Contents

1. John Adams

2. Mornings on Horseback

3. Truman

4. The Course of Human Events

ALSO BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

Truman

Brave Companions

Mornings on Horseback

The Path Between the Seas

The Great Bridge

The Johnstown Flood

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We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not.

~John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1774

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

THE ROAD TO PHILADELPHIA

You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator. . . . We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

~Abigail Adams

I

IN THE COLD, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north. A foot or more of snow covered the landscape, the remnants of a Christmas storm that had blanketed Massachusetts from one end of the province to the other. Beneath the snow, after weeks of severe cold, the ground was frozen solid to a depth of two feet. Packed ice in the road, ruts as hard as iron, made the going hazardous, and the riders, mindful of the horses, kept at a walk.

Nothing about the harsh landscape differed from other winters. Nor was there anything to distinguish the two riders, no signs of rank or title, no liveried retinue bringing up the rear. It might have been any year and they could have been anybody braving the weather for any number of reasons. Dressed as they were in heavy cloaks, their hats pulled low against the wind, they were barely distinguishable even from each other, except that the older, stouter of the two did most of the talking.

He was John Adams of Braintree and he loved to talk. He was a known talker. There were some, even among his admirers, who wished he talked less. He himself wished he talked less, and he had particular regard for those, like General Washington, who somehow managed great reserve under almost any circumstance.

John Adams was a lawyer and a farmer, a graduate of Harvard College, the husband of Abigail Smith Adams, the father of four children. He was forty years old and he was a revolutionary.

Dismounted, he stood five feet seven or eight inches tall — about “middle size” in that day — and though verging on portly, he had a straight-up, square-shouldered stance and was, in fact, surprisingly fit and solid. His hands were the hands of a man accustomed to pruning his own trees, cutting his own hay, and splitting his own firewood.

In such bitter cold of winter, the pink of his round, clean-shaven, very English face would all but glow, and if he were hatless or without a wig, his high forehead and thinning hairline made the whole of the face look rounder still. The hair, light brown in color, was full about the ears. The chin was firm, the nose sharp, almost birdlike. But it was the dark, perfectly arched brows and keen blue eyes that gave the face its vitality. Years afterward, recalling this juncture in his life, he would describe himself as looking rather like a short, thick Archbishop of Canterbury.

As befitting a studious lawyer from Braintree, Adams was a “plain dressing” man. His oft-stated pleasures were his family, his farm, his books and writing table, a convivial pipe and cup of coffee (now that tea was no longer acceptable), or preferably a glass of good Madeira.

In the warm seasons he relished long walks and time alone on horseback. Such exercise, he believed, roused “the animal spirits” and “dispersed melancholy.” He loved the open meadows of home, the “old acquaintances” of rock ledges and breezes from the sea. From his doorstep to the water’s edge was approximately a mile.

He was a man who cared deeply for his friends, who, with few exceptions, were to be his friends for life, and in some instances despite severe strains. And to no one was he more devoted than to his wife, Abigail. She was his “Dearest Friend,” as he addressed her in letters — his “best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in the world” — while to her he was “the tenderest of husbands,” her “good man.”

John Adams was also, as many could attest, a great-hearted, persevering man of uncommon ability and force. He had a brilliant mind. He was honest and everyone knew it. Emphatically independent by nature, hardworking, frugal — all traits in the New England tradition — he was anything but cold or laconic as supposedly New Englanders were. He could be high-spirited and affectionate, vain, cranky, impetuous, self-absorbed, and fiercely stubborn; passionate, quick to anger, and all-forgiving; generous and entertaining. He was blessed with great courage and good humor, yet subject to spells of despair, and especially when separated from his family or during periods of prolonged inactivity.

Ambitious to excel — to make himself known — he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness came not from fame and fortune, “and all such things,” but from “an habitual contempt of them,” as he wrote. He prized the Roman ideal of honor, and in this, as in much else, he and Abigail were in perfect accord. Fame without honor, in her view, would be “like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light.”

As his family and friends knew, Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that. He was hard-headed and a man of “sensibility,” a close observer of human folly as displayed in everyday life and fired by an inexhaustible love of books and scholarly reflection. He read Cicero, Tacitus, and others of his Roman heroes in Latin, and Plato and Thucydides in the original Greek, which he considered the supreme language. But in his need to fathom the “labyrinth” of human nature, as he said, he was drawn to Shakespeare and Swift, and likely to carry Cervantes or a volume of English poetry with him on his journeys. “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket,” he would tell his son Johnny.

John Adams was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter. He owned no ships or glass factory as did Colonel Josiah Quincy, Braintree’s leading citizen. There was no money in his background, no Adams fortune or elegant Adams homestead like the Boston mansion of John Hancock.

It was in the courtrooms of Massachusetts and on the printed page, principally in the newspapers of Boston, that Adams had distinguished himself. Years of riding the court circuit and his brilliance before the bar had brought him wide recognition and respect. And of greater consequence in recent years had been his spirited determination and eloquence in the cause of American rights and liberties.

That he relished the sharp conflict and theater of the courtroom, that he loved the esteem that came with public life, no less than he loved “my farm, my family and goose quill,” there is no doubt, however frequently he protested to the contrary. His desire for “distinction” was too great. Patriotism burned in him like a blue flame. “I have a zeal at my heart for my country and her friends which I cannot smother or conceal,” he told Abigail, warning that it could mean privation and unhappiness for his family unless regulated by cooler judgment than his own.

In less than a year’s time, as a delegate to the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, he had emerged as one of the most “sensible and forcible” figures in the whole patriot cause, the “Great and Common Cause,” his influence exceeding even that of his better-known kinsman, the ardent Boston patriot Samuel Adams.

He was a second cousin of Samuel Adams, but “possessed of another species of character,” as his Philadelphia friend Benjamin Rush would explain. “He saw the whole of a subject at a glance, and . . . was equally fearless of men and of the consequences of a bold assertion of his opinion. . . . He was a stranger to dissimulation.”

It had been John Adams, in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, who rose in the Congress to speak of the urgent need to save the New England army facing the British at Boston and in the same speech called on Congress to put the Virginian George Washington at the head of the army. That was now six months past. The general had since established a command at Cambridge, and it was there that Adams was headed. It was his third trip in a week to Cambridge, and the beginning of a much longer undertaking by horseback. He would ride on to Philadelphia, a journey of nearly 400 miles that he had made before, though never in such punishing weather or at so perilous an hour for his country.

The man riding with him was Joseph Bass, a young shoemaker and Braintree neighbor hired temporarily as servant and traveling companion.

The day was Wednesday, January 24, 1776. The temperature, according to records kept by Adams’s former professor of science at Harvard, John Winthrop, was in the low twenties. At the least, the trip would take two weeks, given the condition of the roads and Adams’s reluctance to travel on the Sabbath.

TO ABIGAIL ADAMS, who had never been out of Massachusetts, the province of Pennsylvania was “that far country,” unimaginably distant, and their separations, lasting months at a time, had become extremely difficult for her.

“Winter makes its approaches fast,” she had written to John in November. “I hope I shall not be obliged to spend it without my dearest friend. . . . I have been like a nun in a cloister ever since you went away.”

He would never return to Philadelphia without her, he had vowed in a letter from his lodgings there. But they each knew better, just as each understood the importance of having Joseph Bass go with him. The young man was a tie with home, a familiar home-face. Once Adams had resettled in Philadelphia, Bass would return home with the horses, and bring also whatever could be found of the “common small” necessities impossible to obtain now, with war at the doorstep.

Could Bass bring her a bundle of pins? Abigail had requested earlier, in the bloody spring of 1775. She was entirely understanding of John’s “arduous task.” Her determination that he play his part was quite as strong as his own. They were of one and the same spirit. “You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator,” she wrote at her kitchen table. “We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.” Unlike the delegates at Philadelphia, she and the children were confronted with the reality of war every waking hour. For though British troops were bottled up in Boston, the British fleet commanded the harbor and the sea and thus no town by the shore was safe from attack. Those Braintree families who were able to leave had already packed and moved inland, out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, shortages of sugar, coffee, pepper, shoes, and ordinary pins were worse than he had any idea.

“The cry for pins is so great that what we used to buy for 7 shillings and six pence are now 20 shillings and not to be had for that.” A bundle of pins contained six thousand, she explained. These she could sell for hard money or use for barter.

There had been a rush of excitement when the British sent an expedition to seize hay and livestock on one of the islands offshore. “The alarm flew [like] lightning,” Abigail reported, “men from all parts came flocking down till 2,000 were collected.” The crisis had passed, but not her state of nerves, with the house so close to the road and the comings and goings of soldiers. They stopped at her door for food and slept on her kitchen floor. Pewter spoons were melted for bullets in her fireplace. “Sometimes refugees from Boston tired and fatigued, seek an asylum for a day or night, a week,” she wrote to John. “You can hardly imagine how we live.”

“Pray don’t let Bass forget my pins,” she reminded him again. “I endeavor to live in the most frugal manner possible, but I am many times distressed.”

The day of the battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775, the thunder of the bombardment had been terrifying, even at the distance of Braintree. Earlier, in April, when news came of Lexington and Concord, John, who was at home at the time, had saddled his horse and gone to see for himself, riding for miles along the route of the British march, past burned-out houses and scenes of extreme distress. He knew then what war meant, what the British meant, and warned Abigail that in case of danger she and the children must “fly to the woods.” But she was as intent to see for herself as he, and with the bombardment at Bunker Hill ringing in her ears, she had taken seven-year-old Johnny by the hand and hurried up the road to the top of nearby Penn’s Hill. From a granite outcropping that breached the summit like the hump of a whale, they could see the smoke of battle rising beyond Boston, ten miles up the bay.

It was the first all-out battle of the war. “How many have fallen we know not,” she wrote that night. “The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot eat, drink, or sleep.”

Their friend Joseph Warren had been killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail reported in another letter. A handsome young physician and leading patriot allied with Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, Warren had been one of the worthiest men of the province. John had known him since the smallpox epidemic of 1764, when John had gone to Boston to be inoculated. Now Joseph Warren was dead at age thirty-four, shot through the face, his body horribly mutilated by British bayonets.

“My bursting heart must find vent at my pen,” Abigail told her absent husband.

THE ROUTE JOHN ADAMS and his young companion would take to Philadelphia that January of 1776 was the same as he had traveled to the First Continental Congress in the summer of 1774. They would travel the Post Road west across Massachusetts as far as Springfield on the Connecticut River, there cross by ferry and swing south along the west bank, down the valley into Connecticut. At Wethersfield they would leave the river for the road to New Haven, and from New Haven on, along the Connecticut shore — through Fairfield, Norwalk, Stamford, Greenwich — they would be riding the New York Post Road. At New York, horses and riders would be ferried over the Hudson River to New Jersey, where they would travel “as fine a road as ever trod,” in the opinion of John Adams, whose first official position in Braintree had been surveyor of roads. Three more ferry crossings, at Hackensack, Newark, and New Brunswick, would put them on a straightaway ride to the little college town of Princeton. Then came Trenton and a final ferry crossing over the Delaware to Pennsylvania. In another twenty miles they would be in sight of Philadelphia.

All told, they would pass through more than fifty towns in five provinces — some twenty towns in Massachusetts alone — stopping several times a day to eat, sleep, or tend the horses. With ice clogging the rivers, there was no estimating how long delays might be at ferry crossings.

Making the journey in 1774, Adams had traveled in style, with the full Massachusetts delegation, everyone in a state of high expectation. He had been a different man then, torn between elation and despair over what might be expected of him. It had been his first chance to see something of the world. His father had lived his entire life in Braintree, and no Adams had ever taken part in public life beyond Braintree. He himself had never set foot out of New England, and many days he suffered intense torment over his ability to meet the demands of the new role to be played. Politics did not come easily to him. He was too independent by nature and his political experience amounted to less than a year’s service in the Massachusetts legislature. But was there anyone of sufficient experience or ability to meet the demands of the moment?

“I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate,” he wrote in the seclusion of his diary. “We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune — in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.”

He must prepare for “a long journey indeed,” he had told Abigail. “But if the length of the journey was all, it would be no burden. . . . things are wanted to be done.”

He had worried over how he might look in such company and what clothes to take.

I think it will be necessary to make me up a couple of pieces of new linen. I am told they wash miserably at N[ew] York, the Jerseys, and Philadelphia, too, in comparison of Boston, and am advised to carry a great deal of linen.

Whether to make me a suit of new clothes at Boston or to make them at Philadelphia, and what to make I know not.

Still, the prospect of a gathering of such historic portent stirred him as nothing ever had. “It is to be a school of political prophets I suppose — a nursery of American statesmen,” he wrote to a friend, James Warren of Plymouth. “May it thrive and prosper and flourish and from this fountain may there issue streams, which shall gladden all the cities and towns in North America, forever.”

There had been a rousing send-off in Boston, on August 10, 1774, and in full view of British troops. Samuel Adams, never a fancy dresser, had appeared in a stunning new red coat, new wig, silver-buckled shoes, gold knee buckles, the best silk hose, a spotless new cocked hat on his massive head, and carrying a gold-headed cane, all gifts from the Sons of Liberty. It was thought that as leader of the delegation he should look the part. In addition, they had provided “a little purse” for expenses.

It had been a triumphal, leisurely journey of nearly three weeks, with welcoming parties riding out to greet them at town after town. They were feted and toasted, prayers were said, church bells rang. Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate who joined the procession, assured John Adams that the Congress was to be the grandest, most important assembly ever held in America. At New Haven “every bell was clanging,” people were crowding at doors and windows “as if to see a coronation.”

In New York they were shown the sights — City Hall, the college, and at Bowling Green, at the foot of Broadway, the gilded equestrian statue of King George III, which had yet to be pulled from its pedestal by an angry mob. The grand houses and hospitality were such as Adams had never known, even if, as a self-respecting New Englander, he thought New Yorkers lacking in decorum. “They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether,” he observed. “If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again — and talk away.”

Truly he was seeing the large world, he assured Abigail in a letter from the tavern at Princeton, a day’s ride from Philadelphia. “Tomorrow we reach the theater of action. God Almighty grant us wisdom and virtue sufficient for the high trust that is devolved upon us.”

But that had been nearly two years past. It had been high summer, green and baking hot under summer skies, an entirely different time that now seemed far past, so much had happened since. There had been no war then, no blood had been spilled at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Now fully twenty regiments of red-coated British regulars occupied Boston under General William Howe. British warships, some of 50 guns, lay at anchor in Boston Harbor, while American forces outside the city had become perilously thin.

In the late summer and fall of 1775, the “bloody flux,” epidemic dysentery, had ripped through their ranks. Adams’s youngest brother, Elihu, a captain of militia, camped beside the Charles River at Cambridge, was stricken and died, leaving a wife and three children. Nor was Braintree spared the violent epidemic. For Abigail, then thirty years old, it had been the worst ordeal of her life.

“Such is the distress of the neighborhood that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick . . . so mortal a time the oldest man does not remember,” she had lamented in a letter to John. “As to politics I know nothing about them. I have wrote as much as I am able to, being very weak.”

“Mrs. Randall has lost her daughter, Mrs. Bracket hers, Mr. Thomas Thayer his wife,” she reported. “I know of eight this week who have been buried in this town.” Parson Wibird was so ill he could scarcely take a step. “We have been four sabbaths without any meeting.” Their three-year-old Tommy was so wretchedly sick that “[were] you to look upon him you would not know him.” She was constantly scrubbing the house with hot vinegar.

“Woe follows woe, one affliction treads upon the heel of another,” she wrote. Some families had lost three, four, and five children. Some families were entirely gone.

The strong clarity of her handwriting, the unhesitating flow of her pen across the paper, line after line, seemed at odds with her circumstances. Rarely was a word crossed out or changed. It was as if she knew exactly what was in her heart and how she wished to express it — as if the very act of writing, of forming letters, in her distinctive angular fashion, keeping every line straight, would somehow help maintain her balance, validate her own being in such times.

She had begun signing herself “Portia,” after the long-suffering, virtuous wife of the Roman statesman Brutus. If her “dearest friend” was to play the part of a Roman hero, so would she.

Her mother lay mortally ill in neighboring Weymouth. When, on October 1, 1775, her mother died, Abigail wrote to John, “You often expressed your anxiety over me when you left me before, surrounded with terrors, but my trouble then was as the small dust in the balance compared to what I have since endured.”

In addition to tending her children, she was nursing a desperately ill servant named Patty. The girl had become “the most shocking object my eyes ever beheld . . . [and] continuously desirous of my being with her the little while she expects to live.” It was all Abigail could do to remain in the same house. When Patty died on October 9, she “made the fourth corpse that was this day committed to the ground.”

Correspondence was maddeningly slow and unreliable. In late October she wrote to say she had not had a line from John in a month and that in his last letter he had made no mention of the six she had written to him. “’Tis only in my night visions that I know anything about you.” Yet in that time he had written seven letters to her, including one mourning the loss of her mother and asking for news of “poor, distressed” Patty.

Heartsick, searching for an answer to why such evil should “befall a city and a people,” Abigail had pondered whether it could be God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.

AT CAMBRIDGE THE MORNING of the bitterly cold first day of the new year, 1776, George Washington had raised the new Continental flag with thirteen stripes before his headquarters and announced that the new army was now “entirely continental.” But for days afterward, their enlistments up, hundreds, thousands of troops, New England militia, started for home. Replacements had to be found, an immensely difficult and potentially perilous changing of the guard had to be carried off, one army moving out, another moving in, all in the bitter winds and snow of winter and in such fashion as the enemy would never know.

“It is not in the pages of history, perhaps, to furnish a case like ours,” Washington informed John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress. Hardly 5,000 colonial troops were fit for duty. Promises of men, muskets, powder, and urgently needed supplies never materialized. Blankets and linen for bandages were “greatly wanted.” Firewood was in short supply. With smallpox spreading in Boston, the British command had allowed pathetic columns of the ill-clad, starving poor of Boston to come pouring out of town and into the American lines, many of them sick, and all in desperate need of food and shelter.

“The reflection on my situation and that of this army produces many an unhappy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep,” wrote Washington, who had never before commanded anything larger than a regiment.

The night of January 8, Washington had ordered a brief American assault on Charlestown, largely to keep the British guessing. Adams, at home at his desk writing a letter, was brought to his feet by the sudden crash of the guns, “a very hot fire” of artillery that lasted half an hour and lit the sky over Braintree’s north common. Whether American forces were on the attack or defense, he could not tell. “But in either case, I rejoice,” he wrote, taking up his pen again, “for defeat appears to me preferable to total inaction.”

As it was, Washington saw his situation to be so precarious that the only choice was an all-out attack on Boston, and he wrote to tell Adams, “I am exceedingly desirous of consulting you.” As a former delegate to Philadelphia, Washington understood the need to keep Congress informed. Earlier, concerned whether his authority reached beyond Boston to the defense of New York, he had asked Adams for an opinion, and Adams’s reply had been characteristically unhesitating and unambiguous: “Your commission constitutes you commander of all the forces . . . and you are vested with full power and authority to act as you think for the good and welfare of the service.”

No one in Congress had impressed Adams more. On the day he had called on his fellow delegates to put their colleague, “the gentleman from Virginia,” in command at Boston, Washington, out of modesty, had left the chamber, while a look of mortification, as Adams would tell the story, filled the face of John Hancock, who had hoped he would be chosen. Washington was virtuous, brave, and in his new responsibilities, “one of the most important characters in the world,” Adams had informed Abigail. “The liberties of America depend upon him in great degree.” Later, when she met Washington at a Cambridge reception, Abigail thought John had not said half enough in praise of him.

A council of war with the commander and his generals convened January 16 in the parlor of the large house on Brattle Street, Cambridge, that served as Washington’s headquarters. With others of the Massachusetts congressional delegation still at Philadelphia, Adams was the only member of Congress present as Washington made the case for an attack on Boston, by sending his troops across the frozen bay. But the generals flatly rejected the plan and it was put aside.

Two days later, Adams was summoned again. Devastating news had arrived by dispatch rider. An American assault on Quebec led by Colonels Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold had failed. The “gallant Montgomery” was dead, “brave Arnold” was wounded. It was a crushing moment for Washington and for John Adams. Congress had ordered the invasion of Canada, the plan was Washington’s own, and the troops were mostly New Englanders.

As a young man, struggling over what to make of his life, Adams had often pictured himself as a soldier. Only the previous spring, when Washington appeared in Congress resplendent in the blue-and-buff uniform of a Virginia militia officer, Adams had written to Abigail, “Oh that I was a soldier!” He was reading military books. “Everybody must and will be a soldier,” he told her. On the morning Washington departed Philadelphia to assume command at Boston, he and others of the Massachusetts delegation had traveled a short way with the general and his entourage, to a rousing accompaniment of fifes and drums, Adams feeling extremely sorry for himself for having to stay behind to tend what had become the unglamorous labors of Congress. “I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling for my bread and my liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, must leave others to wear the laurels.”

But such waves of self-pity came and went, as Abigail knew, and when in need of sympathy, it was to her alone that he would appeal. He was not a man to back down or give up, not one to do anything other than what he saw to be his duty. What in another time and society might be taken as platitudes about public service were to both John and Abigail Adams a lifelong creed. And in this bleakest of hours, heading for Cambridge, and on to Philadelphia, Adams saw his way clearer and with greater resolve than ever in his life. It was a road he had been traveling for a long time.

II

AT THE CENTER OF BRAINTREE, Massachusetts, and central to the town’s way of life, was the meetinghouse, the First Church, with its bell tower and graveyard on the opposite side of the road. From the door of the house where John Adams had said goodbye to wife and children that morning, to the church, was less than a mile. Riding north out of town, he passed the snow-covered graveyard on the left, the church on the right.

He had been born in the house immediately adjacent to his own, a nearly duplicate farmer’s cottage belonging to his father. He had been baptized in the church where his father was a deacon, and he had every expectation that when his time came he would go to his final rest in the same ground where his father and mother lay, indeed where leaning headstones marked the graves of the Adams line going back four generations. When he referred to himself as John Adams of Braintree, it was not in a manner of speaking.

The first of the line, Henry Adams of Barton St. David in Somersetshire, England, with his wife Edith Squire and nine children — eight sons and a daughter — had arrived in Braintree in the year 1638, in the reign of King Charles I, nearly a century before John Adams was born. They were part of the great Puritan migration, Dissenters from the Church of England who, in the decade following the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, crossed the North Atlantic intent on making a new City of God, some twenty thousand people, most of whom came as families. Only one, the seventh and youngest of Henry Adams’s eight sons remained in Braintree. He was Joseph, and he was succeeded by a second Joseph — one of Henry’s eighty-nine grandchildren! — who married Hannah Bass, a granddaughter of John and Priscilla Alden, and they had eleven children, of whom one was another John, born in 1691.

They were people who earned their daily bread by the work of their hands. The men were all farmers who, through the long winters, in New England fashion, worked at other trades for “hard money,” which was always scarce. The first Henry Adams and several of his descendants were maltsters, makers of malt from barley for use in baking or brewing beer, a trade carried over from England. The first John Adams, remembered as Deacon John, was a farmer and shoemaker, a man of “sturdy, unostentatious demeanor,” who, like his father, “played the part of a solid citizen,” as tithing man, constable, lieutenant in the militia, selectman, and ultimately church deacon, taking his place on the deacon’s bench before the pulpit.

In 1734, in October, the golden time of year on the Massachusetts shore, Deacon John Adams, at age forty-three, married Susanna Boylston of Brookline. She was twenty-five, and from a family considered of higher social standing than that of her husband. Nothing written in her own hand would survive — no letters, diaries, or legal papers with her signature — nor any correspondence addressed to her by any of her family, and so, since it is also known that letters were frequently read aloud to her, there is reason to believe that Susanna Boylston Adams was illiterate.

One year later, on October 19, 1735, by the Old Style calendar, their first child, a son, was born and given his father’s name. When England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, October 19 became October 30.

“What has preserved this race of Adamses in all their ramifications in such numbers, health, peace, comfort, and mediocrity?” this firstborn son of Deacon John would one day write to Benjamin Rush. “I believe it is religion, without which they would have been rakes, fops, sots, gamblers, starved with hunger, or frozen with cold, scalped by Indians, etc., etc., etc., been melted away and disappeared. . . .” In truth, he was extremely proud of his descent from “a line of virtuous, independent New England farmers.” That virtue and independence were among the highest of mortal attainments, John Adams never doubted. The New England farmer was his own man who owned his own land, a freeholder, and thus the equal of anyone.

The Braintree of Adams’s boyhood was a quiet village of scattered houses and small neighboring farmsteads strung along the old coast road, the winding main thoroughfare from Boston to Plymouth, just back from the very irregular south shore of Massachusetts Bay. The setting was particularly picturesque, with orchards, stone walls, meadows of salt hay, and broad marshlands through which meandered numerous brooks and the Neponset River. From the shoreline the land sloped gently upward to granite outcroppings and hills, including Penn’s Hill, the highest promontory, close by the Adams farm. Offshore the bay was dotted with small islands, some wooded, some used for grazing sheep. Recalling his childhood in later life, Adams wrote of the unparalleled bliss of roaming the open fields and woodlands of the town, of exploring the creeks, hiking the beaches, “of making and sailing boats . . . swimming, skating, flying kites and shooting marbles, bat and ball, football . . . wrestling and sometimes boxing,” shooting at crows and ducks, and “running about to quiltings and frolics and dances among the boys and girls.” The first fifteen years of his life, he said, “went off like a fairytale.”

The community numbered perhaps 2,000 people. There was one other meetinghouse — a much smaller, more recent Anglican church — a schoolhouse, gristmill, village store, blacksmith shop, granite quarry, a half dozen or more taverns and, in a section called Germantown, Colonel Quincy’s glass factory. With no newspaper in town, news from Boston and the world beyond came from travelers on the coast road, no communication moving faster than a horse and rider. But within the community itself, news of nearly any kind, good or bad, traveled rapidly. People saw each other at church, town meeting, in the mill, or at the taverns. Independent as a Braintree farmer and his family may have been, they were not isolated.

The Adams homestead, the farmhouse at the foot of Penn’s Hill where young John was born and raised, was a five-room New England saltbox, the simplest, most commonplace kind of dwelling. It had been built in 1681, and built strongly around a massive brick chimney. Its timbers were of hand-hewn oak, its inner walls of brick, these finished on the inside with lath and plaster and faced on the exterior with pine clapboard. There were three rooms and two great fireplaces at ground level, and two rooms above. A narrow stairway tucked against the chimney, immediately inside the front door, led to the second floor. The windows had twenty-four panes (“12-over-12”) and wooden shutters. There were outbuildings and a good-sized barn to the rear, fields and orchard, and through a broad meadow flowed “beautiful, winding” Fresh Brook, as Adams affectionately described it. The well, for household use, was just out the front door. And though situated “as near as might be” to the road, the house was “fenced” by a stone wall, as was the somewhat older companion house that stood forty paces apart on the property, the house John and Abigail moved into after they were married and from which he departed on the winter morning in 1776. The one major difference between the two buildings was that the house of Adams’s boyhood sat at an angle to the road, while the other faced it squarely. Across the road, in the direction of the sea, lay open fields.

In the dry spells of summer, dust from the road blew in the open windows of both houses with every passing horse or wagon. From June to September, the heat in the upstairs bedrooms could be murderous. In winter, even with logs blazing in huge kitchen fireplaces, women wore heavy shawls and men sat in overcoats, while upstairs any water left in the unheated rooms turned to ice.

In most of the essentials of daily life, as in their way of life, Adams’s father and mother lived no differently than had their fathers and mothers, or those who preceded them. The furnishings Adams grew up with were of the plainest kind — a half dozen ordinary wooden chairs, a table, several beds, a looking glass or two. There was a Bible, possibly a few other books on religious subjects. Three silver spoons — one large, two small — counted prominently as family valuables. Clothes and other personal possessions were modest and time-worn. As one of the Adams line would write, “A hat would descend from father to son, and for fifty years make its regular appearance at meeting.”

Small as the house was, its occupancy was seldom limited to the immediate family. Besides father and mother, three sons, and a hired girl, there was nearly always an Adams or Boylston cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparent, or friend staying the night. Men from town would stop in after dark to talk town business or church matters with Deacon John.

With the short growing season, the severe winters and stony fields, the immemorial uncertainties of farming, life was not easy and survival never taken for granted. One learned early in New England about the battle of life. Father and mother were hardworking and frugal of necessity, as well as by principle. “Let frugality and industry be our virtues,” John Adams advised Abigail concerning the raising of their own children. “Fire them with ambition to be useful,” he wrote, echoing what had been learned at home.

About his mother, Adams would have comparatively little to say, beyond that he loved her deeply — she was his “honored and beloved mother” — and that she was a highly principled woman of strong will, strong temper, and exceptional energy, all traits he shared though this he did not say. Of his father, however, he could hardly say enough. There were scarcely words to express the depth of his gratitude for the kindnesses his father had shown him, the admiration he felt for his father’s integrity. His father was “the honestest man” John Adams ever knew. “In wisdom, piety, benevolence and charity in proportion to his education and sphere of life, I have never known his superior,” Adams would write long afterward, by which time he had come to know the most prominent men of the age on two sides of the Atlantic. His father was his idol. It was his father’s honesty, his father’s independent spirit and love of country, Adams said, that were his lifelong inspiration.

A good-looking, active boy, if small for his age, he was unusually sensitive to criticism but also quickly responsive to praise, as well as being extremely bright, which his father saw early, and decided he must go to Harvard to become a minister. An elder brother of Deacon John, Joseph Adams, who graduated from Harvard in 1710, had become a minister with a church in New Hampshire. Further, Deacon John himself, for as little education as he had had, wrote in a clear hand and had, as he said, “an admiration of learning.”

Taught to read at home, the boy went first and happily to a dame school — lessons for a handful of children in the kitchen of a neighbor, with heavy reliance on The New England Primer. (“He who ne’er learns his ABC, forever will a blockhead be.”) But later at the tiny local schoolhouse, subjected to a lackluster “churl” of a teacher who paid him no attention, he lost all interest. He cared not for books or study, and saw no sense in talk of college. He wished only to be a farmer, he informed his father.

That being so, said Deacon John not unkindly, the boy could come along to the creek with him and help cut thatch. Accordingly, as Adams would tell the story, father and son set off the next morning and “with great humor” his father kept him working through the day.

At night at home, he said, “Well, John, are you satisfied with being a farmer?” Though the labor had been very hard and very muddy, I answered, “I like it very well, sir.”

“Aya, but I don’t like it so well: so you will go back to school today.” I went but was not so happy as among the creek thatch.

Later, when he told his father it was his teacher he disliked, not the books, and that he wished to go to another school, his father immediately took his side and wasted no time with further talk. John was enrolled the next day in a private school down the road where, kindly treated by a schoolmaster named Joseph Marsh, he made a dramatic turn and began studying in earnest.

A small textbook edition of Cicero’s Orations became one of his earliest, proudest possessions, as he affirmed with the note “John Adams Book 1749/50” written a half dozen times on the title page.

In little more than a year, at age fifteen, he was pronounced “fitted for college,” which meant Harvard, it being the only choice. Marsh, himself a Harvard graduate, agreed to accompany John to Cambridge to appear for the usual examination before the president and masters of the college. But on the appointed morning Marsh pleaded ill and told John he must go alone. The boy was thunderstruck, terrified; but picturing his father’s grief and the disappointment of both father and teacher, he “collected resolution enough to proceed,” and on his father’s horse rode off down the road alone, suffering “a very melancholy journey.”

Writing years later, he remembered the day as grey and somber. Threatening clouds hung over Cambridge, and for a fifteen-year-old farm boy to stand before the grand monarchs of learning in their wigs and robes, with so much riding on the outcome, was itself as severe a test as could be imagined. His tutor, however, had assured him he was ready, which turned out to be so. He was admitted to Harvard and granted a partial scholarship.

“I was as light when I came home, as I had been heavy when I went,” Adams wrote.

It had long been an article of faith among the Adamses that land was the only sound investment and, once purchased, was never to be sold. Only once is Deacon John known to have made an exception to the rule, when he sold ten acres to help send his son John to college.

THE HARVARD OF JOHN ADAMS’S undergraduate days was an institution of four red-brick buildings, a small chapel, a faculty of seven, and an enrollment of approximately one hundred scholars. His own class of 1755, numbering twenty-seven, was put under the tutorship of Joseph Mayhew, who taught Latin, and for Adams the four years were a time out of time that passed all too swiftly. When it was over and he abruptly found himself playing the part of village schoolmaster in remote Worcester, he would write woefully to a college friend, “Total and complete misery has succeeded so suddenly to total and complete happiness, that all the philosophy I can muster can scarce support me under the amazing shock.”

He worked hard and did well at Harvard, and was attracted particularly to mathematics and science, as taught by his favorite professor, John Winthrop, the most distinguished member of the faculty and the leading American astronomer of the time. Among Adams’s cherished Harvard memories was of a crystal night when, from the roof of Old Harvard Hall, he gazed through Professor Winthrop’s telescope at the satellites of Jupiter.

He enjoyed his classmates and made several close friends. To his surprise, he also discovered a love of study and books such as he had never imagined. “I read forever,” he would remember happily, and as years passed, in an age when educated men took particular pride in the breadth of their reading, he became one of the most voracious readers of any. Having discovered books at Harvard, he was seldom ever to be without one for the rest of his days.

He lived in the “lowermost northwest chamber” of Massachusetts Hall, sharing quarters with Thomas Sparhawk, whose chief distinction at college appears to have come from breaking windows, and Joseph Stockbridge, notable for his wealth and his refusal to eat meat.

The regimen was strict and demanding, the day starting with morning prayers in Holden Chapel at six and ending with evening prayers at five. The entire college dined at Commons, on the ground floor of Old Harvard, each scholar bringing his own knife and fork which, when the meal ended, would be wiped clean on the table cloth. By most accounts, the food was wretched. Adams not only never complained, but attributed his own and the overall good health of the others to the daily fare — beef, mutton, Indian pudding, salt fish on Saturday — and an ever abundant supply of hard cider. “I shall never forget, how refreshing and salubrious we found it, hard as it often was.” Indeed, for the rest of his life, a morning “gill” of hard cider was to be John Adams’s preferred drink before breakfast.

“All scholars,” it was stated in the college rules, were to “behave themselves blamelessly, leading sober, righteous, and godly lives.” There was to be no “leaning” at prayers, no lying, blasphemy, fornication, drunkenness, or picking locks. Once, the records show, Adams was fined three shillings, nine pence for absence from college longer than the time allowed for vacation or by permission. Otherwise, he had not a mark against him. As the dutiful son of Deacon John, he appears neither to have succumbed to gambling, “riotous living,” nor to “wenching” in taverns on the road to Charlestown.

But the appeal of young women was exceedingly strong, for as an elderly John Adams would one day write, he was “of an amorous disposition” and from as early as ten or eleven years of age had been “very fond of the society of females.” Yet he kept himself in rein, he later insisted.

I had my favorites among the young women and spent many of my evenings in their company and this disposition although controlled for seven years after my entrance into college, returned and engaged me too much ‘til I was married. I shall draw no characters nor give any enumeration of my youthful flames. It would be considered as no compliment to the dead or the living. This I will say — they were all modest and virtuous girls and always maintained that character through life. No virgin or matron ever had cause to blush at the sight of me, or to regret her acquaintance with me. No father, brother, son, or friend ever had cause of grief or resentment for any intercourse between me and any daughter, sister, mother or any other relation of the female sex. My children may be assured that no illegitimate brother or sister exists or ever existed.

A student’s place in his class being determined on entrance to Harvard by the “dignity of family,” rather than alphabetically or by academic performance, Adams was listed fourteenth of the twenty-five who received degrees, his placement due to the fact that his mother was a Boylston and his father a deacon. Otherwise, he would have been among the last on the list. At commencement ceremonies, as one of the first three academically, he argued the affirmative to the question “Is civil government absolutely necessary for men?” It was to be a lifelong theme.

HOW CLOSE ADAMS CAME to becoming a minister he never exactly said, but most likely it was not close at all. His mother, though a pious woman, thought him unsuited for the life, for all that Deacon John wished it for him. Adams would recall only that in his last years at Harvard, having joined a debating and discussion club, he was told he had “some faculty” for public speaking and would make a better lawyer than preacher, a prospect, he said, that he readily understood and embraced. He knew from experience under his father’s roof, when “ecclesiastical councils” gathered there, the kind of contention that could surround a preacher, whatever he might or might not say from the pulpit. “I saw such a spirit of dogmatism and bigotry in clergy and laity, that if I should be a priest I must take my side, and pronounce as positively as any of them, or never get a parish, or getting it must soon leave it.” He had no heart for such a life and his father, he felt certain, would understand, his father being “a man of so thoughtful and considerate a turn of mind,” even if the profession of law was not one generally held in high esteem.

He judged his father correctly, it seems, but to become a lawyer required that he be taken into the office of a practicing attorney who would charge a fee, which the young man himself would have to earn, and it was this necessity, with his Harvard years ended, that led to the schoolmaster’s desk at Worcester late in the summer of 1755.

He made the sixty-mile journey from Braintree to Worcester by horseback in a single day and, though untried and untrained as a teacher, immediately assumed his new role in a one-room schoolhouse at the center of town. To compensate for his obvious youth, he would explain to a friend, he had to maintain a stiff, frowning attitude.

His small charges, both boys and girls numbering about a dozen, responded, he found, as he had at their age, more to encouragement and praise than to scolding or “thwacking.” A teacher ought to be an encourager, Adams decided. “But we must be cautious and sparing of our praise, lest it become too familiar.” Yet for the day-to-day routine of the classroom, he thought himself poorly suited and dreamed of more glorious pursuits, almost anything other than what he was doing. One student remembered Master Adams spending most of the day at his desk absorbed in his own thoughts or busily writing — sermons presumably. But Adams did like the children and hugely enjoyed observing them:

I sometimes, in my sprightly moments, consider myself, in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great world in miniature. I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep-projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, etc., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society. . . . At one table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane and rattles his snuff box. At another sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about Adam’s fall in which we sinned, all as his primer has it.

He perceived life as a stirring drama like that of the theater, but with significant differences, as he wrote to a classmate, Charles Cushing:

Upon common theaters, indeed, the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actors than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss! On the contrary if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.

He boarded with a local physician whose collection of medical books helped satisfy his insatiable appetite for reading. For a time, interest in the law seemed to fade and Adams thought of becoming a doctor. But after attending several sessions of the local court, he felt himself “irresistibly impelled” to the law. In the meantime, he was reading Milton, Virgil, Voltaire, Viscount Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History, and copying long extracts in a literary commonplace book.

From his reading and from all he heard of the common talk in town, he found himself meditating more and more about politics and history. It was the time of the French and Indian War, when Americans had begun calling themselves Americans rather than colonists. Excitement was high, animosity toward the French intense. In one of his solitary “reveries,” Adams poured out his thoughts in an amazing letter for anyone so young to have written, and for all it foresaw and said about him. Dated October 12, 1755, the letter was to another of his classmates and his cousin Nathan Webb.

“All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to change,” Adams began.

Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways. When they have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly affects their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place. Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant village, inhabited only by a few abandoned ruffians, but by degrees it rose to a stupendous height, and excelled in arts and arms all the nations that preceded it. But the demolition of Carthage (what one should think should have established it in supreme dominion) by removing all danger, suffered it to sink into debauchery, and made it at length an easy prey to Barbarians.

England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe.

Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people according to exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe, will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men in each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each others’ influence and keep the country in equilibrio.

Be not surprised that I am turned politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.

At Harvard he had tried keeping a journal. In Worcester he began again in a paper booklet no bigger than the palm of his hand, writing in a minute, almost microscopic script, numbering the days down the left hand margin, his entries at first given to spare, matter-of-fact notations on the weather and what little passed for social events in his new life:

January23 [1756]. Friday.

A fair and agreeable day. Kept school. Drank tea at Col. Chandler’s, and spent the evening at Major Gardiner’s.

January 24. Saturday.

A very high west wind. Warm and cloudy. P.M. Warm and fair.

January 25. Sunday.

A cold weather. Heard friend Thayer preach two ingenious discourses from Jeremy [Jeremiah] 10th, 6, and 7. Supped at Col. Chandler’s.

Soon he was filling pages with observations like those on his small scholars and on the arrival of spring, with frequently sensuous responses to nature — to “soft vernal showers,” atmosphere full of “ravishing fragrance,” air “soft and yielding.”

Increasingly, however, the subject uppermost in mind was himself, as waves of loneliness, feelings of abject discontent over his circumstances, dissatisfaction with his own nature, seemed at times nearly to overwhelm him. Something of the spirit of the old Puritan diarists took hold. By writing only to himself, for himself, by dutifully reckoning day by day his moral assets and liabilities, and particularly the liabilities, he could thus improve himself.

“Oh! that I could wear out of my mind every mean and base affectation, conquer my natural pride and conceit.”

Why was he constantly forming yet never executing good resolutions? Why was he so absent-minded, so lazy, so prone to daydreaming his life away? He vowed to read more seriously. He vowed to quit chewing tobacco.

On July 21, 1756, he wrote:

I am resolved to rise with the sun and to study Scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other three mornings. Noons and nights I intend to read English authors. . . . I will rouse up my mind and fix my attention. I will stand collected within myself and think upon what I read and what I see. I will strive with all my soul to be something more than persons who have had less advantages than myself.

But the next morning he slept until seven and a one-line entry the following week read, “A very rainy day. Dreamed away the time.”

There was so much he wanted to know and do, but life was passing him by. He was twenty years old. “I have no books, no time, no friends. I must therefore be contented to live and die an ignorant, obscure fellow.”

That such spells of gloom were failings in themselves, he was painfully aware, yet he was at a loss to know what to do about it. “I can as easily still the fierce tempests or stop the rapid thunderbolt, as command the motions and operations of my own mind,” he lamented. Actual thunderstorms left him feeling nervous and unstrung.

By turns he worried over never having any bright or original ideas, or being too bright for his own good, too ready to show off and especially in the company of the older men in the community who befriended him.

“Honesty, sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he concluded after one evening’s gathering. He was therefore of the opinion that men ought “to avow their opinions and defend them with boldness.”

Vanity, he saw, was his chief failing. “Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly,” he wrote, vowing to reform himself.

By “vanity” he did not mean he had an excessive pride in appearance. Adams was never one to spend much time in front of a mirror. Rather, in the eighteenth-century use of the word, he was berating himself for being overly proud, conceited.

“A puffy, vain, conceited conversation never fails to bring a man into contempt, although his natural endowments be ever so great, and his application and industry ever so intense. . . . [And] I must own myself to have been, to a very heinous degree, guilty in this respect.”

By late summer of 1756 Adams had made up his mind about the future. On August 21, he signed a contract with a young Worcester attorney, James Putnam, to study “under his inspection” for two years. The day after, a Sunday, inspired by a sermon he had heard — and also, it would seem, by a feeling of relief that his decision not to become a minister was at last resolved — he wrote of the “glorious shows” of nature and the intense sensation of pleasure they evoked. Beholding the night sky, “the amazing concave of Heaven sprinkled and glittering with stars,” he was “thrown into a kind of transport” and knew such wonders to be the gifts of God, expressions of God’s love. But greatest of all, he wrote, was the gift of an inquiring mind.

But all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses . . . are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.

To a friend Adams wrote, “It will be hard work, but the more difficult and dangerous the enterprise, a higher crown of laurel is bestowed on the conqueror. . . . But the point is now determined, and I shall have the liberty to think for myself.”

He changed lodgings, moving in with lawyer Putnam, and while continuing his daytime duties at the Worcester schoolhouse, he read law at night moving fast (too fast, he later thought) through Wood’s four-volume Institute of the Laws of England, Hawkins’s Abridgment of Coke’s Institutes, Salkeld’s hefty Reports, Coke’s Entries, and Hawkins’s massive two-volume Pleas of the Crown in a single volume that weighed fully eight pounds. “Can you imagine any drier reading?” he would one day write to Benjamin Rush, heavily underscoring the question.

Putnam’s fee was $100, when Adams could “find it convenient.”

With the war continuing, much the greatest excitement in Worcester was the arrival of Lord Jeffrey Amherst and 4,000 of the King’s troops on their way west to Fort William Henry on Lake George. They camped on a nearby hill and for several days and nights life in the town was transformed. Writing more than half a century later, Adams could still warm to the memory.

The officers were very social, spent their evenings and took their suppers with such of the inhabitants as were able to invite, and entertained us with their music and their dances. Many of them were Scotchmen in their plaids and their music was delightful. Even the bagpipe was not disagreeable.

“I then rejoiced that I was an Englishman, and gloried in the name of Britain,” he would recall to a friend. How he might fare in the law was another matter. As he wrote at the time, “I am not without apprehensions.”

IN THE FALL OF 1758, his studies with Putnam completed, Adams returned to Braintree to move in with his father and mother again after an absence of eight years. “I am beginning life anew,” he jubilantly informed a Harvard classmate.

He was busy catching up with old friends, busy with his share of the farm work and preparing for admittance to the bar. For the first time, he was on his own with his studies, and he bent to them with the spirit of independence and intense determination that were to characterize much of his whole approach to life. In his diary he wrote of chopping wood and translating Justinian, with equal resolution.

“I have read Gilbert’s first section, of feuds, this evening but I am not a master of it,” he recorded October 5, referring to Sir Geoffrey Gilbert’s Treatise of Feudal Tenures. “Rose about sun rise. Unpitched a load of hay. Translated two leaves more of Justinian . . . and am now reading over again Gilbert’s section of feudal tenures,” he wrote the day following, October 6. October 7: “Read in Gilbert. . . .” October 9: “I must and will make that book familiar to me.” October 10: “Read in Gilbert. I read him slowly, but I gain ideas and knowledge as I go along.” October 12: “This small volume will take me a fortnight, but I will be master of it.”

Though full of opinions, he often found himself reluctant to express them. “I was young, and then very bashful, however saucy I may have sometimes been since,” he would recall long afterward to Thomas Jefferson.

Feeling miserably unsure of himself, he attended court in Boston, where, awestruck, he listened to the leading attorneys of the day, Jeremiah Gridley and James Otis, argue cases. But, as he explained to a friend in Worcester, the appeal of Boston was threefold.

I had the pleasure to sit and hear the greatest lawyers, orators, in short the greatest men in America, haranguing at the bar, and on the bench. I had the pleasure of spending my evenings with my Harvard friends in the joys of serene, sedate conversation, and perhaps it is worth my while to add, I had the pleasure of seeing a great many and of feeling some very [pretty] girls.

On the morning he found his way through the crooked streets of Boston to Jeremiah Gridley’s office for the requisite interview for admission to the bar, Gridley, much to Adams’s surprise, gave him not a few cursory minutes but several hours, questioning him closely on his reading. With a kindly, paternal air, Gridley also counseled him to “pursue the study of the law itself, rather than the gain of it,” and not to marry early.

Adams was admitted to the bar in a ceremony before the Superior Court at Boston on November 6, 1759, and in a matter of weeks, at age twenty-four, he had taken his first case, which he lost.

In Braintree, as elsewhere in New England, much of town business was taken up with the commonplace problem of keeping one man’s livestock out of another man’s fields, and by long-standing custom most legal matters were handled by town clerks and officials who, though without legal training, were thoroughly schooled in procedure, knowing to the last detail all that was required for writs and warrants, matters about which, for all his reading, Adams knew little. The case Lambert v. Field involved two horses belonging to Luke Lambert, a coarse, cocksure man whom Adams did not like. Lambert’s horses had broken into the enclosure of a neighbor, Joseph Field, and trampled some crops. When Lambert crossed onto Field’s land to retrieve them, Field called for him to stop, but Lambert, as Adams noted, “waved his hat and screamed at the horses and drove away, without tendering Field his damages.”

As counsel for Field, the plaintiff, Adams felt confident in his understanding of the principles of law involved, but worried that the writ he prepared was “unclerklike” and thus he would fail. He had had no experience in preparing such a document. His anguish was acute. He blamed Putnam for insufficient training. He blamed his mother for insisting he take the case lest it be thought he was incapable of drawing a writ. Nothing, he decided, would ever come easily to him. “But it is my destiny to dig treasures with my own fingers,” he wrote woefully.

To gather strength, he read aloud from Cicero’s Orations. The “sweetness and grandeur” of just the sounds of Cicero were sufficient reward, even if one understood none of the meaning. “Besides . . . it exercises my lungs, raises my spirits, opens my pores, quickens the circulation, and so contributes much to health.”

The case was the talk of the village. Everybody knew everybody involved. The justice of the peace, before whom Adams would appear, and the lawyer for Lambert were father and son — Colonel Josiah Quincy and young Samuel Quincy — a circumstance that obviously did not bode well for Adams and his client.

Just as he feared, Adams lost on a technicality. He had neglected to include the words “the county in the direction to the constables of Braintree.”

“Field’s wrath waxed hot,” he recorded, and his own misery was extreme. In his first appearance as a lawyer he had been bested by a crude countryman like Lambert. He had been made to look a fool in the eyes of the whole town, and the humiliation and anger he felt appear to have affected the atmosphere at home. The night following, a terrible family row broke out. Susanna Adams flew into a rage over the fact that Deacon John, in answer to his own conscience and feelings of responsibility as selectman, had brought a destitute young woman to live in the crowded household, the town having no means to provide for her. How was the girl to pay for her board, Susanna demanded of her husband, who responded by asserting his right to govern in his own home. “I won’t have the town’s poor brought here, stark naked for me to clothe for nothing,” she stormed. He should resign as selectman.

When the young woman, whose name was Judah, burst into tears and John’s brother Peter pointed this out, Adams told him to hold his tongue, which touched Peter off and “all was breaking into flame.” Adams was so shaken, he had to leave the room and take up his Cicero again in order to compose himself.

His mother’s uncontrolled responses, her “scolds, rages,” were a grievous flaw, he felt. He knew the sudden, uncontrollable rush of his own anger, almost to the point of bursting. He must observe more closely the effects of reason and rage, just as he must never again undertake a case without command of the details. “Let me never undertake to draw a writ without sufficient time to examine and digest in my mind all the doubts, queries, objections that may arise,” he wrote. And he never did. The painful lesson had been learned.

Henceforth, he vowed, he would bend his whole soul to the law. He would let nothing distract him. He drew inspiration from his Roman heroes. “The first way for a young man to set himself on the road towards glorious reputation,” he read in Cicero, “is to win renown.” “Reputation,” wrote Adams, “ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts, and aim of my behavior.”

Should he confine himself to the small stage of Braintree? Or would he be better off in Boston? But how possibly could anyone with an interest in life keep a clear head in Boston?

My eyes are so diverted with chimney sweeps, carriers of wood, merchants, ladies, priests, carts, horses, oxen, coaches, market men and women, soldiers, sailors, and my ears with the rattle gabble of them all that I can’t think long enough in the street upon any one thing to start and pursue a thought.

He felt “anxious, eager after something,” but what it was he did not know. “I feel my own ignorance. I feel concern for knowledge. I have . . . a strong desire for distinction.”

“I never shall shine, ‘til some animating occasion calls forth all my powers.” It was 1760, the year twenty-two-year-old George III was crowned king and Adams turned twenty-five.

But if self-absorbed and ambitious, he was hardly more so than a number of other young men of ability of his time. The difference was that Adams wrote about it and was perfectly honest with himself.

“Why have I not genius to start some new thought?” he asked at another point in his diary. “Some thing that will surprise the world?” Why could he not bring order to his life? Why could he not clear his table of its clutter of books and papers and concentrate on just one book, one subject? Why did imagination so often intervene? Why did thoughts of girls keep intruding?

“Ballast is what I want. I totter with every breeze.”

Chide himself as he would about time spent to little purpose, his appetite for life, for the pleasures of society was too central to his nature to be denied. Further, he had a talent for friendship. To many he seemed prickly, intractable, and often he was, but as his friend Jonathan Sewall would write, Adams had “a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible to the finest feelings.” He needed friends, prized old friendships. He kept in touch with his Harvard classmates, and for several in particular maintained boundless admiration. Moses Hemmenway, who had become a Congregational minister known for his interminable sermons, would remain, in Adams’s estimate, one of the first scholars of their generation. Samuel Locke, another from the class, was not only the youngest man ever chosen for the presidency of Harvard, but to Adams one of the best men ever chosen, irrespective of the fact that Locke had had to resign after only a few years in office, when his housemaid became pregnant. With his departure, in the words of one Harvard history, Locke was “promptly forgotten,” but not by John Adams.

“Friendship,” Adams had written to his classmate and cousin, Nathan Webb, “is one of the distinguishing glorys of man. . . . From this I expect to receive the chief happiness of my future life.” When, a few years later, Webb became mortally ill, Adams was at his bedside keeping watch through several nights before his death.

His current friends — Sewall, Richard Cranch, Parson Anthony Wibird — were to be his friends to the last, despite drastic changes in circumstance, differing temperaments, eccentricities, or politics. When in time Adams became Richard Cranch’s brother-in-law, he would sign his letters “as ever your faithful friend and affectionate brother, John Adams,” meaning every word.

There was little he enjoyed more than an evening of spontaneous “chatter,” of stories by candlelight in congenial surroundings, of political and philosophic discourse, “intimate, unreserved conversation,” as he put it. And flirting, “gallanting,” with the girls.

He was lively, pungent, and naturally amiable — so amiable, as Thomas Jefferson would later write, that it was impossible not to warm to him. He was so widely read, he could talk on almost any subject, sail off in almost any direction. What he knew he knew well.

Jonathan Sewall had already concluded that Adams was destined for greatness, telling him, only partly in jest, that “in future ages, when New England shall have risen to its intended grandeur, it shall be as carefully recorded among the registers of the literati that Adams flourished in the second century after the exode of its first settlers from Great Britain, as it is now that Cicero was born in the six-hundred-and-forty-seventh year after the building of Rome.”

Yet Adams often felt ill at ease, hopelessly awkward. He sensed people were laughing at him, as sometimes they were, and this was especially hurtful. He had a way of shrugging his shoulders and distorting his face that must be corrected, he knew. He berated himself for being too shy. “I should look bold, speak with more spirit.” In the presence of women — those he wished to impress above all — he was too susceptible to the least sign of approval. “Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved. . . . So I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain, conceited, ostentatious.”

Determined to understand human nature, fascinated by nearly everyone he encountered, he devoted large portions of his diary to recording their stories, their views on life, how they stood, talked, their facial expressions, how their minds worked. In the way that his literary commonplace book served as a notebook on his reading, the diary became his notebook on people. “Let me search for the clue which led great Shakespeare into the labyrinth of human nature. Let me examine how men think.”

He made close study of the attorneys he most admired, the Boston giants of the profession, searching for clues to their success. Jeremiah Gridley’s “grandeur” emanated from his great learning, his “lordly” manner. The strength of James Otis was his fiery eloquence. “I find myself imitating Otis,” wrote Adams.

His portraits of “original characters” in and about Braintree were extraordinary, detailed, full of life and color, and written obviously, like so much of the diary, out of the pure joy of writing. Possibly he knew what a gift he had as an observer of human nature. In another time, under different circumstances, he might have become a great novelist.

That so many disparate qualities could exist in one person was of never-ending fascination to him. He longed to understand this in others, as in himself. The good-natured, obliging landlady of a friend was also a “squaddy, masculine creature” with “a great staring, rolling eye,” “a rare collection of disagreeable qualities.” A tavern loafer of “low and ignoble countenance,” one Zab Hayward of Braintree, who had no conception of conventional grace in dancing or anything else, was nonetheless regarded as the best dancer in town. Adams sat one night in a local tavern observing from the sidelines. “Every room . . . crowded with people,” he recorded. “Negroes with a fiddle. Young fellows and girls dancing in the chamber as if they would kick the floor through.” When at first Zab “gathered a circle around him . . . his behavior and speeches were softly silly, but as his blood grew warm by motion and liquor, he grew droll.

He caught a girl and danced a jig with her, and then led her to one side of the ring and said, “Stand there, I call for you by and by.” This was spoken comically enough, and raised a loud laugh. He caught another girl with light hair and a patch on her chin, and held her by the hand while he sung a song. . . . This tickled the girl’s vanity, for the song which he applied to her described a very fine girl indeed.

Adams’s new friend, Pastor Anthony Wibird, who had assumed the pulpit of Braintree’s First Church during the time Adams was away at Worcester, also became the subject of some of his most vivid sketches. Older than Adams by several years, Wibird was, as would be said in understatement, “somewhat eccentric,” yet warmly esteemed. His pastorate would be the longest in the annals of the parish, lasting forty-five years, and the friendship between Adams and Wibird, equally enduring. Privately, Adams wrote of him with the delight of a naturalist taking notes on some rare and exotic specimen:

P[arson] W[ibird] is crooked, his head bends forward. . . . His nose is a large Roman nose with a prodigious bunch protuberance upon the upper part of it. His mouth is large and irregular, his teeth black and foul and craggy. . . . His eyes are a little squinted, his visage is long and lank, his complexion wan, his cheeks are fallen, his chin is long, large, and lean. . . . When he prays at home, he raises one knee upon the chair, and throws one hand over the back of it. With the other he scratches his neck, pulls the hair of his wig. . . . When he walks, he heaves away, and swags one side, and steps almost twice as far with one foot as the other. . . . When he speaks, he cocks and rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and jerks his body about.

Wibird was “slovenly and lazy,” yet — and here was the wonder — he had great “delicacy” of mind, judgment, and humor. He was superb in the pulpit. “He is a genius,” Adams declared in summation.

Parson Wibird was one of the half dozen or so bachelors in Adams’s social circle. The two closest friends were Jonathan Sewall, a bright, witty fellow Harvard man and struggling attorney from Middlesex County, and Richard Cranch, a good-natured, English-born clockmaker who knew French, loved poetry, and delighted in discussing theological questions with Adams. Bela Lincoln was a physician from nearby Hingham. Robert Treat Paine was another lawyer and Harvard graduate, whom Adams thought conceited but who, like Wibird and Sewall, had a quick wit, which for Adams was usually enough to justify nearly any failing.

The preferred gathering place was the large, bustling Josiah Quincy household at the center of town, where a great part of the appeal was the Quincy family. Colonel Quincy, as an officer in the militia and possibly the wealthiest man in Braintree, was its leading citizen, but also someone Adams greatly admired for his polish and eloquence. (Nothing so helped one gain command of the language, Quincy advised the young man, as the frequent reading and imitation of Swift and Pope.) In addition to the lawyer son Samuel, there were sons Edmund and Josiah, who was also a lawyer, as well as a daughter, Hannah, and a cousin, Esther, who, for Adams and his friends, were the prime attractions. Esther was “pert, sprightly, and gay.” Hannah was all of that and an outrageous flirt besides.

While Jonathan Sewall fell almost immediately in love with Esther, whom he would eventually marry, Adams, Richard Cranch, and Bela Lincoln were all in eager pursuit of the high-spirited Hannah. Sensing he was the favorite, Adams was soon devoting every possible hour to her, and when not, dreaming of her. Nothing like this had happened to him before. His pleasure and distress were extreme, as he confided to his friend and rival Cranch:

If I look upon a law book my eyes it is true are on the book, but imagination is at a tea table seeing that hair, those eyes, that shape, that familiar friendly look. . . . I go to bed and ruminate half the night, then fall asleep and dream the same enchanting scenes.

All this was transpiring when the amorous spirits of the whole group appear to have been at a pitch. Adams recorded how one evening several couples slipped off to a side room and “there laughed and screamed and kissed and hussled,” and afterward emerged “glowing like furnaces.”

After an evening stroll with Hannah through Braintree — through “Cupid’s Grove” — Adams spent a long night and most of the next day with Parson Wibird, talking and reading aloud from Benjamin Franklin’s Reflections on Courtship and Marriage.

“Let no trifling diversion or amusement or company decoy you from your books,” he lectured himself in his diary, “i.e., let no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness decoy you from your books.” Besides, he had moments of doubt when he thought Hannah less than sincere. “Her face and heart have no correspondence,” he wrote.

Then came the spring night he would remember ever after. Alone with Hannah at the Quincy house, he was about to propose when cousin Esther and Jonathan Sewall suddenly burst into the room and the moment passed, never to be recovered. As it was, Bela Lincoln, the Hingham physician, increased his attentions and in a year he and Hannah Quincy would marry.

Seeing what a narrow escape he had had, Adams solemnly determined to rededicate himself. Only by a turn of fate had he been delivered from “dangerous shackles.” “Let love and vanity be extinguished and the great passions of ambition, patriotism, break out and burn,” he wrote.

Yet, when he met Abigail Smith for the first time later that same summer of 1759, he would not be greatly impressed, not when he compared her to Hannah. Abigail and her sisters Mary and Elizabeth were the daughters of Reverend William Smith of Weymouth, the small seaport town farther along the coast road. Adams’s friend Cranch had lately begun calling on Mary, the oldest and prettiest of the three. On the evening he invited Adams to go along with him to meet Abigail, the middle sister, it was for Adams anything but love at first sight. In contrast to his loving, tender Hannah, these Smith sisters were, he wrote, neither “fond, nor frank, nor candid.” Nor did Adams much like the father, who seemed a “crafty, designing man.” Adams’s first impressions were almost entirely bad and, as he would come to realize, quite mistaken.

THE HEAVIEST BLOW of his young life befell John Adams on May 25, 1761, when his father, Deacon John, died at age seventy, the victim of epidemic influenza that took a heavy toll in eastern Massachusetts and on older people especially. In Braintree, seventeen elderly men and women died. Adams’s mother was also stricken, and though she survived — as she was to survive one epidemic after another down the years — she was too ill to leave her bed when her husband was buried.

On the back of the office copy of his father’s will, Adams wrote in his own hand the only known obituary of Deacon John:

The testator had a good education, though not at college, and was a very capable and useful man. In his early life he was an officer of the militia, afterwards a deacon of the church, and a selectman of the town; almost all the business of the town being managed by him in that department for twenty years together; a man of strict piety, and great integrity; much esteemed and beloved wherever he was known, which was not far, his sphere of life being not extensive.

With his father gone, Adams experienced a “want of strength [and] courage” such as he had never known. Still, as expected of him, he stepped in as head of the family, and as time passed, those expressions of self-doubt, the fits of despair and self-consciousness that had so characterized the outpourings in his diary, grew fewer.

With his inheritance, he became a man of substantial property by the measure of Braintree. He received the house immediately beside that of his father’s, as well as forty acres — ten of adjoining land, plus thirty of orchard, pasture, woodland, and swamp — and slightly less than a third of his father’s personal estate, since alone of the three sons he had been provided a college education.

Adams was a freeholder now and his thoughts took a decided “turn to husbandry.” He was soon absorbed in all manner of projects and improvements, working with several hired men — “the help,” as New Englanders said — building stone walls, digging up stumps, carting manure, plowing with six yoke of oxen, planting corn and potatoes. He loved the farm as never before, even the swamp, “my swamp,” as he wrote.

His love of the law, too, grew greater. He felt privileged, blessed in his profession, he told Jonathan Sewall:

Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of right, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice?

In the house that was now his own, in what had once been the kitchen, before a lean-to enlargement was added at back, he established his first proper law office. The room was bright and sunny and in winter warmed by what had been the old kitchen fireplace. In the corner nearest the road, he had an outside door cut so that clients might directly come and go.

His practice picked up. He was going to Boston now once or twice a week. Soon he was riding the circuit with the royal judges. “I grow more expert . . . I feel my own strength.”

In November 1762 his friend Richard Cranch and Mary Smith were married, a high occasion for Adams that he hugely enjoyed, including the customary round of “matrimonial stories” shared among the men “to raise the spirits,” one of which he happily included in his journal:

The story of B. Bicknal’s wife is a very clever one. She said, when she was married she was very anxious, she feared, she trembled, she could not go to bed. But she recollected she had put her hand to the plow and could not look back, so she mustered up her spirits, committed her soul to God and her body to B. Bicknal and into bed she leaped — and in the morning she was amazed, she could not think for her life what it was that had so scared her.

In the company of Richard Cranch, Adams had been seeing more and more of the Smith family, about whom he had had a change of heart. That his interest, at first informal, then ardent, was centered on Abigail was obvious to all. As an aspiring lawyer, he must not marry early, Jeremiah Gridley had warned. So it was not until October 25, 1764, after a courtship of nearly five years and just short of his twenty-ninth birthday, that John Adams’s life changed as never before, when at the Weymouth parsonage, in a small service conducted by her father, he and Abigail Smith became husband and wife.

OF THE COURTSHIP Adams had said not a word in his diary. Indeed, for the entire year of 1764 there were no diary entries, a sure sign of how preoccupied he was.

At their first meeting, in the summer of 1759, Abigail had been a shy, frail fifteen-year-old. Often ill during childhood and still subject to recurring headaches and insomnia, she appeared more delicate and vulnerable than her sisters. By the time of her wedding, she was not quite twenty, little more than five feet tall, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a fine, pale complexion. For a rather stiff pastel portrait, one of a pair that she and John sat for in Salem a few years after their marriage, she posed with just a hint of a smile, three strands of pearls at the neck, her hair pulled back with a blue ribbon. But where the flat, oval face in her husband’s portrait conveyed nothing of his bristling intelligence and appetite for life, in hers there was a strong, unmistakable look of good sense and character. He could have been almost any well-fed, untested young man with dark, arched brows and a grey wig, while she was distinctly attractive, readily identifiable, her intent dark eyes clearly focused on the world.

One wonders how a more gifted artist might have rendered Abigail. Long years afterward, Gilbert Stuart, while working on her portrait, would exclaim to a friend that he wished to God he could have painted Mrs. Adams when she was young; she would have made “a perfect Venus,” to which her husband, on hearing the story, expressed emphatic agreement.

Year after year through the long courtship John trotted his horse up and over Penn’s Hill by the coast road five miles to Weymouth at every chance and in all seasons. She was his Diana, after the Roman goddess of the moon. He was her Lysander, the Spartan hero. In the privacy of correspondence, he would address her as “Ever Dear Diana” or “Miss Adorable.” She nearly always began her letters then, as later, “My Dearest Friend.” She saw what latent abilities and strengths were in her ardent suitor and was deeply in love. Where others might see a stout, bluff little man, she saw a giant of great heart, and so it was ever to be.

Only once before their marriage, when the diary was still active, did Adams dare mention her in its pages, and then almost in code:

Di was a constant feast. Tender, feeling, sensible, friendly. A friend. Not an imprudent, not an indelicate, not a disagreeable word of action. Prudent, soft, sensible, obliging, active.

She, too, was an avid reader and attributed her “taste for letters” to Richard Cranch, who, she later wrote, “taught me to love the poets and put into my hands, Milton, Pope, and Thompson, and Shakespeare.” She could quote poetry more readily than could John Adams, and over a lifetime would quote her favorites again and again in correspondence, often making small, inconsequential mistakes, an indication that rather than looking passages up, she was quoting from memory.

Intelligence and wit shined in her. She was consistently cheerful. She, too, loved to talk quite as much as her suitor, and as time would tell, she was no less strong-minded.

Considered too frail for school, she had been taught at home by her mother and had access to the library of several hundred books accumulated by her father. A graduate of Harvard, the Reverend Smith was adoring of all his children, who, in addition to the three daughters, included one son, William. They must never speak unkindly of anyone, Abigail remembered her father saying repeatedly. They must say only “handsome things,” and make topics rather than persons their subjects — sensible policy for a parson’s family. But Abigail had views on nearly everything and persons no less than topics. Nor was she ever to be particularly hesitant about expressing what she thought.

Open in their affections for one another, she and John were also open in their criticisms. “Candor is my characteristic,” he told her, as though she might not have noticed. He thought she could improve her singing voice. He faulted her for her “parrot-toed” way of walking and for sitting cross-legged. She told him he was too severe in his judgments of people and that to others often appeared haughty. Besides, she chided him, “a gentleman has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.”

During the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1764, when Boston became “one great hospital,” he went to the city to be inoculated, an often harrowing, potentially fatal ordeal extending over many days. Though he sailed through with little discomfort, she worried excessively and they corresponded nearly every day, Adams reminding her to be sure to have his letters “smoked,” on the chance they carried contamination.

The rambling, old-fashioned parsonage at Weymouth and its furnishings were a step removed from the plain farmer’s cottage of John’s boyhood or the house Abigail would move to once they were married. Also, two black slaves were part of the Smith household.

According to traditional family accounts, the match was strongly opposed by Abigail’s mother. She was a Quincy, the daughter of old John Quincy, whose big hilltop homestead, known as Mount Wollaston, was a Braintree landmark. Abigail, it was thought, would be marrying beneath her. But the determination of both Abigail and John, in combination with their obvious attraction to each other — like steel to a magnet, John said — were more than enough to carry the day.

A month before the wedding, during a spell of several weeks when they were unable to see one another because of illness, Adams wrote to her:

Oh, my dear girl, I thank heaven that another fortnight will restore you to me — after so long a separation. My soul and body have both been thrown into disorder by your absence, and a month or two more would make me the most insufferable cynic in the world. I see nothing but faults, follies, frailties and defects in anybody lately. People have lost all their good properties or I my justice or discernment.

But you who have always softened and warmed my heart, shall restore my benevolence as well as my health and tranquility of mind. You shall polish and refine my sentiments of life and manners, banish all the unsocial and ill natured particles in my composition, and form me to that happy temper that can reconcile a quick discernment with a perfect candor.

Believe me, now and ever your faithful

Lysander

HIS MARRIAGE to Abigail Smith was the most important decision of John Adams’s life, as would become apparent with time. She was in all respects his equal and the part she was to play would be greater than he could possibly have imagined, for all his love for her and what appreciation he already had of her beneficial, steadying influence.

Bride and groom moved to Braintree the evening of the wedding. There was a servant to wait on them — the same Judah who had been the cause of the family row years before — who was temporarily on loan from John’s mother. But as the days and weeks passed, Abigail did her own cooking by the open hearth, and while John busied himself with his law books and the farm, she spun and wove clothes for their everyday use.

Her more sheltered, bookish upbringing notwithstanding, she was to prove every bit as hardworking as he and no less conscientious about whatever she undertook. She was and would remain a thoroughgoing New England woman who rose at five in the morning and was seldom idle. She did everything that needed doing. All her life she would do her own sewing, baking, feed her own ducks and chickens, churn her own butter (both because that was what was expected, and because she knew her butter to be superior). And for all her reading, her remarkable knowledge of English poetry and literature, she was never to lose certain countrified Yankee patterns of speech, saying “Canady” for Canada, as an example, using “set” for sit, or the old New England “aya,” for yes.

To John’s great satisfaction, Abigail also got along splendidly with his very unbookish mother. For a year or more, until Susanna Adams was remarried to an older Braintree man named John Hall, she continued to live with her son Peter in the family homestead next door, and the two women grew extremely fond of one another. To Abigail her mother-in-law was a cheerful, open-minded person of “exemplary benevolence,” dedicated heart and soul to the welfare of her family, which was more than her eldest son ever committed to paper, even if he concurred.

John and Abigail’s own first child followed not quite nine months after their marriage, a baby girl, Abigail or “Nabby,” who arrived July 14, 1765, and was, her mother recorded, “the dear image of her still dearer Papa.”

A second baby, John Quincy, was born two years later, and again in mid-July, 1767, and Adams began worrying about college for Johnny, fine clothes for Nabby, dancing schools, “and all that.” To Abigail, after nearly three years of marriage, her John was still “the tenderest of husbands,” his affections “unabated.”

For Adams, life had been made infinitely fuller. All the ties he felt to the old farm were stronger now with Abigail in partnership. She was the ballast he had wanted, the vital center of a new and better life. The time he spent away from home, riding the court circuit, apart from her and the “little ones,” became increasingly difficult. “God preserve you and all our family,” he would write.

But in 1765, the same year little Abigail was born and Adams found himself chosen surveyor of highways in Braintree, he was swept by events into sudden public prominence. His marriage and family life were barely under way when he began the rise to the fame he had so long desired. “I never shall shine ‘til some animating occasion calls forth all my powers,” he had written, and here now was the moment.

“I am . . . under all obligations of interest and ambition, as well as honor, gratitude and duty, to exert the utmost of abilities in this important cause,” he wrote, and with characteristic honesty he had not left ambition out.

THE FIRST NEWS of the Stamp Act reached the American colonies during the last week of May 1765 and produced an immediate uproar, and in Massachusetts especially. Starting in November, nearly everything written or printed on paper other than private correspondence and books — all pamphlets, newspapers, advertisements, deeds, diplomas, bills, bonds, all legal documents, ship’s papers, even playing cards — were required to carry revenue stamps, some costing as much as ten pounds. The new law, the first British attempt to tax Americans directly, had been passed by Parliament to help pay for the cost of the French and Indian War and to meet the expense of maintaining a colonial military force to prevent Indian wars. Everyone was affected. The Boston Gazette reported Virginia in a state of “utmost consternation.” In August, Boston mobs, “like devils let loose,” stoned the residence of Andrew Oliver, secretary of the province, who had been appointed distributor of the stamps, then attacked and destroyed the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, wrongly suspecting him of having sponsored the detested tax.

Adams, who had earlier joined a new law club in Boston started by Jeremiah Gridley, had, at Gridley’s suggestion, been working on an essay that would become A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law. It was his first extended political work and one of the most salient of his life, written at the age of thirty. Now, at the height of the furor, he arranged for its publication as an unsigned, untitled essay in the Gazette. (It would be published in England later, in a volume titled The True Sentiments of America.) It was not a call to arms or mob action — with his countryman’s dislike of the Boston “rabble,” Adams was repelled by such an “atrocious violation of the peace.” The Stamp Act was hardly mentioned. Rather, it was a statement of his own fervent patriotism and the taproot conviction that American freedoms were not ideals still to be obtained, but rights long and firmly established by British law and by the courage and sacrifices of generations of Americans. Years later Adams would say the Revolution began in the minds of Americans long before any shots were fired or blood shed.

“Be it remembered,” he wrote in his Dissertation, “that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we have not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know. But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

He was calling on his readers for independence of thought, to use their own minds. It was the same theme he had struck in his diary at Worcester a decade before, in his turmoil over what to do with his life, writing, “The point is now determined, and I shall have the liberty to think for myself.”

Government is a plain, simple, intelligent thing, founded in nature and reason, quite comprehensible by common sense [the Dissertation continued]. . . . The true source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think. . . . Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. . . . Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments . . . that many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries, even before Parliament existed. . . . Let us read and recollect and impress upon our souls the views and ends of our more immediate forefathers, in exchanging their native country for a dreary, inhospitable wilderness. . . . Recollect their amazing fortitude, their bitter sufferings — the hunger, the nakedness, the cold, which they patiently endured — the severe labors of clearing their grounds, building their houses, raising their provisions, amidst dangers from wild beasts and savage men, before they had time or money or materials for commerce. Recollect the civil and religious principles and hopes and expectations which constantly supported and carried them through all hardships with patience and resignation. Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty, for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials.

The essay began appearing in the Gazette on August 12, 1765, and it struck an immediate chord. “The author is a young man, not above 33 or 34, but of incomparable sense,” wrote Boston’s senior pastor, Charles Chauncey, to the learned Rhode Island clergyman and future president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles. “I esteem that piece one of the best that has been written. It has done honor to its author; and it is a pity but he should be known.”

Soon afterward Adams drafted what became known as the Braintree Instructions — instructions from the freeholders of the town to their delegate to the General Court, the legislative body of Massachusetts — which, when printed in October in the Gazette, “rang” through the colony. “We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental principle of the [English] constitution that no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent.” There must be “no taxation without representation” — a phrase that had been used in Ireland for more than a generation. And in rejecting the rule of the juryless Admiralty Court in enforcing this law, the instructions declared that there must be a trial by jury and an independent judiciary.

In amazingly little time the document was adopted by forty towns, something that had never happened before.

Now fully joined in Boston’s political ferment, Adams was meeting with Gridley, James Otis, Samuel Adams, and others. Observing them closely, he concluded that it was his older, second cousin, Samuel Adams who had “the most thorough understanding of liberty.” Samuel Adams was “zealous and keen in the cause,” of “steadfast integrity,” a “universal good character.” The esteemed Otis, however, had begun to act strangely. He was “liable to great inequities of temper, sometimes in despondency, sometimes in rage,” Adams recorded in dismay.

Otis, a protégé of Gridley, had been for Adams the shining example of the lawyer-scholar, learned yet powerful in argument. Now he became Adams’s political hero, just as Thomas Hutchinson became Adams’s chief villain. A lifetime later, Adams would vividly describe Otis as he had been in his surpassing moment, in the winter of 1761, in argument against writs of assistance, search warrants that permitted customs officers to enter and search any premises whenever they wished. Before the bench in the second-floor Council Chamber of the Province House in Boston, Otis had declared such writs — which were perfectly valid in English law and commonly issued in England — null and void because they violated the natural rights of Englishmen. Adams, who had been present as an observer only, would remember it as one of the inspiring moments of his life, a turning point for him as for history. The five judges, with Hutchinson at their head as chief justice, sat in comfort near blazing fireplaces, Adams recalled, “all in their new fresh robes of scarlet English cloth, in their broad hats, and immense judicial wigs.” But Otis, in opposition, was a “flame” unto himself. “With the promptitude of classical illusions, a depth of research . . . and a torrent of impetuous eloquence, hurried away all before him.” By Adams’s account, every one of the immense crowded audience went away, as he did, ready to take up arms against writs of assistance. “Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain,” Adams would claim. “Then and there the child independence was born.”

But by 1765 it was the tragic decline of James Otis that gripped Adams. At meetings now, Otis talked on endlessly and to no point. No one could get a word in. “Otis is in confusion yet,” Adams noted a year or so later. “He rambles and wanders like a ship without a helm.” Adams began to doubt Otis’s sanity, and as time passed, it became clear that Otis, his hero, was indeed going mad, a dreadful spectacle.

“The year 1765 has been the most remarkable year of my life,” Adams wrote in his diary that December. “The enormous engine fabricated by the British Parliament for battering down all the rights and liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread through the whole continent a spirit that will be recorded to our honor, with all future generations.”

“At home with my family. Thinking,” reads the entry of a few nights later.

“At home. Thinking,” he wrote Christmas Day.

WITH THE REPEAL of the Stamp Act by Parliament in the spring of 1766, and the easing of tensions that followed in the next two years, until the arrival of British troops at Boston, Adams put politics aside to concentrate on earning a living. He was thinking of politics not at all, he insisted.

He was back on the road, riding the circuit, the reach of his travels extending more than two hundred miles, from the island of Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod, north to Maine, which was then part of the Massachusetts Bay Province, to as far west as Worcester. As recalled in the family years later, he was endowed for the profession of law with the natural gifts of “a clear and sonorous voice,” a “ready elocution,” stubbornness, but with the “counter-check” of self-control, and a strong moral sense. He handled every kind of case — land transfers, trespass, admiralty, marine insurance, murder, adultery, rape, bastardy, buggery, assault and battery, tarring and feathering. He defended, not always successfully, poor debtors, horse thieves, and smugglers. He saw every side of life, learned to see things as they were, and was considered, as Jonathan Sewall would write, as “honest [a] lawyer as ever broke bread.”

In 1766, like his father before him, Adams was elected selectman in Braintree. But so active had his Boston practice become by 1768 that he moved the family to a rented house in the city, a decision he did not like, fearing the effect on their health. He established a Boston office and presently admitted two young men, Jonathan Austin and William Tudor, to read law with him, in return for fees of 10 pounds sterling. “What shall I do with two clerks at a time?” Adams speculated in his diary, adding that he would do all he could “for their education and advancement in the world,” a pledge he was to keep faithfully. When Billy Tudor was admitted to the bar three years later, Adams took time to write to Tudor’s wealthy father to praise the young man for his clear head and honest heart, but also to prod the father into giving his son some help getting started in his practice. Adams had seen too often the ill effect of fathers who ignored their sons when a little help could have made all the difference.

With the death of Jeremiah Gridley the year before and the mental collapse of James Otis, John Adams, still in his thirties, had become Boston’s busiest attorney. He was “under full sail,” prospering at last, and in the Adams tradition, he began buying more land, seldom more than five or ten acres of salt marsh or woodland at a time, but steadily, year after year. (Among his father’s memorable observations was that he never knew a piece of land to run away or break.) Eventually, after his brother Peter married and moved to his wife’s house, John would purchase all of the old homestead, with its barn and fifty-three acres, which included Fresh Brook, to Adams a prime asset. In one pasture, he reckoned, there were a thousand red cedars, which in twenty years, “if properly pruned,” might be worth a shilling each. And with an appreciative Yankee eye, he noted “a quantity of good stone in it, too.”

He was becoming more substantial in other ways. “My good man is so very fat that I am lean as a rail,” Abigail bemoaned to her sister Mary. He acquired more and more books, books being an acknowledged extravagance he could seldom curb. (With one London bookseller he had placed a standing order for “every book and pamphlet, of reputation, upon the subjects of law and government as soon as it comes out.”) “I want to see my wife and children every day,” he would write while away on the court circuit. “I want to see my grass and blossoms and corn. . . . But above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.”

In the privacy of his journal, he could also admit now, if obliquely, to seeing himself as a figure of some larger importance. After noting in one entry that his horse had overfed on grass and water, Adams speculated wryly, “My biographer will scarcely introduce my little mare and her adventures.”

He could still search his soul over which path to follow. “To what object are my views directed?” he asked. “Am I grasping at money, or scheming for power?” Yes, he was amassing a library, but to what purpose? “Fame, fortune, power say some, are the ends intended by a library. The service of God, country, clients, fellow men, say others. Which of these lie nearest my heart?

What plan of reading or reflection or business can be pursued by a man who is now at Pownalborough [Maine], then at Martha’s Vineyard, next at Boston, then at Taunton, presently at Barnstable, then at Concord, now at Salem, then at Cambridge, and afterward Worcester. Now at Sessions, then at Pleas, now in Admiralty, now at Superior Court, then in the gallery of the House. . . . Here and there and everywhere, a rambling, roving, vagrant, vagabond life.

Yet when Jonathan Sewall, who had become attorney general of the province, called on Adams at the request of governor Francis Bernard to offer him the office of advocate general in the Court of Admiralty, a plum for an ambitious lawyer, Adams had no difficulty saying no.

Politically he and Sewall were on opposing sides, Sewall having become an avowed Tory. Yet they tried to remain friends. “He always called me John and I him Jonathan,” remembered Adams, “and I often said to him, I wish my name were David.” Both understood that the office, lucrative in itself, was, in Adams’s words, a “sure introduction to the most profitable business in the province.” Sewall, with his large Brattle Street house in Cambridge, was himself an example of how high one could rise. Yet so open a door to prosperity, not to say the gratification to one’s vanity, that a royal appointment might offer tempted Adams not at all.

With Boston full of red-coated British troops — sent in 1768 to keep order, as another round of taxes was imposed by Parliament, this time on paper, tea, paint, and glass — the atmosphere in the city turned incendiary. Incidents of violence broke out between townsmen and soldiers, the hated “Lobsterbacks.”

The crisis came in March of 1770, a year already shadowed for John and Abigail by the loss of a child. A baby girl, Susanna, born since the move to Boston and named for John’s mother, had died in February at a little more than a year old. Adams was so upset by the loss that he could not speak of it for years.

ON THE COLD MOONLIT EVENING of March 5, 1770, the streets of Boston were covered by nearly a foot of snow. On the icy, cobbled square where the Province House stood, a lone British sentry, posted in front of the nearby Custom House, was being taunted by a small band of men and boys. The time was shortly after nine. Somewhere a church bell began to toll, the alarm for fire, and almost at once crowds came pouring into the streets, many men, up from the waterfront, brandishing sticks and clubs. As a throng of several hundred converged at the Custom House, the lone guard was reinforced by eight British soldiers with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, their captain with drawn sword. Shouting, cursing, the crowd pelted the despised redcoats with snowballs, chunks of ice, oyster shells, and stones. In the melee the soldiers suddenly opened fire, killing five men. Samuel Adams was quick to call the killings a “bloody butchery” and to distribute a print published by Paul Revere vividly portraying the scene as a slaughter of the innocent, an image of British tyranny, the Boston Massacre, that would become fixed in the public mind.

The following day thirty-four-year-old John Adams was asked to defend the soldiers and their captain, when they came to trial. No one else would take the case, he was informed. Hesitating no more than he had over Jonathan Sewall’s offer of royal appointment, Adams accepted, firm in the belief, as he said, that no man in a free country should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial, and convinced, on principle, that the case was of utmost importance. As a lawyer, his duty was clear. That he would be hazarding his hard-earned reputation and, in his words, “incurring a clamor and popular suspicions and prejudices” against him, was obvious, and if some of what he later said on the subject would sound a little self-righteous, he was also being entirely honest.

Only the year before, in 1769, Adams had defended four American sailors charged with killing a British naval officer who had boarded their ship with a press gang to grab them for the British navy. The sailors were acquitted on grounds of acting in self-defense, but public opinion had been vehement against the heinous practice of impressment. Adams had been in step with the popular outrage, exactly as he was out of step now. He worried for Abigail, who was pregnant again, and feared he was risking his family’s safety as well as his own, such was the state of emotions in Boston. It was rumored he had been bribed to take the case. In reality, a retainer of eighteen guineas was the only payment he would receive.

Criticism of almost any kind was nearly always painful for Adams, but public scorn was painful in the extreme.

“The only way to compose myself and collect my thoughts,” he wrote in his diary, “is to set down at my table, place my diary before me, and take my pen into my hand. This apparatus takes off my attention from other objects. Pen, ink, and paper and a sitting posture are great helps to attention and thinking.”

From a treatise by the eminent Italian penologist and opponent of capital punishment Cesare, Marchese di Beccaria, he carefully copied the following:

If, by supporting the rights of mankind, and of invincible truth, I shall contribute to save from the agonies of death one unfortunate victim of tyranny, or of ignorance, equally fatal, his blessings and years of transport will be sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind.

There were to be two conspicuously fair trials held in the new courthouse on Queen Street. The first was of the British captain, Thomas Preston, the opening of the trial being delayed until October when passions had cooled. The second was of the soldiers. In the first trial Adams was assisted by young Josiah Quincy, Jr., while the court-appointed lawyer trying the case was Josiah’s brother, Samuel, assisted by Robert Treat Paine. Whether Captain Preston had given an order to fire, as was charged, could never be proven. Adams’s argument for the defense, though unrecorded, was considered a virtuoso performance. Captain Preston was found not guilty.

Adams’s closing for the second and longer trial, which was recorded, did not come until December 3, and lasted two days. The effect on the crowded courtroom was described as “electrical.” “I am for the prisoners at bar,” he began, then invoked the line from the Marchese di Beccaria. Close study of the facts had convinced Adams of the innocence of the soldiers. The tragedy was not brought on by the soldiers, but by the mob, and the mob, it must be understood, was the inevitable result of the flawed policy of quartering troops in a city on the pretext of keeping the peace:

We have entertained a great variety of phrases to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentlemen, [it was] most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars. And why should we scruple to call such a people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them. The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers. . . . Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace.

He described how the shrieking “rabble” pelted the soldiers with snowballs, oyster shells, sticks, “every species of rubbish,” as a cry went up to “Kill them! Kill them!” One soldier had been knocked down with a club, then hit again as soon as he could rise. “Do you expect he should behave like a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy?” Adams asked. Self-defense was the primary canon of the law of nature. Better that many guilty persons escape unpunished than one innocent person should be punished. “The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.”

“Facts are stubborn things,” he told the jury, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

The jury remained out two and a half hours. Of the eight soldiers, six were acquitted and two found guilty of manslaughter, for which they were branded on their thumbs.

There were angry reactions to the decision. Adams was taken to task in the Gazette and claimed later to have suffered the loss of more than half his practice. But there were no riots, and Samuel Adams appears never to have objected to the part he played. Possibly Samuel Adams had privately approved, even encouraged it behind the scenes, out of respect for John’s fierce integrity, and on the theory that so staunch a show of fairness would be good politics.

As time would show, John Adams’s part in the drama did increase his public standing, making him in the long run more respected than ever. Years later, reflecting from the perspective of old age, he himself would call it the most exhausting case he ever undertook, but conclude with pardonable pride that his part in the defense was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”

A SECOND SON, Charles, was born that summer of 1770, and for all the criticism to which he was being subjected, Adams was elected by the Boston Town Meeting as a representative to the Massachusetts legislature. It was his first real commitment to politics. Inevitably it would mean more time away from his practice, and still further reduction in income. When, the night of the meeting, he told Abigail of his apprehensions, she burst into tears, but then, as Adams would relate, said “she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come.”

But the complications and demands of both the law and politics became too much and Adams suffered what appears to have been a physical breakdown. “Especially the constant obligation to speak in public almost every day for many hours had exhausted my health, brought on pain in my breast and complaint in my lungs, which seriously threatened my life,” he would later write. In the spring of 1771, he and the family moved back to Braintree, to “the air of my native spot, and the fine breezes from the sea,” which “together with daily rides on horseback,” gradually restored him.

Another child, Thomas Boylston, was born in September of 1772, and again Adams was off on the “vagabond life” of the circuit, carrying a copy of Don Quixote in his saddlebag and writing Abigail sometimes as many as three letters a day.

Business was good in Massachusetts in the calm of 1772 and Adams prospered once again. He appeared in more than two hundred Superior Court cases. Among his clients were many of the richest men in the colony, including John Hancock. At the conclusion of one morning in court, Adams was told people were calling him the finest speaker they had ever heard, “the equal to the greatest orator that ever spoke in Greece or Rome.”

He could speak extemporaneously and, if need be, almost without limit. Once, to give a client time to retrieve a necessary record, Adams spoke for five hours, through which the court and jury sat with perfect patience. At the end he was roundly applauded because, as he related the story, he had spoken “in favor of justice.”

At home, he filled pages of his journal with observations on government and freedom, “notes for an oration at Braintree,” as he labeled them, though the oration appears never to have been delivered.

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people. . . . There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all others, by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors, in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike. . . .

The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved. . . .

Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable. . . .

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

At the same time, he was vowing, at least in the privacy of his diary, to devote himself wholly to his private business and providing for his family. “Above all things I must avoid politics. . . .” But as tensions in the colony mounted, so did his pent-up rage and longing for action. On an evening with the Cranches, when a visiting Englishman began extolling the English sense of justice, Adams exploded, taking everyone by surprise, and Adams as much as any. “I cannot but reflect upon myself with the severity of these rash, inexperienced, boyish, raw and awkward expressions,” he wrote afterward. “A man who has not better government of his tongue, no more command of his temper, is unfit for everything but children’s play and the company of boys.” There was no more justice in Britain than in hell, he had told the Englishman.

By the time of the destruction of the tea, what was later to become known as the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, he had again moved the family to Boston. His hatred of mob action notwithstanding, Adams was exuberant over the event. In less than six months, in May 1774, in reprisal, the British closed the port of Boston, the worst blow to the city in its history. “We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial,” he told Abigail. Shut off from the sea, Boston was doomed. It must suffer martyrdom and expire in a noble cause. For himself, he saw “no prospect of any business in my way this whole summer. I don’t receive a shilling a week.”

Yet she must not assume he was “in the dumps.” Quite the contrary: he felt better than he had in years.

IN 1774, Adams was chosen by the legislature as one of five delegates to the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, and with all Massachusetts on the verge of rebellion, he removed Abigail and the children again to Braintree, where they would remain.

In July he traveled to Maine, for what was to be his last turn on the circuit before leaving for Philadelphia. During a break from the court at Falmouth (later Portland), he and Jonathan Sewall, who was still attorney general, climbed a hill overlooking the blue sweep of Casco Bay, where they could talk privately.

Their friendship had cooled in recent years, as had been inevitable under the circumstances. In his diary Adams had grieved that his best friend in the world had become his implacable enemy. “God forgive him for the part he has acted,” Adams had written, adding, “It is not impossible that he may make the same prayer for me.” Now Sewall pleaded with Adams not to attend the Congress. The power of Great Britain was “irresistible” and would destroy all who stood in the way, Sewall warned.

As long as they lived, neither man would forget the moment. Adams told Sewall he knew Great Britain was “determined on her system,” but “that very determination, determined me on mine.” The die was cast, Adams said. “Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, [I am] with my country . . . You may depend upon it.”

Less than a year later, after the battle of Bunker Hill, Sewall would choose to “quit America.” With his wife and family he sailed for London, never to return. “It is not despair which drives me away,” he wrote before departure. “I have faith . . . that rebellion will shrink back to its native hell, and that Great Britain will rise superior to all the gasconade of the little, wicked American politicians.”

Not long afterward, in a series of letters to the Boston Gazette that he signed “Novangelus” — the New Englander — Adams argued that Americans had every right to determine their own destiny and charged the Foreign Ministry in London with corruption and venal intent. America, Adams warned, could face subjugation of the kind inflicted on Ireland. Unless America took action, and at once, Adams wrote, they faced the prospect of living like the Irish on potatoes and water.

III

WITH JOSEPH BASS AT HIS SIDE, Adams crossed Long Bridge over the frozen Charles River and rode into Cambridge in the early afternoon of January 24, 1776, in time to dine with General Washington at the temporary quarters of Colonel Thomas Mifflin near Harvard Yard. Mifflin, a wealthy young Philadelphia merchant who served with Adams in the Continental Congress, had been one of the first to welcome Adams on his arrival in Philadelphia. As a “fighting Quaker,” he had since become Washington’s aide-de-camp.

Martha Washington was present with her husband, as were General Horatio Gates and his lady. When Martha Washington and Elizabeth Gates arrived in Cambridge by coach in December, it was remarked that they would surely be a welcome addition “in country where [fire] wood was scarce.” Gates, a former British officer, was an affable, plain-faced man who, like Washington, had served during the French and Indian War on the disastrous Braddock expedition. As adjutant general he was Washington’s right hand at Cambridge.

Washington and Adams were nearly the same age, Washington, at forty-three, being just three years older. Powerfully built, he stood nearly a head taller than Adams — six feet four in his boots, taller than almost anyone of the day — and loomed over his short, plump wife. The three officers, in their beautiful buff and blue uniforms, were all that Adams might imagine when picturing himself as a soldier.

Yet even they were upstaged by the main attractions of the gathering, a dozen or more sachems and warriors of the Caughnawaga Indians in full regalia who had been invited to dine, together with their wives and children. Adams had been fascinated by Indians since boyhood, when the aged leaders of the Punkapaug and Neponset tribes had called on his father. But he shared with Washington and Gates a dread fear of the British unleashing Indian war parties on the frontiers, as had the French twenty years before. Recalling what he had read and heard, Adams had earlier written to a friend, “The Indians are known to conduct their wars so entirely without faith and humanity that it would bring eternal infamy on the Ministry throughout all Europe if they should excite those savages to war. . . . To let loose these blood hounds to scalp men and to butcher women and children is horrid.” Yet finding himself now unexpectedly in the actual presence of Indians was another matter, and he had a very different reaction.

The dinner, starting at two o’clock, was a diplomatic occasion. The Caughnawagas had come to offer their services to the Americans, and, gathered all about him, they presented a spectacle that Adams, to his surprise, hugely enjoyed. “It was a savage feast, carnivorous animals devouring their prey,” he wrote in his diary. “Yet they were wondrous polite. The general introduced me to them as one of the Grand Council Fire at Philadelphia, upon which they made me many bows and cordial reception.” To Abigail he reported himself decidedly pleased by the whole occasion.

What he could not risk telling her by letter was that the command at Cambridge had received the most heartening news, indeed the only good news, of the long, grim winter. An expedition led by young Henry Knox, a former Boston bookseller and colonel in Washington’s army, had been sent to Lake Champlain to retrieve the artillery captured by Ethan Allen at Fort Ticonderoga and haul the great guns back over the snow-covered Berkshire Mountains all the way to Boston, a task many had thought impossible. Now the “noble train” was at Framingham, twenty miles to the west. It was a feat of almost unimaginable daring and difficulty and, ironically, only made possible by the severity of the winter, as the guns had been dragged over the snow on sleds.

Mounted and on their way again the next morning, with the temperature still in the twenties, Adams and Bass were joined by a newly elected Massachusetts delegate to Congress, young Elbridge Gerry. They rode out past the pickets and campfires of Cambridge and at Framingham stopped to see for themselves the guns from Ticonderoga, Adams making careful note of the inventory — 58 cannon ranging in size from 3- and 4-pounders to one giant 24-pounder that weighed more than two tons. Clearly, with such artillery, Washington could change the whole picture at Boston.

The three riders pressed on through the grey and white landscape, making twenty to twenty-five miles a day. A “cold journey,” Adams wrote. The weather was persistently wretched. There was more snow, wind, and freezing rain.

With dusk coming on by four in the afternoon and the bitter cold turning colder still, the glow and warmth of familiar wayside taverns was more welcome than ever. Under normal circumstances, Adams nearly always enjoyed such stops. He loved the food — wild goose on a spit, punch, wine, bread and cheese, apples — and a leisurely pipe afterward, while toasting himself by the fire. He picked up news, delighted in “scenes and characters,” as he said, enough “for the amusement of Swift or even Shakespeare.”

It was in such places that he had first sensed the rising tide of revolution. A year before the first meeting of Congress in 1774, riding the court circuit, he had stopped one winter night at a tavern at Shrewsbury, about forty miles from Boston, and as he would recall for Benjamin Rush years afterward, the scene left a vivid impression.

. . . as I was cold and wet I sat down at a good fire in the bar room dry my great coat and saddlebags, till a fire could be made in my chamber. There presently came in, one after another half a dozen or half a score substantial yeomen of the neighborhood, who, sitting down to the fire after lighting their pipes, began a lively conversation upon politics. As I believed I was unknown to all of them, I sat in total silence to hear them. One said, “The people of Boston are distracted.” Another answered, “No wonder the people of Boston are distracted; oppression will make wise men mad.” A third said, “What would you say, if a fellow should come to your house and tell you he was come to take a list of your cattle that Parliament might tax you for them at so much a head? And how should you feel if he should go out and break open your barn, to take down your oxen, cows, horses and sheep?” “What would I say,” replied the first, “I would knock him in the head.” “Well,” said a fourth, “if Parliament can take away Mr. Hancock’s wharf and Mr. Row’s wharf, they can take away your barn and my house.” After much more reasoning in this style, a fifth who had as yet been silent, broke out, “Well it is high time for us to rebel. We must rebel sometime or other: and we had better rebel now than at any time to come: if we put it off for ten or twenty years, and let them go on as they have begun, they will get a strong party among us, and plague us a great deal more than they can now. As yet they have but a small party on their side.”

But now, at town after town, the atmosphere was edged with melancholy, the talk was of defeat at Quebec and the dire situation at Boston.

Snow lay deep most of the way. With drifts banked against buildings and stone walls, trees bare against the sky, the wind seldom still, no part of the journey was easy or uplifting to the spirits. Instead of welcoming committees and church bells, there was only the frozen road ahead.

The one bright note was young Gerry, who belonged to the so-called “codfish aristocracy” of Marblehead, his father having made a fortune shipping dried cod to Spain and the West Indies. Like Adams, indeed like every member of the Massachusetts delegation, Gerry was a Harvard graduate, a slight, birdlike man, age thirty-one, who spoke with a stammer and had an odd way of contorting his face, squinting and enlarging his eyes. But he was good company. Because of the family business, he had traveled extensively and was an ardent patriot. He and Adams talked all the way, making the journey, as Adams related to Abigail, considerably less tedious than it might have been. Their days together on the wintry road marked the start of what was to be a long, eventful friendship.

Like Adams, Gerry viewed mankind as capable of both great good and great evil. Importantly now, they were also of the same heart concerning what had to be done at Philadelphia.

Abigail had already said what John knew needed saying when, in November, a petition was circulated at home calling for reconciliation with Britain. “I could not join today in the petitions . . . for a reconciliation between our no longer parent state, by a tyrant state and these colonies,” she wrote. Then, making a slight but definite dash mark with her pen before continuing, as if to signify her own break from the past, she said, “Let us separate, they are unworthy to be our brethren.”

Passing through New York, Adams bought two copies of a small anonymous pamphlet, newly published under the title Common Sense. Keeping one, he sent the other on to her.

• • •

ADAMS AND HIS TWO COMPANIONS arrived at Philadelphia on Thursday, February 8, 1776, fifteen days after leaving Braintree.

His first letters from Abigail did not reach him until more than a month later and were filled with accounts of thrilling events. The American bombardment of Boston had begun March 2 and 3. “No sleep for me tonight,” she wrote, as the house trembled about her. On March 5 she described a more thunderous barrage: “the rattling of the windows, the jar of the house and the continuous roar of the 24-pounders.”

The night before, working at great speed, Washington’s men had moved the guns from Ticonderoga to commanding positions on the high ground of the Dorchester Peninsula, south of Boston, looking over Boston Harbor and the British fleet. With hundreds of ox teams and more than a thousand American troops at work, breastworks had been set up and cannon hauled into place, all in a night and to the complete surprise of the British. Abigail was told that the British commander, on seeing what they had accomplished, remarked, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”

Days of fearful tension followed until Sunday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, when she went again to the top of Penn’s Hill to see a spectacle such as no one could ever have imagined — the British were abandoning Boston. General William Howe had struck an agreement with Washington. If allowed to depart in peace, the army would not leave Boston in flames.

The entire fleet, “the largest fleet ever seen in America,” was lifting canvas in a fair breeze and turning to the open sea. “You may count upwards of one hundred and seventy-sail,” she wrote. “They look like a forest.”

The British had been outwitted, humiliated. The greatest military power on earth had been forced to retreat by an army of amateurs; it was a heady realization. As would be said by the Duke of Manchester before the House of Lords, “The fact remains, that the army which was sent to reduce the province of Massachusetts Bay has been driven from the capital, and the standard of the provincial army now waves in triumph over the walls of Boston.”

With the departing fleet sailed a thousand Loyalists, many well known to John and Abigail Adams, including John’s first mentor in the law, James Putnam of Worcester, and Samuel Quincy, brother of Hannah and Josiah, and Adams’s opposing counsel in the Boston Massacre trials.

That such had come to pass, wrote Abigail, was surely the work of the Lord and “marvelous in our eyes.”

CHAPTER TWO

TRUE BLUE

We were about one third Tories, and [one] third timid, and one third true blue.

~John Adams

I

PHILADELPHIA, the provincial capital of Pennsylvania on the western bank of the Delaware River, was a true eighteenth-century metropolis, the largest, wealthiest city in British America, and the most beautiful. Visitors wrote in praise of its “very exactly straight streets,” its “many fair houses and public edifices,” and of the broad, tidal Delaware, alive in every season but winter with a continuous traffic of ships great and small.

Though more than a hundred miles from the open sea, it was America’s busiest port, with wharves stretching nearly two miles along the river. The topgallants of huge merchantmen loomed over busy Water Street and Front Street. Cutters, shad boats, and two-masted shallops tied up, moved in and out, in company with the great, flat-bottomed Durham boats built to carry pig iron from the Durham Works upstream. Shipbuilding was a thriving industry; seagoing trade, the city’s lifeblood. Ships outbound carried lumber and wheat, Pennsylvania’s chief exports. Inbound ships brought European trade goods and from the West Indies, sugar, molasses, spices, and, increasingly now, European armaments and supplies for war. With no means for producing arms or gunpowder, the colonies were dependent on clandestine shipments from Europe by way of the Caribbean, and particularly the tiny Dutch island of St. Eustatius. One vessel reportedly docked at Philadelphia with 49,000 pounds of gunpowder.

Because of Pennsylvania’s reputation for religious tolerance, and an abundance of good land available to the west, Philadelphia was the principal port of entry to America. The incoming tide of English, Welsh, Scotch-Irish, and Palatine Germans had been growing steadily. In numbers, if not in influence, Presbyterians and Baptists had long since surpassed the Quakers of the Quaker City.

Fifty years earlier, when young Benjamin Franklin arrived from Boston with a single “Dutch” (German) dollar in his pocket, Philadelphia had been a town of 10,000 people. By 1776 its population was approaching 30,000. Larger than New York, nearly twice the size of Boston, it was growing faster than either.

As conceived by its English Quaker founder, William Penn, in 1682, the plan of Philadelphia was a spacious grid, which to a man like John Adams, accustomed to the tangle of Boston’s narrow streets, seemed a sensible arrangement. “I like it,” Adams had declared in his journal at the time of the First Congress, when, newly arrived and filled with curiosity, he set off with his walking stick, resolved to learn his way about.

Front Street is near the river, then 2nd Street, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th [he recorded]. The cross streets which intersect these are all equally wide, straight and parallel to each other, and are named for forest and fruit trees, Pear Street, Apple Street, Walnut Street, Chestnut Street, etc.

The main thoroughfare was High Street, commonly called Market Street, as it was the location of the immense public market. Most streets near the waterfront had brick footwalks and gutters and were lit at night by whale oil lamps, except when the moon was full. Many of the principal streets were lined with trees. “This is the most regular, neat, and convenient city I ever was in and has made the most rapid progress to its present greatness,” declared an English visitor. But it was the public buildings and churches that made the greatest impression. The State House, where Congress met; and nearby Carpenters’ Hall, which had been the setting for the First Congress; “noble” Christ Church, as Adams called it, with its magnificent Palladian window and landmark spire; the new hospital; the new poorhouse; the new Walnut Street Prison, were all unusually handsome and substantial. Silas Deane of Connecticut thought the poorhouse, or “Bettering House,” equal to anything of its kind anywhere. “All this is done by private donation and chiefly by the people called Quakers,” he informed his wife. To another Connecticut delegate, Oliver Wolcott, the massive new jail more resembled a prince’s palace than a house of confinement.

Public-spirited Philadelphians inspired by Benjamin Franklin had established the first volunteer fire company in the colonies, the first medical school, and a library. Franklin himself, Philadelphia’s first citizen, was the most famous American alive — printer, publisher, philosopher, scientist, and, as inventor of the lightning rod, “the man who tamed the lightning.” It was Franklin also who had led the way in establishing the American Philosophical Society, “for the promoting of useful knowledge,” with the result that Philadelphia had become the recognized center of American thought and ideas. Other eminent members of the Philosophical Society included John Bartram, who west of town, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, had created the first botanical garden in America; Dr. Benjamin Rush, an enterprising young physician and champion of humanitarian reform; and David Rittenhouse, clockmaker, optician, instrument-maker and self-taught astronomer who, to study the transit of Venus in 1769, had erected an incongruous-looking observation platform that still stood on the grounds of the State House.

Topics of “consideration” at the Philosophical Society, as set forth in Franklin’s initial proposal were, in the spirit of the age, all-embracing:

all philosophical [scientific] experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasure of life . . . all new-discovered plants, herbs, trees, roots, and methods of propagating them. . . . New methods of curing or preventing diseases. . . . New mechanical inventions for saving labor. . . . All new arts, trades, manufacturers, etc. that may be proposed or thought of.

As it was, Philadelphia manufacturers and artisans produced more goods than in any city in America — boots, wigs, hardware, fancy carriages, Franklin stoves, mirror glass, and no end of bricks for a city where nearly everything was built of brick. Thomas Affleck produced furniture as fine as any made in the colonies, all in the fashionable style of the English cabinetmaker Chippendale. John Behrent on Third Street advertised what may have been the first piano made in America, “a just finished extraordinary instrument by the name of a pianoforte, made of mahogany, being of the nature of a harpsichord.”

With twenty-three printing establishments and, by 1776, seven newspapers — more newspapers even than in London — Philadelphia was the publishing capital of the colonies. It was not only that Franklin’s immensely popular Poor Richard’s Almanack emanated from Philadelphia, but political pamphlets of such far-reaching influence as John Dickinson’s Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, Thomas Jefferson’s spirited Summary View of the Rights of British America, and now, Common Sense, which was selling faster than anything ever published in America.

Shops in nearly every street offered an array of goods and enticements such as most delegates to Congress could never find at home, everything from French brandy and Strasburg snuff to fancy chamber pots, artificial teeth, or ordinary pins of the kind John Adams purchased in “great heaps” to send home to Abigail. John Sparhawk, proprietor of the London Bookstore on Second Street, in addition to volumes on medicine and law, sold scientific instruments, swords, spurs, and backgammon tables.

There were as many as thirty bookshops and twice the number of taverns and coffeehouses, with names like Blue Anchor, Bunch of Grapes, Tun Tavern, Conestoga Wagon, Rising Sun, Half Moon, and each had its own clientele. The Free Masons convened at the staid old Indian King on Market Street. The London Coffee House, at the southwest corner of Front and Market, in the commercial center, was the favorite of the leading merchants and sea captains, indeed the place where much of the city’s business was transacted, while the new, larger City Tavern on the west side of Second Street, between Walnut and Chestnut, had become the great gathering place for members of Congress. Adams, recording his first arrival in Philadelphia in August 1774, had written that “dirty, dusty, and fatigued as we were, we could not resist the importunity to go to the [City] Tavern,” which, he decided, must be the most genteel place of its kind in all the colonies. It was there, at the City Tavern, a few days later, that Adams had first met George Washington.

Distilleries and breweries were thriving. Adams found the local beer so much to his liking that he temporarily abandoned his usual hard cider. “I drink no cider, but feast on Philadelphia beer,” he acknowledged to Abigail.

To anyone unaccustomed to city life, the crowds and noise seemed overwhelming, and worst were market days, Wednesdays and Saturdays, when German-speaking country people came rolling into town in huge farm wagons loaded with produce, live chickens, pigs, and cattle. The “thundering of coaches, chariots, chaises, wagons, drays and the whole fraternity of noise almost continually assails our ears,” complained a visiting physician. Delegate Stephen Hopkins from Rhode Island one day counted seventy farm wagons on Market Street.

Swarms of people moved up and down the sidewalks and spilled into the streets. At no point on the American continent could so many human beings be seen in such close proximity or in such variety. Sailors, tradesmen, mechanics in long leather aprons, journeymen printers, house-painters, sail-makers, indentured servants, black slave women, their heads wrapped in bright bandannas, free black stevedores and draymen, mixed together with Quaker merchants and the elegants of the city in their finery, everyone busy about something, and everyone, it seemed to visitors, unexpectedly friendly and polite.

Few delegates to Congress ever became accustomed to the bustle and noise; or to the suffocating heat of a Philadelphia summer; or to the clouds of mosquitoes and horseflies that with the onset of summer rose like a biblical scourge. Prices were high. Lodgings of even a modest sort were difficult to find. Conditions for the poor appeared little better than in other American cities. Misery, too, was on display. Delegates to Congress were frequently approached by beggars and, as in every city of the time, the scars and mutilations of disease and war were not uncommon among the passing crowds. Further, Philadelphia was notorious for its deadly epidemics of smallpox. During the most recent outbreak, in 1773, more than 300 people had died.

In his initial eagerness to see everything, Adams had made a tour of the new hospital. Led below ground to view the “lunaticks” locked in their cells, he saw to his horror that one was a former client from Massachusetts, a man he had once saved from being whipped for horse stealing. Afterward, upstairs, Adams walked between long rows of beds filled with the sick and lame, a scene of “human wretchedness” that tore at his heart. But if bothered by pigs loose in the streets, or the stench of rotting garbage and horse manure, he wrote nothing of it. Besides, like others, he found that to the west, toward the Schuylkill River, the city rapidly thinned out, beginning at about Sixth Street. By Eighth, beyond the hospital and the potter’s burial ground, one was in open country. To a man who thought nothing of walking five to ten miles to “rouse the spirits,” it was a welcome prospect. There were fields with wild strawberries in summer and scattered ponds, which in winter were filled with skaters, the most accomplished of whom, doffing their hats, performed something called the “Philadelphia Salute,” a bow much like in a minuet.

One fair afternoon, as if to clear their heads, Adams and two or three others climbed the bell tower of Christ Church, up a series of dimly lit, narrow ladders, past the great bells in their yokes, to a point a hundred feet aboveground, where a trap door led to the open air of the arched lantern, above which rose the church spire. Steadying themselves on a slightly canted roof, they looked over the whole of the city, the long sweep of the river, and the farmland of New Jersey to the east. The breeze at that height was like nothing to be felt in the streets below.

With the rest of the Massachusetts delegation, Adams had moved into a lodging house kept by a Mrs. Sarah Yard on the east side of Second Street, across from City Tavern. A tally of his expenses shows charges for room and board of 30 shillings a week in Pennsylvania currency, not including firewood and candles, which were extra.

“My time is too totally filled from the moment I get out of bed until I return to it, [with] visits, ceremonies, company, business, newspapers, pamphlets, etc., etc., etc.,” he had reported excitedly to Abigail.

On Sundays, the one day of respite from Congress, he was at church most of the day, attending services twice, even three times. With numerous denominations to choose from (everything except Congregational), he tried nearly all — the Anglican Christ Church, the meetinghouses of the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, the German Moravians — and passed judgment on them all, both their music and the comparative quality of their preaching. The Reverend Thomas Coombe of Christ Church was “sprightly” and distinct. “But I am not charmed,” wrote Adams. “His style was indifferent.” Indifference was a quality Adams found difficult to tolerate. The Methodist preacher was another matter. “He reaches the imagination and touches the passions very well.”

One Sunday, “led by curiosity and good company,” which included George Washington, Adams crossed a “Romish” threshold, to attend afternoon mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Fifth Street, an experience so singular that he reflected on it at length both in his journal and in a letter to Abigail. Everything about the service was the antithesis of a lifetime of Sabbaths at Braintree’s plain First Church, where unfettered daylight through clear window glass allowed for no dark or shadowed corners, or suggestion of mystery. For the first time, Adams was confronted with so much that generations of his people had abhorred and rebelled against, and he found himself both distressed and strangely moved. The music, bells, candles, gold, and silver were “so calculated to take in mankind,” that he wondered the Reformation had ever succeeded. He felt pity for “the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood,” he told Abigail.

The dress of the priest was rich with lace — his pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar piece was very rich — little images and crucifixes about — wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Savior in a frame of marble over the altar at full length upon the Cross, in the agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds?

Yet Adams stayed through all of the long service. The music and chanting of the assembly continued through the afternoon, “most sweetly and exquisitely,” and he quite approved of the priest’s “good, short, moral essay” on the duty of parents to see to their children’s temporal and spiritual interests. The whole experience, Adams concluded, was “awful and affecting” — the word “awful” then meaning full of awe, or “that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence.”

For one accustomed also to the plainest of domestic comforts and daily fare — and who loved to eat — the scale of Philadelphia hospitality in the opening weeks of the First Congress had been memorable. Not even in New York had he seen such display of private wealth, or dined and imbibed so grandly. At a great dinner for Congress in the banqueting hall at the State House, on September 16, 1774, a total of thirty-one toasts had been raised before the affair ended. There were further elegant receptions and dinners at the homes of the Mifflins, the Shippens, the Powels, Cadwalladers, and Dickinsons, extended gatherings presided over and attended by many of the most beautiful, fashionably dressed women of Philadelphia.

“I shall be killed with kindness in this place,” he told Abigail. “We go to Congress at nine and there we stay, most earnestly engaged until three in the afternoon, then we adjourn and go to dinner with some of the nobles of Pennsylvania at four o’clock and feast on ten thousand delicacies, and sit drinking Madeira, claret and burgundy ‘til six or seven.” Even plain Quakers, he reported, served ducks, hams, chickens, beef, creams, and custards.

“A most sinful feast again,” he recorded after another occasion, this in the splendor of a great four-story mansion on Third Street, the home of Mayor Samuel Powel, whose wealth and taste could be measured in richly carved paneling, magnificent paintings, a tea service in solid silver that would have fetched considerably more than the entire contents of the Adams household at Braintree.

“Dined with Mr. [Benjamin] Chew, Chief Justice of the Province,” he began still another diary entry.

Turtle and every other thing. Flummery, jellies, sweet meats of twenty sorts. Trifles, whipped syllabubs, floating islands . . . and then a dessert of fruits, raisins, almonds, pears, peaches — wines most excellent and admirable. I drank Madeira at a great rate and found no inconvenience in it.

Within the walls of Congress, he was at first dazzled by the other delegates, who, he decided, comprised an assembly surpassing any in history. Of the fifty-four in attendance, nearly half were lawyers and most had received a college education. Several, like Washington, were known to be men of great wealth, but others, like Roger Sherman of Connecticut, had humbler origins. He had begun as a shoemaker.

As observant of people as ever, Adams recorded his impressions in vivid, fragmentary notes of a kind kept by no other member of Congress. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia was a “tall, spare . . . masterly man”; Roger Sherman spoke “often and long, but very heavily”; James Duane of New York had a “sly, surveying eye,” but appeared “very sensible.” Joseph Galloway, a leading Philadelphia attorney and speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly who would later resign from Congress and ultimately seek refuge with the British army, struck Adams at first meeting as having an air of “design and cunning.”

John Dickinson, another prominent Philadelphian, was “a shadow . . . pale as ashes”; Adams doubted he would live a month. Caesar Rodney of Delaware was “the oddest looking man in the world . . . slender as a reed — pale — his face is not bigger than a large apple. Yet there is sense and fire, spirit, wit, and humor in his countenance.”

Adams was amazed by the range and variety of talents. “The art and address of ambassadors from a dozen belligerent powers of Europe, nay, of a conclave of cardinals at the election of a Pope . . . would not exceed the specimens we have seen.” Here were “fortunes, abilities, learning, eloquence, acuteness” equal to any. “Every question is discussed with moderation, and an acuteness and minuteness equal to that of Queen Elizabeth’s privy council.”

But after a month of such “acuteness and minuteness” over every issue at hand, irrespective of importance, Adams was “wearied to death.” The business of Congress had become tedious beyond expression, he told Abigail.

This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man — an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities.

The consequence of this is that business is drawn and spun out to immeasurable length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we should pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative.

Certain members began to irritate him. The perpetual round of feasting became only another burden of his “pilgrimage.” Even Philadelphia lost its charm. For all its “wealth and regularity,” Adams decided, Philadelphia was no Boston. Yet on departure from the First Congress in late October of 1774, after a stay of two months, he had written wistfully of the “happy, peaceful, the elegant, the hospitable, and polite city of Philadelphia,” wondering if he would ever be back.

By the time he returned for the Second Continental Congress, in late spring 1775, a month after Lexington and Concord, Philadelphia had become the capital of a revolution. Troops were drilling; lavish entertaining was out of fashion. Congress was in the throes of creating an army, appointing a commander-in-chief, issuing the first Continental money. With several other delegates, Adams spent a day inspecting defenses on the Delaware.

“There are in this city three large regiments raised, formed, armed, trained, and uniformed under officers consisting of gentlemen of the very first fortune and best character in the place,” Adams reported to Abigail’s uncle, Isaac Smith, a prosperous Boston merchant whom Adams greatly admired. “All this started up since [the] 19th [of] April [since Lexington and Concord]. They cover the common every day of the week, Sundays not excepted.”

The deliberations of Congress, meantime, had been moved from Carpenters’ Hall to the larger, grander State House on the south side of Chestnut Street, between Fifth and Sixth Streets. Built some forty years before, it comprised a handsome main edifice, two stories tall with a bell tower and arcaded wings joining smaller “offices” at either end, all of it done in red brick. High on the exterior west wall of the main building, a large clock proclaimed the hour.

Congress convened in the Assembly Room on the first floor, to the left of the Chestnut Street entrance. An ample chamber, measuring forty by forty feet, it was notably devoid of decoration, “neat but not elegant,” with whitewashed walls and flooded with daylight from high windows on both the north and south sides. On a low platform at the east end of the room stood a single, tall-backed chair for the president. There were two woodstoves and on the east wall, twin fireplaces, one on either side of the president’s chair. Seats for the delegates, fifty or so Windsor chairs, were arranged in a semicircle facing the president’s chair, these interspersed with work tables covered with green baize cloths and clustered according to region: New England on the left, middle colonies in the center, southern colonies on the right.

The Pennsylvania Assembly, having given up its space, had moved across the hall to the more elaborate Supreme Court Room, where the royal coat-of-arms hung. At the rear of the hall, a broad stairway led to the banqueting room that extended a hundred feet, the full length of the building.

Outside to the rear was the State House Yard, an open public green the size of a city block and enclosed the whole way around by a seven-foot brick wall. The Rittenhouse observation platform stood off to one side, and at the center of the far wall a huge single-arched wooden gate, twice the height of the wall, opened onto Walnut Street. In good weather, as a place for the delegates to stretch their legs and talk privately, the yard was ideal. Many days more business was transacted there than inside. And with the yard serving also now as a place to store cannon and barrels of gunpowder, the war was never far from consciousness.

All sessions of Congress were conducted in strictest secrecy behind closed doors because of the number of British agents in and about Philadelphia and the need to convey an impression of unity, that all members were perfectly agreed on the results of their deliberations. Consequently, like others, Adams could report comparatively little in his letters home, except that the hours were longer than ever, the issues of greater urgency, the strain worse on everybody.

His health suffered. His eyes bothered him to the point that he had difficulty reading. He wrote of the frustrations of “wasting, exhausting” debates. America was “a great, unwieldy body,” he decided. “Its progress must be slow. It is like a large fleet sailing under convoy. The fleetest sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest.”

Yet he would not give up or let down. “I will not despond.”

A sweltering, fly-infested summer of 1775 was followed by an autumn of almost unceasing rains. Dysentery broke out in the military camps. Adams, though suffering from rheumatism and a violent cold, worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, in committee meetings from seven to ten in the morning, then to the full Congress till late afternoon, then back to committees from six to ten at night.

Politics were no less perplexing than ever. “Politics are a labyrinth without a clue,” he wrote, but he had come to understand the makeup of Congress. He knew the delegates now as he had not before, and they had come to know him. That he was repeatedly chosen for the most important committees was a measure of his influence and of the respect others had for his integrity, his intellect, and exceptional capacity for hard work. He was the leading committeeman of the Massachusetts delegation, perhaps indeed of the whole Congress.

By October, at the time of Abigail’s shattering ordeal with sickness and death at home, Adams was writing to say they must prepare themselves, “minds and hearts for every event, even the worst.” Since his first involvement in the “Cause of America,” he had known the crisis would never be settled peaceably and this, he told her in confidence, had been a source of much “disquietude.”

The thought that we might be driven to the sad necessity of breaking our connection with G[reat] B[ritain], exclusive of the carnage and destruction which it was easy to see must attend the separation, always gave me a great deal of grief.

II

POSSIBLY IT WAS HIS FIRST or second day back in Philadelphia, in early February 1776, after the long wintry journey from home, that Adams, in his room at Mrs. Yard’s, drew up a list of what he was determined to see accomplished. Or as appears more likely, from its placement in his diary, the list had been composed earlier, somewhere en route. Undated, it included, “An alliance to be formed with France and Spain”; “Government to be assumed by every colony”; “Powder mills to be built in every colony and fresh efforts to make saltpetre [for the making of gunpowder].” And, on the second of the two small opposing pages in the diary, he wrote, a “Declaration of Independency.”

Independence had been talked about privately and alluded to in correspondence, but rarely spoken of directly in public declamation, or in print. To Adams independence was the only guarantee of American liberty, and he was determined that the great step be taken. The only question was when to make the move. If a decision were forced on Congress too soon, the result could be disastrous; independence would be voted down. But every day that independence was put off would mean added difficulties in the course of the larger struggle. Abigail, in one of her letters, aptly offered some favorite lines from Shakespeare:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in the shallows and in miseries . . .

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

But just when to catch the tide was the question. By Adams’s estimate, Congress was about equally divided three ways — those opposed to independence who were Tories at heart if not openly, those too cautious or timid to take a position one way or the other, and the “true blue,” as he said, who wanted to declare independence with all possible speed. So as yet the voices for independence were decidedly in the minority. Indeed, the delegates of six colonies — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina — were under specific instructions not to vote for independence.

The opposing argument hung on the lingering possibility of a last-minute reconciliation with Britain. Were not the likes of Edmund Burke speaking out in Parliament for American rights, it was said. Supposedly a peace commission was on the way from London. To Adams such talk was a phantom. “The Ministry,” he wrote, “have caught the colonies as I have often caught a horse, by holding an empty hat, as if it was full of corn. . . .” But throughout the middle colonies, as in parts of the South, great numbers of people had no wish to separate from the mother country. In Philadelphia such sentiment ran strong, and not just among the city’s numerous Tories. “The plot thickens. . . . Thinking people uneasy,” observed a local attorney. “The Congress in equilibrio on the question of independence or no. . . . I love the cause of liberty, but cannot heartily join in the presentation of measures totally foreign to the original plan of resistance.”

To many staunchly pacifist Quakers any step that led nearer to all-out war was anathema. To them George III was “the best of kings,” and they spoke of those who called themselves patriots as “the violent people.”

The mood of the city had become extremely contentious. “The malignant air of calumny has taken possession of almost all ranks and societies of people in this place,” wrote Christopher Marshall, an apothecary and committed patriot (though a Quaker) who had become one of Adams’s circle of Philadelphia friends.

The rich, the poor, the high professor and the prophane, seem all to be infected with this grievous disorder, so that the love of our neighbor seems to be quite banished, the love of self and opinions so far prevails. . . . The [Tory] enemies of our present struggle . . . are grown even scurrilous to individuals, and treat all characters who differ from them with the most opprobrious language.

In Congress the strain was showing. From Virginia had come word that the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, having escaped to the safety of a British man-of-war, had called on all slaves to rebel, promising them their freedom if they joined the King’s forces. On New Year’s Day he had ordered the bombardment of Norfolk. Southern delegates were outraged. At the same time the bad news from Canada had had much the same effect witnessed by Adams in the wayside taverns en route from Massachusetts. “There is a deep anxiety, a kind of thoughtful melancholy,” he reported to Abigail. Writing again, he stressed that the events of war were always uncertain. Then, paraphrasing a favorite line from the popular play Cato by Joseph Addison — a line that General Washington, too, would often call upon — Adams told her, “We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it.”

With sickness widespread in Philadelphia there was much hacking and coughing in Congress and many a long, sallow look. When some of the delegates protested that smoke from the wood stoves in the chamber was the cause of such poor health, the stoves were removed. Other ailments struck. Thomas Lynch of South Carolina suffered a stroke from which he would not recover. Smallpox reappeared in the city, putting everyone further on edge. In March one of New England’s most prominent delegates, Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, would die of the disease.

On February 27, word arrived that Parliament, in December, had prohibited all trade with the colonies and denounced as traitors all Americans who did not make an unconditional submission. The punishment for treason, as every member of Congress knew, was death by hanging.

A vast British armada was reported under way across the Atlantic and there were ominous rumors of the King hiring an army of German mercenaries. It was the New Englanders who held firm for independence, though two of the Massachusetts delegation, John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine, exhibited nothing like the zeal of either Samuel Adams or Elbridge Gerry. There were many, too, among the other delegations, who could be counted on, though unfortunately several of the most important were absent. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia would not appear at Philadelphia until the middle of March. Caesar Rodney of Delaware would be away until April. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia would not arrive for another three months, not until the middle of May. Meanwhile, time was wasting and a great deal needed doing.

Present nearly every day, notwithstanding his years and infirmities, was Benjamin Franklin, who, at age seventy, was popularly perceived to be the oldest, wisest head in the Congress, which he was, and the most influential, which he was not. Franklin wanted independence and considered Congress lamentably irresolute on the matter, as he told Adams. Franklin had no expectation of new terms from Britain and from long experience in London, as an agent for Pennsylvania, he knew the King and the Foreign Ministry as did no one else in Congress. But Franklin had no liking for floor debate. He was patient, imperturbable, and at times sound asleep in his chair. Never would he argue a point. Indeed, it was rare that he spoke at all or ventured an opinion except in private conversation, which to Adams, who was almost incapable of staying out of an argument, was extremely difficult to comprehend. “He has not assumed anything,” Adams wrote in frustration, “nor affected to take the lead; but has seemed to choose that the Congress pursue their own sentiments, and adopt their own plans.” That Franklin was quietly proposing to equip the Continental Army with bows and arrows must have left Adams still more puzzled.

For Adams any sustained equivalent of Franklin’s benign calm would have been impossible. Knowing his hour had come and that he must rise to the occasion and play a leading part, he would play it with all that was in him.

Among the opposition there were only two whom he disliked, Benjamin Harrison and Edward Rutledge. Harrison, an outspoken Virginia planter, six feet four inches tall and immensely fat, was a fervent champion of American rights who liked to say he would have come to Philadelphia on foot had it been necessary. To Adams, nonetheless, he was a profane and impious fool. Rutledge, the youngest member, was dandified, twenty-six years old, and overflowing with self-confidence. At first, Adams judged him “smart” if not “deep,” but the more Rutledge talked, the more he expressed disagreement with Adams, the more scathing Adams’s assessment became, to the point where, in his diary, he appeared nearly to run out of words. “Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob o’ Lincoln, a swallow, a sparrow, a peacock, excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady — jejune, inane, and puerile.”

Yet Adams remained pointedly courteous to both men, as to others of the anti-independence faction. Among the surprises of the unfolding drama, as tensions increased, was the extent to which the ardent, disputatious John Adams held himself in rein, proving when need be a model of civility and self-restraint, even of patience.

In later years Adams would recall the warning advice given the Massachusetts delegation the day of their arrival for the First Congress. Benjamin Rush, Thomas Mifflin, and two or three other Philadelphia patriots had ridden out to welcome the Massachusetts men, and at a tavern in the village of Frankford, in the seclusion of a private room, they told the New Englanders they were “suspected of having independence in view.” They were perceived to be “too zealous” and must not presume to take the lead. Virginia, they were reminded, was the largest, richest, and most populous of the colonies, and the “very proud” Virginians felt they had the right to lead.

According to Adams, the advice made a deep impression, and among the consequences was the choice of George Washington to head the army. But Adams also wrote that he had “not in my nature prudence and caution enough” always to stand back. Years before, at age twenty, he had set down in his diary that men ought to “avow their opinions and defend them with boldness,” and he was of the same mettle still.

THE BULWARK OF THE OPPOSITION, of the “cool faction,” was the Pennsylvania delegation, and the greatly respected John Dickinson was its eloquent floor leader. Cautious, conservative by nature, Dickinson was, as Adams had noted, a distinctive figure, tall and exceptionally slender, with almost no color in his face. Because of his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, an early pamphlet on the evils of British policy, Dickinson had become a hero. He was “the Farmer,” his name spoken everywhere, though he was hardly the plain man of the soil many imagined. Born to wealth and raised on an estate in Delaware, he had trained in the law at London and made his career in Philadelphia, where he had risen rapidly to the top of his profession. Married to a Quaker heiress, he lived in grand style, riding through the city in a magnificent coach-and-four attended by liveried black slaves. His town house, catercornered to the State House on Chestnut Street, was then undergoing extensive alterations and thought to be too large and showy even by his wife, who preferred their nearby country seat, Fairhill.

Dickinson had wished to make a good first impression on Adams, and he succeeded. As a dinner guest at Fairhill during the First Congress, Adams was charmed. Dickinson “has an excellent heart, and the cause of his country lies near it,” Adams had written. As for his initial concern that the rigors of Congress might be too much for someone of such delicate appearance, Adams had learned better. Though afflicted with the gout, Dickinson had since assumed command of a Philadelphia battalion with the rank of colonel. He had become the politician-soldier of the sort Adams so often imagined himself, yet it was with a determination no less than Adams’s own that Dickinson kept telling Congress that peaceful methods for resolving the current crisis were still possible and greatly preferable. He was not a Tory. He was not opposed to independence in principle. Rather, he insisted, now was not the time for so dangerous and irrevocable a decision.

Adams had come to believe that Dickinson’s real struggle was with his mother and his wife, both devout Quakers who bedeviled him with their pacifist views. “If I had such a mother and such a wife,” Adams would reflect years later, recalling Dickinson’s predicament, “I believe I should have shot myself.”

Outraged by Dickinson’s insistence on petitions to the King as essential to restoring peace, even after Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, Adams had strongly denounced any such step. Like many other delegates, he had been infuriated by Congress’s humble petition of July 8, 1775, the so-called Olive Branch Petition, that had been Dickinson’s major contribution. From the day he saw with his own eyes what the British had done at Lexington and Concord, Adams failed to understand how anyone could have any misconception or naïve hope about what to expect from the British. “Powder and artillery are the most efficacious, sure and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt,” Adams wrote privately.

In a speech on the floor of Congress, Dickinson warned the New England delegates that they would have “blood . . . on their heads” if they excluded the possibility of peace. Adams, springing to his feet, responded so vehemently that when he left the chamber Dickinson came rushing after, to confront him outside.

“What is the reason, Mr. Adams, that you New England men oppose our measures of reconciliation?” Dickinson angrily demanded, according to Adams’s later account of the scene. “Look, ye! If you don’t concur with us in our pacific system, I, and a number of us, will break off from you in New England and we will carry on the opposition by ourselves in our own way.”

Though infuriated by Dickinson’s “magisterial” tone, Adams replied calmly that there were many accommodations he would make in the cause of harmony and unanimity. He would not, however, be threatened.

Venting his “fire” in a private letter, Adams portrayed Dickinson as a “piddling genius” who lent a “silly cast” to deliberations. The letter was intercepted by British agents and widely published in Tory newspapers, with the result that Dickinson refused to speak when, one morning on their way to the State House, he and Adams passed “near enough to touch elbows,” as Adams recorded that day.

He passed without moving his hat or head or hand. I bowed and pulled off my hat. He passed haughtily by. . . . But I was determined to make my bow, that I might know his temper.

We are not to be on speaking terms, nor bowing terms, for the time to come.

Others refused to speak to Adams, so great was the respect for Dickinson in Congress and in the city. A British spy in Philadelphia named Gilbert Barkley reported to his contact in London, “The Quakers and many others look on him [Adams], and others of his way of thinking, as the greatest enemies of this country.” For weeks Adams was ostracized, “avoided like a man infected with leprosy,” he would remember. He felt as he had after the Boston Massacre trials, “borne down” by the weight of unpopularity. Benjamin Rush would write sympathetically of Adams walking the streets of Philadelphia alone, “an object of nearly universal scorn and detestation.”

Such was the support for Dickinson and the Olive Branch Petition that Adams and his colleagues were left no choice but to acquiesce. The petition was agreed to — only to be summarily dismissed by George III, who refused even to look at it and proclaimed the colonies in a state of rebellion.

Still, Dickinson and the anti-independents clung to the hope of a resolution to the crisis, insisting reconciliation was still possible, and so the wait for the peace commissioners had continued.

WHAT NEITHER JOHN DICKINSON nor John Adams nor anyone could have anticipated was the stunning effect of Common Sense. The little pamphlet had become a clarion call, rousing spirits within Congress and without as nothing else had. The first edition, attributed to an unnamed “Englishman” and published by Robert Bell in a print shop on Third Street, appeared January 9, 1776. By the time Adams had resumed his place in Congress a month later, Common Sense had gone into a third edition and was sweeping the colonies. In little time more than 100,000 copies were in circulation. “Who is the author of Common Sense?” asked a correspondent from South Carolina in the Philadelphia Evening Post. “He deserves a statue of gold.”

Written to be understood by everyone, Common Sense attacked the very idea of hereditary monarchy as absurd and evil, and named the “royal brute” George III as the cause of every woe in America. It was a call to arms, an unabashed argument for war, and a call for American independence, something that had never been said so boldly before in print. “Why is it that we hesitate? . . . The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth . . . for God’s sake, let us come to a final separation. . . . The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

The British spy, Barkley, reported its publication as he did such other vital news items as the arrival of shipments of gunpowder from the West Indies, or the sailing from Philadelphia of armed sloops and brigantines flying “what they call the American flag.”

The anonymous author was revealed to be a down-at-the-heels English immigrant, Thomas Paine, who had landed at Philadelphia a year earlier with little more than a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Paine had been encouraged in his efforts by Benjamin Rush, who was himself the author of a pamphlet on the evils of slavery, and it was Rush who provided the title.

Friends in Massachusetts reported to Adams that because of Common Sense the clamor for a declaration of independence was never greater. “This is the time . . . we have never had such a favorable moment,” wrote one. In a letter to Abigail, referring to the copy he had sent her, Adams said he expected Common Sense to become the “common faith,” and on learning that in Boston, he, Adams, was presumed to be the author, he felt flattered. Writing to a former law clerk, he declared himself innocent, saying he could never have achieved a style of such “strength and brevity.” But Adams was not without misgivings. The more he thought about it, the less he admired Common Sense. The writer, he told Abigail, “has a better hand at pulling down than building.”

That Paine had attempted to prove the unlawfulness of monarchy with analogies from the Bible, declaring monarchy to be “one of the sins of the Jews,” struck Adams as ridiculous. Paine had assured his readers that in a war with Britain, Americans, being such experienced seamen and willing soldiers and having such an abundance of war matériel at hand, would readily triumph. Adams had no illusions about the prospect of war with Britain. Almost alone among the members of Congress, he saw no quick victory, but a long, painful struggle. The war, he warned prophetically in a speech on February 22, could last ten years. What was more, as he confided to Abigail’s uncle, Isaac Smith, he thought “this American contest will light up a general war” in Europe.

But it was Paine’s “feeble” understanding of constitutional government, his outline of a unicameral legislature to be established once independence was achieved, that disturbed Adams most. In response, he began setting down his own thoughts on government, resolved, as he later wrote, “to do all in my power to counteract the effect” on the popular mind of so foolish a plan.

Meanwhile, for all the gloom and discord at the State House, Congress was making decisions. On February 26 there was enacted an embargo on exports to Britain. On March 2, Silas Deane was appointed a secret envoy to France to go “in the character of a merchant” to buy clothing and arms, and to appraise the “disposition” of France should the colonies declare independence. Oliver Wolcott, Deane’s fellow delegate from Connecticut, sensed the approach of a moment that could “decide the fate of this country.” Adams busily jotted notes:

Is any assistance attainable from F[rance]? What connection may we safely form with her. 1st. No political connection. Submit to none of her authority. . . . 2nd. No military connection. Receive no troops from her. 3rd. Only a commercial connection.

In the hope that the Canadians could be persuaded to join the American cause as “the 14th colony,” Congress organized a diplomatic expedition to Montreal with Benjamin Franklin at its head, and despite his age and poor health, Franklin departed on what was to be an exceedingly arduous and futile mission.

Adams joined in floor debate day after day, arguing a point, pleading, persuading, and nearly always with effect. No one spoke more often or with greater force. “Every important step was opposed, and carried by bare majorities, which obliged me to be almost constantly engaged in debate,” he would recall.

But I was not content with all that was done, and almost every day, I had something to say about advising the states to institute governments, to express my total despair of any good coming from the petition or of those things which were called conciliatory measures. I constantly insisted that all such measures, instead of having any tendency to produce a reconciliation, would only be considered as proofs of our timidity and want of confidence in the ground we stood on, and would only encourage our enemies to greater exertions against us.

Rarely did he prepare his remarks in advance other than in his mind, so that once on his feet he could speak from what he knew and what he strongly felt. He had tried writing his speeches but found it impossible. “I understand it not,” he would tell Benjamin Rush. “I never could write declamations, orations, or popular addresses.”

He had no liking for grand oratorical flourishes. “Affectation is as disagreeable in a letter as in conversation,” he once told Abigail, in explanation of his views on “epistolary style,” and the same principle applied to making a speech. The art of persuasion, he held, depended mainly on a marshaling of facts, clarity, conviction, and the ability to think on one’s feet. True eloquence consisted of truth and “rapid reason.” As a British spy was later to write astutely of Adams, he also had a particular gift for seeing “large subjects largely”

He would stand at his place, back straight, walking stick in hand, at times letting the stick slip between thumb and forefinger to make a quick tap on the floor, as if to punctuate a point. The “clear and sonorous” voice would fill the room. No one ever had trouble hearing what Adams had to say, nor was there ever the least ambiguity about what he meant. Nothing of what he or anyone said in the course of debate was officially recorded. But in later writings Adams recalled stressing certain points repeatedly:

We shall be driven to the necessity of declaring ourselves independent and we ought now to be employed in preparing a plan for confederation of the colonies, [here might come the sharp tap of the stick] and treaties to be proposed to foreign power [tap] . . . together with a declaration of independence [tap]. . . .

Foreign powers can not be expected to acknowledge us, till we have acknowledged ourselves and taken our station among them as a sovereign power [tap], an independent nation [tap].

On March 14, Congress voted to disarm all Tories. On March 23, in a momentous step, the delegates resolved to permit the outfitting of privateers, “armed vessels,” to prey on “the enemies of the United Colonies,” a move Adams roundly supported. In the advocacy of sea defenses he stood second to none. The previous fall he had urged the creation of an American fleet, which to some, like Samuel Chase of Maryland, had seemed “the maddest idea in the world.” The fight began on the floor, and on October 13, to the extent of authorizing funds for two small swift-sailing ships, Congress founded a navy. By the end of the year Congress had directed that thirteen frigates be built. Adams was appointed to a naval committee that met in a rented room at Tun Tavern, and it was Adams who drafted the first set of rules and regulations for the new navy, a point of pride with him for as long as he lived.

Knowing nothing of armed ships, he made himself expert, and would call his work on the naval committee the pleasantest part of his labors, in part because it brought him in contact with one of the singular figures in Congress, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, who was nearly as old as Franklin and always wore his broad-brimmed Quaker hat in the chamber. Adams found most Quakers to be “dull as beetles,” but Hopkins was an exception. A lively, learned man, he had seen a great deal of life, suffered the loss of three sons at sea, and served in one public office or other continuously from the time he was twenty-five. The old gentleman loved to drink rum and expound on his favorite writers. The experience and judgment he brought to the business of Congress were of great use, as Adams wrote, but it was in after-hours that he “kept us alive.”

His custom was to drink nothing all day, nor ‘til eight o’clock in the evening, and then his beverage was Jamaica spirits and water . . . . He read Greek, Roman, and British history, and was familiar with English poetry. . . . And the flow of his soul made his reading our own, and seemed to bring to recollection in all of us all we had ever read.

Hopkins never drank to excess, according to Adams, but all he drank was promptly “converted into wit, sense, knowledge, and good humor.”

There was more to be done by sea and land than anyone knew, Adams kept saying. When on March 25 word arrived that the British had abandoned Boston, setting off jubilant celebration in Philadelphia, he lost no time in advocating the immediate fortification of Boston Harbor. “Fortify, fortify, and never let them in again,” he urged a friend at home. On April 6, in another decisive step, Congress opened American ports to the trade of all nations except Britain.

Half measures would not answer, Adams knew. The tentative attitude of Dickinson and the “Quaker interests” was becoming more and more difficult to tolerate. Adams’s sense of urgency grew greater by the day. “The middle way is no way at all,” he wrote to General Horatio Gates. “If we finally fail in this great and glorious contest, it will be by bewildering ourselves in groping for the middle way.”

“This story of [peace] commissioners is as arrant an illusion as ever hatched in the brain of an enthusiast, a politician, or a maniac,” he told Abigail in a letter in which he confided that he had been busy at something, “about ten sheets of paper with my own hand,” that he would have to tell her about later.

Adams’s Thoughts on Government, as it would be known, was first set forth in a letter to a fellow congressman, William Hooper, who, before returning home to help write a new constitution for North Carolina, had asked Adams for a “sketch” of his views. When another of the North Carolinians, John Penn, requested a copy, this, too, Adams provided, in addition to three more copies, all written out by hand, for Jonathan Sergeant of New Jersey and Virginians George Wythe and Richard Henry Lee, who with Adams’s consent, had the letter published as a pamphlet by the Philadelphia printer John Dunlap.

For Adams the structure of government was a subject of passionate interest that raised fundamental questions about the realities of human nature, political power, and the good society. It was a concern that for years had propelled much of his reading and the exchange of ideas with those whose judgment he most respected, including Abigail, who had written to him the year before, “I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or few is ever grasping. . . .

The great fish swallow up the small [she had continued] and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.

Adams had accused Thomas Paine of being better at tearing down than building. In what he wrote in response, he was being the builder, as best he knew. To do this he had had “to borrow a little time from my sleep.” He was exhausted, he acknowledged, but he seems also to have sensed the importance of what he had done.

“It has been the will of Heaven,” the essay began, “that we should be thrown into existence at a period when the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live . . . .

a period when a coincidence of circumstances without example has afforded to thirteen colonies at once an opportunity of beginning government anew from the foundation and building as they choose. How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? How few have ever had anything more of choice in government than in climate?

He was looking beyond independence, beyond the outcome of the war, to what would be established once independence and victory were achieved. Much as he foresaw the hard truth about the war to be waged, Adams had the clearest idea of anyone in Congress of what independence would actually entail, the great difficulties and risks, no less than the opportunities. When arguing cases in court, he liked to draw on the fables of La Fontaine and to quote the line “in every thing one must consider the end.”

The happiness of the people was the purpose of government, he wrote, and therefore that form of government was best which produced the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number. And since all “sober inquirers after truth” agreed that happiness derived from virtue, that form of government with virtue as its foundation was more likely than any other to promote the general happiness.

The greatest minds agreed, Adams continued, that all good government was republican, and the “true idea” of a republic was “an empire of laws and not of men,” a phrase not original with Adams but that he had borrowed from the writings of the seventeenth-century philosopher James Harrington. A government with a single legislative body would never do. There should be a representative assembly, “an exact portrait in miniature of the people at large,” but it must not have the whole legislative power, for the reason that like an individual with unchecked power, it could be subject to “fits of humor, transports of passion, partialities of prejudice.” A single assembly could “grow avaricious . . . exempt itself from burdens . . . become ambitious and after some time vote itself perpetual.” Balance would come from the creation of a second, smaller legislative body, a “distinct assembly” of perhaps twenty or thirty, chosen by the larger legislature. This “Council,” as Adams called it, would be given “free and independent judgment upon all acts of legislation that it may be able to check and correct the errors of the others.”

The executive, the governor, should, Adams thought, be chosen by the two houses of the legislature, and for not more than a year at a time. Executive power would include the veto and the appointment of all judges and justices, as well as militia officers, thus making the executive the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Essential to the stability of government and to an “able and impartial administration of justice,” Adams stressed, was separation of judicial power from both the legislative and executive. There must be an independent judiciary. “Men of experience on the laws, of exemplary morals, invincible patience, unruffled calmness and indefatigable application” should be “subservient to none” and appointed for life.

Finally and emphatically, he urged the widest possible support for education. “Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.”

Little that Adams ever wrote had such effect as his Thoughts on Government. Yet he felt it was too rough, “crude” in execution. He regretted insufficient time to write “more correctly.”

FROM ABIGAILCAME LONG LETTERS FILLED with news from home — of family, of politics, of her day-to-day struggle to manage expenses, cope with shortages, and keep the farm going, a responsibility for which little in her background had prepared her. “Frugality, industry, and economy are the lessons of the day,” she confided to a friend, “at least they must be so for me or my small boat will suffer shipwreck.” To John she pleaded repeatedly for more news of his health and his outlook, and filled pages with her own feelings for all that was transpiring at Philadelphia.

She was particularly curious about the Virginians, wondering if, as slaveholders, they had the necessary commitment to the cause of freedom. “I have,” she wrote, “sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creature of theirs.” What she felt about those in Massachusetts who owned slaves, including her own father, she did not say, but she need not have — John knew her mind on the subject. Writing to him during the First Congress, she had been unmistakably clear: “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me — [to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

It had been two weeks now since she had seen the British fleet sail out of Boston, and she viewed the approach of spring very differently than she had only a month before. Her world had been transformed. She was experiencing an uncommon ”gaiety de coeur,” she wrote. “I think the sun shines brighter, the birds sing more melodiously.” She longed to hear word of independence declared. Her spirit took flight at the thought:

— and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.

Borrowing a line from a poem by Daniel Defoe that she knew he would recognize (for he had used it, too), she wrote, “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of yours as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as vassals of your sex. Regard us then as being placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

She was not being entirely serious. In part, in her moment of springtime gaiety, she was teasing him. But only in part.

Adams responded in a light spirit. “I cannot but laugh,” he began.

We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented. This is rather too coarse a compliment but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out.

Depend on it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and in practice you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.

Others wrote from Massachusetts to question why it was taking so long to accomplish what everyone at home was demanding. “People can’t account for the hesitancy they observe,” said James Warren, while his wife, Mercy Otis Warren, who was a playwright and a woman Adams particularly admired, lectured him on the ideal republican government she foresaw for the future union of the colonies.

Replying to James Warren on April 16, Adams could hardly control his anger. “Have you seen the privateering resolves? Are not those independence enough for my beloved constituents? Have you seen the resolves opening our ports to all nations? Are these independence enough? What more would you have?”

But writing again to Warren, Adams tried to explain the concern and hesitation over independence. “All great changes are irksome to the human mind, especially those which are attended with great dangers and uncertain effects. No man living can foresee the consequences of such a measure.”

The future was exceedingly dangerous, Adams felt certain. His mind was much on eventualities, given what he knew of human nature.

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls. . . .

There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be decency and respect, and veneration introduced for persons of authority of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular government, this is our only way.

To Mercy Warren, Adams counseled, “Patience! Patience! Patience!”

A week or so after denouncing the tyranny of men, Abigail wrote to say that in her loneliness and with so much riding on her shoulders, she scarcely knew which way to turn. “I miss my partner and find myself unequal to the cares which fall upon me. . . . I want to say many things I must omit. It is not fit to wake the soul by tender strokes of art, or to ruminate upon happiness we might enjoy, lest absences become intolerable.”

She wished he would burn her letters, she said in postscript.

Sometimes he wrote to her from Congress itself. (“When a man is seated in the midst of forty people, some of whom are talking, and others whispering, it is not easy to think what is proper to write,” he would tell her.) On April 18 she asked if he would be home in May or June, and to say she thought of him only “with the tenderest affection.” He, on April 23, went on about his Philadelphia barber who more than anyone helped him maintain a sense of proportion. “He is a little dapper fellow . . . a tongue as fluent and voluble as you please, wit at will, and . . . never . . . at a loss for a story to tell . . . while he is shaving and combing me . . . he contributes more than I could have imagined to my comfort in this life.”

But having received her letter, Adams became about as tender as he would allow on paper.

Is there no way for two friendly souls to converse together, although the bodies are 400 miles off. Yes, by letter. But I want a better communication. I want to hear you think, or to see your thoughts.

The conclusion of your letter makes my heart throb more than a cannonade would. You bid me burn your letters. But I must forget you first.

She followed at length, this time with thoughts on his concerns, writing that “a people may let a King fall, yet still remain a people, but if a King let his people slip from him, he is no longer a King. And as this is most certainly our case, why not proclaim to the world in decisive terms our own importance?”

“I think you shine as a stateswoman,” he responded exuberantly, and in another letter wrote:

Your sentiments of the duties we owe to our country are such as become the best of women and the best of men. Among all the disappointments and perplexities which have fallen my share in life, nothing has contributed so much to support my mind as the choice blessing of a wife . . . .

I want to take a walk with you in the garden — to go over to the common, the plain, the meadow. I want to take Charles in one hand and Tom in the other, and walk with you, Nabby on your right hand and John on my left, to view the corn fields, the orchards . . .

Alas, poor imagination! How faintly and imperfectly do you supply the want of [the] original and reality!

SPRING HAD ARRIVED. Days of warm April rain and intermittent sunshine followed one after another. Trees were leafing out. In the enclosed backyards of the city, cherry blossoms burst into flower, followed by a profusion of lilacs in bloom.

Behind the closed doors of Congress the current of events seemed also to turn with the season as the delegates of three southern colonies, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina, received instructions freeing them to vote for independence. Even among the opposition, there was growing agreement on the need for unanimity, “harmony,” a healing of disputes. “It is a true saying of a wit,” wrote Carter Braxton of Virginia, referring possibly to Benjamin Franklin, “we must hang together or separately.”

Then, on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 8, Philadelphia heard the muffled but unmistakable thunder of cannon from thirty miles down the Delaware, as two heavily armed British ships, the frigate Roebuck and sloop-of-war Liverpool, tried to run the river defenses, a blockade of armed gondolas. The crash of cannon went on for two days before the ships turned back. No great damage was done, and to many it all seemed, as said in the Pennsylvania Gazette, “a most interesting spectacle.” Thousands rushed by carriage and horseback to watch from the shoreline. But it had also been vivid proof that the war was no abstraction and could in fact come to Philadelphia in all its fury, a thought many had preferred not to face. The British fleet that evacuated Boston, it was now known, had sailed to Halifax, where presumably it was waiting for reinforcements before returning to attack New York.

By sundown May 9, the excitement down the river had ended. On the day after, Friday, May 10, came what many in Congress knew to be a critical juncture. Adams had decided the time was ripe to make his move.

With Richard Henry Lee, he put forth a resolution recommending that the individual colonies assume all powers of government — to secure “the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and Amer-ica in general.” Not only was it passed, but with surprising unanimity. It awaited only a preamble which, as drafted by Adams, was a still more radical statement. This brought on three days of fierce debate, during which Adams repeatedly took the floor, supported by Richard Henry Lee, while James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued in opposition. A decision that could clear the way to independence had at last arrived.

In contrast to the resolution, Adams’s preamble put aside any possibility of reconciliation and all but declared the colonies immediately independent:

Whereas his Britannic Majesty, in conjunction with the lords and commons of Great Britain, has, by a late act of Parliament, excluded the inhabitants of these United Colonies from the protection of his crown; and whereas, no answer whatever to the humble petitions of the colonies for redress of grievances and reconciliation with Great Britain has been or is likely to be given; but the whole force of that kingdom, aided by foreign mercenaries, is to be exerted for the destruction of the good people of these colonies; and whereas it appears absolutely irreconcilable to reason and good conscience, for people of these colonies to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any government under the crown of Great Britain . . . it is [therefore] necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed, and all the powers of government exerted under the authority of the people of the colonies, for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order, as well as the defense of their lives, liberties, and properties, against hostile invasions and cruel depredations of their enemies.

“Why all this haste?” James Duane demanded, according to notes that Adams kept. “Why all this driving?’

Samuel Adams, who rarely spoke in Congress, rose from his place. “I wonder the people have conducted so well as they have,” he said.

James Wilson responded, “Before we are prepared to build a new house, why should we pull down the old one, and expose ourselves to all the inclemencies of the season?”

John Dickinson was absent, apparently indisposed, a victim of exhaustion.

What John Adams said was not recorded. But as the constant battler on the floor, with all that he had written, his work on committees, his relentless energy, industry, and unyielding determination, he had emerged a leader like no other, and when the breakthrough came at last on Wednesday, May 15, it was his victory more than anyone’s in Congress.

The preamble was approved. When an exasperated James Duane told Adams it seemed “a machine for the fabrication of independence,” Adams replied that he thought it “independence itself.” He was elated. Congress, he wrote, had that day “passed the most important resolution that was ever taken in America.”

Others agreed. Even “the cool considerate men think it amounts to a declaration of independence,” wrote Caesar Rodney enthusiastically. Most telling was the immediate effect in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia itself, where popular opinion took a dramatic turn in support of independence.

At his lodgings two days later, Adams sat quietly writing to Abigail:

When I consider the great events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental of touching some springs, and turning some wheels, which have had and will have such effects, I feel an awe upon my mind which is not easily described.

“I have reasons to believe,” he added, “that no colony which shall assume a government under the people, will give it up.”

III

THE DAYS HAD become as warm as summer. “Fine sunshine,” recorded Adams’s Philadelphia friend Christopher Marshall one day after another. “Uncommonly hot . . . uncomfortable both to horse and man,” registered Josiah Bartlett, who, returning to Congress from the cool of New Hampshire, was astonished to see fields of winter rye in New Jersey already full grown by the middle of May.

Thomas Jefferson, on reaching Philadelphia, decided, “as the excessive heats of the city are coming fast,” to find lodgings “on the skirts of town where I may have the benefit of circulating air.” He moved to spacious quarters in a new brick house at the southwest corner of Seventh and Market, in what was nearly open country. They were larger, more expensive accommodations than most delegates had — a suite of two rooms, bedroom and parlor on the second floor, with ample windows for “circulating air” — and unlike most delegates, he would reside alone, separate from the rest.

Jefferson had arrived on May 14 after a pleasant week’s journey by horseback from the Piedmont of Virginia, accompanied by a single servant, a fourteen-year-old slave named Bob Hemings. Jefferson’s road to Philadelphia, the reverse of Adams’s, had been north by northeast, through the red-clay countryside of Virginia to Noland’s Ferry on the Potomac, then on into Maryland, winding past miles of prosperous-looking farms that became still more prosperous-looking as he crossed into Pennsylvania.

On resuming his seat in Congress, at the climax of debate over Adams’s preamble, Jefferson had felt as nearly unsuited for the business at hand as for the stifling city climate. “I’ve been so long out of the political world that I am almost a new man in it,” he wrote his college friend and confidant John Page. He worried about his ill wife at home. Given the choice, he would have preferred to be at Williamsburg, where a new Virginia constitution was being drafted. Of more immediate concern than the doings of Congress, it would appear from what he wrote Page, were some books, a two-volume French history of the Celts and a book on English gardens that he hoped Page would purchase for him from an estate sale.

At thirty-three Thomas Jefferson was the youngest of the Virginia delegates. He had not attended the First Congress, when Washington and Patrick Henry had been part of the delegation, and the Virginians with their liveried servants and splendid horses had ridden into the city like princelings. His role in the Second Congress had been on the whole modest. If he was conspicuous, it was mainly because of his height. At six feet two-and-a-half inches, he stood taller than all but a few and towered over someone like John Hancock, who at five feet four was perhaps the shortest man in the assembly. Standing beside John Adams, Jefferson looked like a lanky, freckled youth.

With eight years difference in their age, Adams was Jefferson’s senior, both in years and political experience. The differences in physique, background, manner, and temperament could hardly have been more contrasting. Where Adams was stout, Jefferson was lean and long-limbed, almost bony. Where Adams stood foursquare to the world, shoulders back, Jefferson customarily stood with his arms folded tightly across his chest. When taking his seat, it was as if he folded into a chair, all knees and elbows and abnormally large hands and feet. Where Adams was nearly bald, Jefferson had a full head of thick coppery hair. His freckled face was lean like his body, the eyes hazel, the mouth a thin line, the chin sharp.

Jefferson was a superb horseman, beautiful to see. He sang, he played the violin. He was as accomplished in the classics as Adams, but also in mathematics, horticulture, architecture, and in his interest in and knowledge of science he far exceeded Adams. Jefferson dabbled in “improvements” in agriculture and mechanical devices. His was the more inventive mind. He adored designing and redesigning things of all kinds. Jefferson, who may never have actually put his own hand to a plow, as Adams had, would devise an improved plow based on mathematical principles, “a moldboard of least resistance,” and find equal satisfaction in arriving at the perfect shape for a stone column or silver goblet.

Jefferson was devoted to the ideal of improving mankind but had comparatively little interest in people in particular. Adams was not inclined to believe mankind improvable, but was certain it was important that human nature be understood.

In contrast to Adams’s need to fill pages of his diaries with his innermost thoughts and feelings, Jefferson kept neat account books. In an invariably precise hand, he recorded every purchase, every payment for meals, wines, books, violin strings, the least item of clothing. Unlike Adams, who, except for books, indulged himself in no expenditures beyond what were necessary, Jefferson was continually in and out of Philadelphia shops, buying whatever struck his fancy.

In the spirit of science, Jefferson maintained letter-perfect records of weights, measurements, and daily temperature readings. (Adams is not known even to have owned a thermometer.) “Nothing was too small for him to keep account of,” one of his plantation overseers would remember of Jefferson. Yet he kept no personal diary, and for all the hours given to what he called “pen and ink work,” Jefferson rarely ever revealed his inner feelings in what he wrote. He had nothing like Adams’s fascination with human nature and, quite unlike Adams, little sense of humor. “He is a man of science,” a close observer would later write of Jefferson. “But . . . he knows little of the nature of man — very little indeed.”

It was Jefferson’s graciousness that was so appealing. He was never blunt or assertive as Adams could be, but subtle, serene by all appearances, always polite, soft-spoken, and diplomatic, if somewhat remote. With Adams there was seldom a doubt about what he meant by what he said. With Jefferson there was nearly always a slight air of ambiguity. In private conversation Jefferson “sparkled.” But in Congress, like Franklin, he scarcely said a word, and if he did, it was in a voice so weak as to be almost inaudible. Rarely would he object to a point or disagree with anyone to his face. “Never contradict anybody,” he was advised by Franklin, whom he admired above all men, though it was advice he hardly needed. He “abhorred dispute,” as he said, shrank from the contentiousness of politics, and instinctively avoided confrontation of any kind. It was as if he were trying to proceed through life as he had designed his moldboard plow to go through the red clay of Virginia, with the least resistance possible.

Years later, still puzzling over Jefferson’s passivity at Philadelphia, Adams would claim that “during the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”

Jefferson himself would one day advise a grandson, “When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, he has a right to his opinion, as I to mine.

Why should I question it. His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion? . . . Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.

Jefferson wished to avoid the rough and tumble of life whenever possible. John Adams’s irrepressible desire was to seize hold of it, and at times his was to be the path of Don Quixote.

A departure from Jefferson’s prevailing silence in Congress came late that summer when he stood in opposition to a proposal for a fast day, and in so doing appeared to cast aspersions on Christianity, to which Adams reacted sharply. Benjamin Rush reminded Adams of the incident in a letter written years later.

You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson’s objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments from a gentleman whom you so highly respected and with whom you agreed upon so many subjects, and that it was the only instance you had ever known of a man of sound sense and real genius that was an enemy to Christianity. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.

In one regard only did Jefferson’s behavior seem at odds with his usual placid way. If unwilling or unable to express anger, or passion, in his dealings with other men, he could be very different with his horse. As would be said within his own family, “The only impatience of temper he ever exhibited was with his horse, which he subdued to his will by a fearless application of the whip on the slightest manifestation of restiveness.”

As the author of the Summary View, the young Virginian had, as Adams said, achieved “the reputation of a masterly pen,” and however reticent in Congress, he proved “prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation. . . .” That Jefferson, after attending the College of William and Mary, had read law at Williamsburg for five years with the eminent George Wythe, gave him still greater standing with Adams, who considered Wythe one of the ablest men in Congress. In his journal, Adams recorded a remark made by the New Yorker James Duane to the effect that Jefferson was “the greatest rubber off of dust” that Duane had ever met, and that he spoke French, Italian, and Spanish, and was working on German. The journal entry, dated October 25, 1775, was Adams’s first recorded mention of Jefferson.

Sensitive to Adams’s seniority and his importance in Congress — and possibly to Adams’s vanity — Jefferson was consistently deferential to him. Clearly, too, for all their differences, they had much in common, not the least of which was their love of words, of books, and serious scholarship. They were as widely read, as learned as any two men in Congress. A list of the favorite authors of either could have served for the other. They had read the same law, distinguished themselves at an early age in the same profession, though Jefferson had never relished the practice of law as Adams had, nor felt the financial need to keep at it.

They were men who loved noble endeavor, who shared a disdain for indolence, and hated wasting time. Jefferson’s devotion to home, to family, and his own native ground was quite as strong as Adams’s. When Jefferson spoke of “my country,” he usually meant Virginia, as Adams referred to Massachusetts as “my country.” The one was as proudly a Virginian as the other a Yankee. The stamp of their origins was strong on both, and neither would have acknowledged any better place on earth than his “country,” though neither, it is true, had yet seen much else. As Adams had never been farther south than Philadelphia, Jefferson had been no farther north than New York.

But in this, too, was the root of differences that ran deep and would prove long-lasting, for the reason that Massachusetts and Virginia were truly different countries. Indeed, it would be difficult for future generations to comprehend how much separated a man raised on a freeholder’s farm in coastal New England from a son of Virginia such as Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson had been born to respectable wealth achieved by his father, Peter Jefferson, a man of rugged vitality, tobacco planter and surveyor, and to an unassailable place in the Virginia aristocracy through his mother, Jane, who was a Randolph. His landholdings in Albemarle County, mostly inherited from his father, exceeded 5,000 acres. But where Adams, at his farm by Penn’s Hill, lived very much like his father, and among the people of the town, Jefferson, very unlike his father or other Virginia planters, had removed to a mountaintop, removed from contact with everyday life, to create a palatial country seat of his own design in the manner of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio.

It was a bold undertaking that spoke of unusually cultivated taste and high ambition, and was made possible by the added wealth that came with his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow.

He had started the project at the age of twenty-five, in 1768. Still only partly built, it had the high, columned porticoes of a classic Italian villa and carried a name, Monticello, meaning “little mountain” in old Italian. He had contracted for 100,000 bricks, ordered specially made window frames from London, and in Philadelphia purchased the unexpired servitude of an indentured servant, a stonecutter, to do the columns. It was a house and setting such as John Adams had never seen or could ever have imagined as his own, any more than he could have imagined the scale of Jefferson’s domain. On his daily rounds by horseback, surveying his crops and fields, where as many as a hundred black slaves labored, Jefferson would commonly ride ten miles, as far as from Braintree to Boston, without ever leaving his own land. Further, he owned another 5,000-acre plantation to the southwest in Bedford County, an inheritance from his wife’s father.

Jefferson had been raised and educated as the perfect landed gentleman of Virginia. He knew no other way. His earliest childhood memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave and in countless ways he had been carried ever since by slaves, though they were never called that, but rather “servants” or “laborers.” It was not just that slaves worked his fields; they cut his firewood, cooked and served his meals, washed and ironed his linen, brushed his suits, nursed his children, cleaned, scrubbed, polished, opened and closed doors for him, saddled his horse, turned down his bed, waited on him hand and foot from dawn to dusk.

By 1776, with the addition of the land inherited from his father-in-law, Jefferson reckoned himself a wealthy man and lived like one. With the inheritance also came substantial debts and still more slaves, but then in Virginia this was seen as a matter of course. The whole economy and way of life were built on slaves and debt, with tobacco planters in particular dependent on slave labor and money borrowed from English creditors against future crops. John Adams, by contrast, had neither debts nor slaves and all his life abhorred the idea of either.

In keeping with his background, Adams was less than dazzled by the Virginia grandees. In Virginia, he would say, “all geese are swans.” Jefferson, for his part, knew little or nothing of New Englanders and counted none as friends. A man of cultivated, even fastidious tastes, Jefferson was later to tell his Virginia neighbor James Madison that he had observed in Adams a certain “want of taste,” this apparently in reference to the fact that Adams was known on occasion to chew tobacco and take his rum more or less straight.

Jefferson had been slower, more cautious and ambivalent than Adams about resolving his views on independence. As recently as August 1775, less than a year past, Jefferson had written to a Tory kinsman, John Randolph, of “looking with fondness towards a reconciliation with Great Britain.” He longed for the “return of the happy period when, consistently with duty, I may withdraw myself totally from the public stage, and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquillity, banishing every desire of afterwards even hearing what passes in the world.” But in the same letter he declared that “rather than submit to the right of legislating for us assumed by the British parliament and which late experience has shown they will so cruelly exercise, [I] would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.” His commitment now in the spring of 1776 was no less than Adams’s own. And it was because of their common zeal for independence, their wholehearted, mutual devotion to the common cause of America, and the certainty that they were taking part in one of history’s turning points, that the two were able to concentrate on the common purpose in a spirit of respect and cooperation, putting aside obvious differences, as well as others not so obvious and more serious than they could then have known.

Adams considered Jefferson his protégé at Philadelphia; Jefferson, impressed by Adams’s clarity and vigor in argument, his “sound head,” looked upon him as a mentor. They served on committees together, and as the pace quickened in the weeks after Jefferson’s arrival, they were together much of the time. As would be said, each felt the value of the other in the common task.

IF THERE WAS “a tide in the affairs of men,” as Abigail had reminded John, now was “the flood.” “Every post and every day rolls in upon us independence like a torrent,” he wrote on May 20.

Despite drenching rain, an open-air public meeting that day at the State House Yard drew a throng of thousands who listened as the May 15 resolve was read aloud, then voiced a demand vote for a new Pennsylvania constitution and a new legislature.

At week’s end, on Friday, May 24, General Washington arrived for two days of meetings with Congress to report his heightened concern for the situation at New York, where a British attack was expected any time. The King, it was now known, had hired some 17,000 German troops to fight in America. At New York, Washington had at most 7,000 men fit for duty.

Three days later came word that on May 15, the Virginia convention at Williamsburg had resolved unanimously to instruct the Virginia delegation at Philadelphia “to declare the United Colonies free and independent states.” An exultant John Adams wrote to Patrick Henry that the “natural course and order of things” was coming to pass at last. “The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than had prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America.”

On Friday, June 7, at the State House, Richard Henry Lee rose to speak. Sunshine streamed through the high windows. Lee, slim and elegant, was a spirited orator who was said to practice his gestures before a mirror. In a hunting accident years before, he had lost the fingers of his left hand, which he kept wrapped in a black handkerchief, and this, with his lithe figure and aquiline nose, gave him a decidedly theatrical presence. The importance of the moment was understood by everyone in the room.

Resolved [Lee began]: . . . That these United Colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Adams immediately seconded the motion and the day following, Saturday, June 8, the debate began. Speaking in opposition, John Dickinson, James Wilson, Robert Livingston, and Edward Rutledge declared, according to notes kept by Jefferson, that while “friends of the measure,” they opposed any declaration of independence until “the voice of the people” drove them to it. Further, should Congress proceed before hearing the “voice,” then certain colonies “might secede from the union. . . .” It was the threat Dickinson in his anger had used earlier against Adams, but whether it was Dickinson speaking now, Jefferson did not record. Nor did he record what Adams, Lee, and George Wythe said, only that they declared public opinion to be ahead of Congress: that “the people wait for us to lead the way,” that the European powers would neither trade nor treat with the colonies until they established independence, that “the present [military] campaign may be unsuccessful, and therefore we had better propose an alliance while our affairs wear a hopeful aspect.” And that it was essential “to lose no time.”

Intense debate continued past dark. Candles were brought in. “The sensible part of the house opposed the motion,” wrote an irate Edward Rutledge. “No reason could be assigned for pressing into this measure, but the reason of every madman.”

On Monday, June 10, after President John Hancock reconvened the assembly, Rutledge and the “cool party” succeeded in having the final vote delayed for twenty days, until July 1, to allow delegates from the middle colonies time to send for new instructions. Nonetheless, it was agreed that no time be lost in preparing a declaration of independence. A committee was appointed, the Committee of Five, as it became known, consisting of Jefferson, Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin, who had by now returned from his expedition to Canada but was ill and exhausted and rarely seen.

On the floor above, meantime, in the Banqueting Hall of the State House, another revolution was transpiring as the Pennsylvania Assembly struggled over what instructions to give its delegation.

Adams, who had not written a word to Abigail in nearly two weeks, dashed off a letter saying, “Great things are on the tapis.”

JEFFERSON WAS TO DRAFT the declaration. But how this was agreed to was never made altogether clear. He and Adams would have differing explanations, each writing long after the fact.

According to Adams, Jefferson proposed that he, Adams, do the writing, but that he declined, telling Jefferson he must do it.

“Why?” Jefferson asked, as Adams would recount.

“Reasons enough,” Adams said.

“What can be your reasons?”

“Reason first: you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.”

Jefferson would recall no such exchange. As Jefferson remembered, the committee simply met and unanimously chose him to undertake the draft. “I consented: I drew it [up].”

Possibly neither of their memories served, and possibly both were correct. Jefferson may well have been the choice of the committee and out of deference or natural courtesy, he may well have offered Adams the honor. If there is anything that seems not in keeping, it is the tone of Adams’s self-deprecation, which is more that of the old man he became than the Adams of 1776, who was anything but inadequate as a writer and who was by no means as unpopular as he later said. If he was thought “obnoxious,” it would have been only by a few, and only he himself is known to have used the word. In all the surviving record of official and private papers pertaining to the Continental Congress, there is only one member or eyewitness to events in Philadelphia in 1776 who wrote dis-paragingly of John Adams, and that was Adams writing long years afterward. As critical as he could be in his assessment of others, the man he was inclined to criticize most severely was himself. In fact, the respect he commanded at Philadelphia that spring appears to have been second to none.

Unquestionably, Adams did value Jefferson’s literary talents, but he knew also how much else he must attend to in the little time available, and the outcome of the “great question” was by no means certain. Already Adams was serving on twenty-three committees, and that same week was assigned to three more, including an all-important new Continental Board of War and Ordnance, of which he was to be the president.

That there would be political advantage in having the declaration written by a Virginian was clear, for the same reason there had been political advantage in having the Virginian Washington in command of the army. But be that as it may, Jefferson, with his “peculiar felicity of expression,” as Adams said, was the best choice for the task, just as Washington had been the best choice to command the Continental Army, and again Adams had played a key part. Had his contribution as a member of Congress been only that of casting the two Virginians in their respective, fateful roles, his service to the American cause would have been very great.

ALONE IN HIS UPSTAIRS PARLOR at Seventh and Market, Jefferson went to work, seated in an unusual revolving Windsor chair and holding on his lap a portable writing box, a small folding desk of his own design which, like the chair, he had had specially made for him by a Philadelphia cabinetmaker. Traffic rattled by below the open windows. The June days and nights turned increasingly warm.

He worked rapidly and, to judge by surviving drafts, with a sure command of his material. He had none of his books with him, nor needed any, he later claimed. It was not his objective to be original, he would explain, only “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.”

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

He borrowed readily from his own previous writing, particularly from a recent draft for a new Virginia constitution, but also from a declaration of rights for Virginia, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on June 12. It had been drawn up by George Mason, who wrote that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights . . . among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty.” And there was a pamphlet written by the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson, published in Philadelphia in 1774, that declared, “All men are, by nature equal and free: no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.”

But then Mason, Wilson, and John Adams, no less than Jefferson, were, as they all appreciated, drawing on long familiarity with the seminal works of the English and Scottish writers John Locke, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Henry St. John Bolingbroke, or such English poets as Defoe (“When kings the sword of justice first lay down,/They are no kings, though they possess the crown./Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,/The good of subjects is the end of kings”). Or, for that matter, Cicero. (“The people’s good is the highest law.”)

Adams, in his earlier notes for an oration at Braintree, had written, “Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike. . . . The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man [kings included] to endanger public liberty.” The purpose of government, he had said in his recent Thoughts on Government, was the “greatest quantity of human happiness.”

What made Jefferson’s work surpassing was the grace and eloquence of expression. Jefferson had done superbly and in minimum time.

I was delighted with its high tone and flights of oratory with which it abounded [Adams would recall], especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly would never oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted, if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant. . . . I thought the expression too passionate; and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.

A number of alterations were made, however, when Jefferson reviewed it with the committee, and several were by Adams. Possibly it was Franklin, or Jefferson himself, who made the small but inspired change in the second paragraph. Where, in the initial draft, certain “truths” were described as “sacred and undeniable,” a simpler, stronger “self-evident” was substituted.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .

Adams had no doubt that there would be further changes called for and considerable debate over details and language once the declaration was submitted to Congress for approval. Still, he was confident enough about the draft that he laboriously transcribed the full text in his own hand, and later sent the copy to Abigail, who, understandably, thought he had written the Declaration.

THE PRESSURES OF RESPONSIBILITY grew greater for Adams almost by the hour. As head of the new Board of War, meeting every morning and evening, he was acutely aware of Washington’s distress at New York. Dispatch riders from the general’s headquarters brought repeated warnings that arms, lead, flints, medicines, and entrenching tools were all urgently needed. At Boston the troops were “almost mutinous in want of pay.” In Canada, where the remnants of an American army were still holding out, the situation was gravely compounded by the ravages of smallpox.

On June 15, the provincial legislature of New Jersey had ordered the arrest of its royal governor, William Franklin, the estranged, illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, and authorized its delegates in Congress to vote for independence. To see that this was done, five new New Jersey delegates had been appointed.

In Maryland, delegate Samuel Chase, who had earlier gone to Canada with Benjamin Franklin, was rounding up support for independence, as perhaps no one else could have. A huge, red-faced young man of inexhaustible energy, Chase refused to accept the dictum that Maryland’s delegates must vote down independence. “I have not been idle,” he reported to Adams.

As he had for months now, Adams struggled to keep a balance with the need, on one hand, for all possible haste, and the need, on the other, to keep from pushing too fast, forcing events too soon. Some things, some people, must not be hurried. Time and timing were both of the essence, now more than ever. Reminders of time passing were everywhere about him: the great clock ticking away on the outside wall of the State House; bells at night striking the hour; the “clarions” of a hundred roosters calling across town as he began his day at first light.

“What in the name of Common Sense are you gentlemen of the Continental Congress about?” demanded a constituent writing from Massachusetts. “Is it dozing?”

“The only question is concerning the proper time for making a specific declaration in words,” Adams replied.

Some people must have time to look around them, before, behind, on the right hand, and on the left, and then to think, and after all this to resolve. Others see at one intuitive glance into the past and the future, and judge with precision at once. But remember you can’t make thirteen clocks strike precisely alike at the same second.

No one in Congress had worked harder or done more to bring about a break with Britain. But it was the fact of independence more than the words on paper that concerned Adams, and especially for what it would do to unify the colonies and bring “spirit” to American military operations. Facts were “stubborn things,” he had once argued in defense of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, and as stubborn as any of the large facts bearing heavily on his mind now was “the bloody conflict we are destined to endure.”

On June 23 a conference of committees from every county in Pennsylvania declared that the delegates of Pennsylvania in Congress should vote for independence. “You see therefore,” Adams wrote to Samuel Chase, “that there is such a universal expectation that the great question will be decided the first of July. . . . to postpone it again would hazard convulsions and dangerous conspiracies.”

The birth of a new nation was at hand, perhaps truly, as Thomas Paine had written, a new world. “Solemn” was Adams’s word for the atmosphere in Congress.

CHAPTER THREE

COLOSSUS OF INDEPENDENCE

[His] power of thought and expression . . . moved us from our seats.

~Thomas Jefferson

I

MONDAY, JULY 1, 1776, began hot and steamy in Philadelphia, and before the morning was ended a full-scale summer storm would break. Adams, as usual, was out of bed before dawn. He dressed, wrote a long letter to a former delegate, Archibald Bulloch, who was the new president of Georgia, and following breakfast, walked to the State House, knowing what was in store. “This morning is assigned the greatest debate of all,” he had said in the letter. “A declaration, that these colonies are free and independent states, has been reported by a committee some weeks ago for that purpose, and this day or tomorrow is to determine its fate. May heaven prosper the newborn republic.”

He had wished Bulloch to know also that constant vigil was being kept for the arrival of the British at New York. “We are in daily expectation of an armament before New York, where, if it comes, the conflict may be bloody,” he warned. Words in debate were one thing, the war quite another, but to Adams independence and the war were never disjunctive.

The object is great which we have in view, and we must expect a great expense of blood to obtain it. But we should always remember that a free constitution of civil government cannot be purchased at too dear a rate, as there is nothing on this side of Jerusalem of equal importance to mankind.

Presumably everything that could or need be said on the question of independence had been exhausted in Congress. Presumably, the question could be put and decided with little further ado. But it was not to be. John Dickinson had resolved to make one last appeal and Adams would be obliged to answer. They would rise to make their cases like the great lawyers they were, each summoning all his powers of reason and persuasion.

At ten o’clock, with the doors closed, John Hancock sounded the gavel. Richard Henry Lee’s prior motion calling for independence was again read aloud; the Congress resolved itself into a committee of the whole and “resumed consideration.” Immediately, Dickinson, gaunt and deathly pale, stood to be heard. With marked earnestness, he marshaled all past argument and reasoning against “premature” separation from Britain. “He had prepared himself apparently with great labor and ardent zeal,” Adams would recall admiringly. “He conducted the debate not only with great ingenuity and eloquence, but with equal politeness and candor.”

Though no one transcribed the speech, Dickinson’s extensive notes would survive. He knew how unpopular he had become, Dickinson began. He knew that by standing firm, as a matter of principle, he was almost certainly ending his career. “My conduct this day, I expect, will give the finishing blow to my once great . . . and now too diminished popularity. . . . But thinking as I do on the subject of debate, silence would be guilt.”

To proceed now with a declaration of independence, he said, would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.”

When he sat down, all was silent except for the rain that had begun spattering against the windows. No one spoke, no one rose to answer him, until Adams at last “determined to speak.”

He wished now as never in his life, Adams began, that he had the gifts of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, for he was certain none of them ever had before him a question of greater importance. Outside, the wind picked up. The storm struck with thunder, lightning, and pelting rain. In his schoolmaster days at Worcester, Adams had recorded how such storms “unstrung” him. Now he spoke on steadily, making the case for independence as he had so often before. He was logical, positive, sensitive to the historic importance of the moment, and, looking into the future, saw a new nation, a new time, all much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend.

Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions, born and unborn are most essentially interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

No transcription was made, no notes were kept. There would be only Adams’s own recollections, plus those of several others who would remember more the force of Adams himself than any particular thing he said. That it was the most powerful and important speech heard in the Congress since it first convened, and the greatest speech of Adams’s life, there is no question.

To Jefferson, Adams was “not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.” Recalling the moment long afterward, Adams would say he had been carried out of himself, “’carried out in spirit,’ as enthusiastic preachers sometimes express themselves.” To Richard Stockton, one of the new delegates from New Jersey, Adams was “the Atlas” of the hour, “the man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency. . . . He it was who sustained the debate, and by the force of his reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expediency of the measure.”

Stockton and two other new delegates from New Jersey, Francis Hopkinson and the Reverend John Witherspoon, famous Presbyterian preacher and president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, had come into the chamber an hour or so after Adams had taken the floor and was nearly finished speaking. When they asked that Adams repeat what they had missed, he objected. He was not an actor there to entertain an audience, he said good-naturedly. But at the urging of Edward Rutledge, who told Adams that only he had the facts at his command, Adams relinquished and gave the speech a second time “in as concise a manner as I could, ‘til at length the New Jersey gentlemen said they were fully satisfied and ready for the question.” By then he had been on his feet for two hours.

Others spoke, including Witherspoon, the first clergyman to serve in Congress, whose manner of speech made plain his Scottish origins. In all, the debate lasted nine hours. At one point, according to Adams, Hewes of North Carolina, who had long opposed separation from Britain, “started suddenly upright, and lifting up both his hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, ‘It is done! and I will abide by it.’”

But when later that evening a preliminary vote was taken, four colonies unexpectedly held back, refusing to proclaim independence. The all-important Pennsylvania delegation, despite popular opinion in Pennsylvania, stood with John Dickinson and voted no. The New York delegates abstained, saying they favored the motion but lacked specific instructions. South Carolina, too, surprisingly, voted no, while Delaware, with only two delegates present, was divided. The missing Delaware delegate was Caesar Rodney, one of the most ardent of the independence faction. Where he was or when he might reappear was unclear, but a rider had been sent racing off to find him.

When Edward Rutledge rescued the moment by moving that a final vote be postponed until the next day, implying that for the sake of unanimity South Carolina might change its mind, Adams and the others immediately agreed. For while the nine colonies supporting independence made a clear majority, it was hardly the show of solidarity that such a step ought to have.

The atmosphere that night at City Tavern and in the lodging houses of the delegates was extremely tense. The crux of the matter was the Pennsylvania delegation, for in the preliminary vote three of the seven Pennsylvania delegates had gone against John Dickinson and declared in the affirmative, and it was of utmost interest that one of the three, along with Franklin and John Morton, was James Wilson, who, though a friend and ally of Dickinson, had switched sides to vote for independence. The question now was how many of the rest who were in league with Dickinson would on the morrow continue, in Adams’s words, to “vote point blank against the known and declared sense of their constituents.”

To compound the tension that night, word reached Philadelphia of the sighting off New York of a hundred British ships, the first arrivals of a fleet that would number over four hundred.

THOUGH THE RECORD of all that happened the following day, Tuesday, July 2, is regrettably sparse, it appears that just as the doors to Congress were about to be closed at the usual hour of nine o’clock, Caesar Rodney, mud-spattered, “booted and spurred,” made his dramatic entrance. The tall, thin Rodney — the “oddest-looking man in the world,” Adams once described him — had been made to appear stranger still, and more to be pitied, by a skin cancer on one side of his face that he kept hidden behind a scarf of green silk. But, as Adams had also recognized, Rodney was a man of spirit, of “fire.” Almost unimaginably, he had ridden eighty miles through the night, changing horses several times, to be there in time to cast his vote.

Yet more important even than the arrival of Rodney were two empty chairs among the Pennsylvania delegation. Refusing to vote for independence but understanding the need for Congress to speak with one voice, John Dickinson and Robert Morris had voluntarily absented themselves from the proceedings, thus swinging Pennsylvania behind independence by a vote of three to two. What private agreements had been made the night before, if any, who or how many had come to the State House that morning knowing what was afoot, no one recorded.

Outside, more rain threatened, and at about ten came another cloudburst like the day before. New York continued to abstain, but South Carolina, as hinted by Edward Rutledge, joined the majority to make the decision unanimous in the sense that no colony stood opposed. The vote went rapidly.

So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the other silent, the effect was the same.

It was John Adams, more than anyone, who had made it happen. Further, he seems to have understood more clearly than any what a momentous day it was and in the privacy of two long letters to Abigail, he poured out his feelings as did no one else:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.

Lest she judge him overly “transported,” he said he was well aware of the “toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration.” Still, the end was more than worth all the means. “You will see in a few days,” he wrote in the second letter, “a Declaration setting forth the causes, which have impelled us to this mighty revolution, and the reasons that will justify it in the sight of God and man.”

That the hand of God was involved in the birth of the new nation he had no doubt. “It is the will of heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever.” If the people now were to have “unbounded power,” and as the people were quite as capable of corruption as “the great,” and thus high risks were involved, he would submit all his hopes and fears to an overruling providence, “in which unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.”

THE “BAR OF SECRECY” notwithstanding, the news spread rapidly through the city. “This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States,” recorded a young artist newly established in Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale, exuberant over the news. The facts, wrote Elbridge Gerry, were as well known in the taverns and coffeehouses of the city as in Congress itself.

But there could be no pause. There was too much still to be done. Congress had to review and approve the language of the drafted declaration before it could be made official. Deliberations of a different kind commenced at once, continuing through the next morning, July 3, when mercifully the temperature had dropped ten degrees, broken by the storm of the previous day.

For Thomas Jefferson it became a painful ordeal, as change after change was called for and approximately a quarter of what he had written was cut entirely. Seated beside Benjamin Franklin, the young Virginian looked on in silence. He is not known to have uttered a word in protest, or in defense of what he had written. Later he would describe the opposition to his draft as being like “the ceaseless action of gravity weighing upon us night and day.” At one point Franklin leaned over to tell him a story that, as a printer and publisher over so many years, he must have offered before as comfort to a wounded author. He had once known a hatter who wished to have a sign made saying, JOHN THOMPSON, HATTER, MAKES AND SELLS HATS FOR READY MONEY, this to be accompanied by a picture of a hat. But the man had chosen first to ask the opinion of friends, with the result that one word after another was removed as superfluous or redundant, until at last the sign was reduced to Thompson’s name and the picture of the hat.

Beyond its stirring preamble, most of the document before Congress was taken up with a list of grievances, specific charges against the King — “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns. . . . He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny. . . .” And it was the King, “the Christian King of Great Britain,” Jefferson had emphasized, who was responsible for the horrors of the slave trade. As emphatic a passage as any, this on the slave trade was to have been the ringing climax of all the charges. Now it was removed in its entirety because, said Jefferson later, South Carolina and Georgia objected. Some northern delegates, too, were a “little tender” on the subject, “for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers. . . .”

In truth, black slavery had long since become an accepted part of life in all of the thirteen colonies. Of a total population in the colonies of nearly 2,500,000 people in 1776, approximately one in five were slaves, some 500,000 men, women, and children. In Virginia alone, which had the most slaves by far, they numbered more than 200,000. There was no member of the Virginia delegation who did not own slaves, and of all members of Congress at least a third owned or had owned slaves. The total of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves in 1776, as near as can be determined from his personal records, was about 200, which was also the approximate number owned by George Washington.

John Dickinson, who owned eleven African men and women, was understood to be Philadelphia’s second-largest slaveholder. Even Benjamin Franklin, who adamantly opposed slavery, had once owned two black house servants and had personally traded in slaves, buying and selling from his Market Street print shop. And though in recent years the Quakers of the city had been freeing more and more of their slaves, such notices as Franklin once published, offering “a likely wench about fifteen years old,” were still to be seen in Philadelphia newspapers. One appearing that July in the Pennsylvania Journal read:

TO BE SOLD: A large quantity of pine boards that are well seasoned. Likewise a Negro wench; she is to be disposed of for no fault, but only that she is present with child, she is about 20 years old . . . and is fit for either town or country business.

The president of Congress, John Hancock, had only in recent years freed the last of the slaves who were part of his lavish Boston household, and it was well known, as Jefferson said, that New Englanders had been “considerable carriers” in the lucrative slave trade. At one point, earlier in the century, approximately half the tonnage of New England shipping had been in transporting slaves, and the port of Boston prospered from the trade.

But it was also New Englanders who had assailed slavery in the most vehement terms. As early as 1700, before Jefferson or anyone in Congress was born, Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston, an eminent Puritan known for his role as a judge in the Salem witch trials, had declared in a tract called The Selling of Joseph, that “all men, as they are sons of Adam . . . have equal right unto liberty,” and saw no justification, moral or economic, for making property of human beings. Slavery was evil. Of the slave trade, he wrote: “How horrible is the uncleanness, immorality, if not murder, that the ships are guilty of that bring crowds of these miserable men and women.”

James Otis, in his famous speech on writs of assistance in 1761, had called for the immediate liberation of the slaves. “The colonists [of Massachusetts] are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are white and black. . . . Does it follow that it is the right to enslave a man because he is black?” When Samuel Adams and his wife were presented with a black slave girl as a gift in 1765, they had immediately set her free.

Of John Adams’s circle in Philadelphia, the one to have taken the most assertive stand against slavery was the young physician Benjamin Rush, who from the time of the First Congress had been as close to all that went on as anyone not a delegate could have been and who, in another few weeks, would himself be elected to Congress, as one of the new Pennsylvania delegation. Rush — high-spirited, handsome, and all of thirty — had studied medicine in Edinburgh and in London, where he came to know Benjamin Franklin and once dined with Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Overflowing with energy and goodwill, he was ardent for reform of all kinds: smallpox inoculation for the poor, humane care for the insane, reform of the penal code, but especially for the abolition of slavery. In 1773, Rush had published a pamphlet attacking slavery, and in 1774, the year the First Congress convened, he had helped organize the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. He had appealed to the clergy to recognize slavery as a sin, and urged all legislators, “ye advocates for American liberty,” to work for the liberty of blacks as well. The eyes of the world were watching, Rush charged. Yet he himself owned a slave.

On first meeting, Adams and Rush had misjudged each other. Adams thought Rush “a sprightly, pretty fellow,” but “too much a talker to be a deep thinker,” while Rush found Adams “cold and reserved.” But they had quickly changed their minds, discovering much in common besides the love of talk. Like Adams, Rush was without affectation and unafraid to speak his mind, sometimes to the point of tactlessness. (Prudence, he was fond of saying, “is a rascally virtue.”) Like Jefferson, the young physician seemed to take limitless interest in nearly everything under the sun.

Adams and Rush were of the same mind on slavery. Adams was utterly opposed to slavery and the slave trade and, like Rush, favored a gradual emancipation of all slaves. That it was, at the least, inconsistent for slave owners to be espousing freedom and equality was not lost on Adams, any more than on others on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In London, Samuel Johnson, who had no sympathy for the American cause, had asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” Abigail, in her letters that spring, had questioned whether the passion for liberty could be “equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs,” and had earlier pondered whether the agonies of pestilence and war could be God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.

In time, Adams and Jefferson would each denounce slavery. Jefferson was to write of the degrading effects of the institution on both slave and master. Adams would call slavery a “foul contagion in the human character.” In years past, as an attorney, Adams had appeared in several slave cases for the owner, never the slave, but he had no use for slavery. He never owned a slave as a matter of principle, nor hired the slaves of others to work on his farm, as was sometimes done in New England. He was to declare unequivocally in later years that “Negro slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude,” and like Abigail, he felt this at the time.

But neither he nor any other delegate in Congress would have let the issue jeopardize a declaration of independence, however strong their feelings. If Adams was disappointed or downcast over the removal of Jefferson’s indictment of the slave trade, he seems to have said nothing at the time. Nor is it possible to know the extent of Jefferson’s disappointment, or if the opposition of South Carolina and Georgia was truly as decisive as he later claimed. Very possibly there were many delegates, from North and South, happy to see the passage omitted for the reason that it was so patently absurd to hold the King responsible for horrors that, everyone knew, Americans — and Christians no less than the King — had brought on themselves. Slavery and the slave trade were hardly the fault of George III, however ardently Jefferson wished to fix the blame on the distant monarch.

Of more than eighty changes made in Jefferson’s draft during the time Congress deliberated, most were minor and served to improve it. The King’s conduct was called one of “repeated” rather than “unremitting” injuries. The accusation that the King had “suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states” was edited to a simpler “He has obstructed the administration of justice.”

But one final cut toward the conclusion was as substantial nearly as the excise of the passage on the slave trade, and it appears to have wounded Jefferson deeply.

To the long list of indictments against the King, he had added one assailing the English people, “our British brethren,” as a further oppressor, for allowing their Parliament and their King “to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us.” And therein, Jefferson charged, was the heart of the tragedy, the feeling of betrayal, the “common blood” cause of American outrage. “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us renounce forever these unfeeling brethren,” he had written. “We must endeavor to forget our former love for them.”

This most emotional passage of all was too much for many in Congress, and to it Jefferson had added a final poignant note: “We might have been a free and great people together.” Nearly all of this was removed. There was to be no mention of a “last stab,” or “love,” or of the “free and great people” that might have been. Nor was there to be any mention of Scottish mercenaries, James Wilson and John Witherspoon both being Scots.

To no one’s surprise, Adams did not sit silently by. He was present every hour, “fighting fearlessly for every word,” as Jefferson would write.

No man better merited than Mr. John Adams to hold a most conspicuous place in the design. He was the pillar of its support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults encountered.

Finally, to Jefferson’s concluding line was added the phrase “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” an addition that Adams assuredly welcomed. Thus it would read:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

But it was to be the eloquent lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration that would stand down the years, affecting the human spirit as neither Jefferson nor anyone could have foreseen. And however much was owed to the writings of others, as Jefferson acknowledged, or to such editorial refinements as those contributed by Franklin or Adams, they were, when all was said and done, his lines. It was Jefferson who had written them for all time:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

IN LATER YEARS the excessive summer heat of Philadelphia would frequently figure in accounts of Thursday, July 4, 1776. In fact, the day, like the one before, was pleasantly cool and comfortable. In Congress, discussion of the Declaration appears to have continued through the morning until about eleven o’clock, when debate was closed and the vote taken. Again, as on July 2, twelve colonies voted in the affirmative, while New York abstained. Again, John Dickinson was absent. It all went very smoothly.

Congress ordered that the document be authenticated and printed. But it would be another month before the engrossed copy was signed by the delegates. For now, only the President, John Hancock, and the Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, fixed their signatures.

With passage of the Declaration of Independence thus completed, and having thereby renounced allegiance to the King and proclaimed the birth of a new United States of America, the Congress proceeded directly to other business. Indeed, to all appearances, nothing happened in Congress on July 4, 1776. Adams, who had responded with such depth of feeling to the events of July 2, recorded not a word of July 4. Of Jefferson’s day, it is known only that he took time off to shop for ladies’ gloves and a new thermometer that he purchased at John Sparhawk’s London Bookshop for a handsome 3 pounds, 15 shillings.

But by the following morning, the fifth, printer John Dunlap had broadside editions available and the delegates were busy sending copies to friends. On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post carried the full text on its first page.

The great day of celebration came Monday, July 8, at noon in the State House Yard, when the Declaration was read aloud before an exuberant crowd. With drums pounding, five battalions paraded through the city and “on the common, gave us the feu de joie [thirteen cannon blasts], notwithstanding the scarcity of powder,” as Adams recorded. Bells rang through the day and into the night. There were bonfires at street corners. Houses were illuminated with candles in their windows. In the Supreme Court Room at the State House, as planned, a half dozen Philadelphians chosen for the honor took the King’s Arms down from the wall and carried it off to be thrown on top of a huge fire and consumed in an instant, the blaze lighting the scene for blocks around.

“Fine starlight, pleasant evening,” recorded Adams’s friend Christopher Marshall. “There were bonfires, ringing bells, with other great demonstrations of joy upon the unanimity and agreement of the Declaration.” Another Philadelphia patriot, Charles Biddle, a wealthy merchant who had joined the crowd in the State House Yard to hear the Declaration read, recorded only that he had seen “very few respectable people present.”

As mounted messengers carried the news beyond Philadelphia, celebrations broke out everywhere. In New York the next day, the Declaration was read aloud to Washington’s assembled troops, and it was that night, at the foot of Broadway, that a roaring crowd pulled down the larger-than-life equestrian statue of George III. As in Philadelphia, drums rolled, bonfires burned, prayers were said, and toasts raised in town after town, North and South. When the news finally reached Savannah, Georgia, in August, it set off a day-long celebration during which the Declaration was read four times in four different public places and the largest crowd in the history of the province gathered for a mock burial of King George III. The feeling was that the air had been cleared at last. “The Declaration,” said the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, “must give new spring to all our affairs.”

The actual signing of the document would not take place until Friday, August 2, after a fair copy had been elegantly engrossed on a single, giant sheet of parchment by Timothy Matlack, assistant to the secretary of Congress. Nothing was reported of the historic event. As with everything transacted within Congress, secrecy prevailed. To judge by what was in the newspapers and the correspondence of the delegates, the signing never took place.

In later years, Jefferson would entertain guests at Monticello with descriptions of black flies that so tormented the delegates, biting through their silk hose, that they had hurried the signing along as swiftly as possible. But at the time Jefferson wrote nothing of the occasion, nor did John Adams. In old age, trying to reconstruct events of that crowded summer, both men would stubbornly and incorrectly insist that the signing took place July 4.

Apparently there was no fuss or ceremony on August 2. The delegates simply came forward in turn and fixed their signatures. Also, a number of the most important figures in Congress were absent — Richard Henry Lee, George Wythe, Oliver Wolcott, Elbridge Gerry — and would sign later. A new representative from New Hampshire, Matthew Thornton, who had not been a member when the Declaration was passed, would add his name in November, and Thomas McKean of Delaware appears not to have signed until January 1777, which made him the last.

Like the others, Adams and Jefferson each signed with his own delegation, Adams on the right, in a clear and firm, plain hand, Jefferson at lower center with a signature more precise and elegant, but equally legible.

The fact that a signed document now existed, as well as the names of the signatories, was kept secret for the time being, as all were acutely aware that by taking up the pen and writing their names, they had committed treason, a point of considerably greater immediacy now, with the British army so near at hand.

Whether Benjamin Franklin quipped “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall hang separately” is impossible to know, just as there is no way to confirm the much-repeated story that the diminutive John Hancock wrote his name large so the King might read it without his spectacles. But the stories endured because they were in character, like the remark attributed to Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island. Hopkins, who suffered from palsy, is said to have observed, on completing his spidery signature, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

The most encouraging result of the decision for independence was its almost immediate effect on “spirit,” within Congress and among the people, but also among the rank-and-file militia. “The Declaration of Independence has produced a new era in this part of America,” wrote Benjamin Rush, who had since taken his place in Congress in time to be a “signer.” “The militia of Pennsylvania seem to be actuated with a spirit more than Roman. Near 2,000 citizens of Philadelphia have lately marched to New York.” Such influence as the Declaration had had would have been “inconceivable” earlier. To Abigail, Adams wrote of the “gallant spirit prevailing in these middle colonies,” and described the militia turning out in “great numbers and in high spirits.” Samuel Adams, to whom the Declaration was “the decisive measure,” wished only that it had come sooner.

Even those in Congress who had been so ardently opposed, now, by word or deed, committed themselves to the “Glorious Revolution.” Robert Morris continued in his duties without pause, working as strenuously as anyone. “I think an individual that declines the service of his country because its councils are not comfortable to his ideas makes a bad subject,” he wrote, still unable to see himself as other than a “subject.” John Dickinson, though ill and exhausted from the strain of the past weeks, departed at the head of the first troops to march out of the city to join in the defense of New Jersey, a scene that made a deep impression on many, including John Adams. “Mr. Dickinson’s alacrity and spirit,” he told Abigail, “certainly becomes his character and sets a fine example.”

II

THE SHIPS FLYING the Union Jack that arrived off New York at the end of June 1776 — the fleet from Halifax that one eyewitness described as looking like “all London afloat” — had been only the start of an overwhelming show of British might come to settle the fate of the new United States of America.

By July 3, 9,000 troops led by General William Howe had landed on Staten Island, where hundreds of Tories were on hand to welcome them. Howe himself had gone ashore on July 2, the very day that Congress had voted for independence, and in the days following, up the Narrows between Staten Island and Long Island, came ever more British sails, including an armada of 130 warships and transports from England under command of the general’s brother, Admiral Richard Lord Howe. By mid-August, 32,000 fully equipped, highly trained, thoroughly professional British and German (Hessian) soldiers — more than the entire population of Philadelphia — were ashore on Staten Island, supported by ten ships-of-the-line and twenty frigates, making in all the largest, most costly British overseas deployment ever until that time.

By contrast, the American army gathered in defense of New York, digging in on Manhattan and Long Island, was optimistically thought to number 20,000 troops, these nearly all poorly equipped amateurs led by Washington, who in his year as commander-in-chief had yet to fight a battle. From Long Island, one of Washington’s ablest divisional commanders, Nathanael Greene, wrote to tell John Adams that in reality the American force might number 9,000; and as Adams knew, they had no naval support — not a single available warship or transport. When, on July 12, with the wind and tide in their favor, the British sent two men-of-war up the Hudson River to demonstrate who had control, there was nothing to stop them. As the huge ships passed upstream, American militia stood gawking onshore, which evoked an angry general order from Washington declaring such “unsoldierly conduct” could only give the enemy a low opinion of the American army.

From the flow of dispatches arriving at the War Office in Philadelphia, Adams was more aware of the situation than anyone in Congress and he was miserable, thinking about the consequences of a defeat at New York. He had not wanted the responsibility of heading the Board of War and felt “vastly unequal” to the multitude of problems and decisions to be grappled with. But it was also clear that they were all unequal to the task. No one in Congress was qualified. “We are all inexperienced in this business,” he emphasized to Nathanael Greene.

The War Office consisted of rented space two blocks from the State House on Market Street. To a board of five members of Congress — Adams, Harrison, Rutledge, Sherman, and Wilson — fell the burden of virtually running the war. They were responsible for ordnance and fortifications, for appointing and promoting officers, for recruitment of enlisted men and raising rifle companies, for pay, provisions, and for somehow resolving the constant demand for flints, saltpeter and gunpowder, horses, wagons, tents, shoes, soap, and blankets. They dispatched ship carpenters where needed, appointed chaplains, and faced the incessant day-to-day frustrations of bickering, jealousies, and corruption. It was arduous, thankless work. He must be “very exactly and minutely acquainted with the state of every regiment,” Adams was lectured by General Horatio Gates. And as all decisions required the approval of Congress, it was for the Board to prepare the reports on which to vote. It would be resolved that five tons of powder be sent to Williamsburg; or that British prisoners be moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania; or that new positions of drum major and fife major be created; or that special commissioners be appointed to audit the accounts of the army of New York.

There were the ever-vexing complications of dealing in various colonial currencies of differing value, and the increasing worry over inflation and the fate of the new Continental money, the unbacked paper currency being produced in Philadelphia in steadily greater quantity. (One Nathan Sellers, a scrivener whose job it was to sign every bill by hand, recorded signing 4,800 bills in a single day that July.) “If that [the Continental currency] suffers in its credit, the Cause must suffer,” Adams warned. “If that fails, the Cause must fail.”

One of the committee assignments he shared with Jefferson was the Committee on Spies, charged with, among other things, drawing up a set of Articles of War — regulations and rules of discipline for the army. Knowing discipline to be a difficult and unpopular subject, Adams had recommended that they present a complete system at once and “let it meet its fate.” And since, in his view, there was but one system of merit, that which had “carried two empires to the head of mankind,” the Roman and the British (the second being drawn directly from the first), he recommended a straight-on borrowing of the British Articles of War, with only a few modifications. According to Adams, writing years later, “Jefferson in those days never failed to agree with me in everything of a political nature, and he very cordially concurred in this.” But by midsummer the matter of the Articles of War had been passed over to the Board of War and had still to be considered by Congress.

Strongly opposed to the existing policy of short-term enlistments, Adams declared himself adamantly in favor of a regular army. But of his many worries the greatest was disease. Responding to the medical theories of young Dr. Rush, he pleaded for greater cleanliness among the troops. Smallpox worried him most of all. Smallpox was the “King of Terrors,” the enemy to be feared more than any other. “Smallpox! Smallpox! What shall we do with it?” he asked Abigail. In a dispatch of July 11, Washington reported that an outbreak of smallpox in Boston had infected some of the troops and that every precaution was being taken to prevent the spread of infection to New York.

Adams’s labors on the Board of War began usually at six in the morning and continued until nine, then resumed again in the evening. Between times, he was in the thick of debate in Congress over the Articles of Confederation. He knew it to be work of the greatest importance, but the strain was beginning to take a toll. He needed rest and for the first time hinted to Abigail the possibility of a “furlow.”

Then, on July 16, came a letter from Abigail’s uncle, Isaac Smith, reporting that Abigail, acting on her own, had decided that she and the children must be inoculated for smallpox. They had come to Boston to undergo the treatment, Smith himself having provided his large house on Court Street for their time of isolation.

Adams was beside himself. “Never — never in my life, had I so many cares upon my mind at once,” he wrote to her. Under any other circumstances he would leave for Boston at once. As it was, he had no choice — he could only pray for their health. “I cannot leave this place, without more injury to the public now, than I ever could at any other time, being in the midst of scenes of business, which must not stop for anything.”

Her letter of explanation, written July 13, did not reach Philadelphia for another week. Because of the outbreak of smallpox in Boston, thousands of people had come in from the surrounding countryside to be inoculated. It was there, in Boston, that smallpox inoculation had been introduced in America more than half a century earlier, and by a kinsman of Adams, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, Adams’s great uncle on his mother’s side. The idea had come from a slave belonging to Cotton Mather, an African named Onesimus, who had said the practice was long established in Africa, where those with the courage to use it were made immune, and he had his own scar on his arm to show. The technique, the same as still practiced by Dr. Boylston, was to make a small incision, then with a quill scoop the “pus from the ripe pustules” of a smallpox patient into the open cut. A generally mild case of smallpox would result, yet the risk of death was relatively slight. The ordeal of the patient, however, could be considerable, as Adams knew from all he had seen at the time he was inoculated, and largely because of various purges that were thought essential to recovery.

“Such a spirit of inoculation” had never been known, Abigail reported. “The town and every house in it are as full as they can hold.”

She and the children were part of a family contingent numbering seventeen that included the Cranches and their three children, Abigail’s sister Elizabeth, a three-year-old daughter of brother William Smith, named Louisa, whom Abigail had taken under her wing, three servants, and two cousins — Cotton Tufts, Jr., and John Thaxter, Jr., a former law clerk of Adams’s who had lately become the tutor for the Adams children.

We had our bedding, etc. to bring [Abigail wrote]. A cow we have driven down from B[raintree] and some hay I have had put into the stable, wood, etc., and we have really commenced housekeepers here. . . . Our little one [three-year-old Thomas] stood the operation manfully. . . . I wish it was so you could have been with us, but I submit.

“The little folks are very sick then and puke every morning, but after that they are comfortable,” she continued. Now especially, he must keep writing to her. “Every expression of tenderness is a cordial to my heart. Unimportant as they are to the rest of the world, to me they are everything.”

Though she herself was well enough to turn out on July 18 for Boston’s celebration for the Declaration of Independence, the children’s ordeal went on. The stay in her uncle’s house would last nearly two months. “Nabby has enough of the smallpox for all the family beside,” Abigail would report. “She is pretty well covered, not a spot of what is so sore that she can neither walk, sit, stand, or lay with any comfort.” The pustules were the size of a large pea. Another time she would write of six-year-old Charles burning with fever and going into a delirium that lasted forty-eight hours.

In a letter to Isaac Smith, expressing his gratitude for all Smith was doing for his family, Adams said he would leave for Boston immediately if he could, but could not “in honor and duty to the public stir from this place. . . . We are in hourly expectation of some important event at New York.” Writing to Abigail, he told her how proud he was of her for what she had done. He wished the whole populace could be inoculated. Yet he could not help being on “tenterhooks.” It had taken ten days for her letter to reach him and heaven only knew what might have transpired in the interval.

It was the paradox of their lives that, as much as his public role kept them apart, he always needed to be with Abigail and she with him. They would never become accustomed to being separated. “I can do nothing without you,” he was to tell her one way or another, time and again, and always from the heart. She would have him no other way than he was; she believed fervently in what he was doing, encouraged him in the role, and wished no other for him; she wanted him to be where he was doing his utmost for the country. And still she desperately wanted him with her. Each worried incessantly about the other’s health and well-being, at times to the point of making themselves ill.

With sickness all about her now, Abigail sensed from John’s letters that something was amiss with him. “Not one word respecting yourself,” she wrote. “My anxiety for your welfare will never leave me but with my parting breath, ‘tis of more importance to me than all this world contains besides.”

Her suspicions were justified. By late July it had been six months since he and Joseph Bass had set off in the snow from Braintree, and the effect of the work, and unrelieved pressure, of too little sleep, no exercise, and increasing worries over her, had caught up with him. In fact, the whole Massachusetts delegation was in a bad way. Elbridge Gerry, sick and exhausted, had already departed for home. John Hancock was beset by gout. Robert Treat Paine, racked by a cough, seldom appeared in Congress. Samuel Adams was “completely worn out.”

On July 25, having received no further news from Boston, Adams addressed a letter to the General Court of Massachusetts requesting a leave of absence, and to James Warren, who as Speaker of the General Court could help arrange such a leave, he declared, “My face is grown pale, my eyes weak and inflamed, my nerves tremulous, my mind as weak as water.” He suffered “feverous heats by day and sweats by night,” an infallible symptom, he was sure, of an approaching collapse. “I know better than anybody what my constitution will bear and what it will not,” he told Warren, “and you may depend upon it, I have already tempted it beyond prudence and safety.”

Philadelphia’s customary steamy summer had returned in force. On a particularly sweltering Sunday, July 28, during which he appears never to have left his Market Street lodgings, Thomas Jefferson checked his thermometer no less than fourteen times, dutifully recording every reading, from a low of 76¾ at six-twenty in the morning to a high of 85 by midafternoon. At ten that night it was still 79¼.

Jefferson, too, was desperate to be gone. He was concerned about his wife and, like many in Congress, he continued to believe the war would be of short duration. The following day he wrote to Richard Henry Lee, who had been absent since mid-June, pleading for Lee to return and relieve him.

“For God’s sake, for your country’s sake, and for my sake, come,” he implored. “I receive by every post such accounts of the state of Mrs. Jefferson’s health that it will be impossible for me to disappoint her expectation of seeing me at the time promised.”

Jefferson hoped to be home by mid-August, and had no intention of returning to Congress. The nature of his wife’s ailment, however, was never explained. What expressions of worry or affection or frustration, what details of his own health he confided in the privacy of his letters to Martha Jefferson, or she to him, were not to be known, as he would one day, for reasons he never expressed, burn all their correspondence.

Earlier that spring in Virginia, Jefferson had himself suffered a severe breakdown following the sudden death of his mother. Excruciating headaches had kept him bedridden for weeks. Jefferson’s feelings for his mother are difficult to gauge. He is not known to have ever expressed affection for her, and of her death he wrote all of one sentence, notable for its brevity and absence of the least sentiment. “My mother died at 8 o’clock this morning in the 57th year of her age,” was all he chose to record. Possibly it was a deeply private love for his mother and the shock of her death coming so suddenly that explained his collapse. Or possibly it was worry over his wife’s illness, or the stress of revolutionary politics. But there was no mistaking the intensity of his suffering. It had been necessary to delay his return to Congress for nearly six weeks.

Now, to his friend John Page, Jefferson wrote that it was only with “great pain” that he remained in Philadelphia.

• • •

WWHILE THE BOARD OF WAR consumed much of Adams’s time and energy, he was nonetheless in the thick of discussion and debate over the most pressing issue before Congress, the proposed “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.” With independence proclaimed, confederation — a working union of the colonies — had become the focus of “spirit” animating the delegates. Union was as essential as independence, nearly all contended — indeed, more important in the view of many — and the issues to be resolved were formidable.

Strict secrecy prevailed, much to Adams’s disapproval. There was theory and there was practice in government, and Adams, the delegate who, as Rush said, could see “the whole subject at a glance,” was determined that with theory now so eloquently proclaimed, practice be attended with equal diligence, and he wanted nothing about the deliberations to be concealed. In Massachusetts the idea of galleries for the public to watch the legislature was the custom. When Wilson of Pennsylvania, who agreed with him, moved that the doors be opened, galleries erected, or that Congress adjourn to some public building where the people might be accommodated, Adams enthusiastically seconded the motion, but to no avail.

As things were, Congress had no real legal authority. It could only pass resolutions, not laws. Having thus far dealt primarily with the “minutiae” of a plan for confederation, the delegates, by late July, had gotten down to the “great points of representation, boundaries, and taxation,” in Jefferson’s words; and as Josiah Bartlett wrote with New Hampshire understatement, “the sentiments of the members [were] very different on many of the articles.” Nor was progress ever easy. “I find,” wrote Rush, who had been in Congress all of a few weeks, “there is a great deal of difference between sporting a sentiment in a letter, or over a glass of wine upon politics, and discharging properly the duties of a senator.”

To Adams, as he explained to Abigail, there were two especially knotty problems:

If a confederation should take place, one great question is how shall we vote? Whether each colony shall count one? Or whether each shall have a weight in proportion to its numbers, or wealth, or exports or imports, or a compound ratio of all?

Another is whether Congress shall have authority to limit the dimensions of each colony, to prevent those which claim, by charter, or proclamation, or commission to the South Sea [the Pacific Ocean], from growing too great and powerful, so as to be dangerous to the rest.

More than that he felt he could not tell her, and for three days, July 30, 31, and August 1, Adams was engaged in passionate debate over the first of these problems.

As it stood, according to Article 17 of the proposed plan, each colony, irrespective of population or wealth, was to have one vote in deciding all questions concerning the confederation. Thirteen separate states would have thirteen equal votes, a concept Adams strongly opposed. He advocated voting in proportion to population, which was not surprising for someone from Massachusetts, one of the most populated and wealthy states. But he spoke more as an American than a New Englander. The individuality of the colonies was “a mere sound,” he said, according to Jefferson’s notes. “The confederacy is to make us one individual only; it is to form us, like separate parcels of metal, into one common mass. We shall no longer retain our separate individuality, but become a single individual as to all questions submitted to the confederacy.”

Speaking for the small colonies, Hopkins of Rhode Island pointed out that the four largest would contain more than half the inhabitants of the confederacy and would thus govern the others as they pleased. But Benjamin Rush, in an eloquent first speech in Congress, declared, “The more a man aims at serving America the more he serves his colony.” “We have been too free with the word independence. We are dependent on each other — not totally independent states. . . . When I entered that door, I considered myself a citizen of America.”

With Franklin and Wilson, Rush moved that the vote be in proportion to numbers, insisting further that only freemen should be counted and that this would have the “excellent effect” of inducing the colonies to discourage slavery.

Jefferson was among those who remained silent, and the issue was not to be resolved then or for a long time to come. But on the second knotty problem, that concerning Virginia’s claim that her boundaries extended to “the South Sea,” which was debated August 2, the same day as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson did speak up to say he protested the right of Congress to decide upon the right of Virginia.

• • •

THE TENSION GREW EXTREME. John wrote to Abigail of being in constant “suspense, uncertainty, and anxiety” about the army at New York, and about “my best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in this world and all my children.”

Even if he were granted a leave of absence, it would not come soon. Things being what they were, perhaps it would be better if she came to Philadelphia. If she were beside him, Adams wrote, he could stay on indefinitely, “proud and happy as a bridegroom.” But thinking better of it, he decided she should inquire about horses to bring him home. “If Bass is in the land of the living, and is willing to take one more ride with his old friend, let him come.”

Low in spirits, feeling misjudged and unappreciated by others in Congress, some of whom, he was sure, mistook his ardor for ambition, he succumbed to brooding and self-pity. Nobody understood him. “I have a very tender feeling heart,” he wrote. “This country knows not, and never can know the torments I have endured for its sake.” He would rather build stone walls upon Penn’s Hill than hold the highest office in government, he told her, as though he believed every word.

His view of the prospects at New York grew steadily darker. “May Heaven grant us victory, if we deserve it,” he prayed, “if not, patience, humility, and persistence under defeat.”

But sensitive to Abigail’s own anxiety and the long days of her confinement in Boston, he began writing at greater length and more frequently than he had, filling pages with his thoughts on a great variety of subjects, conscious that the mixture was often quite odd. Her pleasure in such letters was boundless. “I know not how you find the time amidst such a multitude of cares as surround you,” she wrote. “I am really astonished at looking over the number [of letters] I have received during this month. . . . I hope ‘tis your amusement and relaxation from care to be thus employed. It has been a feast to me.”

A large wall map at the State House inspired a letter given over entirely to geography. (The Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto, by Henry Popple, measured nearly eight by eight feet, and was so detailed it even marked Braintree, spelled “Bantry.”) As a branch of knowledge, geography was “absolutely necessary to every person of public character,” and to every child, Adams declared. “Really there ought not to be a state, a city, a promontory, a river, a harbor, an inlet or a mountain in all America, but what should be intimately known to every youth who has any pretensions to liberal education.”

A sermon preached one Sunday by an unknown southern Baptist minister led to an extended essay on New England and southern preachers, the benefits of travel and education, Adams’s own ambition to establish a Boston Philosophical Society, and concluded with a consideration of the shortcomings of his fellow New Englanders, in which he was also writing about himself.

My countrymen want art and address. They want knowledge of the world. They want the exterior and superficial accomplishments of gentlemen upon which the world has foolishly set so high a value. In solid abilities and real virtues they vastly excel in general any people upon this continent. Our N[ew] England people are awkward and bashful; yet they are pert, ostentatious and vain, a mixture which excites ridicule and gives disgust. They have not the faculty of showing themselves to best advantage, nor the act of concealment of this faculty. An art and faculty which some people possess in the highest degree. Our deficiencies in these respects are owing wholly to the little intercourse we have had with strangers, and to our inexperience in the world. These imperfections must be remedied, for New England must produce the heroes, the statesmen, the philosophers, or America will be no great figure for some time.

He wrote of Benjamin Rush as the very model of a member of the American Philosophical Society, and described a rare moment away from the cares of Congress, a visit he had made to the studio of Charles Willson Peale on Arch Street, where he had had the pleasure of seeing portraits by Peale of Washington, Franklin, the young wife of Benjamin Rush, and various members of Peale’s large family. Peale, a new star in the Philadelphia firmament, young, gifted, gregarious, was also a wholehearted patriot who only days earlier had signed on as a common soldier in a company of local militia. “He is ingenious,” Adams wrote. “He has vanity, loves finery, wears a sword, gold lace, speaks French, is capable of friendship, and strong family attachments, and natural affections.”

Adams was drawn particularly to a painting Peale had begun several years earlier following the death of a daughter who, like Adams’s own Susanna, had died in infancy. “He showed me one moving picture. His wife, all bathed in tears, with a child about six months old, laid out upon her lap. This picture struck me prodigiously.”

Encouraged by Adams’s interest, Peale brought out books for him to see, showed him his sketches of Virginia plantation houses where he had stayed, including Washington’s Mount Vernon. “He showed me several imitations of heads, which he had made in clay, as large as life, with his hands only. Among the rest, one of his own head and face, which was a very great likeness.” Adams was delighted. How he wished he had the time and “tranquility of mind” for “these elegant and ingenious arts of painting, sculpture, statuary, architecture, and music.”

But if Peale’s portraits were all “very well done,” he told Abigail, they were not so accomplished as those by John Singleton Copley, a view he knew would please her, since two particularly fine examples of Copley’s work, companion portraits of Isaac Smith and his wife, Elizabeth, hung in the house where she was confined. “Copley,” Adams assured her, “is the greatest master that ever was in America.”

Writing of her days in the Smith house, Abigail told him she had discovered the joy of a room of her own. She had never coveted anything until now. It was a small room of her aunt’s with a “pretty desk,” bookshelves, and a window overlooking a garden. She wrote all her letters there, she explained, and kept his letters to her “unmolested” by anyone.

Here, I say, I have amused myself in reading and thinking of my absent friend, sometimes with a mixture of pain, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes anticipating a joyful and happy meeting, whilst my heart would bound and palpitate with the pleasing idea, and with the purest affection I have held you to my bosom ‘til my whole soul has dissolved in tenderness and my pen fallen from my hand.

How often do I reflect with pleasure that I hold in possession a heart equally warm with my own, and fully as susceptible of the tenderest impressions, and who even now whilst he is reading here, feels all I describe.

“I must leave my pen to recover myself and write in another strain,” she went on. “I wish for peace and tranquility. All my desires and all my ambition is to be esteemed and loved by my partner, to join with him in the education and instruction of our little ones, to set under our own vines in peace, liberty, and safety.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, she said there was an odd report circulating in Braintree that he had been poisoned.

EARLY ON THURSDAY, August 22, an exceptionally clear, bright day in New York, the British commenced their invasion of Long Island. In wave after wave, first in small boats, then transports, 15,000 English, Scottish, and Hessian troops were rowed across the Narrows from Staten Island to land without opposition on the broad shoreline near Gravesend, eight miles to the rear of the American stronghold on Brooklyn Heights.

A violent storm the night before had cleared the air. The wind was out of the north. Everything sparkled in sunlight. An aide to Admiral Richard Lord Howe described the spectacle of a fleet “of above 300 ships and vessels with their sails open to dry, the sun shining clear upon them,” of the green, wooded hills and meadows of Long Island, and the calm surface of the water as “one of the finest and most picturesque scenes that imagination can fancy”; and to this was added “the vast importance of the business and of the motions of the day.”

Contrary to basic military doctrine, Washington had divided his forces between Manhattan and Long Island. Expecting a second, larger British landing on Manhattan, he remained there, while on Long Island his battalions braced themselves for the assault. But for days the British command under General William Howe made no move in force, not until August 27, when a furious battle was fought to the southwest of Brooklyn Heights. Washington was by then on the scene with reinforcements from Manhattan. Exhorting his men to conduct themselves like soldiers, he told them everything worth living for was at stake.

But the inexperienced Americans were outnumbered, outflanked, and overwhelmed in only a few hours. Most had never been in battle, and while many fought hard and courageously, many did not. Conceivably, as Adams speculated, had General Nathanael Greene remained one of their commanders, things would have gone differently. Ill of fever, Greene had been replaced by General John Sullivan, a former member of Congress from New Hampshire who knew nothing of the terrain and had little of Greene’s ability. More than 1,000 Americans were captured, wounded, or killed, and among the prisoners were several generals, including Sullivan. British losses were perhaps 400.

Howe’s forces had gone into action filled with contempt for the traitorous American rabble, and numbers of Americans were slaughtered after surrendering. One British officer happily reported, “The Hessians and our brave Highlanders gave no quarter; and it was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets after we had surrendered them so that they could not resist. . . . You know all stratagems are lawful in war, especially against such vile enemies to their King and country.”

From a hill where with a telescope he watched a Maryland regiment fight its way back to the American lines against terrible odds, Washington was heard to say, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!”

When the remaining American army fell back to the defenses on Brooklyn Heights, General Howe, remembering the cost of his assault on Bunker Hill, chose not to press the attack, then or the following day.

Meantime, the wind held north, preventing any movement of British warships up the East River to cut off escape by the Americans, and on August 29 another storm blew in. A cold, drenching rain continued through the day and into the night. Before morning, a “peculiar providential” fog set in. When daylight came and the fog began to thin, the British discovered that the Americans had vanished.

Through the night, under the cover of darkness, rain, and fog, Washington’s army had been ferried across the mile-wide East River, through powerful currents, in every conceivable kind of small boat, most of them manned by Massachusetts fishermen — some 9,000 to 10,000 troops with baggage and equipment, all moving with utmost silence.

The risks involved in so difficult a withdrawal had been extreme. Much had depended on those troops that remained behind, holding the lines until the last possible moment, an assignment given to two Pennsylvania battalions under Thomas Mifflin, who was by now a major general. “Our situation was very dangerous,” an unnamed officer would write in the Pennsylvania Evening Post. “The retreat was conducted in the greatest secrecy, and by six o’clock in the morning we had everything embarked.” But the hero was Washington. “There never was a man that behaved better upon the occasion than General Washington; he was on horseback the whole night, and never left the ferry stairs ‘til he had seen the whole of his troops embarked.”

NEWS OF WHAT HAPPENED did not reach Philadelphia until days later. It was only on August 27, the day of the battle of Long Island, that Congress even learned that the British had landed at Gravesend. The wait for further word seemed interminable and in such “strange uncertainty,” John Adams sensed disaster. “Have we not put too much to the hazard in sending the greatest part of the army over to Long Island from whence there is no retreat?” he pondered.

It was not until August 31 that Congress learned of the battle and of Washington’s withdrawal. And though the escape had been brilliantly executed and Washington was justly praised for saving his army, the defeat on the battlefield had been overwhelming, and the effect on Congress and on people everywhere as the news spread was devastating. “In general, our generals were outgeneralled,” Adams would conclude.

Newspapers were filled with eyewitness accounts of the suffering and defeat. For days in Philadelphia the talk was of little else. Then, to compound the atmosphere of uncertainty, the captured General Sullivan appeared in the city. He had been paroled by the British to report to Congress that Admiral Lord Howe wished to confer privately about an accommodation.

Sullivan arrived on September 2, and it was on the following day, Tuesday, September 3, with the outlook as dark as it had ever been, that Jefferson decided to delay his departure no more. As it was, he had stayed three weeks longer than he had intended. Having settled his accounts, he mounted his horse, and with his young servant following behind, started for Virginia.

Adams, too, had reached a decision, as he explained to Abigail in a letter of September 4. Events having taken such a turn at Long Island, he would remain in Philadelphia. When Joseph Bass arrived the next day with the horses to take him home, it made no difference. “The panic may seize whom it will,” Adams wrote, “it will not seize me.”

WHEN JOHN SULLIVAN, a swarthy, arrogant man, appeared in Congress on September 3 to deliver Lord Howe’s request for a conference, Adams was incensed. As Sullivan began his speech, Adams remarked under his breath to Benjamin Rush how much better it would have been had a musket ball at Long Island gone through Sullivan’s head.

Taking the floor in protest, Adams called Sullivan a decoy duck sent to seduce Congress into renunciation of independence. But after four days of debate it was decided that a committee be sent to meet with Howe, a decision, said Caesar Rodney, made more to “satisfy some disturbed minds out of doors,” than from any expectation of bringing about peace.

Adams remained adamantly opposed, convinced Howe was up to “Machiavellian maneuvers.” But when unanimously chosen as one of a committee of three to go on the mission, he consented. “The staunch and intrepid, such as were enemies as much as myself to the measure, pushed for me, I suppose that as little evil might come of it, as possible,” he wrote almost apologetically. The other two were Franklin and Edward Rutledge. Thus, New England, the middle states, and the South were to be represented, or, as also noted, it could be seen as a trio of the oldest, the youngest, and the most stouthearted of the members of Congress.

They were to meet His Lordship on Staten Island, and on the morning of September 9, in “fine sunshine,” they set off, the whole city aware of what was happening. Franklin and Rutledge each rode in a high, two-wheeled chaise, accompanied by a servant. Adams went on horseback, accompanied by Joseph Bass. Congress, in the meanwhile, could only sit and wait, while in New York the admiral’s brother, General Howe, temporarily suspended operations against the rebels.

Free of the city, out of doors and riding again, Adams felt a wave of relief from his cares and woes, even to the point of finding Edward Rutledge an acceptable companion. The road across New Jersey was filled with soldiers marching to join Washington, mostly Pennsylvania men in long brown coats. But for the “straggling and loitering” to be seen, it would have been an encouraging spectacle.

The journey consumed two days. With the road crowded, progress was slow and dusty. At New Brunswick the inn was so full, Adams and Franklin had to share the same bed in a tiny room with only one small window. Before turning in, when Adams moved to close the window against the night air, Franklin objected, declaring they would suffocate. Contrary to convention, Franklin believed in the benefits of fresh air at night and had published his theories on the question. “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in small close rooms,” he had written, stressing “it is the frowzy corrupt air from animal substances, and the perspired matter from our bodies, which, being long confined in beds not lately used, and clothes not lately worn . . . obtains that kind of putridity which infects us, and occasions the colds observed upon sleeping in, wearing, or turning over, such beds [and] clothes.” He wished to have the window remain open, Franklin informed Adams.

“I answered that I was afraid of the evening air,” Adams would write, recounting the memorable scene. “Dr. Franklin replied, ‘The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now worse than that without doors. Come, open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.’” Adams assured Franklin he had read his theories; they did not match his own experience, Adams said, but he would be glad to hear them again.

So the two eminent bedfellows lay side-by-side in the dark, the window open, Franklin expounding, as Adams remembered, “upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.”

At Perth Amboy the morning of September 11, the three Americans were met by one of Lord Howe’s officers who had crossed the narrow channel from Staten Island on the admiral’s red-and-gilt barge and presented himself as a volunteer hostage. He would remain in Perth Amboy, he explained, as a guarantee that they would not be seized as prisoners. Adams told Franklin he thought the idea absurd. Franklin agreed and they insisted the officer go back with them on the barge.

Lord Howe was waiting as they came ashore at what was called Billopp’s Point, at the southwestern tip of Staten Island. He was an impressive sight, spotless in the superbly tailored uniform of a Royal Navy flag officer — knee-length navy blue coat of fine wool with white lapels, white cuffs, white lace below the cuffs, gleaming gold buttons and buttonholes edged with gold, gold-hilted dress sword at his side and on his head a magnificent black cocked hat with gold edging and a black silk cockade. To the rear stood a line of Hessian Guards with fixed bayonets — German fusiliers of the Lieb Regiment with striking uniforms of blue, yellow, and red — men chosen for their height and bravery, whose tall polished silver caps made them appear taller still.

Seeing his returned officer, Howe remarked, “Gentlemen, you make me a very high compliment, and you may depend upon it, I will consider it as the most sacred of things.”

Franklin, who had known Howe in England, introduced Adams and Rutledge. There were the customary bows, after which they proceeded up a path to a large stone manor house, walking between the Hessian guards who looked, Adams remembered, “fierce as ten furies,” as they presented arms, “making all the grimaces and gestures and motions of their muskets with bayonets fixed, which I suppose etiquette requires but which we neither understood nor regarded.”

Considering the kind of military display the admiral might have provided — given the number of troops encamped still on Staten Island — or the impression he could have made had they met on board his flagship, this was an exceedingly modest show, suggesting both that the meeting was hastily arranged and that Howe, in the role of messenger of peace, felt any attempt at intimidation would be inappropriate.

The Billopp House belonged to a Tory, Christopher Billopp, and had been badly used by the Hessian Guard who were quartered there. Inside, it looked no better than a stable, except for the large parlor, where in a last-minute effort to decorate for the occasion — and dampen the smell — the floor had been spread with moss and green branches. A table was set and following a cold meal of “good claret,” ham, and mutton, the admiral commenced the meeting.

A proud, stolid man with a prominent nose and large, sad eyes, Lord Richard Howe was fifty-five years old, older than Adams judged him. He had served in His Majesty’s navy since the age of fourteen. He was considered an exceptionally able officer and, by reputation, had an exceptional gift for persuasion. Like his brother, the general, he was also known to be well disposed toward Americans. He was convinced, like most Englishmen, that the great majority of Americans remained loyal to George III and that such men as the three seated before him at the table were an insignificant minority. It was with expressions of affection for America that he chose to open the discussion, stressing in particular his regard for Massachusetts.

Eighteen years earlier, during the French and Indian War, an older brother, Brigadier George Augustus, Viscount Howe, one of the outstanding British soldiers of the time, had been killed at Ticonderoga. The great William Pitt, then Britain’s Secretary of State, had called him “a complete model of military virtue,” and the Massachusetts Assembly had provided funds for a marble memorial in Westminster Abbey, an honor that Admiral Lord Howe said he esteemed “above all.” He felt for America, said the admiral, as he did for a brother. “If America should fail, I should feel and lament it like the loss of a brother.”

With a smile, Franklin replied, “My Lord, we will do our utmost endeavors to save your Lordship that mortification.”

But the admiral did not smile. All would have been better, he observed, had he only arrived before the Declaration of Independence was signed. The Declaration had “changed the ground.” Were it given up, however, he might possibly “effect the King’s purposes . . . to restore peace and grant pardons,” and thus such discussions as they were having could lead to a “re-union upon terms honorable and advantageous to the colonies as well as to Great Britain.” Was there “no way of treading back this step of independency?”

It must be understood, he continued, that he could not confer with them as members of Congress — that he “could not acknowledge that body which was not acknowledged by the King, whose delegate he was,” as his secretary recorded in the notes of the meeting — and that he therefore could only consider them “merely as gentlemen of great ability and influence,” private persons and British subjects.

To this Adams immediately responded: “Your Lordship may consider me in what light you please,” Adams said, “and indeed, I should be willing to consider myself, for a few moments, in any character which would be agreeable to your Lordship, except that of a British subject.”

Further, as Howe’s secretary, Henry Strachey, noted, Adams expressed “warmly” his determination “not to depart from the idea of independency.” Turning to Franklin and Rutledge, Howe remarked gravely, “Mr. Adams is a decided character,” the emphasis apparently on the word “decided.”

Years afterward Adams would better understand the gloomy look on Howe’s face, when he learned that before leaving London, Howe had been given a list of those American rebels who were to be granted pardons. John Adams was not on the list. He was to hang.

In the course of nearly three hours, Howe did most of the talking. But, as the committee would report to Congress, it had soon become obvious that Howe had no authority other than to grant pardons should America submit, which, as Franklin told him, meant he had nothing really to offer.

He was sorry that the gentlemen had had “the trouble of coming so far to so little purpose,” Howe said at last. If the colonies could not give up “independency,” negotiation was impossible.

“They met, they talked, they parted,” wrote one of Howe’s staff, “and now nothing remains but to fight it out against a set of the most determined hypocrites and demagogues, compiled of the refuse of the colonies, that ever were permitted by Providence to be the scourge of a country.”

The Declaration of Independence had passed a first test. The war would go on.

THE BRITISH MOVED at once. On the morning of Sunday, September 15, with favorable winds and tide this time, five British warships sailed into the East River and commenced a thunderous, point-blank bombardment of American shore defenses on Manhattan. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” wrote the admiral’s secretary.

In a letter to Congress, Washington had earlier explained his intention of abandoning New York, and his larger conclusion that he and his army must avoid pitched battles with such a disciplined and numerous enemy, but rather fight a defensive war. But what happened when bargeloads of British and Hessian infantry began crossing from Long Island, coming through the smoke of the cannonade to land at Kips Bay, was no orderly evacuation of the kind Washington intended. Since the escape from Brooklyn Heights, militia had been deserting in droves. Now those who remained abandoned their entrenchments and fled, never firing a shot. Entire units turned and ran. Galloping to the scene on horseback, Washington charged up and down among the fleeing men, trying to rally them to stand and fight. Outraged, Washington lost his celebrated self-control and began cursing and striking at officers with his riding crop.

Muskets, knapsacks, wagons, and cannon were left behind in the pell-mell rush to get away. Washington could only move with the troops, retreating rapidly northward, up the island of Manhattan to the rocky defenses of Harlem Heights.

For Washington and the American army it was a disastrous, shameful day, and when the news reached Philadelphia, the effect on Congress was decided. As Samuel Chase wrote, “Our affairs here wear a very unfavorable aspect.”

His army was falling apart, Washington informed John Hancock in a bleak letter from Harlem Heights on September 25. For the moment, the British were again doing nothing, but unless “some speedy and effectual measures” were adopted by Congress, “our cause will be lost.” The war, it was clear, was not to be “the work of a day.” Short enlistments would no longer answer. There must be an army built on “a permanent footing,” a standing army.

To place any dependence upon militia is, assuredly, resting on a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life, unaccustomed to the din of arms, totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves, when opposed to troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge, and superior in arms, makes them timid, and ready to fly from their own shadows.

Love of country and belief in the cause were noble sentiments, Washington continued, but even among the officers, those who acted “upon principles of disinterestedness” were “no more than a drop in the ocean.” There must be good pay for officers. For the men, nothing would satisfy but a bounty and an offer of free land.

Stealing by his troops was rampant. If ever he was to bring discipline to bear, check this “lust for plunder,” and stop wholesale desertions and widespread drunkenness, he must have new rules and regulations authorizing harsher punishments.

But Congress was ahead of him. It had already moved to make the changes Washington called for, and again it was Adams — Adams who had never thought it would be anything other than a long, difficult war — who had taken the lead, both as head of the Board of War and in floor debate.

On September 16, Congress adopted a new plan issued by the Board of War whereby every soldier who signed on for the duration was to be offered $20 and 100 acres of land. On September 20, a set of Articles of War — Adams’s rendering of the British Articles of War — was agreed upon. The severity of punishments was increased, as Washington wished. Washington thought the maximum number of lashes allowed hitherto was hardly sufficient. For such crimes as drunkenness or sleeping on guard duty, Congress increased the punishment from thirty-nine to a hundred lashes, and increased as well the number of crimes for which the penalty was death. On October 1, Adams proposed the creation of a military academy. Although nothing would come of the motion until after the war, it was the first such proposal made.

Little that had happened through the summer had distressed Adams quite so much as the behavior of American troops, and especially reports that Massachusetts men had “behaved ill.” “Unfaithfulness” was something he could not abide, and in his spells of gloom he pondered whether the fault was in the times.

Unfaithfulness in public stations is deeply criminal [he wrote to Abigail]. But there is no encouragement to be faithful. Neither profit, nor honor, nor applause is acquired by faithfulness. . . . There is too much corruption, even in this infant age of our Republic. Virtue is not in fashion. Vice is not infamous.

One day, as he and Benjamin Rush sat together in Congress, Rush asked Adams in a whisper if he thought America would succeed in the struggle. “Yes,” Adams replied, “if we fear God and repent our sins.”

But the most direct and obvious response to the perilous state of Washington and his army, was the attention Congress turned to France. Regrettable as it may have seemed to many, a large majority in Congress now saw that independence could not be won without something more than a people’s army, or without help from the outside.

“We look only to heaven and France for succour,” Rush wrote. At City Tavern and the London Coffee House toasts were now commonly raised to His Most Christian Majesty, young King Louis XVI of France, and to “a speedy alliance” between France and the United States.

Months before, in February, listing all that he was determined to see accomplished along with “independency,” Adams had put an alliance with France at the head of the list. But in notes made in early March, at the time Silas Deane was appointed as a secret envoy, Adams had stressed that there must be no political or military connection with France, only a commercial connection. Later, in July, as head of the Committee of Treaties, he had written into the proposed Plan of Treaties an article that in quite blunt, undiplomatic language made clear his deep-seated distrust of France. Designed to safeguard the territorial integrity of the new United States, it stated that in case of any war “between the Most Christian King and the King of Great Britain, the Most Christian King shall never invade, nor under any pretense attempt to possess himself of” Canada, Florida, nor any city or town on the continent of North America, nor any island “lying near to the said continent.”

By September, given the realities of the war, Adams had relinquished his earlier misgivings over a military connection with France, but when the Plan of Treaties was taken up in debate on the floor and motions were made to insert what he called “articles of entangling alliance,” he fought them tooth and nail, and with success. As he wrote, the plan passed “without one particle” of such stipulations and, in fact, would remain the model for nearly all treaties of the United States for the next twenty-five years.

On September 26, Congress took the momentous step of appointing Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as commissioners to the Court of France, to serve with Silas Deane.

In a letter to Jefferson, who had earlier requested just such an assignment, Richard Henry Lee stressed that it was the “great abilities and unshaken virtue” needed in carrying out such a mission that had directed Congress in its choice. In effect, Lee was telling Jefferson that Congress was counting on him and that there was no assignment more crucial to the fate of the country. “In my judgment, the most eminent services that the greatest of her sons can do America will not more essentially serve her and honor themselves than a successful negotiation with France.”

When Jefferson wrote from Virginia to say that after days of deliberation he had decided he could not accept — because of “circumstances very peculiar in the situation of my family,” which was understood to mean the health of his wife — Congress named, in his place, Arthur Lee, a brother of Richard Henry Lee, which was to prove an unfortunate choice.

AUTUMN BROUGHT CLEAR, cool days, with starlit nights cold enough for log fires at City Tavern, where Adams customarily dined. People were putting on flannels again. Wild geese were flying, their honking heard as they beat their way over the city in great V formations. Numbers of the staunchest members of Congress were departing for home, claiming the need for rest. Samuel Chase, Stephen Hopkins, and Joseph Hewes, like Thomas Jefferson, had left in September. In early October, Caesar Rodney and Roger Sherman took their leave. Franklin, who would sail for France on October 26, was already packing.

From Abigail came word that she and the children, having survived the long ordeal of inoculation in Boston, were at last home again in Braintree. Little Charles was still weak and having a “tedious time of it,” but young Johnny, “Master John,” as she now referred to him, had become her post rider, carrying the family mail to and from Boston.

“I have been here until I am stupefied,” Adams told her in a gloomy letter of October 7. The suspense of what was to happen next in New York continued. Turning the situation over and over in his mind, Adams only grew more downcast.

But then four days later, as if a different man, he made his decision. “I suppose your Ladyship has been in the twitters for some time past, because you have not received a letter by every post as you used to,” he wrote in high spirits. “But I’m coming home to make my apology in person.” On Sunday, October 13, he and Bass saddled their horses and started for Braintree.

• • •

IT HAD BEEN a little more than eight months since Adams arrived in Philadelphia in February, and except for the few days taken up with the expedition to meet with Lord Howe, he had never strayed out of the city. True to his parting words to Jonathan Sewall on the hill above Casco Bay two summers before, he had shown unflinching devotion to the cause of his country, “swim or sink, live or die.” He had never walked away from work that needed doing. He had never failed to speak his mind when it counted, to take a stand and fight for what he believed. Yet remarkably, he had never lost his temper or attacked anyone in a personal way, no matter the bitterness or inner fury to be found in some of his private writings.

For eight difficult, wearisome months, working under the greatest imaginable stress and with the full realization of all that was riding on what transpired in Congress, he had kept his head, kept driving toward the single surpassing objective of independence. The timing, the wording, the spirit of the Declaration, the plan of confederation, the approach to treaties, the winning of the war, were all, he saw, essential to achieving the large, overriding goal of an independent America. And beyond independence, as he consistently emphasized, was the ultimate need for a republican form of government built on a foundation of checks and balances.

Writing of Adams that September, Benjamin Rush told a friend, “This illustrious patriot has not his superior, scarcely his equal for abilities and virtue on the whole of the continent of America.” Later, Rush would say of Adams, “Every member of Congress in 1776 acknowledged him to be the first man in the House.” Jefferson was to remember Adams as “the colossus of independence.”

Few Americans ever achieved so much of such value and consequence to their country in so little time. Above all, with his sense of urgency and unrelenting drive, Adams made the Declaration of Independence happen when it did. Had it come later, the course of events could have gone very differently.

PART II

Distant Shores

Fortune may have yet a better success in reserve for you, and they who lose today may win tomorrow.

~Cervantes

CHAPTER FOUR

APPOINTMENT TO FRANCE

I cannot but wish I were better qualified.

~John Adams

I

“WHEN DO YOU EXPECT TO SEE MR. ADAMS?” inquired Mercy Otis Warren in a hurried note from Plymouth.

Surely it must be a “great trial of patience and philosophy” to be so long separated from “the companion of your heart and from the father of your little flock,” continued the older woman, whose tone in correspondence with Abigail Adams was customarily that of the wiser, slightly superior adviser.

Patience, fortitude, public spirit, magnanimity, and self-denial were called for, though she herself, wrote Mercy in candor, could not claim these “sublime” qualities. As Abigail knew, it had been only a short time past when Mercy urged her own husband to resign his commission as a general rather than serve outside New England, and James Warren had complied.

“But oh! the dread of losing all that this world can bestow by one costly sacrifice keeps my mind in continual alarms.”

The note was dated October 15, 1776. By the time Abigail found a moment to reply, a new year had begun and John Adams had come and gone, riding away on still another winter day to still another session of Congress, heading for Baltimore accompanied by a new Massachusetts congressman, James Lovell.

“I had it in my heart to dissuade him from going and I know I could have prevailed,” Abigail wrote to Mercy, “but our public affairs at the time wore so gloomy an aspect that I thought if ever his assistance was wanted, it must be at such a time. I therefore resigned myself to suffer some anxiety and many melancholy hours for this year to come.”

Their separation was more grievous than any, for as she confided discreetly “circumstances” conspired. She was pregnant again. But she took heart, she said, from the late successes of General Washington, an affirming figure for a dark passage. “I am apt to think that our late misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief. ‘Affliction is a good man’s shining time,’” she wrote, quoting a favorite line from the English poet Edward Young.

In the aftermath of still further defeat in New York — at White Plains, and Fort Washington — the general had beat an inglorious retreat south through New Jersey to the Delaware, his army dwindling to less than 4,000 men, many of whom were without shoes and so thinly clad as to be unfit for service. With the onset of winter, the weather turned bitterly cold. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine, who was with the retreating army. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”

On December 7, Washington escaped to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, putting the river between his force and the enemy. Only days later, Congress evacuated Philadelphia and moved south to Baltimore, bag and baggage. The prospect for the American cause had never looked so bleak.

But when the British commander, General Howe, called a halt to the campaign on December 14, ordering his troops into winter quarters in New York and leaving New Jersey in the hands of small holding forces, Washington, to the astonishment of everyone, counterattacked. On Christmas night, in driving sleet and snow, he and his ragged army recrossed the Delaware and struck at Trenton the next morning, taking a drowsy Hessian guardpost completely by surprise. On January 2, he struck again, at Princeton, and again with stunning success. Measured by the numbers of troops involved, these were small engagements, but the effect on American spirits could hardly have been greater, and just when all seemed lost.

By mid-January 1777, Washington’s army, too, was settled in winter quarters, miserably, at Morristown, New Jersey, while along the coast of Massachusetts, heavy snow fell in weather as severe as any in memory. In the wake of one February storm, howling winds piled drifts higher than a man’s head. From her window beside the coast road, Abigail looked out at a world of white desolation, a small, slight figure, snow-bound with five children, including her niece, Louisa, and determined to be no summer soldier or sunshine patriot. She had never seen the road so obstructed, she informed John. For days not a soul passed her door.

“I want a bird of passage,” she declared in early March, still having heard nothing from him. “Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”

When a first letter from Baltimore arrived on March 9, filled with his distress over no word from her, she replied at once. Her health was as good as to be expected in her condition. Moreover, “’Tis a constant remembrancer of an absent friend, and excites sensations of tenderness which are better felt than expressed.”

By spring she had grown uncomfortably large and clumsy — young Johnny told her he never saw anyone grow so fat — but she was also uncommonly pale. She could never put the “cruel war” out of her mind. Her only brother, William Smith, had gone to sea, as a captain of marines on a privateer. Troops passed continually up and down the coast road — “not an hour in the day but what we see soldiers marching.”

Adams, who by then had returned with the Congress to Philadelphia, wrote every week. He was homesick, weary with work. Attendance in Congress was down to a mere twenty. When Jefferson, claiming personal reasons, failed to return, Adams was especially disappointed. “We want your industry and abilities here extremely,” he wrote to Jefferson. “Your country is not quite secure enough to excuse your retreat to the delights of domestic life.” But Adams was not unsympathetic. “Yet for the soul of me, when I attend on my own feelings, I cannot blame you.”

The Board of War was examining reports of atrocities committed by Hessian troops in New Jersey; Adams was sickened by what he heard. He was exasperated, too, by the constant squabbles of American officers. “They worry one another like mastiffs, scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts,” he told Abigail.

I believe there is no one principle which predominates in human nature so much in every stage of life, from the cradle to the grave, in males and females, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, high and low, as this passion for superiority.

He wondered if he was sadly miscast in his public role. “I begin to suspect that I have not much grand in my composition. The pride and pomp of war, the continual sound of drums and fifeshave no charms for me.” He would prefer the delights of a garden to dominion of a world. “I have nothing of Caesar’s greatness in my soul. Power has not my wishes in her train.”

He urged Abigail to keep up her cheer. Wondering what was in store for their children, he poured out heartfelt advice and admonitions to each of them.

You have discovered in your childhood a remarkable modesty, discretion, and reserve [he told Nabby]. You are now, I think, far advanced in your twelfth year — a time when the understanding opens, and the youth begin to look abroad into the world among whom they are to live. To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.

“A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man,” he counseled Johnny, while to Charles he expressed the hope that with the war over by and by he would have only to study “the arts of peace.” To Thomas he offered the prospect of a career in medicine, warming so to the subject that he seemed to forget the boy was only five years old. “Would it not please you to study nature on all her wonderful operations, and to relieve your fellow creatures under the severest pains and distress to which human nature is liable?”

“I love to receive letters very much better than I love to write them,” replied Johnny, who reported proudly that he was embarked on the third volume of Tobias Smollett’s History of England.

History was the true source of “solid instruction,” Adams wrote to the boy encouragingly. He must read Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War. There was no better preparation, whatever part he was called to play on “the stage of life.” It was best read in the original Greek, of course, but he could find a reliable translation among his father’s books. (Long afterward, writing of this time in his boyhood, John Quincy Adams would recall secreting himself in a closet to smoke tobacco and read Milton’s Paradise Lost, trying without success to determine what “recondite charm” in them gave his father so much pleasure.)

RAMPANT INFLATION, shortages of nearly every necessity made the day-to-day struggle at home increasingly difficult. A dollar was not worth what a quarter had been, Abigail reported. “Our money will soon be as useless as blank paper.” Bread, salt, sugar, meat and molasses, cotton and wool, had become dear beyond measure. Farm help, help of any sort, was impossible to find. Yet she managed — scrimped, saved, wove her own wool, made the family’s clothes — determined not only to stay free of debt, but to make improvements. She would do her part in her way, as a patriotic duty but also because it was expected of her in his absence. “I believe nature has assigned each sex its particular duties and sphere of action,” she would write, “and to act well your part, ‘there all the honor lies.’”

“What will become of you, I know not,” John wrote in anguish. “How you will be able to live is past my comprehension.”

That spring James Warren reported to Adams that the farm never looked better and that Abigail was “like to outshine all farmers.” But then Adams had never doubted that she could run things as well as he, or better.

She wanted him home by July in time for her delivery. Even the brutes of creation had the consoling company of their mates at such times, she reminded him. Beset by morbid premonitions, she imagined their separation as prelude to the “still more painful one” of his death, or her own. She longed for his soothing tenderness. “Is this weakness or is it not?”

His affection for her was of a kind that neither time nor place could abate, he insisted, knowing, as she did, that he could not abandon his duties.

On a night in early July, taken with a “shaking fit,” she feared the life within was lost. Two weeks later, after an ordeal of several days, she wrote to tell him their baby, a daughter, had been stillborn. “It appeared to be a very fine babe, and as it never opened its eyes in this world, it looked as though they were only closed for sleep.”

“The corn looks well, and [the] English grain promising,” she bravely reported the week following. “We cannot be sufficiently thankful to a bountiful Providence that the horrors of famine are not added to those of war.”

They had both wanted another child and hoped it would be another daughter. “The loss of this sweet little girl,” wrote Adams after receiving her letter, “has most tenderly and sensibly affected me.”

“’Tis almost 14 years since we were united, but not more than half that time we had the happiness of living together,” she wrote plaintively. “The unfeeling world may consider it in what light they please, I consider it a sacrifice to my country and one of my greatest misfortunes.”

Remembering these years long afterward, Adams would tell Benjamin Rush they were “times that tried women’s souls as well as men’s.”

THROUGH THE REST of the eventful summer of 1777, they exchanged news of the war. An immense enemy force under General John Burgoyne had started south from Canada, down the valley of Lake Champlain, in an audacious move to separate New England from the rest of the country. Fort Ticonderoga had fallen, abandoned by its American garrison, and enemy troops were pressing steadily on, hacking their way through the wilderness to reach the Hudson River. On July 22, Sir William Howe had sailed out of New York Harbor with a fleet of 267 ships carrying 18,000 soldiers, and vanished over the horizon, bound, it was thought, for Philadelphia. A week later the ships appeared in Delaware Bay, only to disappear again, which led to days of tension and speculation as to Howe’s intentions. Adams interpreted such feints and maneuvers to mean the real objective was the Hudson, where Howe would join forces with Burgoyne, but then Adams decided an invasion of Philadelphia must be the plan after all. If Howe’s army was at sea all this time, he speculated to Abigail, the men between decks must be suffering beyond expression.

Howe’s fleet was sighted in Chesapeake Bay on August 21. Three days later, in a show of resolve, Washington paraded his troops through Philadelphia, every man wearing a sprig of green as an emblem of hope. Adams felt a lift of heart at the sight. His hard work with the Board of War had had some effect. They looked well armed and tolerably well clothed, he thought, if a bit out of step.

Sixty miles below Philadelphia, the next day, August 25, Howe’s army began coming ashore. On September 11, in a fierce, confused fight at Brandywine Creek, only twenty-five miles south of Philadelphia, Washington tried without success to check the advance of a superior enemy force. The battle, one of the largest of the war, raged until dark. The roar of cannon and of volleys of musketry could be heard plainly in Philadelphia. Washington lost more than 1,500 men killed, wounded, and taken prisoner. In no time the British were on the outskirts of the city, and before dawn on September 19, in response to urgent warning messages from a young officer on Washington’s staff, Alexander Hamilton, Congress began departing with all possible speed — “chased like a covey of partridges,” as Adams would say — to resettle in the little market town of York to the west. On September 26, Howe’s columns marched in to occupy Philadelphia.

Privately, Adams questioned Washington’s leadership. The Virginian had been “out-generaled” once again. “Oh, Heaven! grant us one great soul!” Adams wrote in his diary. “One leading mind would extricate the best cause from that ruin which seems to await it. . . . One active, masterly capacity would bring order out of this confusion and save this country.”

But writing to Abigail, he showed no despair. The army had survived, the loss of Philadelphia did not matter, he assured her. She longed for “spirited exertions everywhere,” for “some grand important actions to take place.”

In October, as if in answer, came the stupendous news of the surrender of Burgoyne and his entire army at Saratoga to an American force commanded by Horatio Gates. In another few weeks, like most delegates to Congress, Adams was heading home.

Yet his stay this time was to be more abbreviated even than that of the year past, and Mercy Otis Warren would once more summon Abigail to noble sacrifice. “Great advantages are often attended with great inconveniences, and great minds called to severe trials,” she wrote. “If your dearest friend had not abilities to render such important services to his country, he would not be called. . . . I know your public spirit and fortitude to be such that you will throw no impediment in his way.”

ADAMS REACHED MASSACHUSETTS by horseback in the last days of November 1777 and for two weeks did little but relish the comforts of his own fireside. He was home to stay, by preference and of necessity, he said.

It was my intention to decline the next elections, and return to my practise at the bar. I had been four years in Congress, left my accounts in very loose condition. My debtors were failing, the paper money was depreciating. I was daily losing the fruits of seventeen years’ industry. My family was living on my past acquisitions which were very moderate. . . . My children were growing up without my care in their education, and all my emoluments as a member of Congress for four years had not been sufficient to pay a laboring man on a farm.

But before leaving York, Adams had been told by Elbridge Gerry that he was to be appointed a commissioner to France, in place of Silas Deane, who was being recalled to answer charges of questionable conduct. According to Adams’s later recollection, he said nothing to Gerry about accepting the post, only that he felt unqualified. Gerry, too, would describe Adams as “silent” on the matter, though Gerry would tell the Congress that knowing Adams as he did, he was sure Adams would not decline the duty. On November 27, Congress named Adams a commissioner to work with Franklin and Arthur Lee in negotiating a French alliance.

A packet of letters and Adams’s official commission to the Court of France went off to Braintree by post rider. There was a formal letter of notification from the new president of Congress, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, and another from Richard Henry Lee and James Lovell on behalf of the Committee for Foreign Affairs. (“We are by no means willing to indulge a thought of your declining this important service.”) In a separate letter, Lovell, the new Massachusetts representative, said that all in Congress who understood the importance of the negotiations with France were counting on Adams’s acceptance, and that those sacrifices Adams had already made of private happiness gave them confidence he would undertake “this new business.” There was alarm over Franklin’s age, Lovell said, adding, “We want one man of inflexible integrity on the embassy.”

Lovell, the most active member of the Committee for Foreign Affairs and a dedicated patriot, was a shrewd, industrious man who loved intrigue and would make himself Congress’s expert on cryptology. He and Adams had known each other for years, and Lovell professed only the warmest regard for Adams, as well as for Abigail. But Lovell was a practiced flatterer, sometimes to the point of impropriety. In a note to Abigail the summer before, accompanying some information on the war he thought she would want to see, Lovell had declared, “This knowledge is only part of the foundation of my affectionate esteem for you. Nor will I mention the whole.” So an appeal to Adams’s self-regard, by extolling his integrity to the point of implying that Franklin and Arthur Lee had none, was quite in the Lovell mode.

The official packet reached Braintree in mid-December, at about the time Washington’s army was on the march west from Philadelphia to take up winter quarters at Valley Forge. Adams was away at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, representing a client in what was to be his last appearance ever in court as a private attorney. Thinking the packet must be urgent business, Abigail opened it and was stunned by what she read. Furious, she wrote straight away to Lovell, demanding to know how he could “contrive to rob me of all my happiness.

And can I, sir, consent to be separated from him whom my heart esteems above all earthly things, and for an unlimited time? My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension, and must I cheerfully comply with the demand of my country?

The thought of John braving the North Atlantic in winter, and the very real possibility of his capture at sea, horrified her. No one put to sea from Boston in winter if it could possibly be avoided, even in peacetime.

News of the appointment had already reached Adams in New Hampshire. Thus, the day he dismounted from his horse at Braintree, December 22, he and Abigail knew they had reached one of the turning points of their lives. What was said between them, neither divulged. But the decision, difficult as it was, Adams made at once. There was no hesitation, no playing out the ordeal of deciding. If nothing else, he was decisive — they both were. Within twenty-four hours he had written his letter of acceptance to Henry Laurens. To James Lovell he wrote, “I should have wanted no motives or arguments to induce me to accept of this momentous trust, if I could be sure that the public would be benefited by it.

But when I see my brothers at the bar here so easily making fortunes for themselves and their families . . . and when I see my own children growing up in something very like real want, because I have taken no care of them, it requires as much philosophy as I am master of, to determine to persevere in public life, and engage in a new scene for which I fear I am very ill qualified.

The question of whether Abigail should accompany him was discussed, and for a few days it appeared she might go, great as her fear was of crossing the water. It was the risk of capture by the enemy that weighed heaviest in the balance. But also the expense of living in Paris was bound to be more than they could afford, and clearly things at home would fall to ruin without her.

“My desire was, you know, to have run all hazards and accompanied him,” Abigail would tell a friend, “but I could not prevail upon him to consent.”

She would remain at home, but ten-year-old Johnny was to go with his father, as the boy ardently wished. It was the chance of a lifetime for him, an experience of inestimable value, Abigail recognized, her “thousand fears” notwithstanding. Assuredly he would encounter temptation, she wrote, but to exclude him from temptation would be to exclude him from the world in which he was to live. Later, in a long letter written after he had gone, she would assure him he was ever in her heart, but tell him also what was expected of him in his obligations to society, his country, and to his family:

You are in possession of a natural good understanding and of spirits unbroken by adversity, and untamed with care. Improve your understanding for acquiring useful knowledge and virtue, such as will render you an ornament to society, an honor to your country, and a blessing to your parents . . . and remember you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions.

He was to “attend” the advantages of such an experience and “attend constantly and steadfastly to the precepts and instructions of your father as you value the happiness of your mother and your own welfare.”

THEY WERE TO SAIL on the new 24-gun frigate Boston, under the command of Captain Samuel Tucker of Marblehead. For weeks there was much scurrying to get ready, much ado over packing and estimating the food and supplies to be sent on board — for Adams, John Quincy, and a Braintree man named Joseph Stephens, who would be going as Adams’s servant. The completed list included such immediate necessities for Adams as ink, paper, account books, twenty-five quill pens, a dozen clay pipes, tobacco, and a pocket-size pistol; but also two hogs, two “fat sheep,” six dozen chickens and five bushels of corn, fourteen dozen eggs, a keg of rum, a barrel of madeira, four dozen bottles of port wine, tea, chocolate, brown sugar, mustard, pepper, a box of wafers, a bag of Indian meal, and a barrel of apples.

In view of the number of spies in and about Boston and the certainty of British cruisers in New England waters, departure was to be managed with all possible secrecy. Adams was not to go aboard at Boston. He would be picked up near dark, at a rendezvous on the Braintree shore known as Hough’s Neck. As little as possible was to be said of the plan. Adams would leave pressing legal matters unattended and without explanation to his clients. Numbers of friends, even members of the family, never knew of his appointment to France until after he had gone.

One of the last letters he received before departure was from his admiring friend Benjamin Rush, who in his usual flowing, assured hand wrote that though he hated to see Adams go, he had every confidence in him:

I am aware that your abilities and firmness are much wanted at the Court of France, and after all that has been said of the advantages of dressing, powdering, and bowing well as necessary accomplishments for an ambassador, I maintain that knowledge and integrity with a common share of prudence will outweigh them all. . . . I am willing to risk the safety of our country upon this single proposition, that you will effectually “baffle and deceive them all by being perfectly honest.”

On a blustery morning in February, the Boston dropped anchor off Nantasket Roads. But with snow squalls and winds gathering to gale force, it was not until two days later that a barge was lowered.

Abigail did not go down to the shore to see her husband and son depart. The goodbyes were said at home.

THEY CROSSED THROUGH GREY TWILIGHT and blowing snow to a house by the shore, where sailors from the Boston were waiting out of the bitter wind. It was the home of a distant cousin whose wife, afflicted by “hysterical complaints,” accosted Adams with a warning. He was embarking under bad signs. “The heavens frown, the clouds roll, the waves roar upon the beach,” she declaimed. He was not enough of a Roman, Adams later said, to take this as an ill omen, but then neither was he a New Englander of the kind bred to the sea, for all that he loved its proximity and bracing air. He had never in his life sailed on a ship. His one venture had been by small boat in boyhood, and then only to go fishing at nearby Cohasset Rocks.

Now he was embarking on a 3,000-mile voyage on the North Atlantic in its most treacherous season, the risks far greater than he knew. The difference between what he understood of the perils to be faced and what the captain understood was hardly less than the difference between his understanding and that of his small son. A hardened seaman like Captain Tucker knew what the Atlantic could deliver up in February: the chances of being hit by a northeaster and driven onto the shoals of Cape Cod, graveyard of ships; the sheer terror of winter storms at sea when freezing spray aloft could turn to ice so heavy as to cause a ship to capsize. Navigation, never a simple matter, became difficult in the extreme from a violently pitching deck and with a horizon distorted by breaking seas, or, in the absence of sun and stars, quite impossible.

Adams was leaving his wife, children, friends, his home, his livelihood, everything he loved. He was risking his life and that of his small son, risking capture and who knew what horrors and indignities as a prisoner, all to begin “new business” for which he felt ill suited, knowing nothing of European politics or diplomacy and unable to speak French, the language of diplomacy. He had never in his life laid eyes on a King or Queen, or the Foreign Minister of a great power, never set foot in a city of more than 30,000 people. At age forty-two he was bound for an unimaginably distant world apart, with very little idea of what was in store and every cause to be extremely apprehensive.

But with his overriding sense of duty, his need to serve, his ambition, and as a patriot fiercely committed to the fight for independence, he could not have done otherwise. There was never really a doubt about his going.

If he was untrained and inexperienced in diplomacy, so was every American. If unable to speak French, he could learn. Fearsome as the winter seas might be, he was not lacking in courage, and besides, the voyage would provide opportunity to appraise the Continental Navy at first hand, a subject he believed of highest importance. And for all he may have strayed from the hidebound preachments of his forebears, Adams remained enough of a Puritan to believe anything worthy must carry a measure of pain.

“The wind was very high, and the sea very rough,” he would record in his diary, “but by means of a quantity of hay in the bottom of the boat, and good watch coats with which we were covered, we arrived on board the Boston about five o’clock, tolerably warm and dry.”

Continuing high winds and steep seas kept the ship at anchor in the roadstead another thirty-six hours. Then once under way, on a morning with the temperature at 14 degrees, the ship went only as far as Marble-head, where a sudden snowstorm blotted out all visibility, and nearly two days passed before Captain Tucker could put to sea. The weather was no warmer but fair at last, and the wind out of the northwest, exactly what was needed to clear Cape Cod on a broad reach.

The date was Tuesday, February 17, 1778, and, as Adams had no way of knowing, it marked the beginning of what would become a singular odyssey, in which he would journey farther in all, both by sea and land, than any other leader of the American cause.

“This morning weighed the last anchor and came under sail before breakfast,” he recorded. “A fine wind and a pleasant sun, but sharp cold air. Thus I bid farewell to my native shore.”

II

BY THOSE WHO KNEW, the Boston was judged a pretty ship. One of the smaller of the thirteen frigates commissioned by Congress, she had been built and launched at Newburyport in 1776. One hundred and fourteen feet on deck, and 514 tons, she had a theoretical complement of 200 men. As it was, there were 172 crowded on board, counting officers, crew, and 36 passengers, mostly French officers returning after service in the Continental Army. Of this French contingent, Adams took an immediate liking to an army surgeon named Nicholas Noel, who spoke English and thought well enough of John Quincy to begin schooling him in French.

As for Captain Tucker, Adams considered him able and attentive, though, to judge by the few books in his cabin, no doubt lacking in erudition. The son of a Marblehead sea captain, Tucker was thirty years old, a square, solid looking man with a booming voice who had been at sea since the age of eleven. But the Boston was a new command with a green crew, and the official instructions Tucker had received concerning his highly important passenger were unlike any in his experience. He had not only the responsibility of ensuring safe passage to France, but he was to consult with the Honorable John Adams on all important decisions.

You are to afford him on his passage every accommodation in your power, and to consult him on all occasions, with respect to your passage and general conduct, and the port you shall endeavor to get into, and on all occasions have great regard to the importance of his security and safe arrival.

Adams showed an immediate interest in seeing everything about the ship and how it was run and, except for the tiny snug cabin that he and Johnny shared, little met his approval. Nor, characteristically, had he the least hesitation about letting Tucker know.

There was too much informality, too little discipline, and a “detestable” use of profanity that should never be tolerated. The men were insufficiently practiced in use of the guns; many hardly knew the ropes. Most disturbing was the same appalling indifference to sanitation that Adams knew from Dr. Rush to be the scourge of the Continental Army. Once walking through Potter’s Field in Philadelphia the previous April, Adams had been overcome by the thought that more than 2,000 American soldiers had already been buried there, nearly all victims of smallpox and camp diseases. Dirty frying pans slayed more than swords, he had told Abigail. “Discipline, discipline is the great thing wanted.” There could be no cleanliness without discipline, and death from disease among seamen was, he knew, exceedingly high. (For every sailor in the British navy killed in action or who died of wounds in the era of the American Revolution, seventeen died of disease.)

Meals on the Boston were wretched and served at the cook’s pleasure. The reek of burning sea coal and the stench of stagnant water below-decks were dreadful, and contributed to everyone’s misery when, after the first full day of “rolling and rocking” at sea, every passenger and half the crew became seasick.

Under ideal circumstances a crossing to France could be accomplished in about three weeks. As it was, the voyage would take six weeks and four days, excellent time, given that eight to ten weeks were the usual run in winter, and quite remarkable given all that happened.

IN THE FIRST FAINT LIGHT of morning, the second day at sea, with wind and weather holding fair, from the masthead came a call of three ships bearing east on the northward horizon — three British frigates, as another hour would tell — that soon gave chase. After consultation with Adams, Captain Tucker determined to stand away from them. Two of the three ships eventually fell off, but one, the best sailor, kept in pursuit. “Sometimes we gained upon her, sometimes she upon us,” Adams recorded. The chase went on all day and for two days following, when they crossed into the Gulf Stream.

When night approached, the wind died away [Adams would write at the close of the third day], and we were left rolling and pitching in a calm, with our guns all out, our courses all drawn up, and every way prepared for battle; the officers and men were in good spirits, and Captain Tucker said his orders were to carry me to France . . . he thought it his duty, therefore, to avoid fighting, especially with an unequal force, if he could, but if he could not avoid an engagement, he would give them something that should make them remember him.

In the night a sudden, violent storm struck with a blinding cannonade of thunder and lightning. The ship “shuddered . . . darted from side to side . . . all hands were called, and with much difficulty the guns were all got in and secured. It was with the utmost difficulty that my little son and I could hold ourselves in bed with both our hands, and bracing ourselves against the boards, planks, and timbers with our feet.” There was a horrendous, terrifying crash as a bolt of lightning hit the main mast, very near the powder room. Twenty seamen were injured. One man, a hole burned in the top of his head, would die “raving mad.”

The storm raged on. “The sea being very cross and high, forced me to scud before the wind under my foresail,” recorded Captain Tucker. “Heavy gales and a dangerous sea running,” he wrote the next day; “one thing and another continually giving way on board. . . . Pray God protect us.”

Adams wanted to keep a running account of all that was happening but found it impossible. He was so drenched, everything was so soaking wet, that pen and paper were useless.

The ship was a wreck, its main mast split above and below the deck. No man could keep upon his legs, and nothing could be kept in its place [he later wrote]. The wind blowing against the current [of the Gulf Stream], not directly, but in various angles, produced a tumbling sea, vast mountains, sometimes dashing against each other . . . and not infrequently breaking on the ship, threatened to bury us all at once in the deep. The sails were all hauled down but a foresail . . . and we were left with bare poles entirely at the mercy of wind and water. The noises were such that we could not hear each other speak at any distance. The shrouds and every other rope in the ship exposed to the wind became a chord of very harsh music. Their vibrations produced a constant and a hideous howl.

In his diary later, Adams would confess to moments of severe regret that he had ever brought his son, but he wrote also of his extreme pride in the boy:

[His] behavior gave me a satisfaction that I cannot express. Fully sensible of our danger, he was constantly endeavoring to bear up under it with manly courage and patience, very attentive to me, and his thoughts always running in a serious strain. In this he was not singular. . . . I believe there was not a soul on board who was wholly thoughtless of a Divinity.

Appraising his own performance, Adams felt more than a little pleased, even some surprise, it would appear, that he had remained “perfectly calm.”

The storm had driven the ship several hundred miles off course. But days of smooth sailing followed, and with the crew busy with repairs, Adams resumed lecturing the captain on order and improvements.

Tucker appears to have taken all that the insistent landsman had to say in remarkably good spirits and acted upon it as best he could, to Adams’s considerable satisfaction. “I am constantly giving hints to the captain concerning order, economy and regularity,” he wrote, “and he seems to be sensible of the necessity of them, and exerts himself to introduce them.” As great a nuisance as Adams may have been, he got results; the ship took on a new look.

[Tucker] has cleared out between decks, ordered up the hammocks to be aired, and ordered up the sick, such as could bear it, upon deck for sweet air. This ship would have bred the plague or jail fever, if there had not been great exertions since the storm to wash, sweep, air and purify clothes, cots, cabins, hammocks and all other things, places, and persons.

Adams quite liked the salty, booming Tucker, and Tucker had come to appreciate Adams’s company. Indeed, in remarks made later before the Navy Board, he would pay Adams as high a compliment as he knew. “I did not say much to him at first, but damn and bugger my eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marblehead man.”

On February 28, Adams could happily record in his diary that with smooth seas and a fine breeze the Boston had hardly any motion but forward. He was sleeping as soundly as in his bed at home.

The color of the ocean changed from blue to green as the Gulf Stream was left behind. “What is this Gulf Stream?” he pondered. “What is the course of it? From what point and to what point does it flow?” Flocks of gulls appeared astern, trailing the ship. “The wind is fresh, the ship sails at a great rate.”

One fine day followed another. Life on board settled into a routine. With the captain’s help, John Quincy had undertaken to learn the name of every sail and master the use of a mariner’s compass. Father and son both worked on their French, Adams reading a bilingual edition of Molière’s Amphitryon, one of several books he had brought from home.

He discussed medicine with the French surgeon Dr. Noel and encouraged the ship’s first lieutenant, William Barron, to talk about his career and all that he had seen of the world. Barron, a Virginian, impressed Adams as exactly the kind of officer “much wanted in our infant navy.”

One spectacular day, with all sails spread, the ship made an average of ten knots. Yet whatever the romance of the sea might be, it eluded Adams. “We see nothing but sky, clouds, and sea, and then seas, clouds, and sky.”

“Oh that we might make [a] prize today of an English vessel lately from London with all the newspapers and magazines on board,” he mused another morning.

“Nothing very remarkable this day,” Captain Tucker wrote in his log. It had become a familiar entry. Once, after recording that the preceding twenty-four hours had both begun and ended with pleasant weather, he added, “Nothing more remarkable to my sorrow.”

But suddenly life picked up again. “We spied a sail and gave her chase,” a delighted Adams recorded. A ship hull-down on the southeastern horizon was thought to be a British cruiser. Tucker ordered the Boston cleared for action. Seeing Adams on the quarterdeck, he quickly explained the situation and, with Adams in agreement on a decision to attack, respectfully suggested that Adams go below, as “hot work” was to ensue.

The ship was a heavily armed merchantman flying the British flag, and in an hour or more they had all but closed on one another. The Boston, coming up bow-on, fired one shot, the merchantman fired three, one ball splitting the Boston’s mizzen yard directly over the head of John Adams, who, as Tucker now saw, had taken a place in the heart of the action, musket in hand. When the Boston swung broadside, revealing for the first time her more formidable array of cannon, the British ship struck her colors.

It was a fine prize, the Martha, out of London and bound for British-held New York with a cargo valued at 70,000 pounds. The British captain and crew, prisoners now, were brought on board. Tucker assigned a picked crew to sail the prize to Boston, ordered a 7-gun salute, and proceeded on course. For Tucker especially, it was a moment of sweet triumph. The Martha, however, would soon be retaken by the British and delivered to Halifax.

Of the part Adams had played in the action, Tucker was to speak warmly, and later confirm how, at the height of the fray, he had discovered Adams “among my marines accoutered as one of them and in the act of defense.

I then went unto him and said, “My dear sir, how came you here,” and with a smile he replied, “I ought to do my share of the fighting.” This was sufficient for me to judge of the bravery of my venerable and patriotic Adams.

Days later, approaching a French brig, Tucker ordered a signal shot fired. The gun blew to pieces, felling several sailors and shattering the leg of Lieutenant Barron, the officer Adams so admired. And it was Adams and Tucker who gripped young Barron in their arms as Dr. Noel amputated the limb. Barron died more than a week later, after “enduring the greatest pain,” according to the captain’s log, and was committed to the deep from the quarterdeck. “He was put into a chest,” wrote Adams, “and ten or twelve pounds of shot put in with him, and then nailed up. The fragment of the gun which destroyed him was lashed to the chest, and the whole launched overboard through one of the ports in the presence of all the ship’s crew.”

ON MARCH24 , in the Bay of Biscay, Adams could see by telescope the snow-capped mountains of Spain. At the week’s end, as the Boston at last entered the busy thoroughfare of Bordeaux, an Irish passenger from the Martha broke out a fiddle and played all afternoon as the sailors danced.

On Monday, March 30, with a French pilot aboard, the Boston moved up the Gironde, where the whole landscape struck Adams as extraordinarily beautiful. “Europe, thou great theater of arts, sciences, commerce, war, am I at last permitted to visit thy territories,” he wrote that night in his diary, allowing that the sight of France at last gave him a kind of “pleasing melancholy.”

When the Boston anchored at Bordeaux, he and Dr. Noel were invited to dine on a French warship lying close by. It was Adams’s first exposure to French hospitality — in effect his first time in France — and he could not have been more pleased or impressed by the gentility of his hosts, the elegant cabin where the meal was served, the white stone plates, napkins, everything “as clean as in any gentleman’s house,” and food and wine, which, after the Boston, seemed heaven-sent.

His hosts spoke no English. But with the doctor serving as interpreter, Adams learned to his astonishment that as a consequence of the American triumph at Saratoga, France and the United States had already agreed to an alliance.

Thus, before he had even set foot on French soil, he found that the very purpose of his mission, to assist in negotiations for such an alliance, had been accomplished. The agreement, one of the most fateful in history, had been signed on February 6, 1778, or before Adams had even left home.

It was shortly after daybreak the next morning, April 1, All Fools’ Day, when Adams, his son, and servant took leave of Captain Tucker and were rowed ashore. The relief felt by Tucker, his mission accomplished, may be imagined.

ADAMS WAS TO CROSS the Atlantic three more times, and John Quincy, too, in years to come would sail several times to and from Europe. But for neither was there ever to be an ocean voyage comparable to this, their first. Both would allude to it frequently — the novelty and high adventure, the savage storm, the battle at sea, the misery and terror and exhilaration of it all.

In a first letter from France to his “Hon[ore]d Mamma,” the lines of his pen running up and down in waves, as though he were still on board ship, John Quincy would express what was felt deeply by both father and son: “I hope I shall never forget the goodness of God in preserving us through all the dangers we have been exposed to.”

Years later, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams would describe the voyage on the Boston as symbolic of his whole life. The raging seas he had passed through, he seemed to be saying, were like the times they lived in, and he was at the mercy of the times no less than the seas. Possibly he saw, too, in the presence of John Quincy, how directly his determination to dare such seas affected his family and how much, with his devotion to the cause of America, he had put at risk beyond his own life. Besides, as he may also have seen, the voyage had demonstrated how better suited he was for action than for smooth sailing with little to do.

III

1778 April 4, Saturday

About ten o’clock we commenced our journey [by post chaise] to Paris and went about 50 miles.

April 5, Sunday

Proceeded on our journey, more than 100 miles.

April 6, Monday

Fields of grain, the vineyards, the castles, the cities, the gardens, everything is beautiful. Yet every place swarms with beggars.

April 8, Wednesday

Rode through Orleans and arrived in Paris about nine o’clock. For thirty miles from Paris or more the road was paved, and the scenes were extremely beautiful.

But for the beggars, France was nearly all beautiful in Adams’s eyes, everything greatly to his liking. In Bordeaux he had been welcomed as a hero, cheered by crowds in the streets, embraced, escorted on a tour of the city, taken to his first opera ever, which he hugely enjoyed. With France and America now joined in common cause, he was no longer the envoy of a friendly nation but of an ally. “God save the Congress, Liberty, and Adams,” an illuminated inscription proclaimed.

An American merchant in Bordeaux warned Adams of bad blood within the American commission at Paris, and some of the local citizenry had seemed disappointed to learn he was not Samuel Adams, ”le fameux Adams.” At a dinner in his honor a beautiful young woman seated beside him had opened the conversation with a question Adams found shocking. But though initially befuddled — “I believe at first I blushed” — he recovered and came off rather well, he thought.

“Mr. Adams,” she had said, “by your name I conclude you are descended from the first man and woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition which may resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first couple found out the art of lying together?”

Assisted by an interpreter, Adams replied that his family resembled the first couple both in name and in their frailties and that no doubt “instinct” was the answer to her question. “For there was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or of the magnet, by which when a pair approached within striking distance they flew together . . . like two objects in an electrical experiment.”

“Well,” she retorted. “I know not how it was, but this I know, it is a very happy shock.”

Rolling through the tollgates of Paris the night of April 8, crossing the Seine by the Pont Neuf, passing the Palace of the Louvre, Adams was astonished at the crowds, the numbers of carriages in the streets, the “glittering clatter” of Paris he had read of in books. Toward morning, awake in his hotel room on the Rue de Richelieu, he wondered at the stillness of so great a city — until first light when the clamor of bells and street cries and iron-rimmed carriage wheels on cobblestones was such as he had never heard.

The first call of the day was on Benjamin Franklin, and from that point on Adams was kept steadily on the move, with sights to see, social engagements, dinners, teas, the theater. There were important people he must meet, new faces, names to remember — endless, multitudinous French names — and in nearly every setting, awash in the rapid-fire conversation of what were, he was certain, the most polished people on earth, including a great number of exceedingly fashionable and opinionated women, he understood almost nothing.

It was Franklin who orchestrated the social rounds, insisting the first morning that they dine at the usual French hour of two o’clock with Jacques Turgot (Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne), the distinguished economist and, until recently, Minister of Finance. Adams had felt himself unsuitably “accoutered” to appear in such company, he told Franklin, but off they went.

Franklin lived in the gracious splendor of a garden pavilion, part of the magnificent Hôtel de Valentinois, a columned château on the heights of the village of Passy, overlooking the Seine, half an hour’s ride from the city on the road to Versailles. It was the estate of a wealthy government contractor, former slave trader and generous friend of the American cause, Jacques Donatien Le Ray, the Comte de Chaumont, whose admiration for Franklin appeared boundless and who, with his stout figure and bald head, somewhat resembled him. As the guest of Chaumont, Franklin enjoyed the attention of nine liveried servants, a wine cellar of more than a thousand bottles, and virtually every comfort.

Receiving Adams with all customary cordiality, Franklin insisted that he move in with him to quarters previously occupied by Silas Deane. Arrangements were made for John Quincy to attend a nearby boarding school also attended by one of Franklin’s grandsons, eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache.

Franklin’s friends, the “first people” of Paris as he spoke of them, must become Adams’s friends, too, Franklin insisted. In addition to Chaumont and Turgot, there was the stately, white-haired Duchesse d’Enville (Marie-Louise-Elisabeth de La Rochefoucauld), one of the recognized “great ladies” of Paris, whom Adams liked at once, finding her observations, when translated, full of “bold, masculine and original sense.” She was to be their hostess on several occasions. Her son, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, grandson of the great French moralist of the previous century, François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, was a scholar in his own right who, to Adams’s relief, spoke perfect English. It was he who had done one of the earliest French translations of the Declaration of Independence.

Particularly appealing to the eye was Madame Brillon (Anne-Louise de Harancourt Brillon de Jouy), who was much spoiled by a wealthy, elderly husband and made an open show of her affection for Franklin, flirtatiously calling him “Cher Papa” while perched on his lap. Adams would later learn that another woman who appeared to be part of the Brillon family, a “very plain” person whom he presumed to be a companion of Madame Brillon, was in fact the mistress of Monsieur Brillon. “I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats,” Adams would write. “But I did not know the world.”

There was also Franklin’s particular friend and near neighbor at Passy, the flamboyant, once-beautiful Madame Helvétius, widow of the acclaimed philosophe Claude-Adrien Helvétius, who lived amid a menagerie of chickens, ducks, birds in aviaries, dogs, cats, and pet deer. There was the brilliant mathematician and political theorist Marie-Jean A. N. Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, another of the philosophes of the French enlightenment, whose strange pallor Adams took to be the result of “hard study.” And of supreme importance was the King’s Foreign Minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the most polished of all, a fleshy, majestic career diplomat who, during Adams’s initial courtesy call at Versailles, expressed dismay that Adams understood nothing he said, but politely remarked that he hoped Adams would remain long enough in France to learn French perfectly.

Adams had never beheld such opulence — no American had — the exquisite dress, the diamonds on display, the bright rouge worn by the women, the time and money devoted to the elaborate coiffures of women and men alike. (Every morning in Paris some 7,000 barbers rushed through the streets to attend their customers.) Nor had he ever encountered such exquisite manners. Everyone was so exceedingly polite to everyone, and to foreigners most of all.

“The reception I have met in this kingdom has been as friendly, as polite, and as respectful as was possible,” Adams assured Abigail in the first of his letters to reach her.

It is the universal opinion of the people here, of all ranks, that a friendship between France and America is in the interest of both countries and the late alliance, so happily formed, is universally popular; so much so that I have been told by persons of good judgment that the government here would have been under a sort of necessity of agreeing to it even if it have not been agreeable to themselves.

The delights of France are innumerable. The politeness, the elegance, the softness, the delicacy is extreme.

In short, stern and haughty republican that I am, I cannot help loving these people for their earnest desire and assiduity to please. . . . The richness, the magnificence, and splendor is beyond all description.

But thinking perhaps he had strayed from his own true republican self a bit more than was seemly — and than Abigail would wish — he assured her that all such “bagatelles” meant nothing to him. “I cannot help suspecting that the more elegance, the less virtue in all times and countries.”

In later years much would be written and said of John Adams’s dislike of France, his puritanical disapproval of the French and their ways. But while, to be sure, there was much he disapproved of, and even disliked, much that he found shocking, such as the forwardness of the women, so also did most Americans of the day. Adams’s objections stemmed not so much from a Puritan background — as often said — but from the ideal of republican virtue, the classic Roman stoic emphasis on simplicity and the view that decadence inevitably followed luxury, age-old themes replete in the writings of his favorite Romans. Like so many of his countrymen, then and later, Adams both loved and disapproved of France, depending in large degree on circumstances or his mood of the moment. What, in fact, was most interesting, as expressed repeatedly in his diary and private correspondence — and what seems to have struck him as most unexpected — was how very much about France he found appealing, how much he did truly love about the French and their approach to life. “If human nature could be made happy by anything that can please the eye, the ear, the taste or any other sense, or passion or fancy, this country would be the region for happiness,” he wrote.

On an evening when the Comte de Chaumont took him in his carriage to a concert in the Royal Gardens of the Tuileries — the Concert Spirituel, which Adams was to attend many times — he was delighted to find that both men and women singers performed, and that the gardens were full of “company of both sexes walking,” as he wrote in his diary. He did not, however, record the numbers of prostitutes that gathered regularly in the gardens, some standing on chairs to attract attention, even as decorous family parties strolled past.

He enjoyed particularly the company of women of fashion whose animated opinions were as much a part of every social occasion as those of the men. In such company no gentlemen would be tolerated in monopolizing a conversation. Adams thought women superior to men overall, as Abigail knew, and he was sure she would wish to know his views on the educated women of France.

To tell you the truth, I admire the ladies here. Don’t be jealous. They are handsome, and very well educated. Their accomplishments are exceedingly brilliant. And their knowledge of letters and arts, exceeds that of the English ladies, I believe.

His “venerable colleague” Franklin, he noted, had the enviable privilege, because of his advanced age, to embrace the ladies as much as he pleased and to be “perpetually” embraced by them in return. But then the adoration of Franklin to be found in all quarters was extraordinary, as Adams would later recount:

His name was familiar to government and people, to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend of humankind. When they spoke of him, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.

Crowds in the streets cheered the “good doctor.” Fashionable women had taken to wearing a variation of his familiar bearskin hat. His likeness appeared everywhere — in prints, on medallions, on the lids of snuff boxes, making his face, as Franklin himself said, as well known as that of the man in the moon. Possibly the likeness of no one human face had been so widely reproduced in so many forms. Reputedly, the King himself, in a rare show of humor, arranged for it to be hand-painted on the bottom of a Sèvres porcelain chamber pot, as a New Year’s day surprise for one of Franklin’s adoring ladies at Court.

Franklin was loved for his sober, homespun look — the fur hat, the uncurled, unpowdered hair, the spectacles on the end of his nose — and widely believed to be a Quaker, a misunderstanding he made no effort to correct. He was seen as the representative American, the rustic sage from the wilds of Pennsylvania (quite apart from the fact that he had lived sixteen years in London), and he agreeably played the part. Everything about him announced his “simplicity and innocence,” observed an adoring French historian of the day.

But it was as a man of science that Franklin was most adored. It was the fame of his electrical experiments and overall inventiveness that made him one of the paragons of the age. Except for the aged Voltaire, who had only recently returned to Paris after years of exile and who had only a few months to live, there was in the eyes of the French no greater mortal.

It was that year, 1778, that Franklin sat for the celebrated sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, and that Franklin’s host at the Hôtel de Valentinois, Le Ray de Chaumont, commissioned the painter Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, a favorite at the court, to do Franklin’s portrait. For the Duplessis painting, which was to be a greater triumph at the Salon of 1779 than even Houdon’s bust, Franklin wore his customary fur-collared russet coat and appeared perfectly at peace with himself and the world. Admirers saw strength of mind in the high, bald forehead, strength of character in the “robust” neck, unshakable serenity in the slight smile. But the lift of the brows lent a certain sardonic expression and the large, brown eyes looked sad and weary. No name was provided at the bottom of the elaborate frame, only a single-word inscription writ large in Latin, “VIR,” meaning “man of character.”

Whenever possible, Adams worked on his French, preferring the quiet of early morning, before Franklin was stirring. With lists of recommended books — French dictionaries, grammars, works of literature, histories of diplomacy — he went to one Paris bookseller after another until he had them all, and more. And as often as he could, he attended the theater, usually taking John Quincy with him. (For the boy it was the beginning of a lifelong love of the theater.) Adams would bring the text of the play in hand, so they could follow the lines as spoken. But as he would tell Nabby in a letter, it was really the ladies “who are always to me the most pleasing ornaments of such spectacles.”

At a performance of Voltaire’s Alzire, at the Comédie Française, Voltaire himself was seated in a nearby box. Between acts, as the audience called his name, the eighty-three-year-old hero would rise and bow. “Although he was very advanced in age, had the paleness of death and deep lines and wrinkles in his face,” Adams noted, there was “sparkling vitality” in his eyes. “They were still the poet’s eyes with a fine frenzy rolling,” Adams wrote, borrowing an expression from Shakespeare.

A few days later, Adams was present for what was felt to be one of the high moments in the Age of Enlightenment when, at the Academy of Sciences, Voltaire and Franklin, like two aged actors, as Adams described them, embraced each other in the French manner, “hugging one another in their arms, and kissing each other’s cheeks.”

ON FINE SPRING DAYS Adams could walk among the lilacs and allées of linden trees in the formal gardens of the Hôtel de Valentinois. The whole of France was one great garden, it seemed. “Nature and art have conspired to render everything here delightful,” he wrote to Abigail. His health was good. He was extremely pleased with John Quincy’s progress in French.

But he was also deeply troubled by the rancor within the American commission. Franklin had wasted no time confirming what Adams had heard at Bordeaux. It had been Adams’s second day at Passy, during a moment of privacy, when Franklin spoke of the “coolness” between him and Arthur Lee, whom Franklin described as bad-tempered and extremely difficult to work with. Lee, said Franklin, was one of those “who went through life quarrelling with one person or another ‘til they commonly ended in the loss of their reason.” Lee was in league with another American, Ralph Izard, who, though appointed minister to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, remained in Paris and only caused trouble. Franklin called Izard a man of violent passions and assured Adams that neither Lee nor Izard was liked by the French.

For their part, Lee and Izard were quick to assure Adams that Franklin was beneath contempt, expressing their views with a vehemence that astonished Adams as much as their choice of words.

Izard, a wealthy South Carolinian, was a devotee of the arts who with his wife had been living in Europe for several years. He was handsome, much infatuated with his own opinions, and an honest man, Adams believed.

Arthur Lee was known for his “mercurial temperament.” As a commissioner to the court of France, Lee’s importance, theoretically, was equal to that of Franklin and Adams. Also, with two brothers in Congress — Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee — he had more than a little political influence. Tall, erect, with a prominent Lee nose, he was as proud as any of his proud Virginia line, and spoke a passable French. He had trained in medicine at Edinburgh, where he was first in his class, then changed professions, taking up the law in London, where he became an agent for Massachusetts, first as an associate of Franklin, then succeeding him after Franklin’s return to Philadelphia in 1775. It was in London that Lee had learned to dislike Franklin, and from the time he arrived in Paris, he had found it nearly unbearable to serve again in Franklin’s shadow. Refusing to live with Franklin at Passy, Lee had arranged his own accommodations in the neighboring village of Chaillot.

Suspicious by nature, Lee had been the first to raise questions about Silas Deane’s dealings as a commissioner. Lee was convinced that Deane, in buying supplies for the American army, had pocketed a fortune, and his letters to his brothers in Congress, charging Deane with corruption, had played a part in the decision of Congress to recall Deane. And, by the evidence, it appears that Deane had, indeed, let himself be bought. But Lee had suspected Franklin as well and was certain that Franklin was out to ruin him. (The thought that it might have been Jefferson, with his aversion to controversy, Jefferson who idolized Franklin, serving on the commission instead of Arthur Lee, was never lost on Franklin or Adams.) Indignant over Franklin’s unwillingness to share confidences with him, Lee wrote an angry letter that Franklin left unanswered. “I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation,” Franklin at last wrote to Lee in reply, but then never sent the letter. Writing to Samuel Adams, Lee described Franklin as “the most corrupt of all corrupt men.”

John Adams had been predisposed to like Lee, largely out of admiration for Richard Henry Lee. But Adams was soon writing in his diary that Lee had confidence in no one. “He believes all men selfish, and no man honest or sincere.” Still, Adams was never to doubt Lee’s integrity or faithfulness to the American cause.

As for Franklin, Adams had come to France with few if any doubts or misgivings, fully expecting that he and Franklin could work as effectively together as at Philadelphia. That he greatly respected Franklin, there is no doubt. In private correspondence with James Warren, at the time of Franklin’s arduous mission to Montreal in 1776, Adams had written:

Franklin’s character you know. His masterly acquaintance with the French language, his extensive correspondence in France, his great experience in life, his wisdom, his prudence, caution; his engaging addresses, united to his unshaken firmness in the present American system of politics and war, point him out as the fittest character for this momentous undertaking.

Their own expedition together to see Admiral Lord Howe at Staten Island had provided further opportunity for both men to know and appreciate one another. And though of different generations — and differing views on the effects of night air — they had in common, along with their Massachusetts origins, a lifelong love of the printed word, delight in amusing stories and turns of phrase. They were two staunch patriots who hated the British and shared the absolute conviction that for all the hazards and trials of the present, America was destined to be a “mighty empire.”

From his student days at Harvard under John Winthrop, Adams had acquired an early admiration for Franklin as a man of science. Had Franklin done no more than devise the lightning rod, Adams liked to say, it would have been sufficient reason for the world to honor his name.

Franklin was a “great and good man,” Adams had once assured Abigail in a letter from Philadelphia. Even in later years, when his opinion of Franklin had radically changed, Adams could still praise him for his genius and talents:

He had wit at will. He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured and caustic. Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais at his pleasure. He had talents of irony, allegory, and fable that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth.

But after several weeks at Passy, living together in close quarters, accompanying Franklin on his social rounds, observing the daily routine and how things were being run, Adams began to see another man than the idolized sage who, if not the villain portrayed by Lee and Izard, nonetheless gave Adams pause.

He found Franklin cordial but aloof, easygoing to the point of indolence, distressingly slipshod about details and about money. It was obvious time had taken its toll. Franklin was fat and stooped, his sloping girth larger than ever. Suffering terribly from the gout and from boils, he moved slowly and with difficulty, often with obvious pain. Some days he could barely get about.

The man who, as Poor Richard, had preached “Early to bed, early to rise,” seldom rose before ten o’clock. (Adams found that by the time Franklin had finished breakfast he was able to receive only a few callers before it was time to depart for his midday dinner. Dinner over, Franklin often napped.) The man who had admonished generations of aspiring Americans to “Keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee” seemed but vaguely interested in the day-to-day operations of the commission. “A little neglect may breed great mischief,” Poor Richard had warned; Adams found more than a little neglect everywhere he turned. Public money was being spent, as Arthur Lee said, “without economy and without account.” Adams would recall, “It was impossible for me to enter into any examination of what had passed before my arrival, because I could find no books, letters, or documents of any kind to inform or guide me.”

“A thousand times I have desired that the public accounts might from time to time be made up, to which I have as constantly received evasive or affrontive answers,” complained Arthur Lee. “So that now Mr. Adams and myself find that after the expenditure of more than five million livres, we are involved in confusion and debt.”

Franklin acknowledged that frugality was a virtue he never acquired. As a wealthy man, he had no personal worries about money, and for all his supposed simplicity, he loved his pleasures and ease, as Adams noted. He rode in an elegant carriage, entertained handsomely. Adams worried about not only the cost but the appropriateness of such extravagance. He imagined the rent for their accommodations at the Hôtel de Valentinois to be exorbitant. When Franklin informed him that the Comte de Chaumont was charging nothing, that they were living there at no cost, Adams worried that that, too, was inappropriate, since, as everyone knew, Chaumont was one of the largest contractors furnishing supplies for the American army.

As time passed and his French improved, Adams further realized that Franklin spoke the language poorly and understood considerably less than he let on. Never verbose in social gatherings even in his own language, “the good doctor” sat in the salons of Paris, looking on benevolently, a glass of champagne in hand, rarely saying anything. When he did speak in French, he was, one official told Adams, almost impossible to understand. He refused to bother his head with French grammar, Franklin admitted to Adams, and to his French admirers this, with his odd pronunciation, were but another part of his charm, which only added to Adams’s annoyance. Try as he might, Adams could never feel at ease in French society. Franklin, always at ease, never gave the appearance of trying at all.

From the time that news of the surrender at Saratoga first reached Paris, in December 1777, Franklin had found himself the center of attentions not just from the Court of His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI, but from the British as well. Lord North, the Prime Minister, had delivered a conciliatory speech to Parliament; George III even recommended opening a channel of communication with “that insidious man” Franklin, with the result that a host of British agents began beating a path to Paris to ascertain what peace terms the Americans might consider.

Less than a mile from Passy, in the village of Auteuil, a cordial, well-to-do Scot named William Alexander established residence in order to be close to his dear old friend Dr. Franklin. Alexander was in and out of the Hôtel de Valentinois like one of the family, sometimes rousing Franklin from his bed before the usual hour to converse on the latest theory of latent heat or the increasing consumption of sugar in Britain. Alexander was outspoken in his contempt for British policy toward America. He thought the war an appalling blunder and favored unlimited independence for the United States.

Alexander, who was also a British spy, felt he could read Franklin’s mind perfectly. However, the new resident commissioner at Passy, John Adams, required closer study, and in an effort to inform London, Alexander provided an especially perceptive appraisal:

John Adams is a man of the shortest of what is called middle size in England, strong and tight-made, rather inclining to fat, of a complexion that bespeaks a warmer climate than Massachusetts is supposed, a countenance which bespeaks rather reflection than imagination. His learning I suspect is pretty much confined to the classics and law. His knowledge of England and its constitution is [a] matter of real amazement to me. The most trite and common things as well as the more nice relative either to customs, manners, arts, policy, or constitution are equally known to him. He is an enthusiast, however, with regard to everything in this country [France] but the constitution and can conceive no country superior to it. I think he would be esteemed a bad politician in Europe in everything but discretion. He has, I believe, a keen temper which if he can command thoroughly, will be a great merit. His understanding lies, I think, rather in seeing large things largely than correctly. . . . In the conduct of affairs he may perhaps be able to take so comprehensive a view as to render invention and expedient unnecessary, but were they to become necessary, I think he would fail in these — and I am not clear as to the first, or whether much of his reputation may not arise from a very firm and decisive tone suited to the times, with a clear and perspicuous elocution.

Another frequent visitor, David Hartley, member of Parliament, old friend of Franklin’s and an emissary from Lord North, struck Adams as a conceited dandy and almost certainly a spy. “I suppose as I did not flatter Mr. Hartley with professions of confidence which I did not feel,” Adams would write, “and of so much admiration of his great genius and talents as he felt himself, he conceived a disgust at me.” Hartley, as Adams himself would later relate, described Adams as “the most ungracious man” he ever met.

Warned repeatedly that he was surrounded by spies both French and British, the imperturbable Franklin declared he had no worry, since he had nothing to hide.

I have long observed one rule [he wrote to a friend] . . . to be concerned in no affairs that I should blush to have made in public, and to do nothing but what spies may see. . . . If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as probably he is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.

Of the Americans around Franklin, the closest and most trusted was Dr. Edward Bancroft, a New England physician in his mid-thirties and another warm friend from Franklin’s London years. Bancroft was employed as secretary for the commission. An affable and unusually accomplished man of many interests — writer, inventor, member of the Royal Society, avid experimenter with inks and dyes — he was the ideal companion for Franklin. He was consistently hardworking, fluent in French, and had made himself all but indispensable to Franklin.

But what neither Franklin nor Adams was ever to know was that Bancroft, too, was a British spy, his “emoluments” from the Crown amounting to 500 pounds per year. Anything of importance that transpired within the American commission, or between Franklin and the French Foreign Minister, all instructions received from Congress, any confidences shared, were known by the British cabinet in London within days. Bancroft’s dispatches, written in invisible ink, were placed in a sealed bottle that was deposited in a hole in a tree on the south terrace of the Tuileries Gardens regularly every Tuesday evening after nine-thirty. The system worked to perfection for several years.

Adams instinctively disliked Bancroft, thought him a gossip, found his habitual mocking of Christianity offensive, thought him dishonest and rightly suspected him of using inside information to profit on the London stock market. Indeed, the mix of private and public business beneath the roof of the Hôtel de Valentinois was considerable, with Bancroft, the Comte de Chaumont, and possibly even Franklin, all capitalizing on secret French support for the American war and a steady flow of inside information. Bancroft’s larger treachery, however, went unsuspected by Adams. Only Arthur Lee suspected that Bancroft was a spy, but then Lee imagined spies everywhere.

Adams was concerned that Franklin, out of laziness, was leaving too many decisions to Chaumont or Bancroft. But if Adams was disillusioned by the Franklin he came to know at Passy, he also recognized that Franklin had the confidence of Vergennes and the French Court as did no other American, and it was therefore the duty of all to treat him with respect. In all that he wrote in correspondence in his first nine months in France, Adams never criticized Franklin; and inclined as he may have been at times to side with Arthur Lee, he steadfastly refused to do so. Lee may have been justified in some of his anger at Franklin, Adams felt, but Lee was badly cast in his role, a dreadful aggravation to Franklin and also to the French, who not only disliked him but distrusted him, which was more serious.

As time passed, Adams’s appreciation of the importance of France to America’s future only increased. “The longer I live in Europe and the more I consider our affairs,” he wrote, “the more important our alliance with France appears to me.” Yet he felt he himself was in an impossible role. He saw the futility and unnecessary expense of having three commissioners, and after six weeks in Paris, as early as May 21, he was writing to Samuel Adams to say that one commissioner, Franklin, would be quite enough. As it was, he and Arthur Lee were superfluous.

ONE OF THE RARE OCCASIONS when the three American commissioners did anything together was the day of Adams’s presentation to Louis XVI, on May 8, 1778. Accompanied by both Franklin and Lee, Adams arrived at Versailles in all-new French clothes, his wig dressed, and wearing a dress sword, as required at the palace.

They were received in the King’s sumptuous, gilded bedchamber, as the King went through the elaborate morning ceremony of being dressed by officers of the state. In a brief, pleasant, inconsequential exchange, the Comte de Vergennes explained that the new American commissioner spoke no French, to which the young monarch responded, ”Pas un mot!” (“Not a word!”), before passing into another room.

Adams detected “goodness and innocence” in the King’s face. “He had the appearance of a strong constitution,” Adams would write of the twenty-four-year-old Louis XVI, who was indeed kindhearted and robust, if painfully nearsighted and awkward, and who had it in his power to determine the fate of the United States of America.

In June at the public supper of the royal family, le grand couvert, Adams was turned out again in attire “becoming the station I held, but not to be compared with the gold and diamonds and embroidery about me.” Seated in close view, among ladies of “the first rank and fashion,” he felt himself being gazed at in the way he and others had once gazed at the Indian chiefs who came to address Congress, except that he found it difficult to command such “power of the face” as the chiefs had.

The King, “the royal carver” at the table, “ate like a king and made a royal supper of solid beef and other things in proportion.” But in the account Adams gave years afterward, it was the graceful Marie Antoinette, agleam in diamonds and finery, who remained most vivid in memory:

She was an object too sublime and beautiful for my dull pen to describe. . . . Her dress was everything art and wealth could make it. One of the maids of honor told me she had diamonds upon her person to the value of eighteen million livres, and I always thought her majesty much beholden to her dress. . . . Shehad a fine complexion indicating her perfect health, and was a handsome woman in her face and figure. . . . The Queen took a large spoonful of soup and displayed her fine person and graceful manner, in alternately looking at the company in various parts of the hall and ordering several kinds of seasoning to be brought to her, by which she fitted her supper to her taste. When this was accomplished, her Majesty exhibited to the admiring spectators the magnificent spectacle of a great queen swallowing her royal supper in a single spoonful, all at once. This was all performed like perfect clockwork, not a feature of her face, nor a motion of any part of her person, especially her arm and her hand could be criticized as out of order.

THAT JUNE, 1778, Great Britain attacked French ships at sea. The war for American independence had set off a struggle for power in Europe. Britain and France were again at each other’s throats. There was no declaration of war, nor would there be one. “Yet,” Adams would rightly inform Samuel Adams, “there is in fact as complete a war as ever existed, and it will continue.”

With little to do of a diplomatic nature, he took hold of administrative duties, striving to straighten out accounts and expedite correspondence, no less determined than he had been on board the Boston to see a badly run ship put in order. His long experience on the Board of War stood him in good stead. He drafted reports to Congress, sent off letters to various agents of Congress in France who had been drawing exorbitant bills on the commission, directing them to start providing regular account of their disbursements, and warning that they could be running up debts beyond available funds. He addressed the matter of prizes taken at sea by American privateers, and gave all possible attention to the vexing issue of what to do about American prisoners of war held by the British and those British prisoners taken on the high seas who were being held in France. The commissioners hoped for an exchange but were frustrated by British insistence that captive Americans were traitors and thus not conventional prisoners of war.

“I found that the business of our commission would never be done unless I did it,” Adams wrote. “My two colleagues would agree on nothing . . . and often when I had drawn the papers and had them fairly copied for signature, and Mr. Lee and I had signed them, I was frequently obliged to wait several days before I could procure the signature of Dr. Franklin on them.”

If Franklin was slow to get under way in the morning, Arthur Lee found it impossible to arrive from Chaillot, only ten minutes away, earlier than eleven o’clock, by which time Adams, who rose at five, had been at his desk for hours.

Privately, he was distraught and painfully lonely. It had been more than three months since he left home and still there was no word from Abigail. He worried about her, longed for her, and in this felt still further removed from Lee, who had never married, and Franklin, whose wife was dead and who, when she was alive, had spent years apart from her with no apparent regret.

Franklin amused himself playing chess with his fashionable friends (including Madame Brillon while she bathed in her tub); Adams did not know chess. Franklin had his Masonic meetings; Adams was not a Mason. As at Philadelphia after his first weeks there, he began to tire of lavish hospitality, the “profusion of unmeaning wealth and magnificence.” Such “incessant dinners and dissipations” were not the objects of his mission to France. “My countrymen were suffering in America and their affairs were in great confusion in Europe.”

“Dined at home,” became a frequent note in his diary. Through June there were few entries at all, so concerned had he become about “a house full of spies.”

When a first letter from Abigail arrived on June 16, he wrote to her at once, but it would be midsummer before he heard from her again, and numerous letters that he wrote in the intervening time were either stolen, lost, or captured at sea — he would never know. Nor would it be known how many of her letters disappeared en route.

As once he had sent Abigail pins from Philadelphia, so now at her request he shipped off packages of European trade goods — handkerchiefs, ribbon, bolts of calico — which could “fetch hard money” at home and mean the difference to her financial survival. But, as with all correspondence, months must pass before he knew if any of the shipments were reaching her.

There was no news from Congress, no news of the war at home, which was as formidable a problem as any. Dispatches from Philadelphia that evaded capture at sea took at least six weeks to reach Paris under ideal sailing conditions. The great distance separating America from Europe, the inevitable long delay in any communication with Congress, or worse, the complete lack of communication for months at a stretch, would plague both Franklin and Adams their whole time in Europe, and put them at a decided disadvantage in dealing with European ministers, who maintained far closer, more efficient contact. Ships that were supposed to sail for America in a week or two, often lay in port for months, letters on board. By contrast, there was no European court to which an express could not be sent from Paris in ten or fifteen days, and an answer could be expected within approximately the same time. “There is, I imagine, no minister who would not think it safer to act by orders than from his own discretion,” wrote Franklin in a letter explaining why he and the other Americans in Paris had to decide matters on their own most all of the time. To receive an answer from an inquiry to Philadelphia could take six months.

Relations between Franklin and Lee grew steadily more unpleasant, and Adams’s role consequently became ever more frustrating, to the point where he felt he must unburden himself again to Samuel Adams, providing what was, in all, a very fair assessment:

Between you and me, I have a difficult task [Adams wrote on August 7]. I am between two gentlemen of opposite tempers. The one may be too easy and good natured upon some occasions, the other too rigid and severe upon some occasions. The one may perhaps overlook an instance of roguery, from inadvertance and too much confidence. The other may mistake an instance of integrity for its opposite. . . . Yet both may be and I believe are honest men, and devoted friends to their country. But this is an ugly situation for me who does not abound in philosophy and who cannot and will not trim. The consequence of it may very probably be that I may have the entire confidence of neither. Yet I have hitherto lived in friendship with both.

With the passing of summer, Adams grew extremely disheartened. His one unfailing source of pleasure, “the joy of my heart,” was John Quincy, who, he told Abigail proudly, was “esteemed” by all. A prominent figure in Franklin’s circle, Marie Grand, wife of Ferdinand Grand, the French banker for American funds, was so impressed by the boy — indeed by both father and son — that she wrote Abigail to tell her so. In a conversation with Adams at a dinner, she recounted, he had remarked that in some cases it was the duty of a good citizen to sacrifice his all for the good of the country. She had found such a sentiment worthy of a Roman, yet rather hard to believe. Surely “nature,” love of one’s wife and children, would “operate more powerfully” than love of one’s country. In reply, Adams said his wife felt as he did. And young John Quincy, too, Madame Grand told Abigail, “inherits the spirit of his father, and bids fair to be a Roman like him.”

Adams had never had more to do in his life, he wrote, or so little to show for his efforts. Maintaining a position of impartiality between Franklin and Arthur Lee, playing mediator, had become a dreadful strain. In October, determined to improve the situation, Adams urged Lee to give up living at Chaillot and move in with them at the Hôtel de Valentinois.

“I am very sincere,” he wrote. “There is room enough in this house to accommodate us all.” He offered Lee his own quarters, saying he would move into the library.

This arrangement will save a large sum of money to the public, and . . . give us a thousand opportunities of conversing together, which now we have not. . . . It would remove the reproach we now lie under, of which I confess myself very much ashamed, of not being able to agree together. . . . I am, dear sir, with an earnest desire and a settled determination to cultivate a harmony, nay more a friendship with both my colleagues.

When Lee declined, strife within the commission grew worse. “The uncandor, the prejudices, the rage among several persons here, make me sick as death,” Adams wrote in his diary. His two compatriots were men of honor and integrity, he still believed, but the one grew increasingly cunning and dissipated, the other sour, secretive, and no less cunning. “Virtue is not always amiable,” Adams concluded.

Feeling his role was little better than that of a clerk, feeling forgotten by Congress, he labored on intensely, writing letters, struggling with accounts, trying to keep abreast of events through the London newspapers and magazines, where he now saw himself derided as pathetically out of place. “The English have got at me,” he reported to Abigail. “They make fine work of me — fanatic, bigot, perfect cypher, not one word of the language, awkward figure, uncouth dress, no address, no character, cunning hardheaded attorney. But the falsest of it all is that I am disgusted with the Parisians.” He hated playing second fiddle to Franklin, and by the year’s end, to judge by a letter written to James Warren, Franklin’s self-indulgent, self-serving ways had become nearly more than Adams could bear, for though he mentioned no name, it was obvious whom he meant.

The longer I live and the more I see of public men, the more I wish to be a private one. Modesty is a virtue that can never thrive in public. Modest merit! Is there such a thing remaining in public life? It is now become a maxim with some, who are even men of merit, that the world esteems a man in proportion as he esteems himself. . . . I am often astonished at the boldness with which persons make their pretensions. A man must be his own trumpeter — he must write or dictate paragraphs of praise in the newspapers; he must dress, have a retinue and equipage; he must ostentatiously publish to the world his own writings with his name. . . . He must get his picture drawn, his statue made, and must hire all the artists in his turn to set about works to spread his name, make the mob stare and gape, and perpetuate his fame.

Yet the mood that poured from Adams’s pen did not always match the spirit with which he went about his daily business; and the gloom or vitriol of one letter might be nowhere apparent in others written at the same time, even the same day. He wrote little or nothing, for example, of how he and Franklin worked together, yet live and work together they did in close proximity for months on end while accomplishing much.

Once, several years earlier, in one of the many passages in his diary in which he worked out his thoughts, Adams had written that concealment of one’s dislike for another was not a form of dishonesty or deception, but an acceptable, even wise way of conducting the business of life.

There are persons whom in my heart I despise, others I abhor. Yet I am not obliged to inform the one of my contempt, nor the other of my detestation. This kind of dissimulation . . . is a necessary branch of wisdom, and so far from being immoral . . . that it is a duty and a virtue.

But this, he was quick to add, was a rule with definite limitations, “for there are times when the cause of religion, of government, of liberty, the interest of the present age of posterity, render it a necessary duty to make known his sentiments and intentions boldly and publicly.”

Whatever Franklin’s failings and flaws, Adams never discounted the value of his popularity and prestige. French esteem for the “good doctor” remained of immense importance to the American cause, as Adams knew. Arthur Lee, by contrast, was seldom anything but a handicap. His dislike of the French was obvious. “His countenance is disgusting,” Adams was to write. “His air is not pleasing . . . his temper is harsh, sour . . . his judgment of men and things is often wrong.”

What most distressed Adams about Franklin was his approach with Vergennes. He “hates to offend and seldom gives any opinion ‘til obliged,” Adams noted. It was what had troubled Adams about Franklin in Congress. “Although he has as determined a soul as any man, yet it is his constant policy never to say yes or no decidedly but when he cannot avoid it.” Franklin’s concept of diplomacy was to ask for nothing that Vergennes would not give, be grateful for whatever help the French provided, and remain ever accommodating and patient. As Franklin’s friend Condorcet would remark approvingly, Franklin as a diplomat “observed much and acted little.”

Adams, no less than Franklin, felt the French alliance must be “cultivated with perfect faith and tenderness.” But he was apprehensive of too much diffidence. He worried about the effect in the long run, as he explained to Roger Sherman in a letter he appears never to have sent. “There is [a] danger that the [American] people and their representatives [in Congress] may have too much timidity in their conduct towards this power, and that your ministers here may have too much diffidence of themselves and too much complaisance for the Court.” Specifically, he warned of excessive attention to what the French thought, what France wanted, and “too much [French] influence in our deliberations.”

In 1776, Adams had argued in Congress that any alliance with France must be commercial only. To James Warren, he had expressed his shame at the “whining” he heard that all was lost unless France stepped in. “Are we to be beholden to France for our liberties?” But now, with the end of the struggle no nearer in view, and with his newfound regard for the French, Adams saw things differently. France was “a rock upon which we may safely build,” he told Warren. Like George Washington, Adams saw that sea power could decide the outcome of the war. Specifically he saw French naval support as the crucial necessity and felt duty-bound not just to voice his opinion to Vergennes, but to press for a greater commitment of French naval power, even at the risk of annoying the proud foreign minister.

Earlier in the summer, a French naval expedition under Admiral Charles-Henri Théodat d’Estaing, combined with an American land assault against the British at Newport, Rhode Island, had failed — news that didn’t reach Paris until late in the year. Thus, to Adams, it was clear that more French ships were needed and no time was to be lost.

Franklin agreed, but counseled moderation. In December, Adams drafted a letter to Vergennes, which Franklin toned down. It was their most important undertaking together.

Signed by all three commissioners and submitted in the first week of January 1779, the letter stated that nothing would bring the war to a “speedy conclusion” more effectively than “sending a powerful fleet sufficient to secure naval superiority” in American waters. “Such a naval force, acting in concert with the armies of the United States, would in all probability take and destroy the whole British power in that part of the world.”

Vergennes, however, chose to ignore the letter. His thoughts for the time being — and as probably the commissioners did not know — were taken up with the prospect of a French invasion of England.

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1778, at Philadelphia, Congress named Benjamin Franklin minister plenipotentiary to the Court of Louis XVI. The three-man American commission was dispensed with. It was midwinter, however, before word reached Paris; the official dispatches did not arrive until February 12, 1779.

The new arrangement was exactly what Adams had recommended and the news was to leave him feeling more miserable than ever. He had been ill for the first time since coming to France, suffering from a violent cold and trying to cure himself in characteristic fashion by walking ten miles a day. Though he had clearly indicated that Franklin should be the one chosen, there had always been the possibility that Congress might pick him. Arthur Lee was dispatched to Madrid. But Congress had neglected to provide any instruction for what he, Adams, was to do, neither recalling him nor assigning him to a new post, which was both mystifying and insulting. Adams was not even mentioned in the communiqué.

Such being the case, he made the decision on his own, informing Vergennes that as he had been “restored to the character of a private citizen,” he would depart. He submitted a request for passage on the next available ship bound for America, and to Congress addressed a long letter saying that since no notice appeared to have been taken of him, he could only assume that Congress “has no further service for me on this side of the water, and that all my duties are on the other.”

“I shall therefore soon present before you your own good man. Happy — happy indeed — shall I be,” he announced to Abigail, trying to see the bright side. To Richard Henry Lee, he claimed his new status as a private citizen “best becomes me, and is most agreeable to me.” In truth, he was hurt and angry, and justifiably. He had been badly served by a Congress that told him nothing and showed no gratitude for all he had done. He felt himself strangely adrift, less able than ever in his life to sense what lay in store for him. In a letter to James Warren, he vowed never again to allow himself to be made the sport of wise men or fools.

His moods swung from high to low, then lower still with the arrival of a packet of letters from Abigail filled with abject loneliness and accusing him of neglecting her. “All things look gloomy and melancholy around me,” she wrote. “You could not have suffered more upon your voyage than I have felt cut off from all communication with you.” Adams claimed to have written nearly fifty letters to her between April and September, which was almost certainly an exaggeration, but whatever the number, she had received only two. “Let me entreat you to write me more letters at a time, surely you cannot want subjects.” What he wrote, she said, was always too brief, cold, and impersonal. It was as if he had “changed hearts with some frozen Laplander.”

Trying to respond as calmly as possible, Adams wrote and burned three letters in succession. One was too sad, the next too angry, a third too cheerful to reflect the truth, as he explained in a fourth and final version. Was it possible that “some infernal has whispered in your ear insinuations?” Had she forgotten the “unalterable tenderness of my heart?” he asked.

“For God’s sake, never reproach me again with not writing or with writing scrips. Your wounds are too deep.

You know not — you feel not — the dangers that surround me, nor those that may be brought upon our country.

Millions would not tempt me to write you as I used [to]. I have no security that every letter I write will not be broken open and copied and transmitted to Congress and the English newspapers. They would find no treason or deceit in them, it is true, but they would find weakness and indiscretion, which they would make as ill use of.

In another letter, written after receiving three from him, Abigail said she had no doubt of his affection. “But my soul is wounded at a separation from you, and my fortitude is all dissolved in frailty and weakness.” She could not understand his reluctance to express his love. “The affection I feel for my friend is of the tenderest kind, matured by years, sanctified by choice and approved by Heaven. Angels can witness its purity, what care I then for the ridicule of Britain should this testimony of it fall into their hands?”

Adams enlisted support from John Quincy, who told his mother that Papa could “write but very little because he had so many other things to think of, but he can not let slip one opportunity without writing a few lines and when you receive them you complain as bad or worse than if he had not wrote at all and it really hurts him to receive such letters.”

“If I were to tell you all the tenderness of my heart,” Adams confided, “I should do nothing but write to you. I beg you not to be uneasy.”

As the time to leave drew nearer, he grew increasingly woeful. What had he accomplished after all? Did anyone care?

“I am left kicking and sprawling in the mire. . . . It is hardly a state of disgrace that I am in but rather of total neglect and contempt.” What was to become of him? He had never been in such a situation. “My present feelings are new to me.”

Not since the most anguished diary entries of his youth had he declared himself so overburdened with woe. “If ever I had any wit, it is all evaporated. If ever I had any imagination, it is all quenched. . . . I believe I am grown more austere, severe, rigid, and miserable than I ever was.”

As ardently as he longed for home, he hated to leave Paris, hated to leave France, and expected he would never return. “The climate is more favorable to my constitution than ours,” he acknowledged to Abigail. He loved the food, the civility of everyday life. The French were “the happiest people in the world . . . and have the best disposition to make others so.

There is such a choice of elegant entertainments in the theatric way, of good company and excellent books that nothing would be wanting to me in this country but my family and peace to my country to make me one of the happiest of men.

The one tribute he received was a letter from Versailles, a letter Adams treasured. Vergennes, speaking for the King, offered praise for “the wise conduct that you have held to throughout the tenure of your commission,” as well as “the zeal with which you have constantly furthered the cause of your nation, while strengthening the alliance that ties it to his Majesty.”

What appears to have pleased Adams no less was the discovery during his parting call at Versailles that his French had so improved he could manage an extended conversation and speak as rapidly as he pleased.

THE TWO ADAMSES took their leave of Benjamin Franklin and others at Passy on March 8, 1779, and, with the servant Stephens, departed by post chaise for the coast of Brittany. At the bustling port of Nantes on the lower Loire, they settled into a hotel to wait for passage on the American frigate Alliance. Days passed, eventually weeks, during which father and son were together steadily. Biding their time, they walked about the town and along the river. Through long afternoons, Adams helped the boy in translating Cicero.

In late April, they moved on board the Alliance, only to learn later still, in a letter from Franklin, that orders had been changed and the ship was not to sail for America after all. However, a French frigate, La Sensible, was due to sail from Lorient, with a new French minister to the United States, Chevalier Anne-César de La Luzerne. Franklin gave instructions that the Alliance carry Adams to Lorient, but on arrival Adams found that Minister La Luzerne had been delayed. And so the wait went on, father and son remaining on board the Alliance.

In the days that followed, Adams spent considerable time with the daring young Scottish-American naval officer, John Paul Jones, who was fitting out an old French merchantman that he had renamed the Bonhomme Richard. They had met earlier at Passy, corresponded over naval matters, and Jones, quite unjustly, had decided that Adams, in his role as commissioner, was conspiring against him. Privately, Jones referred to Adams as a “wicked and conceited upstart,” and expressed the wish that “Mr. Roundface” were at home minding his own business.

Having no part to play, no say in anything, no useful work, and no choice but to wait, was more nearly than Adams could bear. He began brooding. Imagining himself the victim of more than mere chance, he saw Jones and “the old conjurer” Franklin at the bottom of his troubles. He was being kept waiting, being humiliated, intentionally. “I may be mistaken in these conjectures, they may be injurious to J. and F., and therefore I shall not talk about them, but I am determined to put down my thoughts and see which turns out,” Adams wrote in his diary.

Do I see that these people despise me, or do I see that they dread me? Can I bear contempt — to know that I am despised? It is my duty to bear everything that I cannot help.

From time spent with Jones, Adams decided he was the most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American navy.

Eccentricities and irregularities are to be expected from him. They are in his character, they are visible in his eyes. His voice is soft and small; his eye has keenness, and wildness and softness in it.

Adams never doubted that faces carried clues to character: the white-as-paper pallor of Condorcet bespoke dedication to hard study; the eyes of Voltaire with their “fine frenzy rolling” were the eyes of a poet; in the face of Louis XVI, Adams had seen “goodness and innocence” as clearly as he saw “keenness, and wildness and softness” in the eyes of young Jones.

But then studying his own face in the mirror, Adams did not like what he saw. There was nothing exceptional about him, he concluded, writing in his diary. “By my physical constitution, I am but an ordinary man. The times alone have destined me to fame.” There was too much weakness and languor in his nature. “When I look in the glass, my eye, my forehead, my brow, my cheeks, my lips all betray this relaxation.” Yet he could be roused, he knew. “Yet some greatevents, some cutting expressions, some mean scandals, hypocrisies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into a rage a little like a lion.”

Most days, however, passed pleasantly enough. It was by his own choice that he dined often with Jones, spent hours in conversation with him and his officers, and as always, Adams was buoyed by talk. He and the surgeon of the Bonhomme Richard, an especially companionable man named Bourke, discussed everything from mathematics to rheumatism, Paris, London, the war at home, the war at sea, medicine at sea, the absence of profanity on French ships, and the nuances of the French language. At a dinner hosted by Jones at L’Épée Royale in town, the talk turned to the two ways most recommended for learning French, to take a mistress and to attend the Comédie-Française. When in good humor Dr. Bourke asked Adams which he preferred, Adams responded in like spirit, “Perhaps both would teach it soonest, to be sure sooner than either.” But in his diary, he felt obliged to add, “The language is nowhere better spoken than at the Comédie.”

“On board all day, reading Don Quixote,” was the single entry for May 18.

It was June by the time the French minister, La Luzerne, arrived at Lorient. On June 17, Adams and John Quincy went aboard the Sensible, and that afternoon they were finally under way from France, Adams having no idea how very soon he would be returning.

IV

THERE WAS NO ADVANCE WORD of the arrival of the Sensible. The latest information Abigail had received, at the end of June in a letter written the first week of April, was that Adams was waiting to sail on the Alliance. But then in mid-July, Mercy Warren had passed along information received through James Lovell to the effect that Congress had in mind a new appointment for Adams, and that “Nobody seems to have an expectation of his return at present.”

In the year and a half of her husband’s absence, Abigail’s distress had been worse than she had ever anticipated or, she was certain, than anyone could ever realize. “Known only to my own heart is the sacrifice I have made, and the conflict it has cost me,” she had confided to her sister Elizabeth in the first weeks of his absence. “I wish a thousand times I had gone with him,” she later told John Thaxter. For the first time in fourteen years of marriage she had had to face an entire winter on her own.

“How lonely are my days. How solitary are my nights,” she had written to Adams in a letter that would not reach Passy until after he had departed.

Her sister Mary Cranch, of whom Abigail was extremely fond, continued to reside nearby in Braintree with her husband and family. But sister Elizabeth had married and moved away to Haverhill near the New Hampshire border. (Unimpressed by Elizabeth’s choice in a husband, the young Reverend John Shaw, Abigail had tried to dissuade her, but without success. “Men are very scarce to be sure,” Abigail had written by way of explanation to her own John.) And now Nabby, too, had gone off for an extended stay with the Warrens, leaving Abigail feeling more solitary than ever.

Earlier in the fall, when the French fleet put in at Boston, she had had her own encounter with French hospitality. A delegation of French officers, resplendent in royal blue and scarlet uniforms, had appeared in Braintree to pay their respects to the wife of the American commissioner. She was invited to dine on board one of their ships, which she did, twice, delighting in the perfect manners of the officers and the sense of being at the center of things. On another occasion, accompanied by Colonel Quincy, she dined with Admiral d’Estaing on board his magnificent flagship, Languedoc, possibly the finest warship in the world. “If I ever had any national prejudices [against the French] they are done away,” she wrote, “and I am ashamed to own I was ever possessed of so narrow a spirit.”

But in winter, surrounded by mountains of snow, secluded from all society, she could as well have been in Greenland, she said. In other times of separation, times of horrible duress with war at her doorstep and epidemic disease raging, she had somehow borne up, with so much to contend with, so little time to dwell on her own loneliness. “This is a painful situation,” she wrote to James Lovell, “and my patience is nearly exhausted.”

But there was a further, complicating element and that was Lovell himself. When Adams had wondered, from the tone of her letters, if some “infernal” might be whispering insinuations in her ear, he was not far from the truth.

In the first weeks after Adams’s departure for France, Abigail had confided her state of mind to Lovell, who in response had written that her alarms and distress only afforded him “delight.” More letters followed in which Lovell addressed her as Portia, presuming to use Adams’s pet name for her, and inquiring whether he must limit himself to language devoid of sentiment. She replied saying, “I begin to look upon you as a very dangerous man . . . a most ingenious and agreeable flatterer.” Yet she signed her letter “Portia.”

Writing again, he appealed to her with a line from the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay, declaring if “ye were mine . . . how dearly I would love thee,” and underscored the word love. When at the start of a new year she wrote to say Adams had been absent for a full eleven months, the reply from Lovell was closer to the raw double entendres of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a book Abigail had never read: he expressed relief that her husband’s “rigid patriotism” (again underscored) had not left her pregnant again.

Telling her not to imagine Adams doing anything in his private hours in Paris other than attending museums, Lovell, by insinuation, raised the question of what else Adams might be doing.

Lovell was a married man who, in five years in Congress, never once returned to Boston to see his wife and children. That he enjoyed the company of several women in Philadelphia was no secret there, but whether Abigail knew of this is not clear.

In Lovell’s defense, it could be said that other men, too, would, as time went on, find Abigail Adams an irresistible correspondent — young John Thaxter, as an example, and most notably Thomas Jefferson. Her spirit and intelligence, her interest in their lives, her fund of opinions, seemed to elicit confidences such as they shared with few others, though none in the salacious manner of Lovell.

Abigail could have called a halt to the exchange with Lovell at any time, had she wished. But she did not. Clearly she enjoyed his flirtatious attention, but primarily she craved information — “intelligence” — and more than anyone in Congress, Lovell had shown himself willing and able to keep her supplied with news. He reported to her on the war, sent copies of the weekly Journals of Congress. As the most active member of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, he was also in the best possible position to keep her posted on anything pertaining to her husband.

At no time was she indiscreet in what she wrote, and if he was, she refused to be intimidated. She needed him. That her affections rested entirely with her “dearest friend,” and that she longed only for his return, she left no doubt. “I love everyone who manifests a regard or shows an attachment to my absent friend,” she told Lovell, and however infrequently she heard from her absent friend, she kept writing to him at length with never a letup.

ON AUGUST 2, 1779, a clear summer day with the blue waters of Boston sparkling in sunshine, the two Adamses and their servant were rowed from the Sensible to a point on the Braintree shore not far from where, under such different conditions, their adventures had begun. With no one expecting them, the shore was empty. Their arrival at home was a total surprise.

Try as he would through life, John Adams was never able to express adequately his attachment to home, his adoration of his wife and children. And the effect of his long absences since the onset of the war had only intensified these feelings. “I am, with an ardor that words have not power to express, yours,” he had closed a letter to Abigail, and though her wish that he be less stringent in his expressions of affection was entirely understandable, there was never a question about the depth of his feelings or his devotion to her.

But at last there was no need for either to write anything. They were together again and their happiness — the happiness of the entire family — could not have been greater.

The farm would have been at its summer peak, and one may imagine John and Abigail walking their fields together, John glad for home ground beneath his feet again and delighting in the look of things under her management. There would be hard cider again, to start the day, fresh vegetables from the kitchen garden. There were relatives and old friends to see — his mother, the Cranches, Colonel Quincy, Parson Wibird. Neighbors stopped to bid him welcome. Together he and Abigail rode over Penn’s Hill to visit with her father at the Weymouth parsonage. But mainly, it appears, Adams kept close to home, within familiar walls and the embrace of his family. The three children who had remained with their mother had all grown and changed. All had stories to tell him and hung on his own telling of his travels, the sights he had seen. The talk went on day and night, and doubtless John Quincy demonstrated his French to the amazement of all.

Time and again when away, Adams would profess preference for the simple domestic life by Penn’s Hill above anything he knew; time and again, on reaching home, he would say that there and there only was everything he desired. It was a lifelong refrain, and his enjoyment now seemed to bear him out.

Sweet though it was, the interval was no time out of time. The war weighed too heavily on everyone’s mind. The scarcities, inflation, taxes, and profiteering, the incessant worries and enmities of war, were all ever-present. Adams experienced firsthand the “amazing depreciation” of the currency, of prices so high as to be laughable under any other circumstances. Abigail and friends spoke bitterly of a selfish, avaricious spirit that had taken hold to a degree unthinkable earlier. A highly indignant James Warren told how “fellows who would have cleaned my shoes five years ago” had “amassed fortunes and are riding in chariots.”

The news of the war was not encouraging. In the spring of 1778, Washington’s army had emerged from the ordeal of winter at Valley Forge a stronger, more disciplined force. That June, when the British chose to evacuate Philadelphia and march back to New York, Washington had hit them at Monmouth, New Jersey, in a major battle which, though indecisive, had proven that his so-called “rabble” were well able to hold their own against the vaunted enemy. But then both armies were back where they had been before, with the British holding New York, the Americans outside keeping watch, and in the aftermath of the failed French and American effort at Newport that summer, the war appeared at a stalemate. Attention shifted to naval engagements between the French and British in the West Indies and to British forays into the South, where, in the spring of 1779, the Americans were defeated at Briar Creek, Georgia. There were British raids along the coast of Connecticut that summer, shortly before Adams returned, and apprehension along coastal Massachusetts that a major British strike there might be in the offing. But no one knew and nothing seemed to portend a resolution of the struggle.

• • •

ADAMS HAD BEEN HOME hardly a week when the town of Braintree chose him as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. Adams accepted and immediately began preparing himself.

There being as yet no national constitution, the form of government chosen by each of the states was a matter of utmost gravity. The constitution of an independent sovereign state had to stand on its own merits, not serve merely as a secondary component of a larger, overarching structure.

On September 1, Adams was off to Cambridge, to the First Church at the corner of Harvard Yard, where some 250 delegates gathered. In another few days he was chosen as one of a drafting committee of thirty who met in Boston on September 13 and in turn picked a subcommittee of three — Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin, who was president of the convention — whereupon the other two picked Adams to draw up the state’s constitution. He had become, as he later said, a sub-sub committee of one.

The work was to be his alone, and if ever he had a chance to rise to an occasion for which he was ideally suited, this was it. So many of his salient strengths — the acute legal mind, his command of the English language, his devotion to the ideals of the good society — so much that he knew of government, so much that he had read and written, could now be brought to bear on one noble task.

Nor could circumstances have been much more in his favor. He was rested, refreshed, inspired by the welcome home and by the honor his town and fellow delegates had bestowed on him. He could work at home in familiar surroundings, his books and papers about him, and with Abigail’s steadying presence, which was always to his advantage. That his efforts were for his own Massachusetts was also of very great importance. After the frustrations and disappointments of France, such a chance to shine again must have seemed a godsend. Possibly, had there been no difficult time in France, no feelings of failure, his performance now would have been something less. In any event, the result was to be one of the most admirable, long-lasting achievements of John Adams’s life.

To prepare, he had reviewed in detail those constitutions already framed by other states, and reread his own Thoughts on Government. He worked through the still-warm days of late September in his office just off the front hall. He worked at a plain, tall desk at which he wrote standing up or perched on a high stool, and he appears to have completed the draft sometime in early October. Printed copies, for the consideration of the convention, were ready at the end of the month, on or about October 30, 1779, his forty-fourth birthday.

It was titled “A Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Adams having chosen to use the word “commonwealth” rather than “state,” as had Virginia, a decision he made on his own and that no one was to question. A tone of absolute clarity and elevated thought was established in the opening lines, in a Preamble, a new feature in constitutions, affirming the old ideal of the common good founded on a social compact:

The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government is to secure the existence of the body politic; to protect it; and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying, in safety and tranquility, their natural rights and the blessings of life; and whenever these great objects are not obtained, the people have a right to alter the government, and to take measures necessary for their safety, happiness, and prosperity.

The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals. It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.

A Declaration of Rights, following the Preamble and preceding the Constitution itself, stated unequivocally that all men were “born equally free and independent” — words Adams had taken from the Virginia Declaration of Rights as written by George Mason — and that they had certain “natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” It guaranteed free elections, and in one of a number of articles borrowed from the constitution of Pennsylvania, guaranteed “freedom of speaking” and “liberty of the press.” It provided against unreasonable searches and seizures, and trial by jury. While it did not guarantee freedom of religion, it affirmed the “duty” of all people to worship “The Supreme Being, the great creator and preserver of the universe,” and that no one was to be “hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty, or estate for worshipping God in the manner most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience,” provided he did not disturb the public peace.

The people of Massachusetts were to have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves, and in an article intended to prevent the formation of a hereditary monarchy, an expanded version of a similar article in the Virginia constitution, Adams wrote:

No man, nor corporation or association of men have any other title to obtain advantages or particular and exclusive privileges distinct from those of the community, than what arises from the consideration of services rendered to the public . . . the idea of a man born a magistrate, lawgiver, or judge is absurd and unnatural.

In fundamental ways, the form of government was very like what Adams had proposed in his Thoughts on Government, and again, as in Thoughts on Government, he called for a “government of laws, and not of men.” Founded on the principle of the separation and balance of powers, the Constitution declared in a single sentence that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts “the legislative, executive and judicial power shall be placed in separate departments, to the end that it might be a government of laws, and not of men.”

There would be two branches of the legislature, a Senate and a House of Representatives, an executive, the governor, who was to be elected at large annually and have veto power over the acts of the legislature. But it was the establishment of an independent judiciary, with judges of the Supreme Court appointed, not elected, and for life (“as long as they behave themselves well”), that Adams made one of his greatest contributions not only to Massachusetts but to the country, as time would tell.

In addition, notably, there was Section II of Chapter 6, a paragraph headed “The Encouragement of Literature, Etc.,” which was like no other declaration to be found in any constitution ever written until then, or since. It was entirely Adams’s creation, his original contribution to the constitution of Massachusetts, and he rightly took great pride in it.

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

It was, in all, a declaration of Adams’s faith in education as the bulwark of the good society, the old abiding faith of his Puritan forebears. The survival of the rights and liberties of the people depended on the spread of wisdom, knowledge, and virtue among all the people, the common people, of whom he, as a farmer’s son, was one. “I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading,” Adams had written in his diary at age twenty-five, while still living under his father’s roof.

As had no constitution before, Adams was declaring it the “duty” of government not only to provide education but to “cherish” the interests of literature and science — indeed, the full range of the arts, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history.

In the last week of August, Adams had attended a dinner at Harvard in honor of the new French minister, the Chevalier de La Luzerne. The setting was the Philosophy Room of Harvard Hall, the old laboratory of Adams’s favorite professor, Winthrop. There, among the “philosophical apparatus,” Adams had offered to some of his dinner companions his dream of establishing a Society of Arts and Sciences at Boston, as a counterpart to the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. The idea was to be enthusiastically taken up; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences would be founded in less than a year. But the dinner and the conversation were also an inspiration for what he wrote in the paragraph on education, and particularly the inclusion of natural history.

Because wisdom and education were not sufficient of themselves, he had added the further “duty” of government to “countenance and inculcate” the principles of humanity, charity, industry, frugality, honesty, sincerity — virtue, in sum. And amiability as well — “good humor,” as he called it — counted for the common good, the Constitution of Massachusetts was to proclaim, suggesting that such delight in life as Adams had found in the amiable outlook of the French had had a decided influence.

He had written Section II of Chapter 6, in a burst of inspiration, the words “flowing” from his pen, but expected the convention to “show it no mercy,” as he later said. “I was somewhat apprehensive that criticism and objections would be made to the section, and particularly that the ‘natural history’ and ‘good humor’ would be stricken out.” To his surprise and delight, the whole of the paragraph passed intact, and, as he also noted, “unanimously without amendment!”

In the end, the convention approved nearly all of his draft, with only a few notable changes. Preferring what Jefferson had written in the Declaration of Independence, the convention revised the first article of the Declaration of Rights, that all men were “born equally free and independent,” to read that all men were “born free and equal,” a change Adams did not like and would like even less as time went on. He did not believe all men were created equal, except in the eyes of God, but that all men, for all their many obvious differences, were born to equal rights.

The reference to freedom of speech was removed, not to be reinstated until much later, and the worship of God was declared a right of all men, as well as a duty. The legislature was also given power to override the governor’s veto, another change Adams regretted, as it was contrary to his belief in a strong, popularly elected executive.

None of the alterations, however, diminished his overall pride in what he and the convention had achieved, and the acclaim it brought. “I take vast satisfaction in the general approbation of the Massachusetts Constitution,” he would tell a friend. “If the people are as wise and honest in the choice of their rulers, as they have been in framing a government, they will be happy, and I shall die content with the prospect for my children.”

As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.

ADAMS HAD PICKED UP on other business in the meantime, attending to some of his old law practice, and responding to those friends in Congress who wrote to welcome him home. Still wounded by the way Congress had treated him, he imagined that in the rancorous atmosphere of Philadelphia, with controversy swirling about the Deane affair and the hatred between Franklin and Arthur Lee, his own reputation was suffering. To his credit he had not rushed off to Philadelphia to see for himself, as someone less wise and less proud might have. If he had cause for complaint in such times of stress and uncertainty, so too, he knew, did others. “None of us have anything to boast of in these times, in respect to the happiness of life,” he observed in one letter.

“We stand in greater need than ever of men of your principles,” wrote his ever-devoted friend Benjamin Rush, who, like many, assumed that Adams would soon be reelected to Congress.

“Be assured you have not an enemy among us,” declared James Lovell, who also made light of his prior “scrawls” to “lovely Portia.” How much, if anything, Adams ever learned of Lovell’s letters to Abigail is unknown.

Then, in October, out of the blue, came word from Philadelphia that Adams had been chosen by Congress to return to France as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate treaties of peace and commerce with Great Britain, a position he had neither solicited nor expected. The decision had been virtually unanimous. “Upon the whole I am of the opinion that in the esteem of Congress, your character is as high as any gentleman’s in America,” wrote Elbridge Gerry, knowing nothing would please Adams more.

Congress had voted him a salary of 2,500 pounds sterling. In addition, he was to have his own official secretary, Francis Dana, a Boston lawyer and member of Congress whom Adams knew and respected.

Henry Laurens, in a letter of congratulations, went out of his way to apologize for the fact that Adams had been so shabbily treated by Congress in his recent assignment, “dismissed without censure or applause,” as Laurens said, but implored him, for the sake of the country, to accept the appointment.

From the Chevalier de La Luzerne came an offer of return passage on the Sensible, which was being refitted in Boston Harbor and soon to sail.

ADAMS DECIDED TO GO after even less discussion with Abigail than in 1779. That the same perils pertained went without saying.

Again Abigail was to remain behind, but this time nine-year-old Charles would also accompany his father, along with John Quincy. At first, John Quincy objected, saying he preferred to remain at home and prepare for Harvard, but his mother convinced him of the great opportunity inherent in such an experience.

In a heartfelt letter of farewell, she would liken the judicious traveler to a river that increases its volume the farther it flows from its source. “It will be expected of you, my son, that as you are favored with superior advantages under the instructive eye of a tender parent, that your improvements should bear some proportion to your advantages.

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

In addition to Francis Dana, John Thaxter would go as Adams’s own private secretary and tutor for the boys. So including two servants, Stephens and another for Francis Dana, they made a company of seven.

There was no part he would rather play than that of peacemaker, Adams wrote to La Luzerne, but with a cautionary note: “Alas! When I reflect upon the importance, delicacy, intricacy and danger of the service, I feel a great deal of diffidence in myself.”

Adams had no illusions of peace near at hand or of an easy path for himself. As he wrote forthrightly to Samuel Huntington, the new president of Congress, with so much at stake, his distress now was greater even than when he had last sailed for France.

Thus, a little more than three months after he had arrived home, Adams was again on his way across the ocean. The wind was favorable, he noted aboard the Sensible, November 15, under way past Cape Ann.

“My habitation, how disconsolate it looks!” Abigail wrote. “My table I sit down to it. But I cannot swallow my food. . . . My hopes and fears rise alternately. I cannot resign more than I do, unless life is called for.”

CHAPTER FIVE

UNALTERABLY DETERMINED

[His] obstinacy . . . will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents . . .

~The Comte de Vergennes

Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.

~John Adams

I

TWO DAYS OUT FROM BOSTON, in a stiff northeast wind, the Sensible, with 350 people on board, sprang a leak. A pump was put immediately in service, yet the leak grew worse day by day.

There was no sign of British cruisers, which to Adams were the worst of evils; but then the second week, off the Grand Banks, the wind began blowing from the northwest, the sea to run high. For one endless, miserable day, in howling winds, the old frigate labored under foresail only. A “very violent gale,” recorded Adams, who, in order to write, had to get down on his cabin floor on hands and knees.

By the time the storm passed, the ship was leaking so badly that two pumps had to be manned day and night, unrelenting work in which all hands took part, passengers as well, including John Quincy. The situation was alarming. In the event of another storm or an encounter with the enemy, the captain explained, they would have no chance. The only choice was to make for the nearest friendly port, for Spain, “with all the sail the ship could prudently bear.”

The Sensible labored slowly across the ocean, until finally, on the morning of December 8, 1779, running with the wind, she reached El Ferrol, on Spain’s rocky northwestern tip. It had been a closer call than anyone liked to think. In less than an hour at anchor at El Ferrol, with the pumps stopped, there were seven feet of water in the hold.

“We have had an escape again,” Adams began in a letter to Abigail from shore. “One more storm would very probably [have] carried us to the bottom of the sea,” added John Quincy in his report to his mother.

Faced with the prospect of being marooned for weeks while repairs were made, Adams inquired about proceeding overland. The distance to Paris was 1,000 miles. The journey, east across Spain and over the Pyrenees to the French border, was one of extreme difficulty, he was warned, and never more so than in winter. But to sit still and wait again as he had in France, to let circumstance rule, or the whims or priorities of others, were not in his nature. He was determined to go, and talk of difficulties had little effect. Indeed, for a man so constituted as Adams, such talk could well have been the deciding factor. “The season, the roads, the accommodations for traveling are so unfavorable that it is not expected I can get to Paris in less than thirty days,” he wrote in explanation to the president of Congress, Samuel Huntington. “But if I were to wait for the frigate, it would probably be much longer. I am determined, therefore, to make the best of way by land.”

At first light, December 15, Adams, his sons, Francis Dana, John Thaxter, servants, Spanish guides and muleteers, and two additional Americans who had been aboard the Sensible, set off mounted on scrawny mules and looking, as John Thaxter noted, very like a scene from Don Quixote, and quixotic the whole undertaking turned out to be. Adams was exhausted before the journey began. In the week since landing he had hardly slept a night, so horrific was the torment of fleas and bedbugs, Spain’s “enemies of all repose,” as he said.

At the old city of La Coruña provisions were gathered. Three ancient calashes — clumsy, brightly painted two-wheeled carriages — were also added to the caravan, these remarkable for their cracked leather seats and broken harness patched together with rope and twine and pulled by mules with tiny, tinkling bells tied about their necks. As the calashes proved more uncomfortable than the mules, Adams, Dana, and Thaxter chose to go by mule most of the way.

We carried bread and cheese, meat, knives and forks, spoons, apples and nuts [Adams would write]. Indeed, we were obliged to carry . . . our own beds, blankets . . . everything that we wanted. . . . We got nothing at the taverns but fire, water . . . and sometimes the wine of the country.

From La Coruña, their route passed through Betanzos, once the capital of the kingdom of Galicia, then Lugo, Astorga, Burgos, and Bilbao. “There is the grandest profusion of wild irregular mountains I ever saw,” Adams wrote. But the roads proved worse even than he had imagined, so rocky and treacherous it was necessary to go by foot a great part of the journey.

“We had nothing worth remarking today except we kept ascending,” wrote John Quincy on December 31. Another day’s journey was “almost perpendicular.” With encouragement from his father, the boy had started a diary, the beginning of what was to be a lifelong enterprise lasting sixty-eight years.

To the Americans the wretchedness of the Spanish people, the squalor of the wayside taverns, were appalling. “Smoke filled every part of the kitchen, stable, and other part[s] of the house, as thick as possible so that it was . . . very difficult to see and breathe,” Adams recorded at one tavern. “The mules, hogs, fowls and human inhabitants live . . . all together,” he wrote of another overnight accommodation. Everywhere he saw poverty and misery, people in rags. “Nothing appeared rich but the churches, nobody fat but the clergy,” he noted sadly.

There were days of rain, fog, and snow, mountains that went endlessly on and on, mountains like “a tumbling sea.” The boys were sick with colds. Francis Dana became so ill there was a question whether he could continue. “We go along barking and sneezing and coughing as if we were fitter for a hospital than for travelers on the road,” wrote Adams, whose own strength and spirits began to give out. He had never known a worse undertaking, he fumed in his diary. Given the choice of his first crossing on the Boston, or this, he would prefer the former with all its horrors. But only to Abigail, in a letter written at Bilbao, did he concede that he had made a mistake coming overland.

The one compensation of the journey was the warmth of the welcome they received along the route. Spain by now had entered the war, but as an ally of France only. John Jay of New York, the American minister to Spain, had been in Madrid for a year, and his mission had proven hopeless, as the Spanish Court had no interest in recognizing the independence of the United States. Still, no representative of any government would have been treated with more courtesy and friendship than were Adams and his party in town after town, as he was to report proudly.

At last in January, two weeks into the new year 1780, the travelers crossed the frontier at St.-Jean-de-Luz and by nightfall arrived at Bayonne. Leaving Spain, Adams regretted only that he had had no time for a detour to see the famous pilgrimage cathedral of Santiago de Compestela, and that he had to part with his mule, “as he was an excellent animal and had served me well.”

Heading on by post chaise, he and his party were in Bordeaux in another few days, and despite fog and icy roads reached Paris on February 9, travel-worn but in “tolerable” health, nearly two months after departing from El Ferrol, three months after setting sail from Boston. A letter from Abigail filled with worry was waiting for him at the Hôtel de Valois on the Rue de Richelieu, which he planned to make his address this time.

LOSING NO TIME, Adams enrolled the boys the next morning in the boarding school at Passy, then called on Franklin. At Versailles the day after, accompanied by Franklin and Francis Dana, Adams “had the honor to wait on” the aged Prime Minister of France, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas, who was as old nearly as the century, older even than Franklin; as well as the Minister of Marine, Gabriel Sartine; and the all-important Foreign Minister, the Comte de Vergennes.

In Franklin’s estimate, the “disposition” of the Court to the American cause was as favorable as it had ever been, and Adams came away from these initial discussions feeling even more sanguine. He had never heard the French Foreign Ministry “so frank, explicit, and decided,” he stressed in a letter to Congress. Most encouraging was the talk of French naval support, and from all that he heard, he grew increasingly optimistic. The largest French fleet yet was preparing to sail. Four thousand troops under General Rochambeau were soon to depart.

“The French Court seemed to be now every day more and more convinced of the good policy, and indeed the necessity, of prosecuting the war with vigor in America,” Adams informed James Warren. “They have been making great preparations accordingly, and are determined to maintain a clear superiority.”

The one annoyance was Vergennes’s apparent displeasure over Adams’s mission. Adams offered a letter of explanation, saying he had been chosen by Congress as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate a peace with Great Britain, as well as a treaty of commerce. It was the wish of Congress, as a way to save time, that an authorized American envoy be present in Europe to treat with the ministers of the other powers the moment peace became possible. Further, it was the wish of Congress — as well as his own — to take no steps without consulting the ministers of his Most Christian Majesty.

Adams asked whether, “in the present circumstances of things,” the British should be made aware of the purpose of his mission, and suggested that an official announcement be published such as had already appeared in the Journals of Congress.

His letter was written on February 12. In reply, February 15, Vergennes insisted that nothing be said of the matter until Conrad Gérard, the French minister to America who had been replaced by La Luzerne, arrived back in Paris, and explained Adams’s instructions from Congress. In the meantime, Adams was told, “It is the part of prudence to conceal your eventual character [as peacemaker] and, above all, to take the necessary precautions that the object of your commission remain unknown to the Court of London.”

Adams was astonished and deeply insulted. It was no affair of Gérard’s to explain his instructions. It was also inconceivable that the British did not already know the nature of his business. The London papers had already carried news of his arrival in Europe and that he had come to “hear and receive any proposals of peace” from Great Britain. And as Vergennes was known to employ a veritable army of spies, he was hardly groping in the dark on such matters.

The proud, immensely shrewd French Foreign Minister had become one of the great figures of eighteenth-century Europe by dint of exceedingly hard work and by making himself a consummate man of the world. French support for the American war was his policy and he its champion from the start, despite the fearful drain it imposed on the treasury of France. There was thus no one more deserving of American gratitude. But it was because of no abiding fervor for American liberty that he had persuaded his young king to come to America’s aid. France was an absolute monarchy and Vergennes as stout a monarchist as could be found. His purpose, first, last, and always, was to weaken and humble Britain and, at the same time, expand French trade in America.

“Always keep in mind,” Vergennes would tell the Minister of Finance, “that in separating the United States from Great Britain, it was above all their commerce we wanted.”

Adams had no illusions about what determined the actions of nations. “It is interest alone which does it,” he had once told Congress, “and it is interest alone which can be trusted.” For Vergennes’s American policy he had a vivid image: “He means . . . to keep his hand under our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.”

As polite as Adams remained, Vergennes neither liked nor trusted him. He found Adams’s manifest integrity unsettling; Adams’s emphatic patriotism appealed not at all. The Foreign Minister was a man accustomed to deference, and exceedingly fond of having his way. Preferring to deal only with the ever obliging Franklin, he dreaded the prospect of Adams meddling in what he, Vergennes, regarded as his exclusive domain, the power politics of Europe. While all Paris might see Franklin as the authentic, homespun “natural” American, Vergennes knew better. It was precisely Franklin’s subtlety, his worldliness, that made him invaluable as a diplomat. Adams, on the other hand, was truly a provincial. Worse, he was a novice; and there was no telling the damage such a man might do.

Vergennes’s professed need to see the instructions Gérard was bringing was disingenuous, since Gérard had long since sent Vergennes a summary of Adams’s instructions, in a dispatch from Philadelphia the very day they were adopted by Congress.

“The delicacies of the Comte de Vergennes about communicating my powers [to Britain] are not perfectly consonant to my manner of thinking,” Adams wrote to Congress. Were he free to follow his own judgment, he would pursue a “bolder plan.” But in the face of the Foreign Minister’s directive there seemed little he could do. Franklin volunteered no support, nor did Adams ask for it.

At loose ends once again in Europe, and with no word from Congress, Adams was nonetheless determined to make himself useful. If nothing else, he could write — Adams would always write. Another man might have relaxed and bided his time, just as another man might have waited at El Ferrol for his ship to be repaired, rather than striking out over the mountains of Spain.

Through that spring in Paris and on into summer, with able assistance from Francis Dana and John Thaxter, Adams produced letters by the score, reports, newspaper articles — a great outpouring of “intelligence” surpassing in quantity even his most ambitious literary efforts of other years. Determined to improve European understanding of the American cause, he became, with Vergennes’s sanction, his own office of information and propaganda, supplying anonymous articles to the Mercure de France, a weekly journal edited by Edmé-Jacques Genêt of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “I can assure you of his [Vergennes’s] pleasure in giving his approval to publish in the Mercure everything that shall come from such a good pen,” wrote Genêt, who tried tactfully to convince Adams he would do better with his French readers if he were not quite so long-winded.

In addition, Adams turned out articles tailored for publication in the British press, these to be placed by an American in London named Edmund Jenings. Another American agent in London, Thomas Digges, was recruited to keep Adams supplied with items gleaned from the London papers. Jenings and Digges were somewhat shadowy figures who may have been double agents like Edward Bancroft, but Adams trusted both, relied heavily on them, and the system worked with great efficiency. Digges’s reporting especially was fast and accurate. His dispatches, sent to C. F. Hoochera, a favorite bookseller of Adams’s on the Pont Neuf, were addressed to Ferdinando Ramón San, a name Adams borrowed from one of the muleteers on the trek across Spain.

Adams and Dana got along well. In accepting the appointment as secretary, Dana had insisted that he be considered Adams’s equal, a colleague, not an employee, and Adams, who had agreed, proved as good as his word. No less the New Englander than Adams, Dana was equally ill suited to trifling away his time. They were of like mind on most matters, including the underlying motives of the Comte de Vergennes.

Between times, on his own, Adams maintained correspondence with James Warren, James Lovell, Elbridge Gerry, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Rush. And he wrote periodically to Vergennes, affirming his faith in the French-American alliance and passing along what little news from America came his way.

But much the greatest part of the outpouring was to Congress. From his rooms on the Rue de Richelieu, Adams issued almost daily correspondence, writing at times two and three letters a day, these addressed to President Samuel Huntington and filled with reports on British politics, British and French naval activities, or his own considered views on European affairs. In a letter dated April 18, he gave as clear-headed an appraisal as Congress was to receive from anyone in Europe.

Although I am convinced by everything I see, and read and hear, that all the powers of Europe . . . rejoice in the American Revolution and consider the independence of America in their interest and happiness . . . yet I have many reasons to think that not one of them, not even Spain or France, wishes to see America rise very fast to power. We ought therefore to be cautious how we magnify our ideas and exaggerate our expressions of the generosity and magnanimity of any of these powers. Let us treat them with gratitude, but with dignity. Let us remember what is due to ourselves and our posterity as well as to them. Let us above all things avoid as much as possible entangling ourselves with their wars and politics . . . America has been the sport of European wars and politics long enough.

With still no response from Congress, after some forty-six letters, he kept steadily on. “I have written more to Congress since my arrival in Paris than they ever received from Europe put it all together since the revolution [began],” he told Elbridge Gerry without exaggeration. Franklin by contrast rarely wrote a word to Congress. By late July, Adams had produced no less than ninety-five letters — more than Congress wanted, he imagined — and never knowing whether anything had been received.

“I am so taken up with writing to Phil[adelphia] that I don’t write to you as often as I wish,” he told Abigail, to whom he had already written twenty times or more.

He saw his sons as often as he could and tried to keep watch on their progress at school. “Can’t you keep a steadier hand?” he admonished John Quincy in response to a hurried scrawl from the boy listing his course of study. It was essential to learn to write well, Adams lectured. When another letter from John Quincy arrived, this beautifully executed on lightly penciled guide lines, Adams wrote at once to praise him and say how pleased he was. But unable to resist giving further advice, he told him to waste no time learning to do flourishes with his pen. “Ornaments of this kind, if not done with great skill, are worse than none,” declared Adams in his notably plain hand.

Living at the center of Paris, he was able to see more of the city than ever before. The busy Rue de Richelieu was one of the most fashionable streets and the Hôtel de Valois, at 17 Rue de Richelieu, a premier residence. John Quincy would remember it as “magnificent.” Close by were the gardens of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries, which, with their statuary, Adams thought beautiful beyond compare. On days when the boys could be with him, they walked the gardens and much of the city. He took them on his rounds of the bookshops on the Left Bank. They toured the Jardin du Roi, with its celebrated natural history displays. How long would it be, Adams wondered, before America had such collections.

“There is everything here that can inform understanding, or refine the taste, and indeed one would think that could purify the heart,” he wrote of Paris to Abigail. Yet there were temptations. “Yet it must be remembered there is everything here, too, which can seduce, betray, deceive, corrupt and debauch,” and in order to see to his duties, he must steel himself.

The conflict between the appeal of the arts and the sense that they were the product of a luxury-loving (and thus corrupt) foreign society played heavily on his mind. Delightful as it was to stroll the gardens of Paris, enticing as were science and the arts, he, John Adams, had work to do, a public trust to uphold. The science of government was his duty; the art of negotiation must take precedence.

Then, in a prophetic paragraph that would be quoted for generations within the Adams family and beyond, he wrote:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

How Americans deported themselves in Europe was a serious matter, Adams’s convictions stemming more from patriotism than prudishness. So much more was at stake than one’s own pleasure.

When a young New England merchant named Elkanah Watson, the son of a friend, wrote to inquire what sort of manners he should cultivate in anticipation of touring Europe, Adams’s answer went far to explain his own conduct under the circumstances and the kind of guidance he was giving his sons.

You tell me, sir, you wish to cultivate your manners before you begin your travels . . . permit me to take the liberty of advising you to cultivate the manners of your own country, not those of Europe. I don’t mean by this that you should put on a long face, never dance with the ladies, go to a play, or take a game of cards. But you may depend upon this, that the more decisively you adhere to a manly simplicity in your dress, equipage, and behavior, the more you devote yourself to business and study, and the less to dissipation and pleasure, the more you will recommend yourself to every man and woman in this country whose friendship or acquaintance is worth your having or wishing. There is an urbanity without ostentation or extravagance which will succeed everywhere and at all times. You will excuse this freedom, on account of my friendship for your father and consequently for you, and because I know that some young gentlemen have come to Europe with different sentiments and have consequently injured the character of their country as well as their own both here [and at home].

The boys were getting on splendidly, he assured their mother. Her “delicate” Charles was “hardy as flint,” “speaks French like a hero.” “He is a delightful little fellow. I love him too much.”

Yet as before, Adams remained reluctant to profess his love for her, though it was from the heart that he wrote:

May Heaven permit you and me to enjoy the cool of the evening of life in tranquility, undisturbed by the cares of politics and war — and above all with the sweetest of all reflections that neither ambition, nor vanity, nor any base motive, or sordid passion through the whole course of great and terrible events that have attended it, have drawn us aside from the line of duty and the dictates of our consciences. Let us have ambition enough to keep our simplicity, our frugality, and our integrity, and transmit these virtues as the fairest of inheritance to our children.

Peace was his dearest wish. But when ever would they see it? “The events of politics are not less uncertain than those of war.”

JOHN ADAMS WAS NOT UNSYMPATHETIC to the concerns of the Comte de Vergennes and the Foreign Ministry. Nor was he ever so obtuse about French sensibilities and the importance of maintaining good relations with France as his detractors would later charge. “The Court here have many differences to manage as well as we,” he wrote understandingly to Samuel Adams, “and it is a delicate thing to push things in this country.” While he believed candor essential in dealing with the French, “harshness,” he knew, was sure to ruin even the fairest negotiations with them.

His great worry, as he reported to Congress, was that the French were growing tired of the war. In fact, as Adams was unaware, Vergennes had privately informed his king of a “need” for peace, while to a friend he expressed but “feeble confidence” in the Americans. Further, Adams correctly suspected it was the French intention, once the war was ended, to keep America poor and dependent — “Keep us weak. Make us feel our obligations. Impress our minds with a sense of gratitude.” He saw acutely and painfully the dilemma of the French Alliance. Without French help, the United States could not win the war, yet it was purely for their own purposes that the French were involved.

Still, he felt no difficulty in dealing with Vergennes. Nor, interestingly, was he distressed with Franklin. In voluminous correspondence with members of Congress and in his private writings, Adams had not a complaining or disrespectful word to say about Franklin, nothing of the bitter disdain expressed in letters the year before.

But there now followed a chain of events that were to culminate in a serious rift with both Vergennes and Franklin. Probably it was inevitable.

On June 16, as had become routine, Adams sent Vergennes some latest items of news from America, these concerning the American currency. Three months before, on March 18, 1780, desperate to curb rampant inflation, Congress had resolved to devalue the dollar. It was a matter about which Vergennes already knew and, in passing along the information, Adams volunteered no opinion of Congress’s policy. A few days later, however, Adams was summoned to Versailles for a discussion of the issue, during which he candidly voiced his approval of what Congress had done. Vergennes was as polite as always. “The conversation was long . . . very decent and civil on both sides,” Adams would recall. But again Adams was telling the Foreign Minister what he already knew, since Adams had earlier expressed his views to Chaumont, who lost no time reporting the conversation to Vergennes.

Vergennes’s situation was more complicated than Adams knew. There was dissension within the Foreign Ministry. The aged Prime Minister, Maurepas, was secretly making peace gestures to the British, and implying that the French might give way on support for American independence.

The easiest, most prudent step for Vergennes would have been to let the matter of the dollar cool for a while. Normally he would have taken it up with Franklin, the properly accredited minister to the Court, with whom he had never known the least discord. But it appears that he saw his chance. Having found no way to control Adams, he could now at last be rid of him.

In an official letter of June 21, Vergennes informed Adams that France opposed any revaluation of the American currency unless an exception were made for French merchants. He portrayed the measure as an act of bad faith on the part of America, implying it could have serious consequences to the alliance, and he called on Adams to request Congress to “retrace its steps and do justice to the subjects of the King.”

If Vergennes was setting a trap — as it seems he was — Adams obliged by stepping into it, and perhaps knowingly. In a characteristically spirited, unambiguous letter, Adams made the case for revaluation and for no preferred treatment for French merchants, his purpose being to make clear his own views and those, he was sure, of Congress and the American people. “I thought it my indispensable duty to my country and to Congress, to France and the Count himself, to be explicit,” he would say.

Revaluation was a necessity, he wrote. Congress had no other choice. And since most French merchants who dealt in armaments and military supplies had been paid in European currencies, they had little cause for complaint. Besides, their profits had been substantial. But the crux of the matter was that, in justice, no foreign merchant could possibly be granted better treatment than American merchants. It was that simple. “Foreigners, when they come to trade with a nation, make themselves temporary citizens, and tacitly consent to be bound by the same laws.”

The letter was undoubtedly what Vergennes expected from Adams, and all that he needed — a written statement from Adams showing him to be in direct opposition to French policy and thus a threat to relations between France and America.

Adams, however, took this first real exchange of views with the aloof Foreign Minister as a long-awaited opportunity to broaden discussions on matters of more importance. The prospect of greater French military involvement in the war in America that had looked so promising earlier, appeared to have faded. While the army of Rochambeau had been sent to aid Washington, French warships had sailed not for the United States, as expected, but for the West Indies. Whatever the size of the armies of Washington and Rochambeau, Adams wrote emphatically, victory in America and an end to the war there would never come so long as the British were masters of the sea. The critical need was for a grand strategy whereby a French fleet would be deployed along the coast of the United States, to bottle up the British armies in the port cities where they were concentrated. Further, Adams argued, to keep a superior naval force on the coast of North America was “the best policy” for France, even were France to consider her own interests alone.

In another letter, raising again the naval question, Adams said he was “determined to omit no opportunity of communicating my sentiments to your excellency, upon everything that appears to me to be of importance to the common cause.”

But Vergennes had had enough. On July 29, in a crushing reply, he ended any further communication with Adams. He would henceforth deal only with Franklin, he announced, and in a pointedly undiplomatic conclusion, informed Adams, “Le Roi n’a pas eu besoin de vos sollicitations pour s’occuper des intérêts des États-Unis.” “The King did not stand in need of your solicitations to direct his attention to the interests of the United States.”

A full set of Adams’s letters were then delivered to Franklin, with an accompanying note from Vergennes saying, “The King expects that you will lay the whole before Congress.” At the same time, a dispatch from the Foreign Minister went off to Philadelphia directing La Luzerne to see what could be done to have Adams recalled.

Franklin wrote a letter of his own to Congress, which he need not have. He could have merely forwarded the Adams letters as Vergennes requested and said little or nothing. But Franklin, too, it seemed had had enough of Adams. His letter was dated August 9, 1780, and while mild in tone and not entirely unfair in judgment, it was, as Franklin knew perfectly, a devastating indictment. Vergennes could not have wished for more, which may well have been Franklin’s intent. “Mr. Adams has given extreme offense to the court here,” it began.

. . . having nothing else wherewith to employ himself, he seems to have endeavored to supply what he may suppose my negotiations defective in. He thinks, as he tells me himself, that America has been too free in expressions of gratitude to France; for that she is more obliged to us than we to her; and that we should show spirit in our applications. I apprehend that he mistakes his ground, and that this court is to be treated with decency and delicacy. The King, a young and virtuous prince, has, I am persuaded, a pleasure in reflecting on the generous benevolence of the action in assisting an oppressed people, and proposes it as a part of the glory of his reign. I think it right to increase this pleasure by our thankful acknowledgements, and that such an expression of gratitude is not only our duty, but our interest. A different conduct seems to me what is not only improper and unbecoming, but what may be hurtful to us. Mr. Adams, on the other hand, who at the same time means our welfare and interest as much as I do or any man can do, seems to think a little apparent stoutness and greater air of independence and boldness in our demands will produce us more ample assistance. . . .

Mr. Vergennes, who appears much offended, told me yesterday that he would enter into no further discussions with Mr. Adams, nor answer any more of his letters. . . . It is my intention, while I stay here, to procure what advantages I can for our country by endeavoring to please this court.

Not for months was Adams to learn what Franklin had done. Nor was he to see Franklin or Vergennes again for an even longer time. For as Franklin also reported to Congress, Adams had by then departed Paris for Holland to see, as he told Franklin, “whether something might be done to render us less dependent on France.”

II

IT WAS NOT HIS IDEA ALONE, or contrary to American intent. The prospect of securing financial help from the Dutch Republic had been talked about in Congress and at Paris for some time. The Dutch had been smuggling arms to America in quantity since before the French had become involved. More even than their French counterparts, Dutch merchants had grown rich in the trade, and so it seemed a reasonable prospect that Dutch money might also be available. Congress had considered sending a minister to Holland even before Adams left on his initial mission to France, and in his first months at Paris, he had reported that there was more friendship for America in Holland than generally understood. In advance of his second mission to Europe as peacemaker, Congress debated assigning Adams the additional task of negotiating a Dutch loan, but after concluding that a “distinct appointment” made better sense, named its former president, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, to seek a loan of $10 million. But Laurens was unable to depart for months to come, not until the summer of 1780.

Franklin, for his part, expressed strong disapproval of any such overt “suitoring” for alliances, preferring, as he said, that America, “a virgin state, should preserve the virgin character” and “wait with decent dignity for the applications of others.” Apparently he saw no contradiction with his own “suitoring” at the Court of Versailles, or the irony that he, of all people, would preach the preservation of a “virgin character.”

Adams, who had never lost interest in Holland, strongly disagreed, and from reports gathered since his return to Paris, he surmised that the chances for financial help from the Dutch were better than ever. He tried to convince Franklin and Vergennes of the need for a reconnaissance of the Low Countries, but without success. It was only when the strain of relations with Vergennes reached the breaking point that Vergennes acquiesced and provided Adams with the necessary passports, relieved to be rid of him.

With no support or consideration from either Vergennes or Franklin, Adams’s position in Paris had become untenable. He longed for a change of scene. Above all, he longed to accomplish something, and was very quickly on his way to Amsterdam.

The venture was entirely of his own making. He went as a private citizen only, without authority, and, as it happened, wholly unaware that in June Congress had decided he should pursue exactly such a survey until Henry Laurens arrived. Optimism in Congress on the subject was as great as Adams’s own.

For Adams, ever the independent man, it was a role of the kind he most loved — setting forth on his own against the odds in the service of the greatest of causes. For he genuinely believed the fate of the Revolution hung in the balance.

He removed his sons from the school at Passy and on July 27, accompanied by the servant Stephens, they were on their way north by coach, traveling fast over good roads to Compiègne and Valenciennes, through the finest farmland Adams had ever seen, at the height of one of the most abundant summers France had known. “The wheat, rye, barley, oats, peas, beans, and several other grains, the hemp, flax, grass, clover . . . the vines, the cattle, the sheep, in short everything upon this road is beautiful,” observed the farmer from Braintree happily.

The boys, free from school and again in their father’s company, felt a lift of spirits to match his own. “We passed by Mons, which is a city and a very pretty one,” wrote thirteen-year-old John Quincy. “I never saw a more beautiful one in my life.”

They rolled through Brussels and Antwerp. At Rotterdam, on a Sunday, attending services at an English church, they listened as the English preacher prayed that “a certain king” might have “health and long life and that his enemies might not prevail against him.” Praying silently on his own, Adams asked that George III “be brought to consideration and repentance and to do justice to his enemies and to all the world.”

From Rotterdam they continued by horse-drawn canal boat to Delft, then The Hague, the Dutch seat of government. On the approach to Amsterdam that evening the giant canvas sails of immense windmills turned ceaselessly on all sides, a spectacle such as they had never seen.

Holland was as far north as Adams had ever been in his travels and about as different from France as a place could be. Holland, the name commonly used for the Seven Provinces of the Netherlands (of which Holland was the richest and most populated province), had particular appeal to Americans. It was the tiny, indomitable republic which, in 1648, had formally won its independence from Spain, the mightiest empire of the time, after a war and truce that stretched over some eighty years. Like the United States, the Dutch Republic was born of war, and for more than a century had survived and prospered between two of the great, interminably warring powers of Europe, France and England. Adams would liken it to a frog hopping about between the legs of two battling bulls.

As America faced the challenge of a continental wilderness, Holland faced the North Sea. The extraordinary ingenuity and industry of the Dutch in wresting land from the sea were legendary. Still the actual spectacle of all that had been contrived and built, the innumerable canals, bridges, dams, dikes, sluices, and windmills needed to cope with water, to drain land, and hold back the sea — and that all had to be kept in working order so that life could go on — made first-time visitors stand back in awe, and New Englanders especially, knowing what they did of inhospitable climate and limited space. Francis Dana, when he arrived later, wrote of the Dutch living in a world made by hand. “The whole is an astonishing machinery, created, connected, constantly preserved by the labor, industry, and unremitting attention of its inhabitants at an expense beyond calculation.”

Amsterdam alone had more than 500 bridges arching its web of canals. The pride of the city, its Town Hall, a massive structure of cut stone, stood, as almost every visitor was informed, on 13,659 wooden piles.

Predominantly Protestant, Holland was known for its tolerance, for allowing religious freedom to thousands of European Jews, French Huguenots, and other Christian sects. To New Englanders it was very nearly sacred ground, as the place where the English separatists known as the Pilgrims had found refuge in the seventeenth century, settling at Leyden for twelve years before embarking for Massachusetts.

The seventeenth century had been the Golden Age of the Dutch. In one of the most astonishing upsurges of commercial vitality in all history, they had become the greatest trading nation in the world, the leading shipbuilders and mapmakers. Amsterdam, the busiest port in Europe, became the richest city in the world, and with their vast wealth, the Dutch became Europe’s money lenders.

In the arts and letters, it was the age of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and van Ruysdael; of the poet Joost van den Vondel, of Grotius in theology and maritime law, Spinoza in philosophy. In the liberal atmosphere of seventeenth-century Holland, the French philosopher René Descartes found refuge and freedom to publish. John Locke, from whom Adams, Jefferson, and other American patriots drew inspiration, had published some of his earliest works while a political refugee in Amsterdam.

The Golden Age was long past by the time Adams arrived — Dutch maritime power and Dutch prestige were acknowledged to be “in decline” — yet business was thriving and visitors were struck by signs of Dutch prosperity on all sides. Amsterdam remained the commercial center of Europe. Its immense harbor thronged with shipping. “Wherever the eye ranges, masts and sails appear,” wrote an English traveler. “Bells are sounding and vessels departing at all hours.”

Beside the city’s broad, tree-lined main canals, row upon row of elegant brick grachtenhuizen (canal houses) proclaimed the wealth of its merchant citizenry as did nothing else. Four and five stories tall, they were much alike in the Dutch manner, with stepped or bell-shaped gables and tall, sparkling windows of Dutch plate glass, which was considered something quite special. “The verdure of the trees reflecting strongly upon large windows which are kept bright and free of dust, add infinitely to their luster and magnificence,” wrote a visiting American. The homes of the wealthiest families, the grandest houses of all, numbering in the hundreds along the Herengracht and the Keizersgracht (the Gentlemen’s Canal and the Emperor’s Canal), were as fine as any of the great city houses of Europe. And more even than the elegant façades, the interiors and furnishings of such houses — the marble floors, chinaware, leather-bound books, maps, and huge ebony-framed portraits of the merchants themselves or of their Golden Age patriarchs — bespoke generations of accumulated wealth and unrivaled position.

Commonly described as a kind of northern Venice, Amsterdam had none of the architectural grandeur of Venice and was subject to long, dank North Sea winters. Also, by late summer, the season when Adams arrived, many of the canals turned putrid-smelling, and “so laden with filth,” an English woman wrote, “that on a hot day the feculence seems pestilential.” Indeed, the Dutch climate was widely understood to be dangerous to the health. “Amsterdam fever” was a well-known and dreaded malady. Visitors who stayed too long could expect to be ill, it was said, though young James Boswell of London had written that one ought to experience no difficulty if one ate well, drank well, dressed properly, and took exercise. Of Amsterdam, however, Boswell had little to say beyond that it was a place where he could patronize brothels unobserved.

Adams found the city densely crowded and teeming with foreigners — French, English, and Americans, commercial agents, sea captains, journalists, tourists, and spies. In smoky cafés Dutch merchants and bankers drank coffee, pulled at clay pipes, and talked incessantly to all hours. The talk was open, spirited — an atmosphere made to order for Adams — and rife with high-blown speculation, most of which struck him as amusing, as he told Franklin in a friendly letter written soon after his arrival.

One says America will give France the go by. Another that France and Spain will abandon America. A third that Spain will forsake France and America. A fourth that America has the interest of all Europe against her. A fifth that she will become the greatest manufacturing country and thus ruin Europe. A sixth that she will become a great and ambitious military and naval power, and consequently terrible to Europe.

Suspicious that there were too many Englishmen, and thus too many possible spies, in the hotel where he and the boys were staying, Adams found modest lodgings with an elderly widow, a “Madame La Veuve du Henry Schorn, of de Achterburgwal by de Hoogstrat,” as he would give the new address.

To get his bearings he was out and about, walking the canals, studying the buildings, circumventing the entire city by foot, meeting people, glad to return to useful work. Through all his life Adams would be happiest when there was clear purpose to his days.

“Papa went out”; “Papa went out to dinner”; “Papa went out to take a walk,” recorded John Quincy.

Adams knew no one, but from all that he saw and heard, and after meetings with a number of prominent Amsterdam bankers — Henrik Hooft, Jan de Neufville and son, Jacob and Nicholas van Staphorst — he grew highly optimistic. A “considerable” loan was entirely possible, he reported to Congress. Moreover, there was no better place in Europe in which to gather information or from which to circulate it.

In an exuberant letter to Abigail, he called Holland “the greatest curiosity in the world.” He doubted there was any nation of Europe “more estimable than the Dutch, in proportion.

Their industry and economy ought to be examples to the world. They have less ambition, I mean that of conquest and military glory, than their neighbors, but I don’t perceive that they have more avarice. And they carry learning and the arts, I think, to a greater extent.

His only concerns were that the air was “not so salubrious” as that of France, and that the Dutch knew little at all about America, which he found astonishing.

When on September 16, Francis Dana turned up from Paris with the news that Congress had given Adams authority to work on securing a Dutch loan until Henry Laurens appeared, Adams notified John Thaxter to pack everything at the hotel in Paris and come at once. John Quincy and Charles were enrolled in Amsterdam’s renowned Latin School, and Adams set to work. All his energy, zeal, stubborn determination, and his idealism, qualities that had seemed ill-suited at Versailles, were now to be brought to bear. In little time he cultivated an amazing range of friends among the press and in intellectual and financial circles, a number of whom were Jews who, Adams later said, were among the most liberal and accommodating of all.

He made a study of Dutch ways and temperament, read deeply in Dutch history, searching out ever more volumes in Amsterdam’s numerous well-stocked bookshops. He struggled to learn the language, and in what seemed an equally daunting task, to fathom the complexities of the Dutch system of government.

Between times, he kept campaigning by mail for an American navy, his determination perhaps reinforced by a new appreciation of all that commerce at sea had meant to the Dutch. “If I could have my will, there should not be the least obstruction of navigation, commerce, or privateering,” Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush, “because I firmly believe that one sailor will do us more good than two soldiers.” To Congress he declared emphatically, “A navy is our natural and only defense.”

In October, events took an unexpected turn, when word came from London that Henry Laurens, on his way to Amsterdam, had been captured at sea by a British man-of-war. Charged with high treason, Laurens was being held prisoner in the Tower of London, with “orders that no person whatever speaks to him,” as Adams’s London contact Thomas Digges reported. A sack containing Laurens’s confidential papers had been thrown overboard from his ship too late and the British had hooked it from the sea. Among the papers was the draft of a proposed secret treaty between America and the Netherlands, a document of no real significance, but one the British were happy to use as a pretext for a show of angry indignation and threats of war, a possibility the Dutch dreaded as they did no other.

With the responsibility of securing a loan now squarely on his shoulders, and the likelihood of peace no nearer than before, Adams settled in for the long haul.

At home the war in the South was going badly. Charleston had fallen to the British. At Camden, South Carolina, General Horatio Gates had suffered a devastating defeat in a battle in which American soldiers had fled like sheep. Nearly 1,000 Americans had been killed and a thousand more captured. Gates had been a favorite general officer of the Congress and of Adams, and it had been one of the most disastrous defeats of the war.

But there must be no softening of resolve, Adams declared. “I think I see very clearly that America must grow up in war,” he wrote to Congress. His own central task was to convince the Dutch that America would accept no outcome short of complete, irrevocable independence. Without that insurance, there would be no Dutch loan. Of this Adams was now absolutely certain.

This country had been grossly deceived. It has little knowledge of the numbers, wealth, and resources of the United States, and less faith in their finally supporting independence, upon which alone a credit depends. They also have an opinion of the power of England vastly higher than the truth. Measures must be taken with great caution and delicacy to undeceive them.

With his phenomenal capacity for work — an attribute not lost on the industrious Dutch — he produced materials of every kind in an all-out effort to “undeceive” them, while at the same time providing Congress with some of the most astute political reporting of his diplomatic career. Help came from a number of his new Dutch friends, “people of the first character,” as he said, who saw in the American struggle for independence hope for all humanity, and who, as Adams would long contend, never received the recognition they deserved.

Charles W. F. Dumas was a Dutch radical and friend of Franklin, a schoolmaster, linguist, and man of letters. Older than Adams by nearly fifteen years, he served faithfully as a translator and expert source of information.

John Luzac of Leyden, a lawyer, scholar, and editor, published in his Gazette de Leyde a steady variety of material supplied by Adams, including the first European translation of the new Massachusetts Constitution, which was to have an important effect in the Netherlands. In little time Luzac and Adams became the closest of friends.

Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, a Dutch nobleman, had been the first and most prominent figure in the country to champion the American cause, and he greatly admired Adams’s determination. Van der Capellen knew the majority of the Dutch sympathized with the American Revolution, but astutely he advised Adams that only American success in the war would enlist Dutch credit, for all the expressions of good will and interest he would hear.

At The Hague, as Adams came to understand, there was little sympathy for the American cause, nor much hope for decisive action. The government of the country, maddeningly complicated to anyone unfamiliar with it, seemed devised intentionally to foster inertia. It was a republic, but with no real executive power, only a symbolic head of state, the hereditary Stadholder, William V, Prince of Orange, who was related to the British royal family and personally devoted to the status quo. As Adams explained to Congress, sovereignty resided in the national assembly, Their High Mightinesses, the States-General. Yet even they were but the deputies of the “regents” in the cities, a very select group of great influence. Thus, as Adams wrote, the true power lay in the cities and in Amsterdam in particular. “The burgomasters of Amsterdam . . . who are called the regency, are one integral branch of the sovereignty of the seven United Provinces, and the most material branch of all because the city of Amsterdam is one quarter of the whole Republic, at least in taxes.”

Not until the government at The Hague took it upon itself to recognize the United States would anyone in the government be permitted to receive Adams officially. In actual practice nearly all would shun him. This being the case, it seemed only sensible to concentrate his efforts in Amsterdam, as both the money and the real political power were there.

But as Adams found, Dutch talk of financial support and an actual Dutch loan were decidedly different matters, his initial high expectations to the contrary. “No [banking] house that I have as yet thought it prudent to apply to dares to undertake the trust,” he told Congress. The Netherlands had been too long allied with Britain, as a matter of commercial advantage. Dutch prosperity depended in large measure on British support for Dutch trade on the high seas. Dutch banks, moreover, held substantial loans to Britain. Hence, there was extreme reluctance to take any step, do anything rash, that might upset the British.

That November of 1780 the situation was further compounded by more dispiriting news from America. In September General Benedict Arnold had conspired to commit treason, to turn over the fortress at West Point to the British, and when found out, defected to the enemy. As Baron van der Capellen reported to Adams, Arnold’s treachery, on top of the loss of Charleston and Gates’s defeat at Camden, left Dutch confidence shattered. “Never has the credit of America stood so low,” he told Adams, who advised Congress to “depend upon no money from hence.”

All professions of Dutch friendship for America were but “little adulations to procure a share of our trade,” and now even they had vanished like a vapor, as had his own prior exuberance and admiration for the Dutch.

A HARD NORTH SEA WINTER set in to match Adams’s mood. Days were bitterly cold and raw, with darkness descending at four in the afternoon and the air of Amsterdam thick with chimney smoke. With the canals frozen, thousands of skaters took to the ice, a spectacle that provided what little cheer Adams found in life.

His health was suffering. He worried about his sons. At the Latin School, because he spoke no Dutch, John Quincy had been placed with elementary students. The boy grew restless and disheartened. The rector of the school thought him impertinent and merited a thrashing, as he informed his father. Adams’s response was exactly what his own father’s would have been. “Send the boys to me this evening,” he answered. He had no wish to see his children subjected to such “littleness of soul,” he explained to Abigail in a letter in which he gave vent not only to his indignation at the schoolmaster, but at what he had come to see as a decidedly unattractive side to the Dutch character that he had no desire to see rub off on his sons. “The masters are mean-spirited wretches, punching, kicking, and boxing the children upon every turn,” he wrote.

No longer did he see the Dutch as “examples to the world,” but perceived now, bitterly, “a general littleness arising from the incessant contemplation of stivers and doits [pennies and nickels], which pervades the whole people.” Frugality and industry were virtues everywhere, but avarice and stinginess were not frugality.

The Dutch say that without a habit of thinking of every doit before you spend it, no man can be a good merchant or conduct trade with success. This I believe is a just maxim in general. But I would never wish to see a son of mine govern himself by it. It is the sure and certain way for an industrious man to be rich. It is the only possible way for a merchant to become the first merchant or the richest man in the place. But this is an object that I hope none of my children will ever aim at.

Through a young American named Benjamin Waterhouse, a student of medicine at the University of Leyden, Adams arranged for tutors for the two boys, and the opportunity for them to attend lectures at the university.

Such was the turmoil of Amsterdam that Adams now found it impossible even to arrange meetings. “Very few dare to see me,” he reported. Searching desperately for a sign that all was not lost, the best he could come up with was the popularity of new songs full of patriotic resentment toward the English. A woman who sang one such song on an Amsterdam street corner sold six hundred copies in an hour, he informed Congress. But the hard truth was that after five months in the Dutch Republic, Adams had yet to meet a single government official of any importance.

In December, the veteran British ambassador to the Netherlands, Sir Joseph Yorke, began openly threatening the Dutch, setting off something very like panic. “War is to a Dutchman the greatest of evils,” Adams wrote. “Yorke is so sensible of this that he keeps alive a continual fear of it.” At year’s end, “the high and mighty” Yorke abruptly departed and Britain commenced an undeclared war on Dutch shipping.

Convinced he must now gain recognition of American independence and arrange a Dutch-American alliance — and thus only, he had concluded, could he obtain a loan — Adams pressed Congress for greater authority. As winter progressed, his new commission arrived; Congress had designated him minister plenipotentiary to the Dutch Republic, which provided all the authority to be wished for.

Through February and March, despite the weather, Adams kept on the move, traveling back and forth between Amsterdam, Leyden, and The Hague, conferring with as many of his Dutch friends and contacts as possible. Again, as at Paris, the question was the timing of a formal announcement of his new powers.

Advised that his Amsterdam lodgings were too “obscure” for his new position, and that his effectiveness was being hurt by talk of this, Adams arranged for an American firm in Amsterdam to “hire” a suitable house — “the best house that is to be had at as cheap a rate as may be,” he wrote — and to have it furnished “decent enough for any character in Europe to dine in with a republican citizen.” In lengthy correspondence on the matter, he specified that the house be “large, roomy, and handsome, fit for the Hôtel des États-Unis d’Amérique.” He would need two manservants and a “good cook” (whether male or female he did not care). A “genteel carriage” would be required, as well as a coachman, and Adams was particular that the livery be in the Paris mode: deep blue coat and breeches, scarlet cape and waistcoats. (He also wanted the clothes returned when the time came for the servants to leave.) This was “new work” for him, he added, having never set up housekeeping before.

At Versailles, meanwhile, the Comte de Vergennes was writing to his ambassador at Philadelphia to say that Adams, in his role in the Netherlands, had become an embarrassment, an observation that La Luzerne was expected to pass along to his numerous friends in Congress. Especially distressing to Vergennes was the thought of Adams ever having any say in a peace settlement. “[He] has a rigidity, an arrogance, and an obstinacy that will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents . . .”

BY ESTABLISHED DIPLOMATIC FORM, no emissary ever proclaimed his mission — his “public character” — until the government to which he was accredited was ready to receive him. To do otherwise was deemed not only appallingly bad form but altogether impractical.

By the time spring came, Adams had decided what he must do, no matter the diplomatic niceties. “America . . . has been too long silent in Europe,” he wrote to Francis Dana. “Her cause is that of all nations and all men, and it needs nothing but to be explained to be approved.”

Adams was by then at Leyden, settled temporarily with his sons, John Thaxter, and Benjamin Waterhouse, the medical student, in a house on a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, the city’s famous cathedral on the opposite side of the Rapenburg Canal from the university. It was the old quarter where the Pilgrims had lived during their years at Leyden, a connection deeply felt by Adams. A deacon at the cathedral would later relate, “Mr. Adams could not refrain from tears in contemplating this great structure.”

On April 19, 1781, six years to the day from the battle of Lexington and Concord, Adams completed and signed a sixteen-page memorial, addressed to “Their High Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries.” A strong, even passionate appeal for cooperation, it began by affirming that the American people were “unalterably determined” to maintain their independence and that if ever there was a “natural alliance,” it would be between the two republics of the Netherlands and the United States. He recalled the years of asylum that the Pilgrims had found among the Dutch. He recounted how New York and New Jersey had been first settled by the Dutch, whose descendants and customs remained. Indeed, so close were the two republics in history, religion, and government, Adams declared, “that every Dutchman instructed on the subject must pronounce the American revolution just and necessary or pass a censure upon the greatest actions of his immortal ancestors.” And if such noble sentiments were not reason enough for a Dutch-American bond, there was “the great and growing interest of commerce,” the “circumstance which perhaps in this age has stronger influence than any other in the formation of friendships between nations.

It may not . . . be amiss to hint that the central situation of this country, her extensive navigation, her possessions in the East and West Indies, the intelligence of her merchants, the number of her capitalists, and the riches of her funds, render a connection with her very desirable to America; and, on the other hand, the abundance and variety of the productions of America, the materials of manufacturers, navigation, and commerce, the vast demand and consumption in America of the manufactures of Europe . . . cannot admit of a doubt that a connection with the United States would be useful to this republic.

Adams was acutely aware of the magnitude of the step he was taking. By breaking the rules of diplomatic convention — by embarking on his own on what he called “militia diplomacy” — he was, he knew, risking ridicule and enmity, and, in the event that things went sour, disgrace. His entire mission was at stake, and who could say what the consequences would be at home if it were to fail. “But wise men know,” he would write, “that militia sometimes gain victories over regular troops, even by departing from the rules.” It was the militia, after all, who had humiliated the British regulars at Lexington and Concord, on that earlier April 19.

For a man of such strong feelings and great inner tensions, these were days of extreme stress, during which he remained uncharacteristically silent, as Benjamin Waterhouse would recall in a telling description of Adams the morning he set off for The Hague, nine miles distant.

I never shall forget the day and the circumstances of Mr. Adams’s going from Leyden to The Hague with the memorial to their High Mightinesses, the States-General. . . . He came down into the front room where we were — his secretary, two sons, and myself — his coach and four at the door, and he, full-dressed, even to his sword, when with energetic countenance and protuberant eyes, and holding his memorial in his hand, said to us in a solemn tone, “Young men! Remember this day, for this day I go to The Hague to put seed in the ground that may produce good or evil — God knows which” — and putting the papers in his side pocket, he stepped into his coach and drove off alone, leaving us, his juniors, solemnized in thought and anxious, for he had hardly spoken to us for several days before — such was his inexpressible solitude.

At The Hague, Adams called first on the French ambassador, the young Duc de La Vauguyon, to inform him of his plan to present the memorial as soon as possible. La Vauguyon, a plump and personable young man whom Adams genuinely liked, spent the next several hours trying to dissuade him, urging that at the least he wait for an opinion from Vergennes. Adams refused. When, the following morning, La Vauguyon appeared at Adams’s hotel to renew his plea, Adams again refused. He knew perfectly well that Vergennes would decide against him, Adams said, and there was no time to be lost.

“What!” said the Duke [according to Adams’s later rendition of the scene]. “Will you take responsibility of it upon yourself?” “Indeed, monsieur le Duc, I will; and I think I alone ought to be responsible, and that no other ambassador, minister, council, or court ought to be answerable for anything concerning it. . . .” “Are you then determined?” “Determined, and unalterably determined, I am.”

On Friday, May 4, 1781, at the Binnenhof, the Inner Courts, at The Hague, Adams called on the Baron van Lynden van Hemmen, president of the States-General for that week, and presented his memorial. And with the energetic help of Dumas and Luzac, Adams had already arranged for its publication in English, French, and Dutch, which was no less important. Thousands of printed copies were made immediately available. Newspapers were provided with the full text. In little time it appeared throughout Europe.

That accomplished, Adams could do no more but wait for a reaction from the Dutch government. They “will deliberate and deliberate and deliberate,” he wrote in despair, little imagining how right he was.

HE HAD BEEN AWAY from home now for more than a year, leaving Abigail to face two winters without him, the first of which had been the most severe in forty years.

Her letters had never stopped, one season to another, though they arrived sporadically and were nearly always five or six months out of date. She wrote to him about the war and the severe weather. Sadly she related the deaths of his brother Peter’s wife, Mary, and of his mother’s husband, John Hall. His mother, she wrote, “desires her tenderest regards to you, though she fears she shall not live to see your return.”

Other letters were taken up with businesslike requests for trade goods, as Adams was again supplying her with regular shipments. She ordered silk gloves, ribbon, thread, fans, common calico, and handkerchiefs. “Handkerchiefs will turn to good account for hard money,” she reminded him. Only once did she request something for herself, a green umbrella from Paris.

As she herself acknowledged, she found it impossible to write a short letter, and to John Quincy and Charles came pages dispensing vigorous, motherly exhortations. Strive to excel, she urged Charles. Anything worth doing was worth doing well, she reminded them. Learning was not attained by chance, but “must be sought for with ardor.” She missed her boys more than she could express, and worried more than ever once she learned of the move to Holland, “a country so damp, abounding in stagnant water, the air of which is said to be very unfriendly to foreigners.”

She tried to keep an even balance in her outlook, she told John. “I am not suddenly elated or depressed. I know America capable of anything she undertakes with spirit and vigor.” No effort was too great for peace, no cost too dear, she wrote, and he must never doubt that his own part in serving that end meant everything to her.

My whole soul is absorbed in the idea. The honor of my dearest friend, the welfare and happiness of this wide, extended country, ages yet unknown, depend for their happiness and security upon the able and skillful, the honest and upright discharge of the important trust committed to him. It would not become me to write the full flow of my heart upon this occasion.

Of the ordeal of separation, she said in closing, “I am inured, but not hardened to the painful portion. Shall I live to see it otherwise?”

Her letters were his great delight, he had assured her, so long as she did not complain, and she was determined to oblige. “I am wholly unconscious of giving you pain in this way since your late absence,” she wrote as the second winter approached. “If I complained [before], it was from the ardor of affection which could not endure the least apprehension of neglect. . . . Sure I am that not a syllable of complaint has ever stained my paper in any letter I have ever written since you left me.”

On Christmas Day, 1780, longing for him, she had written a letter he would not receive until nearly summer:

My dearest friend,

How much is comprised in that short sentence? How fondly can I call you mine, bound by every tie which consecrates the most inviolable friendship, yet separated by a cruel destiny, I feel the pangs of absence sometimes too sensibly for my own repose.

There are times when the heart is peculiarly awake to tender impressions, when philosophy slumbers, or is over-powered by sentiments more conformable to nature. It is then that I feel myself alone in the wide world, without any one to tenderly care for me, or lend me an assisting hand through the difficulties that surround me. Yet my cooler reason disapproves the ripening thought, and bids me bless the hand from which my comforts flow.

”Man active resolute and bold

Is fashioned in a different mold.”

More independent by nature, he can scarcely realize all those ties which bind our sex to his. Is it not natural to suppose that as our dependence is greater, our attachment is stronger? I find in my own breast a sympathetic power always operating upon the near approach of letters from my dearest friend. I cannot determine the exact distance when this secret charm begins to operate. The time is sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. The busy sylphs are ever at my ear, no sooner does Morpheus close my eyes, than “my whole soul, unbounded flies to thee.” Am I superstitious enough for a good Catholic?

A Mr. Ross [John Ross, a merchant from Nantes] arrived lately at Philadelphia and punctually delivered your letters. At the same time a vessel arrived from Holland and brought me yours from Amsterdam of the 25th of Sept[ember], which Mr. Lovell was kind enough to forward to me. I have written to you largely since Davis [Captain Edward Davis of the Dolphin] arrived here, though not in reply to the letters brought by him, for old Neptune alone had the handling of them. He was chased [by British cruisers] and foolishly threw over all his letters into the sea, to my no small mortification.

How many of Adams’s letters had indeed been lost to Neptune, there was no reckoning. But for reasons unknown — and perhaps unknown even to him — Adams appears to have been writing to her hardly at all. In the first half of 1781, to judge by the letters she received, he wrote only once in the first three months and briefly, then briefly again in April, to say he had taken a house in Amsterdam beside the Keizersgracht. Another letter followed in May, another in June, which made four letters in six months and all mostly matter of fact, except that once he wrote, “Oh! Oh! Oh! that you were here.”

He told her little of his work or about the boys — nothing, for example, of the fact that Charles had been severely ill at Leyden. It was as if all his concentration and energy were taken up by his dogged struggle. In the grip of constant uncertainty and stress — and having no successes to report — he preferred to keep silent. He was as preoccupied as he had ever been, and miserably unhappy; and in such a state of mind, as time would show, he was often disinclined to write to her. He abandoned his diary. Only to John Quincy, interestingly, did he pour forth in customary fashion, in letters filled with advice and affection.

IN THE TIME HE HAD SPENT with his eldest son since the voyage of the Boston, it had become clear to Adams that the boy was not only exceptionally bright, but capable of concentrated work to a degree well beyond his years, a judgment confirmed by Benjamin Waterhouse, who wrote of John Quincy bearing down on his lessons “with a constancy rarely seen at that age.” (There was no longer a problem of language for the boy, since university lectures were conducted in Latin.)

“You are now at a university where many of the greatest men have received their education,” Adams reminded him. He must attend all the lectures possible, in law, medicine, chemistry, and philosophy. He must make a study of all the departments and regulations of the celebrated university, “everything in it that may be initiated in the universities of your own country.” Yet when John Quincy asked if he might buy ice skates that winter, Adams consented without hesitation, explaining that skating should be considered a fine art. “It is not simple velocity or agility that constitutes the perfection of it, but grace.” Of riding, fencing, and dancing, he also approved, adding, “Everything in life should be done with reflection.”

He sent a gift of several volumes of Pope, and a fine edition of a favorite Roman author, Terence, in both Latin and French. “Terence is remarkable, for good morals, good taste, and good Latin,” Adams advised. “His language has simplicity and an elegance that make him proper to be accurately studied as a model.” On hearing that John Quincy’s course of studies did not include Cicero and Demosthenes, Adams could hardly contain his indignation. John Quincy must begin upon them at once, he declared, “I absolutely insist upon it.” If forced to it, he would bring John Quincy back from Leyden and teach him himself.

Adams was writing about what he so dearly loved to the son he so dearly loved. That he was raising the boy to serve his country one day, there was never a question.

Latin and Greek were not all that mattered. John Quincy must neither forget nor fail to enjoy the great works of his own “mother tongue,” and especially those of the poets. It was his happiness, too, that mattered.

Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining, and constructive companions through your whole life. In all the disquisitions you have heard concerning the happiness of life, has it ever been recommended to you to read poetry?

. . . You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. You will never have an idle hour.

“You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen,” Adams said at the close of a letter in May. “This will ever be the sum total of the advice of your affectionate father.”

AT PARIS AND PHILADELPHIA all the while, movements were under way to dislodge John Adams as sole American peacemaker in Europe. Distressed by the mounting cost of the war, Vergennes was ready to see it concluded, and, if need be, to compromise with Britain on the question of American independence. Since he could not have the intractable Adams standing in the way, the French Foreign Minister sent specific instructions to La Luzerne to do whatever necessary to have Adams removed. La Luzerne, who had become a figure of conspicuous importance in Philadelphia, his influence with Congress as great as that of anyone, worked assiduously. With money to spend, he bribed at least one member of Congress, General John Sullivan, and possibly others besides.

Benjamin Franklin’s letter of August 9, describing Vergennes’s displeasure with Adams, had only recently arrived in Philadelphia and ignited sharp debate. On one side were those like Samuel Adams and James Lovell, who strongly supported John Adams’s independent spirit and were unwilling that the United States give way always to the wishes of the French. On the other side stood those like John Witherspoon and young James Madison of Virginia, who trusted the French and believed French friendship and support of such critical importance that nothing should be allowed to put the alliance at risk, and who had little faith in John Adams’s “stiffness and tenaciousness of temper,” as Witherspoon said in his clipped Scottish way.

Appearing before a congressional committee considering the “conduct of Mr. Adams,” La Luzerne stated the need for an American plenipotentiary who would “take no step without the approbation of his Majesty,” and who, furthermore, would “receive his directions from the Comte de Vergennes.”

On June 15, 1781, after hours of argument, Congress agreed to be governed by the dictates of the French Court. John Adams’s powers as sole peacemaker with Britain were revoked. He was not to be recalled, as Vergennes wished and as La Luzerne had nearly succeeded in bringing about. Instead, he was to be one of five commissioners, each representing a major section of the country — Adams for New England, Franklin for Pennsylvania, John Jay for New York, Jefferson for Virginia, and Henry Laurens for the Deep South. But with Jay in Spain, Henry Laurens locked up in the Tower of London, Jefferson unlikely to leave Virginia, and Adams tied down with his assignment in Holland, there remained only Franklin to serve as the American negotiator at Paris, exactly as Vergennes desired.

Further, it was determined in a secret session of Congress that the commissioners were to do nothing in the negotiations for peace “without [the] knowledge and concurrence” of the ministers of their “generous ally, the King of France.” Thus all decisions were subject to the approval of Foreign Minister Vergennes. In treating with the British, France was to have the final say, again exactly as Vergennes wished.

Congressman Thomas Rodney of Delaware, who had fought the measure, wrote that night to his older brother, Caesar. “I think it must convince even the French Court that we are reduced to a weak and abject state and that we have lost all that spirit and dignity which once appeared in the proceedings of Congress.”

A few weeks later, and again in secret session, on a motion from James Madison, Adams’s second prior commission, to negotiate a treaty of commerce with Britain, was also revoked.

At Braintree, Abigail had picked up word that Franklin was “blacking” the character of John Adams. “You will send me by first opportunity the whole of this dark process,” she wrote straight away to James Lovell, and then let fly in a fury with her pen. Seldom in history has a wife so stoutly risen in defense of her “good man.”

Was the man [Adams] a gallant, I should think he had been monopolizing the women of the enchanter [Franklin]. Was he a modern courtier, I should think he had outwitted him in court intrigue. Was he a selfish, avaricious, designing, deceitful villain, I should think he had encroached upon the old gentleman’s prerogatives.

“It needs great courage, sir, to engage in the cause of America,” she added, fiercely proud of her “Mr. A.”

He is a good man. Would to heaven we had none but such in office. You know, my friend, that he is a man of principle, and that he will not violate the dictates of his conscience to ingratiate himself with a minister, or with your more respected body.

Yet it wounds me, sir. When he is wounded, I bleed.

IN EARLY SUMMER 1781, Francis Dana received notification from Congress that he was to proceed from Holland to St. Petersburg to seek recognition of the United States by the government of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. As Dana spoke little French and would need secretarial help, he asked Adams if John Quincy might accompany him. It would be an expedition of nearly 1,200 miles to a capital city few Americans had ever seen. But Adams thought highly of Dana, the boy excelled at French, and the experience, Adams felt, would stand him well for the future.

At the same time, Adams decided that young Charles, whose health remained uneven and who had become desperately homesick for his mother, should return to her in the care of Benjamin Waterhouse, who was on his way back to Boston.

“I consented [to the departure of both boys] . . . and thus deprived myself of the greatest pleasure I had in life,” Adams later wrote. But before either departed, Adams himself was off to Paris, summoned by Vergennes to take part in discussions of a possible mediation of the war by Russia and Austria. Nothing was more abhorrent to Adams than the prospect of a truce determined by France and other European powers and he headed south gravely worried.

John Quincy was gone on a “long journey with Mr. Dana . . . as an interpreter,” was as much as he reported to Abigail in a letter from Paris dated July 11, John Quincy’s fourteenth birthday. Charles was coming home, he also told her, but how or when he did not say, as probably he dared not for the boy’s safety. “He is a delightful child, but has too exquisite sensibility for Europe.” He himself was “distracted with more cares than ever,” he wrote, “yet I grow fat. Anxiety is good for my health, I believe.”

To Adams’s immense relief, the discussions at Paris came to nothing, and by the month’s end he was back in Holland in time to spend a few weeks with Charles. In mid-August, the eleven-year-old boy sailed on the South Carolina, which, after a troubled voyage, put in at La Coruña, Spain, where eventually he sailed on another American ship, Cicero, a privateer, and after more delays and adventures reached home at the end of January 1782, more than five months after leaving Amsterdam.

Adams was by then established in his commodious new residence in Amsterdam on the Keizersgracht. While not so grand as the houses along the Herengracht, the next canal nearer the center of the city, it was, as he had requested, perfectly “fit for the Hôtel des États-Unis d’Amérique” — a fine, red-brick canal house five stories tall, with a handsome front door at the top of a short flight of stone steps. There was a deep garden to the rear and the view from the large front windows included a pretty little arched bridge that crossed the Keizersgracht at the nearby corner, at Spiegelstraat, or Looking Glass Street. In the sunshine of summer, the trees bordering the canal cast lovely shadows on the water and on the façades of houses on the opposite side.

But to Adams, absorbed in his work, the outlook was bleak. Try as he could, the Dutch seemed to care only for their own commercial self-interests. He wondered if they were a people deficient in heart.

On August 24, with the arrival of a packet of letters from Congress sent on by Franklin from Paris, Adams learned that his commission as peacemaker had been revoked and a new commission established. He tried to maintain a good front. “Congress may have done very well to join others in the commission for peace who have some faculties for it,” he wrote to Franklin. “My talent, if I have one, lies in making war.”

Exhausted, his sons gone, Francis Dana gone, and with no reason to think his mission to Holland anything but a failure, Adams fell ill. Nothing more was heard from him for six weeks.

THE ILLNESS, mild at first, grew steadily worse to the point that he lay near death in the house by the canal. Several leading physicians came and went. For several days he lost consciousness. Not until October was he able to draft a letter, to say he had fallen victim to a “nervous fever,” the common, if imprecise, term used by the attending physicians. His fullest description of what happened would be to Abigail, in a letter of October 9, when he was just barely able to hold a pen.

Soon after my return from Paris, I was seized with a fever, of which, as the weather was and had long been uncommonly warm, I took little notice, but it increased very slowly and regularly, until it was found to be a nervous fever of a dangerous kind, bordering on putrid. It seized upon my head in such a manner that for five or six days I was lost, and so insensible to the operations of the physicians and surgeons as to have lost the memory of them. My friends were so good as to send me an excellent physician and surgeon whose skill and faithful attention, with the blessing of Heaven, saved my life. . . . I am, however, still weak, and whether I shall be able to recover my health among the pestilential vapors from these stagnant waters, I know not.

Writing a week later to the new president of Congress, Thomas McKean, Adams added that the doctors had administered the “all powerful [Peruvian] bark” — quinine — and that this, too, had helped to save him from a “nervous fever of a very malignant kind.” To his Dutch colleague Charles Dumas, Adams wrote that “my feet had well nigh stumbled on dark mountains,” and that he had recovered only through the “wondrous virtue” of Peruvian bark.

In medical texts of the time, “nervous fever,” or “slow nervous fever,” was defined as an “insidious and dangerous” malady that began with listlessness, followed by chills, flushes of heat, “and a kind of weariness all over, like what is felt after a great fatigue. “

This is always attended with a sort of heaviness and dejection of spirit [wrote Dr. John Huxham, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians at Edinburgh, in a treatise published in 1779] . . . the head grows more heavy, or giddy . . . the pulse quicker. . . .

In this condition the patient often continues for five or six days. . . . About the seventh or eighth day the giddiness, pain, or heaviness of the head become much greater . . . and [this] frequently brings on delirium . . . Now nature sinks apace.

Most susceptible to the disease, it was thought, were those of “weak nerves,” or who had experienced a “long dejection of spirits,” or who had been “confined long in damp and foul air.”

Quite possibly Adams had fallen victim to malaria, which in the heat of summer could be rampant in European seaports. Later, he would tell Abigail that the fever had “burnt up” half his memory and half his spirits. Like headache, fatigue, chills, and hot flashes, a subsequent depression or “melancholia” is also characteristic of the disease, which was thought then to emanate from stagnant water or foul air, “miasma,” but, in fact, as would be learned a century later, is transmitted by mosquitoes.

But his “nervous fever” could also have been typhus, a disease characterized by high fever and delirium, and transmitted by lice.

That Adams’s fatigue and “dejection of spirits” of that summer could have made him vulnerable to such a collapse is certainly possible. Notwithstanding his claim to Abigail to the contrary, anxiety was not at all good for his health. He himself would later say that excessive fatigue and anxiety concerning the state of his affairs in Holland, as well as the “unwholesome damps of the night,” had brought him as “near to death as any man ever approached without being grasped in his arms.”

More than a month would pass before Adams felt reasonably well again, and some symptoms of the fever would drag on, or recur long afterward, another characteristic of malaria. Six months later he would write of his “fever” and “feeble knees”; a year and a half later, he would tell Abigail the consequences of”Amsterdam fever” were still plaguing him.

In addition, others in the house — Thaxter, Stephens, and another of the servants — were stricken in the same way, which did little to improve the atmosphere. Adams would describe Stephens, a robust man who had never been ill, as “almost shaken to pieces” by fever, “reduced almost to a shadow.” In all, it was as low a time as Adams ever knew.

His first letter to anyone, even before his letter to Abigail, was to Franklin on October 4, and in John Thaxter’s hand. Only Adams’s signature was his own. Having explained his long silence, he again stressed his acceptance of the new five-man peace commission, claiming he had actually been consoled by the change during the weeks when it appeared he might have nothing more ever to do with commissions of any sort. Particularly, he had been thinking about Jefferson and was eager to know if Franklin had any further word.

Have you any information concerning Mr. Jefferson, whether he had accepted the trust? Whether he has embarked, or proposes to embark? I saw a paragraph in a Maryland paper which expressed apprehension that he was taken prisoner by a party of horse [cavalry] in Virginia?

In reply, Franklin expressed sincere concern for Adams’s health, and said that while he had no further information on Jefferson, he very much doubted the truth of the story of his having been taken prisoner.

In mid-October, so low he could see no hope or purpose in anything, Adams wrote as downhearted a letter as any he ever sent to Congress. His efforts to raise money were “useless,” his health wretched, his life in Europe so “gloomy and melancholy” and of such little use to the public “that I cannot but wish it may suit with the views of Congress to recall me.” It was, as he doubtless knew, a request Congress would ignore.

Gradually his strength returned, his outlook improved. If nothing else, he could take his new reduced status as peace commissioner gallantly, put a good face on the matter, show no anger or disappointment, no animosity toward Congress or toward Franklin, and he urged Abigail to do the same. “Don’t distress yourself . . . about any malicious attempts to injure me in the estimation of my countrymen. Let them take their course and go the length of their tether,” he wrote. “The contemptible essays made by you-know-whom will only tend to their own confusion. . . . Say as little about it as I do.”

He longed for his “dearest friend.” “What a fine affair it would be if we could flit across the Atlantic as they say the angels do from planet to planet. I would dart to Penn’s Hill and bring you over on my wings.”

“Ah my dear John, where are you?” she was writing at home at almost the same time. “Two years, my dearest friend, have passed away since you left your native land.” She was buying land in the new state of Vermont, she told him, a retreat in the woods where they could retire from the vexations and hazards of public life. In fact, she was well on the way to accumulating more than 1,000 acres in Vermont. “Do you not sometimes sigh for such a seclusion?” she asked.

There was talk of a future role for him in Massachusetts politics, but she had no such ambition. “I know the voice of fame to be a mere weathercock, unstable as water and fleeting as a shadow.” Yet she did have pride, she conceded. “I know I have a large portion of it.”

Her Vermont plans interested him not at all. “God willing I will not go to Vermont,” he would write. “I must be within the scent of the sea.”

AT THE END OF NOVEMBER came sensational news. On Friday, October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, by Chesapeake Bay, the British General Cornwallis had surrendered his army to a combined American and French force under Washington and Rochambeau.

It was as decisive a defeat of the British as Saratoga and made possible by the arrival of Admiral de Grasse with the French West Indies fleet of twenty-eight ships of the line at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The British had been trapped, just as Washington would have been on Long Island early in the war had the British fleet been able to close off the East River. More than 7,000 British troops had put down their arms, more even than at Saratoga.

To many on both sides of the Atlantic, it presaged a quick end to the war. In America, in the first flush of victory, Washington was hailed as “the deliverer” of his country; in London the British Prime Minister, Lord North, exclaimed, “Oh, God! It’s all over.”

Adams received “the glorious news” at Amsterdam the night of November 23. He was elated and took untold satisfaction from the knowledge that French sea power after all had proved decisive. It had been nearly three years since he told Vergennes that nothing would so guarantee a “speedy conclusion” to the war as a powerful French fleet in American waters, and now it had come to pass exactly as he had said.

Adams did not see Yorktown as the end of the struggle, however. The British still occupied major ports, including New York, and there would be no peace, he was sure, as long as a single company of British soldiers were at liberty anywhere in the United States. But if Yorktown did not mean an end to the war, it changed everything in Holland, as Adams saw at once. The chance to achieve his goal of Dutch recognition and financial support would never be better — Dutch merchants had no wish to be on the losing side.

Still “feebled” in health, he immediately met with the Duc de La Vauguyon and by mid-December could happily report to Congress that the French ambassador himself had said it was time Adams “demanded” an answer to his memorial of April, and do all in his power to secure a Dutch loan. “He thinks that I may now assume a higher tone, which the late Cornwallization will well warrant.”

As the new year commenced, Adams was at The Hague audaciously demanding a “categorical answer.” The president of the week, Bartholomeus van den Santheuvel, reported Adams’s inquiry to Their High Mightinesses, the States-General, and so the question of American independence and Dutch-American relations became a matter of political debate throughout the country.

Adams then, in effect, took his case to the people of the Netherlands, calling for citizen petitions to the government for the recognition of the United States, and at the moment when popular sentiment against Britain was strongly on the rise. He went personally to the individual residences at The Hague for the delegations of eighteen cities in the province of Holland, each of which, as he explained to Congress, could be considered an independent republic. At every house, the reception was the same — approval, affection, esteem for the United States. Clearly, the campaign that he and his collaborators — Luzac, Dumas, van der Capellen — had launched to educate the Dutch people about the United States and its cause had not been in vain.

Nor did the collaborators cease to press for action. Van der Capellen in particular warned that alienating the Americans could damage trade with them and that it would be quite unwise to offend any further someone of such rectitude and importance as John Adams. “I know the unflinching character of Mr. Adams,” he wrote. “I know that it has been a sore point, and I shudder for the consequences if we embitter a man of his influence, one of the principal founders of American freedom.”

With the outlook brighter than it had ever been, Adams began receiving communications from Robert R. Livingston, who had been newly elected by Congress as the first Foreign Secretary — a choice the French ambassador, La Luzerne, boasted with some exaggeration to the Comte de Vergennes that he himself had arranged. Strongly allied with those in Congress who were well disposed toward the French, Livingston regarded Adams as imprudent and considered his April 19 memorial to the Dutch Court “a ridiculous display.” In November he demanded that Adams explain his actions, and in a tone bound to infuriate Adams.

We learned from Mr. Dumas that you have presented your credentials to the States-General. We are astonished that you have not written on so important a subject and developed the principles that induced you to declare your public character before the States were disposed to acknowledge it.

In a vigorous response, dated February 26, Adams recounted and explained his conduct in detail. The memorial had been exactly what the situation called for. The opposition of the Duc de La Vauguyon at the time had only confirmed the necessity of it. As for criticism of his own vanity or of his “militia diplomacy,” he wrote: “The charge of vanity is the last resort of little wits and mercenary quacks, the vainest men alive, against me and measures that they can find no other objection to. . . . I have long since learned that a man may give offense and yet succeed.”

It was a remarkable letter — lucid, knowledgeable, and candid, if flagrantly self-congratulatory. Warming to the subject of his memorial, he portrayed it as the great catalyst for turning the entire point of view of the Dutch and thus affecting all Europe. But then he recovered himself, and with appealing self-deprecation evoked a favorite image from Aesop: “’What dust we raise,’ said the fly upon the chariot wheel. It is impossible not to prove that this whole letter is not a similar delusion to that of the fly.”

On February 26, 1782, the northern province of Friesland voted to instruct its delegates in the States-General to move formally to receive John Adams as minister from the United States. “Friesland is said to be a sure index of national sense,” Adams reported to Robert Livingston. “I am told that the Friesians never undertake anything but they carry it through.”

Certain that full Dutch recognition was at hand, Adams and Charles Dumas purchased what they anticipated would be the American embassy at The Hague, a “large elegant” house on the Fluwelen Burgwal — Street of the Velvet Makers — beside one of the city’s most beautiful canals.

“Your humble servant has lately grown much into fashion in this country,” Adams reported to Abigail, having at last genuinely good news for her. “Some folks will think your husband a negotiator, but it is not to be, it is General Washington at Yorktown who did the substance of the work, the form only belongs to me.”

ON MARCH 20 IN LONDON, in a dramatic appearance in the House of Commons, Lord North resigned, to be succeeded by Lord Rockingham, a friend of America whose earlier Ministry had repealed the Stamp Act. In a great shift of government, Charles James Fox, who was known to favor immediate recognition of American independence, became Foreign Secretary and to the post of Secretary of Colonial Affairs was named Lord William Shelburne, who, though he opposed American independence, sent a retired Scottish merchant named Richard Oswald to Paris to sound out Benjamin Franklin on the prospect of negotiations.

In the Netherlands the tide turned on March 28, when the Province of Holland recognized American independence. In rapid order the other provinces followed suit.

On Friday, April 19, a year to the day since Adams presented his memorial, the States-General resolved that “Mr. Adams shall be admitted and acknowledged in the quality of ambassador of the United States to Their High Mightinesses.” When, the following day, Adams came to the assembly to present his letter of credence, it was as sweet a moment of triumph and vindication as he had ever known.

On Monday, April 22, at the Huis ten Bosch Palace at The Hague, Adams was received by His Most Serene Highness the Prince of Orange, William V, and his wife Princess Wilhelmina in a ceremony of formal recognition. The day after, as Adams took particular pleasure in informing Robert Livingston, the French ambasador “made an entertainment for the corps diplomatique in honor of the United States, at which he introduced their minister to all the foreign ministers of this Court . . . and the Duc de La Vauguyon more than compensated for the stiffness of some of the others by paying more attention to the new brother than to the old fraternity.”

All but speechless with pleasure, Adams heard the Spanish ambassador praise him for his determination and spirit, saying he had “struck the greatest blow that has been struck in the American cause, and the most decisive. It is you who have filled this nation with enthusiasm. It is you who have turned all on their heads.” The tribute was one Adams would quote repeatedly in letters, and understandably, given his elation and the spirit of the moment.

The American minister became the toast of the Dutch Republic. Poems and songs were written in celebration of American independence; engraved portraits were published of the American heroes Washington and Adams. La Vauguyon, in a letter to Vergennes, reported that everywhere the recognition of America and the reception of Adams as envoy “arouses the liveliest transports of joy.”

In May, Adams took up residence and put out a flag at the United States House, as he called it, the first American embassy anywhere in the world.

Yet for all this, his efforts to obtain Dutch financial help became no easier; and for all his own abundant self-satisfaction in the part he had played, he appreciated how much else had influenced the outcome. “The resolution which has taken place in this nation,” he told Edmund Jenings, “is the result of a vast number and variety of events, comprising the great scheme of Providence. . . . When I recollect the circumstances, I am amazed, and feel that it is no work of mine.”

AT LAST, on June 11, 1782, Adams negotiated with a syndicate of three Amsterdam banking houses — Willink, Van Staphorst, and De la Lande & Fynje — a loan of 5 million guilders, or $2 million at 5 percent interest. It was not the $10 million Congress had expected Henry Laurens to secure, but it was an all-important beginning. It was money desperately needed at home and a foundation for American credit in Europe.

“If this had been the only action of my life, it would have been well spent,” Adams wrote to Abigail, hoping she would “Pardon the vanity.”

He was writing to her again and at length. He thought it unlikely that anyone would understand or appreciate the struggle and aggravation he had been through, the doubts, timidity, and hostilities he had had to contend with. “I have rendered a most important and essential service to my country here, which I verily believe no other man in the world would have done,” he confided. “I don’t mean by this that I have exerted any abilities here, or any action, that are not very common, but I don’t believe that any other man in the world would have had the patience and perseverance to do and to suffer what was absolutely necessary.”

Untrained in diplomacy and by temperament seemingly so unsuited for it, he had indeed succeeded brilliantly, as others and history would attest. He thought it no life for him — “I must be an independent man,” he reminded her — and possibly he was as ready to give it up as he claimed. (“A child was never more weary of a whistle than I am of embassies.”) But nothing he had done in the service of his country had given such satisfaction. No matter that the Dutch Republic was one of the “lesser theaters” of Europe, or that other events in which he had played a decisive part would rank higher in the balance. It had been his own path that he had taken, alone and in his own way. He had been ignored, ridiculed; he had very nearly died in the process. Yet he had persisted and succeeded.

Sometimes it was necessary to be “assuming,” he observed in a letter to Edmund Jenings. Had he followed the advice and exhortations he was subjected to, and suspended operations to request instructions, he would have been forbidden to proceed as he had and most likely Holland would have signed a separate peace with England. “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”

Ironically, a letter was en route that June from Robert Livingston demanding to know why in his reports to Congress Adams had included nothing about the dockyards and arsenals of Holland, or the ships preparing for sea, or anything about the leading members of the Dutch government. “You have not repeated your private conversations with them, from which infinitely more is to be collected than from all the pamphlets scattered about the streets,” lectured Livingston, who had never set foot in Europe or served in a diplomatic role.

If they avoid your company and conversation it is a more unfavorable symptom than any you have mentioned, and shows clearly that your public character should have been concealed ‘til your address had paved the way for its being acknowledged. . . . None of your letters take the least notice of the French ambassador at The Hague. Is there no intercourse between you? If not, to what is it to be attributed?

The news that the Dutch Republic had recognized the United States did not reach Philadelphia until September, arriving by a Dutch ship named Heer Adams.

At noon, Tuesday, October 8, 1782, Adams arrived at the State House at The Hague to sign a treaty of commerce with the Dutch Republic. Deputies from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland stood waiting at the top of the stairs to escort him to the gilded Trèveszaal, or Truce Hall. With its elaborate frescoed ceiling and tall French doors overlooking a small lake and fountain, it could have been a chamber at Versailles, and as the ceremony proceeded ever so slowly, Adams had ample time to look about.

Finally, it was his turn, the treaty was signed and sealed, his work accomplished.

III

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, John Jay dispatched an urgent note to John Adams from Paris to report that the British emissary Richard Oswald had received a formal commission to treat with the United States on the matter of peace. Jay pressed Adams to come to Paris as soon as possible and cautioned that he “say nothing of this ‘til you see me.”

It was only with his treaty of commerce with the Dutch completed that Adams felt free to leave, but even then he seems to have been in no hurry to get to Paris. He hardly knew what to think about the prospect of making peace, he told Abigail. It could be “troublesome business,” “another furnace of affliction,” yet his spirits were high. “Yet I am very gay, more so than usual. I fear nothing. Why should I?”

The third week of October he started for Paris by carriage and six horses. With him were John Thaxter and an additional new secretary for the work at Paris, Charles Storer, a recent graduate of Harvard. Miserable weather slowed their progress. Unrelenting rain turned the road to a river of mud. The carriage broke down. But it was of Adams’s own choice that he lingered over a private collection of Rubens altarpiece at Antwerp, and an altarpiece by Rubens that he thought “beautiful beyond description.” Twenty-five miles north of Paris, he stopped again to tour the famous château at Chantilly, its stables and gardens, as though time were of no concern. It was a perfect autumn day that he would mark with a particularly lovely passage in his diary, revealing in a few lines the degree to which the hard-headed, intractable New Englander was, in the expression of the time, a man of”sensibility.”

While we were viewing the statue of Montmorency, Mademoiselle de Bourbon came out into the round house at the corner of the castle dressed in beautiful white, her hair uncombed, hanging and flowing about her shoulders, with a book in her hand, and leaned over the bar of iron, but soon perceiving that she had caught my eye and that I viewed her more attentively than she fancied, she rose up with that majesty and grace which persons of her birth affect if they are not taught, turned her hair off of both her shoulders with her hands in a manner that I could not comprehend, and decently stepped back into the chamber and was seen no more.

He reached Paris and the Hôtel de Valois that night. The following day, October 27, having bathed in a public bathhouse by the Seine and called for the services of a Parisian tailor and wigmaker, he was ready to take up his part in the negotiations.

Much had already transpired, as Adams learned from meetings with John Jay and a young American merchant named Matthew Ridley, whom Adams had met earlier in Holland and who, though he had no official role, seemed to know all that was going on.

Jay had arrived in Paris from Spain in June, and through most of the summer he and the British representative Richard Oswald had been in discussions centered on the recognition of American independence as a mandatory precursor to any talk of peace. Franklin had been absent from the talks, ill with the gout and bladder stones, and little progress was made. But in the last days of September, Oswald received word from London empowering him to treat with the ministers of the United States of America, not the American colonies, and at once the discussions took on a new air.

From their first meeting Jay and Adams found they were of like mind on most matters. “[Mr. Adams] is much pleased with Mr. Jay,” Ridley wrote in his diary. “Mr. Adams is exceedingly pleased with Mr. Jay,” Ridley added after several more meetings. Jay, in his diary, recorded only of Adams that he “spoke freely what he thought.”

Jay was younger than Adams by ten years. Born to wealth and position in New York, tall, slim, and pale, he appeared somewhat haughty, carrying himself with a lift of the chin that made his hawk nose an even more pronounced feature. Like Adams, he had distinguished himself in the law and in Congress, where the two men had gotten along well enough, if frequently at cross purposes on issues. Jay, too, could be combative and stubborn, and as the descendant of French Huguenots, he had little liking for the Bourbon Court.

Jay refused to negotiate with the British until recognition of American independence was settled, and in so doing deliberately ignored the instructions of Congress to abide by the wishes of the French. Vergennes had wanted the discussions to proceed irrespective of the “point of independence.” Let independence wait upon the treaty, he had told Franklin. In fact, Vergennes had sent a secret envoy to London to hint to Lord Shelburne that France did not support all the demands of the Americans.

Apparently it was not until he reached Paris, not until his initial meetings with Jay, that Adams learned for the first time of the commission’s instructions from Congress to abide by the guidance of the French Foreign Ministry. Adams was outraged. America was not fighting a war for independence to be told what to do by the French. He wrote immediately to Robert Livingston to say he would rather resign than follow such instructions, and that he and Jay were “perfectly agreed” in their approach to the French.

I cannot express it better than in his own words: “to be honest and grateful to our allies, but to think for ourselves.” I find a construction put upon one article in our instructions by some persons which, I confess, I never put upon it myself. It is represented by some as subjecting us to the French ministry, as taking away from us all right of judging for ourselves, and obliging us to agree to whatever the French ministers should advise us to do, and to do nothing without their consent. I never supposed this to be the intention of Congress. If I had, I never would have accepted the commission, and if I now thought it their intention, I could not continue in it. I cannot think it possible to be the design of Congress. If it is I hereby resign my place in the commission and request that another person may be immediately appointed in my stead.

Disappointed with the cramped accommodations available to him this time at the Hôtel de Valois, Adams changed lodgings, moving to the Hôtel du Roi on the Place du Carrousel, between the Palais Royal and the Quai du Louvre, which was to remain his headquarters.

Through most of the fall Paris had been shrouded with dark skies, cold rain and fog, and the same grim weather continued, adding nothing to anyone’s spirits. For days Adams put off making contact with Franklin. After what Franklin had done to him, he told Matthew Ridley, he could hardly face the thought of going to Passy. When Ridley insisted he must, Adams agreed, but then, putting on his coat to leave, seemed to change his mind. It was only “with much persuasion [that] I got him at length to go,” Ridley wrote.

It would be the first time Adams had seen Franklin since Franklin had written his devastating letter to Congress on August 9, 1780. Exactly when Adams found out about the letter, or read its content, are not clear, but once, and apparently only once, he unburdened his pent-up fury, in a letter written earlier that summer to Edmund Jenings. At the root of Franklin’s behavior, Adams had convinced himself, was “base jealousy.” The possibility that his own feelings toward Franklin could have the same root cause seems not to have entered his mind.

His base jealousy of me, and his sordid envy of my commission for making a treaty of commerce with Great Britain have stimulated him to attempt an assassination upon my character at Philadelphia, of which the world has not yet heard, and of which it cannot hear until the time shall come when many voluminous state papers may be laid before the public, which ought not to be until we are all dead.

Still, Adams was determined not to let personal ire stand in the way of his duty regarding the work at hand.

That I have no friendship for Franklin I avow. That I am incapable of having any with a man of his moral sentiments I avow. As far as fate shall compel me to sit with him in public affairs, I shall treat him with decency and perfect impartiality.

To Abigail he boasted that he and Jay had held the line on the point of independence, refusing to “speak or hear before we were put on an equal foot.” Franklin, he told her, “as usual would have taken the advice of the C[omte] de V[ergennes] and treated without, but nobody would join him.” But in this Adams was both overstating his own part and being blatantly unfair to Franklin, who had supported the recognition of American independence since the beginning, before Adams ever arrived on the scene.

Adams called on Franklin at Passy the same evening that Ridley talked him out the door. He stayed several hours and seized the opportunity to speak frankly of his opinion of the French Court, as well as to praise Jay for his “firmness.” Franklin, wrote Adams afterward, “heard me patiently but said nothing.”

However deep-seated his animosity toward Franklin, Adams did truly treat him with decency and managed to work effectively with him as he had in times past. Adams, Franklin, and Jay met and dined in Paris the next day and would repeatedly again in the weeks to come. As days passed, Adams found himself even admiring the “old conjurer.”

The turning point came early, at one of the meetings prior to sitting down with the British negotiators, when Franklin, knowing the importance of a united front, told Jay and Adams, “I am of your opinion and will go on with these gentlemen in the business without consulting this [the French] Court.”

It was a brave decision. In direct conflict with their instructions from Congress, and at risk of alienating the French, they would ignore Vergennes. In his diary Adams described Franklin as “with us in entire harmony.”

FORMAL SESSIONS WITH THE BRITISH NEGOTIATORS began the morning of October 30 — Adams’s forty-seventh birthday — and continued into the last week of November, as snow fell on the city day after day, only to melt as fog set in. Starting at eleven each morning, the meetings took place at Jay’s lodgings at the Hôtel d’Orléans on the Rue des Petits-Augustins on the Left Bank; or at Adams’s Hôtel du Roi; or the Hôtel de Valentinois at Passy, to spare Franklin the ride into Paris in such weather; or at Richard Oswald’s quarters at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite, also on the Rue des Petits-Augustins.

Henry Laurens, who had been released from the Tower of London in exchange for General Cornwallis, was suffering poor health from his captivity and would not appear for the negotiations until the very end. As secretary for the American commissioners, Franklin had selected his grandson, William Temple Franklin, a decision that did not please Adams, who thought John Thaxter better qualified. (Temple Franklin was twenty-two, the illegitimate son of Franklin’s illegitimate son, William, the former Tory governor of New Jersey who was living in London.) Also, among a half dozen other Americans who, like Matthew Ridley, were in and about the discussions, or dined with the negotiators as confidential matters were taken up, was Franklin’s friend and associate, the spy Bancroft, as well as the young hero the Marquis de Lafayette, who was home from the war in America.

Richard Oswald continued as chief negotiator for the British. Oswald, a Scot, was a merchant who had made a fortune in government contracts and the slave trade. Elderly, blind in one eye, he was favorably inclined toward the American point of view, and agreeable to the point of being unsuited for politics. But he was joined now by Henry Strachey, the undersecretary of state, sent by Lord Shelburne to stiffen Oswald’s resolve. Adams and Franklin had encountered Strachey once before, at Staten Island in 1776, at their meeting with Admiral Lord Howe, when Strachey, serving as Howe’s secretary, had kept notes. Adams, who spelled the name “Stretchey,” described him as an artful, insinuating man who “pushed and pressed every point,” while a young British career diplomat, Alleyne Fitzherbert, who served as an assistant, struck Adams as refreshingly without airs.

In fact, the British envoys were not particularly impressive. In ability, experience, and resolve they were hardly a match for Adams, Franklin, and Jay, who, having started from scratch as diplomats, had come a long way in their time in Europe.

In his diary Adams compared the situation between Britain and America to that of an eagle and a cat. The eagle, soaring over a farmer’s yard, sweeped and pounced on the cat, thinking it a rabbit. “In the air the cat seized her by the neck with her teeth and round her body with her fore and hind claws. The eagle finding herself scratched and pressed, bids the cat let go and fall down. ‘No,’ says the cat. ‘I won’t let go and fall. You shall stoop and set me down.’” The British, it appeared, were more ready to stoop and set America down than ever expected.

THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS to be dealt with, after acknowledgment of independence, were the boundaries of the United States, the right of navigation on the Mississippi River, debts, the interests of American Tories or Loyalists, and American fishing rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, a main point with Adams.

The Americans insisted that Britain cede all territory between the Appalachian Mountains on the east and the Mississippi on the west, and to this the British agreed, thus at a stroke doubling the size of the new nation. The all-important right of the United States to navigation on the Mississippi was also settled.

On the question of private debts incurred by Americans to British merchants before the war, Franklin and Jay felt these had been counterbalanced by the American property confiscated or destroyed by the British army. But Adams strongly objected. Debts contracted in good faith should be paid, he insisted, and such a clause was included, though it would ultimately prove ineffective.

The British wanted compensation for the Loyalists. To Henry Strachey it was essential that such an article be included as proof to the thousands of American refugees that the British government, to which they had remained faithful, had not forgotten them. It was a point of view difficult for the Americans to accept, having, as they made clear, no sympathy for such people.

Strachey departed for London, taking the proposed articles for approval, and in the lull, Adams made his first visit to Versailles since his return to Paris. Vergennes, he had been informed by Lafayette, “took it amiss” that Adams had not been to see him.

Acutely sensitive to all that Vergennes had done to destroy his reputation with Congress, including enlisting Franklin to help make the case against him, Adams was no more eager to see Vergennes than he had been to see Franklin. He traveled the road to Versailles in a state of extreme apprehension, wondering, as he later wrote, whether he was to “hear an expostulation? a reproof? an admonition? or in plain vulgar English, a scolding? or was there any disposition to forget and forgive? and say all malice depart?”

What followed came as a total surprise. Invited to dine, Adams was made much of by both the Comte and Madame la Comtesse, who insisted he sit at her right hand and was “remarkably attentive” to him. Vergennes was overflowing with friendship. “The Comte, who sat opposite, was constantly calling out to me to know what I would eat and offer me petits gateaux, claret and Madeira, etc., etc.,” Adams recorded. Never had he been treated with such respect at Versailles, and he was pleased beyond measure. “Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved. . . . So I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain,” he had once written in his youth, in the throes of painful self-evaluation. Now he was in the full embrace of people who, as he said, made compliments a form of art. “French gentlemen. . . . said that I had shown in Holland that Americans understand negotiation as well as war. . . . Another said, ‘Monsieur, vous êtes le Washington de la négociation.’”

“It is impossible to exceed this,” Adams continued in an effusive account in his diary that he was to regret having written. Somehow, perhaps by his own error, these pages from the diary, or “Peace Journal,” as he called it, would be included with a report that went off to Philadelphia and were later read aloud in Congress to mock Adams for his abject vanity.

But what he wrote in the diary and how he responded to the moment were different matters. In the midst of such attentions, he kept his head. When Vergennes pressed for inside information on the course of the negotiations, Adams told him nothing. Nor did the pleasure he found in being so welcomed and fussed over by those who for so long had treated him with condescension or contempt, divert him even a little from the conviction that the way of the European powers and their leaders had never been and never would be to the benefit of the United States. When, another day, Richard Oswald charged Adams with being afraid of becoming the tool of the powers of Europe, Adams replied, “Indeed, I am.”

“What powers?” says he. “All of them,” says I. “It is obvious that all the powers of Europe will be continually maneuvering with us, to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power. . . . I think it ought to be our rule not to meddle, and that of all the powers of Europe not to desire us, or perhaps even to permit us, to interfere, if they can help it.”

In the meantime, the Comte de Vergennes, through an emissary, had been letting the government in London know confidentially of his opposition to most of the American claims, and to his ambassador in Philadelphia he had written that France does not feel obliged to “sustain the pretentious ambitions” of the United States concerning either boundaries or fisheries.

ADAMS WAS AT HIS BEST in the final days of negotiations.

On November 25, Henry Strachey returned from London and the talks resumed at Oswald’s lodgings at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite. Only two points remained to be settled: recompense for the Loyalists and American fishing rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Adams preferred that nothing be said of the Loyalists. Franklin was especially vehement in insisting that they receive no special treatment. In the end, after a “vast deal of conversation,” the United States promised the Loyalists nothing. It was left that the individual states be requested to provide some form of compensation for property they had confiscated, a gesture that would prove largely meaningless.

Another day Henry Laurens appeared, like a stark reminder of the pain inflicted by a war that had still to end. To the lingering torments of his time in the Tower had been added the news that his son, Colonel John Laurens, had been killed in an unimportant action on a nameless battlefield in South Carolina almost a year after Yorktown. Laurens’s one contribution to the proceedings was to provide a line to prevent the British army from “carrying away any Negroes or other property” when withdrawing from America. Oswald, who had done business with Laurens in former years, when they were both in the slave trade, readily agreed.

It was the argument over the fisheries that nearly brought negotiations to a halt when Adams, once again “unalterably determined,” refused to accept any compromise that would impair New England’s ancient stake in the sacred codfish. With the same vitality he had once brought to the courtrooms of Massachusetts and the floor of Congress, he championed the right of American fishermen, citing articles from treaties past and explaining in detail the migratory patterns of the cod, not to say the temperament of seafaring New Englanders. “How could we restrain our fishermen, the boldest men alive, from fishing in prohibited places?” he asked.

Then, just as agreement seemed near, Henry Strachey proposed to amend the line specifying the American “right” of fishing to read “liberty” of fishing, to which young Fitzherbert declared the word “right” to be “an obnoxious expression.”

The moment was one made for Adams. Rising from his chair, smoldering with indignation, he addressed the British:

Gentlemen, is there or can there be a clearer right? In former treaties, that of Utrecht and that of Paris, France and England have claimed the right and used the word. When God Almighty made the Banks of Newfoundland at 300 leagues distant from the people of America and at 600 leagues distance from those of France and England, did he not give as food a right to the former as to the latter. If Heaven in the Creation have a right, it is ours at least as much as yours. If occupation, use, and possession have a right, we have it as clearly as you. If war and blood and treasure give a right, ours is as good as yours. We have been constantly fighting in Canada, Cape Breton, and Nova Scotia for the defense of the fishery, and have expanded beyond all proportion more than you. If then the right cannot be denied, why then should it not be acknowledged? And put out of dispute?

It was settled — almost. Article III of the treaty would read, “It is agreed that the people of the United States shall continue to enjoy unmolested the right to take fish of every kind on the Grand Bank.” However, on the matter of taking fish along the coast of Newfoundland and “all other of his Britannic Majesty’s Dominions in America,” the people of the United States were to have the “liberty,” which, insisted the British negotiators, amounted to the same thing.

“We did not think it necessary to contend for a word,” wrote a more mellow John Adams years afterward.

By the end of the day there was agreement on everything. Dining that evening at his hotel with Matthew Ridley, Adams was in high spirits. Asked if he would have fish, he laughed and declined, saying he had had “a pretty good meal of them” already that day.

Adams generously praised his fellow negotiators. Franklin, he told Ridley, had performed “nobly.” But to Jay belonged the greatest credit, Adams said. Jay had played the leading part, Adams felt then and later, never failing to give Jay credit.

The following day, Saturday, November 30, 1782, all parties made their way through still another damp Paris snowfall, again to Oswald’s quarters at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite for the signing of the preliminary treaty. Oswald was first to fix his name, followed by the four Americans in alphabetical order.

In effect, the Americans had signed a separate peace with the British. They had acted in direct violation of both the French-American alliance and their specific instructions from Congress to abide by the advice of the French foreign minister. To Adams there was no conflict in what they had done. The decision to break with the orders from Congress, and thus break faith with the French, had been clear-cut, the only honorable course. Congress had left them no choice. Congress had “prostituted” its own honor by surrendering its sovereignty to the French Foreign Minister. “It is glory to have broken such infamous orders,” Adams wrote in his diary. “Infamous I say, for so they will be to all posterity.”

To Franklin fell the unpleasant duty of breaking the news to Vergennes, and fortunately so, as in the parlance of diplomacy, it was a “delicate” moment.

As expected, Vergennes was extremely displeased, though “surprised” was the word he chose. “I am at a loss, sir, to explain your conduct, and that of your colleagues in this occasion,” he wrote formally to Franklin. What had been signed, Franklin emphasized, were preliminary articles only. Nothing had been agreed to that ran contrary to French interests, and, of course, no peace could take place until the French and British concluded their talks and the definitive treaty was signed by all parties. Franklin apologized if he and his colleagues had been guilty of neglecting a point of “bienséance” (propriety), but this was from no want of respect for the King, “whom we all love and honor.”

Then, with a cleverness of the kind he excelled in, Franklin included an afterthought. The English, he said, were now flattering themselves that they had divided the Americans from the French. So it were best that this “little misunderstanding” be forgotten and thereby prove the English mistaken.

Further, with amazing bravado, Franklin asked Vergennes for a loan of 6 million livres.

In truth, Vergennes thought well of the work done by the Americans at the negotiating table. He had no serious objections to the preliminary articles. Indeed, he thought Franklin, Jay, and Adams had obtained considerably more from the British than he had thought possible. “The English buy peace rather than make it,” he remarked contemptuously to a French colleague. The “little misunderstanding” was “got over” in a matter of days and Vergennes agreed to the loan.

In a letter to Livingston that he never sent, Adams would later contend that Franklin would not have signed the treaty without the knowledge of Vergennes — that Vergennes, in fact, had been in on the whole thing. But Adams, exhausted in “strength and spirits,” had by then succumbed to one of his spells of gloom during which he was incapable of seeing either Franklin or Vergennes in any but the darkest light.

It was not until late the following summer that the final, or definitive, Treaty of Paris was signed, and in the intervening time Adams fell once again into a black mood. Again, and with good cause, he felt Congress had forgotten him. He had received no expressions of gratitude or praise for what he had done, nor any sign of what, if anything, Congress had in mind for the future. To Abigail he described the “sharp fiery humors which break out in the back of my neck and other parts of me and plague me as much as the uncertainty in which I am in my own future destiny.”

It was that summer, in a letter of July 22, 1783, to Robert Livingston, that Franklin described Adams in words that were never to be forgotten: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

In the first week of September the peacemakers convened to sign the definitive treaty. Henry Laurens was absent. Thus it was Adams, Franklin, and Jay who represented the United States at the ceremony at the Hôtel d’York on the Rue Jacob, and who signed their names in that order, along with a new representative of King George III, David Hartley.

In fixing his signature to the document, Adams, as he often did, put a little dash or period after his name, as if to say “John Adams, period.”

The all-important first sentence of Article I declared, “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States . . . to be free, sovereign and independent states. . . .”

“Done at Paris,” read the final line, “this third day of September, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty three.”

The mighty Revolution had ended. The new nation was born.

IT HAD BEEN NINE YEARS since the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, eight years since Lexington and Concord, seven since the Declaration of Independence, and more than three years since John Adams had last left home in the role of peacemaker.

To Thomas Jefferson, Adams would one day write, “My friend, you and I have lived in serious times.” And of all the serious events of the exceedingly eventful eighteenth century, none compared to the arrival upon the world stage of the new, independent United States of America. Adams’s part in Holland and at Paris had been profound. As time would tell, the treaty that he, Franklin, and Jay had made was as advantageous to their country as any in history. It would be said they had won the greatest victory in the annals of American diplomacy.

• • •

FOR HIS OWN PART, for the time being, Adams knew for certain only that he was exhausted and intended never again to be separated from Abigail for any extended period for as long as he lived. “You may depend upon a good domestic husband for the remainder of my life, if it is the will of Heaven that I should once more meet you,” he wrote. And this, he told her, was a promise not lightly made. Whether he should come to her, or she to him, or how soon that could be, remained to be seen.

CHAPTER SIX

ABIGAIL IN PARIS

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

~Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

I

AS GREATLY AS SHE WISHED it were not so, Abigail Adams was terrified of the sea. She who had held her ground against war, plague, and abject loneliness, who had faced one dread uncertainty after another through the worst of times, steadfastly, never flinching by all appearances, looked upon “hazarding” a voyage over the North Atlantic with nothing less than horror. The very thought, she told her husband, made a coward of her. It was not something she could change, he must understand, and as a measure of his love, he must come home to her with all possible speed. “I know not whether I shall believe myself how well you love me, unless I can prevail upon you to return.”

Her mind was much on mortality. The same September of the Paris Peace Treaty, her adored father, the Reverend William Smith, had died in the Weymouth parsonage where she had been born and raised. The last of her “parental props” had fallen; one of the strongest of her ties to home was “dissolved.” Her father had been among the reasons she had never felt free to leave for Europe. “I cannot consent to your going, child, whilst I live,” he had told her. Still, though free now, she could not bring herself to go.

In the years when John served in Congress, Pennsylvania had seemed “that far country.” Now her firstborn had seen Russia and returned to Europe on his own by way of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, as she knew from John’s letters, though from the boy himself she had not had a line in two years. Her two youngest, Charles and Thomas, were away at Haverhill, boarding with her sister Elizabeth and the Reverend John Shaw, who was preparing them for college, Abigail having had a change of mind about John Shaw and his abilities. When she made the fifty-mile ride to Haverhill for a visit, it was the farthest from Braintree she had ever traveled.

Of her children, only Nabby remained at home, but at seventeen Nabby’s life, too, was moving on. Fair-haired, pleasing in appearance, she was taller than her mother, more circumspect, less inclined to voice an opinion, a “fine majestic girl who has as much dignity as a princess,” in Abigail’s description, though she wondered if Nabby was too reserved, too prudent.

She has stateliness in her manners which some misconstrue into pride and a haughtiness, but which rather results from too great reserve; she wants more affability, but she has prudence and discretion beyond her years. She is in her person tall, large, and majestic; Mamma’s partiality allows her to be a good figure. Her sensibility is not yet which attracts whilst it is attracted. Her manners rather forbid all kinds of intimacy and awe whilst they command.

“Indeed, she is not like her Mamma,” Abigail confided to John at last. “Had not her Mamma at her age too much sensibility to be very prudent.”

A young lawyer named Royall Tyler had moved to town, boarding with the Cranches, and was showing interest in Nabby. Nor did he neglect to shower attention on Abigail, who thought highly of him. The son of a wealthy father, valedictorian of his class at Harvard, Tyler was handsome, witty, and well read. “If he is steady he will shine in his profession,” she wrote. “His disposition appears extremely amiable.” She seemed nearly as charmed by him as was Nabby.

But there was gossip of “dissipation” in the young man’s past — that he had fathered an illegitimate child by a housemaid at Harvard and had, besides, squandered his inheritance. Abigail began having second thoughts, and wrote at length on the matter to her distant husband. A Odq>growing attachment” between the two young people was plain to see. Tyler was spending more and more evenings by their fire, she reported. What should she do? “What ought I to say? I feel a powerful pleader within my own heart and well recollect the love I bore to the object of my early affections to forbid him to have hope.” She wondered if perhaps a tender passion might be “just the thing for Nabby,” to bring her out of herself.

Earlier, in a long, affectionate letter to his daughter, John had offered memorable advice on choosing a husband that, in sum, expressed what he valued most in a man and what he so struggled to be himself so much of his life:

Daughter! Get you an honest man for a husband, and keep him honest. No matter whether he is rich, provided he be independent. Regard the honor and moral character of the man more than all other circumstances. Think of no other greatness but that of the soul, no other riches but those of the heart. An honest, sensible, humane man, above all the littleness of vanity and extravagances of imagination, laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity clearly within his means and free from debts and obligations, is really the most respectable man in society, makes himself and all about him most happy.

On the matter of Royall Tyler he had shown little patience. “I don’t like the subject at all,” he told Abigail. The girl was too young for such thoughts. Nor did he like Tyler’s method of “courting mothers.” Abigail and Tyler both had “advanced too fast, and I should advise both to retreat.

I don’t like your word “dissipation” at all. I don’t know what it means. . . . My child is a model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the prize, I hope, of any reformed rake. . . . In the name of all that is tender don’t criticize your daughter for those qualities which are her greatest glory, her reserve and her prudence.

By the autumn of 1783, the romance had been suspended, though as Abigail reported, the young man’s “attachment” had not lessened. As for Nabby, she would do nothing without her father’s approval. It was another reason why John was needed at home, to appraise the situation for himself.

Abigail had a melancholy sense of life slipping away before she and John had had a chance to enjoy it. She had turned thirty-nine; the face in the mirror was a young woman no longer. And where, she asked in one especially plaintive letter, was that young “untitled” John Adams she had fallen in love with.

I recollect the untitled man to whom I gave my heart and in the agony of recollection, when time and distance present themselves together, wish he had never been any other. Who shall give me back my time? Who shall compensate to me those years I cannot recall? How dearly have I paid for a titled husband.

Hearing he might be appointed ambassador to the British Court, she begged him to refuse. She had no desire to live in England, no wish for the “parade and nonsense” of a public role. She was too inclined to wear her heart on her countenance, she reminded him. “I am sure I would make an awkward figure. And then it would mortify my pride if I should be thought to disgrace you.” Her health was poor. She tired easily and suffered from headaches. “Neither of us appear built for duration,” she wrote. “Would to heaven the few remaining days allotted to us might be enjoyed together.”

His letters from Paris, written in September, pressed her to sail as soon as possible. Congress had appointed him to a new commission to negotiate a commercial treaty with Britain. She must come. She could sail for London, Amsterdam, or any port in France. The moment he heard of her arrival, he would fly to her — even by balloon if such travel were perfected in time, he added lightheartedly.

But it was only on hearing that he had suffered another serious illness that she changed her mind and resolved to go to him. Except for her marriage itself, it was the most important decision she had ever had to make.

A fever like that at Amsterdam had laid him low, she read in a letter written October 14, one of the last she was to receive before Boston’s harbor was closed by winter ice. He was leaving for London for his health, and taking John Quincy with him. She must come soon. Concerning the courtship, the “family affair” on her mind, that could be managed quite well, Adams wrote. “The lady comes to Europe with you. If the parties preserve their regard until they meet again and continue to behave as they ought, they will still be young enough.”

She began making plans, though not without dire apprehensions:

You invite me to you. You call me to follow you. The most earnest wish of my soul is to be with you — but you can scarcely form an idea of the conflict in my mind. It appears to me such an enterprise, the ocean so formidable, the quitting of my habitation and my country, leaving my children, my friends, with the idea that perhaps I may never see them again, without my husband to console and comfort me under these apprehensions — indeed, my dear friend, there are hours when I feel unequal to the trial.

In January, after further consideration, John wrote again to say that if she thought it inadvisable to come to Europe, he would come to her. As for Nabby, he continued, “I can scarcely think it possible for me to disapprove of her final judgment formed with deliberation upon anything which so deeply concerns her whole happiness.”

Then, having looked into the young man’s background and reputation for himself, as much as that was possible at such a distance, Adams sent another letter, this to Tyler himself. “Sir, you and the young lady have my consent to arrange your plans according to your own judgment,” Adams wrote, “and I pray God to bless and prosper you both whether together or asunder.”

But neither letter would arrive in time.

SEEING TO THE NECESSARY ARRANGEMENTS kept Abigail occupied well into spring. As John had advised, she and Nabby were to be accompanied by two servants, Esther Field and John Briesler, both of Braintree. Uncle Isaac Smith, the Boston merchant, was to look into proper passage, while another uncle, Dr. Cotton Tufts of Weymouth, who had been advising Abigail on land investments, was to manage the family’s financial affairs in her absence.

The farm was leased. But the house and all their possessions Abigail decided to leave in the care of a former slave of her father’s named Phoebe, who had been freed by his will and was newly married to a free black man, William Abdee. “As there was no settled minister in Weymouth,” Abigail told John, “I gave them the liberty of celebrating their nuptials here, which they did much to their satisfaction.” That the couple would remain in her house in her absence, however long that might be, gave her particular peace of mind. “I have no doubt of their care and faithfulness, and prefer them to any other family.”

In characteristic fashion she specified exactly how things were to be. “They are during the present year to have the use of the garden east of the house and that part of the great garden next to the road [and] all the fruit which grows in the garden,” she instructed Cotton Tufts.

Phoebe is to be allowed a pint of milk a day. . . . I give her also a pig seven weeks old, 3 pounds [of] hog’s lard, and what salt beef there is in the house. . . . The house and furniture are to be taken care of by opening and airing, rubbing, and cleaning it. . . . They are to be allowed use of the team in the fall to bring up a load of sea weed. . . . The library is to be under the care of Mr. Cranch. No books to be lent out unless to him and Mr. Tyler. . . . In November you will be so good as to give on my account the sum of 2 dollars to widow Abigail Field, 2 dollars to the widow Sarah Owen, who lives in the same house with her sister Field, 1 dollar to Mrs. Fuller and 1 dollar to the widow Mary Howard and 1 dollar to the wife of John Hayden, who is an aged woman and one of my pensioners — 1 dollar to the widow Mary Green.

By the end of May, all was arranged. She had passage to England on the merchant ship Active, which was expected to sail within a few weeks. She had hoped to embark with friends. As it was, she knew none of the other passengers or the captain. She would not be sailing in winter, nor in the midst of war. Still, it was a venture that she had once thought nothing could ever tempt her to undertake. “But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act,” she wrote to John on May 25, in her last letter before leaving.

Day by day, she had looked for some word from him, but there was none. “My thoughts are fixed, my latest wish depends on thee, guide, guardian, husband, lover, friend,” she wrote, borrowing from one of her poets.

Abigail said her farewells in her front parlor on the morning of June 18, the house filled with neighbors, “not of unmeaning complimenters,” she wrote, “but the honest yeomanry, their wives and daughters like a funeral procession, all come to wish me well and to pray for a speedy return.” She had tried to prepare for the moment. “Knowing I had to act my little part alone, I had possessed myself with calmness, but this was too much for me. . . .” She and everyone around her were weeping as she shook hands one by one.

In Boston, at Isaac Smith’s house the following day, Thomas Jefferson appeared out of the blue, to introduce himself and say that he, too, was soon to sail with his daughter, Martha, and a young mulatto slave, James Hemings. He had been appointed by Congress to join the commissioners, Franklin and Adams, in Paris. Thinking it important that he know more of the commercial interests of New England, he had been making a quick tour of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and had only just arrived in Boston. What Abigail’s first impressions of Jefferson were during this encounter, or what he thought of her, neither recorded.

Jefferson intended to depart from New York in July and urged her to go with him. But her plans were made, her passage paid for. “I thanked him for his politeness,” she reported to John, “but having taken my measures, I was determined to abide by them.”

Like Abigail, Jefferson had never been to sea. As it turned out, he would sail from Boston after all, and only weeks later, crossing under sunny skies, the sea, as his daughter said, as calm as a river.

ABIGAIL SAILED on June 20, 1784. At age thirty-nine, having never been away from either her home or those of close relatives for more than a night or two in all her life, she, Nabby, their two servants, and a cow went on board the Active at Rowe’s Wharf, and with a “fine wind” were quickly under way.

Among the few other passengers, as Abigail recorded, were a Colonel Norton from Martha’s Vineyard, a Dr. Clark, a Mr. Foster, a Mr. Spear, a “haughty Scotchman” named Green, and one other woman whose name happened also to be Adams. No sooner had the ship passed the Boston lighthouse into rougher water than they were all horribly seasick. And so it was to be for days, everyone tossed about in cramped, “excessive disagreeable” quarters together.

“We crawled upon [the] deck whenever we were able, but it was so cold and damp that we could not remain long,” Abigail wrote. The ship was filthy and carrying a cargo of whale oil and potash. With every roll of the waves the whale oil leaked, the potash “smoked and fermented,” contributing further to the “flavor” below.

The staterooms for the women comprised two tiny, airless cabins opening onto the main cabin where meals were served and the men slept. Nabby and the other Mrs. Adams were in one cabin, while Abigail and Esther Field shared the other. At night, to keep from suffocating, they had to leave the doors open onto the main cabin. “We can only live with our door shut whilst we dress and undress,” Abigail wrote in a journal she began for her sister Mary Cranch.

Necessity has no law, but what should I have thought on shore to have layed myself down to sleep in common with a half dozen gentlemen. We have curtains it is true, and we only partly undress . . . but we have the satisfaction of falling in with a set of well behaved, decent gentlemen.

In a storm off the Grand Banks, with bottles and plates crashing to pieces all about them, the women had to be held fast in their chairs, “as some gentleman sat by us with his arm fastened in ours and his feet braced against a table or chair that was lashed down.”

Afterward, the sailors assured her it had been only a breeze. Yet the hard rocking of the ship had so badly injured her cow that the animal had to be killed and cast overboard.

In the unrelieved dampness belowdecks Abigail suffered severely from rheumatism. The food was inedible. The cook she described as a “lazy, dirty Negro with no more knowledge of his business than a savage.” But with a favorable turn in the weather, finding she could get about, her usual spirit returned, and very like John Adams on board the Boston, she proceeded to “make a bustle,” in her expression. “And as I found I might reign mistress on board without any offense, I soon exerted my authority with scrapers, mops, brushes, infusions of vinegar, etc., and in a few hours you would have thought yourself in a different ship.”

She “took up the direction of our cabin,” as she wrote in another account for her sister Elizabeth, “taught the cook to dress his victuals, and have made several puddings with my own hands.” When she mastered the names of all the masts and sails, the captain said he was sure she could take over at the helm as well.

Unlike John, she loved watching the sea. Wrapped in an old camblet cloak, she spent hours on deck, her soul filled with feelings of the sublime. After a night of brilliant phosphorescence in the water, a phenomenon she had longed to witness, she wrote in ecstasy of a “blazing ocean” as far as she could see. “’Great and marvelous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty,’” she recorded reverently.

With Nabby she passed the time in the main cabin reading, writing, chatting, or playing cards with the other passengers, whose company she enjoyed. The doctor, John Clark, her favorite, was consistently cheerful, while Mr. Spear’s “drollery” kept everyone in high spirits. From a book she was reading on medicine, she copied a passage about association with cheerful people being good for the health, and speculated whether her husband might not benefit from a little unbending of the mind.

There was only one of the group whom they would all have been happy to do without, the “haughty Scotchman,” Mr. Green, who harped incessantly on the importance of rank and social position and who himself, Abigail concluded, had neither. He paid attention to her only because she was the wife of John Adams, she saw with distaste. “I know his politeness to me is not personally upon my own account, but because of my connection which gives me importance sufficient to entitle me to his notice.

He is always inquiring who was such [and such] a general? I have felt a disposition to quarrel with him several times, but have restrained myself, and only observed mildly that merit, not titles gave a man preeminence in our country, that I did not doubt it was a mortifying circumstance to the British nobility to find themselves so often conquered by mechanics and mere husbandmen — but that we esteemed it our glory to draw characters not only into the field, but into the senate, and believed no one would deny but what they had shone in both. All our passengers enjoyed this conversation.

One of the crew came to her with a story he felt he must tell her. He had been taken prisoner during the war and held in a jail in England. When he and several others escaped to Holland, the only help they were able to get was from John Adams, who gave them money from his own pocket.

What was ahead for her, she pondered in a diary she kept for herself only. Where would she be living? “No matter where,” she wrote, “so that it only be in the arms of my dearest, best of friends. I hardly dare trust my imagination or anticipate the day. Cruel sleep how you have tormented me.”

When, after a month at sea and the voyage nearly over, the ship lay becalmed, she found the wait intolerable. Motion, she decided, was the most desirable state. “Man was made for action. . . . I am quite out of conceit with calm.”

Heading up the English Channel, the ship was caught in gale winds and for three days there was little sleep for anyone. At last, orders were given to drop anchor in the Downs, the roadstead of the Channel, within sight of the little town of Deal. The passengers were lowered over the side into an open pilot boat and in squally rain and the roar of heaving waves, with everyone soaked to the skin, they made for shore.

We set off from the vessel now mounting upon the top of a wave as high as a steeple [Abigail would write], and then so low that the boat was not to be seen. I could keep myself up no other way than as one of the gentlemen stood braced up against the boat, fast hold of me and I with both arms around him. The other ladies were held in the same manner whilst every wave gave us a broadside.

Then with a sudden rush and a sound like thunder, an immense wave swept the boat broadside high up onto the beach. And thus it was, on Tuesday, July 20, 1784, that Abigail and Nabby were “safely landed upon the British coast.”

UNDER WAY BY POST CHAISE the next morning, they traveled hill and dale to Canterbury, then Chatham, then on to London, seventy-two miles all in a day. Beyond Chatham, they rolled with all possible speed to pass before dark the Black Heath, dreaded for its lurking highwaymen. Fear of the road, the threat of robbery or worse at the hands of highwaymen, was something foreign to Americans. At home it was not uncommon even for women to travel alone feeling perfectly safe. “Every place we passed, and every post chaise we met were crying out a robbery,” Abigail later recounted. “The robber was pursued and taken in about two miles, and we saw the poor wretch, ghastly and horrible, brought along on foot.” She judged him to be no more than twenty years old. Hearing that “the lad” was certain “to swing,” she shuddered. “Though every robber may deserve death, yet to exult over the wretched is what our country is not accustomed to. Long may it be free of such villainies and long may it preserve a commiseration for the wretched.”

Though a “monstrous great” city, London struck Abigail as more pleasant than ever she imagined. There was even sunshine, and the small, elegant Adelphi Hotel, on a narrow street just off the Strand, near the Thames, was “as quiet as at any place in Boston.” That John and John Quincy had stayed there during their visit to London gave it further appeal.

She immediately dispatched a letter to John at The Hague reporting her arrival and her extreme desire to see him. “Heaven give us a happy meeting,” she wrote.

Adams replied at once. Her letter had made him “the happiest man on earth,” he said. “I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday.” Because of the press of business, he was unable to “fly” to her just yet, but John Quincy was proceeding at once.

Hearing that John, while in London the previous fall, had had a full-length portrait done by Copley, and that the painting was on view at the artist’s studio in Haymarket, she hurried off to see it. Adams, in court dress of brown velvet, stood holding a scroll in one hand — his memorial to the Dutch Republic, perhaps, or the Treaty of Paris — while with the other hand he pointed to a map of America spread on a table. Beside the table, a globe figured prominently. He was the picture of a statesman — firm of stance, his expression one of grave resolve. He wore lace at his sleeve and a gold-handled sword. If he looked a little older and stouter than when Abigail had last seen him, she thought it “a very good likeness . . . a most beautiful picture.” She was delighted.

A steady stream of visitors left her little time to herself. They came every day, Americans in London who wished to pay their respects, including a number of Loyalists. She was told how young she looked, offered assistance, invited to tea. When not receiving visitors, she and Nabby went sightseeing (to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum) or shopping for new clothes, but astounded by the prices, they bought little. She was surprised at how familiar the faces of the English looked, so like Americans, that it was as if she had seen them before. “The London ladies,” she also noted, “walk a vast deal and very fast.”

On Friday, July 30, a servant came “puffing” up the stairs at the hotel to announce, “Young Mr. Adams.” When John Quincy entered, Abigail hardly knew him. As tall as his father, he looked older than seventeen — a man nearly. The resemblance to his father was striking. Seeing him with Nabby made her feel very much the matron, she confided to her sister Mary, but “were I not their mother, I would say a likelier pair you will seldom see in a summer’s day.”

Nabby judged her brother a “sober lad,” but one she was sure she would like once they were reacquainted. To a cousin at home John Quincy wrote, quite properly, “You can imagine what an addition has been made to my happiness by the arrival of a kind and tender mother, and a sister who fulfills my most sanguine expectations.”

From The Hague, John Adams promised to be with them in a matter of days, but warned that there could be no lingering in London. He must join his colleagues in Paris.

ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, August 7, Nabby had been out for a walk. When she returned, she noticed a man’s hat on the table with two books in it.

Everything around appeared altered, without my knowing in what particular [she wrote that night in her diary]. I went into my room, the things were moved; I looked around. . . .” Why are these things moved?” — All [this] in a breath to Esther. . . .

“Why is all this appearance of strangeness? Whose hat is that in the other room?” . . . “’Tis my father’s!” I said, “Where is he?”

“In the room above.”

Up I flew, and to his chamber, where he was lying down, and received me with all the tenderness of an affectionate parent after so long an absence. Sure I am, I never felt more agitation of spirits in my life; it will not do to describe.

Abigail’s only reference to the reunion with John was in passing in a letter to Mary Cranch: “You know my dear sister that poets and painters wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen of one or the pencil of the other; we were indeed a very happy family once more met together after a separation of four years.”

Early the following day they were all off for Paris.

II

THE JOURNEY WAS MADE in record time. They went by fast coach from London to the Channel, and by boat to Calais, landing on the shores of France at dawn the next morning, then sped on by coach-and-six. If Abigail felt still, as on shipboard, that motion was the preferred state, she must have been ecstatic.

The whole route from Calais to Paris, she and Nabby felt they were riding through scenes from a favorite novel, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. There were all kinds of travelers, Sterne had written — inquisitive travelers, idle travelers, vain travelers — but the true value of travel was not in strenuous sight-seeing. It was in opening one’s heart to feeling.

Adams had been away from Paris for nearly a year. In an effort to regain his strength after the illness that struck him down in the late summer of 1783, he had moved to a large house with a garden on the outskirts of the city, just beyond Passy in the still-rural village of Auteuil.

Long a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fresh air and exercise, he had become still more adamant on the subject during his years in Europe. If the dank atmosphere of Amsterdam had been the cause of his first terrible collapse, so the noisome air of Paris had laid him low the second time.

Like Passy, Auteuil was set on an airy hill above the Seine, and adjoined the beautiful Bois de Boulogne, where he could take his daily walks or ride horseback. But when his American doctor, James Jay, the brother of John Jay, had suggested a sojourn in England, he had gone off to London with John Quincy and later to Bath, to take the waters, an experience Adams had found little to his liking and that was cut short by a summons to return to Holland to secure still another desperately needed loan.

Adams again succeeded with the Dutch bankers, but only after one of the most horrendous episodes in all his earthly pilgrimage. Crossing a wintry North Sea, he and John Quincy had been caught in a storm. Landing on a desolate Dutch island, they had had to press on the rest of the way by foot and iceboat. “The weather was cold, we were all frequently wet,” he wrote. “I was chilled to the heart, and looked I suppose, as I felt, like a withered old worn out carcass. Our polite skipper frequently eyed me and said he pitied the old man.” Adams, by then forty-eight, felt that during the ordeal he had left one stage of life and entered another.

The four Adamses and their two American servants reached Paris on August 13, stopping at the Hôtel d’York on the Left Bank, where the Peace Treaty had been signed. Jefferson and his daughter had already arrived in the city the week before.

While Adams conferred with Jefferson and Franklin, Abigail and Nabby toured the city, John Quincy serving as their guide and interpreter. Then, after several days, the family moved to the rented house at Auteuil, where they were to remain for no one knew how long.

In Paris there had been talk of Jefferson succeeding Franklin as minister to France, a prospect that Adams rejoiced in. Whether Adams would be appointed to the British Court, as was also expected, remained unresolved, and though it was a position he longed for, as a capstone to his diplomatic service, he could not say so outright, and imagined quite correctly that there was stiff opposition in Congress.

Yet Adams was pleased beyond measure. “The house, the garden, the situation near the Bois de Boulogne, elevated above the river Seine and the low grounds, and distant from the putrid streets of Paris, is the best I could wish for,” he recorded the day they moved in. It had been a long time since he had felt so well disposed. “I make a little America of my own family,” he wrote to Arthur Lee. “I feel more at home than I have ever done in Europe,” he told Cotton Tufts. He thought himself better off even than Franklin; besides, his rent was lower.

The house was enormous, three stories of trimmed limestone, and plainly in need of attention. It had once been the country villa of two extravagant, scandalous sisters, the Demoiselles Verrières — Marie and Claudine-Geneviève de Verrières. Depending on how one counted, there were forty or fifty rooms, including a small theater “gone to decay.” Abigail, accustomed to a cottage of seven rooms, was nonplussed. Weeks later she would still be finding rooms she had not seen.

Reception salon, dining room, and kitchen were on the first floor, as well as quarters for the servants. The family “apartments” were above, where every room had French doors looking over the garden. The mirrors alone were said to have cost 30,000 livres. One octagonal room on the second floor was paneled entirely with mirrors.

“Why, my dear,” wrote Abigail to her niece, Betsy Cranch, “you cannot turn yourself in it without being multiplied twenty times . . . [and] that I do not like, for being rather clumsy, and by no means an elegant figure, I hate to have it so repeated to me.”

The furnishings were sparse; there were no carpets. The whole place could do with a good scrubbing, she saw, and wondered how cold it might be in winter.

The garden, however, was “delightful,” very romantic in its neglect, and it was the garden she would come to love most. There were fully five acres with rows of orange trees, stone walks overhung with grapevines, circles and octagons of flowers in bloom, pots of flowers, a Chinese fence, a fish pond, a fountain that no longer worked, and a little summerhouse, “beautiful in ruins.”

The weather, like the garden, enchanted her. The days and nights of late summer were ideal, “beautiful, soft, serene.” And as time passed, her affection for the place grew appreciably. She would rent furniture, purchase new table linen, china, and glassware, hire servants, acquire a songbird in a cage, and see the garden fountain restored to running order. She felt “so happy” at Auteuil, “so pleasingly situated.”

THE FRENCH AND THEIR WAYS were another matter, however. The shock experienced by John Adams on his first arrival in France was tepid compared to that of his wife.

From the morning of their landing at Calais, Abigail had been convinced that every coachman, porter, and servant was somehow trying to cheat her, an anxiety not helped by the fact that she understood nothing they said. Now the number of servants she was expected to employ and the division of labor insisted upon by them left her bewildered and exasperated. “One [servant] will not touch what belongs to the business of the other, though he or she has time enough to perform the whole,” she wrote, in an effort to explain the system to her sister Mary. The coachman would do nothing but attend the carriage and horses. The cook would only cook, never wash a dish. Then there was the maître d’hôtel whose “business is to purchase articles into the family and oversee that nobody cheats but himself.” Counting Esther Field and John Briesler, she eventually had eight in service, but that, she was told, was hardly what was expected.

She and John both worried about running into debt, given his salary from Congress of $9,000. While such a sum might be a great deal in Brain-tree, John wrote to Cotton Tufts, at Court it was but “a sprat in a whale’s belly.” “

We spend no evenings abroad, make no suppers . . . avoid every expense that is not held indispensable,” Abigail reported to Mary.

The shock was not so much the exorbitant expense of public life in Europe, but that extravagance was taken as the measure of one’s importance. “The inquiry is not whether a person is qualified for his office,” she wrote to Uncle Isaac Smith, “but how many domestics and horses does he keep.” The British ambassador had fifty servants, the Spanish ambassador, seventy-five.

Fashion ruled and fashion decreed that she and Nabby have their own hairdresser in residence, a young woman named Pauline, who, as a matter of pride, refused to dust or sweep. Both the sweeping and waxing of floors was reserved for a manservant called the frotteur who went tearing about from room to room with brushes strapped to his feet, “dancing here and there like a merry Andrew,” and to whom was also assigned the unenviable task of emptying the chamber pots. Why, with so much land available, there was no proper privy, Abigail could not understand.

Even her two servants from home, Esther and John, felt obliged to have their hair dressed, such was the ridicule they were subjected to by the other servants. “To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse.”

She thought Paris far from appealing, for all the splendor of its public buildings. And if she had not seen all of it, she had “smelt it.” Given its state of sanitation, the stench was more than she could bear. With new construction under way everywhere, the narrow streets were cluttered with piles of lumber and stone, great mounds of rubble. Everything looked filthy to her. Even the handsomest buildings were black with soot. The people themselves were the “dirtiest creatures” she had ever laid eyes on, and the number of prostitutes was appalling. That any nation would condone, let alone license, such traffic, she found vile, just as she found abhorrent the French practice of arranged marriages among the rich and titled of society.

“What idea, my dear madame, can you form of the manners of a nation, one city of which furnishes (blush oh, my sex, when I name it) 52,000 unmarried females so lost to a sense of honor and shame as publicly to enroll their names in a notary office for the most abandoned purposes and to commit iniquity with impunity,” she wrote in outrage to Mercy Warren. “Thousands of these miserable wretches perish annually with disease and poverty, whilst the most sacred of institutions is prostituted to unite titles and estates.”

On a visit later to a Paris orphanage run by Catholic Sisters of Charity, she was shown a large room with a hundred cribs and perhaps as many infants. It was a sight both pleasing and painful — pleasing because all was so admirably clean, and the nuns especially attentive and kind, but painful because of the numbers of abandoned babies, “numbers in the arms, great numbers asleep . . . several crying.” In an average year 6,000 children were delivered to the orphanage, she was told by the head nun. Even as they talked, one was brought in that appeared to be three months old. In various parts of the city, it was explained, there were designated places with small boxes in which a baby could be “deposited.” In winter one child in three died of exposure.

Can we draw a veil over the guilty cause [Abigail wrote], or refrain from comparing a country grown old in debauchery and lewdness with the wise laws and institutions of one wherein marriage is considered as holy and honorable, wherein industry and sobriety enable parents to rear numerous offspring, and where the laws provide resource for illegitimacy by obliging the parents to maintenance, and if not to be obtained there, they become the charge of the town or parish where they are born?

The whole French way of life seemed devoted to little else but appearances and frivolity, everybody bent on a good time, going to the theater, to concerts, public shows and spectacles. She wondered when anyone ever did any work. In London she had seen streets swarming with people, but there they appeared to have business in mind. Here pleasure alone seemed to be the business of life and no one ever to tire of it. Not even on the Sabbath was there pause. Sundays were more like election days at home, as all of Paris “poured forth” into the Bois de Boulogne, where the woods resounded with “music and dancing, jollity and mirth of every kind.”

The few resident Americans she met, like the famously beautiful Anne Bingham of Philadelphia and the naval hero John Paul Jones, did not greatly impress her. Young Anne Bingham, who was married to the immensely wealthy William Bingham, was, Abigail agreed, “very handsome,” but “rather too much given to the foibles” of France. “Less money and more years may make her wiser,” Abigail wrote. And John Paul Jones was a decided disappointment. She had pictured him a “rough, stout, war-like Roman.” Instead, he was tiny, soft-spoken, and a favorite with the French ladies, whom he flattered excessively. “I should sooner think of wrapping him up in cotton wool and putting him into my pocket, than sending him to contend with cannon ball.”

But most memorable was her first encounter with a “great lady” of France. The occasion was a dinner given by Franklin at his house in Passy, shortly after the Adams family arrived. In recent years Franklin had become increasingly attached to the “sweet society” of the celebrated Madame Helvétius, whose own small estate was close by in Auteuil. Franklin had even proposed marriage to Madame Helvétius, who declined, saying they were past the age for romance. Yet she remained prominent in his life and always the center of attention at his social gatherings. Franklin told Abigail she was to meet one of the best women in the world, and Abigail, curious to see what so charmed “the good Doctor,” rode to Passy full of anticipation, only to be appalled by the woman from the moment she appeared.

She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air [Abigail began in a vivid sketch, in a letter to her niece, Lucy Cranch]. Upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, “Ah, mon Dieu! where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?” You must suppose her speaking all this in French. “How do I look?” said she, taking hold of a dressing chemise made of tiffany which she had on over a blue lutestring, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman.

Her hair was fangled [done in the latest style]; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty half gauze handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever my maids wore was sewed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders.

She ran out of the room. When she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other, upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, “Hélas, Franklin!” then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hands in the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both gentlemen’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor’s neck.

I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free of affectation or stiffness of behavior, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor’s word, but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although 60 years of age and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.

After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the floor, she wiped it up with her chemise.

To the Yankee matron from Braintree, the sloppy, ill-mannered, egotistical old woman seemed the very personification of the decadence and decay inherent in European society. Abigail hoped there might be other French ladies whose manners were more consistent with her own ideas of decency; otherwise she would wind up a recluse in France.

YET THESE WERE only early impressions, she conceded. “I have been here so little while that it would be improper for me to pass sentence, or form judgments of people,” she told Mercy Warren, implying that with time she might come to see things differently. And change — or at least soften — she did, and especially as she discovered the pleasures and glamour of the Paris theater.

Abigail had always loved to read plays, but with no theaters in Boston, she had never actually seen one performed on stage until arriving in London. Now she could go as often as she wished and in the French manner, with or without the company of her husband. She quickly became a devotee of both the new Comédie-Française and the Opéra. As little as she understood the language, she loved the actors who were “beyond the reach of my pen.” The performances were far superior to what she had seen in London, the crowds considerably more polite. If only the cleanliness of the British could be joined with the civility of the French, she told Mercy, it would be a “most agreeable assemblage.”

For her sister, Elizabeth, Abigail described in loving detail the Comédie-Française, with its great Doric columns, its magnificent chandeliers, one of which, in the sky-blue theater itself, had two hundred candles ablaze.

Fancy, my dear Betsy, this house filled with 2,000 well dressed gentlemen and ladies! . . . Suppose some tragedy represented which requires the grandest scenery, and the most superb habits of kings and queens, the parts well performed, and the passions all excited, until you imagine yourself living at the very period.

One evening the four Adamses went by carriage to the Comédie-Française to see The Marriage of Figaro, then a sensation in Paris. The work of the dashing Beaumarchais — who had been an early supporter of the American Revolution and thickly in league with Silas Deane, shipping supplies to America — the play was a satire about the triumph of virtuous servants over their aristocratic employers. In the fifth act came the famous denunciation of his master by the valet, Figaro, that invariably brought an outburst of approval from the audience.

Because you are a great noble, you think you are a great genius! Nobility, a fortune, a rank, appointments to office: all this makes a man so proud! What did you do to earn all this? You took the trouble to get born — nothing more.

Some weeks later, when her own servants, Esther and Pauline, came home from a performance thrilled by what they had seen, Abigail was delighted.

The opera was more enthralling still, the dancing such as she had never imagined, “the highest degree of perfection.” At first, she was shocked, but not for long. As she wrote to sister Mary, “I have found my taste reconciling itself to habits, customs and fashions which at first disgusted me.

The dresses and beauty of the performers were enchanting, but no sooner did the dance commence that I felt my delicacy wounded, and I was shamed to be seen looking at them. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, with their petticoats short, springing two feet from the floor, poising themselves in the air, with their feet flying, and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers, as though no petticoats had been worn, was a sight altogether new to me. Their motions are as light as air and as quick as lightning.

While the opera house was not as impressive a building as the French theater, it was more lavishly decorated, and the costumes on stage more extravagant. “And oh! the music, vocal and instrumental, it has a soft persuasive power and a dying, dying sound.”

She was changing in outlook, she knew. The more she saw of Paris and French society, the more entranced she was with the “performance” of French life, and especially the women of fashion, most of whom, she was relieved to find, were nothing like Madame Helvétius. It was as if the whole of society were a stage. Life itself was a theatrical production and Frenchwomen, raised on theater, had achieved as perfect a command of the art as anyone actually on stage. Abigail could hardly take her eyes off them, studying their every expression and gesture, charmed by the sound of their voices and by their intelligence.

They are easy in their deportment, eloquent in their speech, their voices soft and musical, and their attitude pleasing. Habituated to frequent theaters from their earliest age, they became perfect mistresses of the art of insinuation and the powers of persuasion. Intelligence is communicated to every feature of the face, and to every limb of the body; so that it may be in truth said, every man of this nation is an actor, and every woman an actress.

However greatly she deplored the dictates of fashion, on principle, she was utterly fascinated by the dress of the French ladies, which she described as being like their manners, “light, airy, and genteel.” She had made clothes for herself and her family for years, and little about the design and exquisite workmanship of what passed before her now escaped her eye. The fashionable shape for women was that of the wasp, “very small at the bottom of the waist and very large round the shoulders,” she reported to a cousin at home, adding ruefully, “You and I, madam, must despair of being in the mode.”

With her limited French and limited means, she found her social circle inevitably limited as well. But of the Frenchwomen she came to know, by far the most engaging, and the one whose company she greatly preferred, was the “sprightly” young wife of the Marquis de Lafayette — Adrienne Françoise de Noailles — whose family, the Noailles, was among the wealthiest, most distinguished of France. In years past, after dining at their Paris mansion, Adams had written at length of all he had seen, the gardens, walks, pictures, and furniture, “all in the highest style of magnificence,” and family portraits “ancient and numerous.” Adrienne was one of five daughters of Jean de Noailles, Duc d’Ayen, and Henriette d’Arguesseau, and to Adams they constituted the most “exemplary” family he had met since arriving in Paris. Adrienne, who was still in her twenties when she and Abigail met, had been married to Lafayette in 1774 when she was fourteen and he sixteen. In contrast to most French-women, and very like Abigail, she remained openly devoted to her husband and children. Importantly, she spoke English and despite her wealth and position dressed simply and disliked pretentious display quite as much as did Abigail. Lafayette, a hero in Paris no less than in America, and himself one of the richest men in France, had recently acquired a palatial house on the Rue de Bourbon, which he made a center of hospitality for Americans in Paris.

“You would have supposed I had been some long absent friend who she dearly loved,” Abigail wrote to Mary Cranch of the greeting she had received the day of her first call on Madame Lafayette, and for the rest of her stay she would never fail to enjoy the young woman’s company. “She is a good and amiable lady, exceedingly fond of her children . . . passionately attached to her husband!!! A French lady and fond of her husband!!!” How aware Abigail may have been of the husband’s frequent infidelities is not known.

Nabby, who felt she, too, had found a compatible soul in Madame Lafayette, began to see sides to French life that her own country might take lessons from. “I have often complained of a stiffness and reserve in our circles in America that was disagreeable,” wrote the daughter whose mother worried that she was too stiff and reserved. “A little French ease adopted would be an improvement.”

HOW WERE HER TWO “dear lads” at home, Abigail asked in a letter to Elizabeth Shaw. “I have got their profiles [silhouettes] stuck up which I look at every morning with pleasure and sometimes speak to as I pass, telling Charles to hold up his head.”

But in time came letters from sisters Elizabeth and Mary both, assuring her that all was well at home, the boys well behaved and enjoying perfect health. Braintree had become a dull place without her, wrote Mary, who faithfully reported all that Abigail would wish to know about her house, farm, the doings of the town — who had been married, who had been born in her absence, who had taken ill, and who had died — and the health of John’s mother, who at seventy-five still walked to meeting each Sunday. Her house, Abigail was told, was just as she would wish. “Phoebe keeps it in perfect order. It is swept and everything that wants it, rubbed once a week.” Her every letter was treasured and read aloud to the delight of all. When Mary called on John’s mother, to say she had come to read Abigail’s letters to her, the old lady replied, “Aya, I had rather hear that she is coming home.”

Abigail was to have no worries over her boys, wrote Elizabeth. “I shall always take unspeakable pleasure in serving them.” The Reverend John Shaw reported the progress being made under his tutelage and offered a benediction for John Adams: “May Heaven reward him for the sacrifices he has made, and for the extensive good he has done to his country.”

It still took two to three months for letters to cross the ocean, sometimes longer, but the three sisters kept up their correspondence without cease. In her letters to Mary Cranch, Abigail was more inclined to share the details of her life and her innermost feelings, while with sister Elizabeth — and perhaps because the Reverend Shaw, too, would be reading what she wrote — she was often moved to evoke the creed they had been raised on in the Weymouth parsonage. “I am rejoiced to find my sons have been blessed with so large a share of health since my absence,” she told Elizabeth.

If they are wise they will improve . . . the bloom of their health in acquiring such a fund of learning and knowledge as may render them useful to themselves, and beneficial to society, the great purpose for which they were sent into the world. . . . To be good, and do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words.

“I wish I could give you some idea of the French ladies,” Nabby wrote to Elizabeth another time. “But it is impossible to do it by letter, I should absolutely be ashamed to write what I must if I tell you truths. There is not a subject in nature that they will not talk upon. . . . I sometimes think myself fortunate in not understanding the language.”

III

FOR ABIGAIL AND JOHN it was the long-dreamed-of chance to enjoy life together again, as husband and wife in a world at peace, and removed from the contentiousness and stress of politics at home, that made the time in France an interlude such as they had never known. No more wars and no more separations became their common creed. With Nabby and John full-grown and the best of companions, they could all four come and go together, do so much that had never been possible before, delighting in each other’s company, indeed preferring it.

To compound the pleasure and stimulation of the new life, there was the bonus of Jefferson and the flourishing of a friendship that under normal circumstances at home would most likely never have happened. The vast differences between Jefferson and Adams, in nature and outlook, were as great as ever; and much had happened in Jefferson’s life since 1776 to change him. But brought together as they were in Paris, in just these years between one revolution and another, none of them knowing what was over the horizon for France or their own country, or for any of them individually, the bonds that grew were exceptional. None of them would think of Paris ever again without thoughts of the other.

In addition to the time he spent working with Adams, Jefferson dined at Auteuil repeatedly, almost from the day the family moved in, and they in turn with him in Paris, once he was settled in a rented house in what was called the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout, near the Opéra. John Quincy, with Jefferson’s encouragement, came to regard Jefferson’s quarters as his own private refuge when in the city, and struck up friendships with Jefferson’s two young aides, Colonel David Humphreys and William Short. The interest Jefferson showed in John Quincy pleased the young man exceedingly and was not lost on his parents. “He appeared to me as much your boy as mine,” Adams would remind Jefferson fondly in later years.

“Dined at Mr. Jefferson’s” became a familiar entry in John Quincy’s diary. “In afternoon, went . . . to Paris, Mr. Jefferson’s.” “Spent evening with Mr. Jefferson, whom I love to be with.”

One afternoon in September the Adams family, Jefferson, and “eight or ten thousand” others attended one of the celebrated Paris spectacles of the time, a balloon ascension from the Tuileries Gardens. “Came home and found Mr. Jefferson again,” Nabby would record another day. “He is an agreeable man.”

When Arthur Lee wrote to tell John Adams that Jefferson’s supposed genius was in fact mediocre, his affectation great, his vanity greater, and warned Adams to judge carefully how much he confided in Jefferson, Adams would have none of it, replying, “My new partner is an old friend . . . whose character I studied nine or ten years ago, and which I do not perceive to be altered. . . . I am very happy with him.”

For Adams so much had changed about the atmosphere in which he lived and worked that it was as if Paris had become an entirely different place, and he, a different man. There were none of the intense pressures and uncertainties of his previous years in Europe. With his family about him, with John Quincy serving as his secretary, he was perfectly at ease, never lonely. “If you and your daughter were with me,” he had once written to Abigail from Paris, “I could keep up my spirits.” And he was as good as his word: his pleasure in her company was palpable to all. “He professes himself so much happier having his family with him, that I feel amply gratified in having ventured across the ocean,” Abigail wrote to her sister Elizabeth. Nothing, it seems, upset him. Not even Franklin bothered him anymore. The old man had become too afflicted with age and the agonies of his ailments, “too much an object of compassion, to be one of resentment,” Adams noted. And the pleasure of working with Jefferson stood in such vivid contrast to the ill will and dark suspicions Adams had had to contend with when dealing with Arthur Lee. As Abigail would confide to Jefferson, there had seldom been anyone in her husband’s life with whom he could associate with such “perfect freedom and unreserve,” and this meant the world to her. Jefferson, she wrote, was “one of the choice ones of the earth.”

She was charmed by his perfect manners, his manifold interests and breadth of reading, and, though she did not say it in so many words, by the attention he paid to her. Knowledge of the repeated tragedies that had befallen him also strongly affected her, as others. That Jefferson had vowed, as he told his family, to “keep what I feel to myself,” only made him a more interesting and sympathetic figure, and particularly to those, like Abigail and John, who had known heartbreak themselves.

IN THE YEARS SINCE JEFFERSON and John Adams had last seen one another in Philadelphia, Jefferson had suffered the loss of two children — an unnamed infant son who died two weeks after his birth, and a baby girl, Lucy Elizabeth, who died in 1781, at age four-and-a-half months. Then, on September 6, 1782, at Monticello, the worst day of Jefferson’s life, his wife Martha had died at age thirty-three, apparently from complications following the birth in the previous spring of still another child, a second Lucy Elizabeth.

As the story was related to the Adamses, Jefferson had been led from his wife’s deathbed all but insensible with grief and for weeks kept to his room, pacing back and forth, seeing no one but his daughter Patsy. He “confined himself from the world,” Nabby wrote in her journal, and then for weeks afterward, as Patsy herself would relate, he “rode out . . . incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountains,” she still his constant companion and “solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.”

At thirty-nine, Jefferson had been left a widower with three young children, his political career over, he thought, his political ambitions dissolved.

In the years immediately after his return from Philadelphia, his influence and accomplishments as a member of the Virginia General Assembly had been second to none. He had labored steadily, revising laws, writing legislation to eliminate injustices and set the foundation for a “well-ordered” republican government. And to a degree he had succeeded, although one of his proudest achievements, a bill for the establishment of religious freedom, a subject of extreme controversy, was not passed by the legislature until several years hence, after he departed for France.

Jefferson was infrequently at Williamsburg, however. His principal work, the revising and writing of laws, was carried on at Monticello, where he remained more or less in isolation, absorbed in his “darling pleasures,” as his friend John Page said — with continuing work on his house, gardens, and orchards, his scholarly pursuits, management of the plantation, and the interests of his family. In February 1778, when Adams and John Quincy were bound for France aboard the Boston, Jefferson was placing orders for another 90,000 bricks, and overseeing the first planting of peas for the year and several varieties of fruit trees.

He had seen nothing of the war. Its principal adverse effects on his way of life were spiraling inflation, and the loss of twenty-two of his slaves who ran off in the hope of joining the British side and gaining their freedom. Any connection he had with the larger struggle was through correspondence. His only contact with the enemy was with prisoners. When 4,000 British and Hessian troops who had surrendered at Saratoga were marched to Charlottesville to be quartered outside of the town, Jefferson arranged for proper housing for the officers on neighboring plantations and saw no reason not to offer his friendship and hospitality. Indeed, he took delight in having such welcome additions to his social circle. One Hessian officer would write warmly that while all Virginians were apparently fond of music, Jefferson and his wife were particularly so. “You will find in his house an elegant harpsichord, pianoforte, and some violins. The latter he performs well upon himself. . . .” Possibly, John and Abigail Adams learned of this while in Paris. In any event, for them to have entertained the enemy under their own roof while war raged would have been unthinkable.

But the detachment Jefferson enjoyed from the war had ended abruptly in the spring of 1779 when the Virginia Assembly chose him to succeed Patrick Henry as the wartime governor, a role he disliked and that was to prove the low point of his public career, as probably he foresaw. Only weeks later he was writing that the day of his retirement could not come soon enough. He had no background or interest in military matters. Furthermore, the real political power was not in the office of the governor, but in the Assembly, as Jefferson himself, distrusting executive authority, had helped to establish. After the rarefied life at Monticello, the everyday confusion, endless paperwork and frustrations of administering a state at war — trying to cope with inflation, taxes, allocations of money and supplies — was torturous and only grew worse.

In the first of two one-year terms, he and his family lived as had his colonial counterparts in the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg, a stone’s throw from the home of George Wythe, where Jefferson had once boarded and read law. In the second term, when the capital was moved further inland to the struggling hamlet of Richmond, he, Martha, and the children occupied a rented house there and again lived in style. But it was his bad luck to be governor in one of the darkest times of the war, as the British shifted their campaign South. Word that Charleston had fallen reached him only days after his reelection. During that summer of 1780 came the humiliating rout at Camden. Virginia troops performed badly, but the defeat meant also the loss of precious cannon, wagons, tents, and muskets. Called on for reinforcements, Virginia could only send unarmed men. Enlistments were down, the state treasury empty.

Jefferson did what he could, and, by his own assessment, was ineffectual. By September he found his duties “so excessive,” his execution of them “so imperfect,” he would have retired but for the urging of friends. Then early in 1781 the British invaded Virginia. The traitor Benedict Arnold led a sudden, daring raid on Richmond, and with the advance of spring, the British under Cornwallis swept through the state almost at will, scattering the legislature to the hills and very nearly capturing the governor.

The Assembly had withdrawn to Charlottesville, theoretically safe from Cornwallis. Jefferson was at Monticello once more, his long-desired retirement scheduled to begin in a few days, as he informed George Washington in a letter of May 28. His term as governor expired on Saturday, June 2.

At sunrise, Monday, June 4, a lone horseman came pounding up the mountain to warn Jefferson that British cavalry were on the way to capture him and the legislature. Captain Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia had made a wild, forty-mile ride through the night. His face was cut and streaked with blood, where it had been lashed by low-hanging branches. Had it not been for a nearly full moon, he might not have arrived in time.

Reportedly, a calm, cheerfully hospitable Jefferson insisted that Jouett have a glass of his best Madeira before continuing on to Charlottesville. “I ordered a carriage to be readied to carry off my family,” Jefferson would write in his account of the morning. Remaining behind, he spent another several hours gathering up papers and making sure the silver and china were hidden away. It was only when he saw by telescope that the streets of Charlottesville in the valley below were filled with British soldiers that he at last mounted his horse and took off through the woods, narrowly escaping the detachment of cavalry that arrived on the mountaintop only minutes later.

The British left Monticello untouched, but at another of Jefferson’s farms, known as Elk Hill, where Cornwallis made his headquarters, they burned barns, crops, and fences, slaughtered sheep and hogs, carried off horses, cut the throats of horses too young for service, and took away with them some thirty slaves.

To have fled as he did had been Jefferson’s only realistic recourse, but it had cost him in reputation. He was accused by political enemies of having taken flight in panic, of abandoning his duties in the face of the British — as if by allowing himself to be captured, he would have somehow better served his country.

The Assembly had also fled west over the Blue Ridge to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley, but when the House of Delegates reconvened in Staunton on June 12, a young member named George Nicholas called for an inquiry into the conduct of Thomas Jefferson. No specific charge was made, and by the year’s end, after Jefferson appeared before the House to defend his actions, he was officially cleared of any blame.

For someone of his extreme sensitivity, it was a painful ordeal. As he told his friend James Monroe, he had suffered “a wound in my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”

Word that Jefferson had been taken captive by the British spread rapidly and as far as Europe, where it had so distressed John Adams. In fact, Jefferson and his family had headed south to the seclusion of Poplar Forest, his other, more remote plantation in Bedford County. There they remained for six weeks, during which Jefferson, in a fall from his horse, shattered his left wrist. To occupy himself, through what had become as low a time as he had known, he began making notes in answer to a series of questions sent by a French aristocrat, the Barté-Martois, on the state of Virginia, notes that would one day be published as a book, Jefferson’s first and only book.

When at summer’s end he was asked to become one of the peace commissioners in Europe, he declined, telling friend and kinsman Edmund Randolph in a letter from Monticello, “[I] have retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will ever more separate me.” A month later, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown to the combined American and French forces under Washington and Rochambeau.

Approaching Monticello by horseback afterward, an officer from Rochambeau’s army, the Marquis de Chastellux, saw the great house “shining alone” on its summit, and described how, arriving on top, he found the “Sage” of Monticello wholly “retired from the world and public business.”

Several days in Jefferson’s company disappeared like minutes, Chastellux later wrote. They talked of art, literature, and natural history, as work on the house continued about them. The clutter and racket of construction were hardly the tranquil setting one would imagine for a sage, but Chastellux thought the house admirably unlike anything he had seen in his American travels. Of Martha Jefferson, then in the ninth month of pregnancy, he wrote only that she was “mild and amiable,” which, regrettably, was no more than conventional compliments for the woman about whom so very little was ever recorded.

With the death of Martha less than five months later, everything changed. In a letter to Chastellux, Jefferson described himself as emerging from a “stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she. . . .” He had lost all interest in Monticello, believing he could never be happy there again. But before the year was out, Congress again called for him to go to France — an idea set in motion by his close political ally, James Madison — and this time Jefferson accepted at once. When the assignment was postponed and the Virginia General Assembly (again at Madison’s request) chose him as a delegate to Congress, he readily accepted that, too, and served six months, though always with an eye on France and what was happening there.

Madison, who had never met John Adams, reported to Jefferson that Adams’s letters to Congress from France revealed nothing so much as his vanity, his prejudice against the French Court, and “venom” against Franklin. When Jefferson learned that Adams was again to collaborate with Franklin at Paris, he was incredulous and in a coded letter to Madison offered a private view of Adams that was anything but an unqualified endorsement. He was at a loss even to imagine how Adams might behave in any negotiation, Jefferson wrote, and likened Adams to a poisonous weed.

He hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere? His vanity is a lineament in his character which had entirely escaped me. His want of taste I had observed. Notwithstanding all this he has a sound head on substantial points, and I think he has integrity. I am glad therefore that he is of the commission and expect he will be useful in it. His dislike of all parties, and all men, by balancing his prejudices, may give the same fair play to his reason as would a general benevolence of temper. At any rate honesty may be expected even from poisonous weeds.

No sooner was Jefferson named by Congress, in May 1784, to replace John Jay at Paris, than he was ready to go. Talk of retirement to Monticello was heard no more. He had not time even to return to Virginia to say goodbye to his two small children, six-year-old Polly and Lucy Elizabeth, now two, who had been left in the care of his wife’s sister, Elizabeth Eppes. He gathered up Patsy, who had been living and studying in Philadelphia and, with the young servant James Hemings, was on his way to Boston and ultimately to Paris.

To John Adams, Jefferson’s presence in Paris was a godsend. The Virginian seemed entirely his old self, in ability and in his devotion to their common tasks as commissioners. “Jefferson is an excellent hand. You could not have sent a better,” Adams wrote in December to Elbridge Gerry, the spirit of his observations markedly different from what Jefferson had written privately of him.

He appears to me to be infected with no party passions or national prejudices, or any partialities, but for his own country. . . . Since our meeting upon our new commissions, our affairs have gone on with utmost harmony and nothing has happened to disturb our peace. I wish this calm will continue and believe it will.

In a letter to Henry Knox, Adams wrote proudly, “You can scarcely have heard a character[ization] too high of my friend and colleague, Mr. Jefferson, either in point of power or virtues. . . . I only fear that his unquenchable thirst for knowledge may injure his health.”

• • •

THAT JEFFERSON WAS OFTEN ILL during their time with him in France was of great concern to the Adamses, though Jefferson himself gamely dismissed it as no more than the “seasoning” required of all newly arrived strangers to the country. But privately, Jefferson, now forty-one, told Abigail he did not expect to live more than a dozen years longer.

When feeling fit, which was much of the time, he was out and about, and as before in Philadelphia, proved an irrepressible shopper. At first chance he bought a new dress sword, silver forks and spoons, candlesticks, wine, violin strings, the model of a hydraulic engine, every purchase recorded in his tidy accounts. He bought new French clothes for himself — French lace cuffs, French shirts and lace ruffles, French gloves — new clothes for Patsy, new clothes for James Hemings, whom he put on regular wages.

The young man had been Jefferson’s personal servant from the time Jefferson was governor of Virginia. He was nineteen years old, the son of a slave named Betty Hemings, who had belonged previously to Jefferson’s late father-in-law, John Wayles, who reportedly was James’s father — which, if true, meant that James was Jefferson’s own half-brother-in-law. Since slavery was forbidden in France, James was to be quietly considered a free man for the time being. He would be apprenticed to one of the finest chefs in Paris, that he might one day bring the haute cuisine of France home to Monticello.

Jefferson was still in arrears — the income from his operations at Monticello and his other farms failed to cover his debts — and, like the Adamses, he fretted that his salary was insufficient for the manner in which he was expected to live, and to which, unlike the Adamses, he was long accustomed.

In matters of economy, as in other aspects of his life, Jefferson did not practice what he preached. He would insist to his daughter Patsy that she keep to the rule of “never buying anything which you have not the money in your pocket to pay for,” and warned that “pain to the mind” of debt was greater by far than having to do without “any article whatever which we may seem to want.” Yet this was hardly how he lived. A chronic acquirer, Jefferson is not known to have ever denied himself anything he wished in the way of material possessions or comforts. Once settled in Paris, he never held back, spending for example, more than 200 francs for an initial stock of fifty-nine bottles of Bordeaux — 200 francs being the equivalent of three months’ wages for the average French worker.

The rented house on the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout was smaller than he liked and would not long satisfy, as he already foresaw; all the same, he proceeded to remodel two rooms and spent half his salary buying more and finer furniture than needed. He rented a pianoforte, hired six additional servants. A chariot he fancied wound up costing 15,000 francs by the time repairs were made and it had been fitted out as he wished with green morocco leather.

With the United States behind on payments on its loans, Jefferson found Paris bankers reluctant to advance him sufficient sums to cover his expenses. In distress, he turned to Adams, who arranged a loan with banks in Amsterdam, as Adams had on occasion for his own expenses. Later, unable to repay the advance, Jefferson would turn to private creditors and go still deeper in debt.

Like Adams, Jefferson wrote repeatedly to friends at home and in Congress, urging that the commissioners’ salaries be raised to a realistic level. That the Adamses were able to make ends meet as they did, Jefferson attributed to what he regarded as an extremely “plain” style of life, and even more to Abigail’s management of expenses. As Jefferson would explain in a letter to George Washington, John Adams had the advantage of being “under the direction of Mrs. Adams, one of the most estimable characters on earth, and the most attentive and honorable economists.”

Yet at no point did Jefferson’s financial plight slow his spendthrift ways. Faithfully, almost obsessively, he kept recording every purchase and expenditure, but it was as if somehow he could never bring himself to add up the columns. At home, in his voluminous farm records, he never in his life added up the profit and loss for any year, and perhaps for the reason that there was almost never any profit.

On principle, Jefferson abhorred cities and their teeming throngs, quite as much as he abhorred debt. The mobs of great cities were like cancerous sores, he had written in his book on Virginia, a state entirely without cities. Nonetheless, he showed no interest now to live as Franklin and Adams did in semirural retreat outside Paris, where the panoramic views over the Seine were more like what he was accustomed to at home, and where the rent was appreciably less. He would reside by choice in the heart of the city his entire time in France, openly delighting in so much that was not to be found in Virginia. He relished all that Paris offered in the way of luxurious shopping, architecture, painting, music, theater, the finest food, the best wine, and the most cultivated society in his experience — never mind what he may have written about cities or the expenses he incurred.

Paris booksellers soon found they had an American patron like no other. In the bookshops and stalls along the Seine were volumes in numbers and variety such as Jefferson had never seen, and his pleasure was boundless. To Madison he would describe the surpassing pleasure of “examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand and putting by everything related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable to every science.” There were weeks when he was buying books every day. In his first month in Paris, he could not buy them fast enough, and ran up bills totaling nearly 800 francs. Nor was the book-buying spree to end. The grand total of books he acquired in France was about 2,000, but he also bought books by the boxful for Washington, Franklin, and James Madison.

With the purchase of works of art, he was tentative at first, buying only two “small laughing busts,” as he recorded, then a plaster statue of Hercules and two portraits that he itemized only as “heads.” Then, in a spasm of bidding at an estate auction, he bought five mostly religious paintings, including a large Herodias Bearing the Head of Saint John, which, like some of the others, was a copy, in this case of a popular work by Guido Reni. Before he was finished, Jefferson would buy sixty-three paintings in France as well as seven terra-cotta busts for 1,100 livres by the greatest sculptor of the day, Jean-Antoine Houdon, whom, at the request of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson also commissioned to do a life-size statue of George Washington.

Devoted to chess, eager to try his skill with some of the expert players of Paris, Jefferson found his way to a chess club, but was so decisively beaten in several games that he never went back.

Though he could read French well enough, Jefferson was never to speak the language with the fluency Adams attained. Further, he was considerably more disapproving of the outspokenness and apparent promiscuity of French women than ever Adams had been. While Adams, on first arriving in Paris, had reported to Abigail how much he admired the Frenchwomen he met — for their accomplishments, education, their views on serious matters — Jefferson felt that the decadent state of government in France was owing in good part to the influence of such women.

He had at once placed twelve-year-old Patsy in the most fashionable and most expensive convent school in Paris, the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont on the Left Bank, where to Protestant students, he was assured, no word was ever spoken of religion, but where presumably she would be safe from social influences he thought wholly unsuitable for her.

She wore a crimson uniform and was soon speaking French better than her father, who visited her frequently, enjoying the walk over the Seine by the Pont Neuf. One morning in October, Jefferson, Adams, Abigail, John Quincy, and Nabby went together to the convent to see two young nuns take the veil in a ceremony that Nabby would describe in her diary as an “affecting sight” for all. “I could not refrain from tears; everyone seemed affected.”

Jefferson’s devotion to his daughter, his obvious pleasure in her company and her equally obvious devotion to him, were to the Adamses greatly to his credit. “She is a sweet girl, delicacy and sensibility are read in every feature,” Nabby wrote of Patsy, “and her manners are in unison with all that is amiable and lovely; she is very young.” Tall for her age and freckled, she was commonly said to resemble her father.

With the onset of winter, Jefferson took ill again. He was confined to the house for six weeks. Sunshine was his great physician, he liked to say, and there was too little of it in Paris.

Then, in the last week of January, came crushing news from Virginia. His two-year-old daughter, Lucy, had died of whooping cough. Of six children, now only two remained alive. The shadow of his unspeakable sorrow fell on everyone around him. The whole Adams household was in mourning. Jefferson, as so often in his life, retreated into silence and went on with his work.

IV

TO THE DIPLOMATIC TASKS at hand, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, the old Revolutionary trio, gave due attention, working steadily and in easy accord. “We proceed with wonderful harmony, in good humor, and unanimity,” acknowledged Adams, whose sole complaint was a gnawing feeling of “inutility.” The issues before them were commercial treaties with the nations of Europe, but it was extremely slow, unexciting work and with no notable progress. The new independent United States faced commercial barriers everywhere, while desperately in need of markets for American surpluses. The American position was free trade, but very little interest was shown.

With Franklin confined to his quarters at Passy, most of the commissioners’ working sessions were held there. They carried on correspondence, drew up reports, and, as obliged, appeared each Tuesday at the King’s levee at Versailles, where afterward they dined with the Comte de Vergennes and the rest of the diplomatic corps. “It is curious to see forty or fifty ambassadors, ministers or other strangers of the first fashion from all the nations of Europe, assembling in the most amicable manner and conversing in the same language,” wrote Jefferson’s aide, Colonel Humphreys. “What heightens the pleasure is their being universally men of unaffected manners and good dispositions.”

The three American commissioners tried not to get discouraged. But as Jefferson observed, “There is a want of confidence in us.” Ultimately, for all their efforts, only one commercial treaty would be negotiated, that with Prussia.

Writing to a correspondent at home, Adams said philosophically, “Public life is like a long journey, in which we have immense tracks of waste countries to pass through for a very few grand and beautiful prospects. At present, I scarcely see a possibility of doing anything for the public worth the expense of maintaining me in Europe.”

An equitable trade agreement with Britain was much the most important and pressing objective. But British-American relations had been strained since the Paris Peace Treaty, and the British remained maddeningly obdurate until that winter, when the commissioners were informed that His Majesty’s government would welcome an American minister to “reside constantly” at the Court of St. James’s. It seemed a hopeful shift in tide, but as such a matter could be decided only by Congress, the inevitable wait began.

In letters to Congress stressing the need for an envoy to Britain, Adams neither offered recommendations nor said anything of his own feelings, as ardently as he wanted the assignment. To Abigail there was no question that he would be chosen — it was his “destiny,” she told Mary Cranch — and she was equally unambiguous about Jefferson’s fitness for his role in France. Jefferson, she assured Cotton Tufts, was “an excellent man . . . and will do honor to his country.”

In marked contrast to both Franklin and Jefferson, Adams remained the picture of health. He had rarely ever looked or felt better. And indeed, life for the Adams family had settled into a routine which, if unspectacular, seemed to agree with all of them. Together almost constantly, they enjoyed a contentment such as they had seldom known.

Their days began early. With breakfast finished, weather permitting, John and John Quincy customarily set off for a five- or six-mile walk in the Bois de Boulogne before getting down to work. At two in the afternoon the family gathered for dinner. Most afternoons Adams was at Passy with Franklin and Jefferson. Tea was usually at five, by which time it was dark. In the evenings the family convened in the second-floor sitting room, to read or play cards, except for John Quincy, who was at his studies again, it having been agreed that he would return home soon to enter Harvard. Many nights Adams worked with him, happily playing the schoolmaster again and with his star pupil.

At seventeen the boy was extraordinarily accomplished. In his seven years away from home and from conventional schooling, he had benefited immeasurably from his father’s interest and encouragement. His travels, his reading, the time spent in the company of men like Francis Dana and Thomas Jefferson had given him a maturity, made him conversant on a breadth of subjects that people found astonishing. He had already seen more of Europe and Russia than any American of his generation. His French was virtually perfect. He was broadly read in English and Roman history. “If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior,” wrote Adams proudly to the boy’s former tutor and guardian at Leyden, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse.

He has translated Virgil’s Aeneid . . . the whole of Sallust and Tacitus’ Agricola . . . a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar’s Commentaries . . . besides Tully’s [Cicero’s] Orations. . . .

In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet he has studied morsels of Aristotle’s Politics, in Plutarch’s Lives, and Lucian’s Dialogues, The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer’s Iliad.

In mathematics I hope he will pass muster. In the course of the last year . . . I have spent my evenings with him. We went with some accuracy through the geometry in the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson’s Euclid in Latin. . . . We went through plane geometry . . . algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions. . . . I then attempted a sublime flight and endeavored to give him some idea of the differential method of calculations . . . [and] Sir Isaac Newton; but alas, it is thirty years since I thought of mathematics.

The picture of father and son, heads together at a table, absorbed in their work, brought Abigail satisfaction of a kind she had been long denied. “The table is covered with mathematical instruments and books, and you hear nothing ‘til nine o’clock but of theorem and problems bisecting and dissecting tangents and se[quents],” she recorded one evening at Auteuil, “after which we are often called upon to relieve their brains by a game of whist.”

By Nabby’s account, “Pappa’s hour” for bed was ten o’clock, after which she and John Quincy would have “a little conversation among themselves.” “We see but little company, and visit much less,” wrote Nabby, who found Auteuil less sociable than she desired. Still in a quandary over Royall Tyler, she had had almost no word from him, and while John Quincy’s plans seemed neatly resolved, hers were not.

No one liked the thought of John Quincy leaving. “I feel very loath to part with my son and shall miss him more than I can express,” Abigail wrote to her sister Mary. But “Master John” was now also “a man in most respects, all I may say but age,” and it was his wish to go home.

She herself felt waves of extreme homesickness. A heavy snow falling over Paris filled her with emotion because it “looked so American.” “What a sad misfortune it is to have the body in one place and the soul in another,” she told Mary. The time in France had made her love her own country more than ever. And from the little experience she had had making the adjustment to foreign ways, and foreign speech, from what she knew now that she had not before of the intricacies and difficulties of diplomacy, she wondered how in the world “Mr. Adams” had ever “lived through the perplexing scenes he has had to encounter.” Her regard for her country and for her husband had never been greater.

But of all that Abigail wrote of life en famille in the house at Auteuil, perhaps the most memorable vignette was in a letter to her niece Lucy Cranch, dated January 5, 1785. Describing a festive scene at the dinner table, she managed to capture much that was essential about each of them, including herself, but of her Mr. Adams in particular.

You must know that the religion of this country requires [an] abundance of feasting and fasting, and each person has his particular saint, as well as each calling and occupation. Tomorrow is to be celebrated le jour des rois. The day before this feast it is customary to make a large paste pie, into which one bean is put. Each person cuts his slice, and the one who is so lucky as to obtain the bean is dubbed king or queen. Accordingly, today, when I went in to dinner, I found one upon our table.

Your cousin Nabby began by taking the first slice; but alas! poor girl, no bean and no queen. In the next place, your cousin John seconded her by taking a larger cut, and as cautious as cousin T__ when he inspects merchandise, bisected his paste with mathematical circumspection; but to him it pertained not. By this time I was ready for my part; but first I declared that I had no cravings for royalty. I accordingly separated my piece with much firmness, nowise disappointed that it fell not to me.

Your uncle, who was all this time picking his chicken bone, saw us divert ourselves without saying anything. But presently he seized the remaining half, and to crumbs went the poor paste, cut here and slash there; when behold, the bean! “And thus,” said he, “are kingdoms obtained!” But the servant who stood by and saw the havoc, declared solemnly that he could not retain the title, as the laws decreed it to chance, and not to force.

WHEN DURING THAT SPRING of 1785 Queen Marie Antoinette gave birth to a son, the Duke of Normandy, a Te Deum was sung in thanks at Notre Dame, with the King himself taking part. As intended, it was one of the grandest occasions of the reign of Louis XVI and his Queen, and the four Adamses and Thomas Jefferson, along with everyone of fashion in Paris, were in attendance. Of the spectacles the Americans beheld in Paris, this was surpassing and would be recalled for years afterward, when such memories of France had become part of a vanished world.

The crowds en route to the cathedral were greater than any they had ever seen in their lives. Jefferson speculated to Nabby that there were as many people in the streets as in all of Massachusetts.

“There was but just space sufficient for the carriages to pass along,” wrote John Quincy, “and had there not been guards placed on both sides at a distance not greater than ten yards from one another, there would have been no passage at all for the coaches. For as it was, the troops had the utmost difficulty to restrain the mob.”

Thanks to Madame Lafayette, they were seated in a gallery overlooking the choir, “as good a place as any in the church,” thought John Quincy, who in a long description of the spectacle in his diary demonstrated that besides being precociously erudite, he had learned, as his father urged, to observe the world around him and was well started on becoming an accomplished writer. He described the Parliament lined up to the right side of the choir, robed in scarlet and black, the Chambre des Comptes on the left, in robes of black and white; the bishops arriving two by two, “a purple kind of mantle over their shoulders,” the Archbishop of Paris, “a mitre upon his head,” and finally the arrival of the King.

. . . and as soon as his Majesty had got to his place and fallen upon his knees, they began to sing the Te Deum, which lasted half an hour, and in which we heard some exceeding fine music.

. . . What a charming sight: an absolute king of one of the most powerful empires on earth, and perhaps a thousand of the first personages of that empire, adoring the divinity who created them, and acknowledging that He can in a moment reduce them to the dust from which they spring.

Another day he wrote of the show of fashion and wealth at Longchamps in the Bois de Boulogne during the week before Easter.

There are perhaps each of these days a thousand carriages that come out of Paris to go round and round one of the roads in the wood one after another. There are two rows of carriages, one goes up and the other down so that the people in every carriage can see all the others. Everybody that has got a splendid carriage, a fine set of horses, or an elegant mistress, send them out on these days to make a show at Longchamps.

After so many years of living and traveling in Europe, the prospect of returning to “the pale of college” was more than a little discouraging to the boy. But like his father, he was “determined that as long as I shall be able to get my own living in an honorable manner, I will depend on no one.

My father has been so much taken up all his lifetime with the interests of the public that his own fortune has suffered by it. So that his children will have to provide for themselves, which I will never be able to do if I loiter away my precious time in Europe.

With the return of fair weather in April, life picked up. Jefferson, his health recovered, became notably sociable and by choice spent part of nearly every day with some or all of the Adamses. For all that would be said later of Jefferson’s love of the French and regard for the philosophes, he clearly preferred to be with the Adamses whenever possible. His pleasure in Abigail’s company was overflowing and delighted her, while Franklin, as she wrote, was “vastly social and civil.” She loved the feeling of being included at the center of things, in much the way she had felt while dining on board the French warships in Boston Harbor.

ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 26, Jefferson rode out from Paris to deliver a letter that had just arrived from Elbridge Gerry informing Adams that he had been named minister to the Court of St. James’s. It was requested that he be in London no later than the King’s birthday on June 4.

Within days Jefferson learned that he was indeed to replace Franklin as minister to France, and it was with considerable sadness that Jefferson and the Adamses realized the end was at hand to a time like none other they had known. Nobody said goodbye to Paris without some sadness, Abigail was told. Gone from her writing were accounts of the dirt and dissipations of the French. Instead, she regretted leaving for the harsher climate of London, regretted leaving her garden, regretted especially the loss of Jefferson’s society.

John Adams, too, for all his ambition to serve in London, seemed anything but eager to leave the setting of such sustained contentment. “I shall find nowhere so fine a little hill, so pleasant a garden, so noble a forest and such pure air and tranquil walks, as at Auteuil,” he wrote to Richard Cranch. “I shall part with Mr. Jefferson with great regret.”

Adams took his new assignment with utmost seriousness, rightly confident that he had given as much thought to British-American relations, and issues of war and peace, as had any American. What “friendly and decent terms” could be achieved in the next few years would be crucial for both nations.

Concerned about protocol in London, worried how he might be received, dreading the thought of people staring at him, he turned for advice to the British ambassador to France, the Duke of Dorset, whom he liked and trusted. In his diary afterward Adams recorded the essence of the conversation:

He said that Lord Carmarthen was their Minister of Foreign Affairs, that I must first wait on him, and he would introduce me to his Majesty. . . . I asked Lord Carmarthen’s age. He said 33. He said I should be stared at a great deal. I told him I trembled at the thought of going there. I was afraid they would gaze with evil eyes.

When another diplomat, assuming that Adams welcomed the change in assignment, remarked that no doubt Adams had a number of relatives in England, Adams took offense. No, he declared, he had no relatives there. “I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.” Writing to Mercy Warren earlier, Adams had said emphatically that he was no John Bull, he was John Yankee, “and such shall I live and die.”

At Versailles, in parting conversation with the Comte de Vergennes, Adams listened as Vergennes grandly told him that it was, of course, a step down to go from the Court of France to any other court, even if a “great thing to be the first ambassador from your country to the country you sprang from!”

When Jefferson called on the aging Foreign Minister, he demonstrated perfectly why he would be so welcome at the French Court.

“You replace Mr. Franklin, I hear,” said Vergennes.

“I succeed,” said Jefferson. “No one can replace him.”

What passed between Adams and Franklin at their final parting was not recorded. Doubtless both were perfectly cordial. There would be further work to transact between them, further correspondence to maintain. But it was the last time they were ever to see one another.

At the house at Auteuil, everyone began packing. In the second week of May, John Quincy set off for Lorient, on the first leg of the long journey home to America. He would sail on a French packet and, as part of his passage, was to look after a gift from Lafayette to George Washington of seven hunting dogs.

THE FINAL DEPARTURE OF JOHN, Abigail, and Nabby from the house at Auteuil, the afternoon of May 20, 1785, was wrenching for everyone present. The servants whom Abigail had once found such a trial clustered about the carriage in tears. When she requested that her songbird be put inside the carriage with her, it fluttered so frantically in its cage that she had to give it up to her chambermaid, and it was on that melancholy note the family departed for Calais.

“We journeyed slowly and sometimes silently,” Abigail wrote to Jefferson. John passed the time en route to the Channel reading the book Jefferson had presented as a parting gift, his own Notes on the State of Virginia, one of two hundred copies he had had privately printed in Paris. The book, Adams would write to Jefferson, was “our meditation all the day long,” implying that he had been reading it aloud to Abigail and Nabby as they rolled toward Calais. The passages on slavery, said Adams, were “worth diamonds.”

Alone at his desk at Poplar Forest, where more than a hundred slaves labored in the fields beyond his window, Jefferson had written one of the most impassioned denunciations of his life, decrying slavery as an extreme depravity:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions [Jefferson had written], the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. . . . if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is to be born to live and labor for another . . . or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. . . . Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Continuing, Jefferson offered as “a suspicion only” that blacks were inferior to whites in both mind and body. “Their inferiority,” he wrote, “is not the effect merely of their condition of life. . . . It is not their condition . . . but nature, which has produced the distinction.” Besides their differences in color and hair, he noted, black people secreted less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, “which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.” They were “more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than whites. . . . more ardent after their female,” but love seemed with them “to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient . . . their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

What John and Abigail Adams may have thought of this from the man who had professed to believe that all men are created equal is not known.

“The departure of your family has left me in the dumps,” Jefferson wrote to Adams from Paris. “My afternoons hang heavily on me.”

Crossing the Channel on board the Dover packet days later, Abigail offered to share the family’s cabin with a desperately seasick young man who, in gratitude for her kindness, gave her two songbirds of his own. “As they were quite accustomed to traveling, I brought them here in safety, for which they happily repay me by their melodious notes,” she would write to Jefferson in her first letter from London, knowing his love of music.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LONDON

An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!

~ London Public Advertiser

I

HIS MAJESTY THE KING of England and the new American minister to the Court of St. James’s were not without common interests and notable similarities. Like John Adams, King George III was devoted to farming. Seldom was His Majesty happier than when inspecting his farms, or talking crops and Merino sheep with his farm workers at Windsor. Like Adams, the King had a passion for books. The difference, as with the farming, was mainly a matter of scale. His private library was one of the treasures of Britain. During Adams’s earlier stay in London, the American painter Benjamin West had arranged a tour of the royal quarters at Buckingham House, and for Adams the high point had been seeing the King’s library. He wished he could stay a week, Adams had said.

George III was to turn forty-seven on June 4, which made him two years younger than Adams, and though taller, he had a comparable “inclination to corpulence.” Like Adams, he was an early riser, often out of bed before five. He, too, kept to a rigorous schedule and was an exuberant talker. Adams would later say George III was the greatest talker he had ever known. He was obstinate, affectionate, devoted to his wife and children, who numbered fifteen — again it was a matter of scale. He was deeply religious and, like Adams, sincerely patriotic.

Yet for all they had in common, the principal difference between the two was vast and paramount. One was the King of England, the other a Yankee farmer’s son — John Yankee — who spoke now for an upstart nation the survival of which was anything but assured. Indeed, in England as in Europe it was generally thought that the experiment in democracy across the water had little chance of success.

With his appointment to the Court, Adams felt he had attained the pinnacle of his career, and, with the retirement of Franklin, he was now America’s most experienced diplomat. But from Elbridge Gerry he had learned that the appointment had come only after rancorous dispute in Congress, and that the central issue, as Gerry reported with blunt candor, was Adams’s vanity, his “weak passion.”

Gerry’s letter had arrived in the last days at Auteuil. Deeply hurt, Adams had written an extraordinary reply, a dissertation on the subject of vanity set forth in his clearest, plainest hand, as if intended for posterity as much as for Gerry. There were all kinds of vanity, Adams wrote — of material possessions, of physical appearance, of ribbons and titles — but there was also that which came from years spent in the service of other men, without attention to oneself, in the face of exhausting toil and at risk of life. This latter kind was a vanity, a pride, he knew. He had experienced that “joy,” and for him to deny it or try to conceal it would be rank hypocrisy:

If at times I have betrayed in word or writing such a sentiment, I have only to say in excuse for it that I am not a hypocrite, nor a cunning man, nor at all times wise, and that although I may be more cautious for the future, I will never be so merely to obtain the reputation of a cunning politician, a character I neither admire nor esteem.

Apologizing for the length of the letter, Adams added finally in a small hand at the bottom of the page, “When a man is hurt he loves to talk of his wounds.” But after further thought — and possibly on the advice of Abigail — he put the letter aside. It was never sent.

The old charge of vanity, the character flaw that Adams so often chastised himself for, had been made again, and on the floor of Congress, just as he was to assume his most important role. So now more than ever he felt bound to do all in his power to serve honorably, succumbing neither to vanity nor political craftiness.

On arrival in London, he went promptly as instructed to confer with young Lord Carmarthen. Informed that his private audience with the King was arranged for June 1, he began preparing himself for what he knew would be an occasion of historic importance for his country and one of the great events of his life. Told that he must deliver a brief speech before the King, and that it be as complimentary as possible, he worked and reworked what he would say until he knew it by heart.

OF THE TIMES when Adams felt himself uncomfortably alone at center stage, there were few to compare to the afternoon in London, when at the end of a short ride through the rain with Lord Carmarthen in his carriage, they approached the arched gatehouse at St. James’s Palace. Doors opened for them, Adams was led up a flight of stairs and down a hall to a room crowded with ministers of state, lords, bishops, and courtiers, all eyes on him as he and Carmarthen stood waiting outside the King’s bedchamber, which was not where the King slept, but a formal reception room.

When the door opened, they proceeded, Adams, as instructed, making three bows, or “reverences,” one on entering, another halfway, a third before “the presence.”

“The United States of America have appointed me their minister plenipotentiary to Your Majesty,” Adams began, nearly overcome by emotion.

“I felt more than I did or could express,” he later wrote. Before him, in the flesh, was the “tyrant” who, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, had plundered American seas and burned American towns, the monarch “unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” while to the King, he himself, Adams knew, could only be a despised traitor fit for the hangman’s noose.

“The appointment of a minister from the United States to Your Majesty’s Court will form an epoch in the history of England and of America,” he continued.

I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow-citizens, in having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty’s royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem my self the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more and more to your Majesty’s royal benevolence, and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood.

I beg your Majesty’s permission to add that although I have some time before been intrusted by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself.

Brief as it was, he got through the speech only with difficulty, his voice at times quaking, and the King, too, was greatly moved. “The King listened to every word I said, with dignity but with apparent emotion,” Adams would report to Foreign Secretary John Jay. “Whether it was in the nature of the interview, or whether it was my visible agitation, for I felt more than I did or could express, that touched him, I cannot say. But he was much affected, and answered me with more tremor than I had spoken with.

The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.

He could not vouch that these were the exact words, Adams cautioned in his letter to Jay, for the King’s manner of speaking had been so odd and strained. (It was Adams’s first encounter with the famous stutter of George III.) “He hesitated some time between his periods, and between the members of the same period. He was indeed much affected.”

Smiling, the King changed the subject. “There is an opinion among some people that you are not the most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of France,” he said.

Adams, embarrassed, replied, “I must avow to your Majesty, I have no attachment but to my own country.”

“An honest man will never have any other,” the King said approvingly, and with a bow signaled that the interview was ended.

I retreated [Adams wrote], stepping backwards, as is the etiquette, and, making my last reverence at the door of the chamber, I went my way. The Master of Ceremonies joined me . . . and accompanied me through the apartments down to my carriage, several stages of servants, gentlemen-porters, and under-porters roaring out like thunder as I went along, “Mr. Adams’ servants, Mr. Adams’ carriage.”

It had all gone superbly. Adams’s remarks had been graceful, dignified, appropriate, and, with the possible exception of his reference to “kindred blood,” altogether sincere. He had proven a diplomat of first rank, almost in spite of himself.

The King, too, had been the essence of courtesy and poise, as Adams later acknowledged. But any thought that the interview presaged an overall cordial welcome for the new minister was dashed soon enough by the London press, which dismissed the meeting as nothing more than a curious anecdote for future historians. “An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!” scoffed the Public Advertiser. The London Gazette expressed rank indignation at the very appointment of such a “character” as Adams to the Court. To the Daily Universal Register it had been a notably cool reception, while the Morning and Daily Advertiser described Adams as so pitifully embarrassed as to be tongue-tied.

Beneath the polite English surface lay burning animosity, surmised Abigail, who, like John, felt she was taking part in an elaborate stage play.

UNTIL A SUITABLE HOUSE could be found, the three Adamses were residing in the Bath Hotel in Piccadilly, where, after the quiet of Auteuil, the noise of the streets seemed horrendous. Abigail hated the thought of having to hire servants again and making the necessary domestic arrangements on her own. “I cannot bear to trouble Mr. Adams with anything of a domestic kind, who from morning until evening has sufficient to occupy all his time,” she wrote to her sister Mary. Still, she delighted in being once more where her own language was spoken. A performance of Handel’s Messiah at Westminster Abbey was “sublime beyond description,” she wrote to Jefferson. “I most sincerely wished for your presence, as your favorite passion would have received the highest gratification. I should have sometimes fancied myself amongst the higher order of beings.”

Three weeks after Adams’s private audience with the King came the Queen’s circle, or “drawing room.” This time all three of the family were to attend, as well as Colonel William Stephens Smith of New York, who had been appointed by Congress as secretary of the American legation and was also newly arrived in London. Smith had served with distinction in the Continental Army. At the battle of Long Island he had made the night withdrawal across the East River and later served on Washington’s staff. He was a graduate of the college at Princeton and, with his soldierly carriage and dark good looks, made a handsome addition to the group.

Days were consumed in preparation. She must look “elegant but plain as I could possibly appear with decency,” Abigail instructed her dressmaker. The dress she wore was of white silk trimmed with white crepe and lilac ribbon, over an enormous hoop. “A very dress cap with long lace lappets, two white plumes and a blonde lace handkerchief; this is my rigging,” she informed Mary in high spirits. “I should have mentioned two pearl pins in my hair, earrings and necklace of the same kind.” Nabby’s attire, too, was in white, only with a petticoat, “the most showy part,” and included a cap with three immense feathers.

Mother and daughter had seldom if ever looked so glorious. “Thus equipped we go in our own carriage,” wrote Abigail. “But I must quit my pen to put myself in order for the ceremony which begins at two o’clock.”

“Congratulate me, my dear sister, it is over,” she commenced the next installment, settling in to describe in detail and with wry humor all that had transpired, and leaving little doubt as to what she thought of such business overall, or whether she was capable of meeting the test, even if it meant four hours on her feet.

Of the English novelists, Abigail was especially fond of Samuel Richardson, whose popular works, Pamela and Clarissa, were tales told through the device of extended letters. Richardson, “master of the human heart,” had “done more towards embellishing the present age, and teaching them the talent of letter-writing, than any other modern I can name.” That her own outpouring of letters was influenced by Richardson, Abigail would have readily agreed. In Richardson’s hands events unfolded in letters written “to the moment,” as things happened. “My letters to you,” she would tell Mary, “are first thoughts, without correction.”

At the palace the Adamses were escorted to a large drawing room, where two hundred selected guests, including foreign diplomats and their wives, were arranged in a large circle. “The King enters the room and goes round to the right, the Queen and princesses to the left,” Abigail began her account for Mary.

Only think of the task the royal family have, to go round to every person and find small talk enough to speak to all of them. Though they very prudently speak in a whisper, so that only the person who stands next can hear what is said. . . . The Lord in Waiting presents you to the King and the Lady in Waiting does the same to Her Majesty. The King is a personable man, but my dear sister, he has a certain countenance which you and I have often remarked, a red face and white eyebrows. . . . When he came to me, Lord Onslow [Arthur Onslow, lord of the royal bedchamber] said, “Mrs. Adams,” upon which I drew off my right glove and His Majesty saluted my left cheek, then asked me if I had taken a walk today. I could have told His Majesty that I had been all morning preparing to wait upon him, but I replied, “No, Sire.” “Why don’t you love walking?” says he. I answered that I was rather indolent in that respect. He then bowed and passed on. It was more than two hours after this before it came my turn to be presented to the Queen. The circle was so large that the company were four hours standing. The Queen was evidently embarrassed when I was presented to her. I had disagreeable feelings, too. She, however, said, “Mrs. Adams, have you got your house? Pray how do you like the situation of it?” Whilst the Princess Royal [Charlotte Augusta Matilda, the oldest daughter of George III and Queen Charlotte] looked compassionate, and asked me if I was much fatigued, and observed that it was a very full drawing room. Her sister who came next, Princess Augusta, after having asked your niece if she was ever in England before, and her answering, “Yes,” inquired me how long ago, and supposed it was when she was very young. And all this is said with much affability and ease and freedom of old acquaintance.

The two princesses were quite pretty, “well shaped,” “heads full of diamonds.” Queen Charlotte, however, was neither pretty nor well shaped, and on the whole, Abigail told Mary, the ladies of the Court were “very plain, ill-shaped, and ugly, but don’t tell anybody that I say so.”

All things considered, the royal family was surprisingly affable, but certainly the life they led was not to be envied. Nor should anyone imagine that Abigail remained anything other than herself: “I could not help reflecting with myself during the ceremony, what a fool I do look like to be thus accoutered and stand for four hours together, only to be spoken to by ‘royalty.’”

THE SUITABLE HOUSE was found and, their furniture having arrived from France, the family moved to the quiet of Grosvenor Square in the West End. The tree-shaded square with its neat gravel walks covered five acres — exactly the size of the garden at Auteuil — and was framed by elegant town houses belonging to a number of London’s most eminent citizens, including Lord Carmarthen.

The house the Adamses rented — what became the first American legation in London — was No. 8, at the northeast corner. The front entrance opened onto a large hall. There was a dining room spacious enough for entertaining on the first floor and another ample room that Adams made his office for public business. Drawing room and library were on the floor above, bedrooms on the third floor. The kitchen was in the English basement, and a stable was to the rear. Once the servants were hired and in place “below stairs,” the staff consisted of Esther Field, now elevated to lady’s maid, a butler, a housemaid, a cook, a kitchen maid, two footmen (one of whom was John Briesler), and a coachman. This made a total of eight, as at Auteuil, and again Abigail would have preferred fewer who worked harder. Adams, after several weeks in residence, allowed that after so long in France he was “not so pleased” with English cookery.

But these were quibbles. The house suited perfectly. For Adams the location was ideal. Abigail had a small room of her own with a view of the square, a place to write and be alone with her thoughts, and to Nabby, it was all a decided improvement over Auteuil. “We shall live more as if we were part of the world,” she wrote to John Quincy.

That “world” — London of the 1780s — was a city grown all out of proportion, with nearly a million souls. Though a city still of “smoke and damp,” in Adams’s words, it was an appreciably cleaner, healthier, less violent place than it had been earlier in the century. It was both the political capital of Britain and the center of manufacturing, finance, and trade. The Thames, its foul, mud-colored main artery and portal to the world, carried more traffic than any river in Europe. One had only to stand on any London bridge, said a guidebook, to see fleets of ships “carrying away the manufactures of Britain and bringing back the produce of the whole earth,” a spectacle illustrating Adams’s chief concern as ambassador, since none was American.

The great dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rose high above what seemed a forest of towers, turrets, and church spires, very unlike the skyline of Paris. A thousand hackneys plied the streets, and innumerable sedan chairs, each propelled by four strong men, usually Irish, who could shout and muscle their way through traffic faster than the hackneys. All was “tumult and hurry,” just as portrayed in English novels. Bond Street shops were thought superior to those of Paris. London coffeehouses, taverns, theaters, and concert halls surpassed anything of the kind elsewhere in the British empire, and for the young and aspiring, London remained the great magnet. Exhilaration of the kind voiced by young James Boswell of Edinburgh upon seeing the city for the first time in 1762 was felt still by thousands who kept coming from the hinterlands. In London was to be found the full tide of human existence, Boswell’s hero, Samuel Johnson, had said, declaring famously, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

The extravagance of the ruling class was notorious. At such exclusive clubs as Brooks or Boodles on St. James’s Street, fortunes were reputedly gambled away at the turn of a card, and, nightly, young men drank themselves into a stupor. This was not quite true, but the stories would never die, and the clothes, carriages, the sheer weight of gold braid on the livery of servants, left little doubt as to how vast was the wealth of the wealthiest. Yet, as the Adamses found, one could hardly go anywhere without encountering such spectacles of poverty and misery as to tear at the heart — people in tatters, hunger and suffering in their faces, as Abigail wrote. And who was to answer for the wretched victims “who are weekly sacrificed upon the gallows in numbers sufficient to astonish a civilized people?” Compounding her sorrow was the realization that every night and in all weather abandoned children by the hundreds slept beneath the bushes and trees of nearby Hyde Park.

The English historian and novelist Tobias Smollett had written of the inevitable distrust felt by every visitor to London, the underlying fear of being taken. For his part, Adams was determined to be neither stingy nor a fool. Approached by the representative of a group known as His Majesty’s Royal Bell Ringers, who asked that he share some of his “honorable bounty” and said two guineas were customary, Adams gave the man one guinea and said he would look into what was customary.

James Boswell could still be seen on occasion holding forth at the Globe Tavern on Fleet Street; the novelist Fanny Burney was soon to become a lady in waiting to Queen Charlotte; Richard Brinsley Sheridan was still part owner and manager of the famous Drury Lane Theater. But the giants of London’s literary world, authors to whom the Adamses were devoted — Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Samuel Johnson — were all dead and gone. And so, too, was Hogarth. The reigning artists were the rivals Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds and the American Benjamin West, who did elegant portraits and historical scenes, rather than graphic renditions of the dark side of London life.

As much as anything, it was a city of entertainments, and this to Abigail was its saving grace. She joked about seeing a “learned pig, dancing dogs, and a little hare that beats a drum,” amusements fit for children; but she openly enjoyed them and with Nabby went more than once to Sadler’s Wells music hall, to delight in the “wonderful feats” of a troupe of tumblers.

The three Adamses went often to the theater, and to Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, where, in company with fashionable London society, they strolled garden paths, sipped imperial tea, listened to music, or gazed at paintings within an immense gilded rotunda. Smollett had described Ranelagh as looking like “the enchanted palace of a genie . . . crowded with the great, the rich, the gay, the happy and the fair.” To Abigail, the “fair” on display were more stunning by far than any to be seen at Court.

Pleased to be in a Protestant country once more, the family attended church regularly, riding to the village of Hackney to hear the celebrated liberal preacher and champion of America, Richard Price, who was to become a valued friend. Once, for no reason other than intellectual curiosity, Adams rode to Windsor to call on the famous English astronomer Sir William Herschel, whose crowning achievement had been the discovery of the planet Uranus. Greeting Adams affably, Herschel was delighted to talk of his work, and Adams returned to Grosvenor Square elated. Nabby recorded that she had never known her father so gratified by a visit of any kind.

But neither the Reverend Price’s friendship nor William Herschel’s reception was representative. With the exception of tradesmen and a few officials of the government, the British overall were decidedly cool toward the new American minister and his family — perfunctory, but no more. And they did stare as Adams had worried they would, and not in a friendly way. “The English may call the French starers,” wrote Nabby to John Quincy, “but I never saw so little civility and politeness in a stare in France as I have here.” To Jefferson, with whom she had commenced regular correspondence, Abigail described the atmosphere as “not the pleasantest in the world.” In truth, the American minister and his family were being pointedly ignored.

Their “society” was confined almost entirely to other Americans living in London, or to such openly avowed friends of America as Richard Price. A few of the Americans were acquaintances from Boston, like the aspiring young architect Charles Bulfinch. Jefferson’s aide, William Short, came on errands from Paris, and the duplicitous Dr. Edward Bancroft showed up, affable as always. Whether Bancroft was serving still as a spy for the British government is not known, though in all likelihood he was.

Friendliest and most helpful were the American painters Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who introduced the family to their protégés, young Mather Brown of Boston and John Trumbull of Connecticut, a veteran of the Revolution. A rage for painters and painting had seized the household, Nabby reported excitedly to John Quincy, after Mather Brown set up his easel at Grosvenor Square to do portraits of all three of the Adamses. Her delight was extreme. (The young man was so striking-looking as to be commonly spoken of as “handsome young Brown,” as though that were his name.) Brown’s portrait of her was quite “tasty,” she thought. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat with ribbons and feather, she sat with her hands in her lap, looking directly ahead, a lovely, poised, somewhat wistful young woman at the threshold of adulthood. Her father was charmed, it was “her exactly,” he said.

For his own portrait Adams posed at his writing desk, with quill and paper in hand, and Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia prominently displayed to one side. Adams believed his strongest attributes were, as he said, “candor, probity, and decision,” but these he failed to find in the face that looked back from the finished canvas, and he expressed disappointment. In Brown’s portrait, he appeared composed, leaner than Copley had portrayed him, and reflective. It was a fine study of an eighteenth-century gentleman of consequence, but nothing about the pose or the expression gave any suggestion of his characteristic alertness and vitality, or sense of humor — let alone “candor, probity, and decision.”

Brown’s rendering of Abigail was thought “a good likeness,” but the painting would ultimately disappear.

Meantime, West and Copley in particular opened doors for Adams in London as did no one else. “I did not ask favors or receive anything but cold formalities from ministers of state or ambassadors,” he would explain. “I found that our American painters had more influence at Court to produce all the favors I wanted.”

“Economies” remained a constant concern. The cost of living in London was higher even than in Paris, and to make matters worse, Congress had cut Adams’s salary by a fifth, from 2,500 to 2,000 pounds. A dinner guest from Scotland would describe a meal with the Adamses as “good” but “plain,” while Jefferson, visiting later, would be astonished by how “very plain” they lived. Writing to Mercy Warren after the first year in London, Adams would confide, “I am driven to my wits’ end for means.”

Lavish entertainment of the kind expected of an ambassador to the Court was out of the question. But then neither did the Adamses have any great desire for London society. She was too old-fashioned, Abigail said, for keeping company with “midnight gamblers and titled gamesters,” whose way of life she had seen something of and may have enjoyed more than she was willing to admit. At a party given by the Swedish ambassador, pressed to fill an empty place at one of the card tables, she won four games straight.

Worst of all was being patronized by the British. One of the few British women to call on Abigail since the move to Grosvenor Square, the wife of a member of Parliament remarked, in an effort to make conversation, “But surely you prefer this country to America?” British prejudice toward the French struck Abigail as ludicrous, now that she had lived in France, and made her realize how greatly she disliked prejudice in any form. But then unexpectedly, she was brought up short to find it in herself.

Having read and loved the plays of Shakespeare since childhood, she was thrilled by the chance to see an actual stage production. The great English tragedienne Sarah Siddons, who had come out of retirement the year before, appeared in Macbeth for the first time and was acclaimed a triumph. That Mrs. Siddons then appeared in Othello, making the transition from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona, was declared the mark of genius, and the Adamses were among the glittering audiences that filled the Drury Lane for both productions. To Abigail, Mrs. Siddons was brilliant but miscast as Lady Macbeth. It was in Othello, as Desdemona, that she was “interesting beyond any actress I had ever seen.”

Yet to read of Desdemona in the arms of a black man was, Abigail found, not the same as seeing it before her eyes. “Othello [played by John Kemble] was represented blacker than any African,” she wrote. Whether it was from “the prejudices of education” or from a “natural antipathy,” she knew not, “but my whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.” Othello was “manly, generous, noble” in character, so much that was admirable. Still she could not separate the color from the man. Filled with self-reproach, she affirmed that there was “something estimable” in everyone, “and the liberal mind regards not what nation or climate it springs up in, nor what color or complexion the man is of.”

Attacks on Adams in the press continued. He was called a nobody, ridiculed for having insufficient means to conduct himself in proper fashion. The Public Advertiser reminded its readers that all so-called American patriots were cowards, murderers, and traitors, and described Adams as looking “pretty fat and flourishing” considering “the low estate he is reduced to.” In letters to the editor he was decried as a “pharisee of liberty,” an “imposter.” Every hireling scribbler was set to vilify them, wrote Abigail, who in her time in London acquired a dislike of the press that would last a lifetime.

From Paris, where he was well supplied with London papers, Jefferson expressed astonishment at such slanders, as well as admiration for Adams’s fortitude. “Indeed a man must be of rock who can stand all this,” he wrote to Abigail. “To Mr. Adams it will be but one victory the more.” Then, in a rare revelation of inner feeling, a confession of weakness such as he seldom made to anyone, Jefferson told her:

It would have ill suited me. I do not love difficulties. I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but [made] irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post. These are weaknesses from which reason and your counsels will preserve Mr. Adams.

Possibly, he postulated, it was “the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character unsusceptible of civilization.”

He had been taken up by the Paris “literati,” he reported happily, and acquired a larger, more expensive house for himself. Located at the corner of the Champs-Élysées and the Rue de Berri, the newly built Hôtel de Langeac had twenty-four rooms, an indoor toilet, and a “clever garden.” Not satisfied with it as it was, Jefferson proceeded to redesign and reconstruct much of the house to suit his fancy, thus adding further to the expense and despite grave concern over his own private finances.

To his brother-in-law, Francis Eppes, who was managing his affairs at home, Jefferson wrote, “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall owe not a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.” But what could he do? He could not sell any more of his land, he wrote: he had sold too much as it was, and land was his only provision for his children. “Nor,” he added, “would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labors.”

Had Jefferson been as forthcoming with Adams as with his brother-in-law, Adams, the farmer’s son, would have had no argument with Jefferson’s faith in land as the only true wealth. But that Jefferson could so matter-of-factly consider selling off his slaves — not freeing them — and so readily transfer the burdens of his own extravagances to the backs of those he held in bondage, would have struck Adams as unconscionable, and would no doubt have been a serious test of his respect, if not affection, for the man. But such matters as these Jefferson never mentioned or discussed with Adams.

Meanwhile, he and Abigail exchanged shopping requests. Jefferson purchased French shoes and lace for her, and hunted down French dessert platters of a kind she had her heart set on for her dining table. For her part, Abigail was to pick out a dozen English shirts for him, a tablecloth and napkins sufficient for a seating of twenty. “But when writing to you,” he declared at the close of one letter, “I fancy myself at Auteuil and chatter on till the last page of my paper awakes me from my reverie.”

OCCASIONS AT COURT grew increasingly tedious and strained for Adams and his family. “Do you go out much for a walk,” the King kept inquiring of Abigail and Nabby at each and every reception, though the King, they thought, at least dissembled better than the Queen, whose countenance, said Nabby, was “as hard and unfeeling as if carved out of an oak knot.”

Particularly grating to Adams was the oft-spoken assumption among many of the British that sooner or later America would “of course” return to the British fold.

There is a strong propensity in this people [he wrote to Richard Henry Lee] to believe that America is weary of her independence; that she wishes to come back; that the states are in confusion; Congress has lost its authority; the governments of the states have no influence; no laws, no order, poverty, distress, ruin, and wretchedness; that no navigation acts we can make will be obeyed; no duties we lay on can be collected . . . that smuggling will defeat all our prohibitions, imposts and revenues. . . . This they love to believe.

There was indeed “a new order of things arisen in the world,” Adams emphasized to another correspondent at home, but British statesmen refused to comprehend this. Overall, the attitude toward America, he had come to realize, was hardly less hostile than it had been during the war. “They hate us,” he wrote to a friend. One Englishman had declared in his presence, “I had rather America had been annihilated, than that she should have carried her point.”

Much of this he and Abigail attributed to “venom” spread by American Loyalists in London. One vehement figure, Harrison Gray, once the treasurer of Massachusetts, said in a letter to the press that if it were left to him, he would have John Adams hanged.

Adams remained remarkably calm, nonetheless, conducting himself with model composure, and refusing to have any contact with Loyalists, with one exception. Taking the initiative, he hunted up his old friend Jonathan Sewall, whom he had not seen since the day they bid farewell at Casco Bay in what seemed a lifetime before. Adams rode to Sewall’s London lodgings, and as Sewall wrote afterward, it was a memorable reunion. “When Mr. Adams came in, he took my hand in both his, and with a hearty squeeze, accosted me in these words, ‘How do you do, my dear old friend!’ Our conversation was just such as might be expected at the meeting of two old sincere friends after a long separation.”

They talked for two hours. Neither had changed his views on the Revolution, nor his enmity for the side the other had chosen, though apparently nothing of this was said. Through the years of the war Sewall had taken heart from every American defeat, every report of dissension in the American army, and from the news of Benedict Arnold’s return to his proper allegiances. Like many Loyalists living in exile in England, Sewall had had a difficult time getting by. Exiled from their homeland, unappreciated in their adopted country, most Loyalists had a hard life.

Sewall had grown bitter and resentful. His hatred of New England patriots was worse than ever: “those sanctified hypocrites,” he called them, those “rebellious, ungenerous, ungrateful sons of bitches.” Suffering bouts of melancholia, he had largely withdrawn from life, seldom leaving his rooms. Noticeably aged, he lived only for his two sons, he confessed to Adams, and for their sakes planned to remove to Canada.

Adams urged Sewall and his wife, Esther Quincy, to come and take a family dinner at Grosvenor Square, and “in a way so friendly and hearty,” wrote Sewall, that he almost complied, but could not, would not.

“Adams has a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible to its finest feelings,” Sewall continued in his account of the reunion. “He is humane, generous and open, warm in his friendly attachments, though perhaps rather implacable to those he thinks his enemies.” Clearly, Adams did not regard Sewall as his enemy.

Each felt he knew the other as well as he knew any man, and privately Adams thought Sewall, in 1774, had tragically sacrificed principle for position, while Sewall, as he wrote, thought Adams’s own “unbounded ambition” was at fault; this and “an enthusiastic zeal for the imagined or real glory and welfare of his country” had overcome Adams’s better self, “his every good and virtuous social and friendly principle.” With some understandable resentment perhaps, Sewall concluded that Adams had gone as far as his ambition would take him, and further that he was ill suited for his present role.

He is not qualified by nature or education to shine in courts. His abilities are undoubtedly equal to the mechanical parts of his business as ambassador; but this is not enough. He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and small talk and flirt with the ladies; in short, he has none of the essential arts or ornaments which constitute a courtier. There are thousands who, with a tenth of his understanding and without a spark of his honesty, would distance him infinitely in any court in Europe.

For all the warmth of the reunion, the expressions of brotherhood, the two hours were difficult. Adams came away deeply saddened. He would forever think of Sewall as one of the casualties of the war. According to Adams, when Sewall died in New Brunswick a number of years later, it was of a broken heart.

II

OF THE MULTIPLE ISSUES in contention between Britain and the new United States of America, and that John Adams had to address as minister, nearly all were holdovers from the Treaty of Paris, agreements made but not resolved, concerning debts, the treatment of Loyalists, compensation for slaves and property confiscated by the British, and the continued presence of British troops in America. All seemed insoluble. With its paper money nearly worthless, its economy in shambles, the United States was desperate for trade, yet without the power or prestige to make demands, or even, it seemed, to qualify for respect. British complacency was massive. The British saw no cause for haste in fulfilling any of the agreements with their poor, weak, former adversary. Nor were they the least inclined to lessen or jeopardize in any way their primacy at sea. British reluctance to be accommodating was quite as great as the American need for equitable resolutions. The British continued to exclude American vessels from both Canada and the West Indies, as well as from Britain. Further, no American products could be shipped anywhere within the British Empire except in British vessels.

To Adams the first priority must be to open British ports to American ships. But his efforts came to nothing, while at home, under the Articles of Confederation enacted in 1781, Congress was without power to regulate commerce. It was thus a sad and humiliating situation.

Adams went repeatedly to Whitehall to meet with Lord Carmarthen. He called at 10 Downing Street for an exchange with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, the younger, who was all of twenty-four years old, who never stopped talking and impressed Adams not at all. Whatever Adams proposed, whatever inquiries he made to the Ministry, he received no answers. Long days and nights were spent reporting to Foreign Secretary Jay and composing memorials to Carmarthen. One particularly important memorial, calling for the withdrawal of British garrisons from the Northwest, as agreed in the Treaty of Paris, went unanswered for three months. When at last Carmarthen replied, it was to say only that this violation of the treaty was no different from the failure of Americans to pay the debts due British creditors.

Adams was hardly surprised. From his first meeting with Pitt, he had been convinced that Britain would never willingly give up the forts, any more than they would open the way to American trade with the West Indies.

When Adams talked of “commercial reciprocity,” the British thought him naïve. Like Jefferson, Adams believed in free trade in theory, but faced with British intransigence, he began losing hope of ever attaining such an agreement and cautioned Jefferson, “We must not, my friend, be the bubbles of our own liberal sentiments.” Presently, the picture no brighter, he told Jefferson that if the British Court refused to act a reasonable and equitable part, the United States should enter into “still closer and stronger connections with France.”

Commercial relations with France, however, were no more promising than with Britain. Jefferson, who was as dedicated to close ties with the French as ever Franklin had been, had thus far succeeded in attaining a single agreement, one whereby American whale oil would be admitted to French markets, and this for a limited time only. Since the end of the war, the French, for their part, had attained nothing like the flourishing American trade that Vergennes had imagined. The demand for French goods in America was low and not likely to improve. When in a meeting with Lord Carmarthen, Adams summoned all his old intensity to warn that the attitude of the British, if continued, would inevitably strengthen commercial ties between the United States and France, it had no effect whatever. He saw no hope, Adams reported to Jefferson.

Correspondence between Grosvenor Square and Paris remained steady and candid. In eight months’ time, from late May 1785, when Adams first assumed his post in London, until February 1786, he wrote twenty-eight letters to Jefferson, and Jefferson wrote a nearly equal number in return. Entirely trusting of one another, the two ministers exchanged news, opinions on issues, speculations on potential markets for American tobacco in Europe. One long letter from Adams was devoted to Portugal’s need for American timber, tar, turpentine, and salt fish, as well as the corresponding future market in America for Portuguese wine and olive oil. When Jefferson asked Adams to inquire about insuring the life of the sculptor Houdon, who was sailing for America to do the statue of Washington, discussion of the matter went back and forth in several letters before Adams had things arranged.

A small but noteworthy difference in the letters was that Jefferson regularly signed himself in conventional fashion, “Your obedient and humble servant,” or “Your friend and servant,” while Adams wrote, “Yours most affectionately,” or “With great and sincere esteem,” or “My dear friend adieu.”

Increasingly their time and correspondence was taken up by concerns over American shipping in the Mediterranean and demands for tribute made by the Barbary States of North Africa — Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco. To insure their Mediterranean trade against attacks by the “Barbary pirates,” the nations of Europe customarily made huge cash payments. It was extortion and an accepted part of the cost of commerce in that part of the world. France paid $200,000 a year to Algiers alone; Britain paid even more, as much as $280,000 annually. In past years, before the war, when American trade in the Mediterranean flourished, American ships had come under the protection paid for by the British. But after 1776, such protection no longer pertained. Nor would France now foot the cost of guaranteeing respect for the American flag off the shores of North Africa. Tribute (bribes) would have to be paid and it would cost the United States dearly, Vergennes had advised Adams earlier; otherwise, there would be no peace with the Barbary States.

Just weeks after Adams arrived in London, in July 1785, two American ships were seized by Algerian pirates. Twenty-one American sailors were taken captive and forced into slave labor. News spread that Benjamin Franklin, en route from France to Philadelphia, had been captured by Barbary pirates, and though untrue, the story caused a sensation.

From Philadelphia, John Jay sent instructions to negotiate with the Barbary States. Funds were made available by Congress up to $80,000. But Adams and Jefferson had no money at hand. When Jefferson inquired whether Adams might borrow again from the Dutch, and reported that French officers in Paris were angry over not having been paid what they were due for services in the Revolution, Adams was helpless to do anything. It was not at all certain, he answered, that there would be funds sufficient even to cover “your subsistence and mine.”

On a chill evening in February came what Adams took to be an opening. At the end of a round of ambassadorial “visits,” he stopped to pay his respects to a new member of the diplomatic corps in London, His Excellency Abdrahaman, envoy of the Sultan of Tripoli. It was apparently a spur-of-the-moment decision on Adams’s part and resulted in an amazing, smoke-filled exchange that Adams, delighted by the humor of the scene, happily recounted for Jefferson.

Adams and his host settled into two large chairs before a great fire, while a pair of factotums stood by at attention. As His Excellency Abdrahaman spoke no English, they got by on scraps of Italian and French. His Excellency wished to know about American tobacco. That grown in Tripoli was far too strong, the American much better, he said, as two immensely long pipes were brought in, ceremoniously filled, and lighted.

It is long since I took a pipe, but [Adams wrote] . . . with great complacency, [I] placed the bowl upon the carpet . . . and smoked in awful pomp, reciprocating whiff for whiff . . . until coffee was brought in. His Excellency took a cup, after I had taken one, and alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco . . . and I followed the example with such exactness and solemnity that [one of] the two secretaries . . . cried out in ecstasy, “Monsieur, vous êtes un Turk!”

The conversation turned to business. America was a great nation, declared His Excellency, but unfortunately a state of war existed between America and Tripoli. Adams questioned how that could be, given there had been no injury, insult, or provocation on either side. The Barbary States were the sovereigns of the Mediterranean all the same, he was told, and without a treaty of peace there could be no peace between Tripoli and America. His Excellency was prepared to arrange such a treaty.

Two days later, at the stroke of noon, His Excellency appeared at Grosvenor Square, flanked by servants in orange robes and turbans. Time was critical, Adams was informed. The sooner peace was made between America and the Barbary States the better. Were a treaty delayed, it would be more difficult to make. A war between Christian and Christian was mild, prisoners were treated with humanity; but, warned His Excellency, a war between Muslim and Christian could be horrible.

The man was either a consummate politician or truly benevolent and wise — Adams could not tell which — and though apprehensive that the sums demanded would be exorbitant, he felt there was no time to lose. He dispatched Colonel Smith to Paris with a letter urging Jefferson to come as quickly as possible. His visit, Adams suggested, could be attributed to his desire to see England and pay his respects at Court.

JEFFERSON ARRIVED on March 11, 1786, to find London brightened by a light dusting of snow. He settled into rooms on Golden Square for a stay, as it turned out, of nearly two months, during which the ties of friendship with John and Abigail became stronger than ever.

Since they had last seen him, Jefferson had become noticeably more elegant in attire. He had taken to powdering his hair and acquired a French valet de chambre, Adrien Petit, who had earlier worked for the Adamses. He looked every inch the polished courtier and, with his height and slim good looks, drew attention everywhere they went.

At a meeting with Ambassador Abdrahaman, Adams and Jefferson were told that peace with Tripoli would cost 30,000 guineas for his employers, as His Excellency put it, plus 3,000 pounds sterling for himself. Payments were to be in cash on delivery of the treaty signed by his sovereign. The two Americans protested that the figure was too high. His Excellency assured them it was his lowest price and allowed that peace with all Barbary states might cost from 200,000 to 300,000 guineas. They could only refer the matter to Congress, Adams and Jefferson replied, and the meeting ended.

Compared to such demands, the sum Congress had authorized them to spend was, as they reported to John Jay, “but a drop in the bucket.”

Several meetings with Lord Carmarthen were no more encouraging with Jefferson present than they had been for Adams for months past. Jefferson felt insulted by Carmarthen’s seeming “aversion to have anything to do with us.”

When Adams presented Jefferson at the King’s levee at St. James’s on March 15, George III could not have been “more ungracious” in his “notice of Mr. Adams and myself,” according to an account later provided by Jefferson. Later still a grandson of Adams’s would take this to mean the King had turned his back on them, and the story would become rooted in history. But almost certainly no such incident occurred. Jefferson said nothing to the effect at the time. Nor did any of the numerous ministers, courtiers, members of Parliament, and other diplomats present who were ever watchful for the slightest sign of royal disapproval or anything the least out of the ordinary. Nothing untoward was reported or hinted at in the newspapers, and importantly, nothing was ever said or written by John Adams, who, of all men, would have been enraged by any disrespect shown a minister of the United States being presented under his sponsorship.

Whatever the truth of the situation, Jefferson’s sensitivity to British hauteur was real, his dislike of the British sufficient to last a lifetime. “They require to be kicked into common good manners,” he told Colonel Smith. The fact that his debts were largely to English creditors may well have had something to do with such feelings.

Of London, he thought only the shops worthy of attention, and devoted ample time to them, spending lavishly on shoes, boots, a flint-lock rifle, a reading lamp, plated harness and stirrups, and a set of chessmen. His major, most costly purchases were British-made scientific instruments, which, he conceded, were the finest available. Possibly at the urging of Abigail, he also paid a shilling to see the “learned pig.”

As at Auteuil, Jefferson was a frequent presence at the house on Grosvenor Square, delighting all with his sparkling conversation and fund of information. Abigail gave several dinners in his honor. John arranged a tour of the King’s library. There were repeated evenings at the theater — Jefferson would see three performances by Mrs. Siddons in three different roles — and a late night at the French ambassador’s ball, in the splendorous Hôtel de France on Hyde Park, an occasion marked by the presence of many “very brilliant ladies of the first distinction,” as Abigail noted.

Appraising the figure she herself cut in such gatherings, Abigail was good-naturedly realistic. She had grown as large as her two sisters combined, she claimed to Mary Cranch, and John was keeping pace with her. Pity the poor horse that would ever have to carry both of them, she wrote.

Recording in his diary the names of the few specimens of the British aristocracy who “ventured” conversation with him at the French ambassador’s ball, Adams noted, “This people cannot look me in the face: there is a conscious guilt and shame in their countenances when they look at me. They feel they have behaved ill, and that I am sensible of it.”

When, after weeks of waiting, there was still no more word from Lord Carmarthen, and the ambassador from Portugal, the one European minister to have shown any interest in opening trade negotiations, was reported too ill to see them, Adams and Jefferson decided to take a break from London and go off on a tour of English gardens, what Abigail called “their little journey into the country.”

She and John had not been apart since they were reunited in London the summer of 1784, not for a year and eight months, which, she noted, was the longest time they had had together since they were married. Time away in Jefferson’s company would, she was sure, do John great good.

THEY SET OFF on April 4, traveling by hired coach, sharing expenses, and accompanied by their two servants, John Briesler and Adrien Petit. They moved rapidly and covered a great deal of ground in just six days, relying on Jefferson’s copy of Observations on Modern Gardening by Thomas Whately as their guide, the last word on English gardens.

Their direction was west along the Thames where the English countryside was in its April glory. Mornings were often cool, but with hazy sunshine breaking through by midday. Willow trees were in leaf. There were cherry blossoms and an abundance of daffodils in bloom, and the more miles that passed, the more the landscape opened up, with broad green hillsides covered with sheep and scampering newborn lambs by the hundreds.

In the long, eventful lives of Adams and Jefferson, it was an excursion of no importance to history. But it was the one and only time they ever spent off on their own together, free of work and responsibility, and at heart both were countrymen, farmers, with an avid interest in soils, tillage, climate, and “improvements.” “There is not a sprig of grass that grows uninteresting to me,” Jefferson was fond of saying, and Adams, in the spirit of eighteenth-century hyperbole, might well have agreed. Each kept occasional notes on the journey, and while Jefferson showed more interest in “practical things,” where Adams was inclined to remark on the historical or literary associations of the places they saw, this does not necessarily preclude a comparable interest in most everything encountered. Adams was quite as interested in proper land management as Jefferson; Jefferson possibly cared as much for Shakespeare as did Adams.

The first stops were two that Jefferson had already made a few days earlier on his own, but was happy to repeat. Both — Alexander Pope’s garden beside the Thames at Twickenham and Woburn Farm — were prime examples of the “modern,” or “new-style” English landscape gardening that was so radically different from the highly symmetrical gardens made fashionable by the French, and particularly by the work of André LaNôtre at Versailles in the time of Louis XIV. In the new style, there was no “regularity.” Instead, a seemingly natural arrangement of open grasslands, winding paths, clumps and groves of trees, in combination with an abundant presence of water in the form of serpentine lakes, streams, and artificial cataracts, was intended to evoke the look of an idealized English landscape. It was all to appear to be the work of the hand of God, but was in fact the doing of the “master-hand” of the landscape gardener or architect. Everything was chosen for effect. The “disposition” of trees was of particular importance, and among the trees and lakes were nearly always arranged a variety of classic temples or pavilions, a faux ruin or grotto, all very romantic in spirit, their size and number depending on the wealth or fancy of the client.

Such gardens could extend over hundreds of acres. They were not flower gardens, but private parks. Architects, gardeners, and clients thought of themselves as working like landscape painters, only on a vast scale and with scores of laborers at their bidding. Whole valleys were carved out, hilltops removed, streams rerouted, thousands of trees planted to achieve the desired look. The colossal expense seemed of no concern.

“Gardening, in the perfection to which it has been lately brought in England, is entitled to a place of considerable rank among the liberal arts,” declared the ultimate authority, Thomas Whately. While Adams noted Woburn’s beauty, Jefferson concentrated on the distribution of labor. “Four people to the farm, four to the pleasure garden, four to the kitchen garden,” he recorded.

Another day, April 6, they toured the ultimate expression of the new style. Stowe, a true eighteenth-century marvel, was the largest, grandest, most famous landscape garden in England. It had been praised in poetry by Pope, acclaimed by Rousseau, and was the work, in part, of the most famous English landscape gardener of the day, Lancelot Brown, “Capability” Brown, as he was known, for his habit of extolling to clients the “capabilities” of their property. But it was also the design of architect William Kent and of its late owner and guiding spirit, Richard Grenville-Temple, Lord Cobham.

Set in a rolling sweep of land that lent a feeling of even grander scale, the estate comprised approximately 400 acres and was approached through a tremendous Corinthian arch. In addition to a columned manor house commanding one ridge, there were all the requisite lakes and waterfalls, bridges and architectural niceties — a Temple of Victory, Temple of Venus, Temple of Bacchus, a faux Gothic temple — everything romantic in spirit. For a panoramic view, said to take in five counties, Adams climbed a circular stairway to the top of a 115-foot observation tower built in His Lordship’s memory. “I mounted . . . with pleasure,” Adams wrote, “as Lord Cobham’s name was familiar to me from Pope’s works.”

Whether Jefferson made the climb is not clear, as he recorded nothing of it, but then neither did he say a word in his notes about a beautiful bridge done in the manner of his adored Palladio, or the Temple of Victory, the honey-colored showpiece of the garden, which was very like the Maison Carrée, the Roman temple at Nîmes, which Jefferson was later to see on his travels in southern France and take as the model for his design for the capitol of Virginia. What he did record was that thirty-three men and boys were required to tend the grounds, and that he considered the huge Corinthian arch useless, inasmuch as it had “no pretension to direction.”

Adams found the total effect greatly to his liking, but thought temples to Venus and Bacchus unnecessary, as mankind had “no need of artificial incitements to such amusements.”

If Stowe was the ultimate in fashionable private splendor, the Shakespeare house in Stratford-on-Avon, the next stop, was as humble as could be imagined. Told that an old wooden chair in a corner by the chimney was where the bard himself had sat, the two American tourists cut off souvenir chips, this “according to the custom,” as Adams was quick to note. But he was distressed by how little evidence remained of Shakespeare, either of the man or the miracle of his mind. “There is nothing preserved of this great genius . . . which might inform us what education, what company, what accident turned his mind to letters and drama,” Adams lamented. Jefferson noted only that he paid a shilling to see the house and Shakespeare’s grave. But years afterward Adams would claim that Jefferson, on arriving at Stratford-on-Avon, had actually gotten down on his knees and kissed the ground.

At Edgehill, scene of the first great battle of the English civil war, and later at Worcester, the setting of Cromwell’s final victory over Charles II in the year 1651, it was Adams’s turn to be deeply moved. This was history he knew in detail. Here were “scenes where freemen had fought for their rights,” he wrote in his diary. Finding some of the local residents sadly ignorant of the subject, he gave them an impromptu lecture.

“And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for?” he asked. “Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground, . . . All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.”

To Adams it appeared his exhortation had “animated” and “pleased” his audience. What the expression may have been on Jefferson’s face, there is no telling. Nor regrettably did either man write of what passed between them along the way — what they talked about mile after mile in their rocking coach, or in the evenings as they dined together, what questions were asked, what observations made on life, politics, the law, the books they loved, their families, the future of their country. It was the closest time they ever spent in each other’s company and neither recorded a word about the other. But then neither wrote very much about anything, as if they had both declared a holiday from “pen work,” in Jefferson’s expression.

Birmingham, where they stopped at the Swann Inn, was the most distant point of the excursion, and the famous nearby farm known as Leasowes, once the home of the poet William Shenstone, was for Jefferson the most anticipated stop of the entire journey. Jefferson had long admired Shenstone’s pastoral verse, but of greater importance had been the influence of Shenstone’s own highly romantic description of Leasowes on Jefferson’s plans for Monticello.

Leasowes, one of the earliest of all the new-style gardens, was considerably smaller than the others, set in gentle farmland, with a view of low hills to the south and west. But Leasowes had fallen into neglect since the poet’s death, and Jefferson was greatly saddened and disappointed. It was nothing like what he had imagined. “This is not even an ornamental farm,” he wrote. “It is only a grazing farm with a path around it, here and there a seat of a board, rarely anything better. Architecture has contributed nothing.” Let Leasowes be an object lesson, he concluded. Shenstone had ruined himself financially with all he had spent on the farm, and so “died of the heartaches which debt occasioned him.” It was a lesson that Jefferson, alas, would not heed.

To Adams, on the other hand, Leasowes was preferable to anything they had seen. The small scale of the place was more to a New Englander’s liking. It was “the simplest and plainest,” the “most rural of all,” and thus particularly appealing, Adams thought. “I saw no spot so small that exhibited such a variety of beauties.”

From Leasowes the travelers turned and headed south again, in the direction of London, stopping in the course of the next few days at Hagley Hall, a Palladian great house on a hill with a sweeping view somewhat like that of Monticello, Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, and then nearby Oxford, where they visited the university’s botanical garden beside the river Cherwell. By nightfall, April 9, they were back in London.

According to Adams’s count, they had toured twenty country places in all and he thought them high entertainment. Later, after a visit with Abigail to Pains Hill on the outskirts of London, at Surrey, where an immense ornamental park with lakes, grottoes, hermit’s hut, even a facsimile tent of an Arab prince, had been created from a “heap of sand,” Adams declared it “the most striking piece of art” of any. Yet he hoped it would be a long time before such gardens ever became the fashion at home, where nature had done greater things on a nobler scale. How anyone could improve on Penn’s Hill, Adams could not imagine.

• • •

IN LONDON, Jefferson resumed his shopping spree, buying, among other things, another microscope and a pair of satin “Florentine” breeches. With the three Adamses and Colonel Smith, he toured the British Museum and, at Adams’s urging, sat for Mather Brown.

Commissioned by Adams, it was Jefferson’s first portrait and quite unlike anything done of him thereafter. A bust by Houdon, for example, sculpted in Paris a few years later, would be Jefferson in the heroic mode, chin lifted, eyes on a distant horizon — Jefferson as frontiersman. In this by Brown he might have been the perfect European dandy, magnificent in ruffled shirt, hair dressed and powdered. He had a wistful, almost mournful expression and there were dark circles under his eyes. It was Jefferson as courtier and romantic, and while some who saw it thought it a poor likeness, the Adamses appear to have been quite pleased.

As requested, Brown would do a copy of the Jefferson portrait for them, as well as a copy of the Adams portrait for Jefferson. The original painting of Jefferson would ultimately disappear. The copy, which was hung prominently in the house on Grosvenor Square, would remain a proud possession in the Adams family for generations.

On April 26, he and Adams having accomplished nothing in the way of diplomatic progress, and with no reason to expect a change in their prospects, Jefferson said his goodbyes and departed for Paris. Officially his mission had been “fruitless.” But of Adams, Jefferson had more to say, writing from Paris to his friend Madison as he had before on the subject. The difference this time was that Jefferson seemed to go out of his way, almost apologetically, to explain how Adams, with all his faults, had won his heart.

You know the opinion I formerly entertained of my friend Mr. Adams. Yourself and the governor were the first who shook that opinion. I afterwards saw proofs which convicted him of a degree of vanity and of blindness to it, of which no germ had appeared in Congress. A 7-months’ intimacy with him here and as many weeks in London have given me opportunities of studying him closely. He is vain, irritable and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being which made him: he is profound in his views, and accurate in his judgment except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment. He is so amiable that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him.

III

FROM THE TIME of his arrival in their lives the previous year, Colonel William Smith had impressed John and Abigail as entirely deserving of his reputation as an admirable young man of great promise. “He possesses a high sense of honor and as independent a spirit as any man I ever knew, and . . . we have every reason to believe that his character will bear the strictest scrutiny,” Abigail had written earlier to Cotton Tufts. “His character is not only fair and unblemished,” she informed John Quincy, “[but] at age 21 he commanded a regiment, and through the whole war conducted with prudence and bravery and intrepidity, when armed against the foe.” She wished John Quincy to know this, because Colonel Smith was “like to become your brother.”

William Smith’s interest in Nabby, and hers in him, had been apparent for months, but only after Nabby had formally broken her engagement to Royall Tyler would Abigail permit any mention of the new “connection.”

The contrast between the character of Smith and Tyler was clear enough, she stressed to John Quincy, in an effort to explain his sister’s decision. Besides, had not Shakespeare observed that “a heart agitated with the remains of a former passion is most susceptible to a new one”?

Having concluded from day-to-day observation that his young secretary possessed all the qualifications necessary to make a “faithful and agreeable” companion for Nabby, John Adams left it to her to determine her own future. But Abigail spent hours with Nabby in close conversation. “I begged her to satisfy herself that she had no prepossession left in her mind and heart, and she answered me she never could be more determined!”

Abigail, however, as she confided to her sister Mary, had begun to find life increasingly empty and pointless. Her health was uneven; she was bothered by recurring rheumatism and severe headaches. She was tired of London and longed for home. When Mary apologized for filling her letters with too many Braintree “particulars,” Abigail replied, “Everything however trivial on that side of water interests me. Nothing here.” “Can there be any pleasure in mixing company where you care for no one and nobody cares for you?”

She dwelled increasingly on the fate of their brother, William, whose drinking and errant ways had been a secret worry for years and who by now, after abandoning his wife and children, had more or less disappeared. In correspondence among themselves the three sisters never referred to William by name, only as “this unhappy connection,” the “poor man,” or “our dearest relative.”

Who was looking after him, Abigail wondered. What had been different about his childhood in the Weymouth parsonage? What might be in store for her own children?

“I cannot, however, upon a retrospect of his education, refrain from thinking that some very capital mistakes were very indesignedly made,” she would tell Mary. “I say this to you who will not consider it as any reflection upon the memory of our dear parents, but only as a proof how much of the best and worthiest may err, and as some mitigation for the conduct of our deceased relatives.”

IN THE FINAL DAYS of May 1786, John Adams was called on to hurry to Amsterdam once again, to secure still another desperately needed Dutch loan for the United States.

On June 12, Adams having returned, Nabby and Colonel William Smith were married in the house on Grosvenor Square, in a small ceremony with only a few friends present — the Copleys, among others. In another few weeks bride and groom moved to a new address on Wimpole Street.

“The young couple appear to be very happy,” was all that Adams had to say, in a letter to James Warren, while to Mary Cranch, Abigail described the ceremony as too solemn and important an event for her not to have experienced “an agitation” equal to what she had felt at her own wedding. The night before the wedding, she further confided, she had dreamed of Royall Tyler, and strangely found herself feeling sorry for him.

Abigail and Nabby had been faithful companions for years, through all of John’s endless absences. They had been virtually inseparable and the change now was difficult for Abigail. She had made the young couple promise to dine at Grosvenor Square every day; still, she was as “lonesome” as she had ever been. To boost her spirits she imagined a marriage between John Quincy and Patsy Jefferson, and to Jefferson playfully proposed the idea. While it was true, she wrote, that in losing her daughter she had gained a son, she already had three sons. What she needed was another daughter. “Suppose you give me Miss Jefferson and in some [fu]ture day take a son in lieu of her. I am for strengthening [the] federal union.”

At home in Massachusetts, meantime, John Quincy had been denied admission to Harvard until he completed several months of tutoring in Greek with the Reverend Shaw at Haverhill. But then in March 1786, John Quincy, too, had become a “son of Harvard.”

He must not study too hard, Adams cautioned kindly. “The smell of the midnight lamp is very unwholesome. Never defraud yourself of sleep, nor your walk. You need not now be in a hurry.” What was essential, Adams advised, was an inquisitive mind. John Quincy must get to know the most exceptional scholars and question them closely. “Ask them about their tutors; manner of teaching. Observe what books lie on their tables. . . . Ask them about the late war . . . or fall into questions of literature, science, or what you will.”

The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education. Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent,

a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.

That his own exceptional, eldest son, with the advantages he had, could one day play a part in bringing about such a “memorable change,” he had every confidence.

When Elizabeth Shaw wrote that as agreeable as John Quincy might be in company, he could be in private conversation “a little too decisive and tenacious” in his opinions, Abigail responded with a strong letter of motherly advice to the young man. “Watchfulness over yourself” was called for, lest his knowledge make him arrogant.

If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world, and obtaining a knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book but it has been supplied to you, that your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have been a blockhead.

By now Charles, too, had entered Harvard, at age fifteen. More outgoing than his older brother, Charles was thought to be too easily distracted from his studies. Where John Quincy required a warning against the perils of the midnight lamp, Charles needed reminding that such a lamp existed.

Remembering so much that went on in his own days at Harvard other than classwork and studies, Adams wrote affectionately to his second son, “You have in your nature a sociability, Charles, which is amiable, but may mislead you. A scholar is always made alone. Studies can only be pursued to good purpose by yourself. Don’t let your companions then, nor your amusements, take up too much of your time.”

ADAMS WAS HIMSELF spending increasing amounts of time alone, working intently and seldom to good purpose, he felt. The impasse over the withdrawal of British troops from the American Northwest and the payment of American debts to British creditors continued. Lord Carmarthen readily agreed that by the Paris Treaty His Majesty’s armed forces were to depart from the United States “with all convenient speed,” but, as he liked also to point out, the same treaty stipulated that creditors on either side “shall meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value in sterling of all bona fide debts.” “I flatter myself, however, sir,” Carmarthen told Adams, “that whenever America shall manifest a real determination to fulfill her part of the treaty, Great Britain will not hesitate to prove her sincerity.”

For Adams, who had argued emphatically at Paris for full repayment of American debt and had never deviated from that view, American reluctance, or inability, to make good on its obligations was a disgrace and politically a great mistake. When word reached London that some states, including Massachusetts, had passed laws against compliance with the treaty, Adams was appalled. Any such suspension of British debts, however colored or disguised, was a direct breach of the treaty, he wrote in a fury to Cotton Tufts, who had become a member of the Massachusetts Senate. “Our countrymen have too long trifled with public and private credit.” He would make good on all outstanding debt to British creditors, and if the British posts in America were not then immediately evacuated, he would declare war.

But he had written this when “wroth and fretted.” War was the last thing he wanted. Any war now would be calamitous for the United States and must be avoided at almost any cost, he wrote another day.

What was implicit in all “oratorical utterance” from Whitehall, Adams knew, was that to the British there was as yet no proper American government and so it would be pointless to undertake serious transactions until such existed. To Adams it was particularly offensive that the British thus far had not thought it necessary even to appoint an ambassador to the United States.

In an exchange of letters between London and Paris, meantime, he and Jefferson considered the question of whether to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates or wage war with them. Jefferson recommended war as more honorable and proposed that an American fleet be built. Adams agreed in principle and promised, “I will go all lengths with you in promoting a navy.” Like Jefferson, he detested the prospect of paying bribes. But given that there was no American navy at present and that it would be years most likely before Congress voted such a resolution, Adams thought it sensible to pay the money. “We ought not fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever,” he told Jefferson, who willingly deferred to Adams’s judgment. Later in January 1787, they would sign a pact with Morocco, whereby the United States, like France and Britain, agreed to pay for protection.

• • •

EAGER FOR A BREAK from the doldrums of summer in London, with Parliament in recess and “everyone fled from the city,” the Adamses decided to see some of the English countryside. With Nabby and Colonel Smith, they set off for a weeklong excursion to Essex. Adams had expressed interest in visiting the village of Braintree, expecting they might find some connection with their own Braintree, but poking about in the village graveyard, he found no familiar names and the village itself was sadly disappointing, poor and “miserable.” Still, the trip was a welcome departure — and for Abigail especially — and even more welcome was the wholly unexpected journey that followed immediately afterward.

Adams was needed at The Hague to exchange ratification of the treaty with Prussia, the one European trade agreement that he and Jefferson, for all their efforts, had succeeded in accomplishing. The treaty, signed in July 1785, had been ratified only that May of 1786, so late that unless it were signed within a matter of weeks, it would expire. Since Prussia had no minister in London or Paris, but only at The Hague, Adams was needed there without delay or the treaty would come to nothing. Jefferson excused himself from attending, saying it was on too short notice.

“As this presents a good opportunity for seeing the country [Holland],” Abigail wrote happily, “I shall accompany him.” In fact, they were both extremely pleased to be going. Little could have delighted Adams more than the chance to show her the country that meant so much to him, where success had been his, where, as they both appreciated, he had helped change the course of history, and where he was still the accredited American minister, Congress having never bothered to replace him.

They were gone five weeks, stopping first at The Hague for the signing ceremony on August 8, then moving on at a pace sufficient to see just about everything — Rotterdam, Delft, Leyden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Utrecht — with Abigail supplying colorful comment in her letters. “Not a hill to be seen,” she wrote, incredulous. The people were “well-fed, well-clothed, contented,” the women notable for their beautiful complexions. (“Rouge is confined to the stage here,” she reported approvingly to Nabby.) She saw no poverty such as in Paris and London. The cities were amazingly clean and orderly. “It is very unusual to see a single square of glass broken, or a brick out of place.” Leyden was the cleanest city she had ever seen in her life; and if Braintree in Essex had failed to evoke feelings of ancestral ties, the church of the Pilgrims at Leyden more than made up for it. In its stillness, she felt the same wave of emotion that had moved Adams to tears on his first visit. At the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, by contrast, the “buzz” of business being transacted reminded her of nothing so much as “the swarming of bees.”

The reception they were given by the Dutch was warm and heartening, “striking proof, not only of their personal esteem,” Abigail wrote, “but of the ideas they entertain with respect to the Revolution which gave birth to their connection with us. . . . The spirit of liberty appears to be all alive with them.”

At Utrecht they witnessed the swearing in of new magistrates of the city, as a result of major constitutional reforms enacted by the Patriot party. It was a ceremony conducted, as Adams wrote, “in the presence of the whole city,” and it moved him profoundly. To John Jay he would claim it to be the first bearing of fruit of the American Revolution in Europe.

THE AUTUMN OF 1786 produced no improvement in relations with the British, whose icy civility Adams found all the more galling after the respect and affection he had been shown in Holland. Yet his spirits were high, his health excellent. Besides, he and Abigail knew by then that they were to become grandparents. Nabby was pregnant, her baby expected in April. Not even the news from home of an uprising of aggrieved farmers in western Massachusetts seemed to distress Adams.

Shays’s Rebellion, as it would come to be known, after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army, was in protest of rising taxes and court action against indebted farmers who, in many cases, were losing their land in the midst of hard times. The insurgents had prevented the sitting of the state supreme court at Springfield. But thus far there had been no violence.

“Don’t be alarmed at the late turbulence in New England,” Adams counseled Jefferson. “The Massachusetts Assembly had, in its zeal to get the better of their debt, laid on a tax rather heavier than the people could bear.” He was confident all would be well and concluded prophetically, “This commotion will terminate in additional strength to the government.”

Inexplicably, correspondence from Jefferson had dwindled to a standstill. On returning from Holland, Abigail had found but one letter waiting, this only to say he did not understand her proposed trade of her son for his daughter, and to relate again his delight in the French. (“They have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.”) After that there had been no further word. A letter to Adams concerning whale oil, sent in late September, was written and signed for Jefferson by his aide, William Short. Then at the end of October came a brief note to Adams, awkwardly written by Jefferson with his left hand.

“An unfortunate dislocation of my right wrist has for three months deprived me of the honor of writing to you,” he at last explained to Abigail before Christmas. But his reason for writing was to tell her that his eight-year-old daughter Polly was on her way to London by ship from Virginia, in the care of a nurse, and that he had taken the liberty to tell those who arranged the voyage “that you will be so good as to take her under your wing till I can have notice to send for her.”

What Jefferson said nothing of was that he had been spending as much time as possible through August and September with a beautiful young woman named Maria Cosway. Born of English parents but raised in Italy, she was the wife of a wealthy, dandified English artist, Richard Cosway, and was herself an artist. She was fluent in several languages, musical, slim and delicate, with sparkling blue eyes and a mountain of fashionably dressed blond hair that made her several inches taller than her tiny, almost dwarf-like husband. The Cosways were a bright fixture in London society, and Abigail and Nabby are known to have met her on at least one social occasion.

Maria was twenty-six years old, Jefferson forty-three, and the attraction of each to the other was instantaneous. If not in love, Jefferson was wholly infatuated. Wishing only to be with her, he canceled every social engagement he could. As he would tell her, “Lying messengers were dispatched into every corner of the city with apologies.” He bought tickets to the theater, the opera; they rode through Paris in Jefferson’s carriage behind a pair of fine new horses, and strolled the gardens at Marley, near Versailles. Sometimes, Richard Cosway was with them, more often they were alone.

Whether it was on a walk in the Cours-la-Reine, as commonly said later, that Jefferson dislocated his wrist, attempting to impress her by vaulting a fence, is not certain. But the accident put an end to their outings, and the pain of the injury was excruciating. For a month Jefferson was virtually confined to his house, and by early October the Cosways had returned to London.

Struggling to write with his left hand, he labored over a carefully composed letter to her in which he described a debate between “Head” and “Heart,” a conventional literary device of the day, and by the end of twelve pages it appeared “Head” was the winner. In any case, when Maria Cosway returned to Paris the next summer, Jefferson showed noticeably less interest in her.

To his friends the Adamses, he said nothing of any of this and possibly they never knew. But then, as the news of Shays’s Rebellion grew more alarming, an exchange of views on the subject set Abigail and Jefferson sharply in opposition for the first time.

To many on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed from reports of the “tumults” in Massachusetts that the new nation was already breaking apart. To the British, accounts in the newspapers only confirmed what they had been predicting all along, while to many Americans who little understood the suffering of the Massachusetts farmers, and this included Abigail, the situation was an outrage, intolerable. “For what have we been contending against the tyranny of Britain,” she asked, writing to Mary Cranch, “to become the sacrifice of a lawless banditti? . . . Will my countrymen justify the maxim of tyrants, that mankind is not made for freedom?”

With the arrival of the new year, and still more sensational reports of mob violence in Massachusetts, she let Jefferson know her opinion in no uncertain terms. “Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their imaginations.” She had no patience with mobs crying out for paper money or the equal distribution of wealth. She saw only the need for “the wisest and most vigorous measures to quell and suppress” the revolt.

It was almost as an afterthought that she told him she would be pleased to look after his daughter as requested.

When Jefferson wrote to say he hoped the captured rebels would be pardoned, Abigail was appalled. “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive,” he lectured. “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”

How sincerely Jefferson meant what he had written, how much was hyperbole among friends, is difficult to gauge. He had a fondness for the imagery of storms. To Maria Cosway he had described how “sublime” it was high on his mountaintop at Monticello “to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!” Moreover, in the same letter to Abigail, he offered the thought that the only hope for change among the ever lighthearted French was not rebellion but to pray for good kings.

Abigail took his wish for “a little rebellion now and then” quite to heart and was not pleased. When Jefferson left Paris at the end of February for a long, leisurely tour of southern France and Italy, ostensibly to see if the mineral springs at Aix-en-Provence might help his still-painful wrist, John Adams kept on writing to him. But Abigail did not. It was the end of June before she could bring herself to write again, and then only to tell Jefferson his daughter had safely arrived.

Interestingly, only months afterward, Jefferson would write a letter to her new son-in-law, Colonel Smith, to say he hated the thought of America not having a rebellion such as had occurred in Massachusetts, every twenty years or so. What were a few lives lost? Jefferson asked. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is a natural manure.” But of this letter, Abigail apparently knew nothing.

ON APRIL 2, 1787, Nabby gave birth to “a fine boy,” William Steuben Smith, who was declared to have “the brow of his grandpapa.” “I feel already as fond of him as if he was my own son, nay, I can hardly persuade myself that he is not,” Abigail wrote to Lucy Cranch.

On June 26, life picked up still more with the arrival of little Polly Jefferson. She was escorted by the captain of the ship she had sailed on, Andrew Ramsay, to whom she had become so attached that his parting was extremely upsetting for her.

“I show her your picture [the Mather Brown portrait],” Abigail wrote to Jefferson. “She says she cannot know it, how should she when she should not know you.”

The one surprise, she informed Jefferson, was the nurse who had accompanied the child. “The old nurse who you expected to have attended her was sick and unable to come. Instead she has a girl about 15 or 16 with her, the sister of the servant you have with you,” she said, tactfully avoiding the word slave.

For Abigail and John Adams it was their one encounter with Sally Hemings, who was actually fourteen, younger even than Abigail supposed, and who was to figure years afterward in a sensational scandal surrounding Jefferson’s private life. She was also the only slave known ever to have lived under the Adamses’ roof.

To Abigail, Sally seemed nearly as much a child as Polly. In the opinion of Captain Ramsay, as Abigail also related, she would be of “so little service” that he recommended taking her back to Virginia. Abigail told Jefferson he would have to be the judge. “She seems fond of the child and appears good natured.” On further acquaintance, however, Abigail concluded that the nurse might need more care than the child and that without supervision would be incapable of her responsibilities.

At first, Polly seemed a handful for anyone. Her weeks on board ship had made her “as rough as a little sailor.” Abigail warmed to her at once. She took her shopping for new clothes and books, kept her at her side as if she were her own. She was a “lovely child,” the favorite of everyone in the household, Abigail wrote. Adams, as he himself said, was entirely won over.

From Polly they learned her pitiful story. Having no memory of her mother, she had been living with an aunt, Jefferson’s sister Elizabeth Eppes, whom she adored and had refused to leave when Jefferson sent for her. Deceived into believing that a visit with her cousins on board Captain Ramsay’s ship in a Virginia harbor was only for a day or two, she had awakened to find her cousins gone, the ship under way. The deception had made her angry and suspicious, as was still readily evident.

Jefferson was at last heard from. Rather than come himself to fetch the child, he was sending his valet, Petit. Having only just returned to Paris from his travels in the South, Jefferson explained, he had “the arrearages of three or four months all crowded on me at once.” To the Adamses it must have seemed a lame excuse, knowing as they did how little there could be of a truly pressing nature to keep Jefferson in Paris and how competent William Short was to handle what business there was for a week or so, just as he had been doing for months.

Abigail was crestfallen. She and the child had both been expecting Jefferson to appear any day. She was distraught, too, at the prospect of sending Polly off with someone who spoke no English. “I am really loath to part with her,” she wrote to Jefferson on July 6, “and she, last evening upon Petit’s arrival, was thrown into all her former distresses, and bursting into tears told me it would be as hard to leave me as it was her Aunt Eppes.”

The day of her departure, Polly clung to Abigail’s neck weeping, “almost in a frenzy.” Abigail, too, was crying. To no one, she said, had she ever become so attached in so few days as this little girl, and as time would show, the love she felt for the child was to be her one enduring tie to Jefferson.

IV

“POPULARITY WAS NEVER my mistress, nor was I ever, or shall I ever be a popular man,” Adams had written to James Warren at the start of the year, 1787, to say he had just completed a book that was almost certain to make him unpopular. “But one thing I know, a man must be sensible of the errors of the people, and upon his guard against them, and must run the risk of their displeasure sometimes, or he will never do them any good in the long run.”

It was, as Warren doubtless appreciated, about as concise a synopsis of Adams’s course through public life as could be found.

Once, in 1776, writing to Abigail about Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Adams had said of Paine that he was “a better hand at pulling down than building.” Now again he observed to Warren, “It is much easier to pull down a government, in such a conjuncture of affairs as we have seen, than to build up at such season as present.” It was Adams’s intention to turn to building again.

For months after the journey to Holland he had remained in “a state of philosophic solitude,” at work in his library on a consideration of comparative government based on “reading and reason.” When, the week of Christmas, Abigail went off with the Smiths for a sojourn at Bath, Adams kept steadily at his labors. “Don’t be solicitous of me. I shall do very well,” he wrote to her Christmas Day. If cold in the night, he would take a “Virgin” to bed — that, he explained, being the English term for a hot water bottle.

He felt an urgency like that of 1776. Great events were taking place at home. Support for a stronger central government was gaining ground — and largely in reaction to Shays’s Rebellion, as Adams had foreseen. A constitutional convention was in the offing, and as he had been impelled in 1776 to write his Thoughts on Government, so Adams plunged ahead now, books piled about him, his pen scratching away until all hours. “He is so much swallowed up in the pursuit of his subject that you must not wonder if you do not receive a line from him,” Abigail explained to John Quincy. But having read what he was writing, she worried. “I tell him they will think in America that he is setting up a king.”

By early January, 1787, Adams had rushed the first installment of his effort to a London printer. Titled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, it was, in finished production, more a pamphlet than a book, in octavo form, and included on the title page a line from Pope: “All nature’s difference keeps all nature’s peace.” Copies were sent off at once to the United States and to Jefferson in Paris.

Adams conceded that the writing suffered from too great haste. He called it a “strange book,” which in many ways it was, much of it a hodgepodge overloaded with historical references and extended borrowings from other writers and usually without benefit of quotation marks. Yet in all he had achieved something quite out of the ordinary, thoughtful, high-minded, and timely. To a considerable extent the book was an expanded, more erudite rendition of the case for checks and balances in government that he had championed in his Thoughts on Government, and later put into operation in his draft of the Massachusetts constitution.

The people of America now had “the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands” that Providence ever ordained to so small a number since Adam and Eve. There must be three parts to government — executive, legislative, and judicial — and to achieve balance it was essential that it be a strong executive, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary. On the role of the executive Adams was emphatic:

If there is one central truth to be collected from the history of all ages, it is this: that the people’s rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a strong executive, or, in other words, without separating the executive from the legislative power. If the executive power, or any considerable part of it, is left in the hands of an aristocratical or democratical assembly, it will corrupt the legislature as necessarily as rust corrupts iron, or as arsenic poisons the human body; and when the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone.

Nonetheless, the legislative power was “naturally and necessarily sovereign and supreme” over the executive.

In all history, he declared, there was no greater statesman and philosopher than Cicero, whose authority should ever carry great weight, and Cicero’s decided opinion in favor of the three branches of government was founded on a reason that was timeless, unchangeable. Were Cicero to return to earth, he would see that the English nation had brought “the great idea” nearly to perfection. The English constitution, Adams declared — and knowing he would be taken to task for it — was the ideal. Indeed, “both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations,” it was “the most stupendous fabric of human invention” in all history. Americans should be applauded for imitating it as far as had been done, but also, he stressed, for making certain improvements in the original, especially in rejecting all hereditary positions.

A hereditary monarchy could be a republic, Adams held, as England demonstrated, and hereditary aristocracies could be usefully employed in balanced governments, as in the House of Lords. But Adams adamantly opposed hereditary monarchy and hereditary aristocracy in America, as well as all hereditary titles, honors, or distinctions of any kind — it was why he, like Jefferson and Franklin, strongly opposed the Society of the Cincinnati, the association restricted to Continental Army officers, which had a hereditary clause in its rules whereby membership was passed on to eldest sons.

As he explained to Jefferson, much of what he wrote was in response to the dangers of radical French thought. Specifically he had written in defence (hence the title) against the theories of the philosophe Turgot, who espoused perfect democracy and a single legislature, or as he wrote, “collecting all authority into one center, that of the nation.” To Adams this was patent nonsense. A simple, perfect democracy had never yet existed. The whole people were incapable of deciding much of anything, even on the small scale of a village. He had had enough experience with town meetings at home to know that in order for anything to be done certain powers and responsibilities had to be delegated to a moderator, a town clerk, a constable, and, at times, to special committees.

Reliance on a single legislature was a certain road to disaster, for the same reason reliance on a single executive — king, potentate, president — was bound to bring ruin and despotism. As the planets were held in their orbits by centripetal and centrifugal forces, “instead of rushing to the sun or flying off in tangents” among the stars, there must, in a just and enduring government, be a balance of forces. Balance, counterpoise, and equilibrium were ideals that he turned to repeatedly. If all power were to be vested in a single legislature, “What was there to restrain it from making tyrannical laws, in order to execute them in a tyrannical manner?”

At home every state but Pennsylvania and Georgia had a bicameral legislature, and because of the obvious shortcomings of the one-house Congress under the Articles of Confederation, agreement on the need for a bicameral Congress was widespread. So to a considerable degree Adams was preaching what had become accepted doctrine at home.

Drawing on history and literature, some fifty books altogether, he examined what he called the modern democratic republics (the little Italian commonwealth of San Marino, Biscay in the Basque region of Spain, the Swiss cantons), modern aristocratic republics (Venice, the Netherlands), and the modern monarchical and regal republics (England, Poland); as well as the ancient democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical republics including Carthage, Athens, Sparta, and Rome. There were frequent citations in Latin, Greek, and French, extended use of Swift, Franklin, Dr. Price, Machiavelli, Guicciardini’s Historia d’Italia, Montesquieu, Plato, Milton, and Hume, in addition to scattered mentions of Aristotle, Thucydides, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and Rousseau, as well as Joseph Priestley, whom Adams had lately come to know in London.

But for all this it remained at heart a lawyer’s brief for what he had said in his Thoughts on Government, and what he had helped establish in practice in the Massachusetts constitution. Where it departed most notably from what he had written before was in its pronouncements on human nature.

To Adams nothing had changed about human nature since the time of the ancients. Inequities within society were inevitable, no matter the political order. Human beings were capable of great good, but also great evil. Thus it had always been and thus it would ever be. He quoted Rousseau’s description of “that hideous sight, the human heart,” and recounted that even Dr. Priestley had said that such were the weaknesses and folly of men, “their love of domination, selfishness, and depravity,” that none could be elevated above others without risk of danger.

How he wished it were not so, Adams wrote. Thucydides had said the source of all evils was “a thirst of power, from rapacious and ambitious passions,” and Adams agreed. “Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.”

As to the ideal of a nation of equals, such was impossible. “Was there, or will there ever be a nation whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches? The answer in all mankind must be in the negative.”

Even in America where there was “a moral and political equality of rights and duties,” there were nonetheless inequalities of wealth, education, family position, and such differences were true of all people in all times. There was inevitably a “natural aristocracy among mankind,” those people of virtue and ability who were “the brightest ornaments and the glory” of a nation, “and may always be made the greatest blessing of society, if it be judiciously managed in the constitution.” These were the people who had the capacity to acquire great wealth and make use of political power, and for all they contributed to society, they could thus become the most dangerous element in society, unless they and their interests were consigned to one branch of the legislature, the Senate, and given no executive power. Above all, the executive magistrate must have sufficient power to defend himself, and thus the people, from all the “enterprises” of the natural aristocracy.

Adams believed in a “government of laws not of men,” as he had written in his Thoughts on Government and in the Massachusetts constitution but, as he stressed now in conclusion, “The executive power is properly the government; the laws are a dead letter until an administration begins to carry them into execution.”

Through the months of work on the Defence, Adams knew it was time to wind things up in London. He had achieved nothing in his diplomatic role and could expect no improvement in his prospects. Within weeks after the first copies of his Defence were ready at the printer, he had written to John Jay to ask that he be recalled. So while noble in intent, the Defence may also have been partly intended as a way of reintroducing himself to his countrymen and influencing the debate on the Constitution. And however apprehensive he may have been over what the reaction might be, he moved ahead without pause, working on two more installments.

In February came warm praise from Paris. “I have read your book with infinite satisfaction and improvement,” wrote Jefferson. It would do “great good,” he predicted. “Its learning and its good sense will I hope make it an institute for our politicians, old as well as young.”

Such approbation was “vast consolation,” Adams responded, conceding that it had been a “hazardous” and “hasty” enterprise, and that he was pursuing it further. There were just two aspects of life in Europe that he regretted leaving. One was access to books, the other was “intimate correspondence with you, which is one of the most agreeable events in my life.”

In time came more praise and approval. From Philadelphia, where the Constitutional Convention had assembled, Benjamin Rush, a member of the Convention, wrote that the Defence had “diffused such excellent principles among us, that there is little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compound federal legislature.” James Madison, who had taken the lead in drafting the so-called Virginia Plan, providing for three equal branches in the new government, and who had seldom ever had anything complimentary to say about Adams, declared in a letter to Jefferson that while men of learning would find nothing new in the book, it was certain to be “a powerful engine in forming public opinion,” and, in fact, had “merit.”

But as both John and Abigail had anticipated, there were others who perceived dark intent in what he had written. Cotton Tufts warned that there were people sowing discord, claiming Adams was all for monarchy and planned to put an English prince on a throne in America. In Virginia, the president of the College of William and Mary, a cousin of Madison’s, the Reverend James Madison, saw a “secret design” in the book — that Adams, under the influence of a foreign Court, was “plotting” to overturn the American government.

LATE THAT SUMMER of 1787, in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention was nearing the completion of its efforts. In Paris parading mobs and incidents of public disrespect for the royal family had caught many by surprise, including the American ambassador. Suddenly all tongues had been let loose in Paris, Jefferson reported excitedly to Adams. There were placards all over the city, and though the mobs had ceased, the Queen had received a “general hiss” while attending the theater. “The King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper; the Queen cries out, but sins on.”

WHEN COPIES of the new Constitution of the United States, signed at Philadelphia on September 17, reached London that autumn, Adams read it “with great satisfaction.” He would have preferred more power in the presidency than provided — particularly the authority to make presidential appointments without Senate approval. But of greater concern was the absence of a bill of rights, in the spirit of what he had written for the constitution of Massachusetts.

“What think you of a Declaration of Rights? Should not such a thing have preceded the model?” Adams wrote straight off to Jefferson.

Writing from Paris a few days later, before receiving Adams’s letter, Jefferson said nothing about a bill of rights, only that there were “things” in the Constitution that “stagger all my dispositions to subscribe” to it. His great concern was the office of the President, which, as conceived, struck him as “a bad edition of a Polish king.

He may be reelected from four years to four years for life. . . . Once in office, and possessing themilitary force of the union, without either the aid or check of a council, he would not be easily dethroned, even if the people could be induced to withdraw their votes from him. I wish that at the end of the four years, they made him ever ineligible a second time.

Here was the difference between them, Adams replied prophetically. “You are afraid of the one, I, the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have full, fair, and perfect representation [in the House]. You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.”

He was not so concerned about a President staying long in office, Adams said, as he was about too frequent elections, which often brought out the worst in people and increased the chances of foreign influence.

While Jefferson would have much to say about the Constitution and the need for a bill of rights in subsequent private correspondence with Madison, he made no public statement for the time being, whereas Adams sent off a strong endorsement to John Jay that was to be widely quoted at home. As once he had seen the Declaration of Independence uniting the different and often disputatious states in common cause, Adams now saw the Constitution as the best means possible “to cement all America in affection and interest as one great nation.” Indeed, if there was a consistent theme in all that Adams wrote and strived for, it was the need for a binding American union.

The public mind cannot be occupied about a nobler object than the proposed plan of government. It appears to be admirably calculated to cement all America in affection and interest as one great nation. A result of accommodation and compromise cannot be supposed perfectly to coincide with any one’s ideas of perfection. But as all the great principles necessary to order, liberty, and safety are respected in it, and provision is made for corrections and amendments as they may be found necessary, I confess I hope to hear of its adoption by all the states.

On December 6, writing to Jefferson, Adams reported that at last his recall had been approved by Congress, “and how we say at sea, ‘Huzza for the new world and farewell to the old one.’”

FOR THE SECOND and, she hoped, the last time in her life, Abigail was making arrangements to cross the North Atlantic, and with hardly less apprehension than the time before.

There was a great accumulation of clothes, books, china, and furniture to pack, a York rosebush she was determined to take. The furniture included pieces purchased originally for the houses at Amsterdam and The Hague. There was a four-post Dutch bed, a great Dutch chest with heavy brass pulls and claw feet, tables of different sizes, a set of six cushioned Louis XV chairs and a settee, these with delicate floral carvings. Adams’s desk, a beautiful French escritoire of veneered satinwood and ebony, which he had bought in Paris after the war, was his particular pride and joy.

All were considerably finer, more elegant pieces than the Adamses had ever owned in years past and would have looked quite out of place in the farmhouse at Braintree. But, as they now knew, they were not to reside in the old homestead. Through Cotton Tufts, Adams had arranged the purchase of what was known as “the Vassall-Borland place,” which Adams had had his eye on for years and which, in memory, seemed quite grand. Built more than fifty years before, about 1731, as the summer villa of a wealthy sugar planter from the West Indies, Leonard Vassall, the house had stood empty through much of the war, after Vassall’s daughter, the widow Borland, a Loyalist, fled to England. When Adams heard the place was available, he made his decision. Located on the coast road, on the north side of town, the property included house, farm buildings, and some eighty acres at a purchase price of 600 pounds. Adams envisioned it as the ideal setting for his retirement.

There were friends in London for Abigail to say goodbye to, last letters to get off to her sisters, and to John Quincy, who, having finished Harvard, was now studying law and not very pleased about it. When Mary Cranch wrote to report that their brother William had died, Abigail was devastated.

Reflection on such bad news was too painful for her, she wrote in reply. Nor was there time for reflection. Her maid, Esther Field, had discovered with an astonishment equal nearly to Abigail’s own, that she was pregnant with the child of the ever-faithful footman, John Briesler, and both wished to be married before sailing for home.

The first week in February, Adams paid a final call at Whitehall. On February 20, he had his “audience of leave” with George III, who in parting said, “Mr. Adams, you may with great truth, assure the United States that whenever they shall fulfill the treaty on their part, I, on my part, will fulfill it in all its particulars.” More than this, however, Adams was to remember the King’s graciousness toward him.

Then, out of the blue and to his utter dismay, Adams was called on to make one last emergency trip to Holland, and in the worst possible season to cross the North Sea. It was essential that he take formal leave of his ambassadorial post there, he was informed, and to secure yet another loan, this to enable the United States to make its payments on earlier loans from the Dutch.

To Adams the journey was punishment for sins unknown. The single consolation was that Jefferson was to meet him at Amsterdam. Together they succeeded with the Dutch bankers and in high spirits agreed that when the time came that Adams was at last on his way to heaven, he would surely have first to negotiate another Dutch loan. It was the last time they ever collaborated in a public matter.

To Abigail, Jefferson had written, “I have considered you while in London as my neighbor, and look forward to the moment of your departure from thence as to an epoch of much regret and concern to me. . . . My daughters join me in affectionate adieus. Polly does not cease to speak of you with warmth and gratitude. Heaven send you, Madam, a pleasant and safe passage.”

It was a charming letter of the kind at which Jefferson excelled and that by now he was writing to a number of women within his Paris circle who, in addition to Maria Cosway, included Anne Bingham and another equally striking American, Angelica Church, as well as several Frenchwomen of note, all of whom, interestingly, were married.

Writing to Jefferson “in the midst of the bustle and fatigue of packing,” Abigail said simply and sincerely that she could not leave without sending “a few lines to my much esteemed friend, to thank him for all his kindness and friendship towards myself and family.”

THE AMERICAN MINISTER, his wife, and two American servants departed London for the last time on Sunday, March 30, 1788, by coach for Portsmouth, where they were to sail on the American ship Lucretia, bound for Boston. The Smiths, with their infant son, were to sail on another ship for New York, the temporary federal capital, where Colonel Smith planned to pursue his career.

“Mr. Adams, the late envoy from the American states, set off for Portsmouth on Sunday last, to embark for his return,” read a small item in the Whitehall Evening Post. “That gentleman settled all his concerns with great honor; and whatever his political tenets may have been, he was much respected and esteemed in this country.”

Because of bad weather, it was another three weeks before the Adamses were truly under way.

As Abigail fervently wished, she and John were never to see England or Europe again. Henceforth, she wrote on board in her diary, she would be quite content to learn what more there was to know of the world from the pages of books.

Adams is not known to have recorded any of his thoughts during the voyage home, but earlier he had said his great desire was “to lay fast of the town of Braintree and embrace it with both arms and all my might. There live, there to die, there to lay my bones, and there to plant one of my sons in the profession of law and the practices of agriculture, like his father.”

Only Nabby, it seems, strongly objected. Their father had still more to do for his country, she had written to John Quincy.

By his opinions, advice, and recommendations, he has, I believe, in his power to do as much, perhaps the most, towards establishing her character as a respectable nation of any man in America — and shall he retire from the world and bury himself amongst his books, and live only for himself? No — I wish it not. . . . The Americans in Europe say he will be elected Vice President. Besides, my brother, independent of other considerations, he would not, I am well convinced, be happy in private life.

John Adams was fifty-two. Except for the few months he had spent in Massachusetts in 1778, he had been away for ten years. In that time he had traveled thousands of miles in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and England; he had repeatedly crossed the English Channel and the North Sea; and his voyage home now marked his fourth crossing of the Atlantic. Altogether by land and sea he journeyed more than 29,000 miles, farther than any leading American of his time in the service of his country, never once refusing to go because of difficulties or unseasonable conditions, or something else that he would have preferred to do.

He had first sailed for Europe in the midst of war. He was returning now after more than five years of peace. For him personally, the homeward passage marked as clear an end to one chapter of his life, and the beginning of another, as had his initial voyage out. The intervening years in Europe had been as memorable and important, he felt, as any in his life.

Through the first years in France, for all his troubles with Franklin, he had worked steadily with the old patriot and often with telling effect. That he had pressed doggedly for a greater part in the war by the French navy would stand as one of his own proudest efforts, and with reason, given what happened at Yorktown.

With his success obtaining Dutch loans at the critical hour of the Revolution, he felt, as did others, that he had truly saved his country. That he had embarked on such an unprecedented mission on his own initiative, that he had undertaken his own one-man diplomatic campaign knowing nothing initially of the country, its language, and with no prior contacts or friendships to call upon, and yet carried through to his goal, were simply extraordinary and a measure of his almost superhuman devotion to the American cause.

His part in the Paris Peace Treaty would stand the test of time, Adams believed, as much as anything he had ever done. If the years and effort at London had come to naught, he at least knew he had given devoted service, conducting himself with consistent aplomb and dedication. No one could fault him for a false step. Nor could it be imagined that another of his countrymen in the same role could have done better.

Of the overwhelming convulsion soon to come in France, of the violent end in the offing for the whole European world Adams had come to know, he appears to have had few if any premonitions, no more than anyone else.

What changes had taken place at home in his absence he could only imagine, but clearly, with the advent of the new Constitution, a new epoch had opened in the history of his country.

For her part, Abigail speculated privately that any further role in politics might be “a little like getting out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

PART III

Independence Forever

Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.

~John Adams

CHAPTER EIGHT

HEIR APPARENT

Gentlemen, I feel a great difficulty how to act. I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.

~John Adams

I

ON THE CRYSTAL-CLEAR MORNING of Tuesday, June 17, 1788, the keeper of the Boston lighthouse, Thomas Knox, sighted the Lucretia making good speed on the northeast horizon, and by prearranged plan he set in motion a welcome home such as John Adams had never imagined.

The landmark lighthouse, the first built in America, stood ten miles out from Boston on a tiny rock island at the head of the harbor. For more than half a century, since before Adams was born, it had taken the brunt of the open Atlantic, only to be blown up by the British in 1776. Rebuilt since the war, it stood again as before, and for those on board the inbound ship, after a rough crossing of fifty-eight days, its granite tower gleaming in the sunshine of a perfect morning was a thrilling sight.

At the signal from lightkeeper Knox, cannon boomed at the fort on Castle Island, to alert the town. Losing no time, Knox then set sail by pilot boat to meet the Lucretia and deliver an official welcome to Minister Adams and his lady from Governor John Hancock.

“My coach will be at the end of Long Wharf,” Hancock had written. The Adamses were to proceed to a reception in their honor at his Beacon Hill home, where he hoped they would “tarry till you have fixed upon your place of abode.”

As the ship cleared the lighthouse and swept into the harbor, the green hills of Braintree stood forth on the port side, while ahead rose Boston’s multiple church steeples. Again cannon thundered from Castle Island, in official salute, and in little time the ship was tying up at dockside, where a crowd of several thousand was gathered.

People were cheering, church bells ringing, as the Adamses came ashore. Along the route to Beacon Hill, more throngs lined the streets. “The bells in the several churches rang during the remainder of the day — every countenance wore the expressions of joy,” reported the Massachusetts Centinel.

For John and Abigail, who in their long absence had often felt unappreciated or forgotten, such an outpouring was inexpressibly gratifying, but also difficult to take in. Hancock, who adored ceremony and show, was so delighted by the excitement, he insisted the next day that he escort them to Braintree in his coach, and that they go accompanied by cavalry. But the Adamses had had enough fanfare and departed Boston on their own. At Braintree they moved in quietly with the Cranches until their furniture could be delivered from the ship.

THE FIRST DAYS at Braintree were a continuing round of emotional reunions — with the Cranches, sons Charles and Thomas, and John’s astonishingly spry mother, now seventy-nine; John’s brother Peter, Cotton Tufts, and Parson Wibird; plus a score of Quincys, Basses, and other old friends and neighbors. John Quincy arrived by horseback from Newburyport, where he was reading law.

Adams rejoiced in the sight of his sons. Charles, eighteen, and Thomas, fifteen, both Harvard scholars now and inches taller than their mother, had been small boys when he last saw them. John Quincy, soon to turn twenty-one, was clearly a grown man, and his father’s pride and joy were no less than ever.

The oldest has given decided proofs of great talents, and there is not a youth his age whose reputation is higher for abilities, or whose character is fairer in point of morals of conduct [he wrote to Nabby]. The youngest is as fine a youth as either of the three, if a spice of fun in his composition should not lead him astray. Charles wins the heart, as usual, and is the most a gentleman of them all.

“Busy unpacking during the whole day,” recorded John Quincy, once the furniture and belongings arrived and the move to the new house began. Another day was devoted to unpacking his father’s books, “yet [we] did not get half enough.”

The Shaws arrived from Haverhill. There were teas and dinners at the Cranches. At church on Sunday the combined family filled several pews. “Parson Wibird preached in his usual dull, unanimated strain,” fumed John Quincy, who had never understood his father’s admiration for the eccentric preacher.

To Abigail’s great disappointment, the new house, the “old Vassall-Borland place,” once thought an elegant country seat, was found to be in poor repair and distressingly small and cramped after what she had known in Europe. Her sense of scale had changed more than she knew. The white clapboard house was handsome enough and stood by itself, uncrowded by the side of a main road, with farmland stretching before and behind. But there were just six rooms and ceilings were low. “In height and breadth, it feels like a wren’s house,” she wrote.

For days house and grounds were overrun with carpenters, masons, and farmhands. Some of her furniture had been badly damaged at sea. “But you know there is no saying nay,” she added gamely.

Adams could not have been more pleased with his new “estate,” as he wrote to an English friend. “It is not large, in the first place. It is but the farm of a patriot.”

Spirits high, he plunged into the farmer’s life, tramping his fields and pastures, inspecting walls, appraising livestock, hiring help, discussing weather and crops, and delegating projects. A French writer, J. P. Brissot de Warville, stopping at Braintree on a tour of America “to examine the effects of liberty upon men, society, and government,” described farmer Adams as “like one of the generals and ambassadors of the golden ages of Rome and Greece . . . forgetful of his books and royal courts.” (After a visit to Mount Vernon, Brissot would write much the same of George Washington.)

But another French traveler would be astonished to find a man of such consequence as Adams living in a house so small that, as he wrote, “no Paris lawyer of the lowest rank would choose [it] for a country seat.”

Speculation on Adams’s political future was rampant. He was talked of as governor, senator, Vice President, everything but President. According to the Centinel, it was already certain he would become Vice President, and if not that, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. “And who can object to Mr. Adams?” asked the paper which, after enumerating his many abilities and attainments, observed that he happened also to be “providentially” unemployed.

Henry Knox and Benjamin Lincoln, two stalwarts of 1776 and now of formidable political importance, came to talk. Benjamin Rush wrote from Philadelphia, warmly endorsing the prospect of his old friend as Vice President. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, in a letter informing Adams that he had received an honorary degree from Yale, said he rejoiced at the thought of Adams for Vice President.

In keeping with the unwritten rule of the time that any display of ambition would be unseemly, Adams kept silent. But, in fact, he had decided from the time he arrived home that he would accept the vice presidency, and that role only, any other being “beneath him,” as Abigail put it confidentially in a letter to Nabby.

The makeup of political leadership in the country had greatly changed in Adams’s absence. Many with whom he had served in the Continental Congress had passed from the scene — some, like Benjamin Rush, were retired from public life; others deceased. Fourteen of those who had signed the Declaration of Independence were dead, including Stephen Hopkins and Caesar Rodney, and much about politics was now in the hands of “new men,” “smart young men,” known to Adams only by reputation. Madison of Virginia was still in his thirties. Hamilton of New York and Fisher Ames of Massachusetts were younger still.

Because Washington, a Virginian, was certain to become President, it was widely agreed that the vice presidency should go to a northerner, and Adams was the leading choice. That Adams could be blunt, stubborn, opinionated, vain, and given to jealousy was understood. Further, some of the “new men,” notably Hamilton and Madison, questioned how willingly and loyally Adams might serve in second place to Washington, in view of the difficulties he was said to have had with Franklin in Paris.

The one visitor known to have recorded a firsthand impression of Adams that fall of 1788 found him quite at peace with life and surprisingly approachable. Judith Sargent Murray, a young woman from Gloucester traveling with her husband on their honeymoon, stopped at Braintree in October and saw in “the countenance of Mr. Adams” a “most pleasing benevolence” she had not anticipated, as well as the marks of “deep thinking” customarily associated with “the sage, the philosopher,” and “unbending integrity.” Here was a man who had “stood before kings upon an equal level,” she wrote. “I expected to be inspired with a painful awe, but strange to tell, every idea of distance was immediately banished.” Of Abigail she observed: “It is evident the domestic as well as the more brilliant virtues are all her own. We were soon grouped in familiar chat. It was with [difficulty] I remembered they were not friends of ancient date.”

Winter approached, and still Adams remained silent on politics. Abigail left for New York to be with Nabby for the arrival of another baby, a second son, John Adams Smith, leaving Adams alone with his ruminations. “I think of my poor dear and pity him,” Abigail wrote from New York to Mary Cranch. But Adams wanted no one to feel sorry for him. Whatever the outcome — whether he was denied the vice presidency or whether the honor was to be his — he would be the winner either way, he insisted. “If they mortify my vanity, they give me comfort. They cannot deprive me of comfort without gratifying my vanity.”

To Jefferson in Paris he wrote, “The new government has my best wishes and most fervent prayers for its success and prosperity; but whether I shall have anything more to do with it, besides praying for it, depends on the future suffrage of freemen.”

BY PROCEDURE established in the new Constitution, the President was to be chosen by “electors” named by the state legislatures. Each elector was to cast one ballot with the names of two choices for President. The person with the most votes in the final tally was to become President, the runner-up, Vice President. In the event of a tie, the decision would go to the House of Representatives, a prospect so disturbing to Alexander Hamilton that he “deemed [it] an essential point of caution” to see that John Adams did not wind up with such a strong showing in the electoral count as to embarrass Washington. He was not against Adams, Hamilton explained privately. “Mr. A, to a sound understanding, has always appeared to me to add an ardent love for the public good.” But Hamilton was taking no chances. Working quietly through the winter, he did what he could to convince leading politicians in several states to withhold votes from Adams.

The scheme succeeded. When the electors met in February 1789, Washington was chosen President unanimously with 69 votes, while Adams, though well ahead of ten others, had 34 votes, or less than half. Adams was humiliated by the news, his pride deeply hurt, but of Hamilton’s part, he knew nothing.

Yet the fact remained that at age fifty-three, he, John Adams, the farmer’s son from Braintree, had been chosen to serve as the first Vice President of the United States, the second-highest office in the land.

Abigail was to remain at home until he found a suitable place for them to live in New York. And thus the morning of his departure there was much that was reminiscent of other days as he bid goodbye, heading off again with a single servant, John Briesler. The difference this time was that Adams went accompanied by cavalry, a sight such as had never been seen in Braintree. It was April 13, 1789, one of the signal days of Adams’s life and also, as it happened, Thomas Jefferson’s forty-sixth birthday.

Boston provided a hero’s send-off, with cannon salutes and exuberant crowds. The grand cavalcade that escorted Adams out of the city included more than forty carriages.

Merit must be conspicuously great when it can thus call forth the voluntary honors of a free and enlightened people [wrote the Massachusetts Centinel]. But the attentions shown on this occasion were not merely honorary — they were the tribute of gratitude due to a man who after retirement from trials and services which were of 18 years unremitted continuance, hath again stepped forth to endeavor to establish and perpetuate that independence . . . and which his exertions have so greatly contributed to produce.

All through Massachusetts and Connecticut people lined the road to cheer Adams as one of their own, a New England man. At Hartford he was presented a bolt of locally manufactured brown broadcloth considered worthy for an inaugural suit. New Haven gave him the “Freedom of the City.” That ideal weather accompanied the procession day after day was taken as auspicious.

At four o’clock the afternoon of April 20, after a week on the road, Adams arrived at the bridge at Spuyten Duyvil Creek, at the northern tip of Manhattan Island. A troop of New York cavalry and a “numerous concourse of citizens” led by John Jay and several members of Congress were waiting to escort him south to the city and Jay’s palatial home on Broadway.

ONCE, IN THE MIDST of negotiations for the Paris Peace Treaty, John Adams had predicted that thirteen United States would one day “form the greatest empire in the world.” It was a faith he had first expressed at age nineteen, when a fledgling schoolmaster at Worcester, writing to his kinsman Nathan Webb; and it remained a faith no less in 1789, for all the skepticism and derision he had heard expressed abroad, and despite the many obstacles confronting the new nation.

Much about the state of things, much that Adams had seen or heard since his return, was heartening. On a visit to Harvard, he had crossed a magnificent new bridge over the Charles River, said to be the finest bridge in America. New England shipping and ocean trade were reviving after a slump that followed the war. A Salem vessel, Grand Turk, had been to China and back and was the talk of Massachusetts.

There was a rise in demand for American farm products. In Virginia, work had started on canals for both the James and Potomac Rivers. At Philadelphia an inventor named John Fitch had demonstrated a steamboat on the Delaware River. But as striking as any sign of the country’s burgeoning energy and productivity was the “Grand Federal Procession” held in Philadelphia that July 4 of 1788, in which many hundreds of tradesmen marched, grouped by guilds: shipbuilders, rope-makers, instrument-makers, blacksmiths, tin-plate workers, cabinetmakers, printers, bookbinders, coppersmiths, gunsmiths, saddlers, and stonecutters, some fifty different groups carrying banners and the tools of their trade.

As a result of the Paris Peace Treaty, the size of the nation was double what it had been, greater in area than the British Isles, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined, and if the American population was small by the standards of Europe, it was expanding rapidly, which to Adams was the most promising sign of all. From 2 million or so in 1776, the population had grown to nearly 4 million by 1789, and this despite seven years of violent war, the departure of perhaps 100,000 Loyalists, and comparatively little immigration during the war years. Philadelphia, still the largest city, had increased to a population of 40,000. New York counted 18,000 and, like Philadelphia, surged with growth. Of the thirteen states, Virginia remained the richest and most populous, and thereby maintained the greatest political influence.

But wages were still low everywhere, and money was scarce. There was no standard American coinage or currency. British, Spanish, French, and German coins were all still in use, along with the coins of the different states, their value varying appreciably from one state to another. In New England, for example, six shillings made a dollar, while in New York eight shillings made a dollar. In the entire country there were only three banks.

Travel was slow and arduous everywhere, the roads appallingly bad and worst in the South. Largely because of bad roads, the new Congress, scheduled to convene in New York on the first Wednesday in March 1789, would not have a sufficient number present to make a quorum in either house until weeks afterward.

The nation had no army to speak of — about 700 officers and men. The Continental Navy had disappeared. The sea power that Adams had envisioned and worked so hard to attain was nonexistent.

The great majority of Americans lived and worked on farms, and fully two-thirds of the population was concentrated in a narrow band along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Spanish Florida. Nearly everything else was wilderness. The whole country, concluded one visitor, was “a vast wood.” In Massachusetts it was thought that less than a third of the land had been cleared, and it was the same in New York and Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, at the end of the rough-hewn wagon road over the Allegheny Mountains, was the westernmost town of any consequence in the country and had fewer than 500 souls.

Approximately half the territory of the United States in 1789 was still occupied by American Indians, most of whom lived west of the Appalachians, and though no one knew how many there were, they probably numbered 100,000.

That a new America was steadily taking form beyond the Appalachians was one of the clearest signs of the times. Down the same road Adams traveled that spring to New York came small caravans from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut — families with children and household belongings piled onto heavy wagons, bound for Ohio, a journey of more than 700 miles. At the same time, settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas were crossing into Kentucky and Tennessee. George Washington himself, known to have great confidence in the future of the West, had landholdings in the Ohio River country of more than 20,000 acres.

But to many the immense size of the country and the shift of population westward were serious concerns. With people spread so far and communication so slow and unreliable, what was to hold the nation together? Such republics of the past as Adams had written about in his Defence of the Constitutions were small in scale — so what hope was there for one so inconceivably large? “What would Aristotle and Plato have said, if anyone had talked to them, of a federative republic of thirteen states, inhabiting a country of five hundred leagues in extent?” Adams pondered.

Besides, the country had no tradition of union. Indeed, Americans were long accustomed to putting the interests of region or state ahead of those of the nation, except during war, and not always then. Following the Revolution, General Nathanael Greene had written to Washington from South Carolina that “many people secretly wish that every state be completely independent and that as soon as our public debts are liquidated that Congress should be no more.”

North and South, the new Constitution had been vehemently opposed as a threat to the rights of the states and thus to individual liberty. Two sides had formed, the Federalists, who wanted a strong federal government, and the Anti-Federalists, who held to the sentiment of Thomas Paine, “That government is best which governs least.” And the outcome had been anything but certain. Not until June 1788, the week the Adamses were unpacking at Braintree, had the Constitution been finally secured, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify.

“The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us,” young schoolmaster Adams had written in his percipient letter to Nathan Webb, and to Adams now, as to others, dissolution remained the greatest single threat to the American experiment. “The fate of this government,” he would write from New York to his former law clerk, William Tudor, “depends absolutely upon raising it above the state goverments.” The first line of the Constitution made the point, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Of the potentially divisive threats to “the more perfect union,” none surpassed slavery. The slave population, too, had burgeoned to nearly 700,000 men, women, and children who had no freedom whatever. There were slaves still in every state but one — only Massachusetts had eliminated slavery thus far — but with the overwhelming majority of slaves, fully 500,000 or more, centered in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the difference between North and South was if anything greater than ever.

For Adams, who had seen far more of Europe than of his own country, the different Americas of the West and the South could only be imagined. But more disturbing to him than almost anything was the view heard in many circles that the old ideal of devotion to the public good had been supplanted by rampant avarice; the love of country, by a love of luxury. Mercy Warren had written to the Adamses while they were still in London that the current “avidity for pleasure” in America was certain to lead to trouble. Money, wrote James Warren bitterly, was all that mattered anymore. “Patriotism is ridiculed,” he had warned Adams. “Integrity and ability are of little consequence.”

The Warrens were among those who had adamantly opposed the Constitution, convinced it would only encourage speculation and vice. Certain that America was going the way of imperial Rome, James Warren had turned tiresomely sour and querulous. And though saddened by the change in his friend, Adams sensed he was right, that a moral shift had taken place. Nabby, appraising the politicians she encountered in New York, including Governor George Clinton, surmised there were few for whom personal aggrandizement was not the guiding motivation. She felt herself “in a land of strangers.” It was a feeling not unknown to her father.

“I find men and manners, principles and opinions, much altered in this country since I left it,” he confided to her. But this only made his dedication to union all the stronger.

II

AT THE START of every new venture of importance in his life, John Adams was invariably assailed by grave doubts. It was a life pattern as distinct as any. The boy of fifteen, riding away from home to be examined for admission to Harvard, suffered a foreboding as bleak as the rain clouds overhead. The delegate to the first Continental Congress, preparing to depart for Philadelphia, felt “unalterable anxiety”; the envoy sailing for France wrote of “great diffidence in myself.” That he always succeeded in conquering these doubts did not seem to matter. In advance of each large, new challenge, the painful waves rolled in upon him once again.

Part of this was stage fright, part the consequence of an honest reckoning of his own inadequacies. Mainly it was the burden of an inordinate ability to perceive things as they were: he was apprehensive because he saw clearly how much there was to be apprehensive about. And so it was as he approached the untried office of Vice President.

With issues of such immense national consequence to be addressed, policies to be considered and resolved, precedents to establish, laws to enact, an entire new structure for the governance of the nation to be brought into being, could he, given his nature, do justice to the essentially passive, ceremonial role he had been chosen to fill? Action had been his metier, advocacy his strength, and the vice presidency offered opportunity for neither. “The Vice President of the United States,” stipulated Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution, “shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” So could he with his passion, his fund of opinion, his love of debate, possibly keep from speaking his mind? “I am but an ordinary man,” he had once written. “The times alone have destined me to fame.” But had “the times” now cast him in a role for which he was wholly unsuited?

Such worries weighed heavily through the journey to New York, for all the “parade and show” in his honor, and in advance of his first appearance in the Senate, he prepared a brief speech in which, with marked understatement and honesty, he identified the problem: “Not wholly without experience in public assemblies, I have been more accustomed to take a share in their debates than to preside in their deliberations.” Some months later, after one of the most unfortunate passages in a long public life, he would acknowledge succinctly to John Quincy that, in truth, the office he held was “not quite adapted to my character,” that it was too inactive, too “mechanical,” and that mistakenly he was inclined to think he must “throw a little light on the subject” when need be.

He had left home not knowing where he and Abigail might live, not knowing what salary Congress would provide, and worries over money troubled him exceedingly. Adams had strong views on the matter of recompense for officeholders. He was adamantly opposed to the notion espoused by some that in the ideal republican government public officials should serve without pay — an idea that had been supported by both Franklin and Washington, two of the wealthiest men in the nation. Were a law to be made “that no man should hold an office who had not a private income sufficient for the subsistence and prospects of himself and family,” Adams had written earlier while in London, then the consequence would be that “all offices would be monopolized by the rich; the poor and the middling ranks would be excluded and an aristocratic despotism would immediately follow.” He thought public officials should not only be paid, but that their salaries should be commensurate with their responsibilities and necessary expenses. And as one of the “middling ranks” himself, he viewed with great concern the expenses of living in New York.

Having had no word from Washington, he knew nothing of what might be on the General’s mind, and one wonders how much worse he might have felt had he known. “May Heaven assist me,” Washington had written privately, “for at present I see nothing but clouds and darkness before me.” If Adams was concerned about making ends meet, Washington had had to arrange a loan to cover personal debts and the expense of moving to New York. Greatest was his worry that the country would expect too much of him.

FEDERAL HALL, where Congress met, was a handsomely proportioned stone building at the junction of Broad and Wall Streets distinguished by its glassy cupola and colonnaded front balcony. Formerly City Hall, it had been transformed according to designs by Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a young French engineer and architect who had served as a volunteer in the Revolution. Local citizens had provided the funds in the hope that an edifice worthy of the new republic would inspire Congress to make New York the permanent capital. When costs ran to twice the initial estimates, few complained, so appealing were the results.

It was the first building in America designed to exalt the national spirit, in what would come to be known as the Federal style. Emblazoned in the pediment of the front portico was an immense American eagle. Stars and laurel wreaths were a decorative motif inside and out, and all greatly admired. The meeting room of the House of Representatives, on the ground floor, had “spacious galleries open to all,” so that visitors could observe the proceedings. The Senate Chamber, on the floor above, was a handsome room with high windows, fireplaces of fine American marble, and a ceiling patterned with thirteen stars and suns. Like the building, the Senate Chamber was neither overly grand nor imposing, but stately and filled with light. But there were no galleries for visitors, as the Senate was to meet behind closed doors.

Senator Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, on first seeing the building, said it surpassed any in the country. “I wish the business expected to be transacted in it may be as well done and as universally admired as the house is.”

Adams was formally received at the door of Federal Hall and escorted upstairs to the Senate on the morning of Tuesday, April 21, two days before George Washington arrived in New York, crossing the harbor in a velvet-lined barge and landing to a stupendous ovation. There was no swearing-in ceremony for Adams — the wording of an oath for the Senate was among the host of matters still to be resolved. He was simply greeted by the president pro tempore of the Senate, John Langdon of New Hampshire, and conducted to his chair at the head of the chamber.

Unfolding two sheets of paper, Adams proceeded with his prepared remarks, “cheerfully and readily” accepting the duties of Vice President. Before him, seated in a semicircle, were most of the newly elected members of the Senate, a number of whom he knew from times past, including Langdon, Ellsworth, Richard Henry Lee, Ralph Izard of South Carolina, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, and Tristram Dalton of Massachusetts, who had been a classmate at Harvard.

Adams said how moved he was to be once again among old friends, so many “defenders of the liberties” of the country. He offered congratulations to the American people on the formation of the Constitution and spoke warmly of the “commanding talents and virtues” of Washington. The part played by the hand of God in the choice of such a man to head the nation, said Adams, was so clear as to be apparent to all.

Having acknowledged the concern he felt over his ability to sit silently by during the debate and preside only, he said it would be his “constant endeavor” to behave toward all members with the consideration and decorum befitting their station and character.

But if from inexperience or inadvertency, anything should ever escape me inconsistent with propriety, I must entreat you, by putting it to its true cause and not to any want of respect, to pardon and excuse me.

“A trust of the greatest magnitude is committed to this legislature,” he said in conclusion, “and the eyes of the world are upon you.”

Questions of ceremony and etiquette, such matters as how properly to address the President, required prompt attention, and to Adams these were no small concerns. If it was largely a ceremonial role he was to play, then best to get it right, he felt, and starting with his own place in the scheme of things, should the President choose to address the Senate. “Gentlemen, I feel a great difficulty how to act,” he said. “I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything. But I am President also of the Senate. When the President comes into the Senate, what shall I be?”

There was silence from the floor, until Oliver Ellsworth, considered an authority on the Constitution, rose to his feet. “I find, sir,” he said, “it is evident and clear, sir, that whenever the Senate are to be there, sir, you must be at the head of them. But further, sir, I shall not pretend to say.”

Later, when Adams raised the question of whether the Senate should be seated or standing when the President addressed them, Richard Henry Lee offered that in England when the King spoke before a combined session of Parliament, members of the House of Lords sat and those of the House of Commons stood. Lee was followed by Ralph Izard, who said he could attest from personal observation of such occasions at Parliament that members of the House of Commons stood because in the House of Lords there were no seats for them.

On the day of his inauguration, Thursday, April 30, Washington rode to Federal Hall in a canary-yellow carriage pulled by six white horses and followed by a long column of New York militia in full dress. The air was sharp, the sun shone brightly, and with all work stopped in the city, the crowds along his route were the largest ever seen. It was as if all New York had turned out and more besides. “Many persons in the crowd,” reported the Gazette of the United States, “were heard to say they should now die contented — nothing being wanted to complete their happiness . . . but the sight of the savior of his country.”

In the Senate Chamber were gathered the members of both houses of Congress, the Vice President, and sundry officials and diplomatic agents, all of whom rose when Washington made his entrance, looking solemn and stately. His hair powdered, he wore a dress sword, white silk stockings, shoes with silver buckles, and a suit of the same brown Hartford broadcloth that Adams, too, was wearing for the occasion. They might have been dressed as twins, except that Washington’s metal buttons had eagles on them.

It was Adams who formally welcomed the General and escorted him to the dais. For an awkward moment Adams appeared to be in some difficulty, as though he had forgotten what he was supposed to say. Then, addressing Washington, he declared that the Senate and House of Representatives were ready to attend him for the oath of office as required by the Constitution. Washington said he was ready. Adams bowed and led the way to the outer balcony, in full view of the throng in the streets. People were cheering and waving from below, and from windows and rooftops as far as the eye could see. Washington bowed once, then a second time.

Fourteen years earlier, it had been Adams who called on the Continental Congress to make the tall Virginian commander-in-chief of the army. Now he stood at Washington’s side as Washington, his right hand on the Bible, repeated the oath of office as read by Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, who had also been a member of the Continental Congress.

In a low voice Washington solemnly swore to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Then, as not specified in the Constitution, he added, “So help me God,” and kissed the Bible, thereby establishing his own first presidential tradition.

“It is done,” Livingston said, and turning to the crowd, cried out, “Long live George Washington, President of the United States.”

With the crowd in raptures, cannon pounding, church bells clanging, Washington bowed still again and then, Adams at his side, moved back to deliver his inaugural address to a seated Congress.

If the Vice President had seemed hesitant or nervous performing his small part earlier, the President was no better. Washington’s hands trembled holding his speech, which he read in a voice so low that many in the room had difficulty hearing what he said. No part of the address was particularly distinguished or memorable and the delivery was monotonous throughout. Several times his voice quavered. Yet none of this seemed to matter. He was Washington and many in the room had tears in their eyes. Representative Fisher Ames of Massachusetts later wrote of sitting “entranced,” as though he were witnessing “an allegory on which virtue was personified.” A French diplomat, Louis-Guillaume Otto, wrote with amazement at the effect Washington had. Never had “a citizen of a free country enjoyed among his compatriots a confidence as pure and as universal . . . a real merit and a faithful virtue must be the basis of it.”

Adams provided no comment on the day’s events. Writing to Abigail late the following day, he reported only that at a reception at the President’s house, Washington had greeted him “with great cordiality . . . affection, and confidence,” and that all had gone “very agreeably.”

Days later, in Paris, where he had only just learned of Adams’s election, Jefferson wrote warmly, “No man on earth pays more cordial homage to your worth or wishes more fervently your happiness.” Having requested temporary leave from his duties in France to settle private affairs at home, Jefferson hoped to reach Virginia by late summer.

But little at all went agreeably for Adams in the weeks to follow. In the Senate, the issue of titles, and particularly the question of how the President was to be addressed, superceded all other business. In the House a move to consider titles met with quick defeat. The House voted that the chief executive should be addressed simply as “George Washington, President of the United States.” But in the Senate the discussions became heated, with Adams taking part more than the members deemed appropriate.

According to some accounts it was the Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, who raised the issue, saying that titles were in use everywhere in the world, that there was something in the human makeup that responded to them, and that they were perfectly appropriate. Senator Izard, expressing agreement, moved that “Excellency” be the President’s title. When Senator Ellsworth observed how very ordinary the mere appellation of President sounded, Adams immediately concurred from the Chair. There were presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs, Adams observed.

A committee appointed to consider the issue reported back with the suggested title “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” But it was Adams who took the lead in advocating titles, voicing his views in direct opposition to a strong-willed senator from Pennsylvania, William Maclay. Indeed, had it not been for Adams and Maclay the issue might have come to little more than it did in the House. Instead, it occupied the Senate for nearly a month.

Only Maclay was keeping a private journal of what transpired, and being the only account, it would be quoted repeatedly by latter-day historians. Maclay’s rendition of Adams was devastating. Adams’s version of what happened, written a few years later, would be quite different. According to Adams, his supposed passion for titles amounted merely to a reasonable request for advice from the Senate on how to address Washington:

Whether I should say, “Mr. Washington,” “Mr. President,” “Sir,” “may it please your Excellency,” or what else? I observed that it had been common while he commanded the army to call him “His Excellency,” but I was free to own it would appear to me better to give him no title but “Sir” or “Mr. President,” than to put him on a level with a governor of Bermuda.

Adams believed everything possible should be done to bring dignity and respect to the central government and thus strengthen the union. If the central government was to have greater authority and importance than the state governments, then the titles of federal office ought to reflect that. It was thus essential to adorn the office of the President, the highest office, with commensurate “dignity and splendor.” Titles were symbols, just as impressive buildings were symbols, except that titles, unlike buildings, cost nothing.

Like Richard Henry Lee, Adams believed the need for “distinctions” ran deep in human nature and that to deny this was unrealistic. The love of titles was like the love of parades and pageantry. The title did not make the man, of course, but it enhanced the standing of the man in the eyes of others. Rank and distinction were essential to any social organization, be it a family, a parish, or a ship, Adams would say. He cared intensely about the future of the republic and, as he had tried to explain in his Defence of the Constitutions, he saw men of education, ability, and wealth as “the natural aristocracy,” the great strength and blessing of society, but potentially also a great threat to liberty, if their power and energies were misdirected. These were not hereditary titles he was proposing, but titles conferred by society for merit and that went only with positions of high federal responsibility. He was convinced that the modest compensation and heavy burdens of public service — the disruption of family life, the criticism and insults one was subjected to — must be compensated for, if ever people of ability were to take part. He believed that honorable titles of a kind not to be acquired in any other line of work could make a difference. To him personally, he insisted, they mattered not at all. It was his thought that Washington should be called “His Majesty the President,” or something of the sort.

But there was no popular support for grand titles. Adams was woefully out of step with the country. Had he been in New York two years earlier, almost certainly he would have seen a play called The Contrast, if for no other reason than it was written by Nabby’s former suitor, Royall Tyler. The first American play to be produced on stage, it opened with the lines:

Exult each patriot heart! This night is shown

A piece which we may fairly call our own:

Where the proud titles of “My Lord!” “Your Grace!”

To humble “Mr.” and plain “Sir” give place.

One wonders, too, what effect Abigail might have had on her husband had she been with him during his first weeks as Vice President. It was not titles that gave men preeminence in America, she had lectured the “haughty Scotchman” on her voyage to England and to the solid approval of her shipmates.

James Madison, in an address to the House, had expressed the conviction of most Americans when he said, “The more simple, the more republican we are in our manners, the more national dignity we shall acquire.”

But Adams would not be stilled. It was almost as if he had to go against the current, lest anyone doubt his independence. He repeatedly intruded on the Senate’s time to voice his views, even lecturing the Senate, as if back at his schoolmaster’s desk. “For forty minutes he harangued us from the chair,” wrote Senator Maclay of one such disquisition.

Maclay, the most radical and outspoken Anti-Federalist in the Senate, was a rough-hewn lawyer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who stood six feet three and believed he was serving among a “set of vipers.” Caustic, opinionated, he disliked just about everyone. In the privacy of his journal he called Alexander Hamilton “a damnable villain”; Robert Morris, “the greatest blackguard”; and referred to James Madison as “His Littleness.” For Adams he felt only contempt. Earlier Benjamin Rush had encouraged Maclay to support Adams for Vice President and to be friendly to him after Adams took office, with a view to the help Adams might provide in making Philadelphia the capital. “We knew his vanity,” Maclay wrote, “and hoped by laying hold of it to render him useful among the New England men in our scheme of bringing Congress to Pennsylvania.” Accordingly, Maclay treated Adams with feigned deference, hating every moment of it, as he wrote in his journal. He thought Adams “silly,” said he had “the face of folly.” Whenever he looked at the Vice President presiding in his chair, wrote Maclay, “I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches.”

It was the spirit of the Constitution that most Americans wanted, Maclay insisted, rising repeatedly to address the Senate. “Let us read the Constitution,” he declared. “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Any such attributes were “contraband language” in America.

To judge by what Maclay recorded, Adams made a fool of himself every time he opened his mouth, while he, Maclay, remained the voice of reason and the people’s will. Possibly, Adams was as ludicrous as Maclay portrayed him. But given Maclay’s contempt for Adams — a contempt so blatant that some in the Senate urged him to exercise some self-restraint — it is hard to imagine that what he wrote was not highly colored by bias.

Persisting in his futile effort, Adams made himself a mockery, even among some who were on his side. When Ralph Izard suggested that Adams himself be bestowed with a title, “His Rotundity,” the joke rapidly spread. In the House, Representatives John Page of Virginia, Jefferson’s lifelong friend, and Thomas Tucker of South Carolina relieved the tedium of extended debates by penning and exchanging doggerel at the Vice President’s expense. “In gravity clad, He has nought in his head, But visions of Nobels and Kings,” wrote Tucker, as a poetic query, to which Page responded:

I’ll tell in a trice —

’Tis old Daddy Vice

Who carries of pride an ass-load;

Who turns up his nose,

Wherever he goes,

With vanity swelled like a toad.

On May 14, exactly as the House had done, the Senate voted that Washington’s title be simply and only “The President of the United States.”

Clearly the issue had been blown out of proportion. As even Madison admitted on the floor of the House, it was not a question of vital importance. Nor had Adams proven himself a monarchist, as some like Maclay kept insisting. Privately, Adams knew what a bad start he had made, and to be the butt of jokes, after all he had been through, was hurtful. But as any adverse or critical comment on Washington, any ridicule at all, would have been considered unacceptable at this stage, Adams served as a convenient target for mockery and humor, and would again, just as he would be subject to the easiest, most damaging of smear words: monarchist. He was the first, but by no means the last, Vice President to take abuse in the President’s place, though much of it, to be sure, he brought on himself.

Most serious perhaps was the damage he had done to his standing with Washington, who was privately advised that the fuss over titles had made Adams not just unpopular in Virginia but “odious.” Washington was thereafter to maintain an appreciable distance from Adams, thus diminishing still more the importance of the vice presidency and Adams’s part in the scheme of things.

Yet through it all, true to his promise, Adams had shown no anger or acted discourteously to anyone. At one point he also conceded from the chair that perhaps he had been out of the country too long and failed to know the temper of the people.

To compound his troubles, word had been passed to him for the first time explaining the “dark and dirty intrigue” used to deny him votes for Vice President, and it sickened him. “Is not my election to this office in the scurvy manner in which it was done a curse rather than a blessing?” he asked Benjamin Rush in a letter charged with disgust. He had not yet learned who was behind the scheme, only that it had originated in New York, and the more he observed of life in New York, the more disconsolate he grew. To William Tudor, he railed against the “corruption of ambition,” the “ungovernable rage” for money and luxury he saw on all sides. Later, Adams would attribute such “scrawls” to “gloomy times and desperate circumstances.” He felt miserably alone. His accommodations with John Jay were the finest possible, and occasional Sundays with Nabby and her family helped greatly. But his need for Abigail, his ballast, was acute.

By mid-May he had located a house and posted an urgent plea for her to come at once. From her letters he knew the trouble she was having finding someone to lease the farm, and that she was short of funds. He told her to borrow whatever she needed, or sell off some of the livestock, “anything at any rate” rather than delay a day longer. If no one would take the place, she should “leave it to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field,” he told her. In the meantime, he was desperate for books to be sent — Hume, Johnson, Priestley, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, “and a Plutarch in French or English.”

As to the nature of his “difficulties,” he gave no explanation. Of all that had been going on in the Senate and his part in it, he said only that he had survived largely through prayer.

“My sincere thanks to Mr. Wibird for his remembrance of me in his prayers,” he told Abigail. “It is to me a most affecting thing to hear myself prayed for, in particular as I do every day in the week, and disposes me to bear with more composure, some disagreeable circumstances that attend my situation.”

The suspicion that Adams was a monarchist at heart grew stronger, and understandably, as in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government he did seem to lean in that direction. Distraught over what he had heard, Benjamin Rush wrote to caution his “dear friend” to think again and remember all he had espoused at the start of the Revolution.

In fact, Adams had done serious damage to his reputation and among others besides Rush whose opinions he most valued. It appeared that the man who put such stress on balance in government was himself a little unbalanced. Writing Madison from Paris, Jefferson dismissed the Senate’s proposed title for Washington as “the most superlatively ridiculous thing” he had ever heard of, and called Adams’s part in such business “proof” that Franklin’s characterization of Adams as “sometimes absolutely mad” was the right one.

As so often before when feeling battered and unappreciated, Adams poured out his fury and frustration on paper. To Rush he insisted he was as much a republican as ever. Still, he did not see hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as necessarily contrary to human nature. Nor was it beyond reason to imagine that the time could come when America, of necessity, might have to resort to something of the kind — as “an asylum against discord, seditions, and civil war” — in order to preserve the laws and liberties of the people. He did not expect to see anything like this happen in his lifetime. He was only saying it was conceivable.

“I am a mortal and irreconcilable enemy to monarchy,” he would later tell Rush, after Rush expressed worry that Adams had abandoned the ideals of 1776. “I am no friend to hereditary limited monarchy in America,” Adams wrote explicitly. “Do not, therefore, my friend, misunderstand me and misrepresent me to posterity.

I deny an “attachment to monarchy,” and I deny that I have “changed my principles since 1776.” . . . The continent is a kind of whispering gallery and acts and speeches are reverberated around from New York in all directions. The report is very loud at a distance when the whisper is very gentle in the center.

But this was written later, when the new government, as well as Adams’s own role in it, had become more stable. In the meanwhile, even Rush conceded that he was equally distraught over the moral temper of the times and the long-range prospects for America. “A hundred years hence, absolute monarchy will probably be rendered necessary in our country by the corruption of our people,” wrote the usually optimistic physician. He asked only that the republican ideal be given a fair chance, which Adams was not only willing, but determined, to do.

Many years afterward, reflecting on his friend Adams and the charge that he had been corrupted by his years in Europe, Rush wrote that, in fact, there had been no change at all. Adams was as “familiar and unaffected” as ever, “strictly upright,” and “a real American in principle and conduct.”

As distressing as almost anything for Adams was the flood of requests for his help in securing government jobs. His response was to refuse them all on the grounds that only the President had the power to make appointments. He himself, he insisted, had no say on patronage. Even appeals from deserving friends were denied. When Mercy Warren asked him to arrange a suitable position for her husband James, Adams replied huffily that he had no such influence and that even if he did he could not possibly allow the authority entrusted to him to become “subservient to my private views, or those of my family or friends.”

Adams detested the idea of friends trying to use him, but he could readily have done something for the Warrens, and with perfect propriety.

One further aggravation were the reports from home about young Charles, who had gotten into a scrape at Harvard. Abigail wrote of suffering “anxious hours” over what she had heard, though given the company Charles had been keeping, she was not surprised. She thought the boy belonged with his father. To Cotton Tufts, who apparently supplied more details on the matter, Adams wrote helplessly, “What shall I do with that tender-hearted fool?”

The exact nature of Charles’s difficulties was never defined in the correspondence, but from fragmentary Harvard records it appears that one student was expelled, others reprimanded, when the one, or all, ran naked through Harvard Yard, and the implications are that there had been drinking involved. In any event, Charles was with Abigail when she arrived by packet boat in New York at the start of summer, and life for the Vice President took a decided turn for the better.

ALL THE FRUSTRATIONS and feelings of stagnation that went with the vice presidency, all that so many others who followed in the office were to bemoan down the years, were felt intensely by the first Vice President. Yet for Adams it was by no means a time of unrelieved misery. Indeed, in their private lives, it was as happy a stretch of years as he and Abigail knew, beginning from the day of her arrival, June 24, 1789. “We are all very happy,” wrote Adams to Cotton Tufts. And so they were.

He had rented a proper country seat, Richmond Hill, a mile north of town on a high promontory beside the Hudson, with sweeping views and nearly always a breeze. Adams loved the location and that the rent was considerably less than for a comparable house in town. His salary as Vice President, a subject of much debate in Congress, would be set at $5,000, a figure lower than previously understood, and whether he could thus afford to live in a style befitting the office remained a worry.

“We are delightfully situated,” Abigail reported to Mary Cranch. “The prospect all around is beautiful to the highest degree.” Sailing ships of every kind were constantly in view, passing up and down the wide tidal river.

On one side we see a view of the city and of Long Island. The river [is] in front, [New] Jersey and the adjacent country on the other side. You turn a little from the road and enter a gate. A winding road with trees in clumps leads to the house, and all around the house it looks wild and rural as uncultivated nature. . . . You enter under a piazza into a hall and turning to the right hand ascend a staircase which lands you in another [hall] of equal dimensions of which I make a drawing room. It has a glass door which opens into a gallery the whole front of the house which is exceeding pleasant. . . . There is upon the back of the house a garden of much greater extent than our Braintree garden, but it is wholly for a walk and flowers. It has hawthorne hedge and rows of trees with a broad gravel walk.

She had her usual complaints — repairs were needed, good servants impossible to find, the local prices outrageous — but the longer she stayed at Richmond Hill, the more attached she became, and Adams concurred. “Never,” he wrote, “did I live in so delightful a spot.”

They were both happy to be near Nabby and the grandchildren, and Abigail unhesitatingly assumed her social obligations as the wife of the Vice President, making and receiving calls. “At Richmond Hill it is expected that I am at home both to gentlemen and ladies whenever they come out, which is almost every day . . . besides it is a sweet morning ride.” After she and Nabby paid a first call on Mrs. Washington, Abigail expressed complete approval. “She is plain in dress, but that plainness is the best of every article. . . . Her hair is white, her teeth beautiful.” Having attended several of the President’s levees, Abigail could attest that the “court” of the Washingtons was as crowded, the company as brilliantly dressed as at St. James’s, with the difference that here she thoroughly enjoyed herself. Her “station” at levees, she explained to Mary, was to the right of Mrs. Washington — though this Mary must keep to herself, “as all distinction you know is unpopular.” If someone mistakenly stood in her place, the President never failed to see the situation corrected without anyone being offended. He “has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point that if he was not really one of the best intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.

He is polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good. These are traits in his character which peculiarly fit him for the exalted station he holds, and God grant that he may hold it with the same applause and universal satisfaction for many, many years, as it is my firm opinion that no other man could rule over this great people and consolidate them into one mighty empire but he who is set over us.

After Paris and London, however, she found New York extremely dull. There was but one theater and the local preachers were unbearably ponderous. Still being at the center of politics more than made up for it. “I am fearful of touching upon political subjects,” she wrote. “Yet perhaps there is no person who feels more interested in them.”

Through the sweltering summer, Adams never missed a day in the Senate, rolling in each morning from Richmond Hill in a one-horse chaise, not the fine carriage portrayed in hostile newspaper accounts. A Judiciary Act was deliberated and passed, establishing a federal court system, and set the size of the Supreme Court. Then a proposal that the Senate have a say in the removal of cabinet officers — a proposal put forth by Senator Maclay — set off fierce debate. To the Federalists, the bill was a flagrant attempt to diminish the power of the President to the benefit of the Senate, and they adamantly objected, arguing that the removal of ranking officials in the executive branch must be at the sole discretion of the President. Adams met with several senators — he was “busy indeed, running to everyone,” according to Maclay’s journal. Most important, he convinced Tristram Dalton of Massachusetts to withdraw his support for Maclay’s bill. Then, when the vote proved a tie, Adams performed his only legislative function and cast his vote against the measure.

Afterward, James Lovell wrote from Massachusetts to tell Adams people were saying he had cast his vote with the President only because he “looked up to that goal.” Of course he looked up to it, Adams answered. How could it be otherwise? “I am forced to look up to it, and bound by duty to do so, because there is only one breath of one mortal between me and it.”

Another confidant, the Connecticut jurist John Trumbull, who had once clerked in Adams’s law office, told Adams the southern aristocrats naturally held him in contempt and remained his enemies because he was a New Englander without “advantages from pride and family.” They “suppose themselves born to greatness and cannot bear to be eclipsed by merit only.”

“You talk of my enemies, but I assure you I have none,” Adams said in spirited reply. That he was a New Englander, there was no denying. As for having no pride of family, there was little he was more proud of.

My father was an honest man, a lover of his country, and an independent spirit and the example of that father inspired me with the greatest pride of my life. . . . My father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great, great grandfather were all inhabitants of Braintree and all independent country gentlemen. I mean officers in the militia and deacons in the church. . . . The line I have just described makes about 160 years in which no bankruptcy was ever committed, no widow or orphan was ever defrauded, no redemptor intervened and no debt was contracted with England.

The old, stubborn independence of his forebears kept playing on his thoughts. It had been the bedrock of their integrity, and he was resolved to see it sustained. When his son Thomas wrote, expressing an interest in public life, Adams felt he was answering for generations of their line:

Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not. A young man should weigh well his plans. Integrity should be preserved in all events, as essential to his happiness, through every stage of his existence. His first maxim then should be to place his honor out of reach of all men. In order to do this he must make it a rule never to become dependent on public employments for subsistence. Let him have a trade, a profession, a farm, a shop, something where he can honestly live, and then he may engage in public affairs, if invited, upon independent principles. My advice to my children is to maintain an independent character.

OTHER THAN A FEW stiff social occasions, Adams had little contact with the President and no influence, but as yet it seemed no one had any influence with Washington. “He seeks information from all quarters and judges more independently than any man I ever saw,” Adams wrote approvingly. In the choice of the cabinet, Adams is not known to have been asked an opinion, or to have offered any.

It was to be a geographically balanced cabinet, with New England, the Middle States, and the South represented, and all four positions were promptly confirmed by the Senate: Hamilton of New York as Secretary of the Treasury; Jefferson, Secretary of State; Edmund Randolph of Virginia, Attorney General; and Henry Knox of Massachusetts as Secretary of War. (If not the most intellectually outstanding of the four, Knox was certainly the most physically noticeable, having acquired over the years an immense girth, to the point of weighing nearly three hundred pounds.) For Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Washington chose John Jay.

It was thus to be a government led by revolutionaries, all men who had taken part in the Revolution. Washington, by common agreement, was the greatest man in the world, and in Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Jay, the American people could fairly claim to have the best minds in the country. And however striking their differences in temperament or political philosophy, they were, without exception, men dedicated primarily to seeing the American experiment succeed.

Adams approved of all the choices for the cabinet. Such was his regard for Hamilton at this point, he arranged for young Charles to clerk in Hamilton’s Wall Street law office until Hamilton commenced his duties as Secretary of the Treasury, when Charles moved on to another firm. So through late summer father and son could be seen riding off to work together each morning in the one-horse chaise.

III

IN SEPTEMBER, as Congress took up the question of where to locate the permanent capital, and the President prepared for a tour of New England, news came of revolution in France. It was a bolt out of the blue, catching everyone by surprise, and the event that was to make the already difficult business of founding the new American government still more complicated and contentious. In the life of John Adams the old issue of America’s relations with France was to bear heavily and fatefully yet again.

On July 14 an enraged mob had stormed and captured the Bastille, the ancient Paris prison that had come to symbolize an intolerable regime. All its prisoners, numbering just seven and none of them political, had been set free. Its commander had been beaten to death and decapitated, his dripping head then carried through the streets on a pike. In the days that followed, as rampaging mobs took over the city, one elderly Paris official was hanged from a lamppost, another cut to pieces, his heart torn from his body and brandished from a window of the Hôtel de Ville.

The headline of the New York Daily Gazette, September 19, 1789, announced, A COMPLETE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. The National Assembly was proceeding to form a new constitution. France, friend and ally in America’s struggle for freedom, was now herself taking up the cause, and nearly everywhere in America the news was greeted with enthusiasm.

France seems travailing in the birth of freedom [wrote William Maclay]. Her throes and pangs of labor are violent. God give her a happy delivery! Royalty, nobility, and vile pageantry, by which a few of the human race lord it over and tread on the necks of their fellow mortals, seem like to be demolished with their kindred Bastille, which is said to be laid in ashes. Ye gods, with what indignation do I review the late attempt of some creatures among us to revive the vile machinery. Oh Adams, Adams what a wretch thou art!

For Adams the news from France had the effect of an alarm bell. Heedless of the troubles he had already brought on himself with his Defence of the Constitutions, he took up his pen and launched into a series of newspaper essays, determined to show again the evil effects of unbalanced governments. He consulted no one, asked for no advice or opinion from others. Working under intense, self-imposed pressure, he wrote straight out, on and on, never pausing to rewrite or edit himself, which would have helped and for which he later apologized.

He labored at these essays for months, during which Congress adjourned and he returned to Massachusetts to join Washington for part of his visit there, proudly escorting the President on a tour of Harvard. But even before the first of the essays appeared, he let it be known that while he understood the reasons for the revolution in France — the oppressive abuses of the government, the overbearing and costly “armies of monks, soldiers, and courtiers” — and though he strongly supported the ideals espoused by French patriots, he viewed the situation with dire misgivings. “The French Revolution,” he wrote to a Dutch friend, Francis van der Kemp, “will, I hope, produce effects in favor of liberty, equity, and humanity as extensive as this whole globe and as lasting as all time.” Yet, he could not help foresee a tragic outcome, in that a single legislative assembly, as chosen by the French, could only mean “great and lasting calamities.”

To the Reverend Richard Price in London, who had preached a widely publicized sermon in support of what was happening in France, Adams acknowledged feeling a sense of satisfaction and triumph in the revolution. Nor did he doubt its immense historic importance: “It appears to me that most of the events in the annals of the world are but childish tales compared to it,” Adams declared. Later, having read Price’s sermon, he said such principles and sentiments as Price expressed had been “from the year 1760 to this hour, the whole scope of my life.” But he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling.” He could not accept the idea of enshrining reason as a religion, as desired by the philosophes. “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.”

From experience he knew the kinds of men such upheavals could give rise to, Adams told another correspondent. In revolutions, he warned, “the most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses frequently obtained more influence than men of sense and judgment; and the weakest man may carry foolish measures in opposition to wise ones proposed by the ablest.” France was “in great danger.” Ahead of anyone in the government, and more clearly than any, Adams foresaw the French Revolution leading to chaos, horror, and ultimate tyranny.

In London, meanwhile, the fiery Irish-born statesman Edmund Burke, who had once been the American Revolution’s strongest friend in Parliament, declared in a speech that the French were proving themselves the ablest architects of ruin who ever existed. “In one summer they have done their business . . . they have completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufacturers.” The French, said Burke, sounding very like Adams, had “destroyed all balances and counterpoises which serve to fix a state and give it steady direction, and then they melted down the whole into one incongruous mass of mob and democracy.”

Burke adamantly opposed such English enthusiasm for the revolution in France as espoused by Richard Price, which he thought woefully irresponsible, and the speech, which was published in full in New York in the Gazette of the United States, was but a prelude to what would be Burke’s most famous book, Reflections on the French Revolution, published late in 1790.

Adams, too, took up the architectural theme, in a letter to his old fellow revolutionary Samuel Adams. “Everything will be pulled down. So much seems certain,” he wrote. “But what will be built up? Are there any principles of political architecture? . . . Will the struggle in Europe be anything other than a change in impostors?”

• • •

THAT SEPTEMBER, Jefferson with his daughters Patsy and Polly, and slaves James and Sally Hemings, landed at Norfolk, Virginia, where he learned for the first time that he had been named Secretary of State.

He had left Paris well after the fall of the Bastille, and though he had witnessed none of the bloodshed of the summer, he had known what was happening and approved, convinced the violence would soon end and that for France, a glorious new day had dawned.

When Jefferson arrived at Monticello, according to traditional family accounts, his slaves were so overjoyed to see him they unhitched his horses and pulled his carriage up the last ridge of the mountain, then carried “Master” in their arms into his house. “It seemed impossible to satisfy their anxiety to touch and kiss the very earth which bore him,” Patsy Jefferson would write.

Jefferson remained at Monticello through the winter, for nearly three months, during which Patsy, at seventeen, was married to a cousin, Thomas Randolph, Jr., after little or no courtship. As a wedding present, Jefferson gave the young couple 1,000 acres and twelve families of slaves, and helped in the eventual purchase of a nearby plantation for them called Edgehill — all of which necessitated an additional loan of several thousand dollars, this time from bankers in Amsterdam.

In early March, Jefferson started for New York, stopping briefly at Philadelphia to pay a last visit to Benjamin Franklin, who was mortally ill. Calling on Benjamin Rush shortly afterward, Jefferson assured his old friend he was as faithful a republican as ever and “deplored” the change in John Adams. He regarded Adams “with respect and affection as a great and upright man,” Jefferson said, but “the greatest man in the world,” he had lately concluded, was Madison.

At New York, Jefferson took a lease on a house on Maiden Lane, and immediately — inevitably — ordered that extensive alterations be made inside and out, despite the fact that New York was not expected to remain the capital much longer. James Hemings, now accomplished in the art of French cookery, was installed in the kitchen, and a letter went off to Paris telling Adrien Petit to come as soon as possible.

With the death of Franklin on April 17, Philadelphia staged the greatest public homage that had ever been given a deceased American. In New York, the House of Representatives voted to put on mourning, but the Senate declined. When Jefferson proposed to Washington that the executive department follow the example of the House, Washington, too, declined, saying he would not know where to draw the line if he once began such a ceremony.

Adams’s only known response to the news of Franklin’s demise was in a letter to Rush in which he lamented the lies history would tell of “our revolution.” “The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war.”

The reunion of the Adamses and Jefferson in New York was appropriately amicable. They saw each other socially at dinners and presidential levees, and on more than one occasion, Jefferson rode out to Richmond Hill. “Jefferson is here and adds much to the social circle,” Abigail noted, but that was all. Jefferson in his letters home to Patsy (whom he addressed as Martha, now that she was a married woman) made no mention of the Adamses.

The Gazette of the United States had by now carried the text of a formal reply by Jefferson to the welcome he had received from his Virginia neighbors. It was a declaration of his faith in reason and democracy that he had taken great pains over.

It rests now with ourselves to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of self-government so long denied to mankind: to show by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err, but its errors are honest, solitary and short-lived. Let us then, my dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

But to Adams the “sufficiency” of reason alone for the care of human affairs was by no means clear, and it was exactly the will of the majority, particularly as being exercised in France, that so gravely concerned him. He was certain France had “severe trials” to endure, as he wrote to a friend. The will of the majority, if out of hand, could lead to “horrible ravages,” he was sure. “My fundamental maxim of government is never to trust the lamb to the wolf,” and in France, he feared, the wolf was now the majority.

Adams’s series of articles also commenced in the Gazette of the United States that spring of 1790, on April 27, and would continue for a year, endlessly, it seemed to many. Though they were unsigned, the identity of the author was common knowledge. Titled “Discourses on Davila,” and ultimately published as a book, they were largely a translation of a history of the French civil wars of the sixteenth century, a once-popular work, Historia delle guerre civili di Francia, by the Italian Enrico Caterino Davila, published first in 1630. More than he had in his Defence of the Constitutions, Adams stressed the perils of unbridled, unbalanced democracy, and in what he called “useful reflections” he dealt with human nature, drawing heavily on the works of Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, and on Pope’s Essay on Man.

In the initial installments, he wrote again, as he had as far back as his teaching days at Worcester, of the natural ”passion for distinction” in all men and women — “whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected.”

“To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable,” wrote the man who, as Vice President, felt himself so consistently overlooked.

He ruminated on avarice, poverty, fame, and honor. No one, he wrote, better understood the human heart than the Romans, who “considered that as reason is the guide of life, the senses, the imagination and affections are the springs of activity.” Unlike Jefferson, Adams was not only fascinated by “the passions,” but certain they ruled more often than others were willing to concede. “Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales.”

The world was growing more enlightened, Adams conceded. “Knowledge is more diffused. . . . Man, as man, becomes an object of respect.” But, he insisted, there was “great reason to pause and preserve our sobriety.

Amidst all their exultations, Americans and Frenchmen should remember that the perfectibility of man is only human and terrestrial perfectibility. Cold will still freeze, and fire will never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind.

Between Jefferson and Adams there was no discussion of their diverging views. To Jefferson, Adams had become an embarrassment, and while always pleasant in social encounters, Jefferson had as little as possible to do with him. On matters of foreign relations, where Adams’s judgment could have been of value, Jefferson would never seek his counsel or include him in deliberations. Washington seldom asked Adams for views, but Jefferson, who in Europe had deferred repeatedly to Adams, asked for them not at all.

Like Washington and many others, Adams had become increasingly distraught over the rise of political divisiveness, the forming of parties or factions. That political parties were an evil that could bring the ruination of republican government was doctrine he, with others, had long accepted and espoused. “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other,” Adams had observed to a correspondent while at Amsterdam, before the Revolution ended. Yet this was exactly what had happened. The “turbulent maneuvers” of factions, he now wrote privately, could “tie the hands and destroy the influence” of every honest man with a desire to serve the public good. There was “division of sentiments over everything,” he told his son-in-law William Smith. “How few aim at the good of the whole, without aiming too much at the prosperity of parts!”

Then, in May, with the weather unseasonably wet and cold and influenza rampant in the city, Washington was suddenly taken so ill it appeared the one unifying force respected by all was in mortal jeopardy.

In the first six months of his presidency, Washington had lived in a comparatively modest house on Cherry Street, but had since moved to grander quarters, a mansion on Broadway, where now the street was cordoned off to give him some quiet. One doctor after another came and went at the front door. For several days, until the fever broke, it appeared the President was dying. Senator Maclay, on a call at the house, found “every eye full of tears.” When the President’s presiding physician allowed that death was all but certain, alarm swept through the city. Calamity faced the country.

For the Adamses, they were days of extreme anxiety. When the crisis passed, Abigail tried to convey to Mary Cranch the degree to which the union and permanency of the government depended on Washington’s life. “At this early day when neither our finances are arranged, nor our government sufficiently cemented to promise duration, his death would, I fear, have had most disastrous consequences.” The prospect of anyone succeeding to Washington’s place was unthinkable, but the realization that there was indeed “only one breath,” as John had put it, between him and the presidency, and that it would be he who would have to face the “disastrous consequences,” had struck her full force as it had not before. “I feared a thousand things which I pray I never may be called to experience,” she continued. “Most assuredly I do not wish for the highest spot. I never before realized what I might be called to do, and the apprehension of it only for a few days greatly distressed me.”

Meantime, the entire household at Richmond Hill was stricken with influenza, with the exception of the Vice President. James Madison had been laid up. One congressman died. Jefferson was out of circulation for a month, confined to his house in the grip of excruciating headaches.

That one had to keep “a good heart,” come what may, was Abigail’s lifelong creed. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” she loved to say, quoting Proverbs. “I hate to complain,” she now wrote. “No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.”

That June of 1790, with the President recovered, the French diplomat, Louis-Guillaume Otto, summing up the situation in New York for his government, reported that the influence and importance of the Vice President were “nil.” If Washington had an heir apparent, by all rights it was Jefferson.

It appears certain at present that he [Adams] will never be President and that he will have a very formidable competitor in Mr. Jefferson, who, with more talents and knowledge than he, has infinitely more the principles and manners of a republican.

THAT SUMMER Congress worked itself to a fever pitch over two issues certain to be of long-lasting consequence. The question of where to locate the national capital had been a topic of rancorous discussion since the summer before, and was again at the forefront, along with a proposal for the federal government to assume some $25 million in debts incurred by the states during the Revolution. The “assumption” plan was the work of the youthful Hamilton, who, since his appointment, had swiftly made the Treasury the most creative department in the government, and was commonly recognized as having extraordinary ability.

An immigrant of illegitimate birth, Hamilton had arrived in New York from the West Indies at age fifteen. In less than ten years he had distinguished himself as a scholar at King’s (later Columbia) College, served as Washington’s aide in the war, led an assault at Yorktown, and married into the wealthy, influential Schuyler family of New York, which did him no harm when, after the war, he turned his energies to the law and politics. Brilliant to the point of genius, he exuded vitality and could turn on great charm when needed. His capacity for hard work was almost superhuman. Though somewhat shorter than Adams — about five feet seven — he was attractively slender, handsome, with clear blue eyes and sandy red hair, and dressed so as never to be lost in a crowd, in perfectly tailored coats, waistcoats, and breeches in a rainbow of colors. Even his ambition seemed to become him — Adams wrote of Hamilton’s “high-minded ambition” — and his incurable love of intrigue had thus far alienated no one.

As one of the principal authors, along with Madison, of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton ranked as a leading proponent of a strong central government, and his name was commonly linked with that of Madison, with whom he remained on friendly terms. Further, both were highly esteemed by the President, which was of considerable importance.

Madison, a tiny, sickly-looking man who weighed little more than a hundred pounds and dressed always in black, had emerged as the most formidable figure in the House, largely on the strength of a penetrating intelligence and a shrewd political sense. Adams thought him overrated, but in time Adams would change his mind.

Hamilton’s assumption plan had first been laid before Congress the previous January, 1790, as part of a large report in which he argued that a sound public credit was essential to economic growth and national unity. He had called for the central government to pay off all federal debt and to assume the debt of the states as well, on the grounds that they had been incurred in the common cause of independence. Boldly, Hamilton argued that such an increase in the national debt would be a blessing, for the greater the responsibility of the central government, the greater its authority.

He was vehemently opposed, however, by those who saw it as an overreaching and very unrepublican move to concentrate power in the central government to the detriment of the states. To southerners in the Congress the scheme would not only reduce the importance of the states, but would lead to a dangerous, ultimately corrupting concentration of wealth and power in the North. And it was Madison now, breaking with Hamilton, who led the opposition in the House, where assumption was put to the vote on April 12 and narrowly defeated.

Still, the battle continued, and at the same time that the location of the capital — the “residence” issue — had become a subject of equal rancor. New Yorkers, eager to keep the capital where it was, had begun building an executive mansion for Washington by the Battery, with a grand panorama of the harbor. New Englanders also favored New York, it being much the easiest location for them to reach, though Philadelphia, adamantly espoused by the Pennsylvanians, was considered an acceptable alternative.

The Virginians wanted no part of either of the northern cities and were strongly committed to bringing the capital south to a site on the Potomac River not far from Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. Those “most adjacent to the seat of legislation will always possess advantages over others,” said Madison, who feared that the South and its agrarian way of life would suffer were the capital to remain in the North.

In the Senate, charges and countercharges were voiced with increasing vehemence. Adams struggled to keep order and apparently with little effect. “John Adams has neither judgment, firmness of mind, nor respectability of deportment to fill the chair of such an assembly,” scoffed the ever-splenetic William Maclay.

Then, on a morning in June, the historic “compromise of 1790” began to take form, when Hamilton and Jefferson met outside the President’s house and Hamilton, taking Jefferson by the arm, walked him up and down for half an hour, urging him, for the sake of the union, to join in “common cause” and resolve acceptance of the assumption bill. Professing that reasonable men ought to be able to reach a compromise, Jefferson invited Hamilton and Madison to dine at his house the next day. And there, over a bottle of Jefferson’s best wine, the bargain was struck. In return for southern support for the assumption bill, Hamilton agreed to do all he could to persuade the Pennsylvanians to vote for a permanent capital by the Potomac, if it were agreed to move the capital temporarily to Philadelphia. Madison said he would not vote for assumption, but then neither would he be “strenuous” in opposition.

Whether, in fact, the outcome was resolved in this fashion is not altogether clear, but certainly Jefferson believed the bargain had been settled, for on July 1 he wrote William Short in Paris to have his furniture and paintings shipped to Philadelphia.

The crucial vote on residence, however, was made not in the House but in the Senate, where apparently an agreement had already been reached between the Pennsylvanians and the Virginians. When a last-minute motion to keep the capital in New York for two more years resulted in a thirteen-to-thirteen tie, Adams cast a nay vote.

By July 12 both houses of Congress had voted to relocate the capital in Philadelphia for ten years — until the turn of the century — after which it would move to a permanent site on the Potomac. The Pennsylvanians went along with the agreement, convinced that once the capital was located in Philadelphia it would never move. Adams was inclined to agree. A capital, he said, ought to be in a great city, an idea no Virginian would ever have entertained.

With the passage of the assumption bill at the end of the month came cries of “intrigues, cabals, and combinations.” New Yorkers were outraged. Senator Maclay speculated that, if the truth were known, Washington was behind the whole arrangement, which indeed he was, and in the first public criticism of the President, the New York Advertiser charged him with gross ingratitude to the city of New York.

AS SOON AS CONGRESS ADJOURNED on August 12, the government began packing for the move. The President and Mrs. Washington departed for Mount Vernon, while the Vice President set off for Philadelphia to find a house, leaving Abigail in despair over the thought of leaving Richmond Hill, and particularly as Nabby gave birth to a third child that summer, another boy, named Thomas.

By late fall the Adamses were resettled in a substantial brick house two miles west of Philadelphia overlooking the Schuylkill. Called Bush Hill, it was another setting of idyllic charm, except that the British army, during the occupation, had left hardly a tree or bush standing.

Washington arrived and moved into the Robert Morris house on Market Street, considered the grandest residence in Philadelphia. (General Sir William Howe had made it his headquarters during the occupation.) Jefferson, too, took a house on Market, just blocks away, where his additions this time included a library, stable, and garden house. He had furniture sent on from Monticello and eventually his treasures from France arrived in no less than eighty packing cases, a quantity of purchases such as no one American had ever brought back from Europe.

On Monday, December 6, Congress reconvened in Congress Hall, formerly the Philadelphia County Courthouse, a two-story red-brick building erected since the war on the west side of the State House. As at Federal Hall in New York, the House of Representatives met on the first floor, the Senate on the floor above. The Supreme Court would sit in what had been City Hall, a corresponding brick building on the east side of the State House.

For all that Philadelphia had grown and changed, it was familiar territory for Adams, filled with memories. He was happy to be back, and once she had overcome another spell of poor health, Abigail was writing of her delight in seeing “the dazzling Mrs. Bingham again,” and of Mrs. Washington’s Friday evenings, where “fine ladies show themselves, and as candlelight is a great improver of beauty, they appear to great advantage.” The President was as fond of theater as were the Adamses, and invited them to accompany him and Mrs. Washington to performances at the Southwark Theater. They dined several times at the presidential mansion, and the President and his lady, in a rare exception to his rule of accepting no invitations, came to dine at Bush Hill.

So bone-chilling was the cold of that winter, every fireplace at Bush Hill had to be kept blazing and Abigail’s principal problem with new servants this time was that they were so frequently drunk. But her house was full of life, as she wrote. Son Thomas, having finished at Harvard, came to live with his mother and father. Charles rode down from New York for periodic visits, bringing his customary good cheer. When John Quincy traveled from Boston for a stay in February, Abigail was able to report to sister Mary that for the first time in years she had all three sons together under her roof.

Like her husband, Abigail had the highest hopes for their eldest son. The time would come, she said, when “this young man will be sought as a jewel of great price.” But John Quincy did not look well and seemed to have lost “much of his sprightliness and vivacity.” The year before, while still at Newburyport, he had fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, Mary Frazier, and was strongly advised by his parents that both he and the girl were too young for a serious “attachment.” By autumn the romance was broken off. Now, Abigail reported to Mary Cranch, the young man fretted that his Boston law practice was so slow taking hold. “We all preach patience to him.”

But her greater worry was Nabby, whose husband, with a growing family and no profession, had suddenly gone off to England on some kind of speculative venture.

Happily, America was prospering, commerce and agriculture both flourishing, and there was increasing confidence everywhere. Secretary Hamilton’s proposed national bank, the centerpiece of his plan and now before Congress, had the support of nearly everyone, Abigail reported to Cotton Tufts. There was not a doubt that the bill would pass and by a considerable majority, she assured the trusted family adviser.

As she predicted, the bill for the Bank of the United States passed by a sizable majority, despite opposition from Madison and Jefferson, who urged the President to exercise a veto on constitutional grounds. But Hamilton’s views carried greater weight with Washington, who signed the bill on February 25.

Better versed on financial matters than her husband, Abigail wanted to invest immediately in government securities, but as she told Cotton Tufts, “Mr. Adams held to his faith in land as true wealth.”

Indeed, Adams not only put his trust in land as the safest of investments, but agreed in theory with Jefferson and Madison that an agricultural society was inherently more stable than any other — not to say more virtuous. Like most farmers, he had strong misgivings about banks, and candidly admitted his ignorance of “coin and commerce.” Yet he was as pleased by the rise of enterprise and prosperity as anyone, and in moments of discouragement over public life, even contemplated going into the China trade! As strong as his attachment to life lived close to the land may have been, Adams liked what he saw happening. “Never since I was born was America so happy as at this time.”

Had the Adamses invested in government securities as Abigail wished, they would, almost certainly, have wound up quite wealthy.

NOWHERE IN THE DOZENS of personal letters they had written in more than a year had either John or Abigail made mention of Jefferson. To judge by their correspondence he might still have been in France. It was not that they never saw him. Rather, it seems that if they had nothing good to say, they said nothing. But then that spring of 1791, Adams and Jefferson were caught up in a public controversy that neither anticipated or wanted and that put the first severe strain on their already cooling friendship. The effect on national politics would be profound, and as was perhaps inevitable, the root cause was the revolution in France.

In furious response to Edmund Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine, who was then in England, had produced a pamphlet, The Rights of Man, that attacked Burke and set forth an impassioned defense of human rights, liberties, and equality. Jefferson, on receiving an early copy, promptly passed it on to a Philadelphia printer with a note warmly endorsing it as the answer to “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” When the printer published a first American edition, Jefferson’s endorsement appeared prominently on the title page and was attributed to the Secretary of State.

The endorsement caused a sensation. Jefferson claimed to be astonished but privately confirmed that by “political heresies” he meant the writings of John Adams. In a letter of explanation to Washington, he said he was “mortified” to be “thus brought forward on the public stage . . . against my love of silence and quiet, and my abhorrence of dispute.” He greatly regretted that “the indiscretion of a printer” had doubtless offended his “friend Mr. Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest and disinterested men alive, I have cordial esteem,” despite “his apostasy to hereditary monarchy.” But to Adams, Jefferson said nothing. Weeks passed, during which Adams, deeply offended, kept silent, then returned to Braintree for a brief visit.

Presently, when a series of spirited letters signed “Publicola” began appearing in Boston’s Columbian Centinel, attacking The Rights of Man and its sponsor, Jefferson, like many readers, assumed “Publicola” was Adams. In fact, it was John Quincy, who, rising to the defense of his father, took Jefferson to task for claiming that a difference in political opinion might be declared “heresy,” and those who differed in view from the Secretary of State were therefore heretics.

I am somewhat at a loss to determine [he wrote] what this very respectable gentleman means by political heresies. Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s as a canonical book of political scripture? As containing the true doctrine of popular infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in one single point? . . . I have always understood, sir, that the citizens of these States were possessed of a full and entire freedom of opinion upon all subjects civil as well as religious; they have not yet established any infallible criterion of orthodoxy, either in church or state . . . and the only political tenet which they could stigmatize with the name of heresy would be that which should attempt to impose an opinion upon their understandings, upon the single principle of authority.

Jefferson let three months pass before sending Adams a rather stiff letter of apology and explanation, which, though well intentioned, hardly sufficed. Written at Philadelphia, the letter was dated July 17, 1791. He had taken up his pen a dozen times and as often put it down, “suspended between opposing considerations,” Jefferson began. “I determine, however, to write from a conviction that truth between candid minds can never do harm.” He had written what he had about “heresies,” he said, only “to take off a little of the dryness of the note.” He had been “thunderstruck” by the printer’s use of the note. He had hoped it would attract no attention and implied it might not have but for the fuss over the “Publicola” series. It was because of “Publicola” that “our names [were] thrown on the public stage as public antagonists.

That you and I differ in our idea of the best form of government is well known to us both, but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confiding our differences of opinion to private conversation. And I can declare with truth in the presence of the Almighty that nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have either my own or your name brought before the public on this occasion. The friendship and confidence which has so long existed between us required this explanation from me, and I know you too well to fear any misconstruction of the motives of it.

Never in his life, Jefferson added, had he written anything for newspapers anonymously or under a pseudonym, and he never intended to.

He did not tell Adams, as he had Washington, that he had Adams specifically in mind as the perpetrator of “heresies.” Nor did he say that he knew by then that “Publicola” was John Quincy. Jefferson’s source was Madison, who had also observed that the young man’s style was notably less clumsy than that of the father.

Adams answered Jefferson at once and with obvious feeling. He accepted Jefferson’s account of what had happened, but allowed that the printer had “sown the seeds of more evils” than he could ever atone for. He, Adams, had been held up to ridicule in one newspaper after another for his meanness (the New Haven Gazette had called him an “unprincipled libeler”), his love of monarchy, his antipathy to freedom. Adams vehemently denied that he favored monarchy. “If you suppose that I have or ever had a design or desire of attempting to introduce a government of Kings, Lords, and Commons, or in other words a hereditary executive, or a hereditary senate, either into the government of the United States or that of any individual state in this country, you are wholly mistaken. . . . If you have ever put such a construction on anything of mine, I beg you would mention it to me, and I will undertake to convince you that it has no such meaning.”

The problem was that so many who criticized his writings had never bothered to read them, Adams said. Some misunderstood them, others willfully misrepresented them. Either way, he had been made the victim of “tempestuous abuse.” That Jefferson himself had once praised his Defence of the Constitutions, apparently finding no heresies therein, Adams, to his credit, made no mention.

He took issue only with Jefferson’s claim that their differences on the best form of government were well known to both of them. This was simply not so, Adams wrote. “You and I have never had a serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning the nature of government.”

He was not “Publicola,” and he had had no hand in writing the essays, Adams assured Jefferson, but refrained from identifying the author. What troubled him most, he said, was the mounting enmity between public men. “I must own to you that the daring traits of ambition and intrigue, and those unbridled rivalries which have already appeared, are the most melancholy and alarming systems that I have ever seen in this country.” If this was what politics came to, then the sooner he was out of it, the happier he would be.

At the last, Adams left no doubt of how much Jefferson and his friendship meant to him.

I thank you, sir, very seriously for writing to me. It is high time that you and I should come to an explanation with each other. The friendship that has subsisted for fifteen years between us without the smallest interruption, and until this occasion without the slightest suspicion, ever has been and still is very dear to my heart. There is no office which I would not resign, rather than give a just occasion to one friend to foresake me. Your motives for writing to me, I have not a doubt, were the most pure and the most friendly; and I have no suspicion that you will not receive this explanation from me in the same candid light.

Jefferson would have been better off had he let the matter drop. Instead, he wrote again, speciously insisting that blame for the controversy rested with “Publicola.” Then, in what must have been an effort to spare Adams’s feelings, he went further. In direct contradiction to what he told Washington, Jefferson denied to Adams that he ever had him in mind when he wrote to the printer: “Indeed, it was impossible that my note should occasion your name to be brought into question; for as far from naming you, I had not even in view any writing which I might suppose to be yours. . . . Thus I hope, my dear sir, that you will see me to have been innocent in effect as I was in intention.”

In sum, Jefferson refused to take any responsibility for what had happened. To Washington he cited the “indiscretion of a printer”; to Adams he said John Quincy was the cause of the trouble, and that he himself was innocent of ever even thinking of Adams in the first place.

But it was not Jefferson who had suffered abuse and ridicule in the press. It was Adams, and the damage done was extreme, given the overwhelming popularity of both Thomas Paine and the French Revolution.

From this point on, Adams and Jefferson were seldom to be perceived as anything other than archrivals. The public stage that Jefferson said he wished to avoid, the growing enmity between public men that Adams abhorred, had made them in the public mind symbols of the emerging divisions in national politics. Further, in what he had written to Madison, and in what he had said in his note to the printer, Jefferson had tagged Adams with being both mentally unsound and a monarchist, the two charges most commonly and unjustly made against him for the rest of his life.

Adams let the matter drop. He made no reply to Jefferson’s last letter, and there would be no further correspondence between them for several years. The “explanation with each other” that Adams hoped for would have to wait for more than two decades.

IN THE AUTUMN of 1791, alarmed to find they were living beyond their means, Abigail and John moved from Bush Hill to a modest dwelling in town at Fourth and Arch Streets. Servants were let go, except for Briesler and a cook, “a clever, sober, honest,” free black woman, as Abigail reported to Mary Cranch. “We live sociably and friendly together,” she wrote, and in many ways felt they were all better off living in town.

But with winter came the inevitable siege of illnesses, and for Abigail, beset mainly by rheumatism “attended with a violent fever,” it was as miserable a time as she had known. Her eyes became so inflamed she could not bear any light in her room, “not even the fire to blaze.” After six weeks in bed she was still too feeble to go downstairs without being carried. “I have scarcely any flesh left in comparison to what I was.” Dr. Rush came several times to draw blood, and, in the mistaken belief that the human body contained more blood than it actually does, it was his practice to bleed patients far more than customary. At times he was known to remove as much as eighty ounces, which could well explain Abigail’s feeble state.

The news that Colonel Smith, newly returned from London, was to sail again on the next packet, and would be taking Nabby and the children with him, left her feeling still more dreadful. The “everlasting fever” hung on, she wrote weeks later, confiding also that the “critical period” of midlife compounded her troubles. She brooded over the brevity of life. “How soon may our fairest prospects be leveled with the dust and show us that man in his best estate is but vanity and dust?” she wrote on March 21, 1792, after a particularly bad night of “nerves.” It was already another election year, the end of the President’s and the Vice President’s terms of office. Who knew what was to come? Southern members of the House seemed determined not just to oppose the Secretary of the Treasury but to destroy him, while much of the press joined in the assault. Not even the President escaped their venom any longer. Oddly it was only the Vice President now who was allowed to “sleep in peace,” though this hardly compensated for Abigail’s worry for the country.

“I firmly believe,” she darkly forecast to Mary, “if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the Southern and Northern states, unless more candor and less intrigue, of which I have no hopes, should prevail.”

Adams was more sanguine. If frequently exhausted by his labors and distressed over her ailments, he appears to have come to terms with his marginal role in the order of things. It had been a painful process, but he had at last learned the part he was supposed to play and to a large degree accepted its limitations. Rarely did he speak in the Senate anymore. Rarely if ever did he intrude on Senate business. If the role of Vice President made him a political cipher — as it would anyone — he could at least serve faithfully.

He was in the chair every day, all day, without fail, which was a point of pride with him, but also of some worry, since he knew such sedentary confinement to be good neither for the body nor the spirit of “a man habituated for a long course of years to long voyages and immense journeys.”

Though loyal to Washington and the administration, Adams was but nominally a Federalist, refusing steadfastly to be, or to be perceived as, a party man. That he had allowed “no party virulence or personal reflections” to escape him was also a matter of pride and consolation. If called upon to maintain order in the Senate now, he apparently had only to tap gently with his silver pencil case on the small mahogany table before him.

In mid-April, her health sufficiently restored for her to travel, Abigail returned to Massachusetts. Adams followed in May, once Congress adjourned, and the long summer at home, far removed from the hornets’ nest of election-year politics at the capital, did much to restore them both.

The one big change at home was that their part of town, the old, first-settled North Precinct, had been broken off from the rest of Braintree and renamed Quincy. Otherwise, town life and days on the farm went on refreshingly the same as always.

AMONG CLOSE ASSOCIATES the President had been expressing a strong desire to return to private life. He was weary of the demands of office, weary and disheartened, Washington said, by party rancor and a severely partisan press that had taken to calling him the American Caesar.

Many of the harshest attacks on Hamilton’s economic policies — and some of the more biting comments on Washington himself — came from the National Gazette, a newspaper newly established in Philadelphia as an antidote to the partisan Federalist views of the Gazette of the United States, to which Alexander Hamilton was a regular contributor of essays and money. But when it became known that the editor of the new National Gazette, Philip Freneau, had been encouraged to establish the paper by Madison and Jefferson, and that he was also employed by Jefferson as a translator in the Department of State, it appeared Jefferson himself had a hand in the attacks on the President and the administration. The most vicious assaults, however, were aimed at Hamilton, whom Freneau delighted in vilifying, and to add to the insults, such diatribes were nearly always accompanied by lavish praise for Jefferson.

Washington claimed to disregard newspaper abuse but privately asked Jefferson to intercede with Freneau and remove him from the State Department. Jefferson insisted that Freneau and his paper were saving the country from monarchy and persuaded Washington that it would be a grave misstep to impede on freedom of the press.

Even more aggravating for the President was the unrelenting feud between Jefferson and Hamilton, the two highest officers in his cabinet, and the most gifted. Animosity between them had reached the point where they could hardly bear to be in the same room. Each was certain the other was a dangerous man intent on dominating the government; and each privately complained of the other to the President.

The one, Hamilton, disliked and distrusted the French, while, for the good of the American economy, strongly favoring better relations with Britain. The other, Jefferson, disliked and distrusted the British, while seeing in France and the French Revolution the embodiment of the highest ideals of the American Revolution. To Jefferson, Hamilton was “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” To Hamilton, Jefferson belonged among those “pretenders to profound knowledge” who were “ignorant of the most useful of all sciences — the science of human nature.” The day would come, Hamilton warned, when Jefferson would be revealed as a voluptuary and an “intriguing incendiary.”

Washington urged “mutual forebearances, and temporizing yieldings on all sides.” To Hamilton, he expressed a deep melancholy that “a fabric so goodly, erected under so many providential circumstances,” should be “wracked by controversy and brought to the edge of collapse.”

On one issue only were Hamilton and Jefferson in agreement — that for the sake of the country, Washington must serve a second term, as he alone could hold the union together. “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told Washington. There were very few such uniquely eminent individuals upon whom society had peculiar claims, Jefferson insisted. Among that indispensable few, however, Jefferson did not count himself. His own intention was to retire.

In the National Gazette, Freneau warned that “plain American republicans” stood to “be overwhelmed by those monarchical writers on Davila, etc.,” who were spreading “their poisoned doctrines throughout this blessed continent.” To commemorate July 4, the paper declared, “Another revolution must and will be brought about in favor of the people.”

Seeing themselves as representing the true spirit of republican ideals, Jefferson, Madison, Freneau, and others allied with them had begun calling themselves Republicans, thus implying that the Federalists were not, but rather monarchists, or monocrats, as Jefferson preferred to say. And while there was as yet some question whether it was Jefferson or Madison who led the Republicans, there was no doubt about who led the Federalists. It was Hamilton, who was more than a match for anyone.

Hamilton, for his part, had no intention of diverting votes from Adams this time around. Aaron Burr, a New York Republican and Hamilton’s nemesis, was in the running for Vice President and so Hamilton was happy now to laud Adams as “a real friend to genuine liberty, order and stable government.”

Early in September, Hamilton sent an urgent letter to Quincy telling Adams he must return to Philadelphia with all possible speed. Adams’s absence from the scene, Hamilton warned, was benefiting the candidacy of yet another, more serious rival for the vice presidency, the popular governor of New York, George Clinton, a long-time Anti-Federalist now in the Republican camp. “I am persuaded you are very indifferent personally to the event of a certain election, yet I hope you are not so as to the cause of good government,” Hamilton wrote.

But with Congress not due to reconvene for another two months and the President still declining to say whether he would serve again, Adams saw no need for hurry and remained where he was. What annoyed him exceedingly, he confided to Abigail, was the idea that George Clinton could ever be regarded as a serious rival, given the immense difference in their sacrifices for the country, differences in experience and knowledge. To Adams this was not a question of vanity but of plain fact.

THE NEWSPAPERS, meanwhile, were filled with increasingly lurid news from Paris. With the whole country beset by chaos and violence, France by now was also at war with much of Europe. The King was being held a virtual prisoner in the Palace of the Tuileries, while the extreme radicals of the revolution, the Jacobins — Marat, Danton, Robespierre — were riding high.

The Massachusetts Centinel carried a report from London dated August 14, describing how, on August 10, a riotous mob of thousands had marched on the Tuileries to proclaim the King a traitor and call for his head. The paper reported that 130 of the King’s Swiss guards were cut down, countless others murdered, and “numerous heads, stuck on poles, were carried about the streets.” Actually more than 500 Swiss guards had been slaughtered, and at least 400 of the besiegers.

An October edition of the Boston paper carried a report of massacres in September in which 6,000 to 7,000 people had been slain, which was an exaggeration. Yet the truth of the September Massacres was hardly less appalling. Some 1,400 political prisoners — including more than 200 priests — were butchered in the name of the revolution. “Let the blood of traitors flow. That is the only way to save the country,” cried Marat, who had once been a physician pledged to save lives.

From London, Nabby wrote to her mother of reports from Paris “too dreadful to relate.” “Ship loads of poor, distressed, penniless priests and others are daily landing upon this island.” The Marquis de Lafayette had fled France and was being “kept a close prisoner by the Austrians.” Madame de Lafayette had escaped to Holland. That the French King and Queen would soon “fall sacrifice to the fury of the mobites,” Nabby had no doubt. “I wonder what Mr. Jefferson says to all these things?”

As it happened, William Short was writing to Jefferson from The Hague at the same time, and his descriptions of events greatly distressed Jefferson. In a stinging confidential reply of January 1793, Jefferson called them “blasphemies.” “The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain,” he informed Short, “on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France.” Jefferson would hear no more of it. “I consider that sect as the same with the Republican patriots (of America). . . .” He deplored the loss of life, Jefferson said, but only as he would deplore the loss of life in battle. Then Jefferson, whose personal philosophy was to get through life with the least pain possible, who shunned even verbal conflict, made as extreme a claim as any of the time.

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest . . . rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every continent, and left free, it would be better than it now is.

He warned Short to take care in the future how he reported events in France. “You have been wounded by the sufferings of your friends, and have by this circumstance been hurried into a temper of mind which would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen.”

• • •

NOT UNTIL NOVEMBER did Washington announce that he would accept a second term, and only then did Adams conclude it was time to return to Philadelphia, setting off by public coach in heavy winter weather. Her health again a concern, Abigail remained at home, a temporary measure as they both supposed.

Snowbound in a tavern at Hartford, Adams fell into conversation with another traveler who happened not to recognize him. Knowing how greatly it would amuse Abigail, he described how the man had launched into a harangue on the state of national politics, declaring that the trouble with John Adams was that “he had been long in Europe and got tainted.”

I told him that it was hard if a man could not go to Europe without being tainted, that if Mr. Adams had been sent to Europe upon their business by the people, and had done it, and in doing it had necessarily got tainted, I thought the people ought to pay him for the damage the taint had done him.

Though the electoral vote would not be known until February, it was clear by Christmas that Washington was again the unanimous choice for President, and that Adams, for all that had been said against him, had won a clear second place, far ahead of George Clinton. In the final count Adams received 77 votes; Clinton, 50; Jefferson, 4; Aaron Burr, 1.

IV

“MONDAY AFTERNOON and all Tuesday it rained, then cleared up, very cold and blustering,” Abigail began a Sunday evening letter to her “Dearest Friend.”

On Friday came a snow storm, wind very violent, at North East. It continued so through Friday night and Saturday, even until Sunday morning, when the snow was over the tops of the stone wall and so banked that no wheel[ed] carriage can stir. We had not any meeting today, and some person[s] had their sheep to dig out from under the snow banks.

Separation had become a burden they must bear once again, and again an extended correspondence resumed, after a hiatus of nearly nine years, one letter following another, back and forth between Quincy and Philadelphia, week upon week. Abigail’s intention to remain at home only temporarily proved wishful thinking. Traveling had become too difficult for her. Since Congress was only in session approximately six months of the year, and John could be at home the rest of the time, she chose to stay in Quincy through the whole of his second term as Vice President.

The state of her health was a prime consideration, but so also was economic necessity, as she would confide to Nabby. “A powerful motive for me to remain here during the absence of your father is the necessity there is that such care and attention should be paid to our affairs at home as will enable us to live in a humble state of independence whenever your father quits public life, which he daily becomes more and more anxious to do.” “He has ever sustained the character of the independent freeman of America,” she added modestly, neglecting to mention the part she had played in making that possible.

For both Abigail and John the stress of separation now was no less severe than in times past, for all the changes in their station in life.

My days of anxiety have indeed been many and painful in years past, when I had many terrors that encompassed me around [Abigail wrote on January 7, 1793, after John had been gone little more than a month]. I have happily surmounted them, but I do not find that I am less solicitous to hear constantly from you than in times of more danger. . . . Years subdue the ardor of passion but in lieu thereof friendship and affection deep-rooted subsists which defies the ravages of time, and whilst the vital flame exists.

For his part, Adams assured her, “I am with all the ardor of youth, yours.” “To a heart that loves praise so well, and received so little of it,” he told her another day, “your letter is like laudanum,” which someone had told him was “the Divinity itself.”

“I want to sit down and converse with you, every evening,” she would write. “I sit here alone and brood over possibilities and conjectures.”

“You apologize for the length of your letters,” he told her in a long letter of his own. “[They] give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There are more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear in the whole week.”

To further reduce expenses, Adams had given up the small house in Philadelphia and taken a room with the secretary of the Senate, Samuel Otis, and his wife, who did not normally accommodate boarders but felt the Vice President of the United States should have something better than the usual lodging house. Never again would he spend money he did not have just to keep up appearances, Adams vowed. “I am so well satisfied with my present simplicity that I am determined never to depart from it.” He had a sunny room with a southern exposure and a fireplace that he kept going most of the time. “I am warm enough at night, but cannot sleep since I left you.”

They exchanged views on politics, events in France, family finances, reported on the weather and the doings of their scattered family. They wrote on everything from the price of clover seed to the meetings of the American Philosophical Society, where Adams had been asked to be a member. Reflecting on the outcome of the election, Abigail saw it as proof not only of the wisdom of the people, but their faith in the administration. The “newspaper warfare” had only strengthened support for the government, she felt certain.

“There must be, however,” Adams responded, “more employment for the press in favor of the government than there has been, or the sour, angry, peevish, fretful, lying paragraphs which assail it on every side will make an impression on many weak and ignorant people.”

Almost from the moment the election was decided — and the Republican campaign to unseat Adams had failed — the Republican press shifted its attacks almost entirely to the President, striking the sharpest blows Washington had yet known. Now it was he who had the deplorable inclination to monarchy. The “hell hounds” were in full cry, wrote Adams, who wondered how well Washington might bear up under the abuse. “His skin is thinner than mine.”

For himself it appeared he had been granted temporary immunity. He was even warmly received on his return to the Senate, where, for the moment, a mood of “tranquility” had settled. He felt, Adams wrote, as though he were receding slowly into the background, yet professed to mind not at all.

The Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of State, meanwhile, were under constant fire from one side or the other. Jefferson was busy behind the scenes in a campaign to drive Hamilton from office. If unwilling to attack Hamilton directly himself, or to write under an assumed name, he was not above urging others to do so. “For God’s sake, my dear sir,” Jefferson would admonish Madison, “take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.”

Jefferson’s certainty that monarchists were poised to destroy the republic had become an obsession. Yet with Adams he remained on speaking terms — in part because he knew Adams to be too independent ever to be in league with Hamilton, and because he sincerely wished for no further rupture in their friendship. When Adams attended his first meeting of the Philosophical Society, Jefferson was “polite enough to accompany me,” as Adams reported to Abigail.

It was Adams’s impression that Jefferson was pulling back from his habitual extravagances. To cut costs, the Secretary of State had sold a horse and some of his furniture. Jefferson’s debt to his British creditors was a colossal 7,000 pounds, Adams had learned, which led him to ponder whether this might account for Jefferson’s antipathy to the central government. If only someone could pay off Jefferson’s debt, indeed pay off the personal debt of all Virginians, Adams speculated, then perhaps Jefferson’s reason might return, “and the whole man and his whole state would become good friends of the Union.”

What vexed Adams most was Jefferson’s “blind spirit of party.” In theory, Jefferson deplored parties or faction no less than did Adams or anyone. In practice, however, he was proving remarkably adept at party politics. As always, he avoided open dispute, debate, controversy, or any kind of confrontation, but behind the scenes he was unrelenting and extremely effective. To Jefferson it was a matter of necessity, given his hatred of Hamilton and all that was riding on what he called the “beautiful” revolution in France. To Adams, Jefferson had become a fanatic. There was not a Jacobin in France more devoted to faction, he told Abigail.

Continuing accounts of the chaos and bloodshed in France left both Adamses filled with pity and contempt. The French government was by now fully in the grip of the extreme radicals, and Adams shuddered at the thought. “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and co[mpany] are furies,” he wrote. “Dragon’s teeth have been sown in France and come up monsters.”

It was known that the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, philosopher and lover of liberty, one of the first in France to translate the Declaration of Independence, and one of the first, with his mother, to befriend Adams in Paris, had been stoned to death by a mob before his mother’s eyes. Louis XVI, stripped of all power, was to go on trial for treason. But Adams was incapable of exulting as others were over the plight of the French monarch. He had no heart for “king-killing,” Adams said. Indeed, he was tired of reading all newspapers, he told Abigail on the eve of Washington’s second inauguration. “The whole drama of the world is such tragedy that I am weary of the spectacle.”

ON MONDAY, March 4, 1793, in an inaugural ceremony of record brevity, Adams looked on respectfully as Washington took the oath of office. The event, held in the Senate, was simple and dignified. Washington’s address, all of two paragraphs, lasted but minutes, and Adams, like others present, was soon on his way home, Congress having adjourned until December.

The prospect of months on his farm doing as he pleased gave Adams a lift of heart as little else could have. But the tragic drama that he had grown so weary of only worsened. No sooner was he home than the news arrived that on January 21, Louis XVI had been beheaded. The papers described the King’s last ride, the scaffold where “his head was severed from his body in one stroke” by the guillotine, the cries of ”Vive la Nation!” from the crowds, then hats thrown in the air.

Like Washington, Adams could not bring himself to say anything publicly. But to a correspondent in England, he warned, “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots,” and he lamented that so much more blood would have to flow before the lesson was learned.

Jefferson, who had once called Louis XVI “a good man,” “an honest man,” observed privately that monarchs were “amenable to punishment like other criminals.” It was the view expressed in a letter in the New York Journal signed “A Republican”:

Mankind is now enlightened. They can discover that kings are like other men, especially with respect to the commission of crimes and an inordinate thirst for power. Reason and liberty are overspreading the world, nor will progress be impeded until the towering crown shall fall, and the spectre of royalty be broken in pieces, in every part of the globe. Monarchy and aristocracy must be annihilated, and the rights of the people firmly established.

Great Britain and Spain, too, had by now declared war on France. Britain’s declaration came on February 1, 1793, and as no one could then have foreseen, Britain and France would be at war for another twenty-two years, well into the next century.

In early April, “Citizen” Genêt landed at Charleston, South Carolina, causing a sensation. Edmund Charles Genêt, the audacious new envoy from Jacobin France, was the son of Edmé Genêt, the French foreign office translator, with whom Adams had once worked in Paris, turning out propaganda for the American Revolution. Young Genêt had been dispatched to America with instructions to rouse American support for France, spread the principles of the French Revolution, and encourage privateering against British shipping by American seamen. From the welcome he received at Charleston and along his whole four-week journey north to Philadelphia, he concluded all Americans were in sympathy with the French radicals and would, in keeping with the French-American alliance of 1778, gladly join France again in common cause. Jacobin clubs — pro-French democratic societies — sprung up along his route, and Genêt liberally dispensed money to outfit American privateers.

But on April 22 in Philadelphia, before Genêt arrived, Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, a decision Adams had no part in but affirmed what he had long said about keeping free from the affairs of Europe. “Let us above all things avoid as much as possible entangling ourselves with their ways and politics,” he had written from France fourteen years earlier.

The welcome for Genêt at Philadelphia was rapturous. Jefferson estimated that the crowd the night of Genêt’s arrival, May 16, numbered 1,000. Genêt said 6,000, and gloried in the “perpetual fetes” that followed in the next several weeks. To the thrill of hundreds of dinner guests Genêt sang the “Marseillaise” and rendered rousing new lines to a tune from a French operetta:

Liberty! Liberty, be thy name adored forever,

Tyrants beware! Your tott’ring thrones must fall;

Our int’rest links the free together,

And Freedom’s sons are Frenchmen all.

“All the old spirit of 1776 is rekindling,” exuded Jefferson, who saw in Genêt’s popularity eloquent testimony by the people against “the cold caution” of their own government.

Washington decided to receive the young emissary, and in a manner which, if not cold, was strictly formal. American neutrality remained firm, which led Genêt, who knew nothing of American politics, to conclude he must rally the American people against the President. Only later would he admit his mistake, and blame Jefferson and the Republicans for deceiving him for their own purposes.

Many years afterward Adams would wildly exaggerate the tumult caused by Genêt, claiming that 10,000 people had roamed the streets threatening “to drag Washington out of his house” and compel the government to declare war on Britain. Adams’s alarm at the time was extreme, but he was by no means alone in wondering if a revolution were hatching. The flourishing pro-French democratic societies were secret political clubs verging on vigilante groups and seemed truly bent on gaining French control over American politics.

Then, with summer, came the two calamities for which the year 1793 would be forever remembered. In France the Reign of Terror commenced, a siege of vicious retribution that would send nearly 3,000 men and women to the guillotine in Paris alone, while in the provinces the slaughter was even more savage. At Lyon, where the guillotine was thought too slow a means of dispensing with antirevolutionaries, hundreds were mown down by cannon fire. At Nantes, 2,000 people were herded onto barges, tied together, taken to the middle of the Loire and drowned.

In Philadelphia, beginning in August, yellow fever raged in the worst epidemic ever to strike an American city. Reports of what was happening in Paris would not reach America for months, but accounts of the “pestilence” in Philadelphia filled the newspapers soon enough. At Quincy the Adamses were in anguish over the welfare of young Thomas, from whom there was no word.

By the last weeks of August people were dying in Philadelphia at a rate of more than twenty a day. In September, as the death toll rose rapidly, Benjamin Rush and other physicians, helpless to stop the plague, advised all who could leave the city to do so without delay. The federal government and most businesses shut down. Bush Hill, where the Adamses had lived, was converted to an emergency hospital. To avoid contamination people stopped shaking hands and walked in the middle of the streets.

According to common understanding, the cause of yellow fever was the foul, steaming air of late summer in cities like Philadelphia — “a putrid state of air occasioned by a collection of filth, heat, and moisture,” as Abigail explained to her sister Elizabeth — and the “proof” was that the disease always vanished with the return of cold weather. That yellow fever, like malaria, is transmitted by mosquitoes (which also vanish with cold weather) would not be understood for another hundred years.

Hamilton and his wife became dangerously ill but would recover. Jefferson, who had earlier given up living in town and moved to a house beside the Schuylkill, wrote of the crowds fleeing to the countryside, and allowed that he, too, would leave except that he did not wish to give the appearance of panic. When the President and Mrs. Washington departed for Mount Vernon, Jefferson was soon on his way to Monticello.

By October the death rate reached more than a hundred a day. People were dying faster than they could be buried. Numbers of physicians and ordinary citizens performed heroically, doing all they could for the stricken, and no one more so than Rush, though whether his ministrations — his insistence on “mercurial purges” and “heroic bloodletting” — did more good than harm became a subject of fierce controversy. Eventually Rush, too, fell ill, but survived.

At Quincy worry over Thomas did not end until mid-October, when the young man wrote to say he had fled to New Jersey and, though perfectly well, was “pretty short of cash.”

The epidemic ended with the first hard frost in November. In all, more than 5,000 had perished and Philadelphia would be a long time recovering from the fearful loss.

In France, however, there was no cease to the slaughter. That October, Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine, as did Brissot de Warville, who had visited the Adamses in Quincy. “Would to Heaven that the destroying angel would put up his sword,” wrote Abigail, who seems to have felt the horror of what was happening more even than her husband.

But the Terror only accelerated, eventually consuming those who set it in motion. Marat was murdered; Danton and Robespierre went to the guillotine. The final toll would eventually reach 14,000 lives. Among those executed in the last few days of the Terror, as Abigail would later learn, to her horror, were the grandmother, mother, and sister of her friend Madame Adrienne Lafayette.

ARRIVING AT PHILADELPHIA in late November, Adams was pleased to find the President reinstated and most of Congress back to business. Moving in with the Otises again, Adams resumed his thoroughly unspectacular, rather solitary routine: “I go to the Senate every day, read the newspapers before I go and the public papers afterward, see a few friends once a week, go to church on Sundays; write now and then a line to you and Nabby, and oftener to Charles than to his brothers to see if I can fix his attention and excite some ambition.”

Adams harbored no illusions about his importance, any more than during his first term. “My country in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” he told Abigail. The measure of his insignificance was that all parties could afford to treat him with some respect. “They all know that I can do them neither much good nor much harm.”

It was not just that the vice presidency offered so little chance to say or do anything of consequence, but that at a time when party politics were becoming increasingly potent and pervasive, he would not, could not, be a party man. And so, for both reasons, he was becoming more and more a man apart.

Genêt was still stirring up trouble, but then, to Adams, Genêt was a fool whose head had been turned by too much popular attention, and there was far more harmony over the issue of neutrality than Adams had expected. Even Jefferson, who had so warmly welcomed Genêt at first, now professed strong agreement with the President’s stand.

Jefferson’s conflict with Hamilton, however, had become intolerable. As Jefferson wrote to his daughter Martha, he was “under such agitation of mind” as he had never known. On December 31, 1793, Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State, news that led Adams to write at length on the subject of his friend, saying things in several family letters he had not said before and that he wished to remain confidential. He had admired Jefferson’s abilities and disposition for so long, Adams told Abigail, that he could not help feel some regret at his leaving. “But his want of candor, his obstinate prejudices of both aversion and attachment, his real partiality in spite of all his pretensions, his low notions about many things, have so utterly reconciled me to [his departure] . . . that I will not weep.” On January 6, he reported, “Jefferson went off yesterday, and a good riddance of bad ware.”

What might be in store for Jefferson in Virginia politics, Adams had no way of knowing, but of this he was certain: if Jefferson were to retire to his “rural amusements and philosophical meditations” at Monticello, he would soon wither away. For instead of being “the ardent pursuer of science” that some imagined, Jefferson was the captive of ambition, and ambition, Adams told John Quincy, was “the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field . . . [and] wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.

Jefferson thinks he shall by this step get a reputation of a humble modest, meek man, wholly without ambition or vanity. He may even have deceived himself into this belief. But if the prospect opens, the world will see . . . he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell. . . . Though his desertion may be a loss to us of some talent, I am not sorry for it on the whole, because his soul is poisoned with ambition.

Ambition was something he knew about, Adams acknowledged, for he himself had been struggling for thirty years to conquer “the foul fiend.”

Jefferson had once described Adams as a poor judge of human nature — “a bad calculator of the force and probably the effect of the motives which govern men,” Jefferson had said in a letter to Madison. But with the exception of Madison, Adams understood Jefferson as well as anyone did, or perhaps ever could. And as exasperated as Adams was with him, as critical as he sounded, he refused to let the friendship slip away.

In April he sent Jefferson the gift of a book, with a note of congratulations on the arrival of spring at Monticello, far from the “din of politics and the rumors of war.” It was the first letter Adams had written to Jefferson in more than two years. Jefferson replied at once, saying he had returned to farming “with an ardor which I scarcely knew in my youth,” and in answer Adams said he knew the very same ardor every summer on his own farm.

Rural life was a topic on which they could readily agree, just as they could on the increasing threat of war. The British had begun stopping American ships and taking off sailors, claiming they were British citizens. In the West Indies they captured American trading vessels. War fever swept the country. When a bill that would have suspended all trade with Britain resulted in a tie vote in the Senate, the Vice President “determined the question in the negative.”

He had had enough of one war to wish ever to see another, Jefferson wrote, and to this Adams concurred wholeheartedly. The President, he reported to Jefferson, was sending Chief Justice John Jay as a special envoy to London to “find a way to reconcile our honor with peace.” He had “no great faith in any very brilliant success,” Adams said, “but [I] hope he may keep us out of war.”

A modest correspondence would continue for two years. At the end of another long stretch at Quincy, Adams would write of a summer spent “so deliciously in farming that I return to the old story of politics with great reluctance,” and Jefferson would profess that “tranquility becomes daily more and more the object of my life, and of this I certainly find more in my present pursuits than those of any other part of my life.” Jefferson portrayed himself as living plainly, “farmerlike,” as though he had little more on his mind than crops and weather. “We have had a hard winter and backward spring,” he would report to Adams from his mountaintop the following May.

This has injured our wheat so much that it cannot be made a good crop by all the showers of heaven which are now falling down on us exactly as we want them. Our first cutting of clover is not yet begun. Strawberries not ripe till within this fortnight, and everything backward in proportion. . . . I am trying potatoes on a large scale, as a substitute for Indian corn for feeding the animals.

Once, briefly, a difference in philosophy was touched upon, when Jefferson observed that the “paper transactions” of one generation should “scarcely be considered by succeeding generations,” a principle he had earlier stated to Madison as “self-evident,” that “’the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither the power or rights over it.” Adams, however, refused to accept the idea that each new generation could simply put aside the past, sweep clean the slate, to suit its own desires. Life was not like that, and if Jefferson thought so, it represented a fundamental difference in outlook.

“The rights of one generation of men must depend, in some degree, on the paper transactions of another,” Adams wrote. “The social compact and the laws must be reduced to writing. Obedience to them becomes a national habit and they cannot be changed by revolutions that are costly things. Men will be too economical of their blood and property to have recourse to them very frequently.” Jefferson’s wish for “a little rebellion now and then to clear the atmosphere,” as he had once put it to Abigail, did not stand to reason, Adams was telling him. Nor did reason have any bearing on what was happening in France, Adams insisted in another letter:

Reasoning has been all lost. Passion, prejudice, interest, necessity have governed and will govern; and a century must roll away before any permanent and quiet system will be established. . . . You and I must look down from the battlements of Heaven if we ever have the pleasure of seeing it.

Politics, Jefferson answered, was “a subject I never loved, and now hate.”

Nowhere in his correspondence with Adams did Jefferson suggest he was suffering anything like what Adams had predicted retirement to Monticello would do to him. Only to Madison did he reveal in a letter of April 1795, “My health is entirely broken down within the last eight months.” And only years later, in a letter to his daughter Polly, warning her against a life of seclusion, would Jefferson acknowledge that in fact he had suffered a breakdown very like what Adams had foreseen.

I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it. . . . I can speak from experience on the subject. From 1793 to 1797, I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society, and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it; and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.

Adams’s supposition that Jefferson was cutting back on his extravagant ways was, however, mistaken. To the contrary, the Virginian had resolved to live in grander style than ever, and plunged into the largest, most costly project of his life. He had decided to transform Monticello — to tear off the entire second floor and more than double the size of the house — along the lines of an elegant new residence he had seen in Paris, a palatial house with a dome called the Hôtel de Salm, on the Left Bank of the Seine. All the building and remodeling he had done thus far — the renovation of rented houses in Paris, New York, and Philadelphia, even the initial construction of Monticello itself — had been but prelude to what was now under way.

It was as if he were helpless to do otherwise. He must draw up plans, design and redesign everything down to the smallest detail, build, rebuild, take apart, take down, and put up again, no matter the cost or impracticality of it all.

The existing eight-room Palladian country house was to become a great domed villa with twenty-one rooms. It was designed to accommodate lavish hospitality and to answer all his own private needs and comforts. His mind brimmed with French ideas and niceties. There were to be beds in alcoves as in France, elongated windows and French doors, a magnificent parquet floor replicated from one he had seen in the country estate of a French friend, as well as ample space to display the paintings and busts, the gilded pier mirrors, clocks, and furniture he had shipped home from France.

He had already begun ordering window sash from Philadelphia, and set his slaves to quarrying limestone and making bricks. To Adams he mentioned his new “nail manufactory” and the time devoted to counting and measuring nails, but of the larger project he said nothing, knowing what the frugal New Englander would think of it.

FOR RELIEF from the tedium of his “insignificant” labors, Adams took long walks through Philadelphia as he often had in years past, his pace only somewhat slower. Exercise was indispensable, he explained to Charles, who had complained of feeling lethargic. “Move or die is the language of our Maker in the constitution of our bodies.” One must rouse oneself from lethargy. “When you cannot walk abroad, walk in your room. . . . Rise up and then open your windows and walk about your room a few times, then sit down again to your books or your pen.”

To many in Congress, Adams was an old man, an assessment he thought perfectly valid. His teeth tormented him — it had been necessary to have several pulled — and he worried over a tremble in his hands. In keeping with the changes of fashion, he had given up wearing a wig and was by now quite grey and bald. He was overweight; his eyes were often red and watery from too much reading.

It was “painful to the vanity of an old man to acknowledge the decays of nature,” he wrote. So weak were his eyes, such was the trembling of his hand, he told John Quincy, that “a pen is as terrible to me as a sword to a coward.” He wondered how much longer he could continue in public life. Yet he devoted hours each day to writing letters, and often at great length. On his walks he generally covered three to five miles, thinking little of it. Nor does there appear to have been any appreciable slowing down on the quantity of books he read.

He had much to be grateful for — “good parents, an excellent wife, and promising children, tolerable health on the whole and competent fortune,” as he told Abigail. With Thomas recently admitted to the Philadelphia bar, he could now claim three lawyer sons. Increasingly his thoughts turned to their careers and their future, more than to his own.

“Much more depends on little things than is commonly imagined,” he cautioned John Quincy. “An erect figure, a steady countenance, a neat dress, a genteel air, an oratorical period, a resolute, determined spirit, often do more than deep erudition or indefatigable application.”

With Charles he shared his private views on the current clamor over the subject of equality. “How the present age can boast of this principle as a discovery, as new light and modern knowledge, I know not.” The root of equality, Adams said, was the Golden Rule — “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Equality was at the heart of Christianity. When he had written in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights that “all men are by nature free and equal,” he meant “not a physical but a moral equality.”

Common sense was sufficient to determine that it could not mean that all men were equal in fact, but in right, not all equally tall, strong, wise, handsome, active, but equally men . . . the work of the same Artist, children in the same cases entitled to the same justice.

Nabby and her family had returned from England, where William Smith’s financial ventures appeared to have brought them a measure of welcome prosperity. Adams was pleased for Nabby, but worried over what his son-in-law would ultimately make of himself. “I know not what he is in pursuit of,” he told Abigail.

John Quincy had lately distinguished himself with a series of newspaper essays denouncing Citizen Genêt and seemed well launched as an attorney in Boston, if still unresolved about aspiring to a public career. When Washington requested of France that Genêt be recalled, Adams, with a father’s pride, was certain that John Quincy’s essays had played a decisive part. Yet he could not help feeling sympathy for Genêt, his old friend’s son. Ordered home to Paris, to face charges of misconduct, which meant almost certain death by guillotine, Genêt chose to stay on in New York, where eventually he married the daughter of George Clinton and settled down to the life of a country gentleman on the Hudson.

From the tone of the letters that arrived week after week from Philadelphia, Abigail sensed a change in her husband. There seemed to be little or none of the old anger, but far more acceptance of life. “I am happy to learn,” she wrote, “that the only fault in your political character, and one which has always given me uneasiness, is wearing away. I mean a certain irritability which has sometimes thrown you off your guard.”

When reports reached him that his mother was gravely ill, Adams, assuming the worst, was saddened almost beyond words. “My aged and venerable mother is drawing near the close of a virtuous and industrious life,” he wrote to Nabby. “May her example be ever present with me! May I be able to fulfill the duties of life as well as she has done.” But the old lady’s resilience was astounding. She revived, to his great relief, and his thoughts returned to his children.

To Abigail, late in the spring of 1794, he wrote of John Quincy’s rising reputation, implying he knew more than he was saying. “I have often thought he has more prudence at 27 than his father at 58.” “All my hopes are in him,” he said in another letter, “both for my family and my country.”

At last, on May 26, Adams sent off a confidential letter to John Quincy with the biggest news he had been able to report in years. He had been informed that day that the President would nominate John Quincy to be minister to the Netherlands. If Adams had played a part in the decision, as possibly he could have, he never said so. To his mind there was not a shadow of doubt that John Quincy was the ideal choice, as he told him. Annoyed that he had not been consulted on the appointment, John Quincy replied, “I rather wish it had not been made at all.” But as an Adams, he had little choice, and so began another long career in public service. His father was presiding as usual the day the Senate confirmed the appointment.

Slightly taller than his father, John Quincy had become notably handsome, his youthful face lean and finely chiseled. In a magnificent portrait by Copley done in London a year later, he might be the beau ideal of the time. He was also more widely traveled and more conversant with French and Dutch than any American diplomat yet dispatched across the Atlantic. He sailed from Boston that September of 1794, taking his brother Thomas along with him to serve as his private secretary.

THE ATTENTION OF THE COUNTRY, meanwhile, had shifted to western Pennsylvania where an insurrection had broken out over a federal excise tax on distilleries, the only internal tax thus far imposed by the federal government. At home at Quincy through the summer, Adams had kept abreast of the crisis in the newspapers. An army of fully 12,000 volunteers marched over the Alleghenies in an unprecedented show of force, Washington himself riding at the head part of the way, with Hamilton second in command. By the time Adams returned to Philadelphia in December and established himself in different lodgings, at the Francis Hotel, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion had ended. It was a victory the Federalists were happy to drink to, but the Republicans soon had their own cause to celebrate, when Alexander Hamilton announced he would retire. Convinced he had accomplished all he could, the brilliant, headstrong Secretary of the Treasury returned to his lucrative New York law practice. No one, however, expected him to abandon politics.

With the retirement also of Secretary of War Henry Knox in December, the sense of an administration in ebb was strongly felt. Only Edmund Randolph, now Secretary of State, remained of Washington’s original cabinet.

The threat of embroilment in the European war continued, America at the “precipice,” as Adams said, and still there was no word from John Jay in London. Adams’s days went on much as before, the greater part of his time given to his duties in the Senate. At the Francis Hotel he occupied a small but comfortable room looking onto Franklin Court, and at meals he appears to have enjoyed the company of the other guests, most of whom were members of Congress. A young English visitor staying at the hotel, Thomas Twining, was delighted to find the Vice President “superior to all sense of superiority” and in appearance more like “an English country gentleman who had seen little of the world, than a statesman who had seen so much of public life.”

I was always glad [he wrote years later] when I saw Mr. Adams enter the room and take his place at our table. Indeed, to behold this distinguished man . . . occupying the chair of the Senate in the morning, and afterwards walking home through the streets and taking his seat among his fellow citizens as their equal, conversing amicably with men over whom he had just presided . . . was a singular spectacle, and a striking exemplification of the state of society in America at this period.

By the time the Jay Treaty at last reached the President in the spring of 1795, Philadelphia was in a frenzy of speculation over what it might contain. On June 8, the day Washington called a special session of the Senate to consider the treaty, he invited Adams to dine alone with him. The meeting was confidential, and Adams said nothing about it, except to caution Abigail that “mum-mum-mum” was the word.

That the terms of Jay’s treaty would ignite a storm of protest was plain at once. Jay had given up virtually every point to the British, in return for very little. Conspicuously absent was any guaranteed protection of American seamen from British seizure. Further, the British had refused to open their ports to American trade, except in the West Indies, but there only to ships of less than seventy tons. The one important British concession was to remove the last of their troops from forts in the northwest by the end of the year.

But Jay had gained peace with Britain — “To do more was impossible,” he told the President — and Washington, though disappointed, concluded it was enough. The treaty, with his prestige behind it, went to the Senate for approval. Through thirteen days of furious debate behind closed doors, Adams could only watch and listen. What felt like a tropical heat wave descended on the city, making the cooped-up chamber all but unbearable. Finally, on June 24, by exactly the required two-thirds margin, the Senate consented to ratification.

Senators were enjoined to disclose nothing until the treaty was signed by the President. But in a matter of days the full text was published by the Philadelphia Aurora, which had replaced Freneau’s National Gazette as the leading Republican newspaper. It was the first scoop in American newspaper history and a “battle royal” commenced at once. Mobs in the streets declared Jay a traitor and burned him in effigy. There were riots in New York and Boston. The President was assailed in print as never before, and nowhere more than in the Aurora, which was edited by young Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Franklin who had once been John Quincy’s schoolmate in France.

From the distance of Monticello, Jefferson saw what Jay had wrought as a “monument of venality” and sent a letter to the new French ambassador at Philadelphia to assure him of his own continuing enthusiasm for France.

Adams, who knew from experience — knew better than anyone — what Jay had been up against in dealing with the British, never doubted that a flawed treaty was far preferable to war with Britain. He stood by the President, unwavering in his support.

The common accusations notwithstanding, Adams was no Anglophile. As greatly as he admired the British constitution and the British structure of government, he considered the British as insolent as ever, and the unfortunate “mad” George III (by now the victim of porphyria), a hopeless blunderer. The day might come when America would have to “beat down” the “insolence of John Bull,” Adams told Abigail, but he prayed it would not be soon.

The furor over the treaty would continue until the House took up the necessary appropriations the following year. But that summer Washington’s troubles grew still worse, when Edmund Randolph resigned as Secretary of State after being accused of taking money from France to influence the administration against Britain — a charge never proven.

With the departure of Randolph the brilliant cabinet that Washington had started with was entirely gone, replaced by men who were by and large mediocrities. Whether, in view of the charges and the abuse he was subjected to, Washington would agree to stand for election again, no one could say, but in his usual fashion, he would keep his thoughts to himself for as long as possible.

For the Adamses the summer at Quincy passed uneventfully. Their one private worry was over Charles, who, just as his law career was getting under way, had fallen in love with Sally Smith, the pretty younger sister of Nabby’s husband. Abigail and John both objected to the romance, and with the same line of reasoning they had used earlier with John Quincy. Charles agreed to a moratorium, but after several months candidly told his father, “Were I to declare that I did not entertain the same opinion of Sally Smith that I ever did, I should declare a falsehood.”

When the news reached Quincy early that fall that Charles and Sally had been married in New York, his parents were devastated. But Charles assured them he was never happier, and Nabby affirmed it to have been the best possible step for him. “After all the hairbreadth scrapes and imminent dangers he has run, he is at last safe landed,” she reported.

Stopping at New York en route to Philadelphia in December, Adams was delighted to find Charles well established in a “commodious” home and office on Front Street, and pleased, too, with Sally, who “behaved prettily in her new sphere.” “My love to Daughter Adams, the first I have had since your sister changed her name,” he later wrote affectionately to Charles.

V

“I AM HEIR APPARENT, you know,” Adams reminded Abigail after arriving in Philadelphia for the opening of the Fourth Congress.

The prospect of Adams succeeding Washington had been ever-present for seven years, but now, separated again by hundreds of miles, they addressed themselves to the growing likelihood of his actually becoming President, exchanged thoughts and feelings on the challenge in a way that apparently they never had before, and that perhaps they would have found impossible except at a distance. As Abigail had said herself in a letter years before, “My pen is always freer than my tongue.” Were it for her alone to decide, were personal considerations all that mattered, she wrote, she would unhesitatingly tell him to retire. But with a decision of “such momentous concern,” she dared not try to influence him. “I can say only that circumstances must govern you . . . [and] pray that you have superior direction.” If, however, he entertained any thought of continuing as Vice President under someone other than Washington, he must forget it. “I will be second under no man but Washington,” she declared.

Adams expressed concern over the toll the presidency could take on his health. He felt perfectly strong, he assured her, but twice mentioned the tremble in his hands, and remarked that he could see the President rapidly aging before his eyes.

Early in February 1796, on the same day Benjamin Franklin Bache declared in the Aurora that “good patriot” Jefferson was the inevitable and ideal choice to replace Washington, Adams professed to be tired of politics. “I am weary of the game,” he told Abigail, then added with characteristic honesty what she had long understood, “Yet I don’t know how I would live out of it.”

No successor to Washington could expect such support as Washington had, she warned. “You know what is before you — the whips, the scorpions, the thorns without roses, the dangers, anxieties, the weight of empire.” Still, the presidency would be a “glorious reward” for all his service to the country, should Providence allot him the task.

“I have looked into myself,” he wrote in another letter, “and see no dishonesty there. I see weakness enough. But no timidity. I have no concern on your account but for your health.”

I hate speeches [he continued], messages, addresses, proclamations and such affected, constrained things. I hate levees and drawing rooms. I hate to speak to 1,000 people to whom I have nothing to say. Yet all this I can do.

When she reminded him that he was sixty years old, he replied, “If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”

IN MARCH, when the House of Representatives took up the Jay Treaty, it appeared a constitutional crisis was in the offing. The Republicans had pounced on the treaty with all their “teeth and . . . nails,” as Adams reported. “The business of the country . . . stands still . . . all is absorbed by the debates. . . . Many persons are very anxious and forebode a majority unfavorable, and the most pernicious and destructive results.” It was hard to imagine the Republicans being that “desperate and unreasonable,” but should they be, he told Abigail, “this Constitution cannot stand. . . . I see nothing but a dissolution of government and immediate war.”

He was again invited to dine alone with the President, who in the course of the evening mentioned three times that he would likely retire. “He detained me there ‘til nine o’clock,” Adams wrote, “and was never more frank and open about politics. I find his opinions and sentiments are more like mine than I ever knew before, respecting England and France and our American parties.”

To Adams, time was moving all too fast. (“Long! Nothing is long! The time will soon be gone and we shall be surprised to know what has become of it.”) Then, the first week in May, he could happily send Abigail word that the Jay Treaty bills had passed both Houses, “and good humor seems to be returning.” The constitutional crisis had passed, the threat of war was greatly diminished.

Requesting a leave of absence, he was on his way home by May 6. His time as Vice President was virtually over. He had served longer than in any other post in his career, and in all he had served extremely well — dutifully as president of the Senate and with unfailing loyalty to Washington. He had cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate of historic importance — in protecting the President’s sole authority over the removal of appointees, for example, and in the several stages leading to the location of the national capital. In all, Adams cast thirty-one deciding votes, always in support of the administration and more than by any vice president in history.

AT QUINCY he threw himself into his other life as farmer Adams with greater zest than ever, as though determined to make the most of what might be his last extended stay for a long while.

It had been a particularly fine spring along the coast of Massachusetts, with warm days and ample rain. The farm “shines very bright,” he wrote. For the first time in years he revived his diary, keeping note of all daily activity and progress. He decided to build a substantial new barn, the first such project he had ever undertaken. “This day my new barn was raised near the spot where . . . my father . . . raised his new barn in 1737,” he recorded on July 13. He thought it looked “very stately and strong.”

He kept three to ten men at work through the summer, including John Briesler, another of the numerous Bass family, Seth Bass, and a hard-drinking neighbor named Billings, who was an especially hard worker. After the sedentary life of the Senate, Adams relished the days out of doors. He loved the work, the tangible results, the feeling that he had not only returned home, but returned, if only for a while, to the ways of his father and generations of Adamses.

July 15, Friday

. . . Went with three hands . . . [to] cut between 40 and 50 red cedars, and with a team of five cattle brought home 22 of them at a load. We have opened the prospect so that the meadows and western mountain may be distinctly seen. . . .

July 16

. . . We got in two loads of English hay. . . .

July 20

. . . Walked in the afternoon over the hills and across the fields and meadows, up to the old plain. The corn is as good there as any I’ve seen. . . .

August 2

. . . finished the great wall on Penn’s Hill.

August 5

. . . Sullivan and Mr. Sam Hayward threshing — Billings and Bass carting earth and seaweed and liming the compost.

He was up each morning with the birds, drank his usual gill of hard cider, and with Abigail passed quiet evenings reading, writing letters, or keeping up with his diary, where along with the chronicle of daily enterprises, he wrote of clear summer skies and described a morning shower as “a soft, fine rain in a clock calm . . . falling as sweetly as I ever saw in April . . .” Ever the realist, he wrote, too, of rattlesnakes and corn worms, Hessian flies and “mosquitoes numerous.”

Though Abigail’s health remained a worry, she apparently felt well enough to entertain Parson Wibird at dinner and to ride to Weymouth to dine with Cotton Tufts, whose salted beef, shell beans, and whortleberry pudding Adams proclaimed “luxurious.”

“Of all the summers of my life,” he recorded, “this has been the freest from care, anxiety, and vexation to me. The sickness of Mrs. A. excepted.”

“Billings and Prince laying wall,” he wrote September 8. “Briesler and James picking apples and making cider. Stetson widening the brook.

I think to christen my place Peacefield, in commemoration of the peace which I assisted in making in 1783, of the thirteen years peace and neutrality which I have contributed to preserve, and of the constant peace and tranquility which I have enjoyed in this residence.

THOUGH POLITICS through the summer of 1796 had been in “a perfect calm,” as Abigail noted, neither she nor John had any illusions about what was to come. Mischief was surely brewing in “the Jacobin caldron,” she wrote, as “venomous as Macbeth’s hell broth.” When the Boston papers carried news of Washington’s retirement and the text of his “Farewell Address” of September 17, it was, as said, as if a hat had been dropped to start the race.

Adams and Jefferson were the leading candidates in what was the first presidential election with two parties in opposition, an entirely new experience for the country. Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at Peacefield, neither taking any part in what quickly became a vicious, all-out battle.

Adams was pilloried in the Republican press as a gross and shameless monarchist — “His Rotundity,” whose majestic appearance was so much “sesquipedality of belly,” as said Bache’s Aurora. Adams, declared the widely read paper, was unfit to lead the country, and beneath a headline declaring an alarm, Bache warned that unless by their votes the people were to call forth Thomas Jefferson, “the friend of the people,” Adams, the “champion of kings, ranks, and titles,” would be their President. Were Adams to be elected, warned the Boston Chronicle, the principle of hereditary succession would be imposed on America, to make way for John Quincy. With Jefferson, said the paper, no one need worry since Jefferson had only daughters.

To add further fuel to the fire, Thomas Paine, in a fury over the Jay Treaty, unleashed an unprecedented attack on George Washington in the pages of the Aurora. Writing from Paris, Paine called Washington a creature of “grossest adulation,” a man incapable of friendship, “a hypocrite in public life,” apostate and impostor.

For their part, the Federalists were hardly less abusive. Jefferson was decried as a Jacobin, an atheist, and charged with cowardice for having fled Monticello from the British cavalry in 1781. “Poor Jefferson is tortured as much as your better acquaintance,” Adams wrote to John Quincy.

The candidates for Vice President were Aaron Burr of New York for the Republicans, and for the Federalists, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, thus providing regional balance on both sides. Adams was expected to carry New England, Jefferson, the South, while the Middle States could go either way.

To add to Adams’s troubles, Alexander Hamilton was up to his old tricks behind the scenes, urging the strongest possible support for Thomas Pinckney, ostensibly as a way to keep Jefferson from becoming Vice President, but also, it was suspected, to defeat Adams as well and make Pinckney president — Pinckney being someone Hamilton could more readily control.

The rumors of this that reached Adams at Quincy would be confirmed before the year was out by his old friend Elbridge Gerry, who was a presidential elector for Massachusetts and, like Adams, an ardent antiparty man. For both John and Abigail, Gerry’s report marked the end of whatever remaining trust or respect they had for Hamilton. Abigail henceforth referred to him privately as Cassius. John called him “as great a hypocrite as any in the U.S. His intrigues in the election I despise.”

For all the clamor over politics, the country was still at peace and more prosperous than ever. If there was a prevailing sentiment overall concerning national politics, it was one of regret, even sadness, that Washington would soon be stepping down. Abigail expressed what most Americans felt when, quoting Shakespeare, she wrote of Washington, “Take his character all together, and we shall not look upon his like again.”

On November 23, Adams bid her goodbye and started for Philadelphia, and again by public conveyance, John Briesler his sole companion. “Fear takes no hold of me,” he assured Abigail, as if to boost both their spirits. He reached Philadelphia on December 4, and the night of December 7, struggling with the prospect of defeat, he wrote again:

I laugh at myself twenty times a day, for my feelings, and [the] meditations and speculations in which I find myself engaged: Vanity suffers. Cold feelings of unpopularity. Humble reflections. Mortifications. Humiliation. Plans of future life. Economy. Retrenching expenses. Farming. Returning to the bar, drawing writs, arguing causes, taking clerks.

I can pronounce Thomas Jefferson to be chosen P[resident] of [the] U[nited] S[tates] with firmness and a good grace that I don’t fear. But here alone abed, by my fireside, nobody to speak to, pouring upon my disgrace and future prospects — this is ugly.

But in a week or so, in an entirely different mood, he was writing to tell her it appeared he would be elected President. Though the final count would not be known until February, when the electors met, it was being said openly in and out of Congress that he had won, and that Jefferson was to be Vice President.

Overnight, Adams was being treated as though suddenly he had become a different man, and this he found most remarkable. Even Bache’s Aurora seemed to experience a miraculous change of heart. John Adams, the paper now declared, was clearly preferable to Washington.

There can be no doubt that Adams would not be a puppet — that having an opinion and judgment of his own, he would act from his own impulses rather than the impulses of others — that possessing great integrity he would not sacrifice his country’s interests at the shrine of party. . . . In addition . . . it is well known that Adams is an aristocrat only in theory, but that Washington is one in practice — that Adams has the simplicity of a republican but that Washington has the ostentation of an eastern bashaw — that Adams holds none of his fellow men in slavery, but Washington does. . . . The difference is immense.

To Adams’s particular delight, one of the most partisan of all the young Republicans, Representative William Branch Giles of Virginia, had been heard to say of him, “The old man will make a good President, too.”

AT MONTICELLO, Jefferson received word from Madison that he should be prepared for the likelihood of finishing second, and that for the good of the country and the “valuable effect” of his influence on Adams, he must accept the vice presidency. In reply, Jefferson expressed no reluctance to serve under Adams, since “he had always been my senior, from the commencement of my public life.” Then, three days after Christmas, Jefferson took up his pen to write an extraordinary letter to Adams.

From his latest information, Jefferson said, it appeared Adams’s election to the “first magistracy” was an established fact. But to Jefferson this had never been in doubt. “I have never one single moment expected a different issue.” And though he knew he would not be believed, it was true nonetheless that he never wished it otherwise. He warned that Hamilton had been up to some of his usual schemes, but doubted it would change the outcome.

I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below, with the society of neighbors, friends and fellow laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants. No one then will congratulate you with purer disinterestedness than myself. . . . I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office. . . . I devoutly wish you may be able to shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce, and credit will be destroyed. If you are, the glory will be all your own; and that your administration may be filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us is the sincere wish of one who though, in the course of our voyage through life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence, and sentiments of respect and affectionate attachment.

It was a fine show of magnanimity in defeat, as well as one of the warmest expressions of friendship Jefferson ever wrote or that anyone had ever addressed to Adams. But after finishing the letter, Jefferson had second thoughts and sent it on to Madison in Philadelphia — “open for your perusal” — so that if anything he had written “should render the delivery of it ineligible in your opinion, you may return it to me.”

Madison was appalled. He saw the letter as a dreadful mistake, and decided it must go no further. As he explained delicately to Jefferson, friendship was one thing, politics another. Adams already knew of his friendship, Madison advised, and were Adams to prove a failure as President, such compliments and confidence in him as Jefferson had put in writing could prove politically embarrassing.

The letter was never sent. It remained in Madison’s possession, in a file only a few blocks from where Adams resided.

For Adams it could have been one of the most important letters he ever received. Jefferson’s praise, his implicit confidence in him, his rededication to their old friendship would have meant the world to Adams, and never more than now, affecting his entire outlook and possibly with consequent effect on the course of events to follow.

Not long after, however, Adams did receive a letter from Abigail, written at Quincy on January 15, 1797:

The cold has been more severe than I can ever before recollect. It has frozen the ink in my pen, and chilled the blood in my veins, but not the warmth of my affection for him for whom my heart beats with unabated ardor through all the changes and vicissitudes of life, in the still calm of Peacefield, and the turbulent scenes in which he is about to engage.

CHAPTER NINE

OLD OAK

The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place.

~Abigail Adams

I

THE INAUGURATION of the second President of the United States commenced in the first-floor House Chamber of Congress Hall in Philadelphia just before noon, Saturday, March 4, 1797.

The room was filled to overflowing, every seat taken by members of the House and Senate, justices of the Supreme Court, heads of departments, the diplomatic corps, and many ladies said to have added a welcome note of “brilliancy” to the otherwise solemn occasion.

There was a burst of applause when George Washington entered and walked to the dais. More applause followed on the appearance of Thomas Jefferson, who had been inaugurated Vice President upstairs in the Senate earlier that morning, and “like marks of approbation” greeted John Adams, who on his entrance in the wake of the two tall Virginians seemed shorter and more bulky even than usual.

It was a scene few who were present would ever forget. Here were the three who, more than any others, had made the Revolution, and as many in the audience supposed, it was to be the last time they would ever appear on the same platform. Adams felt as he had when he first appeared before George III — as if he were on stage playing a part. It was, he later told Abigail, “the most affecting and overpowering scene I ever acted in.”

Jefferson’s height was accentuated by a long blue frock coat. Washington was in a dress suit of black velvet. Adams, the plainest of the three, wore a suit of grey broadcloth intentionally devoid of fancy buttons and knee buckles.

Resolved to keep things as understated as possible, he had ridden to Congress Hall from his lodgings at the Francis Hotel in a “simple but elegant enough” carriage drawn by just two horses. The grand carriage and six white horses of Washington’s first inauguration had been dispensed with. Nor would Adams allow an official retinue to march in procession with him. As he confided to Abigail, he wanted few if any of the “court” trappings of his predecessor. On learning that she had had the Quincy coat-of-arms painted on her carriage at home, he told her to have it painted out. “They shall have a republican President in earnest,” he wrote.

Overcast skies had cleared by noon. The day turned bright and cloudless. But for Adams there was little cheer. With none of his family present, he felt miserably alone. He had been unable to sleep the night before, sick with worry that he might not make it through the ceremony without fainting. But he succeeded with flying colors, delivering an address that left little doubt as to where he stood on the Constitution, partisan politics, domestic concerns, France, and the pressing issue of peace or war.

Though in print the speech would seem a bit stilted, it was delivered with great force and effect. Stirred by emotion, and in a strong voice, Adams recalled the old ardor of the American Revolution and spoke of the “present happy Constitution” as the creation of “good heads prompted by good hearts.” In answer to concerns about his political creed, he expressed total attachment to and veneration for the present system of a free republican government. “What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?” He spoke of his respect for the rights of all states, and of his belief in expanded education for all the people, both to enlarge the happiness of life and as essential to the preservation of freedom. The great threats to the nation, Adams warned, were sophistry, the spirit of party, and “the pestilence of foreign influence.”

He paid gracious tribute to Washington’s leadership. He lauded American agriculture and manufacturing, pledged himself to a spirit of “equity and humanity” toward the American Indian, “to meliorate their condition by inclining them to be more friendly to us, and our citizens to be more friendly to them.”

To Abigail he would later write, “I have been so strangely used in this country, so belied and so undefended that I was determined to say some things as an appeal to posterity.” But the strongest lines, those underscoring his determination to maintain American neutrality, were delivered directly for the benefit of Congress and the foreign diplomats present, not to say the opposition press. It was his “inflexible determination” to maintain peace with all nations, Adams declared, then expressed a personal esteem for France, stemming from a residence of nearly seven years there. Finally he affirmed an “unshaken confidence” in the spirit of the American people, “on which I have often hazarded my all.”

Then, having issued a solemn invocation of the Supreme Being, he stepped down from the platform to a table at the front of the chamber, where Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth administered the oath of office, Adams energetically repeating the words.

And so Adams became President of the nation that now — with the additions of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee — numbered sixteen states. Having never in his public life held an administrative position, having never played any but a marginal role in the previous administration, having never served in the military, or campaigned for a single vote, or claimed anything like a political bent, he was now chief executive and commander-in-chief.

Many in the chamber were weeping, moved by his words, but still more, it seems, by the prospect of Washington’s exit from the national stage. “A solemn scene it was indeed,” Adams wrote, noting that Washington’s face remained as serene and unclouded as the day. “Me thought I heard him think, ‘Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!’”

Approval came from all sides. Federalist Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts called it “the most august and sublime” occasion he ever attended. Praise in the Federalist press, too, was not so much for Adams as for the occasion — “Thus ended a scene the parallel of which was never before witnessed in any country. . . .” But Republicans openly extolled what the new President had said. In the pages of the Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache proclaimed John Adams a hero in a way inconceivable before, lauding the “Republican plainness” of Adams’s appearance, his “true dignity,” his “incorruptible integrity.” In all, it was one of the handsomest tributes ever paid to Adams.

It is universally admitted that Mr. Adams is a man of incorruptible integrity, and that theresources of his own mind are equal to the duties of his station; we may flatter ourselves that his measures will be taken with prudence, that he will not become the head of a party, and that he will not be the tool of any man or set of men. His speech on the inauguration augers well to our country. . . . He declares himself the friend of France and of peace, the admirer of republicanism, the enemy of party, and he vows his determination to let no political creed interfere in his appointments. How honorable are these sentiments; how characteristic of a patriot!

It was praise Adams took with a large grain of salt, suspecting Bache of wanting only to create a “coolness between me and Mr. Washington.” More to his liking was an item in a Baltimore paper describing him as “an old fielder,” which as he explained to Abigail, “is a tough, hardy, laborious little horse that works very hard and lives upon very little, very useful to his master at small expense.”

BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER his inauguration dozens of old friends, including some like Benjamin Rush who had supported Jefferson in the election, made a point of expressing confidence in Adams. Elbridge Gerry likened him to a ship ballasted with iron, capable of riding out any storm. Cotton Tufts, in a letter lamenting the “vexation” Adams was bound to encounter, wrote, “I will not, however, admit this to be of weight sufficient to deter or prevent a great and good man.” A letter from Samuel Adams, then in his seventy-fifth year, may have meant the most of all. “I congratulate you as the first citizen of the United States — I may add the world. I am, my dear sir, notwithstanding I have been otherwise represented in party papers, your old and unvaried friend.”

Except for his siege of anxiety the night before the inauguration, Adams’s state of mind had remained quite steady. He had never felt “easier,” he assured Abigail, and a diary entry of the wife of the British ambassador seems to bear him out. At a dinner given by Washington in mid-January, Henrietta Liston found herself seated between the President and the Vice President — “between the rising and setting suns” — and though she found Washington as noble as expected, Adams proved surprisingly entertaining. “There is a good deal of amusement in the conversation of Adams, a considerable degree of wit and humor,” she recorded happily.

While he knew much patience would be called for in time to come, Adams reminded Abigail that he had had a “good education” in patience in his years in public life, and could “look at a storm with some composure.” Constituted as he was, he may even have welcomed a storm. When in the predawn hours of January 27, a terrible fire ripped through the home and shop of the Philadelphia printer and publisher of the Federal Gazette, Andrew Brown, taking the lives of his wife and children, Adams was conspicuous among the men handing up buckets to fight the blaze. Brown, as all knew, had for some time been excoriating the Vice President at every chance.

In February, when the outcome of the election became official, it had been Adams’s role, as president of the Senate, to open and read the final votes in the electoral college. He had won by only a narrow margin, with 71 votes to Jefferson’s 68. (Pinckney had 59, Burr, 30, Samuel Adams, II.) As Adams himself observed, he was President by three votes. Yet he appears to have taken it in stride. “I am not alarmed,” he told Nabby, who had written to express her concern. “If the way to do good to my country were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage.” To Abigail he wrote simply, “The die is cast.”

With the inauguration still to come, he had taken one of the most fateful steps of his presidency. Rather than choosing a new cabinet of his own, Adams asked Washington’s four department heads to stay on, convinced this was the surest way to preserve Federalist harmony. “Washington had appointed them and I knew it would turn the world upside down if I removed any one of them,” he later wrote. “I had then no particular objection to any of them.” Also, there was no tradition of cabinet members resigning their positions at the end of a President’s term. Washington himself had encouraged them to remain; nor did any express a wish to leave.

They were Secretary of State Timothy Pickering of Salem, Massachusetts; Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr., of Connecticut; Secretary of War James McHenry of Maryland; and Charles Lee of Virginia, the Attorney General. All were younger men than Adams. Wolcott, the youngest at thirty-seven, was the son of the Oliver Wolcott with whom Adams had served in the Continental Congress. A plump, rather pleasant-looking lawyer who had been educated at Yale, he was thought trustworthy and affable. McHenry, an even friendlier and more likable man, had been born and raised in County Antrim, Ireland, and spoke with a trace of an Irish accent. Charles Lee, like Wolcott, was still in his thirties, a graduate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton and, while perfectly competent, was distinguished primarily for being a Lee of Virginia.

None were of oustanding ability, but all were Federalists, and Wolcott and McHenry, like Secretary of State Pickering, were extreme Federalists, or High Federalists. They belonged to the ardently anti-French, pro-British wing of the party who considered Alexander Hamilton their leader, and because of this, and the fact that they had served in the Washington cabinet, they were inclined to look down on John Adams.

But of the four it was Timothy Pickering who held the strongest views and, as Secretary of State, was the most important, given the precarious nature of a world at war, as well as his own obdurate personality. Pickering was not an easy man to like or get along with even under normal circumstances, as Adams knew. In many ways Pickering might have served as the model New Englander for those who disliked the type. Tall, lean, and severe-looking, with a lantern jaw and hard blue eyes, he was Salem-born-and-bred, a Harvard graduate, proud, opinionated, self-righteous, and utterly humorless. After brief service on Washington’s staff during the war, he had been promoted to adjutant general. Later he became the first Postmaster General, and from there moved over to replace Henry Knox as Secretary of War. When Secretary of State Edmund Randolph was forced to resign under a cloud of suspicion — a cloud largely of Pickering’s making — Pickering was named to succeed him, but only after Washington had been turned down by five others to whom he offered the position.

To his credit, Pickering was energetic and conscientious. He was fond of music and enjoyed a happy marriage that had produced ten children. Adams, who had known him for years, though not well, was willing to give him — indeed all of his cabinet — the benefit of the doubt. “Pickering and all his colleagues are as much attached to me as I desire,” he told Elbridge Gerry.

To many the great question was the part Jefferson might play concerning relations with France — the Republicans hoping it would be considerable, the Federalists determined he should have no say whatever. Privately, Adams was ambivalent on the subject. While he had forgiven Jefferson most of his past trespasses, he had by no means forgotten them. “I may say to you that his patronage of Paine and Freneau and his entanglements with characters and politics which have been pernicious are and have been a source of inquietude and anxiety to me,” Adams confided to Tristram Dalton. “He will have too many French about him to flatter him, but I hope we can keep him steady.”

To Elbridge Gerry, however, Adams expressed greater confidence. In view of Jefferson’s good sense and long friendship, Adams thought he could expect from his Vice President support of the kind he himself had given Washington, “which is and shall be the pride and boast of my life.” Benjamin Rush, meantime, had written to Jefferson to say what a lift it gave him to hear Adams “speak with pleasure of the prospect of administering the government in a connection with you. He does justice to you upon all occasions . . .”

Arriving in Philadelphia just days before the inauguration, Jefferson had called on Adams at the Francis Hotel, where Jefferson, too, was to stay. They had not seen one another for three years, and apparently the reunion went well. As a matter of courtesy, one such visit between the President and Vice President would have sufficed, but the fact that Adams promptly returned the call the next morning was taken as a clear signal that Adams meant truly to pursue a policy above party divisions.

According to Jefferson’s account of the meeting, written years later, Adams “entered immediately” into discussion of the crisis at hand and his wish for Jefferson to play a lead part in resolving it. Faced with the prospect of war with France, Adams was determined to make a fresh effort at negotiations in Paris, to bring about a reconciliation, which he believed possible and desirable. “Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war,” he had written to Abigail.

The government of France, led since 1795 by a five-headed executive commission known as the Directory, had chosen to interpret the Jay Treaty as an Anglo-American alliance. In an effort to improve relations with France, Washington had recalled the American minister, James Monroe, and sent in his place a staunch Federalist, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. But as yet there was no word from Pinckney.

It was the “first wish of his heart,” Adams told Jefferson, to send him to Paris, though he supposed this would be out of the question. “It did not seem justifiable for him to send away the person destined to take his place in case of an accident to himself,” Jefferson would recall; “nor decent to remove from consideration one who was a rival for public favor.”

Jefferson agreed with Adams’s reasoning. Irrespective of whether the Constitution would allow it, he was sick of residing in Europe, Jefferson said, and hoped never to cross the Atlantic again as long as he lived.

That being so, Adams continued, it was his plan to send two emissaries to join Pinckney, making it a bipartisan three-man commission, which by its “dignity” ought to satisfy France, and by its geographical and political balance satisfy both parties and all parts of the country. He had in mind Elbridge Gerry and James Madison, who had recently retired from Congress. Jefferson said he was certain Madison would not accept, but at Adams’s request agreed to inquire.

This was on March 3, the day before the inauguration. The next morning, in his own brief inaugural remarks before the Senate, Jefferson made a point of commending Adams as that “eminent character,” and spoke of their “uninterrupted friendship.” For a fleeting interlude the prospect of truly nonpartisan cooperation between them appeared attainable. “I am much pleased,” one Supreme Court justice wrote, “that Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson lodge together. The thing looks well; it carries conciliation and healing with it, and may have a happy effect on parties.”

The day following the inauguration, however, when President Adams asked others, including Washington, for their opinion on sending Madison to Paris, he heard only stiff objections. To such High Federalists as Timothy Pickering and Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott, Madison was as unacceptable as Jefferson would have been. Wolcott told the President that sending Madison would “make dire work among the passions of our parties in Congress.” When Adams said he refused to be intimidated by party passions, Wolcott threatened to resign.

As Jefferson would recall, it was that evening while walking down Market Street with Adams, after a farewell dinner given by Washington, that he informed Adams of Madison’s refusal to go to France. Adams indicated that in any event the issue was now academic. There had been a change of mind due to objections raised. To Jefferson it was clear that Adams, who imagined he might “steer impartially between the parties,” had been brought abruptly back into the Federalist fold. But it was also clear to Adams that neither Jefferson nor Madison had the least desire to work with the administration, and thus he could expect no help from any of the Republicans.

It was there on Market Street, according to Jefferson, that he and Adams reached the breaking point. Adams never again mentioned a word to him on the subject of France, “or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.”

Whether the parting was quite so clear-cut as Jefferson remembered is uncertain. But as Adams, too, later acknowledged, they “consulted very little together afterward.” Adams was to call on his Vice President for advice no more than Washington had called on him. The great difference, however, was that Jefferson was of the opposing party, with differing objectives and principles, and Adams consequently could never count on such loyalty from Jefferson as he had given Washington. Adams never knew when Jefferson might be working secretly to undercut or thwart him, for Jefferson’s abiding flaw, Adams had concluded, was “want of sincerity.”

In his Farewell Address, Washington had warned against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Particularly in governments of “popular form,” he had said, “it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.” Yet party spirit and animosities were as alive as ever, as Adams had been shown in the bluntest of terms in little more than twenty-four hours since taking office.

On March 8, Washington called at the Francis Hotel to say goodbye to Adams and wish him well. They were parting on good terms. For all his long coolness toward Adams, Washington before leaving office had written an unsolicited letter expressing the ”strong hope” that as President, Adams would not withhold “merited promotion” from John Quincy. “I give it as my decided opinion,” Washington wrote, “that Mr. [John Quincy] Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and there remains no doubt in my mind that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps if he is now to be brought into that line, or into any other public work.” Little that Washington might have said or done could have meant more to Adams.

“The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag,” Jefferson wrote to Madison. “Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see, that they will be ascribed to the new administration.”

Jefferson, too, would depart shortly, after a quick farewell to Adams. “He is as he was,” Adams noted cryptically.

SO MUCH HAD HAPPENED in John Adams’s life — he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country — that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or mountain, but more as a journey or adventure, even a “kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry,” as once he confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter.

In this sense the presidency was but another episode in the long journey, and, as fate would have it, he was left little time to dwell overly on anything but the rush of events and the increasingly dangerous road ahead.

“My entrance into office is marked by a misunderstanding with France, which I shall endeavor to reconcile,” he wrote to John Quincy, “provided that no violation of faith, no stain upon honor is exacted. . . . America is not scared.”

On the evening of March 13, or possibly the next morning, Adams was hit with stunning news. The French Directory had refused to receive General Pinckney. Forced to leave Paris as though he were an undesirable alien, Pinckney had withdrawn to Amsterdam and was awaiting instructions.

To make matters worse, Adams learned of further French seizures of American ships in the Caribbean and that by decrees issued in Paris, the Directory had, in effect, launched an undeclared war on American shipping everywhere. The crisis had come to a head. Adams faced the threat of all-out war.

Days were consumed by tedious meetings. The weather was miserable, he reported to Abigail. “I have a great cold. The news is not pleasant.” Such confidence in his cabinet as he had expressed to Elbridge Gerry was badly shaken. From what he wrote privately to Abigail, it appears he already sensed what trouble was in store from that quarter. “From the situation where I now am, I see a scene of ambition beyond all my former suspicions or imagination. . . . Jealousies and rivalries . . . never stared me in the face in such horrid forms as in the present.”

On March 21 he moved into the President’s House vacated by Washington, but what should rightfully have been a fulfilling moment proved only more demoralizing.

The furniture belonging to the public is in the most deplorable condition [he reported to Abigail]. There is not a chair to sit in. The beds and bedding are in a woeful pickle. This house has been a scene of the most scandalous drinking and disorder among the servants that I ever heard of. I would not have one of them for any consideration. There is not a carpet nor a curtain, nor a glass [mirror], nor linen, nor china, nor anything.

Rent for the house was an exorbitant $2,700 a year, plus another $2,500 for carriages and horses. Though Congress would allot $14,000 to purchase furniture, Adams worried that on his salary of $25,000, it would be impossible to make ends meet. They would be more “pinched” than ever in their lives, he warned Abigail. “All the glasses, ornaments, kitchen furniture . . . all to purchase. All the china . . . glass and crockery. . . .

All the linen besides. . . . Secretaries, servants, wood, charities . . . the million dittoes.” Yet not a word could they say. “We must stand our ground as long as we can.” To no one but her could he ever complain.

The work was more taxing than he had been prepared for, “very dry, dull,” “perplexing,” and “incessant.” But again nothing could be said. “Don’t expose this croaking and groaning. . . . I should lose all my character [reputation] for firmness. . . . Indeed, I sometimes suspect that I deserve a character of peevishness and fretfulness, rather than firmness.”

But more was happening than he let on. On Saturday, March 25, he called for Congress to reconvene in special session on May 15, “to consult and determine on such measures as their wisdom shall be deemed meet for the safety and welfare of the United States.” War clouds gathered over the capital — to the angry indignation of the Republicans. The Federalist press declared the United States had been grievously insulted by France; the Republican press affirmed American friendship with the French and, while expressing the hope that the President would remain true to his inaugural pledge to seek peace, reported that a “certain ex-Secretary” (Hamilton) was secretly preaching war to further his political ambitions.

A lively new newspaper had begun publication in Philadelphia, in answer to Bache’s Aurora. Porcupine’s Gazette was the work of an English printer and bookseller, William Cobbett, who wrote under the pen name “Peter Porcupine” and immediately demonstrated that he could be as biased, sarcastic, and full of invective as Bache, and attract no less attention. Headlines in Porcupine’s Gazette announced that war with France was all but certain:

MR. PINCKNEY, THE AMERICAN MINISTER AT PARIS, HAVING RECEIVED ORDERS TO QUIT THE TERRITORIES OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, HAS ACTUALLY TAKEN HIS DEPARTURE ACCORDINGLY. WAR BETWEEN THESE TWO POWERS MAY THEREFORE BE CONSIDERED INEVITABLE.

Cobbett not only expected and wanted war with France, but favored the alliance with Britain that was bound to result — an increasingly popular view in many quarters.

It is manifestly the design of the French party to lull the people into a fatal security, to deaden their national energy and to defeat in this way those measures of defense which would secure to us our independence. With this view they will fabricate reports of accommodation with France — for this end they are constantly preaching up the improbability of a war with that nation, and some of the base traitors have even declared that in the event of war they will join France.

Adams remained silent, but in letters to Henry Knox and John Quincy said he would do everything possible to settle all disputes with France. To Abigail he confessed to being totally exhausted and begged her to come to his rescue. The more at odds he felt with his cabinet, the less he trusted their judgment, the greater his need for her insight and common sense, her presence in his life. His pleas for her to come grew more urgent even than those he had sent during his difficult debut as Vice President.

“I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you,” he wrote. And again: “I must entreat you to lose not a moment’s time in preparing to come on, that you may take off from me every care of life but that of my public duty, assist me with your councils, and console me with your conversation.”

“The times are critical and dangerous, and I must have you here to assist me,” he told her. “I must now repeat this with zeal and earnestness. I can do nothing without you.”

ABIGAIL HAD BEEN corresponding faithfully the whole time, offering advice, opinions on people, often saying more than she knew she should as the wife of a president. “My pen runs riot,” she allowed. “I forget that it must grow cautious and prudent.” She had encouraged his confidence in Jefferson. Like others, she had thought the odd circumstance of having a President and Vice President of “differing sentiments” could prove a blessing were both to “aim at the same end, the good of their country.” Conceivably the combination of two well-meaning men could serve to continue the Union as Washington had managed all alone.

When Adams confided that he hoped to keep Hamilton at a safe distance, she provided a withering farsighted assessment. “Beware that spare Cassius has always occurred to me when I have seen that cock sparrow,” she wrote. “Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.”

She prayed that “’things which made for peace may not be hid from your eyes.’” Her feelings were not those of pride or ostentation, but “solemnized” by the knowledge of the obligations and duties he had assumed. “That you may be enabled to discharge them with honor to yourself, with justice and impartiality to your country, and with the satisfaction to this great people, shall be the daily prayer of your A.A.”

Her own days were taken up with all that would have preoccupied him had he been home, and more. She kept house, ran the farm, settled issues among the hired men, managed the family finances, and tried not to complain about her health or loneliness.

In a particularly memorable letter, she recounted a crisis that arose when the youngest of her hired hands, James Prince, a free black boy she had taken under her wing in Philadelphia, came to ask if he might attend evening classes in town at a new school for apprentices. Abigail, who had taught him herself to read and write, warmly approved, but was soon asked by a neighbor to withdraw James. If she did not, she was told, the other boys would refuse to attend and the school would close. Had James misbehaved, Abigail asked. No, she was informed, it was because he was black. Did these other boys object when he attended church? No, they did not.

“The boy is a freeman as much as any of the young men, and merely because his face is black is he to be denied instruction?” she asked. “How is he to be qualified to procure a livelihood? Is this the Christian principle of doing unto others as we would have others to do to us?”

She requested that the boys be sent to her. “Tell them . . . that I hope we shall all go to Heaven together.” And this, she was pleased to report to Adams, ended the crisis. She heard no more on the subject; James continued in the school.

As ever, a very considerable part of her time was devoted to correspondence with the rest of the family, about whom she reported to John, seldom withholding her own opinions.

John Quincy was in love again, this time with Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of the American consul in London whom the Adamses knew. Though John Quincy assured his mother that his “matrimonial prospects” were still uncertain, she could not help worrying, as she told him, whether the young woman was right for him, whether she might be too young, too accustomed to the splendors and attractions of Europe — meaning her expensive tastes might be more than he could afford.

“All your observations on the subject are received by me with gratitude, as I knew them to proceed from serious concern and purest parental affection,” answered the young diplomat. The lady in question had “goodness of heart and gentleness of disposition, as well as spirit and discretion,” and would “prove such a daughter as you would wish for your son.”

“My fear arose from the youth and inexperience of the lady,” Abigail wrote in reply, and asked John Quincy to please tell Louisa that “I consider her already my daughter.”

Her greater concern was still over Nabby, whose husband, Colonel Smith, Abigail had sadly concluded, was “a man wholly devoid of judgment.” He had deceived himself with his visionary schemes and “led his family into a state of living which I fear his means will not bear him out.”

In April, as Abigail was preparing to leave for Philadelphia, the weather turned unseasonably hot. Then as suddenly the temperature plunged and John’s aged mother went into a sharp decline. “The good old lady is sure she shall die now [that] her physician and nurse are about to leave her, but she judges with me that all ought to be forsaken for the husband,” Abigail informed John.

Refusing to leave, she was with his mother until the end came on April 21, and it was she who made arrangements for the funeral in her front parlor.

“I prepare to set out on the morrow,” she wrote to John on April 26. “Our aged parent has gone to rest. . . . She fell asleep, and is happy. . . . I am ready and willing to follow my husband wherever he chooses.”

The obituary that appeared in the Boston papers, noted that Susanna Boylston Adams Hall, mother of the President of the United States, who died in the eighty-ninth year of her life, had “afforded the present generation a living example of that simplicity of manners and godly sincerity for which the venerable settlers of this country were so justly esteemed.”

From Philadelphia, Adams wrote to Abigail to express his grief and the wish that he had been at Quincy to give her help and comfort.

Our ancestors are now all gone, and we are to follow them very soon to a country where there will be no war or rumor of war, no envy, no jealousy, rivalry or party.

You and I are entering on a new scene, which will be the most difficult and least agreeable of any in our lives. I hope the burden will be lighter to both of us when we come together.

Her journey south was extremely difficult, because of heavy rains and washed-out roads. She felt like Noah’s dove, Abigail wrote, her thoughts always returning to the ark she had left. The part she must play now, as wife of the President, though “enviable no doubt in the eyes of some,” was one she had never envied or wanted. “That I may discharge my part with honor and give satisfaction is my most earnest wish.”

Stopping to see Nabby at East Chester, she was stunned to find that Colonel Smith was off again on another of his uncertain ventures, and Nabby too upset even to talk about it, except to say she had no idea where he was. “My reflections upon prospects there took from me all appetite for food,” Abigail confided to her sister Mary, “and depressed my spirits, before too low.”

Expecting her to arrive at Philadelphia on May 10, Adams set off that morning by carriage and met her about twenty-five miles outside the city.

I quitted my own carriage, and took my seat by his side [she wrote]. We rode on to Bristol, where I had previously engaged a dinner, and there upon the banks of the Delaware, we spent the day, getting into the city at sunset.

It took several days for her to recover from the trip. But in little time she, too, was caught up in the tumult of events.

ONE DAY LATER, ON MAY 11, Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia from Monticello to find the city astir over a private letter he had written more than a year before that had just appeared in print in the New York Minerva, a strongly Federalist paper, edited by Noah Webster. Writing to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, during the debate over the Jay Treaty, Jefferson had described America as a country taken over by “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty,” and by leaders who were assimilating “the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model.” Then, in the line that caused the stir, Jefferson wrote:

It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to those heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.

Successive translations of the letter from English to Italian to French, then back to English again had changed and intensified some of the wording by the time it appeared in the Minerva — “harlot” had become “whore,” for example — but the meaning was essentially unchanged and the letter was taken by many as an unconscionable attack on Washington.

Jefferson said nothing in his defense, and Washington, too, remained silent. But great damage had been done to Jefferson by the “Mazzei Letter,” notwithstanding the many prominent Republicans who claimed he had only been telling the unvarnished truth.

II

THE PRESIDENT entered Congress Hall at midday, May 16, 1797, absolutely clear in his mind about his intentions and walked to the dais knowing he had the support of his cabinet in what he was about to say. Indeed, some of the language in the speech he carried was their own, arrived at after he had asked for their answers to a list of specific questions, a technique employed by his predecessor. Long a man of decided temperament, Adams was as determined as he had ever been to maintain the policy of neutrality established by Washington, while refusing to submit to any indignities or to sacrifice American honor — he was determined, in essence, to fulfill his own inaugural promises.

But as an old realist, and one who had read more of history and experienced more of it than any of those in his audience, he also knew how extremely difficult, if not impossible, neutrality would be to achieve and maintain in a world at war. He knew how much could happen in France or Britain or on the high seas, or within his own country, over which he had no control. Regional and party differences had made a tinderbox of American politics. It was not only that Republicans were divided from Federalists, but Federalists were sharply at odds with themselves, and the roll of the strident, often vicious press was changing the whole political atmosphere.

Nor was Adams like George Washington immensely popular, elected unanimously, and all but impervious to criticism. He had no loyal following as Washington had, no coterie of friends in Congress. Further, there was the looming reality that America at the moment had no military strength on land or sea. With authorization from the Republic of France, French privateers continued to prey on the American merchant fleet at will and there was no way to stop them.

In a calm, steady voice, Adams said the French had “inflicted a wound in the American breast,” but that it was his sincere desire to see it healed, and to preserve peace and friendship with all nations. He was therefore calling for both “a fresh attempt” at negotiation with France, and a buildup of American military strength.

While we are endeavoring to adjust all our differences with France by amicable negotiation, with the progress of the war in Europe, the depredations on our commerce, the personal injuries to our citizens, and the general complexion of our affairs, render it my duty to recommend your consideration of effectual measures of defense.

This was not an act of belligerence, but a measure to give added weight and respect to the mission he planned to send to Paris.

As was remarked at the time, the speech bore a strong resemblance to the American eagle, an olive branch in one talon, and in the other the “emblems of defense.” Federalist papers hailed Adams’s patriotic fire. He had “shone forth” as in times of old, exciting “the liveliest approbation of all real Americans.”

It may be justly called a true American speech [said the Gazette of the United States]. It breathes in every line true American patriotism. It came from the heart of a tried patriot, and was addressed to the hearts of patriots alone. There was nothing wavering in it; no little trick to catch a transitory approbation from the discontented, or to soothe the fractious. It was the explicit language of the first magistrate of the nation, disclosing to his fellow citizens the honest sentiments of his heart, expressing with proper feeling and sensibility the wrongs done to his injured country, and his determination to attempt to obtain redress; while at the same time it manifested humane anxiety to avert the calamities of war by temperance and negotiations.

Federalist approval was emphatic and widespread. From Mount Vernon, Washington wrote that the President had “placed matters upon their true ground.”

Republicans were enraged. Adams had not only failed to express sufficient sympathy for the French but had sounded a “war-whoop.” How, if he wanted to avoid war, could he press Congress to build up the navy?

Benjamin Bache turned with a fury on the President he had so recently lauded as a prudent, high-minded man of integrity. In almost daily attacks in the Aurora, Adams was belittled as “The President by Three Votes,” mocked again as “His Rotundity,” excoriated as a base hypocrite, a tool of the British, “a man divested of his senses.” He was charged again and again as a creature of Hamilton and the Federalist war hawks.

In fact, most Federalists at this point, including Hamilton, recognized the need for a renewed effort to treat with France, and as Adams did not know, it was largely because of Hamilton’s influence that the cabinet had given their full support to the peace mission.

Within days Adams appointed two special envoys who, with General Pinckney, would comprise a new commission to proceed to Paris. He chose John Marshall of Virginia, whom he did not know, and his own former aide in Paris, Francis Dana. But when Dana declined because of poor health, Adams named Elbridge Gerry.

Marshall, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, was an ardent champion of George Washington under whom he had served gallantly in the war. A cousin of Jefferson’s, but not an admirer of the Vice President, he was known to be able, skilled in the law, and, as mattered greatly, he was one of Virginia’s few Federalists. Secretary of State Pickering and others in the cabinet strongly approved the choice.

Elbridge Gerry, however, was unacceptable to Pickering and the cabinet, who thought him too independent and unreliable. “It is ten to one against his agreeing with his colleagues,” Secretary of War McHenry warned the President. Even Abigail questioned the choice. But Adams insisted. He needed someone on the commission whose friendship and loyalty were beyond doubt. He knew Gerry — “I knew Gerry infinitely better than any of them,” he later said. The old bond of 1776 was still a tie that held Adams to Rush and even to Jefferson, for all the strains of politics. From the time of their ride to Philadelphia by horseback in the crisis winter of 1776, Adams had felt Gerry was someone to count on, and he was prepared to do just that in the present crisis. With the exception of his own son, John Quincy, there was perhaps no man in whom Adams placed more trust. Also, importantly, of the three envoys Gerry was the most sympathetic to France and, with his open admiration of Jefferson, came the closest to making it a bipartisan commission.

Later, when Marshall arrived in Philadelphia, Adams felt still better about the makeup of the commission. He and Marshall liked each other at once, even used virtually the same words to describe one another. Marshall judged Adams a “sensible, plain, candid, good tempered man,” while Adams wrote of Marshall, “he is a plain man, very sensible, cautious, and learned in the law of nations.”

In Paris the three American envoys would be dealing with the extremely wily and charming new French Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. A former bishop in the Catholic Church, Talleyrand had only recently returned to France after more than two years in exile in Philadelphia, where he had been well treated. Adams had known him but only slightly, not enough to have a sense of what to expect.

THE UNDECLARED WAR at sea continued. That spring Adams was informed that already the French had taken more than 300 trading vessels. American seamen had been wounded. In March the French captors of a ship out of Baltimore, the Cincinnatus, had tortured the American captain with thumbscrews in an unsuccessful attempt to make him say he was carrying British cargo.

“The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place,” observed Abigail, who in her letters to her sister Mary was to provide an inside look at the Adams presidency like no other, much as she had in portraying their life in France and London years before, writing always to the moment and with untrammeled candor.

Adams was in his office in the President’s House most of every day and from “such close application” looked exhausted. She took charge of the large house, supervised the staff, and sent off orders to Mary for shipments of the President’s favorite New England cheese, bacon, white potatoes, and cider. In keeping with “old habit,” she told Mary, their day began at five in the morning. Breakfast was at eight, and they saw each other again at dinner, customarily served at three. “I begin to feel a little more at home, and less anxiety about the ceremonious part of my duty,” Abigail allowed. “I am obliged every day to devote two hours for the purpose of seeing company.”

The day is past, and a fatiguing one it has been [she closed another letter at eight o’clock in the evening]. The ladies of Foreign Ministers and the Ministers, with our own secretaries and ladies have visited me today, and add to them, the whole levee today of Senate and House. Strangers, etc. making near one hundred asked permission to visit me, so that from past 12 till near 4:00, I was rising up and sitting down.

She was both involved and vitally interested in her husband’s world. She read all the newspapers, and in time came to know the names and faces of everyone in Congress, their background and political views. Little transpired in the capital that she did not know about. Yet her interest in matters at home never flagged. She kept contact with nieces and nephews, inquired regularly about the welfare of her pensioners: Parson Wibird, who had grown old and infirm, and her aged former servant Phoebe, to whom she sent money and made sure she had sufficient fire-wood and whatever other necessities were wanting.

The President’s worries and burdens were never out of mind. “Mrs. Tufts once styled my situation ‘splendid misery,’” Abigail reminded Mary. Interestingly, it was a phrase Vice President Jefferson also used to describe the presidency.

When Adams named John Quincy to be minister to Prussia, more Republican protest erupted. Washington had never appointed relatives to office, it was said, not even distant relatives. The President must resign, charged the Aurora, “before it is too late to retrieve our deranged affairs.” When Congress chose to leave some matters to the “discretion” of the President, the Aurora attacked Adams for his excessive vanity.

“We may truly say we know not what a day will bring forth,” Abigail observed in her running account. “From every side we are in danger. We are in perils by land, and we are in perils by sea, and in perils by false brethren.” Whom she meant by false brethren, she did not say. But the Vice President all the while did nothing whatever to help his former friend the President. Further, he made no secret of his belief that Adams was leading the nation straight to war.

After years of seclusion at Monticello, Jefferson had, with amazing agility, stepped back into the kind of party politics he professed to abhor, and in no time emerged as leader of the opposition. With Madison in retirement, and the vice presidency providing ample free time, Jefferson kept extremely busy as a “closet politician,” in one man’s expression, writing letters and lending support — ideas, information, and money — to the Republican press, including such “gladiators of the quill” as a dissolute Scottish pamphleteer and scandalmonger named James T. Callender, who wrote for the Aurora and specialized in attacks on John Adams.

The Francis Hotel, where Jefferson continued to lodge, became headquarters for the Republican inner circle. Any pretense of harmony between the President and Vice President was dispensed with. Like other Republicans, Jefferson failed to understand how Adams could reconcile negotiation for peace with measures of defense, and in private correspondence accused Adams of willfully endangering the peace. When some of this got back to Adams, he angrily declared it bespoke a mind “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.”

Yet given all that Jefferson was doing, and the combustible atmosphere of the moment, Adams’s rancorous comments were remarkably few and mild. Many in the Federalist party suspected Jefferson of outright treachery against his own country.

Convinced that the best hope for the world was the defeat of Britain by France, and that such an outcome was imminent, Jefferson privately advised the French chargé d’affaires in Philadelphia, Philippe-Henry-Joseph de Letombe, that the Directory should show the three American envoys all proper courtesy but “then drag out the negotiations at length.”

Letombe wrote of the meeting with “the wise Jefferson,” in a report to his Foreign Minister, dated June 7, 1797. America, Jefferson had impressed upon Letombe, was “penetrated with gratitude to France” and would “never forget that it owes its liberation to France.” The new President of the United States was another matter, however. Jefferson was unsparing: “Mr. Adams is vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.” But Adams’s term of office was only four years, Jefferson reminded Letombe. Besides, Adams did not have popular support. “He only became President by three votes, and the system of the United States will change along with him.”

Possibly these were not Jefferson’s exact words; possibly his assessment of Adams was not as harsh and patently disloyal as Letombe’s account would make it appear. But if what Letombe recorded was all that Jefferson had to say for Adams, this would seem to have proved the end of a long friendship. And whatever Jefferson’s exact words may have been, clearly the chargé d’affaires was led to conclude that the difficulties of the moment were not a question of American regard for France, but of the difficult, unpopular, aberrant old man who temporarily held office as President.

The truth, it happens, was that Adams and Jefferson both wanted peace with France and each was working to attain that objective, though in their decidedly different ways.

SUMMER MARKED the departure of the envoys, Gerry sailing from Boston, Marshall from Philadelphia, where Congress sweltered and fumed trying to wind up business, before “the sick season” came on.

She could not wait to start for home, Abigail wrote. She longed for a sea breeze and her rose bush. “The President really suffers for want of a journey, or rather for want of some relaxation,” she told Mary Cranch.

Today will be the fifth great dinner I have had, about 36 gentlemen today, as many more next week, and I shall have to get through the whole of Congress, with their appendages. Then comes the 4th of July, which is a still more tedious day, as we must then have not only all Congress, but all the gentlemen of the city, the Governor and officers and companies. . . . I hope the day will not be hot.

The Fourth turned out to be a “fine, cool day,” and her reception a great success.

. . . my fatigue arose chiefly from being dressed at an early hour, and receiving the very numerous sets of company who were so polite as to pay their compliments to me in succession in my drawing room after visiting the President below, and partaking of cake, wine, and punch with him. To my company were added the ladies of foreign ministers and Home Secretaries with a few others. The parade lasted from 12 until four o’clock.

To at least one of those present, she and the President seemed the picture of calm good cheer. Henrietta Liston, the British ambassador’s wife, described Adams as “steady and resolute,” while “Mrs. Adams . . . has spirit enough to laugh at Bache’s abuse of her husband, which poor Mrs. Washington could not do.”

In days the city had become a bake house again, as Abigail wrote. “The hot weather of July has weakened us all. Complaints of the bowels are very frequent and troublesome.” Strangely, cats were dying all over the city. The streets were filled with dead cats. No one had an explanation, and no one in Congress wished to delay departure an hour longer than necessary.

On July 10, exhausted, irritable members of both houses started for home convinced the special session had only aggravated party divisions. Adams had hoped it would help unite the country, and in this plainly he had failed.

There was some consolation, however. After a good deal of fuss and bickering, Congress had at last approved an Act Providing a Naval Armament. It was hardly what Adams had called for, but it was a start, providing funds to equip and man three frigates, the Constitution, the United States, and the Constellation, which had been built during the Washington administration but remained unequipped for service.

With a cooling rain falling, the Adamses started for home on July 19. Why, asked the Aurora, had the President of the United States “absconded” from the seat of government at a time when the public mind was “exceedingly agitated”?

III

IT WAS A SUMMER without incident. There was no news from France, no worsening or lessening of the crisis. For Adams the pleasures of August and September at Peacefield had all the desired effect. By the time they were heading back to Philadelphia, he and Abigail were both rested and revived. Abigail wrote of feeling better than she had in years.

Also, one news item appears to have added considerably to their outlook. John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Johnson had been married, as the Adamses learned just before leaving home. The small announcement in a Boston paper, like the first word from John Quincy himself, appeared two months after the fact. The young couple were married on July 26 in the ancient Anglican church known as All Hallows Barking by the Tower of London.

“I have now the happiness of presenting to you another daughter,” read John Quincy’s letter to his “Dear and Honored Parents,” each of whom responded with an appropriately warm letter of congratulations. “And may the blessing of God Almighty be bestowed on this marriage and all its connections and effects,” wrote Adams in benediction.

The departure from Quincy took place in the first week of October, but the Adamses were not to reach the capital for more than a month. Yellow fever again raged in Philadelphia, as they learned en route, and so it was necessary to stop and wait at East Chester with Nabby. Adams was kept apprised by daily reports. Two-thirds of the population of Philadelphia had fled the city. The government had scattered to various outlying towns. He imagined members of Congress stranded along the way all up and down the country, all waiting as he was, “in a very disagreeable, awkward, and uncertain situation.” Told there had been an attempt to break into the President’s House and asked if a guard should be posted, Adams said no, lest a sentinel at the door lead people to think the situation worse than they knew.

The wait at East Chester was not easy, as much as he and Abigail adored Nabby and the four grandchildren. The house was small, and the continued absence of Colonel Smith cast a shadow. Abigail found East Chester itself unbearably dull. She worried about Nabby living there, and urged her to come with the children to Philadelphia. “I cannot leave her here this winter with not a single creature within 20 miles of her to speak a word to, or shorten the long solitary winter evening,” she told Mary. But Nabby refused. “I cannot say as much as is in my mind,” wrote Abigail, “the subject being a very delicate one.”

Adams went to New York for a dinner in his honor. Otherwise, to fill the time there was little but the newspapers and talk of a sensational scandal involving Alexander Hamilton. Possibly for Abigail, who claimed to have seen “the very devil” in Hamilton’s eyes, the story came as no surprise.

The “Reynolds Affair” was a complicated tangle of financial dealings, adultery, blackmail, and alleged corruption in the Department of the Treasury, all dating back five years. In 1792, while his wife and children were away, Hamilton had become involved in an “improper connection” with a young woman named Maria Reynolds. Her husband, James Reynolds, a speculator with an unsavory reputation, commenced to blackmail Hamilton, until the point when he, Reynolds, went to prison for an earlier swindle. It was then, while in prison, that Reynolds, in an effort to ease his case, got word to three Republican members of Congress, including Senator James Monroe, that Hamilton was not only an adulterer, but, as Secretary of the Treasury, secretly profiteering with government funds. When the three confronted Hamilton with the charges, he denied any corrupt act as a public official, but acknowledged the affair with Mrs. Reynolds and the blackmail plot, with the understanding that they, as gentlemen, would keep silent, which they did to a degree. A few more were let in on the secret, including the Republican clerk of the House, John Beckley, and Thomas Jefferson.

But it was not until that summer of 1797 that the story broke in a series of unsigned pamphlets produced by James Callender, the unscrupulous writer for the Aurora, whose source apparently was Beckley.

Callender dismissed the adulterous affair as a cover story and accused Hamilton of being a partner with Reynolds in corrupt financial dealings. In response, Hamilton published his own pamphlet, Observations on Certain Documents . . . in which . . . the Charge of Speculation against Alexander Hamilton . . . is Fully Refuted. He denied any improper speculation with James Reynolds, but confessed to the adulterous affair. “My real crime,” Hamilton wrote, “is an amorous connection with his wife.”

Hamilton’s disgrace was a windfall for the Republicans and all who had long thought him corrupt. Presumably the scandal would put a finish to his public career.

Jefferson appears to have made no comment on the Reynolds Affair. Nor did Adams, though it is certain he and Abigail heard plenty, such was the mood in Philadelphia when in November they arrived back at the President’s House, after an absence of fully four months. “Alas, alas, how weak is human nature,” wrote Abigail to her son Thomas.

There was still no report from the three envoys to France. Speaking before Congress on November 23, Adams could acknowledge only that the “unpleasant state of things” continued. The wait would go on, and the lack of information, plus the suspicion that some people knew more than they were saying, only put nerves further on edge.

Feelings ran deep, dividing the parties, dividing old friends. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” wrote Jefferson, “cross the streets to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.”

IN EUROPE, French armies had been sweeping across Italy and Austria, in a campaign of French aggrandizement led by young General Napoleon Bonaparte, who appeared invincible. Now, with the start of a new year, 1798, Bonaparte had been given command of all forces on land and sea to carry the war across the Channel to Britain, and as John Quincy reported to his father, the expedition was “in great forwardness.” Bonaparte shortly was to change his mind and lead his forces to Egypt instead, as John Quincy would also report. The French had become formidable as never before.

January 1798 in Congress Hall in Philadelphia, by contrast, was marked by a battle royal on the floor of the House. Vicious animosity of a kind previously confined to newspaper attacks broke out in the first physical assault to occur in Congress. In the midst of debate, when Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut insulted Republican Matthew Lyon of Vermont, Lyon crossed the chamber and spat in Griswold’s face. Soon after, Griswold retaliated with a cane. Lyon grabbed fire tongs from the fireplace, and the two went at each other until, kicking and rolling on the floor, they were pulled apart.

To some the scene provided comic relief. To others it was sad testimony to how very far the republican ideal had descended. It was also apt prelude to much that would follow.

Step by step, events were moving toward the precipice, as Adams said. The first hint of trouble with the mission to France had been in a letter to Adams from General Pinckney in November, but it was a hint only, nothing to go on. In January, again in a private letter, came word from John Marshall by way of The Hague warning that the mission might not be received by the French Directory. In February, to make the tension still worse, Adams had to inform Congress that a French privateer had actually attacked a British merchant ship inside Charleston Harbor.

“We are yet all in the dark respecting our envoys,” Abigail wrote on February 16; and again in another week: “Our envoys have been near six months in Paris but to this hour not a line has been received.”

In the meanwhile, as the President was unaware, his cabinet — Wolcott and McHenry in particular — were receiving continued advice and directions from Alexander Hamilton, who had supposedly retired from public life.

Hamilton was still opposed to war with France. “It is an undoubted fact that there is a very general and strong aversion to war in the minds of the people of the country,” he wrote to McHenry. “It is an undoubted fact that there is a very general indisposition toward the war in the minds of the people of the United States,” McHenry dutifully advised the President four days later. But should the present attempt to negotiate fail, then the President must address the Congress in a style “cautious, solemn, grave, and void of asperity,” declared McHenry — Hamilton also having told him this was what he was to say.

At last, late the evening of March 4, a year to the day since Adams became President, official dispatches arrived in Philadelphia and were delivered immediately to Timothy Pickering’s desk at the Department of State at Fifth and Chestnut Streets. Four of the dispatches were in cipher and it would be several days before they were decoded. But the message of the fifth dispatch was clear. Seething with indignation, Pickering pulled on a coat and hurried three blocks to the President’s House.

What Adams read was extremely unsettling. The government of France had refused to see the envoys. The mission had failed. Furthermore, the Directory had decreed all French ports closed to neutral shipping and declared that any ship carrying anything produced in England was subject to French capture.

Promptly the next morning, Monday, March 5, Adams sent the uncoded dispatch to Congress. But there was more to the story, as he soon learned with the decoding of the other dispatches.

After arriving in Paris in the first week of October, the three American envoys were kept waiting for several days and then were granted a meeting with Foreign Minister Talleyrand for all of fifteen minutes. More days of silence followed. Then began a series of visits from three secret agents representing Talleyrand — Jean Conrad Hottinguer, Pierre Bellamy, and Lucien Hauteval — who were referred to by the Americans in their dispatches as X, Y, and Z. The Foreign Minister was favorably disposed toward the United States, the American envoys were informed, but in order for negotiations to proceed, a douceur (a sweetener) would be necessary, a bribe of some $250,000 for Talleyrand personally. In addition, a loan of $10,000,000 for the Republic of France was required as compensation for President Adams’s “insults” in his speech before Congress the previous May.

Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry refused to negotiate on such terms. M. Hottinguer, the X of X, Y, and Z, reminded them of the “power and violence of France,” as Marshall recorded, but the Americans held their ground. “Gentlemen,” said Hottinguer, “you do not speak to the point. It is money. It is expected that you will offer the money. . . . What is your answer?” to which General Pinckney emphatically replied, “No! No! Not a sixpence.”

The last of the dispatches was not entirely decoded until March 12, and for several days Adams struggled over what to do, listening to advice and scribbling his thoughts on paper as his mood swung one way then another. He wrote of the “continued violences” of the French at sea, of their “unexampled arrogance” in refusing to receive the envoys, and declared such “injury, outrage, and insult” more than a self-respecting nation should ever have to submit to. But he also noted that peace might still be attainable, and, in fact, peace with honor was still his determined objective.

Wild rumors swept the city. It was said France had already declared war on the United States, that the French were moving to take possession of Florida and Louisiana.

Adams’s message to Congress on March 19 revealed only that the diplomatic mission had failed, and thus he must call again for the measures necessary to defend the nation in the event of attack. It was as mild a statement as he could have made under the circumstances. There was not a word about war, nor anything said of the contents of the dispatches, except that they had been examined and “maturely considered.”

The Republicans immediately decried the message as a declaration of war. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson called it “insane” and commenced lobbying for ways to delay action and allow time for Bonaparte to invade Britain. Jefferson proposed that members of Congress adjourn at once and go home to consult their constituents on the great crisis. “The present period . . . of two or three weeks,” he told Madison in a burst of hyperbole, “is the most eventful ever known since that of 1775, and will decide whether the principles established by that contest are to prevail, or give way to those they subverted.”

Convinced that Adams was deliberately withholding information favorable to the French, Republicans in and out of Congress began insisting that the documents be made available at once. Any delay would be a sign of further duplicity. The Aurora taunted Adams for being “afraid to tell.”

“Beds of roses have never been his destiny,” Abigail wrote of her husband. Whether he would reveal more of the dispatches was something only he could determine, she told Mary; but “clamor who will,” great care must be taken that nothing endanger the lives of the envoys who were still in Paris. The Republicans, French agents, and the “lying wretch” Bache intended to abuse and misrepresent the President until they forced him to resign, “and then they will reign triumphant, headed by the man of the people,” Jefferson.

The respect she had expressed for Jefferson the year before had vanished. How different was the President’s situation from that of Washington, whose Vice President had “never combined with a party against him . . . never intrigued with foreign ministers or foreign courts against his own government . . . never made Bache his companion and counsellor.” John Adams was no warmonger. In self-defense the country might become involved in a war, and for that the country should be prepared, which was the President’s intent. Of what possible benefit could a war be to him? she asked. “He has no ambition for military glory. He cannot add by war to his peace, comfort, or happiness. It must accumulate upon him an additional load of care, toil, trouble, malice, hatred, and I dare say, revenge.”

On Monday, April 2, on the floor of the House, Representative Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania, who had replaced Madison in the leadership of the Republicans, stood to propose that the President be requested to turn over the text of the dispatches. Republicans who had been clamoring for disclosure were now joined by a number of High Federalists who had gotten wind of the damaging content of the dispatches and were happy to help the Republicans step into a trap of their own making. By a vote of 65 to 27 the House demanded that the full text be delivered at once.

Adams, who had apparently concluded that the envoys were by now safely out of France, released the documents the next day, and with the galleries cleared of visitors and the doors secured, the House went into executive session.

The revelation that the crisis was not less than the administration implied, but far worse, hit the Republicans like a hammer. They were “struck dumb, and opened not their mouths,” wrote Abigail. Many representatives privately voiced outrage over the effrontery of Talleyrand and his agents. Some offered lame new arguments. It was said that the whole XYZ story was a contrivance of the Federalist warmongers, that the breakdown of negotiations was the fault of the American envoys. Jefferson, while refusing to comment publicly, privately blamed Adams for past insults to the French, and insisted that Talleyrand and his agents were not, after all, the French government, which was “above suspicion.”

Once the Senate voted to have copies of the documents printed for use within Congress only, it was only a matter of days before they were public knowledge.

In the House, Gallatin had urged that the dispatches not be published, certain that they would dash any surviving hope of a settlement with France — which, it appears, was exactly the fear that troubled the President. And, indeed, High Federalists were claiming it was too late for preaching peace any longer. The Federalist press protested the “damnable outrages” of the French, and a wave of patriotic anti-French anger swept the city and the country with unexpected passion. As Abigail reported to Mary Cranch and John Quincy, public opinion in the capital changed overnight. The tricolor cockade of France that Republicans had been wearing in their hats all but disappeared from sight. No one was heard singing French patriotic songs in public as before, or espousing the cause of France.

The Aurora, in turn, lashed out at the President as a man “unhinged” by the “delirium of vanity.” Had Adams refrained from insulting the French, had he chosen more suitable envoys, the country would never have been brought to such a pass. But in a matter of days subscriptions and advertising fell off so drastically that it appeared the paper might fail. Anger at Bache and Callender was as intense nearly as at the French. John Fenno, editor of the rival Gazette of the United States, asked, “In the name of justice and honor, how long are we to tolerate this scum of party filth and beggerly corruption . . . to go thus with impunity?” In the heat of the moment, it was a question many were asking, including the wife of the President. Bache and his kind had the “malice and falsehood of Satan,” wrote Abigail, whose dislike of the press, dating from the attacks on Adams by London newspapers a decade before, had nearly reached the breaking point.

For the first time, she began to fear for her husband. “Such lies and falsehoods were continually circulated,” she wrote to Mary, “and base and incendiary letters sent to the house addressed to him, that I really have been alarmed for his personal safety. . . . With this temper in a city like this, materials for a mob might be brought together in ten minutes.”

THE COUNTRY BEGAN to prepare for war. On April 8, 1798, Representative Samuel Sewall, a Federalist from Marblehead, Massachusetts, called on Congress to give the President all he had asked for and slowly, somewhat reluctantly, Congress swung into action. Measures were passed for arming merchant ships. Substantial funds — nearly $1 million — were voted for harbor fortifications and cannon foundries. In May a bill passed empowering United States warships to capture any French privateer or cruiser found in American waters.

“The merchant vessels along the wharf in this city begin to wear a warlike appearance,” reported Porcupine’s Gazette. “I dare say the French spies have been writing many, many a melancholy letter on the subject to their partisans who are laying off the coast.”

Led by Gallatin, the Republicans mounted vigorous resistance, and nothing passed by large majorities. The “Executive Party,” Gallatin argued, was creating the crisis only to “increase their power and to bind us by the treble chain of fiscal, legal and military despotism.”

A bill for a “provisional army” was passed, but not before it was cut from 25,000 men to 10,000, which was still more than Adams had asked for or wanted. For though he was the greatest advocate of the navy of any American statesman of his generation, Adams deplored the idea of a standing army.

The rebirth of the navy — the “wooden walls” he wanted above all for defense of the country — and a new Department of the Navy, separate from the War Department, were his pride and joy. Little that he achieved as President would give him greater satisfaction, and with his choice of the first Secretary of the Navy, the able, energetic Benjamin Stoddert of Maryland, he brought into his administration the one truly loyal ally he had close at hand.

From every part of the country came hundreds of patriotic “addresses” to the President — expressions of loyalty and “readiness” from state legislatures, merchant groups, fraternal orders, college students, small towns and cities. Suddenly, Adams was awash in a great upswelling of patriotism. His popularity soared. Never had he known such attention and acclaim, which some thought surpassed even what Washington had known while in office.

Abigail, making her social calls about the city, found people stopping on the street to bow to her or lift their hats, something she had not experienced before. “People begin to see who have been their firm unshaken friends, steady to their interests and defenders of their rights and liberties,” she wrote. “In short, we are now wonderfully popular except with Bache & Co., who in his paper calls the President, old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams.”

At the New Theater on Chestnut Street a young performer named Gilbert Fox was stopping the show each night singing “Hail Columbia,” which was “The President’s March” with new lyrics composed by Joseph Hopkinson of Philadelphia, son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Francis Hopkinson. Abigail was part of the full house the night of its premiere, April 25, when Fox was called back to sing it three more times and cheers from the audience, according to Abigail, might have been heard a mile away. “The theater, you know,” she reminded Thomas, “has been called the pulse of the people.”

A few nights later, with the President in the audience as Fox sang “Hail Columbia,” the response was still more stupendous. The song was called for “over and over.” The audience joined in the singing, danced in the aisles.

Firm, united let us be. Rallying ‘round our liberty.

As a band of brothers joined,

Peace and safety we shall find.

When a lone man tried to sing “Ciera,” the marching song of the French Revolution, there were shouts to throw him out.

Even the High Federalists heartily approved of John Adams as they never had. The President, it was said, had awakened the nation from its “fatal stupor.”

Adams himself, exhilarated by such unprecedented popularity, appeared to be as caught up in the spirit of the moment as anyone. Deeply touched by the patriotic addresses that kept pouring in, he spent hours laboring to answer them, as if obliged to respond to each and every one, and in some of what he wrote, he appeared ready to declare war anytime. “To arms then, my young friends,” he said in reply to the youth of Boston, “to arms, especially by sea.”

One May afternoon crowds lined Market Street as a thousand young men of Philadelphia marched two-by-two to the President’s House, wearing in their hats, as a sign of their support, black cockades like those worn by Washington’s troops in the Revolution, Adams received a delegation of them in the Levee Room wearing a dress uniform and sword.

Yet here and there in his replies to the patriotic addresses were to be found clear signs that peace, not war, remained his objective. “I should be happy in the friendship of France upon honorable conditions, under any government she may choose to assume,” he said in a letter to the citizens of Hartford, Connecticut.

When he called for a day of fasting and prayer, he was roundly mocked in the Republican press, but on the day itself the churches were filled. To Vice President Jefferson, it was as though an evil spell had been cast over the capital. He called it a “reign of witches,” and saw no difference between Adams and the “war party.” The new navy, in Jefferson’s view, was a colossal waste of money.

When a fight broke out between two street gangs wearing the black and tricolor cockades, the cavalry was called in. It had become dangerous to set foot outside the door at night, Jefferson wrote. “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he told his daughter Martha. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.” One French emigré would remember people acting as though a French army might land at any moment. “Everybody was suspicious of everybody else; everywhere one saw murderous glances.”

Benjamin Bache’s house was assaulted, his windows smashed. It was rumored that French agents were plotting to burn the city. At the presidential mansion, Adams finally consented to have a sentry posted at the door.

What Adams’s thoughts were through all this he did not record. His personal correspondence had dried up. He wrote almost no letters at all of the kind in which he customarily unburdened himself — in large part because Abigail was with him, but also because he had almost no time to himself.

By all signs, however, he was still of two minds in addressing the crisis. In the image of the American eagle, he still clutched both olive branch and arrows, even if, on occasion in his public poses, his head, unlike the eagle’s, was turned to the arrows.

In his physical appearance, Adams was noticeably changed. He was uncharacteristically pale and had lost weight — “he falls away,” Abigail noted. If not exactly toothless, as Bache said, he had suffered the loss of several more teeth, about which he was quite self-conscious. Abigail worried that he was smoking too many cigars and working to the point of collapse.

Some afternoons he is called from his room twenty times in the course of it, to different persons, besides the hours devoted to the ministers of the different departments, the investigation necessary to be made of those persons who apply for offices or are recommended, the weighing the merits, and pretentions of different candidates for the same office, etc., etc., etc.

“I dare not say how really unwell he looks,” she told Cotton Tufts. To Mary Cranch she confided, “I think sometimes that if the [Congress] does not rise and give the President respite, they will have Jefferson sooner than they wish.”

Yet his spirits were fine, his resolve unwavering in the face of Talleyrand and the Directory. “Poor wretches,” she wrote, “I suppose they want him to cringe, but he is made of oak instead of willow. He may be torn up by the roots, or break, but he will never bend.”

ON JUNE 12, Adams received news that rocked him more than he dared show. A letter arrived from William Vans Murray, who had replaced John Quincy as minister at The Hague. Dated April 12, two months past, it revealed that while envoys Pinckney and Marshall had left Paris, Elbridge Gerry had remained behind. It seemed France wished to treat with Gerry alone.

For Adams, who had banked so much on Gerry against the advice of nearly everyone, it was a painful, infuriating turn of events, as once again Abigail reported to Mary.

Can it be possible, can it be believed that Talleyrand has thus declared and fascinated Mr. Gerry, that he should dare to take upon him such a responsibility? I cannot credit it, yet I know the sin which most easily besets him is obstinacy, and a mistaken policy. You may easily suppose how distressed the President is at this conduct, and the more so because he thought Gerry would certainly not go wrong, and he acted [on] his own judgment, against his counsellors, “who have been truer prophets than they wish themselves.” Gerry means the good of his country, he means the peace of it, but he should consider it must not be purchased by national disgrace and dishonor. If he stays behind he is a ruined man in the estimation of his countrymen. This is all between ourselves.

How could Gerry possibly stay “among the wolves?” Mary would ask in response. She felt great distress for the President, she said, but then “he ought not have infallibility demanded of him.”

On June 17, John Marshall arrived by ship in New York, and in another two days received a hero’s welcome in Philadelphia. Marshall said nothing about going to war with France, however. Indeed, for all he had been through, Marshall was confident, he told Adams, that the French did not want a war with the United States.

Marshall was an impressive man, tall, solidly handsome, unmistakably intelligent, and without airs. Further, unlike all the others advising Adams, he had met with the French and strongly advocated caution and moderation. In effect, Marshall told Adams that there need not be a war, which had been Adams’s instinctive sense all along. Marshall also informed him that Elbridge Gerry had remained behind in Paris because he had been told by Talleyrand that if he left, war would follow. Gerry had made his decision for the good of the country, aware of the scorn he would be subjected to at home.

If Adams had had any thought of asking for a declaration of war before Congress adjourned, he changed his mind. Instead, he sent a message of all of four sentences, the fourth and most important of which was: “I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”

But with the war clamor at a pitch, all talk of an alternative solution was limited to private discussion. More common was the opinion that a formal declaration of war could not come too soon, a view most strongly held by those nearest Adams, including his wife. In a letter to John Quincy, Abigail described how the town of Newburyport had taken upon itself to build a 20-gun warship to loan to the government, and that all down the coast other cities were following the example. A few weeks later she would write to him again of further progress with the “subscription” ships, her enthusiasm for the burgeoning navy clearly as great as that of her husband. Philadelphia had raised $80,000 to build a 36-gun frigate. New York had subscribed a nearly equal sum for a comparable ship. Baltimore had done the same. “Boston outstrips them all,” she wrote.

Just months earlier Abigail had questioned the very idea of war. Now, one senses, had she been called upon to serve, she would have signed up and marched off without hesitation. “This city, which was formally torpid with indolence and fettered with Quakerism,” she reported proudly, “has become one military school, and every morning the sound of the drum and fife lead forth, ‘A Band of Brothers Joined.’” Writing to Mary Cranch, Abigail berated Congress for being so slow to vote a declaration of war. “Why, when we have the thing, should we boggle at the name?”

CONTRARY TO THE expectations of nearly everyone, Adams did not ask for a declaration of war against France. Had he done so, the Congress would assuredly have obliged. Instead, they turned their attention to the enemies at home.

Another Philadelphia summer had arrived. The temperature in the last week of June was in the 90s, “the weather so hot and close, the flies so tormenting,” Abigail wrote, she hardly had energy to move. “Not a leaf stirs till nine or ten o’clock . . . It grows sickly, the city noisome.” In two sweltering weeks, their popularity and confidence never higher, the Federalist majority in Congress passed into law extreme measures that Adams had not asked for or encouraged. But then neither did he oppose them, and their passage and his signature on them were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency. Still, the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 must be seen in the context of the time, and the context was tumult and fear.

Adams later spoke of the Alien and Sedition Acts as war measures. It was how he saw them then, and how he chose to remember them. “I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them,” he would write in explanation long afterward, and at the time, the majority of Congress and most of the country were in agreement.

There was rampant fear of the enemy within. French emigrés in America, according to the French consul in Philadelphia, by now numbered 25,000 or more. Many were aristocrats who had fled the Terror; but the majority were refugees from the slave uprisings on the Caribbean island of San Domingo. In Philadelphia a number of French newspapers had been established. There were French booksellers, French schools, French boardinghouses, and French restaurants. The French, it seemed, were everywhere, and who was to measure the threat they posed in the event of war with France?

In addition to the French there were the “wild Irish,” refugees from the Irish Rebellion of 1798 who were thought to include dangerous radicals and in any case, because of their anti-British sentiment, gladly joined ranks with the Republicans. James Callender was sometimes cited as a prime example of this type, apart from the fact that Callender was a Scot.

Beyond that, the United States was at war — declared or not — and there were in fact numbers of enemy agents operating in the country.

The Alien Acts included a Naturalization Act, which increased the required period of residence to qualify for citizenship from five to fourteen years, and the Alien Act, which granted the President the legal right to expel any foreigner he considered “dangerous.” In the view of the Vice President, the Alien Act was something worthy of the ninth century. Jefferson and others imagined a tempestuous John Adams expelling foreigners by the shipload. As it was, they need not have worried. Adams never invoked the law and this despite the urging of Secretary of State Pickering, who did indeed favor massive deportations.

Of greater consequence was the Sedition Act, which made any “False, scandalous, and malicious” writing against the government, Congress, or the President, or any attempt “to excite against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition,” crimes punishable by fine and imprisonment. Though it was clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, its Federalist proponents in Congress insisted, like Adams, that it was a war measure, and an improvement on the existing common law in that proof of the truth of the libel could be used as a legitimate defense. Still, the real and obvious intent was to stifle the Republican press, and of those arrested and convicted under the law, nearly all were Republican editors.

Such stalwart, respected Federalists as Senators Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts and James Lloyd of Maryland were strongly in support of the Sedition Act. Noah Webster, editor, author, lexicographer, and staunch Federalist, declared it time to stop newspaper editors from libeling those with whom they disagreed, and to his friend Timothy Pickering wrote to urge that the new law be strictly enforced.

Even George Washington privately expressed the view that some publications were long overdue punishment for their lies and unprovoked attacks on the leaders of the union.

Vice President Jefferson, having no wish to be present for the inevitable passage of the Sedition Act, or anything more that might take place in such an atmosphere, quietly packed and went home to Monticello.

There were some Federalists who had mixed feelings about the Sedition Act, and John Marshall was openly opposed. Were he in Congress, Marshall said, he would have voted against it.

Though Adams appears to have said nothing on the subject at the time, it is hard to imagine him not taking a measure of satisfaction from the prospect of the tables turned on those who had tormented him for so long. And if Adams was reluctant to express his views, Abigail was not. Bache and his kind would inevitably provoke measures to silence them, she had predicted to Mary Cranch. They were “so criminal” that they ought to be brought to court. “Yet daringly do the vile incendiaries keep up in Bache’s paper the most wicked and base, violent and culminating abuse,” she wrote another day, sure that “nothing will have effect until Congress passes a Sedition Bill.”

It was not uncommon in Philadelphia — or in Massachusetts — to hear talk of the unrivaled influence Abigail Adams had on her husband and of her political sense overall. Fisher Ames once observed that she was “as complete a politician as any lady in the old French Court.” That Adams valued and trusted her judgment ahead of that of any of his department heads there is no question, and she could well have been decisive in persuading Adams to support the Sedition Act. “Bearing neither malice or ill will towards anyone, not even the most deluded . . . I wish the laws of our country were competent to punish the stirrer up of sedition, the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny,” she wrote, and the key word to her was “unfounded.” She wanted proven lies to be judged unacceptable. This, she was sure, would “contribute as much to the peace and harmony of our country as any measure, and in times like the present, a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.”

But it was also possible that Adams needed no persuading, and that in what she wrote to Mary Cranch, Abigail was speaking for both of them. Nor, importantly, was her influence always decisive, as shown by his choice of Elbridge Gerry as an envoy to France and, most importantly, his continued reluctance to declare war.

ON JULY 2, to meet the cost of the military buildup, the House voted a first direct tax on the people, a tax on land. Also, on July 2, to the surprise of many, Adams nominated George Washington as commander-in-chief of the new provisional army. “It was one of those strokes which the prospect and exigency of the times required,” wrote Abigail, “and which the President determined upon without consultation.” In addition, Adams submitted a list of proposed general officers that included Alexander Hamilton, but also several Republicans, most notably Aaron Burr, as well as his own son-in-law, Colonel Smith.

In a matter of days, Congress abrogated the French-American treaties of 1778, created a permanent Marine Corps, passed the Sedition Act, and approved the nomination of Washington as supreme commander. War fever was at a pitch.

On July 9, Secretary McHenry left for Mount Vernon by the express mail stage carrying Washington’s commission and a letter from Adams saying that were it in his power to appoint Washington President, he would gladly do so.

On July 16, Congress adjourned and departed the city with a rush. By July 25, when the Adamses set off, people were already dying in what would become the worst yellow fever epidemic since 1793.

IV

THE YEAR 1798, the most difficult and consequential year of John Adams’s presidency, was to provide him no respite. His stay at Quincy would be longer even than the year before, but the stress of the undeclared war — the Quasi-War, as it came to be known, or Half-War, as he called it — combined with the threatening ambitions of Alexander Hamilton and growing dissension within Adams’s own cabinet, filled his days with frustration and worry. There was precious little peace to be found at Peacefield in the summer of 1798, and especially as Abigail fell so ill that she very nearly died.

The first days at home were supposed to have been an even greater delight than usual, for unbeknown to Adams, a huge improvement to the house had taken place in their absence. An entire wing with a spacious parlor and a library above, had been added to the east end, and the whole house “new painted” inside and out. Abigail had secretly arranged it all that spring through Cotton Tufts, as a surprise for Adams. It was a “wren’s house” no more. She had doubled its size, much as Jefferson had done at Monticello, except on a considerably smaller scale and with the difference that she did it entirely to her own wishes, paying for it out of money she saved from household expenses at Philadelphia, and never asking for Adams’s permission or opinion. “I meant to have it all done snug . . . before I come,” she had told Mary Cranch in April. “I know the President will be glad when it is done, but he can never bear to trouble himself about anything of the kind, and he has not the taste for it. . . .”

The parlor was for Abigail, the second-floor library, or “Book room,” for Adams, and like the parlor, it was to have a handsome fireplace and windows on three sides. It must accommodate all his books “in regular order and be a pleasant room for the President to do business in,” Abigail had directed.

But in late June, just as the project was nearly finished, a Quincy neighbor on his way through Philadelphia stopped to pay his respects and revealed the whole secret to Adams, who, Abigail was happy to report, responded with a hearty laugh.

Whatever pleasure they might have found in their expanded quarters was foreclosed before they ever reached home. Abigail was taken ill on the journey and confined to her bed from the day they arrived, August 8. She was “very weak,” Adams wrote to Oliver Wolcott. Some days later he reported to Timothy Pickering, “Mrs. Adams is extremely low and in great danger.” In fact, she was as sick as she had ever been and it was with difficulty that Adams was able to concentrate on anything else.

Nabby, who with her daughter Caroline had come for an extended visit, hoping to be of help, wrote to John Quincy that it had become a different house. “The illness of our dear mother has cast a gloom over the face of everything here, and it scarce seems like home without her enlivening cheerfulness.”

To Secretary of War McHenry, Adams would describe it as “the most gloomy summer” he had known, but he could as easily have called it one of the most gloomy passages of his life, second only to his own siege of illness and despair in Amsterdam. Writing to George Washington later, after two months at home, Adams would say that Abigail’s fate was still very precarious “and mine in consequence of it.”

Yet to judge from the volume of correspondence, the number and variety of issues he dealt with, he worked no less diligently than usual, spending long hours at his desk in the new library across the hall from Abigail’s sickroom. Official reports from Philadelphia, dispatches from department heads, documents requiring his signature, requests for pardons, applications for jobs, reports of all kinds, arrived in assorted bundles, daily by post rider. Decisions were called for on matters large and small. Benjamin Rush asked that his brother be considered for the Supreme Court. There was a request for the President’s approval to build a lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, a request from Secretary Wolcott for authority to borrow up to $5,000,000 on behalf of the United States, reports from Wolcott on the yellow fever epidemic. Secretary McHenry sent an extended review, numbing in detail, of expenditures required for the Department of War. (“I have supposed that the items in the table of the Quarter Master’s supplies and contingent expenses for the eight additional companies and privates to the old establishment and for the six additional companies of dragoons may be covered by the appropriations for the original army and that the 600 thousand dollars stated by the Quarter Master’s Department for the 12 regiments will procure all the camp equipage not provided for by the table.”) Nor was there any letup in the stream of patriotic addresses.

Adams struggled to read it all and respond. “Wooden walls have been my favorite system of warfare and defense for three and twenty years,” he wrote in reply to an address from the Boston Marine Society. “Americans in general, cultivators as well as merchants and marines, begin to look to that source of security and protection.” After reading Wolcott’s report on the ravages of yellow fever at the capital, Adams sent an anonymous contribution of $500.

Most pressing was an unfortunate dispute that developed between Adams and Washington. At the heart of the issue was whether Alexander Hamilton should be made the second-highest-ranking officer in the new army, as Washington preferred and as Hamilton desperately desired.

When McHenry had gone off by express stage to Mount Vernon in early July, he had carried, in addition to Washington’s commission from the President, a letter from Hamilton about which Adams was told nothing. “The arrangement of the army may demand your particular attention,” Hamilton wrote, referring to Washington’s choice of a general staff. In this regard Washington was advised that the judgment of the President ought not to be a consideration. “The President,” Hamilton wrote, “has no relative ideas, and his prepossessions on military subjects in reference to such a point are of the wrong sort,” meaning, presumably, that Adams cared more for the navy than the army.

The view that Adams was unsuited to prepare the nation for war and that Hamilton, by contrast, was the ideal choice for second-in-command was shared by McHenry and Secretary Pickering alike. Indeed, Pickering had already said as much in a letter to Washington.

Thus, both the Secretary of War and the Secretary of State were secretly campaigning for Hamilton, supplying him with inside information, and undermining the intentions of their President, whom they saw riding for a fall. Sending Hamilton copies of secret government documents that summer, McHenry attached a note saying, “Do not, I pray you, in writing or otherwise betray the confidence which has induced me to deal thus with you or make extracts or copies. . . . Return the papers immediately.”

Washington had accepted his commission in an entirely cordial letter to Adams, but with the understanding that as head of the new army he could choose his own principal officers. Then he made known his intention to name Hamilton as second-in-command, with the rank of major general. Since no one expected Washington to take the field at his age, or to command except in name, the proposed arrangement meant, in effect, that Hamilton was to be in command — it was to be Hamilton’s army.

In a letter that went off from Quincy to McHenry on August 29, Adams wrote that Washington had conducted himself with “perfect honor and consistency.” But the “power and authority are in the President,” Adams reminded his Secretary of War. “There has been too much intrigue in this business,” he added, suggesting he knew more, or suspected more, than he appeared to. In a letter to Oliver Wolcott that he most likely never sent, Adams said angrily that were he to consent to the appointment of Hamilton to second rank under Washington, he would consider it the most reprehensible action of his life. “His talents I respect. His character — I leave . . .”

But Washington had left Adams no way out. To raise the new army Washington’s prestige was essential, as Hamilton, McHenry, Pickering, and Wolcott all understood. On September 30, Adams relinquished the final say to Washington.

September 30 was a Sunday, which makes it unlikely that the letter went off until the following day, October 1, the same day Elbridge Gerry arrived home from France, bringing news that gave a very different cast to the whole picture. Gerry’s ship appeared off Boston that morning. Losing no time, he dispatched a letter to Adams before the ship docked. But whether Gerry’s letter reached Adams before Adams’s letter went off to McHenry with the morning post is not known.

The French wanted peace, Gerry reported.

Three days later, on Thursday, October 4, Gerry presented himself at Quincy, and he and Adams settled in for a long private talk.

In his few days ashore Gerry had been thoroughly ostracized in Boston. “Not a hat was moved” as he walked up State Street, according to one account from the time. Angry crowds shouted insults outside his Cambridge home. But the welcome from Adams was warm, and the more Gerry talked, the more Adams must have realized that the current had turned his way at last. Talleyrand, Gerry assured him, was ready to treat seriously with the United States.

It was a critical moment in Adams’s presidency. Among other things, Gerry had more than justified Adams’s confidence in him. What he was telling Adams, to be sure, was what Adams desperately wanted to hear. The last thing in the world Adams wished to do was to lead the country into a needless war. But more to the point, he judged quite correctly that Gerry was telling the truth.

John Marshall had said much the same thing, and so had John Quincy in some of his correspondence with his father, but as Adams was to write, the assurances of Gerry — “my own ambassador” — were “more positive, more explicit, and decisive.”

Gerry’s letter of October 1, Adams later said, “confirmed these [earlier] assurances beyond all doubt in my mind, and his conversations with me at my own house in Quincy, if anything further had been wanting, would have corroborated the whole.”

It was the week after Gerry’s return when a letter arrived from Washington. Written on September 25, it did not reach Adams until October 8. Were he to be denied the deciding voice in the selection of his general staff, Washington informed the President, he would resign his commission.

Adams sent off an immediate reply, agreeing to Washington’s wishes. As he had accepted Washington’s cabinet in the interest of unanimity, so he now accepted Washington’s choice of Hamilton. But he also had reason to believe now that Hamilton and the army might not be needed at all.

As a matter of form, he reminded Washington a bit lamely that by the Constitution it was the President who had the authority to determine the rank of officers. Washington promoted Hamilton to be inspector general.

In the contest of who was in charge, Adams, it seemed, had been put in his place, outflanked not so much by Washington as by his own cabinet, and ultimately Hamilton, which left Adams feeling bruised and resentful. But at the same time, it gave Hamilton, and those in Adams’s cabinet whose first loyalty was to Hamilton, an inflated sense of their own importance and authority.

From continued discussion with Gerry at Quincy and from new dispatches from William Vans Murray at The Hague, Adams became convinced that Gerry’s conduct in Paris had not only been proper, but courageous. On October 20, writing to Pickering to ask for suggestions on the content of his forthcoming message to Congress, Adams made it plain that he was thinking of sending a new minister to France “who may be ready to embark . . . as soon as . . . the President shall receive from the Directory satisfactory assurance that he shall be received and entitled to all the prerogatives and privileges of the general laws of nations.” Further, he offered a list of those he had in mind for the assignment that included Patrick Henry and William Vans Murray.

Then, in a letter to his Secretary of War expressing his full support for Washington’s judgment, Adams added two pointed observations. Maintaining armies was costly business and could become quite unpopular in the absence of an enemy to fight, he reminded McHenry. Of what possible use could a large army be, Adams was saying, if a French invasion never took place? In closing, he observed, “At present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in heaven.”

ABIGAIL’S ILLNESS dragged on. She never left her sickbed, her “dying bed,” as she said. Talk of sickness and death — of insomnia, melancholy, her persistent, baffling fevers — dominated the domestic scene, just as sickness and death filled the newspapers, week after week, as yellow fever spread in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and worst of all in Philadelphia.

By September nearly 40,000 people had evacuated Philadelphia. Yet the newspapers continued to report more than a hundred new cases a day. “The best skill of our physicians . . . have proved unequal to the contest of this devouring poison,” reported the Aurora. By the time the plague ran its course in Philadelphia, more than 3,000 lost their lives, including, as the Adamses were stunned to read, the mayor of the city and both Bache of the Aurora, who had died on September 10 at age twenty-nine, and his arch nemesis, Fenno of the Gazette of the United States, who died just days before. The list of victims also included four of the servants at the President’s House, as Abigail was duly informed.

The melancholy that beset her was unrelenting, suggesting the fever she suffered may have been malaria, but she was also distressed over further troubles within the family.

Before leaving on his diplomatic assignment abroad, John Quincy had left his savings, some $2,000, in the trust of his brother Charles. In the time since, however, Charles had managed to lose nearly all of it through bad investments, and then kept silent about what had happened, refusing to answer John Quincy’s queries, in the hope that, with a little more time, he might somehow recover at least part of the money. Only that summer had the truth become known within the family, and it was devastating to both parents, but especially to Abigail, who had so long and so diligently managed the family affairs.

“I have not enjoyed one moment’s comfort for upwards of two years on this account,” Charles wrote to his mother in midsummer. “My sleep has been disturbed, and my waking hours embittered.” “

He is not at peace with himself,” she would write later to John Quincy, during her convalescence, “and his conduct does not meet my wishes.”

He has an amiable wife . . . two lovely children. I hope my letters will in time have their effect. I have discharged my duty I hope faithfully, but my dying bed was embittered . . . with distress for the only child whose conduct ever gave me pain.

Abigail was bedridden at Quincy altogether for eleven weeks. It was early November before she was well enough to come downstairs, and it was early November before Philadelphia was declared once more free of yellow fever.

On November 12, leaving Abigail behind, Adams headed off in the presidential coach behind two spirited horses and accompanied by his young nephew William Shaw — Billy Shaw, as he was known — a recent graduate of Harvard who had been lame since birth and had lately become the President’s secretary.

“I strive to divert the melancholy thoughts of our separation, and pray you do the same,” Adams wrote to Abigail at the end of his first day on the road.

CHAPTER TEN

STATESMAN

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

~John Adams

I

ADAMS WAS ON THE MOVE AGAIN, gobbling up the miles. The weather was clear and cool, the road dry. “Our horses go like birds,” he wrote. Some days they made thirty miles. “We glided along unforeseen, unexpected, and have avoided all noise, show, pomp, and parade,” he reported to Abigail from Connecticut.

He wrote nearly a letter a day. His teeth and gums ached; one side of his face was badly swollen. Yet, he assured her, he was neither “fretful nor peevish.” Indeed, the speed at which he moved, his joy in horses that could fly like birds, suggest he was heading for the capital knowing there was a way out of the impasse he had faced since taking office — that out of the gloomiest of times at home had come a first real sense that he might succeed after all in his main objective.

A recurring rumor did much for his spirits. It was said a British fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson had overwhelmed the French off the coast of Egypt. “Nelson’s victory is mightily believed along the road,” Adams wrote. If true, the chance of a French invasion of America had all but vanished.

There was snow in New York and the horses required a day’s rest. Adams stopped to see his son Charles, but of this he wrote nothing.

Crossing New Jersey, the horses flying again, they made forty-five miles in a day, to arrive on November 24 in Philadelphia, where it was known for certain that Nelson had destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile, four months earlier on August 1.

The city was in a bustle. Throngs of people were returning to resume daily life, opening boarded-up shops, airing out houses, scrubbing everything with a will, now that the epidemic had passed. The weather was brisk. Congress was back, and to the delight of the city, George Washington had returned and could be seen coming and going from temporary headquarters at a boarding house on Eighth Street.

The general had entered Philadelphia on November 10 with full military flare, on horseback and in uniform, and accompanied by cavalry. “Almost the whole of the military corps were drawn up on the commons to receive him,” reported the Aurora, which had suspended publication following the death of Benjamin Bache, but was back in business under Bache’s wife, Margaret. “This morning arrived in town the Chief who unites all hearts,” exclaimed another paper, the American Daily Advertiser.

While the war fever of summer had by no means vanished like the yellow fever, the spirit of opinion heard in the shops and taverns, and within the councils of government, was noticeably more moderate, and in large part because of the British victory at the Nile. Albert Gallatin wrote to his wife that he felt an honorable accommodation with France was now within the power of the administration, perhaps even “certain.”

Soon after his arrival, Adams met with a Philadelphia physician named George Logan, who had recently returned from France. As a Quaker and ardent Republican, Logan was not the sort of man Adams was known to favor. To Federalist war hawks he was contemptible, since he had presumed to conduct his own peace mission to France. Roundly castigated as a dangerous, possibly disloyal meddler, Logan found it impossible to get a fair hearing within the administration. When he called on the Secretary of State, to say he had been told by high officials in the French government that France was ready to make peace, Pickering gave him short shrift and showed him to the door. To see George Washington, Logan had accompanied a Philadelphia clergyman when he called at the house on Eighth Street. But Washington had refused to speak to Logan, directing what few comments he had to the clergyman only.

Adams, however, received Logan courteously, and tea was served. He had conversed directly with Talleyrand and a principal member of the Directory, Logan said, and they had expressed the wish to settle all disputes with America.

Adams showed displeasure only once, when Logan insisted that the Directory was ready to receive a new American minister. According to Logan, Adams leaped from his chair, saying that only if a Republican were sent would the French receive him. “But I’ll do no such thing,” Adams said. “I’ll send whom I please.”

“And whomever you do please to send will be received,” Logan assured him.

Whether he knew it at the time, Logan had made a strong impression. “I had no reason to believe him a corrupt character, or deficient in memory or veracity,” Adams later wrote.

Secretaries Pickering and McHenry remained certain that war was inevitable. Nonetheless, they joined the consensus among the President’s advisers that, given the mood of the country and the Congress, a declaration of war at this point would be “inexpedient.” But it was also the unanimous conclusion of the cabinet that another mission to France would be an act of humiliation and was therefore unacceptable. If there were to be peace overtures, they must come from France. Let a French mission cross the ocean this time.

On December 7, 1798, Adams walked to Congress Hall, and in the presence of Generals Washington and Hamilton, Secretary of State Pickering, and both houses of Congress, he affirmed again America’s need for defensive strength and America’s desire for peace. The speech had been written by Pickering and Wolcott, and except for the addition of one phrase, Adams had made few changes. It must, he said, be “left with France . . . to take the requisite step” of assuring that any American mission sent to Paris would be properly received. So while preparation for war would continue, Adams had signaled that the door to peace remained ajar. It was only a question of French intent and sincerity.

The speech infuriated the Republicans and the Vice President, and no less was the anger of the High Federalists in Congress, who had expected a declaration of war. If Adams lacked the fortitude to take the step, then Congress would, they declared. But their efforts failed. Congress was not inclined to declare war.

The martial ambitions of the inspector general were undampened, however. With his new command, Hamilton dreamed now of grand conquest with himself riding at the head of a new American army.

The idea was to “liberate” Spanish Florida and Louisiana, possibly all of Spanish America, in a bold campaign combining a British fleet and American troops. First proposed by an impassioned apostle of Spanish-American freedom, Francesco de Miranda of Venezuela, the scheme had been around for years. Adams had learned of it and dismissed it out of hand. “We are friends with Spain,” he had told Pickering. But the British had shown interest, and in secret Hamilton had lately become involved, seeing possibilities for national empire and personal glory beyond the vision of lesser men. In a letter to one of his generals in Georgia, Hamilton stressed the need for a buildup of military supplies. “This you perceive, looks to offensive operations,” he wrote. “If we are to engage in war, our game will be to attack where we can. France is not to be considered as separate from her ally [Spain]. Tempting objects will be within our grasp.”

Adams knew in general, if not in detail, what Hamilton, Pickering, and others were up to and would later speak of it as a colossal absurdity. “The man is stark mad or I am,” he would remember thinking of Hamilton. But at the time, he kept his own counsel, waiting to make his move. He wanted all “to be still and calm,” and told his department heads no more than they needed to know. For he understood now that their first loyalty was not to him.

For someone supposedly suspicious by nature, Adams had been inordinately slow to suspect the worst of his closest advisers, and to face the obvious truth that keeping Washington’s cabinet had been a mistake. Still, somehow, he must avoid a war and keep Hamilton from gaining the upper hand with his “mad” schemes. As Abigail had warned the summer before, “That man would . . . become a second Bonaparte.”

AT THE NAVY DEPARTMENT and the President’s House that December, with a foot of snow in the streets outside and sleigh bells sounding, Adams, Gerry, McHenry, Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, and others gathered about large maps of the West Indies. Four squadrons, twenty-one ships in total, virtually the whole of the American naval force, were now assigned to the Caribbean. The largest squadron, which included the heavy frigates United States and Constitution, was under Commodore John Barry, who was admonished in his orders that “a spirit of enterprise and adventure cannot be too much encouraged in the officers under your command. . . . We have nothing to dread but unactivity.”

The fleet was to cruise the Lesser Antilles, from St. Christopher (St. Kitts) to Tobago. San Domingo (Haiti) was to have increasing importance. Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the slave rebellion on San Domingo, had written to Adams to suggest they become allies. Desperate for food for his starving troops, Toussaint wanted the American embargo lifted from the former French colony. In effect, he wanted recognition of the black republic, and Adams was interested. Thus, in December, a representative from Toussaint, Joseph Bunel, dined with Adams, marking the first time a man of African descent was the dinner guest of an American President.

American ships would be welcome and protected in all San Domingo ports, Adams was told. John Quincy had earlier written his father to say he hoped something could be done for Toussaint, that he wished to see San Domingo “free and independent.” And with Secretary Pickering strongly of the same mind, Adams responded promptly. Commodore Barry was instructed to show himself “with the greatest part of the fleet at Cape François, to Genl. Toussaint, who has a great desire to see some ships of war belonging to America.” And the issue of de facto recognition, “Toussaint’s clause,” would go before Congress.

General Washington was rarely seen. He was working seven days a week with Hamilton drawing up plans for the army, reviewing applications, and choosing qualified officers for twelve new regiments that were all still largely on paper. Satisfied with what had been accomplished, Washington departed the city for the last time on December 14.

MUCH HAD BEEN SAID of Washington’s cheerful demeanor. Even the Aurora commented on his “good health and spirits,” while Adams, by contrast, looked drawn and weary and was seldom cheerful. The old streak of irritability, his single flaw, according to Abigail, had been made worse by the presidency, as he himself acknowledged. He was weary from work, “weary of conjectures,” as he said. “If you come on, you must expect to find me cross,” he had written to her in fair warning. It was not just that the work was unending, but that it was so tiresome. “A peck of troubles in a large bundle of papers often in a handwriting almost illegible comes every day . . . thousands of sea letters . . . commissions and patents to sign. No company. No society. Idle, unmeaning ceremony.”

Adams’s earlier proposal of Colonel Smith for the general staff had been turned down by the Senate (as had his proposed commission for Aaron Burr). Smith was unacceptable, Adams was told, because he was a bankrupt. This Adams had not denied, but praised his son-in-law as a brave and able soldier who had more than proven himself in the Revolution. Against his better judgment, Adams agreed to try again, this time nominating Smith for a colonel’s commission, which in spite of “warm opposition,” the Senate approved.

In a letter to Smith, telling him the news, Adams made clear what an embarrassment the whole business had been for him, and warned Smith bluntly that, if unchecked, his pride and extravagances would bring ruin.

His own children would be his undoing, Adams complained to Abigail. “My daughter and son [Charles] bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, if I don’t arouse my philosophy. The daughter, too, without a fault. Unfortunate daughter! Unhappy child!”

Snow fell again for several days. Christmas morning dawned clear and bright, and Adams succeeded in rousing his philosophy to a considerable degree. There was no mistaking his age or the burdens of the presidency, he wrote to Abigail. “I am old, old, very old and never shall be very well — certainly while in this office, for the drudgery of it is too much for my years and strength.” But he took joy in the day. “It is Christmas and a fine day,” he wrote. He had a cold, but was over it now. “I sleep well, appetite is good, work hard, conscience is neat and easy. Content to live and willing to die. . . . Hoping to do a little good.”

THE VICE PRESIDENT, having departed Monticello on December 18 and traveled “dreadful” winter roads north by public coach, arrived at Philadelphia that same Christmas morning in time for breakfast at the Francis Hotel. Jefferson had been absent for six months, during which he had raised no voice as head of the Republican party, but had kept extremely busy, writing letters and secretly drafting a set of resolutions to be introduced in the legislature of Kentucky. Written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions declared that each state had a “natural right” to nullify federal actions it deemed unconstitutional. The states were thus to be the arbiters of federal authority. At the same time, James Madison undertook a version of his own resolutions for Virginia.

The Kentucky Resolutions, which had passed in November, were an open challenge to the authority of the central government and a measure both of Jefferson’s revulsion over the Alien and Sedition Acts and the seriousness with which he regarded states’ rights. Possibly he failed to see the dire threat to the union embodied in what he had written, but a letter he wrote to Madison strongly suggests otherwise. He was confident, Jefferson said, that the American people with their “good sense” would “rally with us round the true principles of the federal compact,” but, he wrote in chilling conclusion, he was “determined, were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from the union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government.”

Tormented by the thought of his old enemy Hamilton riding high as inspector general and federal power in the grip of a “military enclave,” Jefferson saw the country on the verge of civil war. He feared a federal army under Hamilton might march on the South at any time. His advice to Madison and other close associates was to stay calm and quiet. “Firmness on our part, but passive firmness, is the true course,” Jefferson cautioned after returning to Philadelphia.

He was distressed also about the bill before Congress to lift the embargo on San Domingo and commence trade with the “rebellious Negroes under Toussaint.” When “Toussaint’s clause” was passed, Jefferson noted bleakly, “We may expect therefore black crews and . . . missionaries” pouring “into the Southern states. . . . If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever, we have to fear it.”

It had been more than a year since the President and Vice President had spoken to each other. Except for passing pleasantries at a few ceremonial occasions, conversation and correspondence between them had ceased. Had they been able to compare notes, they would have discovered how much more they shared in common than met the eye or than either had any idea.

Both complained privately of poor health. They were each extremely lonely and longed for home. Much of what Jefferson wrote to his daughters from Philadelphia in the opening weeks of the New Year, 1799, might have been taken from Adams’s letters to Abigail. Jefferson battled a head cold and suffered from inflammation of the eyes. “The circle of our nearest connections is the only one in which a faithful and lasting affection can be found,” he wrote to Polly. And in a letter to Martha he could hardly have sounded more like Adams in his own days as Vice President: “Environed here in scenes of constant torment, malice, and obliquy, worn down in a station where no effort to render service can avail anything, I feel not that existence is a blessing, but when something recalls my mind to my family or farm.”

Had Jefferson known Adams’s mind at this juncture, he would have been quite surprised. Most striking was their common dislike and fear of Hamilton. The worries Jefferson had about Hamilton’s threat to the nation were more than matched by Adams’s, as Adams revealed in private conversation with Elbridge Gerry at the President’s House. “[Adams] thought Hamilton and a party were endeavoring to get an army on foot to give Hamilton the command of it, and thus to proclaim a regal government and place Hamilton as the head of it, and prepare the way for a province of Great Britain,” wrote Gerry. Plainly, Adams feared a military coup by the second “Bonaparte,” which goes far to explain what was soon to take place.

Closing his Christmas letter to Abigail, Adams said, “I write to you nothing about public affairs because it would be useless to copy the newspapers which you read. And I can say nothing more.”

How much was implied by this, she could only try to imagine.

Three weeks later, in mid-January, to Adams’s utmost joy, his son Thomas, now twenty-seven, arrived in Philadelphia after four years abroad. “Thomas is my delight,” he wrote. It was also of no small consequence that Thomas carried word from John Quincy assuring his father that the French were ready to negotiate.

II

ON MONDAY, February 18, 1799, Adams made his move. Having consulted no one, and without advice from Abigail, he took the most decisive action of his presidency. Indeed, of all the brave acts of his career — his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, his crossing the Atlantic on the Boston in the winter of 1778, the high risks of his mission to Holland — one brief message sent to the United States Senate was perhaps the bravest.

It was carried by a courier to the second-floor Senate Chamber, where an astonished Vice President interrupted the business on the floor to read it aloud:

Always disposed and ready to embrace every plausible appearance of probability of preserving or restoring tranquility, I nominate William Vans Murray, our minister resident at The Hague, to be minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the French Republic.

If the Senate shall advise and consent to his appointment, effectual care shall be taken in his instructions that he shall not go to France without direct and unequivocal assurances from the French government, signified by their Minister of Foreign Relations, that he shall be received in character, shall enjoy the privileges attached to his character by the law of nations, and that a minister of equal rank, title, and powers shall be appointed to treat with him, to discuss and conclude all controversies between the two Republics by a new treaty.

The “war-monger” who the summer before had refused to declare war had declared, if not peace, then, at least, that the door to peace was now wide open.

Republicans were astounded. Federalists were momentarily speechless, then filled with “surprise, indignation, grief, and disgust.” Particularly galling to them was the fact that it was Jefferson who read the message.

The Secretary of State was enraged. The “honor of the country is prostrated in the dust — God grant that its safety may not be in jeopardy,” Timothy Pickering wrote to George Washington. In a letter to William Vans Murray, Pickering would declare “every real patriot . . . was thunderstruck.” Adams, he said, was “suffering the torments of the damned.” “I beg you to be assured that it is wholly his own act,” Pickering reported to Hamilton.

Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, who had greatly admired Adams, worked for his election, and thought he had thus far played “a noble part” as President, felt personally betrayed. Barely able to contain his fury, he wrote of the “vain, jealous, and half frantic mind” of John Adams, a man ruled “by caprice alone.” “Had the foulest heart and the basest head in the world been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted.”

Another riled Federalist, Robert G. Harper of South Carolina, Hamilton’s chief spokesman in the House, privately expressed the hope that on Adams’s way home to Quincy, his horses might run away with him and break his neck.

Hamilton himself allowed that if anything coming from John Adams could astonish, certainly this had.

To Thomas Jefferson it was the “event of events,” but strangely — regrettably — he was unable to accept what Adams had done at face value, or to give him any credit. Rather, Jefferson took pleasure in the “mortification” of the Federalists, which proved, he said, that war was always their intent. To Madison he wrote that Adams had only made the nomination “hoping that his friends in the Senate would take on their own shoulders the odium of rejecting it.”

In the Aurora, Margaret Bache and her new editor, William Duane, would concede only that Adams deserved “fair applause” for prudence.

But for all the indignant fuming of the High Federalists, no motions were made in the Senate for a resolution opposing a new mission to France. When a Senate committee led by Sedgwick came to see Adams a few days later, it was to object only to the choice of Murray, who was thought too young, not “strong enough,” for an assignment of such importance. They wished to have the nomination retracted, which Adams refused to do. Murray was a man of experience and ability through whom communications with Talleyrand were already established, Adams answered. Further, Murray had the advantage of being on the scene.

Accounts differ whether the meeting was amicable or acrimonious, but a compromise resulted in any event. Instead of Murray alone serving as minister plenipotentiary, Adams nominated Patrick Henry and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth to join Murray as envoys to France, making a commission of three. The Senate immediately confirmed the appointments and a day later, March 4, Congress adjourned. Afterward, when Patrick Henry declined for reasons of health, Adams chose another southerner, the Federalist governor of North Carolina, William Davie.

In Massachusetts, infuriated Federalists were saying that had the President’s “old woman” been with him in Philadelphia none of this would have happened — she being the more stouthearted of the two. “This was pretty saucy,” Abigail wrote to John of the gossip, “but the old woman can tell them they are mistaken.” She considered his decision a “master stroke.”

By the second week of March, as Adams was preparing to leave for Quincy, word reached Philadelphia that the American frigate Constellation, under Captain Thomas Truxtun, had captured the French frigate L’Insurgent, after a battle near the island of Nevis in the Leewards, the first major engagement of the undeclared war at sea. Where would it all end, people were asking in Philadelphia. But Adams was anything but alarmed or displeased. Of Captain Truxtun he wrote, “I wish all other officers had as much zeal.”

While his entire political standing, his reputation as President, were riding on his willingness to make peace, Adams was no less ardent for defense. In fact, he was convinced that peace was attainable only as a consequence of America’s growing naval strength. To Secretary Stoddert he even proposed that some of the fast new ships might be used to cruise the coast of France.

Nor do I think we ought to wait a moment to know whether the French mean to give us any proofs of their desire to conciliate with us. I am for pursuing all the measure of defense which the laws authorize us to adopt, especially at sea.

• • •

CONVINCED he could run the government as well from Quincy as at Philadelphia, Adams stretched his stay at home from late March to September, fully seven months. From the views expressed by his vociferous critics, it was hard to say which annoyed them more, his presence at the capital or his absence. At worst, his absence seemed an arrogant abdication of responsibility. At best, it seemed a kind of eccentric scholarly detachment.

Some moderate Federalists and old friends warned Adams he could be doing himself and the country great harm by remaining too long in seclusion. “The public sentiment is very much against your being so much away from the seat of government. They did not elect your officers, nor do they . . . think them equal to govern without your presence and control,” wrote a correspondent who feared a plot against Adams could be hatching in his absence. “I speak the truth when I say that your real friends wish you to be with your officers, because the public impression is that the government will be better conducted.”

There had been criticism of his long absence the year before, irrespective of Abigail’s illness, but the criticism now was greater, and with reason. Adams’s presence at the center of things was what the country rightfully expected, and could indeed have made a difference.

But stay he did at Peacefield, and to his mind with more than sufficient justification. Washington, too, had spent long sessions at Mount Vernon (though never for seven months), and with Philadelphia hit by yellow fever every summer and fall, the government barely functioned there for several months. He could accomplish his work quite as readily at home as at the capital, so long as Congress was not in session. Were he ever unable to appear when Congress was sitting, Adams said, he would resign.

He worked dutifully. He read everything that was sent to him, read several newspapers assiduously, wrote some seventy letters to his department heads during the time he was absent, twenty-eight of which were to his Secretary of State. If there were delays in the system, they were nearly always at Philadelphia, not at his end.

Beyond all that, Adams recognized there was only so much he could do, that he could effect the roll of events only to a point. Writing to Washington earlier, he had expressed much of his philosophy as President in two sentences: “My administration will not certainly be easy to myself. It will be happy, however, if it is honorable. The prosperity of it to the country will depend upon Heaven, and very little on anything in my power.”

Frequently he would interject a similar refrain in thoughtful letters to his department heads when passing down decisions or judgments on matters of government business. For Adams the ultimate command rested always beyond the reach of mortal men, just as the very natures and actions of men themselves were often determined by their Maker. In an official letter to Secretary of the Navy Stoddert written the summer of 1799, Adams began, “It always gives me pain when I find myself obliged to differ in opinion from any of the heads of departments; but, as our understandings are not always in our own power, every man must judge for himself.” When Secretary of War McHenry stressed the importance to the nation of a substantial army and of “genius in the command of it,” Adams responded that “Genius in a general is oftener an instrument of divine vengeance than a guardian angel.”

In health and outlook he always benefited from time on his farm, and Abigail’s health, too, was soon greatly improved. Given his nature and so much that burdened his mind, he undoubtedly had moments of despair and anger. Once when General Knox and Adams’s old friend from the years in Holland, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, came to call, Adams sat the whole time reading a newspaper. Still, he attended the Harvard commencement, a Fourth of July celebration in Boston, and the launching of the frigate Boston.

On July 23, Adams watched from an upstairs window as the Constitution headed out to sea from Boston under full sail. “After a detention of nine days by contrary winds,” he wrote, “the Constitution took advantage of a brisk breeze, and went out of the harbor and out of sight this afternoon, making a beautiful and noble figure.”

According to Abigail, in a midsummer report to John Quincy, the President was in “very good humor.”

LATE IN THE DAY, August 5, Adams received a dispatch from Pickering containing a letter from Talleyrand dated May 12, assuring that the American envoys would be received with all appropriate respect.

It was the word Adams had been waiting for. At his desk at Peacefield the next morning, he wrote a letter to Pickering leaving no doubt of his intentions, his sense of urgency, or who was the senior diplomat between them, and that he expected immediate action taken. It was in all a strong summary of what had been his policy from the start. It also included a flash of Adams’s temper — in what he said in response to Pickering’s umbrage over the impatience Talleyrand had expressed about the time the Americans were taking to get things moving.

“It is far below the dignity of the President of the United States to take any notice of Talleyrand’s impertinent regrets, and insinuations of superfluities,” Adams lectured. “You or Mr. Murray may answer them as you please.”

That said, Adams got to the essential point, lest Pickering have any misconceptions:

I will say to you, however, that I consider this letter as the most authentic intelligence yet received in America of the successes of the coalition. That the design is insidious and hostile at heart, I will not say. Time will tell the truth. Meantime, I dread no longer their diplomatic skill. I have seen it, and felt it, and been the victim of it these twenty-one years. But the charm is dissolved. Their magic is at an end in America. Still, they shall find, as long as I am in office, candor, integrity, and, as far as there can be any confidence and safety, a pacific and friendly disposition. If the spirit of exterminating vengeance ever arises, it shall be conjured up by them, not me. In this spirit I shall pursue the negotiation, and I expect the cooperation of the heads of departments.

American defenses by sea and land were not to be relaxed. As to the mission, he wished “to delay nothing.”

My opinions and determinations in these subjects are so well made up, at least to my satisfaction, that not many hours will be necessary for me to give you my ultimate sentiments concerning the matter or form of the instructions to be given to the envoys.

But just as it seemed Adams had set his course, news came from Paris of a breakup of the Directory — “chaos,” according to reports. To his cabinet it brought a surge of hope that peace could be postponed, a view strongly reinforced by Inspector General Hamilton.

Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, Adams’s consistently loyal supporter, urged him to come at once to Trenton, New Jersey, where the government had set up emergency quarters until the yellow fever epidemic passed in Philadelphia. Although not inclined to go just yet, Adams told Stoddert that should “considerable difference” arise between the heads of departments, he would come at all events.

On September 13, Stoddert wrote again, filled with apprehension “that artful designing men might make such use of your absence” as to disrupt the peace initiative and “make your next election less honorable than it would otherwise be.” This and a letter from Pickering proposing suspension of the peace mission were all Adams needed to hear. Abigail would follow once she had things in order at home.

He would be in Trenton by October 15 at the latest, Adams wrote Stoddert. “I have only one favor to beg, and that is that a certain election may be wholly laid out of this question and all others.”

Adams left Peacefield on the last day of September, ready for what he had to face. But stopping at East Chester to see Nabby, he was struck a blow for which he was wholly unprepared. While the details are sparse, it could only have been one of the most dreadful moments of his life. To make matters worse, he had begun to feel ill en route and so arrived at East Chester already in a low state.

From his distraught daughter-in-law, Charles’s wife, Sally, who with her two small daughters was staying with Nabby, Adams learned for the first time that Charles, who had disappeared, was bankrupt, faithless, and an alcoholic.

“I pitied her, I grieved, I mourned,” Adams wrote to Abigail in anguish, “but could do no more.” David’s son Absalom at least had enterprise, he said. “Mine is a mere rake, buck, blood, and beast.” If he felt pity for Charles, he did not express it.

“I love him too much,” Adams had once written of his small second son when they were in Paris. “Charles wins the heart as usual, and is the most gentleman of them all,” he had said upon seeing him again, after the return from England. Now Charles had become “a madman possessed of the devil.” And, declared Adams, “I renounce him.”

As time passed, the Adamses would say comparatively little about Charles. It was as though the downfall of Abigail’s brother William were repeating itself, and the family returned to the old ways of keeping “calamity” private. Only now and then would Abigail make mention of it, usually in letters to Mary Cranch, and almost never referring to Charles by name. “Any calamity inflicted by the hand of Providence, it would become me in silence to submit to,” she wrote some weeks later, “but when I behold misery and distress, disgrace and poverty brought upon a family by intemperance, my heart bleeds at every pore.” A “graceless child,” he was, but she did not renounce him.

To push on to Trenton, “loaded with sorrow,” was almost more than Adams was up to. He felt wretchedly ill with a cold so severe that he thought he might have yellow fever, which he did not.

Trenton, a village no larger than Quincy under normal conditions, was overflowing with refugees from Philadelphia, in addition to several hundred government officials and military officers. The best that could be arranged for the President were a small bedroom and sitting room in a boardinghouse kept by two maiden sisters named Barnes, one of whom provided the ailing Adams with a down comforter, while the other dosed him with a purgative of rhubarb and calomel.

Adams arrived expecting to meet directly with his cabinet to straighten out the impasse on the mission to France, and as miserable as he felt, he was ready to summon them without delay. What he had not expected was the presence in Trenton of General Hamilton, who had come to make a personal appeal to Adams to suspend the mission.

Hamilton had ridden over from Newark, where his troops were encamped and where by protocol he ought to have remained until called for, should the President wish to see him. That he had chosen to come to Trenton uninvited was taken by some as the kind of bold move Hamilton was known and admired for, but it also strongly suggested an element of desperation.

Hamilton called on Adams at the Barnes boardinghouse, where presumably they drew up chairs in Adams’s tiny sitting room — two proud, pertinacious men who by now hated each other, one ambitious for war, the other peace, and each determined to have his way.

According to Adams, who provided several accounts of the confrontation, then and later, he received the general with appropriate civility, saying nothing of politics. But at first chance Hamilton commenced to “remonstrate” against the mission to France. “His eloquence and vehemence wrought the little man up to a degree of heat and effervescence. . . . He repeated over and over again . . . [his] unbounded confidence in the British empire . . . with such agitation and violent action that I really pitied him, instead of being displeased.” The British had the upper hand in the war, Hamilton insisted, and would soon help restore the Bourbons to power in France. America must join with the British and have no dealings whatever with the present French government.

Adams was astonished by Hamilton’s “total ignorance” of the situation in Europe. He would as soon expect the sun, moon, and stars to fall from their orbits as to see the Bourbons restored, he told Hamilton. But even were that to happen, what injury could it mean for the United States to have envoys there?

The meeting lasted several hours, through which, by his account, Adams sat patiently listening as Hamilton with his famous powers of persuasion talked steadily on. “I heard him with perfect good humor, though never in my life did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”

On October 15, Adams summoned the cabinet to a session that lasted until eleven o’clock that night. Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry, like Hamilton, adamantly opposed the mission. Secretary of the Navy Stoddert supported it, as did Attorney General Lee, the only member of the cabinet not present at Trenton, but who had expressed his views in a letter.

Adams’s decision was given the next morning, Wednesday, October 16, 1799. “The President has resolved to send the commissioners to France,” wrote a thoroughly dispirited Hamilton to George Washington. “All my calculations lead me to regret the measure.” The commission sailed for France on November 15.

If Hamilton and his admirers in the cabinet had outmaneuvered Adams in the contest over command of the army, Adams had now cut the ground out from under Hamilton. Whatever dreams Hamilton entertained of military glory and empire, America was to have no need of either a standing army or a Bonaparte, which, it is fair to say, was as clear an objective in Adams’s mind as was peace with France.

III

“I ENCLOSE THE SPEECH,” Abigail wrote to Mary Cranch. “It has been received here with more applause and approbation than any speech which the President has ever delivered.”

She was reinstated in the President’s House and in the President’s life, resuming her role where she had left off, despite all she had been through, and all, Mary knew, she suffered because of Charles. There would be grumbling over the speech, Abigail wrote. There would always be grumbling, she had come to understand.

Addressing a joint session of the new Congress, at the usual noon hour, December 3, 1799, Adams had delivered the most moderate, peaceable speech since his inaugural message, stressing a “pacific and humane” American stance before the world. Gone were calls for a new navy or a new army. Though the “measures adopted to secure our country against foreign attacks,” must not be renounced, the national defense must be “commensurate with our resources and the situation of our country.” War drums were out of season. Adams evoked instead “prospects of abundance,” “the return of health, industry, and trade, to those cities which have lately been afflicted with disease.”

Let the grumblers wake up to the “brightest, best and most peaceful days they now see,” declared Abigail. Her old delight in being at the center of things had returned in full flower. In unseasonably mild weather, she was out and about taking walks, making calls, receiving visitors, and enjoying the current spectacle of Philadelphia society. For in its last winter as the nation’s capital, the city “intended to shine.” “I have heard of ‘Once a man and twice a child’ and the ladies’ caps are an exact copy of baby’s caps,” Abigail began her report to Mary on “gay attire,” showing no less delight in details — sleeves, buttons, petticoats, hairstyles — than once she had when writing from Paris.

Then, in an instant, the entire mood of the city changed. On December 14, 1799, as if to give period to the passing of the century and the Federal era, George Washington died at Mount Vernon. The cause of death was a heavy cold — a streptococcus infection. He had been sixty-seven, and until a few days before, in good health. The news reached Philadelphia the night of the seventeenth. In the morning the muffled bells of Christ Church commenced to toll and Congress adjourned.

The Adamses were stunned. The nation, said the President in a formal message to the Senate, had lost “her most esteemed, beloved, and admired citizen. . . . I feel myself alone, bereaved of my last brother.” No man was more deservedly beloved and respected, wrote Abigail. A “universal melancholy has pervaded all classes of people.”

The door of the presidential mansion, Congress Hall, Washington’s pew at Christ Church, were draped in black. In Boston Harbor every ship displayed “the melancholy signal of mortality.” “Our pulpit is hung with black,” Mary Cranch reported from Quincy.

The day after Christmas, the official day of mourning in the capital, troops of light infantry and cavalry passed through the city to the slow military beat of muffled drums, in a grand solemn procession that began at Congress Hall and included a host of federal and state leaders, city magistrates, Masons, and a riderless white horse with reversed boots in the stirrups. Washington had been interred in the family vault at Mount Vernon, but this was the nation’s funeral for its first President and greatest hero. The line of march was south on Fifth Street, east on Walnut, then north on Fourth, crossing Chestnut, Market, and Arch Streets to the German Lutheran Church at Fourth and Cherry, which had the largest seating capacity of any church in the city.

“The President of the United States and his Lady . . . and a vast concourse of other citizens,” were present for services led by Bishop William White of Christ Church, with an oration by Representative Henry Lee of Virginia — General “Light-Horse Harry” Lee — who extolled Washington as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

When the service ended after four and a half hours, several hundred people crowded into the President’s House. “The gentlemen all in black,” Abigail noted, while the ladies had not let their grief “deprive them in their taste for ornamenting.” They wore black military sashes, “epaulets of black silk . . . black plumes . . . black gloves and fans.”

But as the encomiums to Washington continued, in speeches, sermons, and editorials — tributes that seemed often as contrived for show as the black plumes and fans — Abigail grew extremely impatient. When a minister at Newburyport, in a rapturous eulogy spoke of Washington as the “savior” of the country, she turned indignant. At no time, she wrote, had the fate of the country rested on the breath of one man, not even Washington. “Wise and judicious observations about his character are those only which will outlive the badges of mourning,” she told Mary. “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.”

For the time being, the President said no more than he already had. But the Vice President was not known to have said anything about Washington. In some quarters it was being observed that because of his shame over the “Mazzei Letter,” Jefferson had deliberately delayed his departure from Monticello to avoid the ceremonies in Washington’s memory. Jefferson, who could have been in Philadelphia in time, did not arrive until two days later, on December 28, after an absence of ten months.

“I CONGRATULATE YOU on the New Year and the New Century,” Adams wrote to his old friend Cotton Tufts on January 1, 1800, adding a line from Virgil, “Aspice venturo laetentur ut omnia! [Look how they are full of joy at the age to come!].”

If Adams had any thoughts or feelings about the passing of the epochal eighteenth century — any observations on the Age of Enlightenment, the century of Johnson, Voltaire, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the age of Pitt and Washington, the advent of the United States of America — or if he had any premonitions or words to the wise about the future of his country or of humankind, he committed none to paper. His thoughts, to judge by what he said to Cotton Tufts, were on home and some marshland he wished to buy, overpriced though it might be.

Across the water, events had moved on dramatically. In February came the news from France of a coup on November 9 — 18 Brumaire, by the French revolutionary calendar. General Bonaparte had taken power as First Consul, which made him, at age thirty-three, sovereign ruler of France and much of Europe. The French Revolution was over, as declared Bonaparte himself.

Jefferson, who had pinned his highest hopes on the revolution, commented only that the situation was “painfully interesting.” Clearly, American enchantment with France and the revolution were also at an end. Washington’s death had seemed to mark the close of one era; the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte ushered in another. Adams, who like Edmund Burke had predicted dictatorship as the inevitable outcome for the revolution, wisely kept silent.

“ELECTIONEERING” had already begun. A “stormy session” was forecast, and from the tone of their letters home — to Mary Cranch, Cotton Tufts, and others — both the Adamses seem to have concluded that there was to be no second term for them. That Jefferson would be the Republican choice to oppose him in the election was a foregone conclusion.

Congress was doing little. From the Vice President’s chair upstairs at Congress Hall, Jefferson lamented the overbearing “dreariness” of the scene. As much as possible, he was associating with the “class of science,” as he said, his friends and fellow members of the Philosophical Society, of which he had become president. He took time to have his portrait painted by young Rembrandt Peale, the gifted son of Charles Willson Peale, and of all the portraits done of him, it was perhaps the strongest — Jefferson in his prime at age fifty-seven, grey-haired, handsome, and confident.

Acutely conscious of the mistakes Adams had made as Vice President, Jefferson, when presiding in the Senate, never talked out of turn, or tried to impose his own opinion from the chair, conduct all in keeping with his nature. Moreover, he saw no necessity to be constantly present, as Adams had. There were better ways to spend his time, Jefferson felt. Seeing the need for a manual of parliamentary rules for the Senate, he wrote one, distinguished by its clarity, emphasis on decorum, and the degree to which he had drawn on the British model. Had it been Adams paying such tribute to English foundations and traditions, the uproar would have been immediate; he would have been denounced still again as “tainted” by his years in London and love for all things British. But among Jefferson’s many contributions to the new republic, his Senate Manual would stand as one of the most useful and enduring.

In writing one rule, No. 17.9, under “Order in Debate,” it was almost as though he had his predecessor as Vice President specifically in mind.

No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously.

If Adams found any relief or pleasure in his duties, it was approving, on April 24, legislation that appropriated $5,900 to “purchase such books as may be necessary” for a new Library of Congress. It was one of the few measures upon which he and the Vice President could have heartily agreed.

IV

THAT THE CONTEST for the presidency in 1800 was to be unlike any of the three preceding presidential elections was clear at once. For the first (and last) time in history, the President was running against the Vice President. The two political parties had also come into their own with a vitality and vengeance exceeding anything in the country’s experience.

Further, under the Sedition Act anyone openly criticizing the President ran the risk of being fined or sent to prison. Since the first sensational case against Congressman Matthew (“Spitting”) Lyon of Vermont, eleven others had been charged and convicted under the law. In one instance, a New Jersey tavern loafer who had done no more than cast aspersions on the President’s posterior was arrested, prosecuted, and fined $150.

That spring of 1800, the notorious James Callender reemerged, determined to defeat “the wretch” Adams, elect his patron Jefferson, and make himself a martyr. Matthew Lyon, after being sentenced to four months in a foul Vermont jail, had become a national hero and was overwhelmingly reelected to Congress.

Callender, who had quit Philadelphia, was now working as a Republican propagandist in Richmond, Virginia, with the encouragement and financial support of Jefferson, who, at the same time, was actively distributing a variety of campaign propaganda throughout the country, always careful to conceal his involvement. “Do not let my name be connected with the business,” he advised James Monroe. That Adams was never known to be involved in such activity struck some as a sign of how naïve and behind the times he was.

In the Richmond Examiner, where he praised Jefferson as “an ornament to human nature,” Callender assaulted Adams in a series of essays that would soon appear as a book titled The Prospect Before Us. It was the first salvo of the election and a clear sign of the sort of contest it would become.

Not satisfied that the old charges of monarchist and warmonger were sufficient, Callender called Adams a “repulsive pedant,” a “gross hypocrite,” and “in his private life, one of the most egregious fools upon the continent.” Adams was “that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness,” a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

“The reign of Mr. Adams,” said Callender, “has hitherto been one continued tempest of malignant passions.” Once, according to Callender, Adams had become so enraged, he tore his wig off, threw it to the floor, and stomped on it. By what “species of madness” had America submitted to accept such a man as president?

The historian will search for those occult causes that induced her to exalt an individual who has neither that innocence of sensibility which incites it to love, nor that omnipotence of intellect which commands us to admire. He will ask why the United States degrades themselves to the choice of a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature, of a wretch that has neither the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courtier, nor the courage of a man?

Adams’s sole objective was to make war on France, Callender asserted. The choice was clear — Adams and war, or Jefferson and peace.

To all this Jefferson gave his approval. Having seen the proof sheets of the new volume, he assured Callender, “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effects.”

To no one’s surprise Callender was promptly arrested for inciting the American people against their President. In May he went on trial in a federal court in Richmond where the jury returned a verdict of guilty and he was sentenced to nine months in jail. But as he and Jefferson expected, it was another victory for the Republicans, just as Matthew Lyon’s conviction had been.

Adams’s far greater concern, meanwhile, was his cabinet. Particularly in his dealings with Pickering and McHenry, tension had been building for months, Adams feeling ever more isolated and certain that their first loyalty was to Hamilton, not him. Reports of ill will within the executive departments appeared in the papers. Adams and Pickering were said to “hate each other with the utmost cordiality.”

The long-overdue showdown came after the Republicans defeated the Federalists in the election of the New York legislature, a crucial election in that it would determine New York’s electoral vote for President. It was as if all Adams’s troubles, all the pent-up anger and frustration he had had in his dealings with the cabinet, let go in a furious outburst at James McHenry, an incompetent but affable man whom Adams rather liked.

On the evening of May 5, Adams summoned McHenry to the presidential mansion to discuss the appointment of a minor federal official. The discussion was quickly concluded and McHenry was about to leave when something he said, or the way he said it, started Adams on the subject of Hamilton and the loss of the New York election. Adams charged McHenry with working secretly with Hamilton to undercut the administration. When McHenry protested, Adams cut him off, saying, “I know it, sir, to be so.” Hamilton, said Adams, seething with anger, was an “intrigant . . . a man devoid of every moral principle, a bastard . . . a foreigner.” Then Adams let fly with what to any faithful Hamiltonian was the ultimate insult. Jefferson, Adams declared, was a better man, “a wiser one,” than Hamilton, and, furthermore, Jefferson would make a better president.

How could McHenry and Pickering presume to know what to do in matters of foreign affairs, Adams went on. How dare they try to suspend the mission to France! And why had he been given no warning that Hamilton would turn up at Trenton? Adams charged McHenry with inept management, of failing to clothe the troops adequately. “You cannot, sir, remain longer in office,” Adams declared at last.

But then, when McHenry agreed to resign, Adams, his fury spent, said almost in apology he had always considered McHenry a man of understanding and integrity.

McHenry immediately wrote his own account of the scene, copies of which he sent to both Adams and Hamilton. Writing to explain his dismissal to a nephew, McHenry portrayed Adams as “actually insane.”

While Adams’s outbursts of temper could be explosive, they never happened in public, always in private confrontations. It was then that “he would give to his language the full impress of his vehement will.” But never until now was he known to have berated a subordinate, and his regret over the outburst was considerable.

Still, nothing he had said was untrue, nor was his anger without justification. In firing McHenry he had done what he should have done well before this. After a pause of a few days — possibly to cool down — he fired Pickering.

This time there was no unpleasant confrontation. On May 10, in customary fashion, Adams asked for Pickering’s resignation by letter. Almost inconceivably, Pickering refused to comply. In a written response of May 12, he said he did not feel it his duty to resign, and implied that he needed the government salary to subsist. Adams discharged him at once and the same day named as his new Secretary of War, Senator Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts, and as Secretary of State, John Marshall, who was now a member of the House of Representatives.

Why Adams failed to discharge Oliver Wolcott while cleaning house was never adequately explained. Though Wolcott had been quite as duplicitous and disloyal to Adams as either McHenry or Pickering, he somehow succeeded in winning Adams’s trust and would continue as Secretary of the Treasury.

Hearing of the dismissals, Alexander Hamilton quickly asked Pickering to search the files at the Department of State for “copies of extracts of all such documents as will enable you to explain both Jefferson and Adams.” The time had come, Hamilton said, when “men of real integrity” must unite against all charlatans.

THE REMOVAL of the government from Philadelphia to the new Federal City by the Potomac was scheduled to take place in June. The President was to go there himself for a first look as soon as he could get away. But two critical issues required decisions in the weeks that remained — what to do about the temporary army and what to do about three Pennsylvania German farmers who had been sentenced to hang for treason.

The fate of the now useless and unpopular army was settled with remarkably little fuss, showing how greatly times had changed. Adams declared that were it left to him the army “should not exist a fortnight.” Both Federalists and Republicans in Congress, seeing no reason why Adams should get the credit, voted to disband the army by summer. Had Hamilton been given free reign with the army, Adams would remark, it would have required a second army to disband the first one.

The fate of the condemned men, however, was left to Adams alone.

In southeastern Pennsylvania the previous year there had been an armed uprising by German (Pennsylvania Dutch) farmers angry over the federal tax on land and the high-handed ways of the federal tax collectors. The “rebellion” had died down by the time state and federal troops arrived, but its leader, John Fries, and two others were taken captive and tried in federal court. Found guilty of treason and sentenced to hang, they had appealed to the President for a pardon.

Adams had been initially incensed at the news of the rebellion — it was he who had ordered the federal troops to the scene — but had since insisted on making his own study of the case. “The issue of this investigation,” he wrote, “has opened a train of very serious contemplations to me, which will require the closest attention of my best understanding, and will prove a severe trial to my heart.” Again he asked for the opinions of his cabinet officers, all of whom recommended that, to set an example, the sentence should be carried out.

Capital punishment was part of life. Nor was Adams opposed to it. As President, he had signed death warrants for military deserters. Secretary of State Pickering, in giving his opinion, was, like the others, only expressing what he viewed as a duty of office. “Painful as is the idea of taking the life of a man,” Pickering wrote, “I feel a calm and solid satisfaction that an opportunity is now presented in executing the justice of the law, to crush that spirit, which, if not overthrown and destroyed, may proceed in its career and overturn the government.”

It was what Adams himself might have written earlier. But with his review completed, Adams saw that he had been mistaken. Fries, it was his judgment, had led a riot, not an insurrection, and was therefore not guilty of treason. Rejecting the verdict of the jury and the unanimous opinion of his cabinet, Adams pardoned Fries and the two others, never doubting he had done the right thing. And though the decision aggravated still further the already infuriated Hamiltonians, who saw it as still one more example of Adams’s weakness and capriciousness, much of the electorate approved, and especially in Pennsylvania.

IF THE PRESIDENT and his wife had misgivings about vacating Philadelphia and the great brick mansion on Market Street, if they were at all saddened by the prospect, such feelings went unrecorded. In her last letters to Mary Cranch before leaving, Abigail wrote mainly of the lovely spring weather — “as luxuriant a season as I ever knew” — and the arrangements to be made for a final dinner party.

She started for Quincy on May 19. The President departed for Washington on May 27, heading southwest in his coach-and-four accompanied by Billy Shaw, and escorted by the ever-faithful John Briesler on horseback. For miles through Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, where well-tended farms were burgeoning with crops in the “luxuriant” season, Adams delighted in the scenery. At Lancaster and later at Frederick, Maryland, he spoke before public gatherings, and was warmly received, as he was at other towns along the way, enjoying what, in that day and age, passed for campaigning. Such were the tributes and entertainments in his honor en route, it was not until June 3 that he reached the boundary line of the ten-mile square of the District of Columbia.

GIVEN WHAT there was to see, Adams might have been terribly disappointed by the Federal City. He could rightfully have fumed over the heat, the mosquitoes, the squalid shacks of the work crews; or the projected cost of the project; or the questionable real estate ventures that had failed year after year, despite so many grand promises. Another nephew, William Cranch, had become involved in one such scheme and gone bankrupt. Being that it was his first foray into the South, Adams might have been disturbed by the sight of slaves at work.

For all the talk, there was no city as yet, only a rather shabby village and great stretches of tree stumps, stubble, and swamp. There were no schools, not a single church. Capitol Hill comprised a few stores, a few nondescript hotels and boardinghouses clustered near a half-finished sandstone Capitol. To accommodate the different departments of the government, only one structure had been completed, the Treasury, a plain two-story brick building a mile to the west of the Capitol, next door to the new President’s House, which was still a long way from being ready.

Oliver Wolcott, in a letter to his wife, described the Capitol and the President’s House as “magnificent,” yet was astounded at how much had still to be done.

I cannot but consider our Presidents as very unfortunate men if they must live in this dwelling. It must be cold and damp in winter. . . . It was built to be looked at by visitors and strangers, and will render its occupants an object of ridicule with some and pity with others.

Dr. William Thornton, a commissioner of the District and architect of the Capitol, spoke confidently of a population in Washington of 160,000 people within a few years. To Wolcott, as to many, it seemed no one in Washington knew what he was talking about. In fact, it would be nearly eighty years before the city had such a population.

Adams, with his memories of Paris and London, with his fondness for Philadelphia and his belief that the capital of a great nation ought to be a great city, could have been appalled by the whole place and seen it as a colossal blunder. He could have dismissed it as Jefferson’s city, Jefferson having devoted more time and thought to the project than anyone in government. Everything considered, there was almost no reason for Adams to have liked anything about it.

Yet by all signs he was quite pleased. “I like the seat of government very well,” he wrote Abigail. He stayed ten days, lodging at Tunnicliffe’s City Hotel, near the Capitol. He was joined by his new appointments, Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of War Dexter, who with the rest of the executive branch had made the move from Philadelphia, along with the complete files of the President and the departments shipped in eight packing cases.

Adams made a brief inspection of the new President’s House. Once, when asked by Washington how he thought a President ought to live — in what manner and style — Adams had said it should be in a fairly grand way. And though he had said nothing specific about the sort of house a President should have, this under construction seems to have met his approval. He imagined himself asleep there, or lying awake, he told Abigail, but referred only to the coming winter, not the next four years.

He enjoyed most of all his visits to Mount Vernon to call on Martha Washington, and to Alexandria, where he was acclaimed by the townspeople and given a dinner in his honor at the home of Attorney General Lee, the net effect of which was to make him extremely homesick.

“Oh! That I could have a home!” He felt he had been forever on the move, on the road. “Rolling, rolling, rolling, till I am very nearly rolling into the bosom of Mother Earth.”

By first light, June 14, he was rolling north to Quincy, leaving John Marshall to manage in his absence.

V

IN THE SUMMER and fall of 1800 the question of who was to lead the nation rapidly became a contest of personal vilification surpassing any presidential election in American history. The spirit of party had taken hold with a vengeance, and whether Adams or Jefferson was the most abused would be hard to say. In Federalist pamphlets and newspapers, Jefferson was decried as a hopeless visionary, a weakling, an intriguer intoxicated with French philosophy, more a Frenchman than an American, and therefore a bad man. He was accused of favoring states’ rights over the Union, charged with infidelity to the Constitution, called a spendthrift and libertine.

One New York paper assured its readers that a Jefferson victory would mean civil war. Hordes of Frenchmen and Irishmen, “the refuse of Europe,” would flood the country and threaten the life of “all who love order, peace, virtue, and religion.” It was said Jefferson had swindled clients as a young lawyer. The old smear of cowardice during his time as governor of Virginia was revived. But most amplified were charges of atheism. Not only was Jefferson a godless man, but one who mocked the Christian faith. In New England word went out that family Bibles would have to be hidden away for safekeeping, were he elected. So widespread and pervasive was such propaganda that even Martha Washington, who may have been smarting still from the “Mazzei Letter,” remarked to a visiting clergyman that she thought Jefferson “one of the most detestable of mankind.”

Stories were spread of personal immorality. It was now that a whispering campaign began to the effect that all southern slave masters were known to cohabit with slave women and that the Sage of Monticello was no exception.

Adams was inevitably excoriated as a monarchist, more British than American, and therefore a bad man. He was ridiculed as old, addled, and toothless. Timothy Pickering spread the rumor that to secure his reelection Adams had struck a corrupt bargain with the Republicans. According to another story, this secret arrangement was with Jefferson himself — Adams was to throw the election Jefferson’s way and serve as Jefferson’s vice president.

If Jefferson carried on with slave women, Adams, according to one story in circulation, had ordered Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to London to procure four pretty mistresses to divide between them. When the story reached Adams, he was highly amused. “I do declare upon my honor,” he wrote William Tudor, “if this is true General Pinckney has kept them all for himself and cheated me out of my two.”

Most vicious were the charges that Adams was insane. Thus, if Jefferson was a Jacobin, a shameless southern libertine, and a “howling” atheist, Adams was a Tory, a vain Yankee scold, and, if truth be known, “quite mad.”

But the great difference in the attacks on Adams in this election was that they came from Republicans and High Federalists alike. While the Republicans assaulted him as a warmonger, he was berated by the High Federalists as fainthearted in the face of the French. While one side belittled him as a creature of the Hamiltonians, the other scorned him as a friend of Elbridge Gerry.

Jefferson in his four years as Vice President had so effectively separated himself from Adams and the administration that he could be held accountable for nothing that had disappointed, displeased, or infuriated anyone, whereas Adams was held forever accountable for the new taxes, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the standing army, and a host of other “menaces,” as said Philadelphia’s Aurora.

There were, as well, striking ironies. Jefferson, the Virginia aristocrat and slave master who lived in a style fit for a prince, as removed from his fellow citizens and their lives as it was possible to be, was hailed as the apostle of liberty, the “Man of the People.” Adams, the farmer’s son who despised slavery and practiced the kind of personal economy and plain living commonly upheld as the American way, was scorned as an aristocrat who, if he could, would enslave the common people. “My countrymen!” exclaimed William Duane in the Aurora in his crusade for Jefferson, “If you have not virtue enough to stem the current, determine to be slaves at once.”

For Adams, abuse from the Jefferson Republicans was an old story. It was to be expected. Far more hurtful were the personal attacks from the Hamilton Federalists.

When Oliver Wolcott wrote from his office in Washington to tell Fisher Ames of Massachusetts that he would work to defeat Adams and that between Adams and Jefferson there was scarcely a difference, that one would be as disastrous as the other, he was only expressing what many Hamilton Federalists had concluded, taking their cue from their leader. For again as in 1788 and 1796, Hamilton was throwing his weight into the contest to tip the balance against Adams, except this time there was no pretense of secrecy.

As early as May, Hamilton had launched a letter campaign to his High Federalist coterie declaring Adams unfit and incapable as President, a man whose defects of character were guaranteed to bring certain ruin to the party. “If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one whom we can oppose . . . who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”

On a tour of New England, ostensibly to bid farewell to his army before it disbanded, Hamilton spent as much time as possible among local Federalist leaders to whom he spread the same charge against Adams. Hamilton’s scheme was to make Charles Cotesworth Pinckney President.

Reports of Hamilton’s activities inevitably reached Quincy. “It was soon understood that . . . his visit was merely an electioneering business, to feel the pulse of the New England states, and impress those upon whom he could have any influence to vote for Pinckney,” Abigail wrote. But by such intrigues, she was sure, “the little cock sparrow general” would lose more votes for Pinckney than he would gain.

When such an old friend as Francis Dana turned his back on Adams, it was extremely painful for him. Yet he himself and his efforts for peace were widely approved in New England, as Hamilton discovered to his dismay. While “strong-minded men” stood ready to support Pinckney, Hamilton wrote in his analysis of the political climate, there was still “in the body of that people . . . a strong attachment” to Adams.

As Abigail observed in mid-August, not a public event or levee took place “without being attended by many persons who never before came and never were they so full, and so crowded as they have been this season.” Meanwhile, local Republicans were noticeably uncritical.

As handsome a tribute as any to Adams appeared in the Washington Federalist. In answer to “late attempts to undervalue” the President, readers were reminded that Adams stood “among the few surviving, steady, tried patriots” whose services to the country were of a kind almost beyond compare:

Bred in the old school of politics, his principles are founded on the experience of ages, and bid defiance to French flippancies and modern crudities. . . . Always great, and though sometimes alone, all weak and personal motives were forgotten in public energy and the security of the sacred liberties of his country. . . . Deeply versed in legal lore, profoundly skilled in political science; joined to the advantage of forty years’ unceasing engagement in the turbulent and triumphant scenes, both at home and in Europe, which have marked our history; learned in the language and arts of diplomacy; more conversant with the views, jealousies, resources, and intrigues of Great Britain, France and Holland than any other American; alike aloof to flattery and vulgar ambition, as above all undue control [he has as] . . . his sole object . . . the present freedom and independence of his country and its future glory. On this solid basis he has attempted to raise a monument of his honest fame.

With reports from the peace commission maddeningly thin and long delayed, the issue of peace and war remained foremost, almost to the end. What the Aurora would proclaim at the close of the campaign was no different from what James Callender had written in early spring. “With Jefferson we shall have peace . . . the friends of war will vote for Adams.”

The two candidates conveyed the customary air of indifference, neither saying anything publicly or appearing to lift a finger in his own behalf. Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at his farm, which he had lately taken to calling Stoneyfield, instead of Peacefield, perhaps feeling the new name was more in keeping with New England candor, or that it better defined the look of the political landscape at the moment.

He devoted himself almost entirely to official duties, maintaining steady correspondence with Secretary Marshall in particular. Nothing mattered more — over nothing did Adams fret more — than the state of negotiations in France. And still there was no word.

The great imponderable was Napoleon Bonaparte. “I cannot account for the long delay of our envoys,” wrote Marshall, who had begun to have doubts and reminded the President that there must be no sacrifice of American honor to please the First Consul. “We ought not be surprised if we see our envoys without a treaty,” he warned, and this could produce “a critical state of things.”

But Adams needed no reminding. In reply, he advised prudent preparations for war, in the event of another rebuff. “I am much of your opinion that we ought not to be surprised,” he told Marshall on September 4.

. . . the government ought to be prepared to take a decided part. Questions of consequence will arise, and among others, whether the President ought not at the opening session to recommend an immediate and general declaration of war against the French Republic. . . . We have had wonderful proofs that the public mind cannot be held in a state of suspense. The public opinion, it seems, must always be a decided one, whether in the right or not. . . . I wish the heads of departments to turn their thoughts to the subject, and view it in all its lights.

For his part, Jefferson appeared to be devoting his time at Monticello to rural interests only.

BOTH ABIGAIL and John enjoyed comparatively good health, and Adams’s love of home, his everyday delight in his farm, were as constant as ever — no less than what Washington had felt for Mount Vernon or Jefferson for Monticello.

But as Abigail confided in family correspondence, her own and the President’s private days and frequent sleepless nights were deeply troubled by the sad fate of their alcoholic son. On her way home from Philadelphia in early November, Abigail had stopped again at East Chester, where this time she saw Charles himself. “The whole man [is] so changed that ruin and destruction have swallowed him up,” Abigail confided to John Quincy. “Poor, poor unhappy, wretched man,” she wrote, her heart breaking. Charles’s wife had gone with her younger child to stay with her mother, while Abigail had brought the other child, four-year-old Susanna, home to Quincy. So with Nabby and her daughter Caroline again spending the summer, it was a full house.

Nothing she had been able to say to Charles had had any effect, Abigail wrote. She had tried “remonstrances.” She had reminded him of all that was dear in life — honor, reputation, family, friends. “But all is lost on him.”

She and the President would provide for his family. “Yet I am wounded to the soul by the consideration of what is to become of him. What will be his fate embitters every moment of my life.” At age thirty, Charles seemed beyond saving.

ON MONDAY, October 13, Adams set off by coach from Quincy on the journey back to Washington. His own heartbreak over Charles was no less than what Abigail suffered, as his later writings disclose, but he had not softened in his decision to renounce his son. Passing through East Chester, Adams did not stop to see him, as Abigail would, he knew, when she followed later, resolved to be with John in Washington whatever lay in store.

The greetings he received along the way were of a kind to help his sagging spirits. Clearly he stood well with the large majority of the Federalist party and a great many more besides who saw him as a staunch, old patriot carrying on in the tradition of Washington. John Adams, it was said, was “a good husband, a good father, a good citizen, and a good man.” He was a peacemaker, whatever the Hamiltonians might say, and the American people did not hold that against him.

Republicans, too, were expressing new regard, even affection for Adams. “The Jacobins profess to admire and respect the independence of Mr. Adams’s character,” Thomas reported from Philadelphia to his mother, “and several of them have told me that next to their idol Jefferson they would definitely prefer him to any man in the country.” But this did not mean they would vote for him, and Thomas was pessimistic. “I am glad you are to be with my father this winter,” he told her. “The prospect is dreary enough, not for him, but for the country.”

Then, without warning, while Adams was on the road to Washington, a “thunderbolt” struck.

Since summer Alexander Hamilton had been working on a “letter” intended initially for a select few Federalists in several states. Timothy Pickering, James McHenry, and Oliver Wolcott had all been recruited to help. Pickering and McHenry had supplied what confidential information they could from past experience in Adams’s cabinet, while Wolcott, still a member of the cabinet, continued to have access to confidential files. But when asked for their views on Hamilton’s initial draft of the letter, most of them were astonished, and urged Hamilton not to put his name on it. Wolcott suggested that it not be released at all, because, he wrote, “the poor old man” was quite capable of doing himself in without help from anyone else. But Hamilton paid no attention.

Not long past, Abigail had warned Adams to “beware of that spare Cassius.” Now, in the eleventh hour of the election, Hamilton lashed out in a desperate effort to destroy Adams, the leading candidate of his own party.

A Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States, a fifty-four-page pamphlet, was published in New York at the end of October. Nothing that Hamilton ever wrote about Jefferson was half so contemptuous. He berated Adams in nearly every way possible — for his “great intrinsic defects of character,” his “disgusting egotism,” weaknesses, vacillation, his “eccentric tendencies,” his “bitter animosity” toward his own cabinet. He deplored Adams’s handling of relations with France, the “precipitate nomination” of William Vans Murray, the firing of Timothy Pickering, the pardoning of John Fries. Though Hamilton did not go so far as to call Adams insane, he cited his “ungovernable temper” as evidence of a man out of control. “It is a fact that he is often liable to paroxisms of anger which deprive him of self-command and produce very outrageous behavior.”

Yet Hamilton made no charges of corruption or misconduct on Adams’s part. He even acknowledged Adams’s patriotism and integrity, and conceded, without getting specific, that Adams had “talents of a certain kind.” And finally, most strangely, having spent fifty pages tearing Adams to pieces, Hamilton concluded by saying Adams must be supported equally with General Pinckney in the election.

Republicans were euphoric. Whatever crazed notions had taken hold of Hamilton, he had surely dealt Adams a blow and “rent the Federal party in twain.” In a high-spirited letter to Jefferson, James Madison said Hamilton’s “thunderbolt” meant certain victory for Jefferson. “I rejoice with you that Republicanism is likely to be so completely triumphant.”

Federalists everywhere were aghast, disbelieving, or seething with anger. In Connecticut, Noah Webster produced a pamphlet accusing Hamilton of extreme disloyalty and ambition to become the American Caesar. By contrast to Hamilton, Webster wrote, Adams was “a man of pure morals, of firm attachment to republican government, of sound and inflexible patriotism.” Were Jefferson to be elected, Webster wrote to Hamilton, “the fault will lie at your door and . . . your conduct on this occasion will be discerned little short of insanity.”

In fact, Hamilton had amply demonstrated that it was he who had become a burden to the party, he, if anyone, who seemed to have departed from his senses.

Speculation as to why he had done it, what possible purpose he might have had, would go on for years. Possibly, as John Quincy surmised, it was because Adams had denied him his chance for military glory, humiliated him at Trenton, and made his army superfluous. Perhaps he believed he was improving Pinckney’s chances. Or he wanted to bring down the Federalist party, so that in the aftermath of a Jefferson victory he could raise it up again as his own creation.

Probably not even Hamilton knew the answer. But by his own hand he had ruined whatever chance he ever had for the power and glory he so desperately desired.

FOR SEVERAL DAYS toward the end of October, plasterers and painters at work on the President’s House in Washington, as well as the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, had been keeping an eye out for the President, not knowing just when he might appear. With the imponderables of travel, no one’s arrival could be predetermined or planned for precisely, not even a President’s.

The immense house was still unfinished. It reeked of wet plaster and wet paint. Fires had to be kept blazing in every fireplace on the main floor to speed up the drying process. Only a twisting back stair had been built between floors. Closet doors were missing. There were no bells to ring for service. And though the furniture had arrived from Philadelphia, it looked lost in such enormous rooms. Just one painting had been hung, a full-length portrait of Washington in his black velvet suit, by Gilbert Stuart, which had also been sent from Philadelphia.

The house stood in a weedy, wagon-rutted field with piles of stone and rubble about. It all looked very raw and unkempt. Yet the great whitewashed stone building, the largest house in America — as large as the half of the Capitol that had been erected — was truly a grand edifice, noble even in its present state.

At midday, Saturday, November 1, Commissioners William Thornton and Alexander White were inspecting the main floor, when, at one o’clock, the President was seen rolling up to the south entrance in his coach-and-four. He was accompanied still by Billy Shaw and Briesler following on horseback. There was no one else, no honor guard, no band playing, no entourage of any kind.

The two commissioners and a few workers at hand comprised the welcoming committee for the arrival of John Adams, the first President to occupy what only much later would become known as the White House.

An office was made ready in an ample room with a southern exposure on the second floor, next door to what was to be Adams’s bedroom. Secretaries Marshall and Stoddert, the two in the cabinet Adams counted on, came to pay their respects. Later, supper finished, he climbed the back stairs candle in hand and retired for the night.

At his desk the next morning, on a plain sheet of paper, which he headed, “President’s House, Washington City, Nov. 2, 1800,” he wrote to Abigail a letter in which he offered a simple benediction:

I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.

But for Adams the house was to be the setting of great disappointment and much sorrow. By the time he wrote to Abigail again, he had seen the Hamilton pamphlet and concluded as Madison had that it meant his certain defeat. “The ancients thought a great book a great evil,” he told her. “Mr. H. will find a little book an evil great enough for him . . . for [it] will insure the choice of the man he dreads or pretends to dread more than me.”

To judge by what he said privately in a letter to a friend, he took the blow with notable equanimity. Like others, he thought Hamilton had succeeded mainly in damaging himself. He was not Hamilton’s enemy, Adams wrote, and Hamilton was not without talent. “There is more burnish, however, on the outside than sterling silver in substance.” But this was as much as he would say, at least while President.

AT THE END of the first week in November, Adams’s long wait for news from France ended. The mission had succeeded. A treaty with France, the Convention of Mortefontaine, had been signed on October 3, 1800, at a château north of Paris. At a grand fete celebrating the event, Bonaparte declared that the differences between France and the United States had been no more than a family quarrel. Gifts were presented to the American envoys, toasts raised to perpetual peace between the two nations.

The first report appeared in a Baltimore paper on November 7. Another month would pass before the official copy of the Convention arrived in Washington, at which point it would be submitted to the Senate for approval.

The news had come too late to affect the election, but peace had truly been achieved. Though Adams could say nothing of it yet, the Quasi-War was over, and for Adams it was an immense victory.

ABIGAIL REACHED Washington on November 16, at the end of an extremely arduous journey. Stopping to see Charles at East Chester, she was stunned to find him desperately ill in the care of Nabby. Abigail had had no forewarning; no one had been told, because his condition had come on so rapidly. Sitting by his bedside, she sensed she was seeing him for the last time. When she left, she again took Susanna with her for the rest of the journey.

In Maryland, as she later described it to Mary Cranch, there was only forest, the roads so rough and uncertain that she and her party were lost for two hours. “But woods are all you see from Baltimore until you reach the city, which is only so in name.” She thought the President’s House beautifully situated by the Potomac, the country around “romantic but wild.” Nearby Georgetown, however, was “the very dirtiest hole I ever saw.”

The house, she told Mary in a letter of November 21, was twice as large as the meetinghouse at home. “It is habitable by fires in every part, thirteen of which we are obliged to keep daily, or sleep in wet and damp places.” The great, unplastered “audience room” at the east end of the main floor, she made her “drying room” to hang out the laundry.

There were many who would have refused to live in the house in the state it was in, but the Adamses made do without complaint. The “great castle,” Abigail knew, had been built for ages to come. She judged it would require thirty servants to run it properly. As it was, she had six, including John and Mary Briesler.

She had not liked what little she had seen of the South thus far. The presence of slaves working about the house left her feeling depressed. The whole system struck her as woefully slow and wasteful, not to say morally wrong. She watched twelve slaves clothed in rags at work outside her window, hauling away dirt and rubble with horses and wagons, while their owners stood by doing nothing. “Two of our hardy New England men would do as much work in a day as the whole 12,” she told Cotton Tufts. “But it is true Republicanism that drive the slaves half fed, and destitute of clothing . . . whilst an owner walks about idle, though one slave is all the property he can boast.”

With the weather turning colder, she found it maddening that with woods everywhere it was impossible to find a woodcutter to keep the fires going. She despaired that anything could ever be accomplished in such a society. “The lower class of whites,” she wrote, “are a grade below the Negroes in point of intelligence, and ten below them in point of civility.” But she wrote, “I shall bear and forebear.”

• • •

ON SATURDAY, November 22, Congress convened for the first time in joint session in the unfinished Capitol, and John Adams delivered what he knew to be his last speech as President.

“I congratulate the people of the United States on the assembling of Congress at the permanent seat of their government,” he began, “and I congratulate you, gentlemen, on the prospect of a residence not to be changed.” As he had privately for the President’s House, he now publicly offered a benediction for the Capitol, the Federal District, and the City of Washington:

It would be unbecoming the representatives of this nation to assemble for the first time in this solemn temple without looking up to the Supreme Ruler of the universe, and imploring his blessing.

May this territory be the residence of virtue and happiness! In this city may that piety and virtue, that wisdom and magnanimity, that constancy and self-government, which adorned the great character whose name it bears, be forever held in veneration! Here, and throughout our country, may simple manners, pure morals, and true religion flourish forever!

The speech that followed was a brief, gracious summation of the state of the union, notable for its clarity and absence of exaggeration. He praised the officers and men of the discharged temporary army, both for their patriotism and their readiness to return to the “station of private citizens.” He praised the navy and recommended further measures for a defensive naval force.

While our best endeavors for the preservation of harmony with all nations will continue to be used, the experience of the world and our own experience admonish us of the insecurity of trusting too confidently to their success. We cannot, without committing a dangerous imprudence, abandon those measures of self-protection which are adapted to our situation, and to which, notwithstanding our pacific policy, the violence of injustice of others may again compel us to resort.

Because he had still to receive official word of the negotiations with France, he said only that it was hoped that American efforts for an accommodation would “meet with a success proportioned to the sincerity with which they have so often been repeated” — which was as close as he came to speaking of his own persistent efforts.

He spoke of the need for amending the judiciary system, and congratulated the Congress for the revenue that year, the largest of any year thus far.

“We find reason to rejoice at the prospect which presents itself,” he said at the last. The country was “prosperous, free, and happy, . . . thanks to the protection of laws emanating only from the general will,” and “the fruits of our own labor.”

Shortly after, in reply to the then customary answer to his speech from the Senate, Adams said of the new Capitol, “Here may the youth of this extensive country forever look up without disappointment, not only to the monuments and memorials of the dead, but to the examples of the living.”

LESS THAN two weeks later, on or about December 3, the same day the electors convened, a postrider arrived at the President’s House with a letter from East Chester. Charles was dead. He had died on November 30 — of dropsy, it was said, but most likely of cirrhosis as well.

His constitution was so shaken [Abigail wrote to her sister Mary], that his disease was rapid, and through the last part of his life, dreadfully painful and distressing. He bore with patience and submission his sufferings and heard the prayers for him with composure. His mind at times was much deranged. . . . He was no man’s enemy but his own. He was beloved in spite of his errors.

To Charles’s widow, Abigail wrote, “[I] would to God I could administer to you that comfort which [I] stand in need of myself.” In his early life, she recalled, no child was ever so tender and amiable. “The President sends his love to you and mourns, as he has for a long time, with you.”

In another few days the outcome of the election was known. Adams had lost. “My little bark has been overset in a squall of thunder and lightning and hail attended by a strong smell of sulfur,” he wrote to Thomas. However crushed, disappointed, saddened, however difficult it was for him to bear up, he expressed no bitterness or envy, and no anger. Nor was anyone to feel sorry for him. “Be not concerned about me,” he told Thomas. “I feel my shoulders relieved from the burden.”

As always, both Adamses were entirely candid with their children. To Thomas, Abigail wrote, “For myself and family I have few regrets . . . I shall be happier at Quincy.” Only her private grief and public ingratitude could at times bear her down. “I lose my sleep often, and I find my spirits flag,” she wrote to Cotton Tufts. “My mind and heart have been severely tried.”

The election had been closer than expected. Adams carried all of New England, but lost in New York, the South, and the West. The Republican victory in New York had been all-important and was due largely to extraordinary efforts by Aaron Burr in New York City. But it was not until Federalist strength in South Carolina proved insufficient to carry the state, and its 8 electoral votes, that the outcome was settled.

In the final electoral count of all sixteen states, Jefferson had 73 votes to Adams’s 65; Pinckney had 63. But Burr had also wound up with 73 votes, and so was tied with Jefferson. The outcome, according to the Constitution, would have to be decided in the House of Representatives.

What was surprising — and would largely be forgotten as time went on — was how well Adams had done. Despite the malicious attacks on him, the furor over the Alien and Sedition Acts, unpopular taxes, betrayals by his own cabinet, the disarray of the Federalists, and the final treachery of Hamilton, he had, in fact, come very close to winning in the electoral count. With a difference of only 250 votes in New York City, Adams would have won with an electoral count of 71 to 61. So another of the ironies of 1800 was that Jefferson, the apostle of agrarian America who loathed cities, owed his ultimate political triumph to New York.

Had the news of the peace agreement at Mortefontaine arrived a few weeks sooner, it, too, could very well have been decisive for Adams. Also, were it not for the fact that in the South three-fifths of the slaves were counted in apportioning the electoral votes, Adams would have been reelected.

To Adams the outcome was proof of how potent party spirit and party organization had become, and the most prominent was Burr’s campaign in New York. Washington, in his Farewell Address, had warned against disunion, permanent alliances with other nations, and “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Adams could rightly claim to have held to the ideals of union and neutrality, but his unrelenting independence — his desire to be a President above party — had cost him dearly.

“How mighty is the spirit of party,” he wrote to Elbridge Gerry. There was nothing unexpected about Jefferson’s success, Adams thought, but Burr’s good fortunes surpassed “all ordinary rules.” All too plainly, times had changed:

All the old patriots, all the splendid talents, the long experience, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists must be subjected to the humiliation of seeing this dextrous gentleman [Burr] rise like a balloon, filled with uninflammable air over the heads. . . . What an encouragement to party intrigue and corruption!

In the last analysis, however, it was not Jefferson or the “dextrous” Burr who defeated Adams so much as the Federalist war faction and the rampaging Hamilton. And none of this would have happened but for Adams’s decision to send the second peace mission to France. It was his determination to find peace and check Hamilton that cost him the full support of the party and thus the election.

VI

TENSION AND UNCERTAINTY over the Jefferson-Burr deadlock increased by the day. Burr refused to step aside in deference to Jefferson and was said to be secretly bargaining with the Federalists in return for support when the issue went to the House. Hamilton, in an effort to play kingmaker at the last, was again in the thick of things. Given his intense dislike and distrust of both men, the choice was painful, but after consideration he had decided on Jefferson.

Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly government [Hamilton wrote in explanation]. Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself; thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement. . . . In the choice of evils, let them [the Federalists in Congress] take the least. Jefferson is in my view less dangerous than Burr.

Adams, who could have applied influence behind the scenes, refused to say or do anything. Firm in his belief in the separation of powers, he saw it as a question for the legislature in which he, as President, had no business and he would stay far from it.

It was said Adams so bitterly resented that Jefferson had bested him in the election that he refused to come to his aid, and that if the truth were known he preferred Burr. But Adams expressed no enmity toward Jefferson; and in private correspondence, he and Abigail both said they preferred — and expected — Jefferson to be the one chosen. It was not that they had recovered their former affection for Jefferson, but they knew his ability, “all the splendid talents, the long experience,” in Adams’s words. Like Hamilton, they saw Jefferson as the less “dangerous” man. To Abigail, Burr was a figure “risen upon stilts,” with no thought to the good of the country.

If there was a gleam of justice to the crisis, it was the dreadful pass Hamilton had come to. “Mr. Hamilton has carried his eggs to a fine market,” Adams told William Tudor, using the old farmer’s expression. “The very man — the very two men of all [in] the world that he was most jealous of are now placed above him.”

On January 1, 1801, the Adamses held the first New Year’s Day reception at the President’s House. Several days later, they invited Jefferson to dine, one of several events that belie claims made then and later that Adams and Jefferson refused to speak. “Mr. Jefferson dines with us and in a card reply to the President’s invitation, he begs him to be assured of his homage and his high consideration,” Abigail wrote Thomas in a letter dated January 3, 1801. Adams having made the overture, Jefferson had responded graciously. Whatever private feelings either harbored, civility prevailed.

Other guests were included and Abigail left an undated account of a conversation with Jefferson, who was seated beside her and professed not to know several members of Congress at the table. She said she knew them all. When he asked what she thought “they mean to do” about the election in the House, she said she did not know, that it was a subject she did not “choose to converse upon,” and then demonstrated that she could make him laugh.

I replied . . . I have heard of a clergyman who upon some difficulty amongst his people, took a text from these words: “And they knew not what to do,” from whence he drew this inference, that when a people were in such a situation, they do not know what to do, they should take great care that they do not do they know not what.

At this he laughed out, and here ended the conversation.

A month later, shortly before she planned to leave for Quincy ahead of the President, Jefferson would come to tea. He “made me a visit . . . in order to take leave and wish me a good journey. It was more than I expected,” she wrote. Were it ever in his power to serve her or her family, he said, nothing would give him more pleasure.

Abigail had come to Washington with a “heavy heart,” as she told John Quincy in a long letter, and events since had provided little relief. “My residence in this city has not served to endear the world to me. To private and domestic sorrow is added a prospect of public calamity for our country. . . . What is before us Heaven only knows.”

“The President,” she was pleased to report, “retains his health and his spirits beyond what you could imagine.”

They had no plans for the future, except to return to Quincy and take up the life they had both professed so often to want more than anything else, except that this time it would be to stay. To a suggestion from William Tudor that he and Tudor reunite as law partners, Adams replied in a letter of January 20, “I must be farmer John of Stoneyfield and nothing more (I hope nothing less) for the rest of my life.”

That evening, when fire broke out next door in the Treasury Building, Adams was immediately out the door and across the way to lend a hand. A newspaper described the event the next day: “The fire for some time threatened the most destructive effects — but through the exertions of the citizens, animated by the example of the President of the United States (who on this occasion fell into the ranks and aided in passing the buckets) was at length subdued.”

• • •

WITH LITTLE MORE than a month left to his term in office, Adams made one of the most important decisions of his presidency. Oliver Ellsworth had resigned as Chief Justice. To replace him Adams first turned to his old friend John Jay, but when Jay declined, he chose John Marshall.

According to Marshall’s account, Adams and he were conversing in Adams’s office at the President’s House. “Who shall I nominate now?” Adams asked. When Marshall said he did not know, Adams turned and declared, “I believe I must nominate you.”

But it is probable that Adams knew exactly whom he would choose before Marshall ever entered the room. In many ways the nomination was inevitable. Few men had so impressed Adams as Marshall, with his good sense and ability. Nor had anyone shown greater loyalty. He was Adams’s kind of Federalist and one who at forty-five — “in the full vigor of middle age,” as Adams said — could be expected to serve on the Court for years to come. On January 31, 1801, at the President’s House, Adams signed Marshall’s commission as Chief Justice, which the Senate confirmed without delay. In its far-reaching importance to the country, Adams’s appointment of Marshall was second only to his nomination of George Washington to command the Continental Army twenty-five years before. Possibly the greatest Chief Justice in history, Marshall would serve on the Court for another thirty-four years.

As time ticked away in the “castle house,” as he called it, Adams kept steadily at work, awaiting decisions in Congress on a judiciary bill that mattered greatly to him, the fate of the peace treaty, which mattered above all, and ultimately February 11, when the electoral vote would be officially declared and the House would go into special session to resolve the Jefferson-Burr tie.

On February 3, the Senate at last approved the Convention of Mortefontaine. No one was overly enthusiastic. As was once said of the Jay Treaty, it was thought to be about as good as could be expected under the circumstances. What was not known, or even suspected, was that Bonaparte, at the very time he had been dealing with the American commission, was secretly negotiating a transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France.

Dreading her long trip home, with “so many horrid rivers to cross and such roads to traverse,” Abigail put off her departure until after February 11. “Today,” she recorded on February 7, “the judges and many others with the heads of departments dine with me for the last time.”

At the Capitol, Wednesday, February 11, the Congress met in joint session. The certificates of the electors were duly opened by the Vice President, who declared the result, and the House went immediately into session to start balloting. But days passed with the House deadlocked, unable to reach a decision. As crowds gathered outside the Capitol, the tension grew extreme. “The crisis is momentous,” reported the Washington Federalist. There was talk of desperate schemes to prevent the election, talk of civil war.

Abigail decided she should wait no longer. Early in the morning of Friday, February 13, she bid Adams goodbye and with her granddaughter, Susanna, set off by public stage through the “wilderness” to Baltimore, the first leg of the journey home. Her stay in the President’s House was over, and she was to have little to say about it ever again.

YEARS LATER, recalling the suspense of waiting for the House decision on the election, Jefferson would describe meeting with Adams on or about February 12 or 14.

“When the election between Burr and myself was kept in suspense by the Federalists,” Jefferson would write to Benjamin Rush, “and they were mediating to place the President [pro tempore] of the Senate at the head of government, I called on Mr. Adams with a view to have this desperate measure prevented by his negative.” According to Jefferson, Adams acted extremely displeased.

He grew warm in an instant, and said with a vehemence he had not used towards me before, “Sir, the event of the election is within your own power. You have only to say you will do justice to the public creditors, maintain the navy, and not disturb those holding office, and the government will instantly be put into your hands. We know it is the wish of the people it should be so.”

“Mr. Adams,” said I, “I know not what part of my conduct, in either public or private life, can have authorized a doubt of my fidelity to the public engagements. I say, however, I will not come into the government by capitulation. I will not enter on it, but in perfect freedom to follow the dictates of my own judgment.”

“Then,” said he, “things must take their course.” I turned the conversation to something else, and soon took my leave. It was the first time in our lives we had ever parted with anything like dissatisfaction.

There is nothing to contradict Jefferson’s account, or anything to verify it. Neither Adams nor his secretary Billy Shaw made note of a visit by Jefferson, or said anything of such an exchange in later years. Nor is there evidence that Adams ever discussed such terms with the Federalists in the House or took an interest in Federalist strategy. But it was also understandable that the Federalists wanted some assurance on where Jefferson stood, since he had made no statements on public issues.

The suspense ended on Tuesday, February 17, when, on the thirty-sixth ballot in the House, Jefferson was chosen President. One Federalist representative, James A. Bayard of Delaware, decided at last to switch his vote.

Later, Bayard would say Jefferson had agreed to the three Federalist terms, but this Jefferson vehemently denied. The question of what actually happened would remain unresolved.

“The Revolution of 1776 is now, and for the first time, arrived at its completion,” proclaimed the Aurora.

Till now the Republicans have indeed beaten the slaves of monarchy in the field of battle, and driven the troops of the King of Great Britain from the shores of our country; but the secret enemies of the American Revolution — her internal, insidious, and indefatigable foes, have never till now been completely discomfitted. This is the true period of the triumph of Republican principle.

IN THE LAME-DUCK Federalist Senate, meanwhile, an act expanding the Federal judiciary, something that Adams had proposed more than a year earlier, was passed into law. The number of circuit courts was doubled to six. Twenty-three new judges were added. For Adams, who had so long championed a strong, independent judiciary as proper balance to the other two branches, it was a major improvement and he proceeded at once to fill the new positions.

For weeks Adams had been exercising his presidential prerogative to fill government positions of all kinds, including some for friends and needy relatives. Scruples of the kind he had once preached to Mercy Warren concerning such appointments were considered no more. Colonel Smith was named surveyor of the Port of New York. Joshua Johnson, the father-in-law of John Quincy, who had fled England to avoid his creditors, after his reputed wealth turned out to be a fiction, was made postmaster of the District of Columbia.

But Adams’s court appointments particularly were given careful consideration. There was no frenzied rush to name “midnight judges,” as portrayed by Jefferson and the Republican press. Most of the nominations for judges were made on February 20, the rest completed by February 24, more than a week in advance of the inauguration. That nearly all those selected were Federalists was no more surprising than the indignation of the President-elect. In fact, most all of the nominees were perfectly good choices and the Republicans opposed hardly any of them. Abigail’s nephew, William Cranch, who was nominated and approved for the circuit court of the District of Columbia, went on to have a distinguished fifty-year career, both as a judge and a court reporter.

Without any prompting or pressure, Adams also named Oliver Wolcott for the Second Circuit Court. Incredibly, Adams still trusted and liked Wolcott, never suspecting him of the treachery of others in the cabinet. (Wolcott, for his part, often privately ridiculed the President for being abnormally suspicious.) “I wish you much pleasure and more honor . . . and I doubt not you will contribute your full share to make justice run down our streets as a stream,” Adams wrote. “My family joins in friendly regards to you and yours.” Wolcott, for all he had done secretly to destroy Adams, was happy to accept the appointment.

Abigail was not to expect much in the way of correspondence from him, Adams told her. “My time will be all taken up. I pray you to continue to write me.” He would be entertaining a delegation of Indians that evening, February 16, 1801, his last official dinner — and was glad to say he was sleeping better “for having the shutters open.”

Among Adams’s final acts as President, and undoubtedly with strong encouragement from Abigail, was to recall John Quincy from his diplomatic service abroad.

Among the last letters he wrote as time ran out was a considerate reminder to Jefferson that he need not purchase horses or carriages, since those in the stable at the President’s House were the property of the United States and would therefore remain behind.

ON INAUGURATION DAY, Wednesday, March 4, John Adams made his exit from the President’s House and the capital at four in the morning, traveling by public stage under clear skies lit by a quarter moon. He departed eight hours before Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office at the Capitol, and even more inconspicuously than he had arrived, rolling through empty streets past darkened houses, and again with Billy Shaw and John Briesler as his companions.

To his political rivals and enemies Adams’s predawn departure was another ill-advised act of a petulant old man. But admirers, too, expressed disappointment. A correspondent for the Massachusetts Spy observed in a letter from Washington that numbers of Adams’s friends wished he had not departed so abruptly. “Sensible, moderate men of both parties would have been pleased had he tarried until after the installation of his successor. It certainly would have had good effect.”

By his presence at the ceremony Adams could have set an example of grace in defeat, while at the same time paying homage to a system whereby power, according to a written constitution, is transferred peacefully. After so vicious a contest for the highest office, with party hatreds so near to igniting in violence, a peaceful transfer of power seemed little short of a miracle. If ever a system was proven to work under extremely adverse circumstances, it was at this inauguration of 1801, and it is regrettable that Adams was not present.

It would also have been more politic to have expressed confidence in his successor, but, such expressions were not Adams’s way if he did not mean them.

No President having ever been defeated for reelection until then, there was no tradition of a defeated president appearing at the installation of the winner. It is also quite possible that Adams was not invited to attend, or made to feel he would be welcome. When it was rumored, for example, that Adams might deliver a valedictory to Congress, the Aurora had questioned how possibly the “Duke of Braintree” could ever consider appearing before “a body in which his former friends are his enemies, and his former opponents the only persons who pity him.” Adams, said the Aurora, was a man who had been cast out by God like “polluted water out at the back door.” “May he return in safety to Braintree, that Mrs. Adams may wash his befuddled brains clear.”

Perhaps, given what Adams had been through at the hands of the Republicans and a number of Federalists still in Congress, those who had done all they could to overthrow him, he simply could not face being made a spectacle of their triumph.

Also, Adams’s departure was no sudden, dark-of-the-night impulse. It had been planned more than a week in advance, as is clear from the correspondence of Billy Shaw, and there was no secret about it. To get to Baltimore in a day, one had to take the early stage, and the early stage departed at four in the morning.

Adams himself never explained why he did not stay for Jefferson’s inauguration, but then it seems he was never asked.

“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Jefferson said famously in his inaugural address before a full Senate Chamber, his voice so soft many had difficulty hearing him. A passing tribute to Washington was made before he finished, but of Adams he said nothing.

To the victorious Republicans, and to generations of historians, the thought of the tall Jefferson, with his air of youth at fifty-seven, assuming the presidency in the new Capitol at the start of a new century, his eye on the future, would stand in vivid contrast to a downcast, bitter John Adams, old and “toothless” at sixty-five, on his “morning flight” to Baltimore.

Downcast, bitter, Adams may have been, but there is no evidence to support such a description. Adams loved the start of a new day, loved being on the move. Conceivably he felt immense relief to be homeward-bound, free finally of his burdens, his conscience “neat and easy,” as he would say. No one will ever know, but it is perfectly possible that as the sun rose higher that cloudless morning, Adams felt contentment of a kind he had not known for years — once he got over the fact that traveling with him on the same stage, as chance would have it, was Theodore Sedgwick. Like two warring boys who are made to sit in the same room until they get along, they would ride together all the way to Massachusetts.

VII

WHATEVER ADAMS’S state of mind, he was leaving his successor a nation “with its coffers full,” as he wrote, and with “fair prospects of peace with all the world smiling in its face, its commerce flourishing, its navy glorious, its agriculture uncommonly productive and lucrative.”

In turbulent, dangerous times he had held to a remarkably steady course. He had shown that a strong defense and a desire for peace were not mutually exclusive, but compatible and greatly in the national interest. The new navy was an outstanding achievement. In less than two years, it had grown from almost nothing to 50 ships, including the frigates United States, Constitution, and Constellation, and over 5,000 officers and seamen, and this bore heavily on the outcome of the negotiations with France. Indeed, Adams’s insistence on American naval strength proved decisive in achieving peace with France in 1800. Further, by undercutting Hamilton and making his army useless, he may have saved the country from militarism.

In his four years as President, there had been no scandal or corruption. If he was less than outstanding as an administrator, if he had too readily gone along with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and was slow to see deceit within his own cabinet, he had managed nonetheless to cope with a divided country and a divided party, and in the end achieved a rare level of statesmanship. To his everlasting credit, at the risk of his career, reputation, and his hold on the presidency, he chose not to go to war when that would have been highly popular and politically advantageous in the short run. As a result, the country was spared what would almost certainly have been a disastrous mistake.

In much the way he had rushed out in the night to help fight fires in Philadelphia and Washington, he had done his all to put out the fire of war — to the immeasurable benefit of the American people, and with no loss of honor or prestige to the nation. It was a brave, heroic performance.

Adams understood clearly the importance of what he had accomplished. To his dying day he would be proudest of all of having achieved peace. As he would write to a friend, “I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: ‘Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.’”

In the brief spell of goodwill that followed Adams’s inaugural address in 1797, Benjamin Bache had reminded the country that the new President was a “man of incorruptible integrity,” “dignity,” exceptional “resources of mind,” and high purpose. “He declares himself the friend of France and of peace, the admirer of republicanism, the enemy of party. . . . How characteristic of a patriot.” The same could have been said at the conclusion of Adams’s presidency no less than at the beginning.

Subjected to some of the most malicious attacks ever endured by a president, beset by personal disloyalty and political betrayal, suffering the loss of his mother, the near death of his wife, the death of a son, tormented by physical ailments, he had more than weathered the storm. His bedrock integrity, his spirit of independence, his devotion to country, his marriage, his humor, and a great underlying love of life were all still very much intact.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

REJOICE EVER MORE

This phrase “rejoice ever more” shall never be out of my heart, memory, or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it.

~John Adams

I

“THE ONLY QUESTION remaining with me is what shall I do with myself?” Adams had written earlier to Cotton Tufts. “Something I must do, or ennui will rain upon me in buckets.”

He could go each morning and evening to fodder his cattle, he supposed. Or take noontime walks to Penn’s Hill. Or “potter” among his fruit trees and cucumbers. But what then? If he had money enough to spend on his farms, he might keep busier. But where was the money to come from? Talk of himself as Farmer John of Stoneyfield came easily. The reality would require adjustments.

He worried about the effect on mind and body of slowing to a standstill. His constitution, he was sure, would be put to a severe test after “a life of journeys and distant voyages.” Stillness “may shake my old frame,” he observed to another friend. “Rapid motion ought not be succeeded by sudden rest.”

He sensed he had little time left. “The day is far spent with us all,” he would tell Mercy Warren. “It cannot be long before we must exchange this theater for some other.” He only hoped it would be one with no politics. He and Abigail both had had enough of politics. “No more elective office for me,” she had written with absolute certainty. But neither would ever lose interest in politics.

For Abigail it was not just that the long journey of public life was ended, but that their capacity to “do good” was to be “so greatly curtailed,” as she had written before leaving Washington.

As it was, she and Adams had ten days of forced seclusion in which to ponder such concerns, starting almost the moment Adams arrived at Quincy on the evening of March 18, 1801. He was no sooner in the door than a wild northeaster struck, a storm of a kind such as they had not seen in years. Black skies, violent winds, and a flood of rain kept on day after day, no one budging from the house.

Somehow the mail got through, bringing a pointedly formal note of one sentence from the President dated March 8:

Th. Jefferson presents his respects to Mr. Adams and incloses him a letter which came to his hands last night; on reading what is written within the cover, he concluded it to be a private letter, and without opening a single paper within it, folded it up and now has the honor to inclose it to Mr. Adams, with the homage of his high consideration and respect.

Adams’s reply, written on March 24, the fifth day of the storm, was one of the few times he ever acknowledged his suffering over the death of Charles, but suggests also that Jefferson may never have offered a word of sympathy to him.

Had you read the papers inclosed [Adams wrote] they might have given you a moment of melancholy or at least of sympathy with a mourning father. They relate wholly to the funeral of a son who was once the delight of my eyes and a darling of my heart, cut off in the flower of his days, amidst very flattering prospects by causes which have been the greatest grief of my heart and the deepest affliction of my life.

In closing, Adams said he saw “nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous administration, which I heartily wish you.”

Jefferson did not respond, however. Adams’s letter was the last there would be between them for eleven years.

The violence and duration of the storm appears to have left Adams in better spirits once it passed. It was, he wrote to Benjamin Stoddert, “so old fashioned a storm that I begin to hope that nature is returning to her old good nature and good humor, and is substituting fermentations in the elements for revolutions in the moral, intellectual, and political world.”

Complaining was not the Adamses’ mode. The adjustments were more difficult than they would concede. The humiliation that defeat and popular rejection had inflicted on them, the death of Charles, and now sudden, total seclusion took a heavy toll. In some circles, they knew, they were openly despised. In others they were now considered irrelevant. Worst perhaps was the sense that no one any longer cared about them one way or the other.

In the year prior to March 4, letters to President Adams numbered in the thousands; in the year that followed, citizen Adams received fewer than a hundred. Once, while president, he had written to Abigail, “We cannot go back. We must stand our ground as long as we can.” In the years following the presidency, it was resolve of a kind they had to summon more often than they admitted.

When members of the Massachusetts legislature came to Quincy to present Adams with a tribute to his devoted service to his country, he was moved to tears.

Feelings of dejection and bitterness would come and go for a long time. Nearly six months after the return to Quincy, in a letter to Billy Shaw, Adams would allow that if he had it to do over again he would have been a shoemaker. His own father, the man he admired above all, had been a shoemaker. Joseph Bass, the young neighbor who had ridden with Adams to Philadelphia the winter of 1776, was a shoemaker and a familiar figure still in Quincy, as well liked and respected as ever.

Long before, on his rounds of Boston as a young lawyer, Adams had often heard a man with a fine voice singing behind the door of an obscure house. One day, curious to know who “this cheerful mortal” might be, he had knocked at the door, to find a poor shoemaker with a large family living in a single room. Did he find it hard getting by, Adams had asked. “Sometimes,” the man said. Adams ordered a pair of shoes. “I had scarcely got out the door before he began to sing again like a nightingale,” Adams remembered. “Which was the greatest philosopher? Epictetus or this shoemaker?” he would ask when telling the story.

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, had said, among other things, “It is difficulties that show what men are.”

WITH THE REVIVAL of spring on the farm, with fruit trees in flower and warmer days steadily lengthening, familiar roles and routines resumed. Abigail, in a letter to Colonel Smith, asked that he tell Nabby, “I have commenced my operation of dairy woman, and she might see me at five o’clock in the morning skimming my milk.” To Catherine Johnson, John Quincy’s mother-in-law, she described how the beauties of her garden, “from the window at which I write . . . the full bloom of the pear, the apple, the plum and peach,” helped her forget the past and rejoice. “Envy nips not their buds, calumny destroys not their fruits, nor does ingratitude tarnish their colors.”

“Your father,” she told Thomas, “appears to enjoy tranquility and a freedom of care which he has never before experienced. His books and farm occupy his attention.”

Adams professed to be perfectly content in his new “employment,” but how long this tranquility would continue, he could not honestly say. “Men are weak,” he added in a letter to William Cranch. “No man can answer for himself.”

He wrote but few letters, and these mostly to friends who had written to wish him well in retirement. But then, as he said, he did not have a great deal to write about, except for how his corn was growing or “how much wall I lay up every day.”

Only occasionally in what he wrote did he reflect on the national or world scene. There was no use trying to predict what Bonaparte might do, because Bonaparte was not like any conqueror of the past, he offered at one point in a letter to Thomas. “Everything I read only serves to confirm me in the opinion of the absolute necessity of our keeping aloof from all European powers and influences, and that a navy is the only arm by which it can be accomplished.” Jefferson, he noted, had lately said some “very strong things” about the navy and Adams felt “irresistibly inclined to agree with him.” But there was a problem with Jefferson, he told Thomas.

The only misfortune of it is that Mr. Jefferson’s sayings are never well digested, often extravagant, and never consistently pursued. He has not a clear head, and never pursues any question through. His ambition and his cunning are the only steady qualities in him. His imagination and ambition are too strong for his reason.

In mid-June came welcome news from John Quincy. After several miscarriages and a difficult pregnancy, Louisa Catherine had given birth to a baby boy on April 12 in Berlin. They would be departing for home as soon as mother and child were strong enough.

Abigail worried about how well John Quincy might cope with his added burdens. “I pray God send him a safe and fortunate passage to his native land, with his poor, weak and feeble wife and baby,” she wrote to Thomas. When, a few weeks later, she learned that the baby had been named George Washington Adams, rather than John, she was not pleased. “I am sure your brother had not any intention of wounding the feelings of his father, but I see he has done it.”

After seven years abroad, John Quincy would have to begin all over again in the law in Boston, in “a profession he never loved, in a place which promises him no great harvest,” Abigail wrote sympathetically. It was “a humiliating prospect.” Yet she saw no other choice for him. So long as the Republicans were in power, “the post of honor” would be in private pursuits.

Adams, meantime, was busy in his hayfields, bringing in the biggest crop ever. Where once the yield had been six tons on the same acreage, it was now thirty, to his immense delight.

The Adams domain comprised in all three farms. In addition to the main house, there were the two old houses by Penn’s Hill where Adams had been born and where he and Abigail had raised their family. In total, by now, there were more than 600 acres of fields, woods, and salt marsh, and as usual in summer the work required hired help.

Adams loved joining in the work as much as ever — for the exercise and “pure air,” the companionship of men he had known and worked with for years, and the pride he took in seeing things done just so. But it all had to be taken with utmost seriousness. Stoneyfield was no gentleman’s farm and he no gentleman farmer. The farm that had sustained the Adamses and their family through the lean years of the Revolution would have to sustain them again. They could expect no additional income. And while the farm had expanded over the years, so had the family. The Adams household was more crowded now than it had ever been and would remain so.

John and Abigail had taken Charles’s wife Sally and her two daughters in to live with them, and this, in addition to Louisa Smith, made six. Nabby and her four children also moved in for the summer, which brought the total to eleven, not counting servants or visiting cousins or friends, of which there were often two or three. At times, there were twenty people or more beneath their roof. In addition, since the return from Washington, Abigail had acquired a Newfoundland puppy, which she named Juno.

JOHN QUINCY, Louisa Catherine, and their infant son arrived at Philadelphia on the ship America on September 4, 1801. “Her health, though yet very infirm, is better than we could have expected,” John Quincy said of Louisa Catherine in a letter to his father, “and your grandson is as hearty as any sailor of his age that ever crossed the ocean.” They were staying with Thomas and had so much to talk about, there was little time for anything else.

The day the letter reached Quincy, Adams wrote, was one of the happiest of his life.

I hope you will consider my house as your home, for yourself, your lady, and son, as well as your servants. . . . We can accommodate you all as well as destiny intends that you and I ought to be accommodated, at least until you have time to deliberate on your future arrangements.

After a rest in Philadelphia, Louisa Catherine and the baby traveled to Washington to see her parents, while John Quincy set off for Massachusetts. The only difference he saw in his brother, Thomas reported to his parents, was a “sort of fatherly look.” Also, Thomas informed them, “He has no propensity to engage in a political career.”

John Quincy wrote of his reunion with his parents as a moment of “inexpressible delight.” Arriving on September 21, he found his father in “good health and spirits.” His mother, though “very ill,” was fast on the mend. Both mother and father, he assured Louisa Catherine, were waiting to receive her with “most cordial affection.” In a few weeks, having purchased a house in Boston, he left for Washington to bring her and the baby home. Any apprehensions he may have had about Louisa Catherine’s first meeting with his family, he kept to himself.

According to what she wrote long afterward, Louisa Catherine arrived at Quincy and almost immediately decided she liked nothing about it or its quaint ways. It was the Thanksgiving season, the days chill, and she was feeling miserably ill and depressed. Family and friends were gathered to look her over.

Raised in France and London, well read, well mannered, and well spoken with an English accent, she found herself being “gazed” at as a curiosity, “a fine lady.” Only “the old gentleman took a fancy to me,” she would write, remembering Adams’s warmth and interest in her. Otherwise, she felt hopelessly out of place.

Quincy! What shall I say of my impressions of Quincy! Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished — Dr Tufts! . . . Mr Cranch! Old Uncle Peter! . . . It was lucky for me that I was so much depressed, and so ill, or I should certainly have given mortal offense. Even the church, its form, its snuffling through the nose, the singers, the dressing and dinner hours, were all novelties to me; and the ceremonious parties, the manners, and the hours of meeting half past four were equally astonishing to me.

Thomas, who had been quite taken with Louisa Catherine, wrote to his mother of her “sprightliness and vivacity.” Even when “in only tolerable health,” Thomas said, “her spirits are abundant.” But she was not in tolerable health at Quincy, and her spirits were far from abundant. As she herself recalled, she was “cold and reserved, and seldom spoke which was deemed pride.” Everyone wanted to please her and at meals particularly, but the more she was fussed over, the more she resented it.

I had a separate dish set by me of which no one was to partake; and every delicate preserve was brought out to treat me with in the kindest manner . . . and though I felt very grateful, it appeared so strongly to stamp me with unfitness that often I would not eat my delicacy, and thus gave offense. Mrs. Adams was too kind. . . . Louisa Smith was jealous to excess, and the first day that I arrived, left the table crying and sobbing, and could not be induced to eat any dinner.

Abigail’s impressions, written at the time, express concern rather than disapproval. The young woman seemed so terribly frail and suffered such a racking cough that Abigail feared for her life. “Her frame is so slender and her constitution so delicate that I have many fears that she will be of short duration.”

Except for “the old gentleman’s” obvious approval of Louisa Catherine, it was not an auspicious beginning. Abigail found it impossible to ignore the “weight of worry” that had been added to John Quincy’s brow.

Louisa Catherine was twenty-six years old, John Quincy thirty-four. In the time he had been away, his hair had greatly thinned, which made him look older, and he did indeed have a serious expression most of the time. With age he was looking more like his father than he had, and there was no mistaking his extraordinary intelligence. But he was less ardent, less spontaneous than his father. He had little of Adams’s passion for life or his humor.

By Christmas the young family had moved into their new home in Boston. John Quincy worried over expenses, worried that his parents might find themselves with too little money. Finding it difficult to get started again in the law, feeling like a stranger, and bored with what work he had, he toyed with the thought of giving it up and striking out for a life of “rustic independence” in the wilds of upstate New York, an idea encouraged by his brother-in-law Colonel Smith and that appealed at once to brother Thomas. “I am your man for a new country,” Thomas affirmed, convinced that his own legal career in Philadelphia was going nowhere. That neither of them was the least prepared or suited for such a venture seems not to have occurred to them.

But the impulse passed as John Quincy began to feel more at home in Boston and acquired a circle of friends. And whatever prior aversion to politics he had had, or that his parents may have expressed, he was very soon involved. “Walked in the mall just before night,” he recorded in his diary on January 28, 1802. “I feel a strong temptation and have great provocation to plunge into political controversy.” Then he wrote, “A politician in this country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.”

In April 1802, less than four months after settling in the city, John Quincy was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. The following November, he ran as a Federalist candidate for Congress and lost, but by less than 100 votes. He had become a rising star. In February 1803, at age thirty-five, John Quincy Adams was elected a United States senator, a victory made all the sweeter by the fact that his opponent was Timothy Pickering.

In the meantime, he could not have been a more dutiful son, riding out to Quincy to be with his parents nearly every weekend. He kept his father supplied with books and encouraged him to undertake an autobiography, which Adams, with some reluctance, began in October 1802, with Part I, titled “John Adams.”

But it was the following spring, in 1803, just after he had been elected to the Senate, that John Quincy came to the rescue of his father and mother as no one else could have.

Partly on his advice, most of what John and Abigail had managed to save over the years — some $13,000 — had been invested with the London banking house of Bird, Savage & Bird, bankers for the United States Treasury. It had seemed an entirely prudent step. But in 1803, the house of Bird, Savage & Bird collapsed, leaving the Adamses on the brink of ruin.

At once, John Quincy stepped in to save them. “The error of judgment was mine,” he wrote, “and therefore I shall not refuse to share in the suffering.” By selling his house in Boston, drawing on his own savings, and borrowing, he was able to proceed slowly to buy up his parents’ property, ultimately paying them what they had lost, while they retained title to the land for life.

To their joy, he also announced that he would move to Quincy with his family, which by the summer of 1803 included a newborn second son, this one named John Adams. The plan was to live in the house where John Quincy had been born. But by September he and his family were off to Washington.

II

TO THE GREAT SURPRISE of those who had predicted nothing but dire consequences should Thomas Jefferson ever rise to the presidency, the advent of Jefferson in the President’s House turned out to be far from a radical upheaval, or a second Revolution, as he claimed.

Not surprisingly, Jefferson made Madison the Secretary of State and chose Albert Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury. He did away with presidential levees, something Adams had wanted to do but felt obliged to continue. Under the new system, Jefferson received the public only twice a year at the President’s House, New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July. He entertained frequently, but preferred small, elegant dinners, which were part of his way of carrying on the process of government. Rather than going to the Capitol to speak before Congress, he submitted his annual message in writing.

Among his first decisions after taking office was to release from jail those sentenced for violating the Sedition Act, and with the avid support of the Republican majority in Congress, he did away with Adams’s Judiciary Act and the new circuit courts. Further, Jefferson abolished the old whiskey tax and began cutting back on the navy, halting shipbuilding and selling off ships already built, while at the same time, ironically, starting to deal effectively with the Barbary pirates.

Yet the first year and more passed with surprisingly little commotion or sensation, until the first weeks of September 1802, shortly before John Quincy declared himself a candidate for Congress. It was then, in the second year of Jefferson’s new administration, that the rumor hitherto only whispered, of a liaison between Jefferson and a slave woman, broke into print. What made it especially sensational was that the source of the allegation was his own former ally and unrelenting scourge of John Adams, the notorious James Callender. As Abigail would later tell Jefferson bluntly, it was as though the serpent he had “cherished and warmed” had turned and “bit the hand that nourished him.”

The slave woman, as the Adamses and the country learned, was Sally Hemings, who fifteen years before, at age fourteen, had arrived with little Polly Jefferson at the house on Grosvenor Square in London, and Abigail had judged her too immature to look after the child.

Callender, having served his sentence for violating the Sedition Act, was out of jail by the time Jefferson took office. But unable to pay the fine imposed by the court, he had appealed to Jefferson for help, asking also that he be made postmaster in Richmond. Feeling that Jefferson owed him as much and more, Callender went to Washington to see Madison and in the course of the meeting implied that if denied his requests he might have things to say. Madison warned Jefferson, who immediately, on May 28, 1801, had his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, give Callender $50.

Furious at Jefferson’s parsimony, Callender switched sides to become the editor of a new Federalist paper, in Richmond, the Recorder. In the summer that followed, writing in the Recorder, Callender revealed that Jefferson, while Vice President, had secretly subsidized and encouraged him as he broke the Hamilton-Reynolds scandal and did all he could to defame John Adams. For proof Callender quoted several of Jefferson’s letters to him.

“I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender,” Jefferson wrote to James Monroe on July 14. His concern, Jefferson said, was that his own “mere motives of charity” might be misunderstood.

When the Republican press attacked Callender for his “apostasy, ingratitude, cowardice, lies, venality, and constitutional malignity,” Callender struck back in the Recorder on September 1, 1802, under the title “The President Again”:

It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, a concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. . . .

By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it. . . . The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.

In subsequent articles Callender reported that Sally Hemings had five children, that she had been in France with Jefferson, and claimed that now, with the truth out, Jefferson could expect certain defeat in the next election. The stories spread rapidly, appearing in the Federalist press — the New York Evening Post, the Washington Federalist, the Gazette of the United States, and in Boston in the Gazette and the Columbian Centinel, papers read by the Adamses. A cartoon published at Newburyport, titled “A Philosophic Cock,” pictured Jefferson as a rooster strutting with his dark hen Sally. In October the Boston Gazette ran the words to a song of several stanzas, supposed to have been written by the sage of Monticello to be sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”:

Of all the damsels on the green

On mountain, or in valley

A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,

As Monticellian Sally.

Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?

What wife were half so handy?

To breed a flock of slaves for stock,

A blackamoor’s a dandy.

The Aurora and the rest of the Republican press remained conspicuously silent on the subject, taking their lead from the President. Jefferson, who made it a “rule of life” not to respond to newspaper attacks, neither denounced Callender nor denied or admitted a connection with Sally Hemings.

That Callender was a malicious scoundrel was undeniable and more than enough for many people to dismiss his charges out of hand. There was no evidence, and further, the story seemed preposterously out of character for a man of such refinement and intellect, not to say for the President of the United States. To Republicans it was but one more act of Federalist villainy.

What was actually known of “Monticellian Sally” amounted to little, and for all the rumors, all that was written then and later, relatively little would ever be known. She was the daughter of a slave woman named Betty Hemings, who had belonged to Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, who reputedly was Sally’s father. If true, this made her the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha, and it was said that she resembled Martha Jefferson and was fair-skinned and “decidedly good looking.” An aged former Monticello slave, Isaac Jefferson, would later remember Sally as “very handsome, long straight hair down her back.” To what degree she had benefited from her years in France, whether she could read or write, or anything about her disposition or abilities are matters of speculation.

It was true, as Callender reported, that by 1802 Sally had given birth to five children, but two had died in infancy. According to surviving records, she had seven children, all born at Monticello, two of whom came later, Madison in 1805 and Easton in 1808. From Jefferson’s own records, it is clear that he was at home at Monticello at least nine months before the birth of each of her children, and that she never conceived when he was not there. Her children were all light-skinned and several, as gossiped then, looked astonishingly like Jefferson.

More than half a century later, Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the son of Jefferson’s daughter Martha, would declare that the real father of Sally Hemings’s children was Jefferson’s nephew, Peter Carr, which was said to explain the striking Jefferson resemblance in the Hemings children.

Sally Hemings’s son Madison would say his mother told him that his father was Jefferson. According to Madison’s account, given long afterward, her relationship with Jefferson began in Paris, and she was pregnant with her first child when she returned to Monticello.

How the Adamses felt about the Callender accusations would not come to light until much later and in private correspondence only. Of the two, Adams would have less to say, and unlike Abigail, he did not confront Jefferson with his ire.

Considering all that Adams had suffered at the hand of Callender, it would have been quite understandable had he lashed out at Jefferson for his hypocrisy and immorality. Adams could well have gloated over the spectacle of Jefferson under fire. But he did not.

It was not until 1810 — not until Jefferson’s presidency was over — that Adams, in a letter to a friend, took up the subject of Callender, Jefferson, and Sally Hemings, privately offering several opinions and suggesting at the close of the letter, “You may burn it if you please.”

For Callender, Adams had no use whatever. “I believe nothing that Callender said any more than if it had been said by an infernal spirit. I would not convict a dog of killing a sheep upon the testimony of two such witnesses,” Adams wrote with characteristic verve, indicating that he did not believe Callender’s accusations about Jefferson. Jefferson’s “charities” to Callender, however, were a “disgrace.” “I give him up to censure for this and I have a better right to do so, because my conscience bears me witness that I never wrote a line against my enemies nor contributed one farthing to any writer for vindicating me or accusing my enemies.” But continuing on, Adams clearly implied that, in fact, he did believe Callender. An unnamed “great lady” who knew the South, he wrote, had said “she did not believe there was a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of children.”

Then Adams put the issue squarely where it belonged, saying, in essence, that all such stories of slave masters and their slave women were metaphors for the overriding sin of slavery itself.

Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson as blots on his character. The story of the latter is a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.

ABIGAIL, to judge by her correspondence, had no wish to say anything on the subject, or to have any contact with Jefferson. She did not consider him a great man, she had told Thomas earlier. She pitied his “weakness” and took much that he professed to be “hollow.” Still, she wrote, there was “a little corner of my heart where once he sat . . . [and] from whence I find it hard wholly to discard him.”

But in the spring of 1804, nearly two years after the Callender accusations, Abigail learned of the death of Jefferson’s daughter, Mary Jefferson Eppes, the Polly for whom she had felt such affection during the child’s stay with her in London. Deeply touched, Abigail wrote Jefferson to express her heartache and sympathy. Until then, she had not written a word to him in seventeen years, not since London. Reasons of “various kinds” had withheld her pen, she explained, “until the powerful feelings of my heart have burst through the restraint. . . . The attachment which I formed for her, when you committed her to my care, has remained with me to this hour.” Yet she signed herself not in friendship, or as his friend, but as one “who once took pleasure in subscribing herself your friend.”

Her letter profoundly moved him, Jefferson wrote from the President’s House. He would ever remember her kindness to Polly, he said, at the same time expressing regret that “circumstances should have arisen which seemed to draw a line between us.” He wished to be friends still:

The friendship with which you honored me has ever been valued and fully reciprocated; and although events have been passing which might be trying to some minds, I never believed yours to be of that kind, nor felt that my own was. Neither my estimate of your character, nor the esteem founded in that, have ever been lessened for a single moment.

Reflecting on his friendship with Adams, he recalled how it had accompanied them “through long and important scenes,” and that while their differences of opinion, resulting from “honest conviction,” might make them seem rivals in the minds of their fellow citizens, they were not in their own minds. “We never stood in one another’s way.”

There Jefferson might well have ended the letter, and the extraordinary exchange that followed with Abigail would never have happened. But he had a wound to air.

I can say with truth that one act of Mr. Adams’s life, and only one ever gave me a moment’s personal displeasure. I did consider his last appointments to office as personally unkind. . . . It seemed but common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of his own choice.

Affirming his “high respect” for her husband, he closed saying, “I have thus, my dear madam, opened myself to you without reserve, which I have long wished an opportunity of doing; and, without knowing how it will be received, I feel relief from being unbosomed.”

Abigail left little doubt of her anger in what she wrote in reply. He had no right to complain of his predecessor’s appointments, she lectured Jefferson. The Constitution empowered the president to fill offices when they were vacant and “Mr. Adams” had chosen well. Besides, she argued inaccurately, he made his choices before it was known whether he, Jefferson, or Burr would be President, and so Jefferson had no cause to take personal offense.

Then, mincing no words, she got to what for her was the heart of the matter. However smoothly he wrote of past differences being only those resulting from “honest conviction,” she refused to let him slide by. “And now, sir, I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former friendship and placed you in a light very different from what I once viewed you in.”

She was outraged by his dealings with Callender, and particularly as revealed in the letters Callender had published. Of the accusations concerning Sally Hemings she said nothing. The issue to her was Callender, who by then was dead. He had been found on a Sunday in June 1803, in Richmond, floating by the shore of the James River in three feet of water. He had been seen earlier wandering the town in a drunken state, but the circumstances of his death were unknown.

Abigail mistakenly understood that Jefferson had liberated the “wretch” Callender from jail, and this to her was totally unacceptable, after the attacks Callender had made on Adams, a man, she reminded Jefferson, “for whom you professed the highest esteem and friendship.” Was he not, as President, she asked, answerable for the influence of his example upon the manners and morals of the nation? She had tried, she said, to believe him innocent of any part in Callender’s slanderous attacks.

Until I read Callender’s seventh letter, containing your compliment to him as a writer and your reward of 50 dollars, I could not be made to believe that such measures could have been resorted to: to stab the fair fame and upright intentions of one who, to use your language, “was acting from an honest conviction in his own mind that he was right.” This, sir, I considered as a personal injury. This was the sword that cut asunder the Gordian knot which could not be untied by all the efforts of party spirit, by rivalship, by jealousy, or any other malignant fiend.

The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth. When such vipers are let loose upon society, all distinction between virtue and vice are leveled, all respect for character is lost.

Her letter, she assured him, was written in confidence. She had shown it to no one. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” she concluded, quoting Proverbs. “I bear no malice, I cherish no enmity. I would not retaliate if I could — nay more in the true spirit of Christian charity, I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.”

Jefferson protested. He was being falsely accused. “My charities to him [Callender] were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life, and to make them chargeable to myself.” He had never suspected Adams of being party to the “atrocities” committed against him by Fenno and Porcupine, so why should he be suspected? He himself had “ever borne testimony to Mr. Adams’s personal wrath,” he assured her.

It was all quite disingenuous, as doubtless Abigail knew. Jefferson had indeed encouraged and paid Callender for his efforts, and he had spoken of Adams in quite unflattering terms on a number of occasions.

Altogether seven letters passed between Abigail and the President, in the course of which she brought up one further matter that, to her mind, had put great strain on the past friendship. A district judge had earlier appointed John Quincy a commissioner of bankruptcy in Boston, a petty federal office involving petty fees, but that had made a difference to him in his first lean year in Boston. When, under Jefferson, John Quincy was suddenly replaced, Abigail had taken it as an act of personal reprisal by Jefferson himself, which it was not, as he managed now to convince her.

“I conclude with sincere prayers for your health and happiness, that yourself and Mr. Adams may long enjoy the tranquility you desire and merit,” Jefferson wrote, bringing to a conclusion his part in the exchange.

Abigail wished him well in his responsibilities and promised to intrude on his time no more. But his part as a “rewarder and encourager” of Callender, “a libeler whom you could not but detest and despise,” she could not and would not forget. Once she had felt both affection and esteem for him, she wrote. “Affection still lingers in the bosom, even after esteem has taken flight.”

This, her last letter, was written on October 25, 1804. On November 19, Adams wrote the following at the bottom of her letter-book copy:

The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without my knowledge or suspicion. Last evening and this morning at the desire of Mrs. Adams, I read them whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.

III

THE PROSPECT OF WRITING an autobiography had never really appealed to Adams. Writing history was difficult at best, he knew, and if personal history, it could be most discomforting. “It is a delicate thing to write from memory,” he told John Quincy. “To me the undertaking would be too painful. I cannot but reflect upon scenes I have beheld.” So having barely begun his projected memoir in the fall of 1802, he let it drop.

For more than a year he wrote little at all, devoting the greater part of his time to the farm. As always, he read much of every day — old favorites in Latin, Greek, and French, English poetry and history, journals such as the Edinburgh Review, and newspapers to the point he feared he might become a newspaper (as “button-maker becomes button at last”). He saw a few old friends, went on long walks with Richard Cranch, attended church, and hugely enjoyed the company of his grandchildren.

But his days on the move, on the road, were truly over. Only on rare occasions did he go even to Boston or Cambridge, to attend a Harvard commencement or a dinner of the American Academy of Sciences. At Fourth of July celebrations in Boston he would join Robert Treat Paine and Elbridge Gerry “in the place of honor” as surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence. But at the most now, the radius of his world was about fifteen miles.

Like Abigail, he worried about Thomas, who seemed incapable of taking hold in Philadelphia and suffered spells of gloom and loneliness, his “blue devils,” and with Abigail he rejoiced when Thomas quit Philadelphia and moved back to Quincy to try a fresh start. Thomas’s presence, the pleasure of his company in the evenings, helped compensate for the large vacant place in the Adamses’ life since the departure of John Quincy for Washington. For her part, Abigail told John Quincy to eat well, not work too hard, and mind his appearance.

I do not wish a Senator to dress like a beau, but I want him to conform so far as to the fashion as not to incur the character of singularity, nor give occasion to the world to ask what kind of mother he had or to charge upon a wife negligence and inattention when she is guiltless. The neatest man, observed a lady the other day, wants his wife to pull up his collar and mind that his coat is brushed.

John Quincy took his seat in the Senate in time to give Jefferson support in the biggest accomplishment of his presidency, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. With the acquisition of Louisiana from Spain, Napoleon Bonaparte had begun planning a French empire in North America. But when the army he sent to crush the slave revolt in San Domingo was wiped out by war and yellow fever, Bonaparte abandoned his plans and suddenly, in 1803, offered to sell the United States all of the vast, unexplored territory of Louisiana. It was an astounding turn of events and one that probably would not have come to pass had the Quasi-War burst into something larger. Were it not for John Adams making peace with France, there might never have been a Louisiana Purchase.

Federalists in Congress argued that under the Constitution the powers of the President did not include buying foreign territory. Jefferson, who had for so long advocated less, not more, power in the executive, chose to take a larger view now, given the opportunity he had to double the size of the nation at a stroke. John Quincy crossed party lines to support the purchase, which his father, too, strongly favored. “’Curse the stripling, how he apes his sire,’” declared one irate Massachusetts Federalist.

When John Quincy joined in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the spread of slavery into Louisiana, he found it harder than pulling a “jaw tooth,” he told his father. “This is now in general the great art of legislation at this place,” he continued, venting his frustration. “To do a thing by assuming the appearance of preventing it. To prevent a thing by assuming that of doing it.”

In the summer of 1804, on the banks of the Hudson River at Weehawken, New Jersey, Alexander Hamilton was fatally wounded in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Carried back across the river to New York, Hamilton died the next day, July 12.

When the Vice President returned to Washington to preside over the Senate, he was looked upon by many, including young Senator Adams, as no better than a murderer. John Adams would write that though he had forgiven his “arch enemy,” Hamilton, Hamilton’s “villainy” was not forgotten. Nor did he feel obliged “to suffer my character to lie under infamous calumnies because the author of them with a pistol bullet in his spinal marrow, died a penitent.”

In the election of 1804, Jefferson and George Clinton of New York, the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans, won by an overwhelming margin. Even Massachusetts went for Jefferson.

Much that John Quincy wrote to his parents from the Capitol had a familiar ring. “Hitherto my conduct has given satisfaction to neither side,” he observed, “and both are offended at what they consider a vain and foolish presumption of singularity, or an ambition of taking a lead different from the views of either. All this I cannot help.”

John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had dined at the President’s House, and would again several times, finding Jefferson no less engaging than ever, but overly fond of extravagant claims and “large stories.” One evening, John Quincy listened in amazement as Jefferson described how, during one of his winters in Paris, the temperature had dropped to twenty below zero for six weeks. It was a preposterous claim. Nothing of the sort had ever happened, as John Quincy knew from having been there. “He knows better than all this, but loves to excite wonder.” At another point, commenting on the French Revolution, Jefferson said it seemed all to have been a dream. John Quincy, as he reported to his father, could hardly believe his ears.

Jefferson had installed a French chef in the presidential mansion. His wine bill alone exceeded $2,500 a year. “There was, as usual, the dissertation upon wines, not very edifying,” John Quincy recorded after another dinner. “Mr. Jefferson said that the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any ancient system of philosophy.”

In addition to serving in the Senate, John Quincy also accepted a new professorial chair of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard. Adams’s pride in his brilliant son could not have been greater, as he let him know when at times John Quincy grew discouraged with the pettiness and hypocrisies of politics.

Patience and perseverance will carry you with honor through all difficulties. Virtuous and studious from your youth, beyond any other instance I know, I have great confidence in your success in the service of your country, however dark your prospects may be at present. Such talents and such learning as you possess, with a character so perfectly fair and a good humor so universally acknowledged, it is impossible for you to fail.

Reminding him of their ordeal on the Boston, when “you and I . . . clasped each other together in our arms, and braced our feet against the bedboards and bedsteads to prevent us from having our brains dashed out,” Adams said he himself had since weathered worse political storms, “and here I am alive and hearty yet.”

Alive and hearty he was, and remarkably so, all things considered. He was a picture of health, as visitors and family members would attest. He still nursed wounds of defeat; he could brood over past insults; he longed for vindication, and for gratitude for so much that he had done and the sacrifices he had made. And he dwelled often on death. Dear old friends were passing from the scene — Parson Wibird, Samuel Adams. He was “never more to see anything but my plow between me and the grave,” Adams told a correspondent, sounding more than a little sorry for himself. Yet in the same letter he claimed to be happier than he had ever been, which if said partly for effect — as a matter of pride — was also fundamentally true, once the initial years of retirement had passed and particularly after he began writing again.

IN EARLY 1805, after four years at Quincy, during which he had made little effort to contact others, Adams decided to send a letter of greetings to his old friend Benjamin Rush.

“Dear Sir,” Adams began on February 6, “It seemed to me that you and I ought not to die without saying goodbye, or bidding each other adieu. Pray how do you do? How does that excellent lady, Mrs. R?

Is the present state of the national republic enough? Is virtue the principle of our government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice, adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst for riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the spirit of party and of faction the motive and principle that governs?

“My much respected and dear friend,” Rush answered. “Your letter of the 6th instant revived a great many pleasant ideas in my mind. I have not forgotten — I cannot forget you.”

You and your excellent Mrs. Adams often compose a conversation by my fireside. We now and then meet with a traveler who has been at Quincy, from whom we hear with great pleasure not only that you enjoy good health, but retain your usual good spirits.

And so began an extended, vivid correspondence between the two men that was to occupy much of their time and bring each continuing enjoyment. For Adams it was as if he had found a vocation again. His letters to Rush became a great outpouring of ideas, innermost feelings, pungent asides, and opinions on all manner of things and mutual acquaintances — so much that he had kept within for too long. He wrote of his worries about the future and the sham of the political scene. “My friend! Our country is a masquerade! No party, no man dares to avow his real sentiments. All is disguise, vizard, cloak.”

Much of his strength and capacity for study were gone, Adams professed. “But such is the constitution of my mind that I cannot avoid forming an opinion.”

[Samuel] Johnson said when he sat upon his throne in a tavern, there he dogmatized and was contradicted, and in this he found delight. My throne is not in a tavern but at my fireside. There I dogmatize, there I laugh and there the newspapers sometimes make me scold; and in dogmatizing, laughing, and scolding I find delight, and why should not I enjoy it, since no one is the worse for it and I am the better.

He had by now resumed work on his autobiography as well, Part II, “Travels and Negotiations,” though it was still labor he did not relish. “To rummage trunks, letter books, bits of journals and great heaps of bundles of old papers is a dreadful bondage to old age, and an extinguisher of old eyes.” And how, after all, did one write about one’s self, he asked Rush. What must he say of his own vanity and levity? How was he to account for so many impulsive, tactless, ill-considered things he had said down the years?

There have been very many times when I have been so agitated in my own mind as to have no consideration at all of the light in which my words, actions, and even writings would be considered by others. Indeed, I never could bring myself seriously to consider that I was a great man, or of much importance or consideration in the world. The few traces that remain of me must, I believe, go down to posterity in much confusion and distraction, as my life has passed. Enough surely of egotism!

He wrote of how greatly friendship mattered to him. “There is something in my composition which restrains me from rancour against any man with whom I have once lived in friendship.” He wrote of his sense of duty to his country. “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” And the threats he saw to the country: “The internal intrigues of our monied and landed and slaved aristocracies are and will be our ruin.” He reported to the learned physician of his own health and disposition, assuring him “my spirits have been as cheerful as they ever were since some sin, to me unknown, involved me in politics.” And he described his physical activities, which began at five or six in the morning with work on his stone walls.

I call for my leavers and iron bars, for my chisels, drills, and wedges to split rocks, and for my wagons to cart seaweed for manure upon my farm. I mount my horse and ride on the seashore, and I walk upon Mount Wollaston and Stonyfield Hill.

For a healthful diet, he told the abstemious Rush, he believed, like the doctors of his youth, in milk and vegetables, “with very little animal food and still less spiritous liquors.” In his autobiography, however, Adams told how his “excellent father” had encouraged him to partake of more meat as well as more “comforting” drink than milk.

He wrote of his renewed enjoyment of Shakespeare — Adams would read Shakespeare twice through again in 1805 — and in his continued devotion to Cicero and the Bible. And he dwelt much on ideas. The ideal of the perfectibility of man as expounded by eighteenth-century philosophers — perfectibility “abstracted from all divine authority” — was unacceptable, he declared.

It is an idea of the Christian religion, and ever has been of all believers of the immortality of the soul, that the intellectual part of man is capable of progressive improvement for ever. Where then is the sense of calling the perfectibility of man an original idea or modern discovery. . . . I consider the perfectibility of man as used by modern philosophers to be mere words without a meaning, that is mere nonsense.

He had himself, he told Rush, “an immense load of errors, weaknesses, follies and sins to mourn over and repent of.” These were “the only affliction” of his present life. But St. Paul had taught him to rejoice ever more and be content. “This phrase ’rejoice ever more’ shall never be out of my heart, memory or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it. This is my perfectibility of man.”

The letters sparkled with aphorisms — on the virtue of America standing free from binding involvement with other nations: “We stand well, let us stand still”; on the perils of majority rule: “Absolute power in a majority is as drunk as it is in one”; on lawyers: “No civilized society can do without lawyers.” Of kings and presidents, Adams said he saw little to distinguish them from other men. “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.” In a spirited appraisal of the overall folderol of an election year, he wrote:

Our electioneering racers have started for the prize. Such a whipping and spurring and huzzaing! Oh what rare sport it will be! Through thick and thin, through mire and dirt, through bogs and fens and sloughs, dashing and splashing and crying out, the devil take the hindmost.

How long will it be possible that honor, truth or virtue should be respected among a people who are engaged in such a quick and perpetual succession of such profligate collisions and conflicts?

Rush, a champion of reform in education, thought Greek and Latin were outmoded and should be replaced with the study of modern languages, which Adams considered thoroughly wrongheaded. “Your labors will be as useless as those of Tom Paine against the Bible,” Adams declared, but wrote also, “Mrs. Adams says she is willing [for] you [to] discredit Greek and Latin, because it will destroy the foundation of all pretensions of the gentlemen to superiority over the ladies, and restore liberty, equality, and fraternity between the sexes.”

Adams made frequent mention of his high regard for physicians as professional men and as friends. Benjamin Waterhouse was “a jewel of a man”; Cotton Tufts was “one of the best men in the world.” And the respect and affection he felt for Rush were abundantly apparent, even in the ways Adams would address him: “Honored and Learned Sir,” “My dear Philosopher and Friend,” “My Sensible and Humorous Friend,” “Learned, Ingenious, Benevolent, Beneficient Old Friend of 1774,” “My Dear Old Friend.” “I am not subject to low spirits,” Adams would tell Rush, “but if I was, one of your letters would cure me at any time for a month.”

For all their differences in political views, neither man had ever abandoned the other. When, in the aftermath of the yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1797, Rush had been publicly attacked for his bloodletting treatment, both by Philadelphia physicians and the press, and his practice dwindled to the point that he could barely survive, Adams, who was then President and struggling with troubles of his own, had appointed him treasurer of the United States Mint. It had been a generous act of friendship that Rush and his family never forgot. Though bound by political philosophy to Jefferson, Rush felt a closer personal tie to Adams.

Rush proved an eager and engaging correspondent, his letters brimming with opinion and vitality, and quite as candid as Adams’s own. “You see,” Rush wrote, “I think aloud in my letters to you as I did in those written near 30 years ago, and as I have often done in your company.”

But then they were both thinking aloud, both writing the way they spoke, each keeping the other company with common interest and shared miseries. If Adams had been rejected by the vote of the people, Rush had been made an outcast by much of his own profession. Each was lonely except for friends and family. “I live like a stranger in my native state,” Rush confided. “My patients are my only acquaintances, my books my only companions, and the members of my family nearly my only friends.” If Adams thought he might have been better off as a shoemaker, Rush would tell him, “I often look back upon the hours I spent serving my country (so unproductive of the objects to which they were devoted) with deep regret.” But much that Rush wrote was exactly the medicine Adams needed, as if the old physician in Philadelphia understood his distant patient perfectly.

Mr. Madison and his lady are now in our city [he reported to Adams]. It gave me great pleasure to hear him mention your name in the most respectful terms a few days ago. He dwelt upon your “genius and integrity,” and acquitted you of ever having had the least friendly designs in your administration upon the present forms of our American governments. [Madison did not consider Adams a monarchist, in other words.] He gave you credit likewise for your correct opinion of banks and standing armies in our country.

To Adams, Rush was a true cohort, in the original meaning of the word — one belonging to the same division of a Roman legion and united in the same struggle. With Rush, Adams felt free to say things not possible with just anyone, as for example in appraising those they had known in the struggle.

When considering George Washington, said Adams, one must always bear in mind that he was a Virginian, which was worth at least five talents, in that “Virginian geese are all swans.” Washington, furthermore, was a great actor who had “the gift of silence,” which, wrote Adams, “I esteem as one of the most precious talents.” Washington was too “unlearned” and had seen too little of the world for someone in his “station.” Still, Washington was a “thoughtful man,” and had great self-command, a quality Adams admired in the extreme.

Dabbling in medical theory, Adams suggested that all Hamilton’s overheated ambitions and impulses might be attributed to “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off!” and that “the same vapors produced his lies and slanders by which he totally destroyed his party forever and finally lost his life in the field of honor.”

Knowing how much Rush admired Jefferson, Adams was nonetheless equally candid on the subject. Hamilton was a great “intriguer,” but so, too, was Jefferson, Adams wrote. “Jefferson has succeeded, and multitudes are made to believe that he is pure benevolence. . . . But you and I know him to be an intriguer.”

He held no resentment against Jefferson, “though he has honored and salaried almost every villain he could find who had been an enemy to me.” Nor would he publicly criticize Jefferson’s handling of the presidency. “I think instead of opposing systematically any administration, running down their characters and opposing all their measures, right or wrong, we ought to support every administration as far as we can in justice.”

THE RESUMPTION of correspondence with Benjamin Rush was one of the happiest events of Adams’s life in retirement. Rush’s wife remarked that the two elderly gentlemen were behaving like a couple of schoolgirls. And though they were never to see one another, the friendship grew stronger than ever.

But while Rush substantiated so much that Adams liked to believe about the meaning of friendship, another old friend, Mercy Otis Warren, hurt and provoked him as no one had in years, and without warning.

In 1806, Mercy Warren published her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution in which she singled out Adams as one of those who had betrayed the Revolution. Adams, she declared, reviving the old charge, had been “corrupted” by his time in England. The man who had “appeared to be actuated by the principles of integrity” became “beclouded by a partiality for monarchy . . . by living long near the splendor of courts and courtiers,” and came home enamored by rank, titles, and “all the insignia of arbitrary sway.” The most prominent features of his character, she further charged, were “pride of talents and much ambition.” “Mr. Adams’s passions and prejudices were sometimes too strong for his sagacity and judgment,” she observed.

With Bache, Callender, and Alexander Hamilton all in their graves, Adams could only have assumed that such accusations were things of the past. Like nearly everyone who ever played a large part in public life and helped make history, Adams wondered how history would portray him, and worried not a little that he might be unfairly treated, misunderstood, or his contributions made to look insignificant compared to those of others. He had no great expectation of being celebrated. No statues or monuments would be erected in his memory, he told Rush, adding, “I wish them not,” which was hardly so. It was an understandable desire to make his own case before the bar of history that propelled him in his labors at autobiography. But to have such a blow as this fall now in his old age, and inflicted by a friend, was infuriating.

In his years in office Adams had felt obliged to say nothing when subjected to ridicule and abuse. But now he felt no such restraint, and in a series of letters he unleashed his wrath as he seldom had, demonstrating, just as Mercy Warren had said, that his passions could at times overcome his sagacity, but also how deeply she had hurt him.

“What have I done, Mrs. Warren,” he wrote, “to merit so much malevolence from a lady concerning whom I never in my life uttered an unkind word or disrespectful insinuation?”

“Corrupted!” he exploded. “Madam! . . . Corruption is a charge that I cannot and will not bear. I challenge the whole human race, and angels and devils, too, to produce an instance of it from my cradle to this hour!”

He denied still again any “partiality for monarchy” and implied that she was getting even with him for once refusing to give her husband a federal job.

To be charged with a surfeit of ambition cut deepest, it would appear. An overweening ambition was the flaw Adams so often attributed to others, that he warned his sons against, and that privately he recognized in himself. But to see it brought against him in print was another matter. “Ambition . . . is the most lively in the most intelligent and most generous minds,” he asserted. However:

If by ambition you mean love of power or a desire of public offices, I answer I never solicited a vote in my life for any public office. I never swerved from any principle, I never professed any opinion — I never concealed even any speculative opinion — to obtain a vote. I never sacrificed a friend or betrayed a trust. I never hired scribblers to defame my rivals. I never wrote a line of slander against my bitterest enemy, nor encouraged it in any other.

In reply, Mercy Warren protested the “rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written.” When the letters kept coming, she accused him of “vulgarisms” and worse: “There is a meanness as well as malignancy in striving to blast a work that many of the best judges of literary merit . . . have spoken of [as] very flattering to the author.”

The letters finally stopped, and by all signs the lifelong friendship between the Adamses and the Warrens had ended, which was deeply troubling on both sides. In time, however, the break would heal, and correspondence between them would resume.

In the meanwhile, the episode had shown that Adams was quite as capable as ever of furious indignation. The old lion could still roar.

Never wholeheartedly devoted to the task of writing his autobiography, he now abandoned the project altogether and launched into a lengthy — some thought interminable — spate of letters to the Boston Patriot, his last passionate exercise in self-justification. At the start he concentrated on answering the charges leveled by Hamilton in the heat of the 1800 election, then continued on to review his role in foreign affairs, from his difficulties with Franklin in Paris to the dismissal of Timothy Pickering to the XYZ Affair and the missions to France. He became the attorney for the accused — fierce and vivid in defense, writing with exceptional vigor and not a little self-admiration, even occasional wonderment at his own virtuous tenacity in the face of opposition and intrigue.

The letters appeared almost weekly for three years, until Adams, too, it appears, realized how tiresome he had become and called a halt. “Voltaire boasted that he made four presses groan for sixty years, but I have to repent that I made the Patriot groan for three,” he later wrote to a friend, aware that his efforts had been largely in vain.

THE DAILY ROUNDS and established patterns of domestic life continued within the Adams homestead, which had come to be called the Big House — to distinguish it from the other houses by Penn’s Hill — and an eyewitness account written years afterward by a kinsman is notable not only for its portraits of the elderly Abigail and John at home in or about the year 1808, but as evidence that “domestic economy,” too, pertained no less than ever.

Josiah Quincy, a cousin of Abigail’s, was six or seven years old when he began attending Sunday dinners at the Big House, which would have been an ordeal for a boy, he wrote, except for “the genuine kindness of the President, who had not a chip of an iceberg in his composition.”

With Mrs. Adams there was a shade more formality. A consciousness of age and dignity, which was often somewhat oppressive, was customary with old people of that day in the presence of the young. Something of this Mrs. Adams certainly had, though it wore off or came to be disregarded by me, for in the end I was strongly attached to her.

It was with certain pride, too, that he, as a Quincy, saw her as one of the last of the true, old-style New England ladies of another era:

She was always dressed handsomely, and her rich silks and laces seemed appropriate to a lady of her dignified position in the town. If there was a little savor of patronage in the generous hospitality she exercised among her simple neighbors, it was never regarded as more than a natural emphasis of her undoubted claims to precedence. The aristocratic colonial families were still recognized, for the tide of democracy had not risen high enough to cover all its distinctions. The parentage and descent of Mrs. Adams were undoubtedly of weight establishing her position; though, as we now look at things, the strong personal claims of herself and husband would seem to have been all sufficient.

Sunday dinners, served at one o’clock, he remembered as sufficiently plentiful but modest, and beginning invariably with a pudding of cornmeal, molasses, and butter.

This was the custom of the time — it being thought desirable to take the edge off of one’s hunger before reaching the joint [of veal or mutton]. Indeed, it was considered wise to stimulate the young to fill themselves with pudding, by the assurance that the boys who managed to eat the most of it should be helped most abundantly to the meat, which was to follow. It need not be said that neither the winner nor his competitors found much room for meat at the close of their contest; and so the domestic economy of the arrangement was very apparent.

When the time came for the meat course, Louisa Smith did the carving while the President made his contribution in the form of “good-humored, easy banter.” What Adams talked about, his young guest was unable to recall in later years, though he remembered distinctly “a certain iron spoon which the old gentleman once fished up from the depths of a pudding in which it had been unwittingly cooked.”

With dinner ended, nearly all at the table went a second time to church. At tea following church, another guest would recount, topics of conversation could range from religion, politics, and literature, to Mrs. Siddons, Shakespeare, and Benedict Arnold.

Like countless grandparents in all times, Abigail worried that she might be spoiling the grandchildren under her charge. “I begin to think grandparents not so well qualified to educate grandchildren as parents,” she wrote to Nabby. “They are apt to relax in their spirit of government, and be too indulgent.” It was a thought that appears never to have concerned John Adams.

BY THE TIME Jefferson’s second term was under way, Bonaparte had crowned himself the Emperor Napoleon and with his victorious armies had become master of Europe. France and Britain were still at war, and on the high seas both the French and the British were again attacking American commerce, seizing American ships, and impressing American seamen. More than a thousand ships and millions of dollars in goods had been lost, and everywhere in the country debate raged over what to do.

Determined to avoid war, Jefferson called for an embargo on all American shipping, which John Adams, like most New Englanders, saw as a catastrophe for New England, if not the nation. But alone of the Federalists in Congress, John Quincy supported and voted for the embargo as a worthy “experiment,” the same term used by Jefferson.

“If ever a nation was guilty of imprudence, ours has been so in making a naval force and marine preparations unpopular,” Adams wrote to Rush. He thought the embargo “a cowardly measure.” He had always been against embargoes, but he would “raise no clamor” now, “being determined to support the government in whatever hands as far as I can in conscience and honor.”

When Massachusetts Federalists denounced John Quincy as no longer one of the party, Adams wrote to him to say he wished they would denounce him the same way, for he had long since “abdicated and disclaimed the name and character and attributes of that sect, as it now appears.”

The embargo proved a colossal mistake for the country, and a catastrophe for New England. For John Quincy, it meant the end of his Senate career. In 1808 the Massachusetts legislature elected a successor even earlier than they had to, which prompted John Quincy to resign before his term ended. If he or his father ever entertained any thought that Jefferson, before leaving office, might reward John Quincy for the support he had given, they were greatly disappointed, for this was not to happen. It was Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, who after taking office as President, rescued John Quincy from practicing law in Boston by appointing him minister to Russia.

Abigail was crestfallen. She thought the appointment unsuitable and urged John Quincy not to accept. “The period is not yet arrived when your country demands you,” she wrote. Adams differed, as much as he dreaded the thought of John Quincy in St. Petersburg. “As to my son, I would not advise him to refuse to serve his country when fairly called to it,” he told Rush, “but as to myself, I would not exchange the pleasure I have in his society once a week for any office in or under the United States.”

By midsummer of 1809, John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had departed for Russia, taking with them the most recent addition to their family, two-year-old Charles Francis Adams, while eight-year-old George and five-year-old John remained behind in Quincy.

“It was like taking our last leave,” Abigail wrote. The separation, Adams told Rush, tore him to pieces. How long it might be until they saw them again, if ever, there was no telling.

TWO MONTHS LATER, feeling the time was ripe, Rush sent Adams a memorable letter, dated October 17, 1809. With Jefferson also in retirement now, Rush thought it time for a renewal of the old friendship between Adams and Jefferson, and that he, Rush, as the friend of both, could help bring it about. He had been corresponding with Jefferson all along, and thus felt he knew the hearts of both men.

As part of his medical investigations, Rush had a long-standing interest in dreams. Dreams, he told his students, should be allowed to “sport themselves idly” in their brains. Observed, dreams could provide useful inferences. In the course of his correspondence with Adams, Rush had already related several dreams of his own. Now he had another to report. He had a dream of reading a history of America written at some point in the future, and of a particular page saying that among the “most extraordinary events” of the year 1809 was the renewal of friendship and correspondence between the two former presidents, Mr. John Adams and Mr. Thomas Jefferson. And it was Adams, according to Rush’s dream history, who rekindled the old friendship.

Mr. Adams addressed a short letter to his friend Mr. Jefferson in which he congratulated him upon his escape to the shades of retirement and domestic happiness, and concluded it with assurances of his regard and good wishes for his welfare. This letter did great honor to Mr. Adams. It discovered a magnanimity known only to great minds. Mr. Jefferson replied to this letter and reciprocated expressions of regard and esteem. These letters were followed by a correspondence of several years.

Delighted by Rush’s good-natured performance, Adams replied: “A dream again! I wish you would dream all day and all night, for one of your dreams puts me in spirits for a month. I have no other objections to your dream, but that it is not history. It may be prophecy.”

But then Adams did nothing, and no more was said of the matter. Silence between Stoneyfield and Monticello continued.

“OUR READING has been all about Russia,” Adams wrote to John Quincy that winter, when it looked for all the world like Russia outside Adams’s window and the palsy in his hands was “rather increased” by the severe cold. He wrote of the pleasure he was taking in John Quincy’s two sons and of their progress in their studies. He reported on his own son Thomas, who was by now married to Ann Harrod of Haverhill and with his growing family had settled in the old house by Penn’s Hill where Adams had been born; and on Elbridge Gerry, who had lately been elected governor of Massachusetts. In October of 1810, Adams celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday.

He had taken up reading modern epic poems and novels, “romances,” he reported to Rush — Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs — and was finding great enjoyment in them.

“My days glide smoothly away,” he wrote early in the new year of 1811. Snow fell for twelve consecutive days, leaving drifts ten feet high.

“I am well, my appetite as good as ever,” he reported after another six months had passed. “I sleep well nights. My natural vision is not bad, but I use glasses for ease to my eyes. . . . My hearing . . . is as good as ever.” His only difficulties were the “quiveration” in his hands and a loss of voice. “It would divert you to witness conversation between my ancient friend and colleague Robert T. Paine and me. He is above eighty. I cannot speak and he cannot hear. Yet we converse.”

But 1811 was to be an almost unbearably difficult and painful year for the Adamses, indeed, “the most afflictive” year they had known. In April, when his horse reared and threw him, Thomas was so badly injured it was feared he would be crippled for life. By early summer Mary Cranch, who suffered from what was probably tuberculosis, appeared to be dying. Then, Sally, Charles’s widow, began spitting up blood, which as Adams later reported to Benjamin Rush, confined her under the constant care of physicians for three or four months.

One night in September, going out in the dark to view a comet, Adams tripped over a stake in the ground and ripped his leg open to the bone, so that for months he too was confined to the house, a doctor “daily hovering” to bathe and dress the wound.

Abigail, who almost alone of the household remained on her feet, went back and forth across town to the Cranches, nursing her sister as well as those at home. “Neither the morals of Epictetus or the stoic philosophy of the ancients could avail to allay the tumult of grief excited by such a succession of distress,” she wrote to John Quincy.

But greatest was the anguish over Nabby, about whom Abigail said nothing yet to John Quincy, probably to spare him the worry.

Nabby had discovered a “hardness” in her right breast, and had come on to Quincy from the farm in upstate New York where she and Colonel Smith had been living for some while in near poverty. She consulted with Cotton Tufts and several physicians in Boston and wrote to Benjamin Rush for his advice. The Boston doctors all advised the surgical removal of her breast, as did Rush in a thoughtful letter to her father. He preferred giving his opinion this way, Rush told Adams, so that he and Abigail could “communicate it gradually.”

From the experience of more than fifty years in such cases, Rush said, he knew but one remedy, “the knife.” “From her account of the moving state of the tumor, it is now in a proper situation for the operation. Should she wait till it superates or even inflames much, it may be too late. . . . I repeat again, let there be no delay. . . . Her time of life calls for expedition in this business, for tumors such as hers tend much more rapidly to cancer after 45 than in more early life.” Nabby was forty-six.

A mastectomy was performed on Nabby in the bedroom beside that of her mother and father on October 8. As Adams wrote to Rush, the operation took twenty-five minutes, the dressing an hour longer. The agony she endured in that day before anesthetics is unimaginable. The four surgeons who performed the operation told Adams afterward that they had never known a patient to show such fortitude.

Two days later, on October 10, the beloved Richard Cranch died of heart failure at age eighty-five, and the day following, Mary Cranch died at age seventy. For Abigail it was the greatest loss since the death of Charles.

The horror of Nabby’s ordeal brought a marked change in Adams. The old shows of temper were not to be seen again. He became more mellow, more accepting of life, and forgiving. He had felt during Nabby’s agony, he said, as if he were living in the Book of Job.

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Adams heard again from Benjamin Rush, who wished to remind him of a visit Adams had had the summer before from two young men from Virginia. They were brothers named Coles, Albemarle County neighbors of Jefferson’s, and in the course of conversation Adams had at length exclaimed, “I always loved Jefferson and I still love him.” This had been carried back to Monticello, and was all Jefferson needed to hear. To Rush he wrote, “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.”

“And now, my dear friend,” declared Rush to Adams “permit me again to suggest to you to receive the olive branch offered to you by the hand of a man who still loves you.”

On New Year’s Day 1812, seated at his desk in the second-floor library, Adams took up his pen to write a short letter to Jefferson very like the one Rush had prophesied in his dream.

IV

IT WAS A BRIEF, cordial note to wish Jefferson many happy new years, and to say he could expect to receive a bit of “homespun lately produced in this quarter by one who was honored in his youth with some of your attention and much of your kindness.” Posted separately, the “homespun” was a copy of John Quincy’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, but before it could arrive, Jefferson had concluded that it must be some article of home-produced clothing, and so in reply to Adams wrote at length about the virtues of the spinning jenny and loom, and of the thriftiness of household manufactures.

If, as stage-managed by Rush, it had been left to Adams to make the first move, Jefferson more than fulfilled his part. “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” he continued. “It carried me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.”

Jefferson was fond of images of storm-tossed seas and employed them often, as he did now, though in his own travels at sea he himself had known only smooth sailing.

Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.

Like Adams, he claimed to be out of touch with politics, which was hardly so. He was kept abreast regularly by Madison and Monroe, among others. “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid,” he wrote, which was also an overstatement, but one certain to please his fellow classical scholar at Quincy.

Adams answered in high spirits and at greater length than Jefferson had written to him. “What an exchange have you made? Of newspapers for Newton!” he wrote. “Rising from the lower deep of the lowest deep of dullness and bathos to the contemplation of the heavens and the heavens of the heavens.” Responding to Jefferson’s figurative storm at sea, Adams recalled again his own real voyage on the Boston, chased by British frigates, struck by “a hideous tempest of thunder and lightning,” the mainmast split, twenty men down, one dead. It was the story of his life, he said.

“I walk every fair day,” he told Jefferson, “sometimes three and four miles. Ride now and then, but very rarely more than ten or fifteen miles.” The tremble in his hands made it difficult to write at all and impossible to write well, as Jefferson could readily see.

Adams wrote to Rush to report the new state of affairs. “Your dream is out. . . . You have wrought wonders! You have made peace between powers that never were at war,” he said, happy about the news but choosing to make light of it, as if no one was supposed ever to think there had been any serious differences between him and the man he had earlier told Rush was a consummate intriguer. Apparently, Adams was ready now both to forgive and to forget.

Rush was exultant. Nothing could have pleased him more, as he wrote immediately to Adams.

I rejoice in the correspondence which has taken place between you and your old friend Mr. Jefferson. I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all. . . .

I admire, as do all my family, the wonderful vivacity and imagery of your letters. Some men’s minds wear well, but yours doesn’t appear to wear at all! “Oh! King, live forever,” said the eastern nations to their monarchs! Live — live, my venerable friend.

Rush wrote to Jefferson to assure him that posterity would acclaim the reconciliation and that Jefferson was certain to find Adams a refreshing correspondent. “I view him as a mountain with its head clear and reflecting beams of the sun, while below it is frost and snow.”

Within months a half dozen letters had traveled the roads between Quincy and Monticello, and one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history — indeed, in the English language — was under way. In two years’ time fifty letters went back and forth, and this was but the beginning. They wrote of old friends and their own friendship, of great causes past, common memories, books, politics, education, philosophy, religion, the French, the British, the French Revolution, American Indians, the American navy, their families, their health, slavery — eventually — and their considered views on life, society, and always, repeatedly, the American Revolution.

“Who shall write the history of the American Revolution?” Adams asked. “Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”

“Nobody,” Jefferson answered, “except perhaps its external facts.”

The level and range of their discourse were always above and beyond the ordinary. At times memory failed; often hyperbole entered in. Often each was writing as much for posterity as for the other. They were two of the leading statesmen of their time, but also two of the finest writers, and they were showing what they could do.

In fundamental ways each proved consistently true to his nature — they were in what they wrote as they had been through life. Jefferson was far more guarded and circumspect, better organized, dispassionate, more mannered, and refused ever to argue. Adams was warm, loquacious, more personal and opinionated, often humorous and willing to poke fun at himself. When Jefferson wrote of various self-appointed seers and mystics who had taken up his time as president, Adams claimed to have had no problem with such people. “They all assumed the character of ambassadors extraordinary from the Almighty, but as I required miracles in proof of their credentials, and they did not perform any, I never gave public audience to any of them.”

Jefferson wrote as an elegant stylist performing for a select audience, as Adams fully appreciated, telling him his letters should be published for the delight of future generations. Adams wrote as he talked, bouncing subjects about with no thought to organization. Adams later told a friend he had no more thought of publishing a letter as he wrote it than he had of giving an account to the press of his going to bed that night. “I considered when I wrote to Mr. J. that I was not writing psalms . . . nor sermons, nor prayers. It was only, as if one sailor had met a brother sailor, after 25 years absence, and had accosted him, ‘How fare you, Jack?’”

By late spring of 1812, the year the correspondence began, the country was again at war with Great Britain, twenty-nine years after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783. Continuing British impressment of American seamen was the principal issue — “injuries and indignities heaped upon our country,” in the words of President Madison. And though the country was ill prepared to fight, war was declared on June 19. Five days later Napoleon and his Grande Armée invaded Russia, which, with John Quincy and his family in St. Petersburg, was to the Adamses a matter of extreme interest.

If only a few more frigates had been built,Adams wrote to Jefferson, who had cut the navy drastically. “Without this our Union will be a brittle china vase.” But then in August the Constitution defeated the British ship Guerriere off Nova Scotia, and later sank the British frigate Java, near Brazil. The Wasp, an American sloop of war, defeated the Frolic, the Hornet sank the Peacock, and in a letter to Adams, Jefferson generously gave credit where credit was due. “I sincerely congratulate you on the success of our little navy, which must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls.”

As the War of 1812 went on, as Madison was elected for a second term with Elbridge Gerry his Vice President, as the seasons came and went at Quincy and Monticello, the letters continued on. It was not an even exchange. Adams wrote at greater length than Jefferson, and he wrote more often. On average Adams wrote two letters for every one from Jefferson, but this was of no matter to him. During one stretch of several months, Adams wrote twelve times before he had an answer from Jefferson. “Never mind . . . if I write four letters to your one,” Adams told him, “your one is worth more than my four.”

For a while, when addressing letters to Jefferson, Adams would even refer to his farm as “Montezillo.” “Mr. Jefferson lives at Monticello, the lofty mountain. I live at Montezillo, a little hill,” Adams would explain, apparently unaware that both words mean “little mountain.”

At first, Adams tried to draw Jefferson out on a variety of matters important to him. “Whether you or I were right posterity must judge,” Adams would observe equably, then launch headlong into what he thought. “I never have approved and never can approve the repeal of taxes, the repeal of the judiciary system, or the neglect of the navy.” He brought up the Alien Law, claiming absurdly that since Jefferson had signed it, too, as Vice President, he therefore shared in the responsibility for it. “Checks and balances, Jefferson, however you and your party may have ridiculed them, are our only security,” he wrote in another letter.

The patriots of the French Revolution, Adams declared, knowing perfectly well how it would provoke Jefferson, were like drunken sailors on wild horses, “lashing and speering till they would kill the horses and break their own necks.” Recalling the Jacobin threat to America, he accused Jefferson of having been “fast asleep in philosophical tranquility.” “What think you of terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?” Adams demanded, as if he were back in court and Jefferson on the witness stand.

“My friend! You and I have passed our lives in serious times,” he reminded Jefferson, and, as an example, pointed to the all-too-serious perils of sedition contained in the Kentucky Resolutions, unaware that Jefferson had been their author.

“You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote, still trying to draw Jefferson out.

But Jefferson, who must have wondered what he had gotten himself into, refused to engage in wrangling or dispute. “The summum bonum with me is now truly Epicurean, ease of body and tranquility of mind,” he wrote, “and to these I wish to consign my remaining days.”

My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgment of the world, who will judge me by my acts and will never take counsel from me as to what the judgment will be. If your objects and opinions have been misunderstood, if the measures and principles of others have wrongly been imputed to you, as I believe thay have been, that you should leave an explanation of them would be an act of justice to yourself. I will add that it has been hoped you would leave such explanations as would place every saddle on its right horse, and replace on the shoulders of others the burdens they shifted on yours.

But all this, my friend, is offered merely for your consideration and judgment, without presuming to anticipate what you alone are qualified to decide for yourself. I mean to express my own purpose only, and the reflections which have led to it. To me then it appears that there have been differences of opinion, and party differences, from the establishment of governments to the present day, and on the same question which now divides our country, that these will continue through all future times: that everyone takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution and the circumstances in which he is placed, that opinions, which are equally honest on both sides, should not effect personal esteem or social intercourse . . . nothing new can be added by you or me to what has been said by others, and will be said in every age.

Jefferson refused to be drawn out, refused to explain himself, and Adams, accepting this, shifted his focus to other matters much on his mind or dear to his heart.

HAD ADAMS at this time in his life done nothing else but produce the letters he wrote to Jefferson, it would have been remarkable. But he was also actively corresponding with others, including an old Dutch friend from the years in Amsterdam, the Reverend Francis van der Kemp, who had lately settled in upstate New York, and Benjamin Waterhouse, who had become a leading figure at the Harvard Medical School. If a grandchild wrote to him, Adams responded at once, always affectionately and very often with a measure of guiding philosophy drawn from experience.

“Your letter touches my heart,” he wrote to Nabby’s second son, John, who was by now in his twenties. “Oh, that I may always be able to say to my grandsons, ‘You have learned much and behave well, my lads. Go on and improve in everything worthy.’

Have you considered the meaning of that word “worthy”? Weigh it well. . . . I had rather you should be worthy possessors of one thousand pounds honestly acquired by your own labor and industry, than of ten millions by banks and tricks. I should rather you be worthy shoemakers than secretaries of states or treasury acquired by libels in newspapers. I had rather you should be worthy makers of brooms and baskets than unworthy presidents of the United States procured by intrigue, factious slander and corruption.

Nor was there any easing off in the exchange with Rush.

Why was it that a nation without wars to fight seemed to lose its honor and integrity, Adams pondered in one letter to Rush. “War necessarily brings with it some virtues, and great and heroic virtues, too,” he wrote. “What horrid creatures we men are, that we cannot be virtuous without murdering one another?”

Thousands upon thousands were being killed at sea and on the steppes of Russia. An infant grandchild, a son of Thomas, died. “I have been called lately to weep in the chamber of my birth over the remains of a beautiful babe of your brother’s, less than a year old,” he wrote to John Quincy. “Why have I been preserved at more than three quarters of a century, and why was that fair flower blasted so soon, are questions we are not permitted to ask.”

In November of 1812, Rush sent Adams a first copy of what he considered his most important work, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind. For years Rush had been investigating the causes of and remedies for madness and other “diseases” of the mind. “The subjects of them have hitherto been enveloped in mystery,” he wrote to Adams. “I have endeavored to bring them down to the level of all other diseases of the human body, and to show that the mind and body are moved by the same causes and subject to the same laws.” He expected to be chastised by his fellow physicians. “But time I hope will do my opinions justice. I believe them to be true and calculated to lessen some of the greatest evils of human life. If they are not, I shall console myself of having aimed well and erred honestly.”

The book was to become the standard American guide for mental illnesses, and in later years Rush would become known as the father of American psychiatry.

Writing to thank Rush for the volume, Adams assured him it would put mankind still deeper in his debt. “You apprehend ‘attacks.’ I say, the more the better,” Adams declared, speculating that what Rush had written would surpass the writings of Franklin in the good it would do.

Shortly after, in another letter to Rush, Adams described a dreamlike incident in his life, the chance purchase of a young horse that reminded him of America. Lest Rush take it to be the account of a dream, Adams assured him it was the literal truth.

“On horseback on my way to Weymouth on a visit to my friend Dr. Tufts, I met a man leading a horse, who asked if I wanted to buy a horse.

Examining the animal in the eyes, ears, head, neck, shoulders, legs, feet and tail, and inquiring of his master, his age, his history, temper, habits, etc., I found he was a colt of three years old that month of November. His sucking teeth were not shed, he was seventeen or eighteen hands high, bones like massy timbers, ribbed quite to his hips, every way broad, strong, and well filled in proportion; as tame, gentle, good natured and good humored as a cosset lamb. Thinks I to my self, this noble creature is the exact emblem of my dear country. I will have him and call him Hobby. He may carry me five-and-twenty or thirty years if I should live. I ride him every day when the weather suits, but I should shudder if he should ever discover or feel his own power.

Rush was delighted by the story, and in his next letter addressed himself to the horse:

Tread gently and safely, high favored beast, while your master bestrides your back. Shake well every blood vessel of his body, and gently agitate every portion of his brain. Keep up the circulation of his blood for years to come, and excite aphorism and anecdotes and dreams for the instruction and amusements by the action of his brain upon his mind.

But confined to the house in the bitter cold of January 1813, Adams portrayed himself as a case study worthy of Rush’s attention and pity. How much longer could an ancient specimen of seventy-seven years be expected to continue? How many aches and pains and low spirits had he still to endure? How many more of his family must he lose? How many friends must disappear?

The mystery to this ancient creature, Adams continued, was where his life had all gone — stage-by-stage, “away like the morning cloud.” The last twelve years “in solitude” had been the pleasantest of all. “Yet where are they?”

Picturing the “withered, faded, wrinkled, tottering, trembling” stage to come, Adams wrote, “Oh! I have some scruples of conscience whether I ought to preserve him, whether it would not be charity to stumble, and relieve him from such a futurity.”

Weeks later the Adamses learned of the death of another grandchild, Louisa Catherine Adams, who had been born in Russia little more than a year before. Trying to console John Quincy and Louisa Catherine, not to say himself, Adams wrote one letter after another at his desk by the library fire. The universe, he told John Quincy, was “inscrutable and incomprehensible.”

While you and I believe that the whole system is under the constant and vigilant direction of a wisdom infinitely more discerning than ours and a benevolence to the whole and to us in particular greater even than our own self love, we have the highest consolation that reason can suggest or imagination conceive. The same general laws that at times afflict us are in your neighborhood bereaving millions of their fathers, brothers, and sons and millions more of their food and their shelter. In our own country of how many deprivations do we read, and how many savage cruelties. What grounds have we to expect or to hope to be excepted from the general lot. . . . Sorrow can make no alternative, afford no relief to the departed, to survivors or to ourselves.

Another evening, watching granddaughters Susanna and Abigail blowing soap bubbles with one of his clay pipes, he wondered about the “allegorical lesson” of the scene.

They fill the air of the room with their bubbles, their air balloons, which roll and shine reflecting the light of the fire and candles, and are very beautiful. There can be no more perfect emblem of the physical and political and theological scenes of human life.

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

John Quincy wrote from St. Petersburg that on the day his child had died, Moscow was in flames set by its inhabitants as the city was surrendered to Napoleon, and that within less than three months Napoleon’s disastrous retreat had begun — “the invader himself was a wretched fugitive and his numberless host was perishing by frosts, famine, and sword.” Yet none of this, John Quincy told his father, could comfort him in the loss of his own child. “I mourned over the fallen city, and even its fallen conquerors, because I was a man and a Christian, but their fate would neither sharpen nor mitigate my private woe.”

A MONTH into that spring of 1813, word reached Quincy from Philadelphia that Benjamin Rush had died suddenly on April 19, apparently from typhus. “Another of our friends of ‘76 is gone, my dear sir, another of the cosigners of the Independence of our country,” Jefferson wrote to Adams.

“I know of no character living or dead who has done more real good for his country,” Adams answered, borne down with grief. To Rush’s widow he wrote that there was no one outside his own family whose friendship was so essential to his happiness. At sixty-eight Rush had still been seeing patients until a few days before his death. Adams’s last letter to him was written only the day before Rush died. The loss of such a friend, Abigail told Nabby, was a “heavy stroke to your father.”

THE FULL GLORY of spring comes late along coastal Massachusetts, but by the last week of May, Quincy was green and blooming, the air fragrant, and Adams’s outlook greatly revived. In a letter to Francis van der Kemp, urging him to come for a visit, Adams promised to show him “a pretty hill” and “a friendly heart.”

I damn nobody [he wrote]. I am an atom of intellect with millions of solar systems over my head, under my feet, on my right hand, on my left, before me, and my adoration of the intelligence that contrived and the power that rules the stupendous fabric is too profound to believe them capable of anything unjust or cruel.

Callers came and went, one of whom warmed his “friendly heart” as perhaps no one else could have — Captain Samuel Tucker of Marblehead, commander of the Boston on the voyage of 1778, who was now in his sixties and retired from the sea, but robust still and as salty a talker as ever.

Earlier, Adams had vowed to Rush that the admonition “rejoice ever more” would “never be out of my heart, memory, or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it.” This, he had said, was his “perfectibility of man.” Now to John Quincy he wrote, “Rejoice always in all events, be thankful always for all things is a hard precept for human nature, though in my philosophy and in my religion a perfect duty.” In the ensuing months his philosophy and religion were, as Adams said, “brought to trial.”

On July 26, after a journey of fifteen days and three hundred miles from upstate New York, Nabby arrived at Quincy in such weakened condition that she had to be carried inside the house. Her cancer had returned and was spreading, but despite terrible pain, she had insisted on coming home, accompanied by her son John and daughter Caroline, to be with her mother and father in the little time left to her. Colonel Smith was in Washington. Having failed at nearly everything he ever tried, he had lately been elected to Congress.

Upstairs in the house, Sally Adams was critically ill with tuberculosis. Abigail was suffering from rheumatism and physical and emotional exhaustion. “My dear, my only daughter lies in the next chamber, consumed with cancer,” Adams wrote to Francis van der Kemp, “my daughter-in-law, Charles’s widow, lies in the next chamber extremely weak and low. . . . My wife, a valetudinarian through a whole life of 69 years, is worn down with care. In the midst of all this my own eyes are awakened by a venom that threatens to put them out.” Nabby was so emaciated as to be almost unrecognizable; her suffering was extreme. Opium provided her only relief.

The family gathered. Colonel Smith arrived from Washington. “She told her physician that she was perfectly sensible of her situation and reconciled to it,” Abigail later wrote. “Although she was bolstered up in her bed and could neither walk or stand, she was always calm.”

Nabby died before dawn on Sunday, August 15, 1813. She was forty-nine and for most of her life, as Adams would tell Jefferson, she had enjoyed the best health of anyone in the family.

Abigail was shattered. It would be a month before she could write to anyone. “The loss is irreparable,” she said at last in a letter to John Quincy. “Heaven be praised your father and I have been supported through all this solemn scene with fortitude and I hope Christian resignation.”

Death was no stranger to him, Adams wrote. He had lost children and grandchildren and could never think of any of them without pain. His dear Nabby had shown extraordinary courage, he told John Quincy. Her death was a release, the most “magnanimous” he ever witnessed. “I am grateful and resigned.”

Jefferson had earlier sent Adams a “Syllabus” he had prepared on the merit of the doctrines of Jesus, and a discussion of religion had since filled much of their correspondence. Now Adams wrote to Jefferson, “The love of God and His creation, delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existence . . . are my religion.”

By October, emerging from her grief, Abigail was writing to John Quincy of the blessings still left to her. High on the list, she said, was “the life, health and cheerfulness of your father. Bowed down as he has been . . . he has not sunk under it.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

JOURNEY’S END

But weak as was his material frame, his mind was still enthroned.

~Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse

I

CONCERNING SUCH MATTERS as who was to be the next governor of Massachusetts or the next President of the United States, Adams professed to take increasingly less interest. Adverse comments about his own role in public life that appeared occasionally in print, or the “strange” letters he occasionally received, were no longer of any matter to him. They were like insects buzzing about, he told John Quincy. “Their bite in former times tingled, but I am grown almost as insensible as a Boston dray horse in September.”

“I assure you in the sincerity of a father,” he wrote to John Quincy in 1815, “the last fourteen years have been the happiest of my life.” The noticeable improvements he had brought to the farm were highly gratifying. The small, everyday pleasures, the calm, the reassuring sameness of life in and about Quincy had proven as beneficial as the pastoral ideal portrayed by the poets he loved and that he himself had so long pictured as his salvation.

But there was no indifference to the larger world. In a time of tumultuous history unfolding, as war raged at home and abroad and Napoleon’s armies suffered continuing defeat, little escaped Adams’s attention or a goodly measure of his opinion. Reading all they could lay hands on, he and Abigail remained informed as always, and not the least of their reasons was the part John Quincy had been delegated to play in events.

On April 1, 1814, at St. Petersburg, John Quincy received word that he had been appointed a peace envoy to negotiate an end to the War of 1812, and was to proceed at once to Ghent in Flanders (Belgium). It seemed as though history was repeating itself, with John Quincy taking up the same role his father had played at Paris in 1782.

Events were moving fast. On April 11, after further defeat on the battlefield, Napoleon abdicated his throne and went into exile on the island of Elba. The French monarchy was restored under the Comte de Provence, Louis XVIII. In America, on August 24, British troops made a successful assault on Washington, scattered the government, and set fire to the Capitol and the President’s House. American warships had been driven from the sea. The Treasury was empty, the outlook grim.

In December, Federalists from the five New England States, led by Timothy Pickering, met at Hartford to denounce the “ruinous war.” There was even talk of New England seceding from the union. At Ghent the same month, the American commissioners led by John Quincy Adams signed a peace treaty with Britain, news that would not reach the United States until February, by which time Americans under General Andrew Jackson had won a decisive victory, on January 15, at the battle of New Orleans.

Then, on March 1, 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba, landed at Cannes, and with 1,500 men marched on Paris, thus beginning the fateful “100 days” that ended with Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo on June 18. Within days he was on his way to the British island of St. Helena for the remainder of his life.

The Napoleonic Wars were over, and John Quincy, after a brief sojourn in Paris, moved on to London to serve, again like his father, as minister to the Court of St. James’s.

As dark as prospects had appeared during the war at home, Adams never lost confidence, even as the British advanced on Washington. He had known worse times, he said. He had seen Congress “chased like a covey of partridges” from Philadelphia, and “we had ropes about our necks then.” The very thought of New England leaving the Union, he found outrageous. As always, he took a national, not sectional, view of the country, and strongly supported President Madison.

That the likes of Napoleon came to bad ends was among the lessons of history. Concerning America’s place in the world, Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush’s son Richard, who had lately become Attorney General of the United States, “We must learn to know ourselves, to esteem ourselves, to respect ourselves.”

“At this time we are very anxious to hear every day, if we could, what is passing abroad,” Abigail wrote John Quincy, still having no idea where he was. “Never was there a period when curiosity was more alive, or expectation more eager, or anxiety more active.”

Letters from John Quincy written in Paris months before began arriving at last on May 6, one of the most joyful days of her life, Abigail exclaimed. And more followed through the summer, recounting the ups and downs of Napoleon and the changing moods of Paris. “I seem to be rambling with you to the Hôtel de Valois, the Hôtel du Roi,” Adams wrote in reply. Had John Quincy been to Passy yet? Or Auteuil or Versailles?

As requested, the Adamses parted with grandsons George and John, who sailed for London to join their parents and brother Charles Francis, from whom they had been separated for nearly six years. The departure of the two boys left both grandparents feeling desolate. They must keep diaries, Adams told them as once he had told their father. Without a diary, their travels would “be no better than a flight of birds through the air,” leaving no trace.

To John Quincy he kept up a steady flow of private ruminations, advice, and the suggestion that he take time for a tour of the English country gardens. He must purchase Whatley’s book on modern gardening, bring his sons “and your lady, too, if she chooses,” Adams wrote, “and visit the gentlemen’s country seats.”

Abigail sent John Quincy her own approving evaluation of each of the “dear boys,” and the wish that his and Louisa Catherine’s joy in seeing them again would equal the pain she felt at parting with them.

“DEATH IS SWEEPING his scythe all around us, cutting down our old friends and brandishing it over us,” Adams wrote a year later, in the summer of 1816. Abigail’s sister Elizabeth, the last of her family, had died. Robert Treat Paine and Vice President Elbridge Gerry were gone, Gerry dying of a heart attack while riding in his carriage to the Senate. The death of Cotton Tufts, in December 1815, was another heavy blow. “Winter in this country is still winter, and carries off a few hundred of our oldest people,” observed Adams, who had turned eighty.

Abigail prepared her will, parceling out among children, grandchildren, and her niece, Louisa Smith, her silk gowns and jewelry, a white lace shawl, beds, blankets, and some $4,000. In addition, to her two sons she left two equal parcels of land she had inherited.

Six months later, in June of 1816, came word that Colonel Smith, too, was no longer among the living.

Jefferson, in his continuing correspondence with Adams, had observed that old and worn as they were they must expect that “here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give way.” There was nothing to be done about it. Meanwhile, he wrote, “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.”

Their exchange of views remained a sustaining exercise for both men. Whatever the state of their physical “pinions and springs,” there was nothing whatever wrong with their minds, nor any decline in the respect each had for the other’s talents and learning. Having run on for several pages about Cicero, Socrates, and the contradictions in Plato, Jefferson asked, “But why am I dosing you with these antediluvian topics? Because I am glad to have someone to whom they are familiar, and who will not receive them as if dropped from the moon.”

Jefferson had offered to sell his private library to the government in Washington to replace the collection of the Library of Congress destroyed by the British when they burned the Capitol. It was both a magnanimous gesture and something of a necessity, as he was hard-pressed to meet his mounting debts. After prolonged debate in Congress, a figure of $23,950 was agreed to, and in April 1815 ten wagons carrying 6,707 volumes packed in pine cases departed from Monticello. When Adams learned what Jefferson had done, he wrote, “I envy you that immortal honor.”

Jefferson immediately commenced to collect anew. He could “not live without books,” he told Adams, who understood perfectly. They remained two of the greatest book lovers of their bookish generation. Adams’s library numbered 3,200 volumes. People sent him books, “overwhelm me with books from all quarters,” as he wrote to Jefferson. Yet he wished he had 100,000. He longed particularly, he said, for a work in Latin available only in Europe, titled Acta Sanctorum, in forty-seven volumes, on the lives of the saints compiled in the sixteenth century. “What would I give to possess in one immense mass, one stupendous draught, all the legends, true and false.”

Unable to sleep as long as Abigail, he would be out of bed and reading by candlelight at five in the morning, and later would read well into the night. When his eyes grew weary, she would read aloud to him.

Unlike Jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestley. “There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them . . .,” Adams read in Rousseau. “The government ought to be what the people make it,” he wrote in response.

At times his marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution, which Adams read at least twice and with delight, since he disagreed with nearly everything she said. To her claim that government must be simple, for example, he answered, “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels . . . but it would not tell the time of day.” On a blank page beside the contents, he wrote, in part:

If [the] empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown, happy indeed will it be for the world; but if all religion and all morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained? The doctrine of human equality is founded entirely in the Christian doctrine that we are all children of the same Father, all accountable to Him for our conduct to one another, all equally bound to respect each other’s self love.

In all, in this one book, Adams’s marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words.

To the pronouncements of the French philosophes in particular, he would respond with an indignant “Nonsense” or “Fool! Fool!” But he could also scratch in an approving “Good” or “Very Good” or an emphatic “Excellent!”

“Your father’s zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him,” Abigail observed to John Quincy in the spring of 1816, as Adams eagerly embarked on a sixteen-volume French history.

TWO PORTRAITS of the Adamses by Gilbert Stuart, painted when Adams was President but never delivered, were added to the walls at Quincy after Adams decided to go himself to Stuart’s Boston studio and bring them home. The portrait of Adams, Abigail thought quite admirable. But hers, she told John Quincy, would be recognizable only to those who had known her twenty years before. Her hair had since turned entirely white and she had so “fallen away” as to be “but a spectre” of what she once was.

At the July 4 celebration in Boston that summer of 1816, Adams looked about and realized he was nearly the last of the generation of 1776, and the only “signer” present.

He and Abigail lived for John Quincy’s return, as they made plain. When during that autumn of 1816 it appeared that James Monroe was to be the next President and newspapers were reporting John Quincy the choice for Secretary of State, Adams sent off a letter to London saying he hoped it was true and that John Quincy would accept the office and come home. If not true, Adams hoped he would come home anyway. Later, with still no word from London, Abigail was more emphatic. “The voice of the nation calls you home,” she wrote. “The government calls you home — and your parents unite in the call. To this summons you must not, you cannot, refuse your assent.”

By the summer of 1817, when President Monroe, on a tour of New England, came to Quincy to dine with the Adamses on the evening of July 7, they entertained forty guests for dinner but could report nothing of their son’s intentions, as there was still no word from him. It was not until July 15 that they learned from Richard Rush that the appointment had been accepted, and not until the second week of August that a letter arrived from John Quincy himself, saying he and his family were safely landed at New York.

“Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole long life,” Adams wrote his son. “A thousand occasions exalted delight . . . a succession of warm showers all day, my threshers, my gardeners, and my farmers all behaved better than usual, and altogether kept me in a kind of trance of delight the whole day.”

“God be thanked,” Abigail wrote. “Come then all of you.”

IN THE HISTORY of the Adams family there was probably no more joyous homecoming than took place in the heat of midmorning on August 18, 1817, when John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and their three sons came over the hill from Milton in a coach-and-four trailing a cloud of dust.

As Abigail recorded, Louisa Smith was the first to see them coming and begin shouting. Abigail hurried to the door. First out of the coach was young John, who ran to her, followed by George calling, “Oh, Grandmother, oh, Grandmother.” Ten-year-old Charles Francis, with no memory of his grandparents, approached with caution. “By this time father and mother were both out, and mutually rejoicing with us,” Abigail wrote. John Quincy had been away for eight years.

At a party given by Abigail that evening, her long drawing room was crowded with neighbors and relatives, one of whom, young Eliza Susan Quincy, described John Quincy as the focus of attention, seated at the end of the room, everyone “rather in awe of him.” At age fifty, he had already served as minister to the Netherlands and Prussia, as United States senator, Harvard professor, minister to Russia and Great Britain, and was soon to assume the second-most-important office in the government. In view of the fact that the past three Presidents in a row — Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe — had earlier served as Secretary of State, it was already being said that the presidency was his destiny, too.

II

THE MONTHS that followed, despite another severe winter and the increasing aggravations of old age, were as happy a time for the Adamses as any in their years of retirement. While John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had departed for Washington, the three grandsons remained nearby — George at Harvard, John and Charles Francis in school in Boston. After dining at Quincy in mid-January 1818, Benjamin Waterhouse reported to John Quincy that his parents seemed in splendid health, but his father in particular. “I never saw your father in better spirits. I really believe that your return to America with all its honorable consequences has not only brightened his chain of life, but added links to it.”

It was “very cold and the snow falling fast,” Abigail wrote to Louisa Catherine, delighted by the spectacle. “It is now a foot or more deep. Winter appears to have set in, with all its beauties.” No President, she was sure, had ever had such a fine or harder-working Secretary of State as her son, Abigail continued in another letter to Louisa Catherine, written in May as her plum trees were blooming and the first peas “looking up newly arrived to daylight.” His father lived for John Quincy’s letters and to write to him in return, difficult as that had become for him.

Through the summer Abigail maintained strength and pleasure in life, by all accounts. John Quincy and Louisa Catherine returned for a much-needed vacation, and several of those who came to call at about this time would remember Abigail seated on a couch sorting a basket of laundry or shelling beans as she talked. “I found a freedom in conversation [with her]. . . . She was possessed of the history of our country and the great occurrences in it,” wrote the noted Salem clergyman William Bently. “She had a distinct view of our public men and measures and had her own opinions.”

But in October, Abigail was taken seriously ill. The diagnosis was typhoid fever, and she was told to remain perfectly still and try not to speak.

“The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years as a wife, and for many years more as a lover, now lies in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to,” Adams wrote in anguish to Jefferson on October 20. The day following, Benjamin Waterhouse sent off a letter to John Quincy advising him to be prepared for the worst. “She has recovered from a similar state once before, and she may again, but typhoid . . . at 74 years of age is enough to create alarm.”

Friends and neighbors took turns with Adams, son Thomas, and niece Louisa Smith at Abigail’s bedside. She was dosed with quinine and Madeira by her physician, Amos Holbrook, and for a day or so she seemed to improve. “Your mother was pronounced so much better this morning that your father has resumed his book,” wrote a friend, Harriet Welsh, to John Quincy and Louisa Catherine. But in another day Abigail had taken a turn for the worse.

On Monday morning, October 26, as Adams sat with her, she spoke for the first time. She told him she was dying and that if it was the will of Heaven, she was ready. She had no wish to live except for his sake.

“He came down,” wrote Harriet Welsh, who was waiting on the first floor, “and said in his energetic manner, ‘I wish I could lie down beside her and die, too.’” “The whole of her life has been filled up doing good,” Adams told the others who were gathered. “I cannot bear to see her in this state.”

Returning to her room later, Adams was trembling so much that he could not stand and had to take a chair, but then seeing that Louisa Smith was in worse distress, he got up and went to her side to tell her they must be strong.

Abigail died at approximately one o’clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, October 28, 1818. She was, according to her son Thomas, “seemingly conscious until her last breath.”

She was buried on November 1. Adams insisted on walking in the procession to the meetinghouse, and except for a momentary dizziness due to the unseasonable heat of the day, he went through “all the rest,” as Thomas wrote, “with great composure and serenity.”

BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE’S letter warning John Quincy to be prepared for the worst had not reached Washington until the day before his mother’s death, and it was not until the day after her funeral that he learned she was gone, “the tenderest and most affectionate of mothers,” as he wrote to his father. “How shall I offer consolation for your loss, when I feel that my own is irreparable?”

“Gracious God! Support my father in this deep and irreparable affliction!” he wrote in his diary.

My mother . . . was a minister of blessing to all human beings within her sphere of action. . . . She had no feelings but of kindness and beneficence. Yet her mind was as firm as her temper was mild and gentle. She . . . has been to me more than a mother. She has been a spirit from above watching over me for good, and contributing by my mere consciousness of her existence, to the comfort of my life. . . . Never have I known another human being, the perpetual object of whose life, was so unremittingly to do good.

“My ever dear, ever affectionate, ever dutiful and deserving son,” Adams wrote, in the first letter he could manage:

The bitterness of death is past. The grim spider so terrible to human nature has no sting left for me.

My consolations are more than I can number. The separation cannot be so long as twenty separations heretofore. The pangs and the anguish have not been so great as when you and I embarked for France in 1778.

All Quincy was in mourning. “The tidings of her illness were heard with grief in every house, and her death is felt as a common loss,” the Reverend Peter Whitney had said without exaggeration at the funeral service.

Madame Adams possessed a mind elevated in its views and capable of attainments above the common order of intellects. . . . But though her attainments were great, and she had lived in the highest walks of society and was fitted for the lofty departments in which she acted, her elevation had never filled her soul with pride, or led her for a moment to forget the feelings and the claims of others.

The obituary notice in Boston’s Columbian Centinel emphasized her importance to her husband’s career in public service and thus to the nation:

Possessing at every period of life, the unlimited confidence, as well as affection of her husband, she was admitted at all times to share largely of his thoughts. While, on the one hand, the activity of her mind, and its thorough knowledge of all branches of domestic economy, enabled her almost wholly to relieve him from the cares incident to the concerns of private life; on the other, she was a friend whom it was his delight to consult in every perplexity of public affairs; and whose counsels never failed to partake of that happy harmony which prevailed in her character; in which intuitive judgment was blended with consummate prudence; the spirit of conciliation, with the spirit of her station, and the refinement of her sex. In the storm, as well as the smooth sea of life, her virtues were ever the object of his trust and veneration.

Letters of condolence arrived for Adams, including one from Jefferson, who had himself been gravely ill. Time and silence were the only medicines, he counseled Adams. “God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.”

“While you live,” Adams answered, “I seem to have a bank at Monticello on which I can draw for a letter of friendship and entertainment when I please.

I believe in God and in his wisdom and benevolence [he continued], and I cannot conceive that such a Being could make such a species as the human merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe in a future state, I should believe in no God. This universe, this all, this [”totality”] would appear with all its swelling pomp, a boyish firework.

That he had been blessed in a partnership with one of the most exceptional women of her time, Adams never doubted. Her letters, he was sure, would be read for generations to come, and with this others strongly agreed. Years later Louisa Catherine, who had not always enjoyed a close or easy relationship with her mother-in-law, would say that it was especially in the letters of Abigail Adams that “the full benevolence of an exceptional heart and the strength of her reasoning capacity” were to be found. “We see her ever as the guiding planet around which all revolved performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power.”

To his granddaughter Caroline, Adams would write of Abigail’s “virtues of the heart.” Never “by word or look” had she discouraged him from “running all hazards” for their country’s liberties. Willingly, bravely, she had shared with him “in all the dangerous consequences we had to hazard.”

For years afterward, whenever complimented about John Quincy and his role in national life, and the part he had played as father, Adams would say with emphasis, “My son had a mother!”

III

TWO WEEKS after Abigail’s death, the painter John Trumbull, as well as several of the Quincy family, insisted that Adams go with them to Boston — “carried me off by storm,” he reported to John Quincy — to view Trumbull’s enormous new painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Commissioned by Congress for the rotunda at the Capitol, it was on tour through several cities and was now on display at Faneuil Hall.

In preparation for an earlier, much smaller version of the scene, Trumbull had painted studies from life of thirty-six of the signers, including Adams, whom Trumbull sketched in London. If there was anyone who ought to see the colossal new rendition, measuring twelve by eighteen feet, it was surely Adams. Also, it was hoped the excursion to town would do him good.

The arrival of Adams at Faneuil Hall was described that night in her journal by Eliza Susan Quincy, herself an artist, who was among those riding with him. “Colonel Trumbull came to the carriage door . . . assisted Mr. Adams to alight and offered his arm to descend the steps. But Mr. Adams pushed him aside and insisted in handing Mrs. Quincy up the stairs and into Faneuil Hall, in which many persons had assembled.” The aged Adams standing before the painting, gazing silently at “the great scene in which he had borne a conspicuous place,” was a sight long remembered.

In composing the picture, Trumbull had placed Adams at the exact center foreground, as if to leave no doubt about his importance. Hand on hip, Adams looked stout but erect, the expression on his face, one of bold confidence and determination. Beside him, facing the desk where John Hancock sat in the president’s chair, were Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Jefferson, and Franklin, all dead now except Jefferson, who in the painting held the Declaration in his hands.

Ranged behind were forty-seven of the fifty-six delegates who had signed the Declaration, each quite recognizable, including Adams’s favorite, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, standing at the rear with his Quaker hat on.

What Adams thought as he looked at the painting will never be known. A few years earlier, hearing that Trumbull was to undertake such a commission, Adams had lectured him on the importance of accuracy. “Truth, nature, fact, should be your sole guide,” Adams had said. “Let not our posterity be deluded with fictions under the pretense of poetical or graphical license.” Further, he had expressed concern over the projected size of the painting. “The dimensions, 18 by 12, appear vast. . . . I have been informed that one of the greatest talents of a painter is a capacity to comprehend a large space, and to proportion all his figures in it.” During his years in Europe, Adams recalled, he had never passed through Antwerp without stopping to see the paintings of Rubens. “I cannot depend upon my memory to say that even his Descent from the Cross or his Apotheosis of the Virgin exceeded these measures.”

Clearly, Trumbull was no Rubens, and concern for accuracy had not been a major consideration. No such scene, with all the delegates present, had ever occurred at Philadelphia.

His audience in Faneuil Hall waited for Adams’s response. Then, pointing to a door in the background, on the right side of the painting, he said only, “When I nominated George Washington of Virginia for Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, he took his hat and rushed out that door.”

Possibly it was Adams’s old vanity that prompted the remark — to remind those gathered of how much else he had done of importance in that room in Philadelphia — or perhaps, confronted all at once with so many faces from the past, he was reminded of the all-important man whose face was not to be seen. Afterward, in a note to John Quincy, Adams remarked only on how cold it had been in the hall and that he had “caught the pip [a sore throat] as a result.”

John Quincy was vexed — “forgive me my dear father for saying it” — that Adams had not paid greater homage to the “mighty consequences” of July 4, 1776. “It was not merely the birthday of a powerful nation. It was the opening of a new era in the history of mankind.” As for the painting, which he had already seen, John Quincy thought it highly disappointing, no more than a collection of interesting portraits, “cold and unmeaning.” But then in capturing so sublime a scene, even a Raphael or a Michelangelo would have been inadequate, he was sure.

“All is now still and tranquil,” Adams wrote to Jefferson as the year ended. “There is nothing to try men’s souls. . . . And I say, God speed the plough, and prosper stone wall.”

TO THE GREAT DELIGHT of everyone around him, Adams remained remarkably healthy and good-spirited. In the exchange of correspondence with Jefferson he continued to be by far the more productive, sending off thirteen letters to Monticello in the year 1819, for example, or more than two for every one from Jefferson.

To his immense pleasure, his Dutch friend, Francis van der Kemp, came for a visit of several days. Writing to Jefferson, Adams described Van der Kemp as “a mountain of salt of the earth.”

With Nabby and Abigail gone, Louisa Catherine filled a great need in his life, writing to him steadily and with affection, and welcoming what he wrote in return. Concerned about the trials she would face as the wife of so prominent a public man, Adams cautioned her to study stoicism. But who was he to preach stoicism, she responded warmly. “You, my dear sir, have ever possessed a nature too ardent, too full of benevolent feelings . . . to sink into the cold and thankless state of stoicism. Your heart is too full of all the generous and kindly affections for you ever to acquire such a cold and selfish doctrine.”

John Quincy’s achievements as Secretary of State were proving all that a proud father could hope for. When the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 added Spanish Florida to the United States, the old President in Quincy proclaimed it a blessing “beyond all calculation,” largely for the ways it might serve American naval operations.

His enjoyment of his family never diminished. He kept close watch on how George, John, and Charles Francis were progressing in their education. To help his son Thomas, who was having a difficult time supporting his wife and five children — but also for his own pleasure — Adams insisted they move in with him. When it was said he deserved to be known as the father of the American navy, Adams answered that he was father of enough as it was, with two sons, fourteen grandchildren, and five great grandchildren, all of whom required his attention and support.

He loved company, the house full. He was rarely without aches and pains and suffered spells of poor health. Some days were extremely difficult. But he could still ride horseback, at nearly eighty-five, and on “rambles” over the farm or his walks about town he sometimes covered three miles.

He never tired of the farm. He loved every wall and field, loved its order and productiveness, the very look of it. “My crops are more abundant than I expected,” he would write one September. “I have the most beautiful cornfield I ever saw. It is drawn up like an army in array, in a long line before my house.”

His appetite strong, he delighted in the plain, substantial fare of the family table. As he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “We go on . . . eating fat turkeys, roast beef — and Indian pudding — and more than that, mince pies and plum pudding in abundance, besides cranberry tarts.”

In the hours he spent alone, reading, thinking, or just looking out the window by his desk, he found an inner peace, even a sense of exhilaration such as he had seldom known. Old poems, ballads, books he had read many times over, gave greater pleasure than ever. “The Psalms of David, in sublimity, beauty, pathos, and originality, or in one word poetry, are superior to all the odes, hymns, and songs in any language,” he told Jefferson. He had read Cicero’s essay on growing old gracefully, De Senectute, for seventy years, to the point of nearly knowing it by heart, but never had it given such joy as on his most recent reading, he told another correspondent.

For as I like a young man in whom there is something of the old [ran a famous passage], so I like an old man in whom there is something of the young; and he who follows this maxim, in body will possibly be an old man but he will never be an old man in mind.

The simplest, most ordinary things, that in other times had seemed incidentals, could lift his heart and set his mind soaring. The philosophy that with sufficient knowledge all could be explained held no appeal. All could not be explained, Adams had come to understand. Mystery was essential. “Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good,” he wrote in the margin of one of his books, “but never assume to comprehend.”

Even the punctuation of a page, or the spelling of an individual word, could seem infinitely beautiful to him as part of what he had come to see as “this wonderful whole.

I never delighted much in contemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measuring syllables; but now . . . if I attempt to look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way, among the nebulae, those mighty orbs, and stupendous orbits of suns, planets, satellites, and comets, which compose the incomprehensible universe; and if I do not sink into nothing in my own estimation, I feel an irresistible impulse to fall on my knees, in adoration of the power that moves, the wisdom that directs, and the benevolence that sanctifies this wonderful whole.

The view from his window the morning after one of the worst March storms on record filled him with ecstasy, despite the damage done to his trees. It was “the most splendid winter scene ever beheld,” Adams wrote.

A rain had fallen from some warmer region in the skies when the cold here below was intense to an extreme. Every drop was frozen wherever it fell in the trees, and clung to the limbs and sprigs as if it had been fastened by hooks of steel. The earth was never more universally covered with snow, and the rain had frozen upon a crust on the surface which shone with the brightness of burnished silver. The icicles on every sprig glowed in all the luster of diamonds. Every tree was a chandelier of cut glass. I have seen a Queen of France with eighteen millions of livres of diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub. The whole world was glittering with precious stones.

• • •

IN LATE 1820, at age eighty-five, Adams found himself chosen as a delegate to a state convention called to revise the Massachusetts constitution that he had drafted some forty years before.

“The town of Quincy has been pleased to elect me a member of the Convention — and wonderful to relate — the election is said to be unanimous. . . . I am sufficiently advanced in my dotage to have accepted the choice,” he reported to Louisa Catherine. “I feel not much like a maker or mender of constitutions, in my present state of imbecility. . . . But I presume we shall not be obliged to carry windmills by assault.” But in what was to be his last public effort, in a speech considered “very remarkable” for its energy and conviction, Adams boldly offered an amendment guaranteeing complete religious freedom in the commonwealth. As he believed that all were equal before God, so he believed that all should be free to worship God as they pleased. In particular, he wanted religious freedom for Jews, as he had written earlier to a noted New York editor, Mordecai Noah, who had sent him a discourse delivered at the consecration of a synagogue in New York.

“You have not extended your ideas of the right of private judgment and the liberty of conscience both in religion and philosophy farther than I do,” Adams wrote in appreciation.

I have had occasion to be acquainted with several gentlemen of your nation and to transact business with some of them, whom I found to be men of as liberal minds, as much as honor, probity, generosity, and good breeding as any I have known in any seat of religion or philosophy.

I wish your nation to be admitted to all the privileges of citizens in every country in the world. This country has done much, I wish it may do more, and annul every narrow idea in religion, government, and commerce.

Jefferson wrote to tell Adams he “rejoiced” at the news that Adams had “health and spirits enough” to take part in such an effort in the “advance of liberalism.” On arrival at the convention, Adams had received a standing ovation. But his amendment failed to pass. Blaming himself, he told Jefferson, “I boggled and blundered more than a young fellow just rising to speak at the bar.” But to young Josiah Quincy, who came by frequently to visit, Adams spoke with regret of the intolerance of Christians.

Josiah, a student at Harvard, was to keep Adams company over several years, spending summers as Adams’s secretary, and in his diary he devoted frequent entries to “the President” and his observations on life. “Visited the President as usual,” he wrote at the end of one session. “He was quite amusing, and gave us anecdotes of his life. He was particularly funny in an account of an interview he had with the Turkish ambassador [the envoy from Tripoli] in England. . . .” Another time Adams stressed the need for “commotion” in life, to keep it from going stagnant. “For my own part,” he exclaimed, “I should not like to live to the Millennium. It would be the most sickish life imaginable.”

One June evening, when Adams came to call on the Quincys and brought along a letter from Jefferson to read aloud, he was asked to explain how he could possibly be on such good terms with Jefferson, after all the abuse he had suffered from him. According to Josiah’s diary, Adams replied as follows:

I do not believe that Mr. Jefferson ever hated me. On the contrary, I believe he always liked me: but he detested Hamilton and my whole administration. Then he wished to be President of the United States, and I stood in his way. So he did everything that he could to pull me down. But if I should quarrel with him for that, I might quarrel with every man I have had anything to do with in life. This is human nature. . . . I forgive all my enemies and hope they may find mercy in Heaven. Mr. Jefferson and I have grown old and retired from public life. So we are upon our ancient terms of goodwill.

Indeed, Adams had become sufficiently confident in their “ancient goodwill” to broach the subject of slavery. In 1819, with Congress in debate over whether to admit Missouri into the union as a slave state, Adams had expressed the hope to Jefferson that the issue might “follow the other waves under the ship and do no harm.” Yet he worried. “I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American empire,” but a struggle between the states over slavery “might rend this mighty fabric in twain.”

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 — whereby Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine (until then part of Massachusetts) as a free state, and slavery excluded in the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36°30’ — left Adams in torment over the future. She would think him mad were he to describe “the calamities that slavery was likely to produce in the country,” he wrote to Louisa Catherine. He imagined horrible massacres of blacks killing whites, and in their turn, whites slaughtering blacks until “at last the whites exasperated to madness shall be wicked enough to exterminate the Negroes.”

All possible humanity should be shown the blacks, he told another correspondent. And while he did not know what the solution to the presence of slavery should be, he was certain it should not be allowed to expand. He was “utterly adverse” to the admission of slavery into Missouri, which was in exact opposition to Jefferson, who favored it. Slavery, he now told Jefferson, was the black cloud over the nation. He had a vision of “armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in armor.” Yet he knew not what to do.

I have been so terrified with this phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the southern gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments. What we are to see God knows, and I leave it to him and his agents in posterity. I have none of the genius of Franklin, to invent a rod to draw from the cloud its thunder and lightning.

Jefferson, who believed that slavery was a “moral and political depravity,” nonetheless refused to free his own slaves and gave no public support to emancipation. “This enterprise is for the young,” he wrote to a young Albemarle County neighbor who was freeing his slaves and urged Jefferson to “become a Hercules against slavery.”

In response to Adams’s impassioned letter of foreboding, Jefferson said nothing. To others, however, he wrote privately at some length. He favored gradual emancipation and eventual colonization for the slaves. Should they ever be set free all at once, Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin, “all whites south of the Potomac and the Ohio must evacuate their states, and most fortunate those who can do it first.” But with Adams he avoided any discussion of the subject.

When, in his next letter, Adams suggested that in addition to the military academy at West Point, which had been established during Jefferson’s presidency, there ought to be a naval academy, Jefferson replied at once in agreement.

Jefferson’s own great preoccupation, his all-consuming interest for several years now, was the establishment of a new university for Virginia at Charlottesville. It was one of the proudest efforts of his life, and he was involved in every aspect, organizing the curriculum, choosing the site, and designing the buildings. Once construction was under way, he kept watch from his mountaintop by telescope. The full complex, when finished, would be his architectural masterpiece. The faculty, as he told Adams proudly, would be drawn from the great seats of learning in Europe.

Adams, who had no project to keep him occupied, said Jefferson’s university was surely “noble employment.” He did not, however, approve of sending abroad for professors when, as he told Jefferson, there were a sufficient number of American scholars with more active, independent minds than to be found in Europe.

The two old correspondents continued to write of their declining health and persistent ailments, of old memories and the death of friends, but the letters grew fewer in number, and there was much about each of their lives that they kept to themselves.

Jefferson told Adams nothing of the new house he had built at his other plantation, Poplar Forest, or that Monticello, as visitors noted, was going to decay. He made no mention of his worsening financial straits and said not a word ever on the subject of Sally Hemings and her children. Indeed, he never referred to his slaves or the fact that his entire way of life was no less dependent on them than ever. Nor did he say anything of the dreadful turmoil within his own household — of the erratic behavior of his son-in-law, Martha’s husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, or of the grandson-in-law, Charles Bankhead, who was subject to violent alcoholic rages.

But then neither did Adams write of his own increasing worry and sorrow over his son Thomas, who, having failed in the law, was drinking heavily and employed now primarily as a caretaker for his father and the farm. John Quincy’s son Charles Francis, writing of his uncle Thomas, described him as “one of the most unpleasant characters in this world . . . a brute in manners and a bully in his family.”

The question of how two of his sons, Charles and Thomas, could have so sadly fallen by the wayside, while John Quincy so conspicuously excelled could only have weighed heavily on Adams’s mind. But of this, for all that he wrote on nearly everything else, he wrote nothing. The closest he seems to have come in blaming himself was in a letter to John Quincy admonishing him that “children must not be wholly forgotten in the midst of public duties.”

VISITORS CONTINUED to call out of curiosity or genuine friendship, and Adams took pleasure in nearly all. Only occasionally would some leave him feeling low and more alone than before. Of one couple he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “They had eyes and ears to perceive the external person, but not feelings to sympathize with the internal griefs, pains, anxieties, solitudes, and inquietudes within.” But he refused to complain.

The morning of August 14, 1821, 200 West Point cadets, an entire corps, who were touring New England, marched out from Boston to parade past the Adams house, colors flying and band playing. Half the town turned out for the excitement. Adams, who stood watching from the porch, had provided breakfast for the cadets at his own expense. Tables were set up under an open tent. When they had stacked their arms and lined up before him, Adams made a brief speech, his voice faint at first but growing stronger as he went on. It was the example of the character of George Washington that they should keep before them, he said.

His remarks finished, the band played a tune called “Adams and Liberty,” while he beat time to the music. At the last, when all 200 cadets came up onto the porch one by one, Adams shook hands with each. “President Adams seemed highly gratified,” recorded Eliza Susan Quincy.

IV

IF ADAMS’S LIFE — indeed, Adams himself — could be defined by what was left to him that he loved, there was still a great deal to the life and to the man, and he was extremely grateful. “No man has more cause for gratitude,” he assured Louisa Catherine.

He had his library room, where he slept now among his treasured books. On the table beside his reading chair were the latest novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, the sermons of Bishop Joseph Butler, along with Pascal’s Provincial Letters.

He had almost continuous company and thrived on it. “In the evening I . . . [went] to the President’s and found the old gentleman well and lively,” reads one entry in Josiah Quincy’s diary. “I scarcely ever saw him look better or converse with more spirit,” reads another. One June evening at the Quincys’, having talked more than anyone, Adams declared happily, “If I was to come here once a day, I should live half a year longer,” to which the family said he must therefore come twice a day and live a year longer. The next day he was back again.

His pride in John Quincy knew no bounds. If he was writing to him less frequently, Adams explained, it was for good reason. “I know that you would answer every scratch of a pen from me, but I know the importance of your occupations and your indefatigable attentions to them, and no trifling letter from me should divert your mind. . . .” The weeks in summer when John Quincy and Louisa Catherine returned home were invariably the summit of the year for the old man.

He wrote regularly to his grandsons on all manner of subjects, from books to the therapeutic benefits of riding horseback to the importance of maintaining one’s independence through life. To Charles Francis he issued a summons to make of himself all that was possible. “Arouse your courage, be determined to be something in the world,” Adams wrote. “You have a fine capacity, my dear boy, if you will exert it. You are responsible to God and man for a fine genius, a talent which is not to be buried in the earth.”

In the spring of 1823, when John was expelled from Harvard, along with fifty others of the senior class for taking part in a student riot, Adams, in an effort to intercede in his behalf, explained to his mother that he could not find it in his own heart to reproach the boy, since he “did no more than all the rest, nor so much as many,” and urged Louisa Catherine to “receive him tenderly, and forgive him kindly.”

The affection Adams felt for Jefferson was expressed repeatedly and often with touching candor. When an old private letter of Adams’s attacking Jefferson turned up in print, to Adams’s extreme embarrassment, Jefferson proved that the friendship meant no less to him. “It would be strange indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “if, at our years, we were to go an age back to hunt up imaginary, or forgotten facts, to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the evening of our lives.”

Physically, Adams was declining rapidly. He suffered severe pains in his back. In cold weather his rheumatism was such that he could get about only with a cane. His teeth were gone. His hearing was going. Sadly, he had to admit he could mount a horse no longer. Yet he insisted, “I am not weary of life. I still enjoy it.”

IN 1824, with James Monroe due to retire from the presidency, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was nominated as a candidate to replace him, exactly as long predicted. With three others also nominated, and all, like John Quincy, avowed Republicans — William Crawford of Georgia, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee — it became a crowded contest of “increasing heat.” John Adams was a great admirer of Andrew Jackson, but the prospect of his adored son winning the highest office was thrilling and a strong reason to stay alive.

To compound the excitement of the summer of 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette returned for a triumphal tour of America, causing a sensation. Landing at New York, he proceeded northward to Boston, accompanied by his son George Washington Lafayette, and on August 29 arrived at Quincy to pay an afternoon call on Adams.

As a crowd gathered outside the Adams house, numbers of the family filled the room where the two old heroes sat reminiscing, Adams hugely enjoying the occasion. “Grandfather exerted himself more than usual, and as to conversation, appeared exactly as he ever was,” recorded Charles Francis. “I think he is rather more striking now than ever, certainly more agreeable, as his asperity of temper is worn away.”

Afterward, Adams is said to have remarked, “That was not the Lafayette I knew,” while Lafayette, saddened by the visit, reportedly remarked, “That was not the John Adams I knew.”

John Quincy, when he arrived in September for a holiday of several weeks, was shocked by his father’s drastically deteriorating condition.

His sight is so dim that he can neither write nor read. He cannot walk without aid. . . . He bears his condition with fortitude, but is sensible to all its helplessness. . . . He receives some letters, and dictates answers to them. In general the most remarkable circumstance of his present state is the total prostration of his physical powers, leaving his mental faculties scarcely impaired at all.

Such was the change in his father that John Quincy decided that one last portrait must be done and persuaded Gilbert Stuart, who was himself nearly seventy and seriously ill, “to paint a picture of affection, and of curiosity for future times.”

Adams agreed to sit, but only because of his regard for Stuart. Adams had little faith in portraits of himself. “Speaking generally,” he said, “no penance is like having one’s picture done.” When a French sculptor, J. B. Binon, had been commissioned a few years earlier to render a marble bust for Faneuil Hall, Adams had posed most reluctantly — “I let them do what they please with my old head,” he had told Jefferson. Stuart, however, was a famously entertaining talker, and thus another matter. “I should like to sit to Stuart from the first of January to the thirty-first of December,” Adams said, “for he lets me do just as I please, and keeps me constantly amused by his conversation.”

Wearing a best black suit, Adams posed on a red velvet settee in the parlor. As anticipated, he and Stuart had a thoroughly fine time during several sittings, and the finished portrait was one of Stuart’s finest. Had it been done by an inferior hand, as Josiah Quincy observed, it might have been painful to look at. But Stuart had caught “a glimpse of the living spirit shining through the feeble and decrepit body. He saw the old man at one of those happy moments when the intelligence lights up the wasted envelope.”

EVER SINCE Abigail’s death, the last days of October had become the most difficult time of the year for Adams. As his grandson George reminded Louisa Catherine, “He was married on the 27th, Grandmother died on the 28th, his birthday [was] the 30th, her funeral, the 31st.” These days, and their memories, as Adams had told George, brought overwhelming sorrow. The “encroaching melancholy” made everything else seem uninteresting and insignificant.

But among the family and friends who gathered at the Big House on October 30, 1824, to celebrate Adams’s eighty-ninth birthday, it was thought that because of the forthcoming election he looked better and “conversed with more spirit” than he had in years. When, after election day, it became known that in Quincy, Braintree, and Weymouth, John Quincy had received every vote cast for the presidency, Adams declared it one of the most gratifying events of his life.

The outcome of the contest nationally, however, was not to be resolved until February. For though Andrew Jackson received more popular votes, no candidate had a majority in the electoral count. So again the decision was left to the House of Representatives, where Speaker of the House Henry Clay used his influence to make John Quincy Adams president. The deciding vote took place in Washington on February 9, 1825. Five days later the news reached Quincy, and again family and friends crowded about “the old President” to wish him congratulations.

He . . . was considerably affected by the fulfillment of his highest wishes [wrote Josiah Quincy]. In the course of conversation, my mother compared him to that old man who was pronounced by Solon to be the highest of mortals when he expired on hearing of his son’s success at the Olympic games. The similarity of their situations visibly moved the old gentleman, and tears of joy rolled down his cheek.

Later, however, Adams told those gathered, “No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”

From Monticello came warm congratulations. “It must excite ineffable feelings in the breast of a father to have lived to see a son to whose educ[atio]n and happiness his life has been so devoted so eminently distinguished by the voice of his country,” Jefferson wrote. Nor should Adams worry about how the country would respond to the outcome.

So deeply are the principles of order, and of obedience to law impressed on the minds of our citizens generally, that I am persuaded there will be an immediate acquiescence in the will of the majority as if Mr. Adams had been the choice of every man.

“Every line from you exhilarates my spirits and gives me a glow of pleasure, but your kind congratulations are solid comfort to my heart,” Adams wrote. “The little strength of mind and the considerable strength of body that I once possessed appear to be all gone, but while I breathe I shall be your friend.”

ON FRIDAY, March 4, 1825, inside the Hall of the House of Representatives at the Capitol in Washington, John Quincy Adams took the oath of office as the sixth President of the United States, administered by Chief Justice John Marshall; and as the year proceeded in Quincy, Massachusetts, the health and physical strength of his aged father, the second President of the United States, seemed to improve rather than decline. Benjamin Waterhouse, who had thought Adams very near death, was amazed by the change, as he wrote to the President. “But physicians do not always consider how much the powers of the mind, and what is called good spirits, can recover the lost energies of the body. I really believe that your father’s revival is mainly owing to the demonstration that his son has not served an ungrateful public.”

Adams, reported Waterhouse, could still tell stories and laugh heartily, “and what is more, eats heartily, more than any other at table. We stayed until he smoked out his cigar after dinner.”

A stream of visitors continued through the seasons and among them was young Ralph Waldo Emerson, who a few years earlier had graduated from Harvard as class poet. He found Adams upstairs in his library seated in a large overstuffed armchair, dressed in a blue coat, a cotton cap covering his bald head. Recounting the interview, Emerson wrote, “He talks very distinctly for so old a man — enters bravely into long sentences which are interrupted by want of breath but carries them invariably to a conclusion without ever correcting a word.”

Speaking of the mood of the times, Adams exclaimed with vehemence, “I would to God there were more ambition in the country,” by which he meant, “ambition of that laudable kind, to excel.”

Asked when he expected to see his son the President, he said, “Never,” meaning presumably that the press of John Quincy’s duties would keep him in Washington. But John Quincy did return, in the early fall of 1825, and spent several days with his father, though what conversation passed between them is unknown. Probably they both knew it was the last time they would spend with one another, and possibly they reviewed the will Adams had drawn up some years before, whereby he left to John Quincy the house, an estimated 103 acres, his French writing desk, “all my manuscript letter-books and account books, letters, journals, and manuscript books, together with the trunks in which they are contained,” as well as his library, on “the condition that he pays to my son, Thomas Boylston Adams, the value of one half of the said library.” The remainder of the estate was to be divided among his two sons, grandchildren, and Louisa Smith.

“My debts, which I hope will not be large,” Adams had stipulated, “and my funeral charges, which I hope will be very small, must be paid by my executors.”

On the day of his departure, Monday, October 13, John Quincy wrote only, “Took leave of my father.”

ANOTHER OF THE visitors who climbed the stairs to the library, a writer named Anne Royall, found Adams nearly blind, his hair “perfectly white,” but was struck by the “sunshine of his countenance,” which, when he spoke, became “extremely animated.”

As Emerson had been told, Adams was always better for having visitors from morning until night, and never was this quite so evident as an evening in the fall of 1825, when Josiah Quincy was assigned to escort his great-aunt Hannah on a visit to the old President.

Hannah Quincy Lincoln Storer was the flirtatious “Orlinda” of Adams’s early diaries, to whom he had once nearly proposed. She had since buried two husbands — Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham and Ebenezer Storer, the treasurer of Harvard — and as Josiah noted, she and Adams were now both verging on their ninety-first year.

As his visitor entered, Adams’s face lighted up. “What! Madam,” he greeted her, “shall we not go walk in Cupid’s Grove together?” “Ah, sir,” she said after an embarrassed pause, “it would not be the first time we have walked there!”

Perhaps the incident is not worth recording [Josiah wrote], as there is really no way of getting upon paper the suggestiveness it had to a witness. . . . The flash of old sentiment was startling from its utter unexpectedness. It is the sort of thing which sets a young fellow to thinking. It is a surprise to find a great personage so simple, so perfectly natural, so thoroughly human.

Late in November, Adams submitted to one further ordeal for the sake of posterity, when an itinerant sculptor named John Henry Browere appeared at Quincy to make a life mask by a secret process of his own invention. It was known that the experience could be extremely disagreeable for the subject, as the entire head had to be covered with successive layers of thin grout and these given time to dry. When, earlier in October, Browere had gone to Monticello to do Jefferson, the mask had dried so hard it had to be chopped off with a mallet, Jefferson suffering, as he said, a “severe trial.” But John Quincy and young Charles Francis had also been done by Browere, and so Adams consented, even though Charles Francis, worried about his grandfather, warned how unpleasant, even dangerous, the experience could be.

The life mask that resulted was not the aged John Adams of the Gilbert Stuart portrait, with a “glimpse of the living spirit shining through.” It was instead the face of a glowering old man at odds with life and the world. But then the expression was doubtless greatly affected by the ordeal he had been put through. “He did not tear my face to pieces,” Adams wrote good-naturedly to Charles Francis afterward, “though I sometimes thought he would beat my brains out with his hammer.”

Then, at the year’s end, a granddaughter of Jefferson’s, Ellen Wayles Randolph, who had recently married a Massachusetts man, Joseph Coolidge, Jr., came to call accompanied by her husband. Adams was extremely pleased. All the high praises he had heard about her were true, he told Jefferson, aware no doubt that she was Jefferson’s favorite.

“She entertained me with accounts of your sentiments of human life, which accorded so perfectly with mine that it gave me great delight.” Only on one point did he differ, Adams said. She had told him that Jefferson would like to repeat his life over again. “In this I could not agree; I had rather go forward and meet whatever is to come.”

• • •

WITH 1826 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it was not long into the new year when Adams and Jefferson were being asked to attend a variety of celebrations planned to commemorate the historic event on the Fourth of July. Invitations poured into Quincy and Charlottesville from Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The two former presidents were, with eighty-eight-year-old Charles Carroll of Maryland, the last signers of the Declaration still alive. Further, as everyone knew, Jefferson was its author and Adams had been its chief advocate on the floor of Congress. One was “the pen,” the other “the voice,” of independence, and the presence of either at any Independence Day celebration, large or small, would give it significance as nothing else could.

But the time was past when either Adams or Jefferson could leave home. Adams was ninety, Jefferson would be eighty-three in April, and each grew steadily more feeble. After calling on Adams that spring, Benjamin Waterhouse wrote to John Quincy, “To the eyes of a physician your father appeared to me much nearer to the bottom of the hill.”

Still, the old mind prevailed, the brave old heart hung on. As once he had been determined to drive a declaration of independence through Congress, or to cross the Pyrenees in winter, so Adams was determined now to live to see one last Fourth of July.

In March, knowing he had little time left, Jefferson drew his last will. Suffering from bouts of diarrhea and a chronic disorder of the urinary tract, caused apparently by an enlargement of the prostate gland, he depended for relief on large doses of laudanum. Besides, he was beset by troubles at his university — disappointing enrollment, unruly students — and by now suffered such personal financial distress that, in desperation, he had agreed to a proposal that the Virginia legislature create a special lottery to save him from ruin.

But then Jefferson, too, was resolved to hang on until the Fourth.

Jefferson’s last letter to Adams, dated Monticello, March 25, 1826, was written at the desk in his office, or “cabinet,” where a recently acquired plaster copy of the Adams bust by Binon, a gift of a friend, looked on from a near shelf. He was writing to say that his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, was on his way to New England, and that if the young man did not see Adams, it would be as though he had “seen nothing.”

Like other young people [Jefferson wrote] he wished to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has heard and learned of the heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.

Thus, it was the future generation and the Revolution that occupied Jefferson’s thoughts at the last. The world their grandchildren knew could give no adequate idea of the times he and Adams had known. “Theirs are the halcyon calms succeeding the storm which our argosy had so stoutly weathered,” Jefferson reminded his old friend in Massachusetts.

Adams, in the letter that would close their long correspondence, wrote on April 17, 1826, to remark on how tall young Randolph was, and how greatly he enjoyed his visit. Also, characteristically Adams was thinking of his son John Quincy, and the rough treatment he was receiving from an uncivil Congress. “Our American chivalry is the worst in all the world. It has no laws, no bounds, no definitions; it seems to be a caprice.”

Several days later the young Reverend George Whitney, son of the Reverend Peter Whitney, who had preached at Abigail’s funeral, called on Adams and came away doubtful that he could last much longer.

ON JUNE 24 at Monticello, after considerable labor, Jefferson completed a letter to the mayor of Washington declining an invitation to the Fourth of July celebration at Washington. It was his farewell public offering and one of his most eloquent, a tribute to the “worthies” of 1776 and the jubilee that was to take place in their honor. Within days it was reprinted all over the country.

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are the grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return to this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

As he had often before — and as was considered perfectly acceptable — Jefferson had done some borrowing for effect. In this case it was imagery from a famous speech of the seventeenth century by one of Cromwell’s soldiers, Richard Rumbold, who, from the scaffold as he was about to be executed, declared, “I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.”

Adams attempted to write nothing so ambitious, and probably, given his condition, it would have proved impossible for him. “The old man fails fast,” the Reverend George Whitney recorded after another visit on June 27.

But when on Friday, June 30, Whitney and a small delegation of town leaders made a formal call on Adams, he received them in his upstairs library seated in his favorite armchair. They had come, they told the old patriot, to ask for a toast that they might read aloud at Quincy’s celebration on the Fourth.

“I will give you,” Adams said, “Independence forever!” Asked if he would like to add something more, he replied, “Not a word.”

The day following, July 1, Adams was so weak he could barely speak. The family physician, Amos Holbrook, the ever faithful Louisa Smith, and one or another of the family remained at his bedside around the clock.

When a townsman and frequent visitor named John Marston called at the house on the afternoon of July 3, Adams was able to utter only a few words. “When I parted from him, he pressed my hand, and said something which was inaudible,” Marston wrote, “but his countenance expressed all that I could desire.”

Early on the morning of Tuesday, July 4, as the first cannon of the day commenced firing in the distance, the Reverend George Whitney arrived at the house to find “the old gentleman was drawing to his end. Dr. Holbrook was there and declared to us that he could not live more than through the day.” Adams lay in bed with his eyes closed, breathing with great difficulty. Thomas sent off an urgent letter to John Quincy to say their father was “sinking rapidly.”

As efforts were made to give Adams more comfort, by changing his position, he awakened. Told that it was the Fourth, he answered clearly, “It is a great day. It is a good day.”

AT MONTICELLO, Thomas Jefferson had been unconscious since the night of July 2, his daughter Martha, his physician Robley Dunglison, and others keeping watch. At about seven o’clock the evening of July 3, Jefferson awakened and uttered a declaration, “This is the Fourth,” or, “This is the Fourth of July.” Told that it would be soon, he slept again. Two hours later, at about nine, he was roused to be given a dose of laudanum, which he refused, saying, “No, doctor, nothing more.”

Sometime near four in the morning Jefferson spoke his last words, calling in the servants “with a strong clear voice,” according to the account of his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, but which servants he called or what he said to them are unknown.

Jefferson died at approximately one o’clock in the afternoon on July 4, as bells in Charlottesville could be faintly heard ringing in celebration in the valley below.

AT QUINCY the roar of cannon grew louder as the hours passed, and in midafternoon a thunderstorm struck — “The artillery of Heaven,” as would be said — to be followed by a gentle rain.

Adams lay peacefully, his mind clear, by all signs. Then late in the afternoon, according to several who were present in the room, he stirred and whispered clearly enough to be understood, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

Somewhat later, struggling for breath, he whispered to his granddaughter Susanna, “Help me, child! Help me!” then lapsed into a final silence.

At about six-twenty his heart stopped. John Adams was dead.

As those present would remember ever after, there was a final clap of thunder that shook the house; the rain stopped and the last sun of the day broke through dark, low hanging clouds — “bursting forth . . . with uncommon splendor at the moment of his exit . . . with a sky beautiful and grand beyond description,” John Marston would write to John Quincy.

By nightfall the whole town knew.

V

AN ESTIMATED 4,000 people crowded silently about the First Congregational Church on July 7. A suggestion that the funeral of John Adams be held at public expense at the State House in Boston had been rejected by the family, who wished no appearance of “forcing” public tribute and asked that the service be kept as simple as possible, as Adams had wanted. But throngs came from Boston and surrounding towns. Cannon boomed from Mount Wollaston, bells rang, and the procession that carried the casket from the Adams house to the church included the governor, the president of Harvard, members of the state legislature, and Congressman Daniel Webster. Pastor Peter Whitney officiated, taking his text from 1Chronicles: “He died in good old age, full of days . . . and honor.” With the service ended, the body of John Adams was laid to rest beside that of his wife, in the graveyard across the road from the church.

The funeral could not have been “conducted in a more solemn or affecting manner,” Josiah Quincy wrote to President Adams, who still did not know of his father’s death.

The news of Jefferson’s death on July 4 had only reached Washington from Charlottesville on July 6. Not until Sunday, July 9, after receiving several urgent messages from home, did John Quincy start north by coach, accompanied by young John, and it was later that day, near Baltimore, that he learned of his father’s death.

That John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on the same day, and that it was, of all days, the Fourth of July, could not be seen as a mere coincidence: it was a “visible and palpable” manifestation of “Divine favor,” wrote John Quincy in his diary that night, expressing what was felt and would be said again and again everywhere the news spread.

Arriving at Quincy on July 13, the President went directly to his father’s house, where suddenly the gravity of his loss hit him for the first time.

Everything about the house is the same [he wrote]. I was not fully sensible of the change till I entered his bedchamber. . . . That moment was inexpressibly painful, and struck me as if it had been an arrow to my heart. My father and mother have departed. The charm which has always made this house to me an abode of enchantment is dissolved; and yet my attachment to it, and to the whole region around, is stronger than I ever felt it before.

In the weeks and months that followed, eulogies to Adams and Jefferson were delivered in all parts of the country, and largely in the spirit that their departure should not be seen as a mournful event. They had lived to see “the expanded greatness and consolidated strength of a pure republic.” They had died “amid the hosannas and grateful benedictions of a numerous, happy, and joyful people,” and on the nation’s fiftieth birthday, which, said Daniel Webster in a speech in Boston, was “proof” from on high “that our country, and its benefactors, are objects of His care.” Webster’s eulogy, delivered at Faneuil Hall on August 2, lasted two hours.

Never a rich man, always worried about making ends meet, John Adams in his long life had accumulated comparatively little in the way of material wealth. Still, as he had hoped, he died considerably more than just solvent. The household possessions, put on auction in September, and largely bought by John Quincy, brought $28,000. Several parcels of land and Adams’s pew at the meetinghouse — these also purchased by John Quincy — added another $31,000. All told, once the estate was settled, John Adams’s net worth at death was approximately $100,000.

John Quincy would insist on keeping the house, and thus it was to remain in the family for another century.

Jefferson, by sad contrast, had died with debts exceeding $100,000, more than the value of Monticello, its land, and all his possessions, including his slaves. He apparently went to his grave believing the state lottery established in his behalf would resolve his financial crisis and provide for his family, but the lottery proved unsuccessful.

By his will Jefferson had freed just five of his slaves, all of whom were members of the Hemings family, but Sally Hemings was not one of them. She was given “her time,” unofficial freedom, by his daughter Martha Randolph after his death.

In January 1827 on the front lawn of Monticello, 130 of Jefferson’s slaves were sold at auction, along with furniture and farm equipment. Finally, in 1831, after years of standing idle, Monticello, too, was sold for a fraction of what it had cost.

Unlike Jefferson, Adams had not composed his own epitaph. Jefferson, characteristically, had both designed the stone obelisk that was to mark his grave at Monticello and specified what was to be inscribed upon it, conspicuously making no mention of the fact that he had been governor of Virginia, minister to France, Secretary of State, Vice President of the United States, or President of the United States. It was his creative work that he wished most to be remembered for:

Here Was Buried

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Author of the Declaration of American Independence,

Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,

And Father of the University of Virginia

Adams had, however, composed an inscription to be carved into the sarcophagus lid of Henry Adams, the first Adams to arrive in Massachusetts, in 1638.

This stone and several others [it read] have been placed in this yard by a great, great, grandson from a veneration of the piety, humility, simplicity, prudence, frugality, industry and perseverance of his ancestors in hopes of recommending an affirmation of their virtues to their posterity.

Adams had chosen to say nothing of any of his own attainments, but rather to place himself as part of a continuum, and to evoke those qualities of character that he had been raised on and that he had strived for so long to uphold.

The last of the ringing eulogies to Adams and Jefferson was not delivered until October of 1826, when Attorney General William Wirt addressed Congress in Washington, speaking longer even than Webster had. Recounting Adams’s career, he cited Adams’s defense of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, his break with his old friend Jonathan Sewall, the crucial role he had played at Philadelphia in 1776 and Jefferson’s line “he moved his hearers from their seats.” Describing the friendly correspondence between the two old patriots in their last years, Wirt said that “it reads a lesson of wisdom on the bitterness of party spirit, by which the wise and the good will not fail to profit.”

But the accomplished orators who celebrated the two “idols of the hour” had all drawn on the historic record, or what could be gathered from secondhand accounts. They had not known Adams or Jefferson, or their “heroic times,” from firsthand experience. Those who had were all but vanished.

It was among the children of his children that Adams and his words to the wise would live longest in memory. “The Lord deliver us from all family pride,” he had written to John Quincy’s son John, for example. “No pride, John, no pride.”

“You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little,” he had told Caroline, in response to her quandary over the riddles of life. “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. . . . Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough. . . . So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.”

Adams had, however, arrived at certain bedrock conclusions before the end came. He believed, with all his heart, as he had written to Jefferson, that no effort in favor of virtue was lost.

He felt he had lived in the greatest of times, that the eighteenth century, as he also told Jefferson, was for all its errors and vices “the most honorable” to human nature. “Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused; arts, sciences useful to man, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any period.”

His faith in God and the hereafter remained unshaken. His fundamental creed, he had reduced to a single sentence: “He who loves the Workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him.”

His confidence in the future of the country he had served so long and dutifully was, in the final years of his life, greater than ever.

Human nature had not changed, however, for all the improvements. Nor would it, he was sure. Nor did he love life any the less for its pain and terrible uncertainties. He remained as he had been, clear-eyed about the paradoxes of life and in his own nature. Once, in a letter to his old friend Francis van der Kemp, he had written, “Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”

It could have been his epitaph.

Acknowledgments

The Adams Papers, from which much of this book has been drawn, may be rightly described as a national treasure. There is no comparable written record of a prominent American family. Housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, the full collection of letters, diaries, and family papers of all kinds, ranges from the year 1639 to 1889 and in volume alone is surpassing. On microfilm it takes up 608 reels, or more than five miles of microfilm. The letters of John and Abigail Adams number in the thousands, and because they both wrote with such consistent candor and in such vivid detail, it is possible to know them — to go beneath the surface of their lives — to an extent not possible with other protagonists of the time. Not Washington, not Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton, not even Franklin for all that he wrote, was so forthcoming on paper as was John Adams over a lifetime of writing about himself and his world. When his private correspondence and diaries are combined with the letters penned by Abigail, the value of the written record is compounded by geometric proportions. Their letters to each other number more than a thousand, and only about half have ever been published. But then the letters of Adams to Jefferson and Benjamin Rush number in the hundreds, as do those by Abigail to her sisters. And beyond all that is the remarkable body of correspondence between the Adamses and their offspring.

Publication of the Adams Papers began in 1961, with the first volume of the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, under the editorial direction of Lyman Butterfield, to whom all Adams biographers and students of the Adams family are indebted. Mr. Butterfield brought to the immense project the high scholarly and literary standards that have distinguished it to this day, as publication of the Papers continues in one splendid volume after another.

For the help they have been in my work with the Papers, I wish to express my thanks to each of the present editorial staff, Richard Ryerson, Anne Decker Cecere, Jennifer A. Shea, and Gregg L. Lint, but especially to the gracious, dedicated Celeste Walker, whose knowledge of the subject, whose answers to innumerable questions, and whose suggestions and thoughtfulness have been invaluable.

Notes on the sources and a full bibliography follow. However, certain works have been mainstays. Of the few biographies ever written of John Adams, those by Gilbert Chinard, Page Smith, and John Ferling are first-rate, fair in judgment, and well written. Other particularly valuable studies are Zoltan Haraszti’s John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw, and two works on the Adams presidency by Ralph A. Brown and Stephen G. Kurtz. And to Joseph Ellis I owe a special word of gratitude, for it was his excellent Passionate Sage, on Adams in his last years, that started me on the path that led to this book.

I am greatly indebted also to three major works upon which I have relied: Dumas Malone’s distinguished six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, The Adams-Jefferson Letters in two volumes edited by Lester J. Cappon, and The Age of Federalism by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, a landmark work in American history if ever there was.

But how does one properly acknowledge the pleasure one finds in such books? Or in the works of those front-rank historians who have written with such extraordinary insight on the nation’s founding time — Edmund Morgan, Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn, Pauline Maier, Richard Ketchum, David Hackett Fischer, to name only a few? Or how to describe adequately the delight of immersing oneself, as I have tried to do, in the writing of the eighteenth century — to read again after long years, or for the first time, the writers John Adams read and loved — Swift, Pope, Defoe, Addison, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Johnson, and Voltaire? I so enjoyed Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, a book I knew little about, that I read it twice.

The research has been done in libraries, archives, museums, and historic sites in Massachusetts, Virginia, Philadelphia, Washington, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, and I thank all those who were so very helpful: Len Tucker, William Fowler, Nicholas Graham, Anne Bentley, Brenda Lawson, Oona E. Beauchard, Jennifer Smith, and the remarkably knowledgeable Peter Drummey of the Massachusetts Historical Society; the staff of the Boston Athenaeum; Brian Sullivan of the Harvard University Archives; Ellen Dunlap, Georgia Barnhill, Joanne Chaison, and Russell Martin of the American Antiquarian Society; Susan Godlewski, Gunars Rutkovskis, and Jamie McGlone of the Boston Public Library, repository of John Adams’s own library; Marianne Peake, Caroline Keinath, Kelly Cobble, and John Stanwich of the National Park Service staff at the Adams National Historical Park, Quincy; Will LaMoy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; Paula Faust Newcomb, Peter J. Hatch, Lucia Stanton, Susan Stein, William L. Beiswanger, Ann Lucas, Fraser Neiman, Zanne MacDonald, Rebecca Bowman, Michael B. Merriam, and my friend and wise counselor Daniel P. Jordan of the Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Charlottesville; Karin Wittenborg, Michael Plunkett, Bryson Clevenger Jr., Margaret Hrabe, Christina Deane, Alice Parra, Irene Norvelle, Anne Benham, Terry Belanger, Kendon Stubbs, and Roger Munsick of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia; Dorothy Twohig and Philander Chase of the Washington Papers, also at the University of Virginia; Roy Strohl, Jack Bales, Douglas Sanford, and Beth Perkins of the Simpson Library at Mary Washington College; Charles Bryan and the staff of the Virginia Historical Society; Robert C. Wilburn of Colonial Williamsburg; Edward C. Carter III, Bruce Laverty, and Roy Goodman of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; Martha Wolfe of Bartram’s Garden; Jennifer Esler of “Clivedon”; Martha Aikens, Ann Coxe Toogood, and Frances Delmar of the National Park Service staff at Independence Park; John Carter and Michael Angelo of the Independence Seaport Museum; the staff of the Pennsylvania Historical Society; the staff of the Free Library of Philadelphia; James Billington, Jeffrey Flannery, David Wigdor, Gerald Gawalt, James Hutson, Staley Hitchcock, Larry E. Sullivan, and Mary Wolfskill of the Library of Congress; the staff of the White House Historical Association; Wagner Loderwyck of the Amsterdam Historical Museum; the staffs of the Rijksmuseum, the Van Loon Museum, and the Maritime Museum, Amsterdam; Michael Crump of the British Museum; and the staffs of Blenheim Palace and the Stowe Landscape Gardens.

In Philadelphia Bruce Gill helped me duplicate John Adams’s climb up the bell tower of historic Christ’s Church. With the help of Captain Samuel Tucker’s log of the 1778 voyage of the Boston, Nat Benjamin of Martha’s Vineyard plotted the ship’s exact course across the North Atlantic to Bordeaux and explained the perils of a winter voyage on the North Atlantic; and Daniel and Alice Jouve were expert guides to the eighteenth-century American landmarks of Paris.

For their favors, interest, advice, and encouragement, I thank Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Adams, Merrill D. Peterson, Lee and George Cochran, Sandy Fisher, Jane and David Acton, Anne Sibbald, John Gable, Dr. C. A. Van Minnen, Douglas L. Wilson, Charles Fagan III, Daniel J. Boorstin, Theodore K. Rabb, Richard D. Brown, Ian Macpherson, Vincent Scully, Suzy Valentine, Ann Nelson, Noel Bagnall, Deborah DeBettencourt, Chip Stokes and Bud Leeds, Curtis Tucker, Rebecca Purdy, Michelle Krowl, Richard Moe, Arthur Sack, Josiah Bunting III, Steve Spear, Bonnie Hurd Smith, Royall D. O’Brien, Mary Beth Norton, Paul and Cathy Rancourt, Robert Wilson, Roger Kennedy, Richard Gilder, the Reverend Sheldon W. Bennett, Joan Paterson Kerr, and Margaret Goodhue.

Richard Ketchum, Susan Stein, Celeste Walker, William Fowler, Richard Ryerson, Daniel P. Jordan, Lucia Stanton, Dorie McCullough Lawson, John Zentay, Nat Benjamin, Richard Craven, Patrick J. Walsh, Richard A. Baker, Donald Ritchie, and Thomas J. McGuire each read parts or all of the manuscript, and for their thoughtful comments and criticism I am very grateful. They have made it a better book than it would have been without their contributions. Any errors of fact or interpretation it may contain are mine alone.

Patrick J. Walsh and Thomas J. McGuire also contributed to the research. But I am indebted above all to the tireless, ever resourceful efforts of my research assistant Michael Hill, who has been unfailingly involved from start to finish.

My friend and literary agent Morton L. Janklow has been an enthusiastic believer in the book all along. My editor, Michael Korda, has provided encouragement and expert guidance, as well as frequent kindnesses. Nor can I say enough for copy editors Gypsy da Silva and Fred Wiemer; the gifted designer of the book, Amy Hill; Wendell Minor, who designed the jacket; Sydney Wolfe Cohen, who did the index; and my son William B. McCullough, who took the jacket photograph.

For her help in dozens of ways, I thank my daughter Dorie Lawson, and for their sustained interest in my work, their patience and good cheer, I thank all of my family — children and spouses, grandchildren numerous and spirited, and foremost and always, my wife Rosalee.

— David McCullough

West Tisbury, Massachusetts

January 10, 2001

Source Notes

ABBREVIATIONS USED

AFC Adams Family Correspondence, L. H. Butterfield, ed.

AP Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). Numbers correspond to MHS microfilm reel number.

DJA Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, L. H. Butterfield, ed.

DJQA Diary of John Quincy Adams, David Grayson Allen, Allan Nevins, eds.

EDJA Earliest Diary of John Adams, L. H. Butterfield, ed.

LOC Library of Congress

LOD Letters of Delegates to Congress, Paul H. Smith, ed.

MHS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts

PBF The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Leonard W. Labaree, Claude A. Lopez, Barbara B. Oberg, eds.

PGW The Papers of George Washington, W. W. Abbott, Philander D. Chase, Dorothy Twohig, eds.

PJA Papers of John Adams, Robert J. Taylor, ed.

PMHB Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

PTJ The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd, John Catanzariti, Charles Cullen, eds.

Works The Works of John Adams, Charles Francis Adams, ed.

I. THE ROAD TO PHILADELPHIA

1. a New England winter: Meteorological Journal of Professor John Winthrop, January 1776, HUG 1879.207.5 mfp, Harvard University Archives.

2. five feet seven: Works, IX, 612

3. Archbishop of Canterbury: JA to Benjamin Waterhouse, AP, #436, MHS March 19, 1817,

4. “the animal spirits”: DJA, I, 27

5. “old acquaintances”: Ibid., II, 9.

6. “an habitual contempt”: AFC, I, 317

7. “like a faint meteor”:

8. the “labyrinth” of human nature: DJA, I 61

9. “You will never be alone”: AFC, IV, 114

10. “my farm, my family”: Ibid., II, 100

11. “I have a zeal”: Ibid., I, 135.

12. “possessed of another species”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, 140.

13. “He saw the whole of a subject”: Ibid., 140–42.

14. “Winter makes its approaches”: AFC, I, 324

15. “like a nun”: Ibid., 325.

16. “arduous task”: Ibid., 222.

17. “You cannot be”: Ibid., 172.

18. “The cry for pins”: Ibid., 219

19. “The alarm flew”: Ibid., 204

20. “Sometimes refugees”: Ibid., 205.

21. “Pray don’t let Bass”: Ibid., 240.

22. “How many have fallen Ibid., 222

23. I wander alone”: DJA, II, 97.

24. I think it will be necessary: AFC, I, 129.

25. “It is to be a school”: PJA, II, 99–100.

26. grandest, most important assembly: DJA, II, 98.

27. “as if to see a coronation”: Ibid., 100.

28. “They talk very loud”: Ibid., 109

29. “theater of action”: AFC, I, 144.

30. “Such is the distress”: Ibid., 277

31. “Mrs. Randall has lost”: Ibid., 278.

32. “Woe follows woe”: Ibid., 284.

33. “You often expressed”: Ibid., 289.

34. “the most shocking”: Ibid., 296.

35. “’Tis only in my night visions”: Ibid., 305.

36. “befall a city”: Ibid., 313.

37. “entirely continental”: Twohig, ed., PGW, Revolutionary War Series, III, I.

38. “It is not in the pages”: Ibid., 19.

39. “The reflection on”: Ibid., 89.

40. “I am exceedingly desirous”: Ibid., 93.

41. “Your commission constitutes”: Ibid., 37.

42. “the gentleman from Virginia”: DJA, III, 323.

43. “one of the most”: AFC, I, 216.

44. enough in praise: Ibid., 246.

45. “Oh that I was a soldier!”: Ibid., 207.

46. Henry Adams of Barton St. David: DJA, III, 254, n. 4.

47. second Joseph: Ibid., 255, n. 6.

48. first Henry Adams: Ibid., 254, n. 4.

49. “What has preserved”: JA to Benjamin Rush, July 19, 1812, AP, MHS.

50. “of making and sailing boats”: DJA, III, 257.

51. “Let frugality”: AFC, I, 114.

52. “the honestest man”: DJA, III, 256.

53. Joseph Adams: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, V, 502.

54. Taught to read at home: DJA, III, 257.

55. “churl”: Works, IX, 613.

56. He cared not for books: DJA, III, 257.

57. to be a farmer: Ibid., 257.

58. which meant Harvard: Ibid., 259; EDJA, 43.

59. admitted to Harvard: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII, 513

60. class 1755 of: Ibid., XIII, 512.

61. “Total and complete misery”: Ibid., XIII, 514.

62. “I read forever”: DJA, III, 262.

63. “lowermost northwest chamber”: EDJA, 43, n. 2.

64. Thomas Sparhawk: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII, 647.

65. Joseph Stockbridge: Ibid., XIII, 647.

66. evening prayers: Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 27–28.

67. wiped clean on the table cloth: Timothy Pickering Papers, Reel #53. MHS.

68. “I shall never forget”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,III, 514

69. “All scholars”: Pierce, History of Harvard,169.

70. Adams was fined: March 15, 1775 Harvard Archives.

71. “amorous disposition”: DJA, III, 260.

72. I shall draw no characters: DJA, III, 260, 261.

73. Adams was listed fourteenth: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,XIII, 512

74. “Is civil government”: Ibid., 515

75. unsuited for the life: DJA, III, 263

76. “I saw such a spirit”: Ibid., 262.

77. “But we must be cautious”: Ibid., I, 9

78. One student remembered: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII, 514.

79. I sometimes: DJA, I, 13.

80. Upon common theaters: PJA, I, 12

81. becoming a doctor: DJA, III, 264.

82. “reveries”: PJA, I, 5

83. “All that part of Creation”: Ibid., 4–6

84. “soft vernal showers”: DJA, I, 27

85. “Oh! that I could”: Ibid., 7.

86. “I have no books”: Ibid., 22

87. “I can as easily”: Ibid., 21.

88. Actual thunderstorms: Ibid., 136.

89. “Honesty, sincerity”: Ibid., 12.

90. “Vanity, I am sensible”: JA to Christopher Gadsen, April 16, 1801. AP, MHS.

91. “A puffy, vain”: DJA, I, 37.

92. “glorious shows”: Ibid., 43.

93. “the amazing concave”: PJA, I, 15.

94. But all the provisions: DJA, I, 43.

95. “It will be hard work”: PJA, I, 17.

96. “Can you imagine”: JA to Richard Rush, February 16, 1814, #95. MHS.

97. King’s troops: DJA, III, 266.

98. “I am not without”: DJA, III, 266.

99. “I am beginning”: EDJA, 65.

100. “I have read Gilbert’s”: DJA, I, 45.

101. “Rose about sun rise”: Ibid., 46.

102. I had the pleasure: EDJA, 99.

103. “pursue the study of the law”: DJA, I, 55.

104. Lambert v. Field: See editorial note in EDJA beginning on p. 82.

105. He blamed his mother: DJA, I, 64.

106. terrible family row: Ibid., 65.

107. soul to the law: Ibid., 72.

108. “Reputation”: Ibid., 78

109. My eyes are so diverted: Ibid., 80–81.

110. “I never shall shine”: Ibid., 133.

111. “Why have I not genius”: Ibid., 95.

112. “Ballast is what I want”: EDJA, 73.

113. “a heart formed”: Ellis, Passionate Sage, 182.

114. not by John Adams: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII, 627.

115. “distinguishing glorys”: PJA, I, 5.

116. “gallanting”: DJA, I, 57.

117. “in future ages”: PJA, I, 40.

118. “Let me search”: DJA, I, 61.

119. “grandeur”: Ibid., 83.

120. “imitating Otis”: Ibid., 84.

121. “squaddy, masculine creature”: Ibid., 75.

122. Zab Hayward: Ibid., 172.

123. P[arson] W[ibird]: Ibid., 92–93.

124. If I look: EDJA, 70.

125. “there laughed and screamed”: DJA, I, 77.

126. “Let no trifling diversion”: Ibid., 72.

127. “Let love and vanity”: Ibid., 87.

128. “fond, nor frank”: Ibid., 109.

129. “crafty, designing man”: Ibid., 108.

130. The testator: PJA, I, 35.

131. forty acres: DJA, III, 277.

132. Now to what: Ibid., I, 124.

133. “I grow more expert”: Ibid., 193.

134. The story of B. Biknal’s wife: Ibid., 231–32.

135. Di was a constant: Ibid., 234.

136. “Candor is my characteristic”: AFC, I, 49.

137. “a gentleman has no business”: Ibid., 47.

138. “smoked”: Ibid., 29.

139. Also, two black slaves: Withey, Dearest Friend, 6; Akers, Abigail Adams, 3.

140. Oh, my dear girl: AFC, I, 49.

141. “I never shall shine”: DJA, I, 133.

142. news of the Stamp Act: Boston Gazette, May 27, 1765.

143. immediate uproar: Ibid., June 24, 1765.

144. “utmost consternation”: Ibid., July 22, 1765.

145. “like devils let loose”: Ibid., Sept. 2, 1765.

146. A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law: See the Boston Gazette, Aug. 12, 1765; Aug. 19, 1765; Sept. 30, 1765; Oct. 2, 1765.

147. “the most thorough understanding”: DJA, I, 271.

148. “liable to great inequities”: Ibid., 271.

149. “The year 1765”: Ibid., 263.

150. He handled every kind of case: See, generally, Wroth and Zobel, Legal Papers of John Adams, , I, xxv–lx.

151. as “honest [a] lawyer”: Works, , I, 58.

152. “What shall I do”: DJA, I, 338.

153. “My good man”: AFC, I, 56.

154. “I want to see my wife”: Ibid., 83.

155. “My biographer”: DJA, I, 355.

156. “To what object”: Ibid., 337.

157. no difficulty saying no: Ibid., III, 288.

158. “He always called me John”: Peabody, ed., John Adams, 130.

159. soldiers suddenly opened fire: Zobel, Boston Massacre, 198–99.

160. John Adams was asked to defend: DJA, III, 292.

161. “incurring a clamor”: Ibid., 294.

162. a retainer of eighteen guineas: Ibid., 293.

163. “The only way to compose myself”: Ibid., I, 352.

164. If, by supporting the rights: Legal Papers of John Adams, III, 242.

165. two conspicuously fair trials: See ibid., Cases 63# and #64, 266.

166. “electrical”: Legal Papers of John Adams, III, 28. Comment of John Quincy Adams.

167. “I am for the prisoners”: Ibid., III, 242.

168. We have entertained: Ibid., 266.

169. “Do you expect”: Ibid., 268.

170. “The reason is”: Ibid., 242.

171. “Facts are stubborn”: Ibid., 269.

172. branded on their thumbs: Ibid., 31.

173. “one of the most gallant”: Ibid., 33.

174. “she thought I had done”: DJA, III, 294.

175. “Especially the constant”: Ibid., 296.

176. five hours: JA to John Adams Smith, June 15, 1812, 118#. MHS.

177. Government is nothing: DJA, II, 57.

178. “Above all things”: Ibid., 67

179. “I cannot but reflect”: Ibid., 76

180. the destruction of the tea: Ibid., 86.

181. “We live, my dear soul”: AFC, I, 107.

182. “in the dumps”: Ibid.

183. During a break: Peabody, ed., John Adams, 133-34.

184. “Swim or sink”:Works, IV. 8.

185. “It is not despair”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XII, 317.

186. “Novangelus”: See, generally. PJA, II, 216-387.

187. dine with General Washington: AFC, I, 343.

188. Caughnawaga Indians: Ibid., 343.

189. “It was a savage feast”: DJA, II, 227.

190. decidedly pleased: AFC, I, 343.

191. Henry Knox: DJA, II, 227.

192. Diary of Henry Knox. MHS.

193. Fort Ticonderoga: DJA, II, 227.

194. making careful note of the inventory: Ibid., 227.

195. “cold journey”: AFC, I, 345.

196. “for the amusement of Swift”: DJA, III, 268.

197. ...as I was cold: Old Family Letters. 140.

198. “I could not join”: AFC, I, 324.

199. the title Common Sense: Ibid., 348.

200. “My God, these fellows”: Ibid., 358.

201. “marvelous in our eyes”: Ibid., 360.

2. TRUE BLUE

1. largest, wealthiest city: See, generally, Weigley, Philadelphia: A 300 Year History. 109-54.

2. Shipbuilding was a: Cresswell, Journal of Nicholas Cresswell. 156.

3. Franklin arrived from Boston: LeMay and Zall, eds., Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. 24.

4. population was approaching ,: Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt. 216.

5. “I like it”: DJA, II, 136.

6. Front Street is near: Ibid., 116.

7. “All this is done”: LOD, I, 56.

8. prince’s palace: Ibid., III, 360.

9. “for the promoting of useful knowledge”: Pennsylvania Gazette, May 20, 1776.

10. all philosophical: Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin. 139.

11. twenty-three printing establishments: Stevens, Birthplace of a Nation. 95.

12. John Sparhawk: Pennsylvania Gazette, April 29, 1776.

13. thirty bookshops: Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Press and the Book in the Century Philadelphia,” PMHB, LXV (Jan. 1941): 13.

14. “dirty, dusty, and fatigued”: DJA, II, 114.

15. Adams had first met George Washington: Ibid., 141.

16. “I drink no cider”: AFC, I, 164.

17. “thundering of coaches”: PMHB, XLVIII (1924): 237.

18. most recent outbreak, 1773: Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, 243.

19. new hospital: DJA, II, 116.

20. “Philadelphia Salute”: Albertz, Benjamin West, 22-23.

21. Christ Church: DJA, II, 127.

22. “My time is too totally”: AFC, I, 155.

23. The Reverend Thomas Coombe: DJA, II, 122.

24. “He reaches the imagination”: Ibid., 156.

25. mass at St. Mary’s: Ibid., 150.

26. “awful”: AFC, I, 167.

27. at the State House: DJA, II, 134.

28. “I shall be killed”: AFC, I, 164.

29. “A most sinful feast”: DJA, II, 127.

30. “Dined with Mr. [Benjamin] Chew”: Ibid., 136.

31. “tall, spare”: Ibid., 120.

32. Roger Sherman: Ibid., 150.

33. “sly, surveying eye”: Ibid., 106.

34. “design and cunning”: Ibid., 121.

35. John Dickinson: Ibid., 117.

36. Caesar Rodney: Ibid., 121.

37. “The art and address”: AFC, I, 163.

38. This assembly: Ibid., 166.

39. “happy, peaceful”: DJA, II, 157.

40. “There are in this city”: AFC, I, 212.

41. in strictest secrecy: Ibid., 157.

42. “wasting, exhausting”: Ibid., 251.

43. “a great, unwieldy body”: Ibid., 216.

44. “I will not despond”: Ibid., 213.

45. “minds and hearts”: Ibid., 295.

46. “An alliance”: DJA, II, 231.

47. There is a tide: Quote from Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3.

48. “The plot thickens”: “Diary of James Allen,” PMHB, IX (1895): 186.

49. “The malignant air”: Christopher Marshall diary, February 15, 1776, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

50. “There is a deep anxiety”: AFC, I, 345.

51. the stoves were removed: LOD, III, 299.

52. Thomas Lynch of South Carolina: Ibid., 292.

53. Samuel Ward of Rhode Island: Ibid., 460.

54. “He has not assumed”: AFC, I, 252–53.

55. profane and pious: DJA, III, 371.

56. “Young Ned Rutledge”: Ibid., II, 156.

57. warning advice: Works, II, 512.

58. “avow their opinions”: DJA, I, 12.

59. “has an excellent heart”: Ibid., II, 133.

60. Olive Branch Petition: Ibid., 162.

61. “Powder and artillery”: JA to John Gill, June 10, 1775. AP, MHS.

62. “blood...on their heads”: LOD, I, 373.

63. “What is the reason”: DJA, III, 318.

64. “piddling genius”: JA to James Warren, July 24, 1775, AP, MHS.

65. He passed without moving: DJA, II, 173.

66. “The Quakers and many others”: Seed, “A British Spy in Philadelphia,” PMHB, LXXXV (Jan. 1961): 22.

67. “an object of nearly universal”: Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 142.

68. “Who is the author”: Philadelphia Evening Post, March 26, 1776.

69. “what they call the American flag”: Seed, “A British Spy in Philadelphia,” PMHB, LXXXV (Jan. 1961): 28-29.

70. “common faith”: AFC, I, 348.

71. “has a better hand”: Ibid., 363.

72. “this American contest”: Ibid., II, 2.

73. On February: 26: LOD, III, 306.

74. Silas Deane: Ibid., 320.

75. “decide the fate”: Ibid., 325.

76. Adams busily jotted notes: DJA, II, 236.

77. “clear and sonorous”: Works. , I, 31.

78. On March 14: DJA, III, 370.

79. On March 23: Ibid., 374.

80. “the maddest idea”: Calkins, “The American Navy and the Opinions of One of its Founders,” 457.

81. the pleasantest part of his labors: DJA, III, 350.

82. “dull as beetles”: ”: AFC, II, 170.

83. His custom: DJA, III, 350.

84. “Fortify, fortify”: LOD, III, 473.

85. “The middle way”: Ibid., 429.

86. “This story of [peace]”: AFC, I, 383.

87. “I am more and more”: Ibid., IV, 329.

88. “It has been the will of Heaven”: Thoughts on Government, in Works IV, 203ff.

89. “‘an empire of laws’”: Credited by Adams to James Harrington.

90. “Men of experience”: Works IV, 207.

91. “Frugality, industry”: AFC, I, 377.

92. “I have,” she wrote: Ibid., 369.

93. “I wish most sincerely”: Ibid., 162.

94. “I think the sun”: ”: Ibid., 370.

95. “Remember all men”: Ibid., 329. Quote from Daniel Defoe, The Kentish Petition, in Bartlett’s Quotations.

96. “I cannot but laugh”: Ibid., 382.

97. “People can’t account”: PJA, IV, 45.

98. “Have you seen the privateering”: LOD, III, 536.

99. “All great changes”: Ibid., 570.

100. “I miss my partner”: AFC, I, 375.

101. On April 18 Ibid., 387

102. on April 23: Ibid., 392.

103. Is there no way: Ibid., 400.

104. “a people may let a King”: Ibid., 402.

105. “I think you shine”: Ibid., 420.

106. “true saying of a wit”: LOD, III, 523.

107. “a most interesting spectacle”: Pennsylvania Gazette, May 15, 1776.

108. “the happiness and safety”: DJA, III, 383.

109. “Why all this haste?”: Ibid., II, 238.

110. “I wonder the people”: Ibid., 239.

111. “Before we are prepared”: Ibid., 240.

112. “a machine for the fabrication of”: Ibid., III, 386.

113. “passed the most important”: LOD, III, 676.

114. “the cool considerate men”: Ibid., IV, 30.

115. When I consider the great events: AFC, I, 410.

116. “Fine sunshine”: Christopher Marshall diary, May 23, 1776, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

117. “Uncommonly hot”: LOD, III, 33.

118. “as the excessive heats”: Boyd, ed. PTJ, I, 292.

119. Bob Hemings: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, , 216.

120. “I’ve been so long”: Boyd, ed. PTJ, I, 293.

121. “Nothing was too small”: Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, 78.

122. “man of science”: William Plumer, Memorandum, 454.

123. “Never contradict”: Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 318.

124. “utter three sentences”: DJA, III, 335–36.

125. shall I become a Don Quixote: Ibid.

126. You rose: Schutz and Adair, eds., Spur of Fame, 227.

127. “only impatience of temper”: Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, , I, 78.

128. “rubber off of dust”: DJA, II, 218.

129. 5,000 acres: Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, xv.

130. window frames: McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 163.

131. indentured servant: Ibid., 69.

132. a hundred black slaves: Monticello Research Center, Charlottesville, Virginia.

133. earliest childhood memory: Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, I ii.

134. substantial debts: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 162.

135. “all geese are swans”: JA to Frances Vanderkemp, November 24, 1814, AP, MHS

136. “looking with fondness”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, I, 241.

137. “return of the happy period”: Ibid., 241.

138. “rather than submit”: Ibid., 242.

139. “Every post”: LOD, IV, 40.

140. “natural course”: Ibid., 122.

141. Richard Henry Lee: Fehrenbach, Greatness to Spare, 201.

142. That these United Colonies: Boyd, ed., PTJ, I, 298.

143. notes kept by Jefferson:Ibid., 309.

144. “The sensible part”: LOD, IV, 174.

145. “Great things”: AFC, II, 13.

146. According to Adams: Works, II, 514.

147. “I consented”: Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, XV, 461.

148. wrote disparagingly of John Adams: DJA, III, 396.

149. Windsor chair: See Bedini, Declaration of Independence Desk,6–7.

150. “to place before mankind”: TJ to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, VII, 407.

151. I was delighted: Works, II, 514.

152. transcribed the full text: AFC, II, 35, n. 3.

153. copy to Abigail: Ibid., 48–49, n. 8.

154. ravages of smallpox: Shurkin, Invisible Fire, 173–77.

155. “I have not been idle”: LOD, IV, 304, n. 1.

156. “What in the name”: Works, II, 291.

157. “The only question”: LOD, IV, 290.

158. “the bloody conflict”: Commager, Spirit of Seventy-six, 308.

159. “You see therefore”: LOD, IV, 304.

3. COLOSSUS OF INDEPENDENCE

1. “This morning is assigned”: LOD, IV, 345.

2. The object is great: Ibid., 345–46.

3. John Dickinson had resolved: DJA, III, 396.

4. “He had prepared himself”: Ibid., 396.

5. “My conduct this day”: LOD, IV, 352.

6. “determined to speak”: DJA, III, 396.

7. Objects of the most stupendous: LOD, IV, 178.

8. “not graceful”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence, 162.

9. “‘carried out in spirit’”: Shaw, Character of John Adams, 99.

10. “the Atlas”: Works, III, 56.

11. not an actor: DJA, III, 397.

12. “started suddenly”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence, 119.

13. Caesar Rodney: Ibid., 193.

14. another cloudburst: P. H. Smith, Time and Temperature, 4. 130

15. The second day of July 1776: AFC, II, 30.

16. “transported”: Ibid., 31.

17. “You will see in a few days”: Ibid., 28.

18. “This day”: Miller, ed., Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale. , I, 189.

19. well known in the taverns: LOD, IV, 370.

20. mercifully the temperature: See P. H. Smith, Time and Temperature, 4.

21. “the ceaseless action”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence.145.

22. JOHN THOMPSON:

23. nearly 2,500,000: Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution. 125.

24. some 5,000 men: Harley, Timetables of African-American History. 42.

25. more than 200,000 slaves: John Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 2

26. was about 200: Estimate by Lucia Stanton of the Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Charlottesville, Virginia.

27. John Dickinson: Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia.” 250.

28. Even Benjamin Franklin: Campbell, Recovering Franklin. 243.

29. buying and selling: Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin. 129.

30. “a likely wench”: Ibid.

31. When Samuel Adams: Lewis, Grand Incendiary. 150.

32. pamphlet attacking slavery: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 83.

33. Yet he himself: Hawke, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly, 84.

34. “a sprightly, pretty fellow”: DJA, II, 182.

35. “equally strong”: AFC, I, 369.

36. “foul contagion”: JA to Colonel Ward, January 8, 1810, AP, #118, MHS.

37. several slave cases: See Wroth and Zobel, Legal Papers of John Adams, II, 48–52.

38. “repeated” rather than “unremitting”: LOD, IV, 360.

39. “suffered the administration”: Ibid., 361.

40. “our British brethren”: Ibid., 363.

41. “fighting fearlessly”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence. 145.

42. for the support of this Declaration: LOD, IV, 364.

43. pleasantly cool: P. H. Smith, Time and Temperature. 3.

44. Of Jefferson’s Day: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian. 229.

45. “on the common”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence. 242.

46. “Fine starlight”: Christopher Marshall diary, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

47. “very few respectable”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence, 555

48. Savannah:Ibid., 280.

49. black flies: Randolph, Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 49.

50. “We must all hang together”: Fehrenbach, Greatness to Spare, 19.

51. “My hand trembles”: Ibid.

52. produced a new era: LOD, IV, 527.

53. “gallant spirit”: AFC, II, 49. 139 “I think an individual”: LOD, IV, 512.

54. “Mr. Dickinson’s alacrity”: AFC, I, 347.

55. Nathanael Greene: PJA, IV, 382.

56. “unsoldierly conduct”: Twohig, ed., PGW, Revolutionary War Series, V, 290.

57. “vastly unequal”: AFC, II, 24.

58. “We are all inexperienced”: PJA, IV, 325.

59. “very exactly and minutely”: Ibid., 388.

60. Continental currency: Ibid., 375.

61. “Jefferson in those days”: Works, III, 68–69.

62. “Smallpox!”: AFC, II, 24.

63. dispatch of July 11: Twohig, ed., PGW, Revolutionary War Series, V, 277.

64. “Never — never”: AFC, II, 50.

65. Her letter of explanation: Ibid., 45.

66. Dr. Zabdiel Boylston: Shurkin, Invisible Fire, 152.

67. Onesimus: Ibid., 155.

68. “pus from the ripe pustules”: Ibid., 162.

69. “Such a spirit of inoculation”: AFC, II, 45.

70. “Nabby has enough of the smallpox”: Ibid., 93.

71. “in honor and duty”: Ibid., 52.

72. “Not one word”: Ibid., 56.

73. Jefferson checked his thermometer: Bear and Stanton, eds. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, I, 433.

74. “For God’s sake”: Boyd, ed, PTJ, I, 482–83.

75. “My mother”: Randolph, Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 30. 145

76. “great pain”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, I, 483.

77. “the whole subject”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 140. 146

78. “minutia”: Boyd, ed, PTJ, I, 477.

79. “a great deal of difference”: LOD, IV, 527. 146

80. If a confederation, AFC, II, 68.

81. “a mere sound”: Boyd, ed, PTJ, I, 325. 147

82. Hopkins of Rhode Island: Ibid., 326. 147

83. “The more a man”: DJA, II, 247–48. 147

84. Jefferson did speak up: LOD, IV, 603–4. 148

85. “suspense, uncertainty”: AFC, II, 83. 148

86. “as a bridegroom”: Ibid., 76.

87. “If Bass is in the land”: Ibid., 84. 148

88. “This country knows not”: Ibid., 99. 148

89. “I know not how”: AFC, II, 73. 148

90. “I am really astonished”: Ibid., 78. 148

91. Henry Popple: Ibid., 91–92. 149

92. My countrymen want art: Ibid., 76.

93. Benjamin Rush: : Ibid., 59.

94. Charles Willson Peale: Ibid., 112.

95. Here, I say:

96. “of above ships”: Tatum, ed., American Journal of Ambrose Serle. 72.

97. “The Hessians”: Commager, Spirit of Seventy-six. 443.

98. “Good God!”: Flexner, George Washington, II, 111.

99. “peculiar providential”: Commager, Spirit of Seventy-six, 445.

100. “Our situation”: Sept. 3,1776.

101. “Have we not”: ”: PJA, V, 3.

102. “In general”: AFC, II, 140. 153

103. letter of September 4: Ibid., 117.

104. “The panic may seize”: Ibid., 120.

105. Adams remarked under his breath: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 140.

106. “satisfy some disturbed minds”: LOD, V, 120.

107. “Machiavellian maneuvers”: DJA, III, 430.

108. “The staunch and intrepid”: Ibid., 425.

109. His Lordship on Staten Island: : Ibid., 417.

110. The Billopp House: AFC, II, viii.

111. “good claret”: DJA, III, 420.

112. Lord Richard Howe: Ibid., 422.

113. “changed the ground”: LOD, V, 138.

114. “Your Lordship”:

115. “warmly”: LOD, V, 140.

116. “Mr. Adams is a decided character”: DJA, III, 423.

117. He was to hang:Ibid., 423.

118. Howe had no authority: AFC, II, 124.

119. “They met, they talked”: Tatum, American Journal of Ambrose Serle. 101.

120. “So terrible”: Ibid., 104.

121. began cursing: See account in Freeman, Leader of the Revolution. 153–75.

122. “Our affairs”: LOD, V, 212.

123. September 25: Twohig, ed. PGW, Revolutionary War Series. VI, 394.

124. To place any dependence: Ibid., 396.

125. $20 and 100 acres of land: AFC, II, 131.

126. Articles of War: DJA, III, 434.

127. a military academy: Ibid., 437.

128. “Unfaithfulness”: AFC, II, 131.

129. “if we fear God”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 142.

130. “great abilities”: Boyd, ed. PTJ, I, 522.

131. “circumstances very peculiar”: Ibid., 524.

132. “tedious time of it”: AFC, II, 107.

133. “I am stupefied”: Ibid., 139.

134. “your Ladyship”: ”: Ibid., 141.

135. “This illustrious patriot”: LOD, V, 183.

136. “Every member of Congress”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 140.

4. APPOINTMENT TO FRANCE

1. “When do you expect”: AFC, II, 142

2. “I had it in my heart”: Ibid., 150

3. “I am apt to think”: Ibid., 151

4. From her window: Ibid., 171

5. “I want a bird of passage”: Ibid.

6. “’Tis a constant remembrancer”: Ibid., 173

7. “not an hour in the day”: Ibid., 241

8. “We want your industry”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters. 6.

9. “They worry one another”: AFC, II, 245.

10. “I begin to suspect”: Ibid., 176

11. You have discovered: Ibid., 179.

12. “A taste for literature”: Ibid., 177.

13. “the arts of peace”: Ibid., 180.

14. Smollet’s History of England: Ibid., 254

15. “solid instruction”: Ibid., 307.

16. “Our money”: Ibid., 340.

17. “like to outshine”: Ibid., 238.

18. “still more painful one”: Ibid., 258

19. “shaking fit”: Ibid., 277

20. “It appeared to be a very fine babe”: Ibid., 282

21. “The corn looks well”: Ibid., 288

22. “The loss of this sweet little girl”: Ibid., 292

23. “’Tis almost 14 years”: Ibid., 301

24. “Oh, Heaven!”: DFA, II, 265

25. “spirited exertions”: AFC, II, 351

26. “Great advantages”: Ibid., 376

27. It was my intention: DFA, IV, 1.

28. told by Elbridge Gerry: Ibid., 3.

29. named Adams a commissioner: LOD, VIII, 335

30. a formal letter of notification: PFA, V, 333.

31. “We are by no means”: LOD, VIII, 372

32. “one man of inflexible integrity”: Ibid., 338

33. expert on cryptology: See Kahn, Codebreakers. 181ff

34. “This knowledge is only part”: AFC, II, 333

35. And can I, sir: Ibid., 371

36. acceptance to Henry Laurens: PFA, V, 367

37. “I should have wanted”: Ibid., 369

38. “My desire was”: AFC, II, 390

39. You are in possession: Ibid., III, 37

40. They were to sail: DFA, II, 269

41. I am aware: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush. I, 190-92

42. “The heavens frown”: DFA, IV, 7

43. “The wind was very high”: Ibid., 7

44. 14 degrees: Journal of Professor John Winthrop, Feb.15, 1778, Harvard University Archives.

45. “This morning weighed the last anchor”: DFA, II, 271

46. Nicholas Noel: Ibid., IV, 7

47. lacking in erudition: Ibid., 10

48 . You are to afford: Tucker Papers. I 26-27

49. “detestable”: DFA, IV 17

50. Potter’s Field: AFC, II, 209

51. “rolling and rocking”: DFA, II, 274

52. When night approached: Ibid., 274

53. ship “shuddered”: Ibid., IV, 12

54. “raving mad”: Ibid., II, 276 see n. I.

55. “The sea being very cross”: Sheppard, Life of Samuel Tucker. 266

56. No man could keep: DFA, II, 275-76.

57. [His] behavior: Ibid., 15-16

58. “perfectly calm”: Ibid., II, 276

59. “I am constantly”: Ibid., 278

60. “I did not say”: Ibid., 368

61. “What is this Gulf Stream?”: Ibid., 279

62. “The wind is fresh”: Ibid., 280

63. John Quincy had undertaken: Ibid., IV, 21.

64. “our infant navy”: Ibid., 25

65. “We see nothing”: Ibid., II, 281

66. “Nothing very remarkable”: Sheppard, Life of Samuel Tucker. 269

67. “We spied a sail”: DFA, IV, 24

68. over the head of John Adams: Ibid., II, 285.

69. “among my marines”: Ibid., 286-87

70. Lieutenant Barron: Ibid., 288

71. “Europe, thou great theater”: Ibid., 292

72. “as clean as in any gentleman’s”: Ibid.

73. “I hope I shall never forget”: AFC, III, 11

74. symbolic of his whole life: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, II, 294, Feb.3, 1812.

75. warned Adams of bad blood: DFA, IV, 39.

76. “le fameux Adams”: Ibid., II, 351

77. “I believe at first”: DFA, IV, 37.

78. “accoutered”: Ibid., 41

79. “bold, masculine”: Ibid., 42

80. “I was astonished”: Ibid., 47

81. “hard study”: Ibid., 67

82. “The reception I have met”: AFC, III, 9.

83. “I cannot help suspecting”: Ibid., 10.

84. “If human nature”: Ibid., 17

85. To tell you the truth: Ibid.

86. His name was familiar: Works. I, 660.

87. “Although he was very advanced”: DJA, IV, 78.

88. Voltaire and Franklin: Ibid., 80–81.

89. “Nature and art”: AFC, III, 31–32.

90. “coolness”: DJA, IV, 43.

91. “mercurial temperament”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates. XIII, 245.

92. “I am old”: Lopez, ed. PBF, XXVI, 223.

93. “the most corrupt”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates. XIII, 252

94. “He believes all men selfish”: DJA, II, 347

95. Franklin’s character: PJA, IV, 26–27.

96. “great and good man”: AFC, I, 253.

97. He had wit at will: Works. I, 663.

98. “It was impossible”: DJA, IV, 87.

99. Franklin spoke the language poorly: Ibid., II, 302.

100. John Adams is a man: Tolles, “Franklin and the Pulteney Mission,” 54.

101. “I suppose”: DJA, IV, 65.

102. I have long observed: Lopez, ed., PBF, XXIII, 211.

103. Dr. Edward Bancroft: A. R. Riggs, The Nine Lives of Arthur Lee, Virginia Patriot (Williamsburg, Va.: Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1976). 52.

104. “The longer I live”: PJA, VI, 348.

105. writing to Samuel Adams: DJA, IV, 106–8.

106. “Pas un mot!”: Ibid., 92.

107. “becoming the station I held”: Ibid., 132.

108. “a royal supper”: Ibid., 133.

109. “I found that the business”: Ibid., 118–19

110. “My countrymen”: Ibid., 67–68.

111. Between you and me: PJA, VI, 354.

112. “joy of my heart”: AFC, III, 125.

113. Marie Grand: Ibid., 91.

114. “I am very sincere”:PJA, Ibid., 126–27.

115. The longer I live: Ibid., 244.

116. “observed much”: Hale, Benjamin Franklin in France, 141.

117. “There is [a] danger”: PJA, VI, 254.

118. “Are we to be beholden”: Ibid., V, 174

119. Adams drafted a letter: See ibid., VI, 294–304.

120. all three commissioners: Works, VII, 72–77.

121. “restored to the character”:PJA, VI, 416.

122. “I shall therefore”: AFC, III, 169.

123. “best becomes me”: PJA, VI, 407. 211 he vowed never again: Ibid., 429.

124. “All things look gloomy”: AFC, III, 95.

125. “changed hearts”: Ibid., 111.

126. “some infernal”: Ibid., 173.

127. “You know not”:AFC, III, 174.

128. “But my soul is wounded”: Ibid., 119.

129. “write but very little”: Ibid., 176.

130. “If ever I had any wit”: Ibid., 182.

131. “The climate is more favorable”: Ibid., 178.

132. “the wise conduct”: PJA, VI, 424.

133. translating Cicero: DJA, II, 362.

134. Franklin gave instructions: Oberg, ed., PBF, XXIX, 370.

135. John Paul Jones: DJA, II, 370.

136. “the old conjurer”: Ibid., 369.

137. Do I see that these people: Ibid., 369.

138. Eccentricities: Ibid., 371.

139. “By my physical constitution”: Ibid., 362.

140. “The language is nowhere”: Ibid., 370.

141. “Nobody seems to have”: AFC, III, 209.

142. “Known only to my own heart”: Ibid., II, 407. 216 “If I ever had any”: Ibid., III, 120.

143. “This is a painful”: Ibid., 148. 217 “delight”: Ibid., 1. 217 “a very dangerous man”: Ibid., 48.

144. if “ye were mine”: Ibid., 83.

145. chose him as a delegate: Ibid., 226.

146. a sub-sub committee of one: Ibid., 228.

147. “A Constitution or Form of Government”: See, generally, Works, IV, 219–67.

148. a dinner at Harvard: AFC, III, 225.

149. “flowing” from his pen: Ibid., 226.

150. “I take vast satisfaction”: Works, IX, 509.

151. “None of us”: Ibid., 484.

152. “Be assured you have”: Hutson, John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution, 44.

153. “Upon the whole”: Works, IX, 493.

154. “dismissed without censure”: Ibid., 497.

155. an offer of return passage: DJA, IV, 174.

156. “It will be expected”: AFC, III, 268.

157. “Alas! When I reflect”: DJA, IV, 175.

158. The wind was favorable: Ibid., 235.

159. “My habitation”: AFC, III, 233.

5. UNALTERABLY DETERMINED

1. the Sensible: DJA, IV, 192, AFC III, 237.

2. “We have had”: AFC, III, 243.

3. proceeding overland: DJA, IV, 193.

4. “The season”: Ibid., 205.

5. a scene from Don Quixote: AFC, III, 251.

6. “enemies of all repose”: DFA, IV, 213.

7. We carried: Ibid., 217.

8. “There is the grandest profusion”: Ibid., II, 419.

9. “We had nothing”: D. G. Allen, ed., DFQA, I, 21.

10. “almost perpendicular”: Ibid., 30.

11. “Smoke filled every part”: DFA, II, 416.

12. “We go along barking”: Ibid., 426-27.

13. a mistake coming overland: AFC, III, 258.

14. part with his mule: DFA, IV, 238.

15. “had the honor”: Ibid., 241.

16. “so frank”: Works, VII, 121.

17. a letter of explanation: DFA, IV, 244.

18. “It is the part of prudence”: Ibid., 245.

19. “Always keep in mind”: Shepherd, Adams Chronicles, 92.

20. “The delicacies”: Works, VII, 138.

21. Although I am convinced: Ibid., 151.

22. “I have written more”: JA to Elbridge Gerry, May 23, 1780, AP, MHS.

23. “I am so taken up”: AFC, III, 320.

24. “Can’t you keep”: Ibid., 309.

25. “Ornaments of this kind”: Ibid., 316.

26. How long would it be: Ibid., 332.

27. “There is everything here”: Ibid., 333.

28. I must study politics: Ibid., 342.

29. You tell me, sir: PFA, IX, 256-57.

30. “delicate” Charles: Ibid., 305.

31. May Heaven permit you: Ibid., 367.

32. “Keep us weak”: DFA, II, 446.

33. official letter of June 21: Works, VII, 190-92.

34. “retrace its steps”: Ibid., 192.

35. “Foreigners, when they come”: Ibid., 198.

36. Whatever the size: Ibid., 220.

37. “the best policy”: Ibid., 226.

38. “determined to omit”: Ibid., 241-42.

39. But Vergennes had had enough: Ibid., 243.

40. “The King expects”: Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, VIII, 117.

41. August 9, 1780: Lopez, ed., PBF, XXIII, 160-66.

42. “a virgin state”: Ibid., 511.

43. “The wheat”: DFA, II, 442.

44. “We passed by Mons”: D. G. Allen, ed., DFQA, I, 37.

45. “a certain king”: Nordholt, Dutch Republic and American Independence, 107.

46. “The whole is an astonishing”: Francis Dana Journal, MHS.

47. liberal atmosphere: Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, xxvi.

48. “Wherever the eye ranges”: Owen, Travels into Different Parts of Europe in the Years 1791-1792, I, 90-91.

49. “The verdure”: Nordholt, Dutch Republic and American Independence, 5.

50. “so laden with filth”: Radcliffe, Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, 106.

51. James Boswell of London: Pottle, ed., Boswell in Holland, 236.

52. One says America: Works, VII, 247.

53. “Madame La Veuve du Henry”: DFA, II, 451.

54. “Papa went out to dinner”: D. G. Allen, ed., DFQA, I, 53.

55. A “considerable” loan: Works, VII, 245.

56. “the greatest curiosity”: AFC, III, 413-14.

57. Adams notified John Thaxter: Ibid., 424.

58. enrolled in Amsterdam’s: Ibid., 424.

59. “If I could have my will”: Ryerson, ed., PFA, X, 165.

6 0. “A navy is our natural”: Ibid., 270.

61. “I think I see very clearly”: Wharton, ed., Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, IV, 97.

62. This country: Ibid., 98.

63. “people of the first character”: Works, VIII, 342.

64. “The burgomasters of Amsterdam”: Works, VIII, 329.

65. “littleness of soul”: AFC, IV, 35.

66. A woman who sang: Wharton, ed., Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, IV, 197.

67. “War is to a Dutchman”: Ibid., 209.

68. “obscure”: John Adams,Correspondence of the Late President Adams, Letter XLIII.

69. “the best house”: JA to Messrs. Sigourney, Ingraham & Bromfield, April 9, 1781, AP, #102 MHS.

70. In lengthy correspondence: JA to Messrs. Sigourney, Ingraham & Bromfield, April 11 and 13, 1781, AP, #102 MHS.

71. “a thousand unfortunate incidents”: Gianta, ed., The Emerging Nation, I, 152.

72. “America . . . has been too long”: Works, VIII, 393.

73. “Mr. Adams could not refrain”: Watson, Tour in Holland, 104.

74. On April 19, 1781: Works, vii, 396-404.

75. I never shall forget: Benjamin Waterhouse to Levi Woodbury, February 20, 1835, Levi Woodbury Papers, DLG, vol. XVI, MHS.

76. “What!” said the Duke: John Adams, Correspondence of the Late President Adams, Letter LI.

77. On Friday, May 4, 1781: Works, VII, 413.

78. “desires her tenderest”: AFC, IV, 3.

79. “Handkerchiefs will turn”: Ibid., III, 321.

80. “a country so damp”: Ibid., 14.

81. “I am wholly unconscious”: Ibid., 13.

82. On Christmas Day, 1780: Ibid., 50-52.

83. Keizersgracht: Ibid., 108.

84 . “Oh! Oh!”: Ibid., 116.

85. “with a constancy”: Ibid., 121.

86. “You are now at a university”: Ibid., 38.

87. “It is not simple velocity”: Ibid., 55.

88. “Terence is remarkable”: Ibid., 80.

89. “I absolutely”: Ibid., 144.

90. Read somewhat in the English poets: Ibid., 114.

91. “You will ever remember”: Ibid., 117.

92. “without [the] knowledge”: Richard Morris, Peacemakers, 215.

93. “I think it must convince”. LOD, XVII, 325.

94. “You will send me”: AFC, IV, 165.

95. “I consented [to the departure]”: John Adams, Correspondence of the Late President Adams, Letter LXIII.

96. “long journey”: AFC, IV, 170.

97. “fit for the Hôtel”: JA to Messrs. Sigourney, Ingraham & Bromfield, April 13,1781, AP, #102 MHS.

98. “Congress may have done”: Works, VII, 460.

99. Adams fell ill: AFC, IV, 224.

100. “all powerful [Peruvian] bark”: JA to Thomas McKean, October 15, 1781, AP, #104 MHS.

101. “wondrous virtue”: JA to M. Dumas, October 15, 1781, AP, #102 MHS.

102. This is always: Huxham, Essay on Fevers, 62-63.

103. typhus: editorial note, Greg L. Lint, AP, MHS.

104. “unwholesome damps”: AFC, IV, 225, n. 3.

105. his “fever”: JA to Edmund Jenings, April 28,1782, AP, #356, MHS.

106. on October 4: Works. VII, 465-66.

107. In reply, Franklin: Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, VIII, 317.

108. In mid-October: Works, VII, 471-75.

109. “Don’t distress yourself”: AFC, IV, 249-51.

110. “Ah my dear John”: Ibid., 256.

111. “God willing”: Works, IX, 513.

112. “Oh, God!”: Richard Morris, Peacemakers, 251.

113. “the glorious news”: Works, VII, 481.

114 . “Cornwallization”: Ibid., 498.

115. “categorical answer”: Ibid., 515.

116. “The charge of vanity”: Ibid., 528.

117. “‘What dust we raise’”: Ibid., 527.

118. “Friesland is said to be”: Ibid., 539.

119. “Your humble servant”: AFC, IV, 300.

120. On Monday, April 22: Works, VII, 571.

121. “made an entertainment”: Ibid., 573-74.

122. “liveliest transports”: Nordholt, Dutch Republic and American Independence, 218.

123. “The resolution”: JA to Edmund Jenings, April 28,1782, AP, #356 MHS.

124. “If this had been”: AFC, IV, 338-39.

125. “I have rendered”: Ibid., 370.

126. “I must be an independent man”: Ibid., 337.

127. a letter to Edmund Jenings: JA to Edmund Jenings, September 27,1782, AP, #358, MHS.

128. If they avoid: Robert Livingston to JA, March 5, 1782, AP, #356, MHS.

129. Heer Adams: Pennsylvania Journal, Sept. 14, 1782.

130. a treaty of commerce: AFC, V, 15.

131. “say nothing of this”: Works, VII, 641.

132. “troublesome business”: AFC, V, 15.

133. he started for Paris: DFA, III, 29, 30.

134. Rubens altarpiece at Antwerp: Ibid., 31.

135. While we were viewing: Ibid., 35-36.

136. “[Mr. Adams] is much pleased”: Klingelhofer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary,”

137. William and Mary Quarterly, XX, Jan. 1963.

138. I cannot express: Works, VII, 652-54.

139. After what Franklin: Klingelhofer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary,” William and Mary Quarterly, XX, Jan., 1963.

140. “with much persuasion”: Ibid.

141. His base jealousy: JA to Edmund Jenings, July 20, 1782, AP, #107, MHS.

142. to “speak or hear”: AFC, V, 28.

143. to praise Jay: DFA, III, 38.

144. “In the air”: Ibid., 45.

145. “took it amiss”: Ibid., 47.

146. “hear an expostulation?”: Ibid., 47, n. 2.

147. “The Comte”: Ibid., 49.

148. “French gentlemen”: Ibid., 50.

149. included with a report: Ibid., 50, n. 2.

150. “What powers?”: Ibid., 61.

151. France does not feel obliged: Morris, The Peacemakers, 330.

152. “vast deal”: Ibid., 75.

153. “carrying away any Negroes”: Ibid., 82.

154. Gentlemen, is there: Ibid., 79.

155. “a pretty good meal”: Klingelhofer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary,” William and Mary Quarterly, XX, Jan., 1963, 132.

156. performed “nobly”: DFA, III, 81.

157. “I am at a loss”: Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, VIII, 641.

158. “English buy peace”: Morris, The Peacemakers, 383.

159. “Sharp fiery humors”: AFC, V, 170.

160. “My friend, you and I”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 349.

161. “You may depend”: AFC, V, 60.

6. ABIGAIL IN PARIS

1. terrified of the sea: AFC, V, 271.

2. “I know not”: Ibid., 277.

3. Reverend William Smith, had died: Ibid., 253.

4. “I cannot consent”: Ibid, 271.

5. “fine majestic girl”: Ibid., 57.

6. She has stateliness: Ibid., 7.

7. “If he is steady”: Ibid., 62.

8. “dissipation”: EDJA, 23 n. 50.

9. Daughter!: JA to AA, April 8,1783, Shaw Family Papers, LOC.

10. “courting mothers”: AFC, V, 74-75.

11. “attachment”: Ibid., 260.

12. I recollect the untitled: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, I, 169.

13. “parade and nonsense”: AFC, V, 259.

14. Her health was poor: Ibid., 270.

15. even by balloon: Ibid., 236.

16. “The lady comes”: Ibid., 256.

17. You invite me: Ibid., 303.

18. “I can scarcely think it”: Ibid., 302.

19. “Sir, you and the”: Ibid., 317.

20. by two servants: Ibid., 305, n. 4.

21. named Phoebe: Ibid., 303.

22. Phoebe is to be allowed: Ibid., 345.

23. “But let no”: Ibid., 331.

24. “not of unmeaning complimenters”: DJA, III, 154.

25. “I thanked him for his politeness”: AFC, V, 398.

26. the Active: DJA, III, 155.

27. “We crawled”: AFC, V, 359.

28. “We can only live”: Ibid., 361.

29. “as some gentlemen sat”: Ibid.

30. rheumatism: Ibid., 365.

31. “lazy, dirty”: Ibid., 364.

32. “make a bustle”: Ibid., 359.

33. she mastered the names: Ibid., 364.

34. “Great and marvelous”: Ibid.

35. reading on medicine: DJA, III, 158.

36. “haughty Scotchman”: AFC, V, 366.

37. One of the crew: DJA, III, 162.

38. “No matter where”: Ibid., 162.

39. “Man was made”: AFC, V, 365.

40. We set off from the vessel: Ibid., 368.

41. seventy-two miles: Ibid., 369.

42.Black Heath: Ibid., 370.

43. “as quiet as at any place”: Ibid., 373.

44. “Heaven give us”: Ibid., 399.

45. portrait done by Copley: DJA, III, 31.

46. “walk a vast deal”: Ibid., 40.

47. “Young Mr. Adams”: Ibid., 43.

48. “You can imagine”: AFC, VI, 32.

49. Everything around appeared: Butterfield et al., ed., Book of Abigail and John, 397-98.

50. “You know my dear sister”: AFC, VI, 17.

51.“I was chilled to the heart”: DJA, III, 153.

52.“The house, the garden”: Ibid., 171.

53.“I make a little America”: Shaw, Character of John Adams, 195.

54.“Why, my dear”: AFC, V, 434.

55.“delightful”: Ibid., 433.

56.“One [servant]”: Ibid., 441.

57.“business is to purchase”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 49.

58.“a sprat in a whale’s belly”: JA to Cotton Tufts, Dec. 15, 1784, AP, #363, MHS.

59.“We spend no evenings”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 50.

60.“The inquiry is not whether”: AFC, VI, 136.

61.“dancing here and there”: Ibid., V, 440.

62. “To be out of fashion”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 69.

63.“smelt it”: Ibid., 54.

64. “What idea, my dear madame”: AFC, V, 447.

65. a Paris orphanage: Ibid., VI, 57.

66. John Paul Jones: Ibid., 5.

67. “Less money”: Ibid, 6.

68. She entered the room: Ibid., V, 436-37.

69. “I have been here”: Ibid., 446.

70. Fancy, my dear Betsy: Ibid., 39.

71. The dresses: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 82.

72. “And oh!”: Ibid., 83.

73.They are easy: Ibid., 76.

74. Adrienne François de Noailles: AFC, VI, 15-16.

75. “You would have supposed”: Ibid., 16.

76.“I have often complained”: Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, 34.

77. “I have got their profiles”: Ibid., 30.

78.“Aya, I had rather”: Ibid., V, 468.

79. “I shall always”: Ibid., VI, 102.

80. “May Heaven reward him”: 310 Ibid., V, 471.

81. “I wish I could give you”: Ibid., V, 465.

82.“Dined at Mr. Jefferson’s”: D. G. Allen, ed. DJQA, I, 216.

83.“eight or ten thousand”: A. A. Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, II, 18.

84. “My new partner”: JA to Arthur Lee, Jan. 31,1785, AP, #364, MHS.

85. “He professes”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 68.

86. “perfect freedom and unreserve”: AFC, VI, 169.

87. “one of the choice ones”: Ibid., 119.

88. Martha had died: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 396.

89. “confined himself from the world”: A. A. Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, II, 45.

90. “rode out”: Randolph, Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 63.

91. 90,000 bricks: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 287.

92. “You will find”: Ibid., 296.

93. “so excessive”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, III, 643.

94. Captain Jack Jouett: See Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 355-58.

95. “I ordered a carriage”: Mayo, ed. Jefferson Himself, 104.

96.thirty slaves: Ibid., 105.

97. George Nicholas called: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 361.

98. “a wound in my spirit”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VI, 185.

99. “[I] have retired”: Ibid., 118.

100. “stupor of mind”: Ibid., 235.

101. “venom”: Ibid., 235.

102. He hates Franklin: Ibid., 241.

103. “Jefferson is an excellent hand”: JA to Elbridge Gerry, April 25,1785, AP, #107, MHS.

104. “You can scarcely”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VII, 393.

105. “seasoning”: Ibid., VIII, 43.

106. he did not expect to live: AFC, V, 458.

107. “never buying anything”: Betts and Bear, eds., Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, 43. 1

108. fifty-nine bottles of Bordeaux: Bear and Stanton, eds. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, I, 564.

109. he turned to Adams: AFC, VI, 43.

110. “small laughing busts”: Bear and Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, I, 565. 1

111. Devoted to chess: Ellen Coolidge Correspondence, University of Virginia Special Collections.

112. “affecting sight”: A. A. Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, II, 25.

113. “She is a sweet girl”: Ibid., 45.

114. Lucy, had died: Ibid.

115. “an excellent man”: AFC, VI, 78.

116. “If you were to examine him”: Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend, 6.

117. “The table is covered”: AFC, VI, 47.

118. “We see but little”: Ibid., 25.

119. “I feel very loath”: Ibid., 20.

120. You must know: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 78.

121. a Te Deum was sung: D. G. Allen, ed., DJQA, I, 242.

122. There are perhaps: Ibid., 239.

123. My father: Ibid., 256.

124. Elbridge Gerry: AFC, VI, 109.

125. “I shall find”: Ibid., 111.

126. He said that Lord Carmarthen: DJA, III, 176.

127. “I have not one”: Ibid.

128. “and such shall I live”: MHS, Warren-Adams Letters, II, 40.

129. “great thing”: DJA, III, 176.

130. “We journeyed”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VIII, 178.

131. “our meditation”: Ibid., 160.

132. The whole commerce: Peden, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia, 162, 139, 141, 143.

133. “The departure”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VI, 164.

7. LONDON

1. the greatest talker: JA to John Langdon, February 28, 1812, AP, #118, MHS.

2. If at times: JA to Elbridge Gerry, May 2, 1785, AP, #364, MHS.

3. as instructed: May 27, 1785, AP, #111, MHS.

4. audience with the King: JA to John Jay, May 29, 1785, AP, #111, MHS.

5. a brief speech before the King: Works, VIII, 255.

6. “I felt more”: Ibid., 257.

7 The circumstances: Ibid., 257.

8. I retreated: Ibid., 258.

9. “character”: AFC, VI, 17.

10. “I cannot bear”: Ibid., 187.

11. Handel’s Messiah: Ibid., 329.

12. “elegant but plain”: Ibid., 189.

13. “A very dress cap”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 101.

14 “Thus equipped”: Ibid.

15. “master of the human heart”: AFC, VI, 313.

16. Only think of the task: Ibid., 102-4.

17. “well shaped”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 104.

18. northeast corner: Memorandum of JA’s rental agreement for the house on Grosvenor Square, AP, June 19, 1785, MHS.

19. “We shall live”: AFC, VI, 205.

20. “tumult and hurry”: Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, 88.

21. “sacrificed upon the gallows”: Ibid., 329.

22. Royal Bell Ringers: June 1785, AP, #364, MHS.

23. “learned pig”: AFC, VI, 331.

24. “enchanted palace”: Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, 92.

25. Sir William Herschel: A. A. Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, I, 84.

26. “The English may call”: AFC, VI, 213.

27. “not the pleasantest”: Ibid., 347.

28. “tasty”: Ibid., xiii.

29. “candor, probity”: Ibid., xiv. 344 “a good likeness”: Ibid., 216.

30. cut Adams’s salary: JA to William Tudor, Sept. 18, 1785, AP, #115, MHS.

31. “I am driven”: JA to Mercy Warren, May 24, 1785, AP, MHS.

32. she won four games: AA to Mrs. Cranch, April 6, 1786, in C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 135.

33. “Othello [played by John Kemble]”: AFC, VI, 366. 346 “a man must be of rock”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VIII, 548. 346 It would have: Ibid.

34. French dessert: AFC, VI, 264–65.

35. “But when writing”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VIII, 549.

36. There is a strong: JA to President Lee, Aug. 26, 1785, AP, #111, MHS.

37. “a new order of things”: JA to Matthew Robinson, March 4, 1786, AP, #113, MHS.

38 “They hate us”: JA to Charles Storer, May 22, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

39. “I had rather”: JA to Elbridge Gerry, July 15, 1785, AP, #107, MHS.

40. John Adams hanged: AFC, VI, 196.

41 “When Mr. Adams came in”: Ibid., I, 136.

42 “those sanctified hypocrites”: Berkin, Jonathan Sewall, 124. 350 a broken heart: Peabody, ed., John Adams, 134.

43. “We must not”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 61. 351 Portugal’s need: Ibid., 90.

44. sculptor Houdon: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VIII, 267, 302, 340, 577, 663. 353 It is long since: Ibid., IX, 285.

45. His Excellency appeared: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, Feb. 8–27, 1786, AP, #367, MHS.

46. “aversion to have anything”: Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, I, 95.

47. “They require”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XII, 193.

48. “This people”: Works, III, 393.

50. “their little journey”: AA to Cotton Tufts, April 8, 1786, AP, #367, MHS.

51. the longest time they had had: AA to Mrs. Cranch, in C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 135–36.

52. Observations on Modern Gardening: Boyd, ed., PTJ, IX, 374. 358 “Four people”: Ibid., 370.

53. “I mounted”: DJA, III, 186.

54. “no pretension”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, IX, 371.

55. Venus and Bacchus unnecessary: DJA, III, 184.

56. “according to the custom”: Ibid., 185.

57. “There is nothing”: Ibid.

58. “kissed the ground”: AA to George Adams, Aug. 7, 1815, AP, #426, MHS.

59. “ground where liberty was fought for”: DJA, III, 185.

60. farm known as Leasowes: Boyd, ed., PTJ, IX, 371.

61. “the simplest and plainest”: DJA, III, 186.

62. You know the opinion: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XI, 94.

63. “He possesses”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Jan. 10, 1786, AP, #367, MHS. 362 “like to become your brother”: AA to JQA, Feb. 16, 1786, AP, #367, MHS.

64. “this unhappy connection”: AFC, VI, 486.

65. “I cannot, however”: AA to Mary Cranch, Feb. 10, 1788, AP, MHS. 363 “The young couple”: JA to James Warren, July 4, 1786, AP, MHS. 363 dreamed of Royall Tyler: AA to Mary Cranch, June 13, 1786, AP, MHS.

66. “Suppose you give”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 162.

67. “smell of the midnight lamp”: JA to JQA, April 2, 1786, AP, #367, MHS. 364 a “memorable change”: JA to Matthew Robinson, March 23, 1786, AP, MHS.

68. “Watchfulness over yourself”: AA to JQA, July 21, 1786, AP, #368, MHS. 365 “You have in your nature”: JA to Charles Adams, June 2, 1786, AP, #113, MHS.

69. “I flatter myself”: Lord Carmarthen to JA, Feb. 28, 1786, AP, #367, MHS. 366 “too long trifled”: JA to Cotton Tufts, May 26, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

70. “I will go”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 177.

71. “everyone fled”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Aug. 1, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

72 “miserable”: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, July 27–Aug. 22, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

73. “As this presents”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Aug. 1, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

74. “Not a hill to be seen”: AA to Mrs. Cranch, in C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams,

II, 146.

75. “Don’t be alarmed”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 557.

76. proposed trade of her son: Ibid., 202.

77. “An unfortunate dislocation”: Ibid., 621.

78. Maria Cosway: See, generally, Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, II, chap. 5. AA and Cosways: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, Jan. 22, 1786, AP, MHS.

79. “Head” and “Heart”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 443–53.

80. “tyranny of Britain”: AA to Mary Cranch, Feb. 25, 1787, AAS.

81. “Ignorant, restless”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 168.

82. he hoped the captured rebels: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XI, 174.

83. “a little rebellion”: Ibid.

84. “workhouse of nature”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 447. 371 daughter had safely arrived: Ibid., II, 50.

85. “The tree of liberty”: Ibid., XII, 356.

86. “a fine boy”: AA to Lucy Cranch, April 26, 1787, American Antiquarian Society.

87. “I show her your picture”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 178.

88. “The old nurse”: Ibid.

89. “as rough as a little sailor”: Ibid., 183.

90. “Popularity”: JA to James Warren, Jan. 9, 1787, AP, MHS.

91. “philosophic solitude”: JA to AA, Dec. 25, 1786, AP, #369, MHS. 374 “He is so much swallowed”: AA to JQA, Nov. 22, 1786, AP, #369, MHS.

92. “setting up a king”: AA to JQA, March 20, 1787, AP, #369, MHS. 374 A Defence of the Constitutions: See, generally, Works, IV–VI.

93. “I have read”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XI, 177.

94. “a powerful engine”: Ibid., 402.

95. “secret design”: Rutland, ed., Papers of James Madison, X, 44. 379 “What think you”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 210. 379 “things” in the Constitution: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XII, 350.

96. “You are afraid”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 213. 380 The public mind: Works, VIII, 467.

97. “and how we say at sea”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 214.

98. “the Vassall-Borland place”: AA to Mary Cranch, Oct. 1787, American Antiquarian Society.

99. William had died: AA to Mary Cranch, Feb. 10, 1788, American Antiquarian Society.

100. Esther Field: Ibid.

101. emergency trip: AA to Cotton Tufts, Feb. 20, 1788, AP, #371, MHS.

102. “I have considered”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XII, 553.

103. “in the midst of the bustle”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 226.

104. By his opinions: Nabby to JQA, Feb. 10, 1788, AP, #371, MHS.

8. HEIR APPARENT

1. Boston lighthouse: Two-Hundredth Anniversary of Boston Light, 70–71.

2. “My coach”: John Hancock to JA, May 7, 1788, AP, MHS.

3. “The bells in the several churches”: Massachusetts Centinel, June 18, 1788.

4. The oldest has given: JA to Abigail Adams Smith, July 16, 1788, AP, MHS.

5. “Busy unpacking”: DJQA, II, 420.

6. “Parson Wibird”: Ibid., 419.

7. “In height and breadth”: AA to Abigail Adams Smith, July 7, 1788, AP, MHS.

8. “It is not large”: Works, IX, 557.

9. Brissot de Warville: Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 1788, 102.

10. “no Paris lawyer”: La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, François. Travels Through the United States of North America, I, 407–8.

11. “And who can object”: Massachusetts Centinel, June 25, 1788.

12. Benjamin Rush wrote: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 469.

13. “I think of my poor”: AA to Mary Cranch, Dec. 15, 1788, AP, MHS.

14. “The new government”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 234.

15. “Mr. A, to a sound understanding”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, V, 231.

16. Merit must be: Massachusetts Centinel, April 15, 1789. 394 “Freedom of the City”: Ibid., May 2, 1789.

17. 4 million by 1789: See population figures in New York Daily Gazette, July 9, 1789.

18. Virginia was still: See population figures ibid.

19. American Indians: See, Purvis, Revolutionary America, 1763–1800, 24.

20. “Aristotle and Plato”: JA to Arthur Lee, July 18, 1788, Princeton University.

21. “people secretly wish”: Abbot, ed., PGW, II, 59–60.

22. “fate of this government”: JA to William Tudor, May 9, 1789, Tudor Papers, MHS.

23. nearly 700,000 men, women: See population figures in New York Daily Gazette, July 9, 1789.

24. fully 500,000: See population figures ibid.

25. “Patriotism is ridiculed”: MHS, Warren-Adams Letters, II, 249.

26. “in a land of strangers”: Abigail Adams Smith to AA, Sept. 7, 1788, AP, MHS.

27. “I find men and manners”: JA to Abigail Adams Smith, Nov. 11, 1788, AP, MHS.

28. “Not wholly without experience”: Works, VIII, 487.

29. “not quite adapted”: JA to JQA, July 9, 1789, AP, MHS.

30. recompense for office holders: Works, IX, 533.

31. “May Heaven assist me”: Freeman, George Washington. Vol. VI, 155.

32. Federal Hall: See, generally, Christman, First Federal Congress, 104–10.

33. “I wish the business”: Ibid., 108.

34. “cheerfully and readily”: Works, VIII, 486.

35. But if from inexperience: Ibid., 487.

36. “Gentlemen, I feel”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 2.

37. “I find, sir”: Ibid., 3.

38. Richard Henry Lee offered: Ibid., 7.

39. “Many persons in the crowd”: Gazette of the United States, April 25, 1789.

40. “Long live George Washington”: New York Gazette, May 1, 1789.

41. With the crowd in raptures: Gazette of the United States, May 2, 1789.

42. “a confidence as pure”: O’Dwyer, “A French Diplomat’s View of Congress, 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, July 1964.

43. “with great cordiality”: JA to AA, May 1, 1789, AP, MHS.

44. “No man on earth”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 238.

45. There were presidents of fire companies: Maclay, Journal of William McClay, 23.

46. how to address Washington: Works, VIII, 513.

47. The Contrast: Tyler, The Contrast, 20.

48. “The more simple”: Hobson, ed., Papers of James Madison, XII, 155.

49. “For forty minutes”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 26.

50. “I cannot help thinking”: Ibid., 29.

51. “His Rotundity”: Ibid.

52. “Is not my election”: Old Family Letters, 36.

53. “corruption of ambition”: JA to William Tudor, June 14, 1789, AP, #115, MHS.

54. “anything at any rate”: JA to AA, May 14, 1789, AP, MHS.

55. Hume, Johnson: JA to AA, May 24, 1789, AP, MHS.

56. “My sincere thanks”: JA to AA, May 19, 1789, AP, MHS.

57. “dear friend”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, I, 522–23.

58. “the most superlatively”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XV, 315.

59. preserve the laws: Old Family Letters, 37.

60. “I am a mortal”: Ibid., 60.

61. I deny an “attachment”: Ibid.

62. “A hundred years hence”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, I, 522.

63. “familiar and unaffected”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, 143.

64. “anxious hours”: AA to JA, May 30, 1789, AP, MHS.

65. “What shall I do”: JA to Cotton Tufts, June 12, 1789, AP, MHS.

66. Charles’s difficulties: Harvard Archives, Faculty Records, 5: 272; 6: 29–30.

67. “We are all very happy”: JA to Cotton Tufts, June 28, 1789, AP, MHS.

68. “We are delightfully situated”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 28, 1789, AP, MHS.

69. “At Richmond Hill”: AA to Mary Cranch, Aug. 9, 1789, AP, MHS.

70. “She is plain in dress”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 28, 1789, AP, MHS.

71. He is polite: AA to Mary Cranch, Jan. 5, 1790, AP, MHS.

72. “busy indeed”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 112.

73. “advantages from pride”: John Trumbull to JA, Feb. 6, 1790, AP, #373, MHS.

74. “You talk of my enemies”: JA to John Trumbull, March 9, 1790, AP, #115, MHS.

75. Public business, my son: JA to Thomas Boylston Adams, Sept. 2, 1789, AP, MHS.

76. young Charles to clerk: Hecht, Odd Destiny, 176.

77. dripping head: New York Daily Gazette, Sept. 23, 1789.

78. a complete revolution: New York Daily Gazette, Sept. 23, 1789.

79. France seems travailing: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 151.

80. “It seemed impossible”: Gardner, ed., Thomas Jefferson, 210.

81. “The essence of the whole”: Old Family Letters, 55.

82. “Jefferson is here”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 3, 1790, AP, MHS.

83. It rests now with ourselves: Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 247.

84. “Discourses on Davila”: See Works, VI, 227–403.

85. “division of sentiments”: JA to William Smith, May 20, 1790, AP, MHS.

86. Washington was suddenly taken so ill: See, generally, Gazette of the United States, May 8 and May 19, 1790.

87. “every eye full of tears”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 259.

88. “At this early day”: AA to Mary Cranch, May 30, 1790, AP, MHS.

89. “I hate to complain”: AA to Mary Cranch, March 21, 1790, AP, MHS.

90. “most adjacent”: Hobson, ed., Papers of James Madison, XII, 375.

91. “John Adams has neither judgment”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 278.

92. New Yorkers were outraged: See New York Journal and Patriotic Register, July 2, July 9, July 20, 1790; New York Daily Gazette, July 3, 1790.

93. “the dazzling Mrs. Bingham”: AA to Abigail Adams Smith, Dec. 26, 1790, AP, MHS.

94. “fine ladies show”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Feb. 6, 1791, AP, MHS.

95. “this young man”: AA to JA, Jan. 5, 1794, AP, MHS.

96. “We all preach patience”: AA to Mary Cranch, March 12, 1791, AP, MHS.

97. her greater worry: AA to Mary Cranch, Dec. 12, 1790, AP, MHS.

98. “the political heresies”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XX, 290.

99. “mortified”: Ibid., 292.

100. Adams answered Jefferson: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 247–50.

101. “Indeed, it was impossible”: Ibid., 250–52.

103. “a clever, sober”: AA to Mary Cranch, Dec. 18, 1791, AP, MHS.

104. “I firmly believe”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 20, 1792, AP, MHS.

105. “not only a monarchist”: J. C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton, 317.

106. “pretenders to profound knowledge”: Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 459.

107. “mutual forebearances”: Catanzariti, ed., PTJ, XXIV, 317.

108. “North and South”: Ibid., XXIII, 538–39.

109. “a real friend”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XII, 568.

110. “I am persuaded”: Ibid., 342.

111. 6,000 to 7000 people: Massachusetts Centinel, Oct. 3, 1792.

112. “too dreadful to relate”: Abigail Adams Smith to AA, Sept. 13, 1792, AP, MHS.

113. a stinging confidential reply: Catanzariti, ed., PTJ, XXV, 14.

114. “he had been long”: JA to AA, Nov. 24, 1792, AP, MHS.

115. “I am with all the ardor”: JA to AA, Jan. 27, 1793, AP, MHS.

116. “You apologize for the length”: JA to AA, Feb. 4, 1794, AP, MHS.

117. “newspaper warfare”: AA to JA, Dec. 23, 1792, AP, MHS.

118. “hell hounds”: JA to AA, Jan. 24, 1793, AP, MHS.

119. “His skin is thinner”: JA to AA, Jan. 31, 1793, AP, MHS.

120. “For God’s sake”: Mason, ed., Papers of James Madison, XV, 43.

121. “polite enough to accompany”: JA to AA, Feb. 3, 1793, AP, MHS.

122. “the whole man”: Ibid.

123. “blind spirit of party”: JA to AA, Dec. 28, 1792, AP, MHS.

124. “Danton, Robespierre”: JA to AA, Jan. 14, 1793, AP, MHS.

125. “The whole drama”: JA to AA, Feb. 27, 1793, AP, MHS.

126. “his head was severed”: New York Daily Gazette, April 3, 1789.

127. Mankind are now enlightened: New York Journal and Patriotic Register, April 6, 1793.

128. “All the old spirit”: Catanzariti, ed., PTJ, XXV, 661.

129. “pretty short of cash”: Thomas Adams to JA, Oct. 9, 1793, AP, MHS.

130. “Would to Heaven”: AA to Abigail Adams Smith, Feb. 3, 1794, AP, MHS.

131. “I go to the Senate”: JA to AA, Jan. 21, 1794, AP, MHS.

132. “My country in its wisdom”: JA to AA, Dec. 19, 1793, AP, MHS.

133. “But his want of candor”: JA to AA, Dec. 26, 1793, AP, MHS.

134. “Jefferson went off”: JA to AA, Jan. 6, 1794, AP, MHS.

135. Jefferson thinks he shall: JA to JQA, Jan. 3, 1793, AP, MHS.

136. “din of politics”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 253–54.

137. “find a way to reconcile”: Ibid., 255.

138. “tranquility becomes daily”: Ibid., 257.

139. This has injured: Ibid., 258.

140. “paper transactions”: Ibid., 254.

141. “The rights of one generation”: Ibid., 255.

142. Reasoning has been all lost: Ibid., 259.

143. “My health is entirely”: Stagg, ed., Papers of James Madison, XVI, I.

144. “nail manufactory”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 258.

145. “Move or die”: JA to Charles Adams, Feb. 7, 1795, AP, MHS.

146. red, watery eyes: Adams’s eye troubles through much of his life may have been caused by a disease known as thyrotoxicosis. See John Ferling and Lewis E. Braverman, “John Adams’s Health Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly, Jan. 1998.

147. “painful to the vanity”: JA to JQA, April 26, 1795, AP, MHS.

148. “Much more depends”: JA to JQA, April 3, 1794, AP, MHS.

149. “How the present age”: JA to Charles Adams, Jan. 9, 1794, AP, MHS.

150. “I know not what”: JA to AA, Jan. 21, 1794, AP, MHS.

151. “My aged and venerable mother”: JA to Abigail Adams Smith, Jan. 7, 1794, AP, MHS.

152. “I have often thought”: JA to AA, May 19, 1794, AP, MHS.

153. “superior to all sense”: Twining, Travels in America a Hundred Years Ago, 37–39.

154. “Were I to declare”: Charles Adams to JA, March 12, 1794, AP, MHS.

155. “After all the hairbreadth”: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, Oct. 26, 1795, AP, MHS.

156. “I am heir apparent”: JA to AA, Jan. 20, 1796, AP, MHS.

157. “I will be second”: AA to JA, Jan. 21, 1796, AP, MHS.

158. “I am weary”: JA to AA, Feb. 10, 1796, AP, MHS.

159. “You know what is before you”: AA to JA, Feb. 20, 1796, AP, MHS.

160. “I have looked into myself”: JA to AA, March 1, 1796, AP, MHS.

161. “If I were near”: JA to AA, March 11, 1796, AP, MHS.

162. “teeth and . . . nails”: Ibid.

163. “He detained me there”: JA to AA, March 25, 1796, AP, MHS.

164. “and good humor”: JA to AA, May 5, 1796, AP, MHS.

165. “This day my new barn”: DJA, III, 227.

166. “a soft, fine”: Ibid., 228.

167. “mosquitoes numerous”: Ibid., 238.

168. “Of all the summers”: Ibid., 238.

169. “venomous as Macbeth’s”: AA to TA, Aug. 16, 1796, AP, MHS.

170. an alarm: Aurora, Oct. 29, 1796.

171. “Poor Jefferson”: JA to JQA, Nov. 11, 1796, AP, MHS.

172. “as great a hypocrite”: Smith, John Adams, II, 908.

173. “Take his character”: AA to JA, Nov. 8, 1796, AP, MHS.

177. “The old man”: Works, I, 495.

178. “he had always been”: Lipscomb, ed.,Writings of Thomas Jefferson, IX, 351.

179. “open for your perusal”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 262.

180. The letter was never sent: Ibid., n. 254.

9. OLD OAK

1. “like marks of approbation”: Boston Gazette, March 16, 1797.

2. “the most affecting”: JA to AA, March 17, 1797, AP, MHS.

3. “simple but elegant”: JA to AA, March 5, 1797, AP, MHS.

4. Quincy coat of arms: JA to AA, Feb. 2, 1797. AP, MHS

5. “They shall have a republican”: JA to AA, Jan. 31, 1797. AP, MHS

6. “I have been so strangely”: JA to AA, March 9, 1797. AP, MHS

7. Adams energetically repeating: Washington (D.C.) Gazette, March 8–11, 1797.

8. “A solemn scene”: JA to AA, March 5, 1797. AP, MHS

9. “Thus ended”: Boston Gazette, March 16, 1797.

10. “Republican plainness”: Aurora, March 20, 1797.

11. It is universally admitted: March 15, 1797.

12. “an old fielder”: JA to AA, Jan. 16, 1797. AP, MHS

13. a ship ballasted with iron: Elbridge Gerry to AA, Jan. 7, 1797. AP, MHS

14. “I will not”: Cotton Tufts to JA, Jan. 23, 1797. AP, MHS

15. “I congratulate you”: Cushing, ed., Writings of Samuel Adams. IV, 408

16. “between the rising”: William and Mary Quarterly

17. Andrew Brown fire: Gazette of the United States, Jan. 30, 1797.

18. “I am not alarmed”: JA to Abigail Adams Smith, Feb. 21, 1797. AP, MHS

19. “The die is cast”: JA to AA, Feb. 9, 1797. AP, MHS

20. “Pickering and all his colleagues”: Works. VIII, 523.

21. “I may say”: JA to Tristram Dalton, Jan. 19, 1797. AP, MHS

22. “which is and shall be”: JA to Elbridge Gerry, Feb. 20, 1797. AP,#117,MHS.

23. “speak with pleasure”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 785.

24. “entered immediately”: “The Anas,” Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. I, 414.

25. “first wish of his heart”: Ibid

26. certain Madison would not accept: Ibid

27. “eminent character”: Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty. 297.

28. “steer impartially”: “The Anas,” Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. I, 415.

29. “I give it as my decided opinion”: Works, VIII, 530.

30. “The President”: Stagg, ed., Papers of James Madison, XVI, 448.

31. “He is as he was”: JA to AA, March 13, 1797. AP, MHS.

32. “My entrance into office”: JA to JQA, March 31, 1797, AP, MHS.

33. “I have a great cold”: JA to AA, March 13, 1797, AP, MHS.

34. “From the situation”: JA to AA, March 17, 1797. AP, MHS.

35. The furniture: JA to AA, March 22, 1797. AP, MHS.

36. “very dry, dull”: JA to AA, April 13, 1797. AP, MHS.

37. “certain ex-Secretary”: Aurora, April 15, 1797.

38. mr pinnckney Porcupine’s Gazette, April 4, 1797.

39. It is manifestly: April 25, 1797.

40. “I must entreat you”: JA to AA, April 11, 1797. AP, MHS.

41. “The times are critical”: JA to AA, April 6, 1797. AP, MHS.

42. “My pen runs riot”: AA to JA, Jan. 29, 1797. AP, MHS.

43. “Beware that spare Cassius”: AA to JA, Jan. 28, 1797, AP, MHS.

44. James Prince: AA to JA, Feb. 13, 1797, AP, MHS.

45. “matrimonial prospects”: JQA to AA, Feb. 18, 1797, AP, MHS.

46. “a man wholly devoid”: AA to JA, Jan. 28, 1797, AP, MHS.

47. “The good old lady”: AA to JA, April 17, 1797, AP, MHS.

48. “My reflections”: AA to Mary Cranch, May 16, 1797, AP, MHS.

49. I quitted my own carriage: AA to Mary Cranch, May 16, 1797, AP, MHS.

50. “inflicted a wound”: Works, IX, 114-15.

51. “emblems of defense”: Columbian Centinel, May 24, 1797.

52. It may be justly called: Gazette of the United States, May 20, 1797.

53. “placed matters upon their true ground”: Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of George Washington, XXXV, 456.

54. “The President by Three Votes”: Aurora, May 19, 1797.

55. “he is a plain man”: Works, VIII, 549.

56. “The task of the President”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 23, 1797, AP, MHS.

57. “such close application”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 96.

58. The day is past: Ibid., 91.

59. “Mrs. Tufts”: Ibid., 90.

60. “closet politician”: William Plummer, Memorandum, 454.

61. “The President really suffers”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams. 98.

62. “steady and resolute”: William and Mary Quarterly,

63. “The hot weather”: AA to Mary Cranch, July 19, 1797, AP, MHS.

64. “absconded”: Aurora, July 28, 1797.

65. “I have now the happiness”: JQA and Louisa Catherine Adams to AA and JA, July 28, 1797, AP, MHS.

66. “I cannot leave her”: AA to Mary Cranch, Oct. 22, 1797, AP, MHS.

67. “My real crime”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton. XXI, 122.

68. “Alas, alas”: AA to Thomas Adams, Jan. 3, 1798, AP, MHS.

69. “We are yet all”: AA to William Smith, Feb. 22, 1798, AP, MHS.

70. “It is an undoubted”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton. XXI, 342.

71. “you do not speak to the point”: DeConde, Quasi-War, 49.

72. “insane”: Mattern, ed., Papers of James Madison, XVII, 99.

73. “Beds of roses”: AA to Mary Cranch, March 20, 1798, AP, MHS.

74. “He has no ambition”: AA to Mary Cranch, March 27, 1798, AP, MHS.

75. “Gallatin ... stood to propose”: Walters, Albert Gallatin, 106.

76. “struck dumb”: AA to Cotton Tufts, May 25, 1798, AP, MHS.

77. “unhinged”: Aurora, May ,23 .1798.

78. “malice and falsehood”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 21, 1798, AP, MHS.

79. “Such lies”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 154.

80. “In short, we are now”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 28, 1798, AP, MHS.

81. “The theater”: AA to Thomas Adams, May 1, 1798, AP, MHS.

82. “reign of witches”: Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, 382.

83. “Politics and party hatreds”: Betts and Bear, Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson. 162.

84. “he falls away”: AA to Mary Cranch, May 20, 1798, AP, MHS.

85. “I dare not say”: AA to Cotton Tufts, June 8, 1798, AP, MHS.

86. “I think sometimes”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams. 178.

87. “Poor wretches”: ibid., 190.

88. Can it be possible: Ibid., 192.

89. “among the wolves”: Mary Cranch to AA, June 22, 1798, AP, MHS.

90. “I will never send”: R. A. Brown, Presidency of John Adams, 57.

91. “This city”: AA to JQA, June 12, 1798, AP, MHS.

92. “Why, when we have”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 9, 1798, AP, MHS.

93. “the weather so hot”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 15, 1798, AP, MHS.

94. “I wish the laws”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 179.

95. “It was one of those strokes”: AA to Mary Cranch, July 9, 1798, AP, MHS.

96. “I meant to have it”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 28, 1798, AP, MHS.

97. “The illness”: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, Sept. 28, 1798, AP, MHS.

98. “the most gloomy’’: Works, VIII, 613.

99. “and mine in consequence”: Ibid., 601.

100. lighthouse at Cape Hatteras:Oliver Wolcott to JA, Sept. 21, 1798, AP, #931, MHS.

101. $5,000,000: JA to Oliver Wolcott, Oct. 1, 1798, AP, #931. MHS.

102. “I have supposed”: James McHenry to JA, Sept. 3, 1798, AP, #931. MHS.

103. “Wooden walls”: JA to Boston Marine Society, Sept. 7, 1798, AP, #931, MHS.

104. “The arrangement”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XXI, 535.

105. “Do not, I pray”: Ibid., XXII, 176.

106. letter to Oliver Wolcott: JA to Oliver Wolcott, Sept. 24, 1798, AP, #931, MHS.

107. “dying bed”: AA to JQA, Nov. 15, 1798 AP, MHS.

108. “The best skill”: Aurora, Sept. 6, 1798.

109. “I have not enjoyed”: AA to JQA, Dec. 2, 1798, AP, MHS.

110. “He is not at peace”: AA to JQA, Nov. 15, 1798, AP, MHS.

10. STATESMAN

1. “Our horses”: JA to AA, Nov. 14, 1798, AP, MHS.

2. “We glided along”: JA to AA, Nov. 15, 1798, AP, MHS.

3. “fretful nor peevish”: JA to AA, Nov. 13, 1798, AP, MHS.

4. “Nelson’s victory”: JA to AA, Nov. 13, 1798, AP, MHS.

5. “Almost the whole”: Aurora, Nov. 12, 1798.

6. received Logan: Works, IX, 244.

7. “But I’ll do no such thing”: DeConde, Quasi-War, 166

8. “I had no reason”: Works., IX, 244.

9. “We are friends”: Works, I, 532.

10. “This you perceive”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XXII, 389.

11. “The man is stark mad”: DeConde, Quasi-War, .171.

12. “That man would ... become”: Ibid., 97.

13. Joseph Bunel: Ibid., 97.

14. “with the greatest part”: Ibid., 135.

15. “Toussaint’s clause”: Ibid., 136.

16. “good health and spirits”: Aurora, Nov. 12, 1798.

17. “If you come”: JA to AA, Dec. 4, 1798, AP, MHS.

18. “A peck of troubles”: JA to AA, Dec. 13, 1798, AP, MHS.

19. “warm opposition”: JA to AA, Jan. 5, 1799, AP, MHS.

20. “My daughter and son”: JA to AA, Dec. 17, 1798, AP, MHS.

21. “I am old”: JA to AA, Dec. 25, 1798, AP, MHS.

22. “natural right”: Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, 405.

23. “Firmness on our part”: Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. X, 94.

24. “We may expect”: Ford, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. VII, 349.

25. “The circle of our nearest”: Betts and Bear, Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson. 170.

26. “[Adams] thought Hamilton”: “Meeting of March 26, 1799 with John Adams.” Papers of Elbridge Gerry, LOC.

27. “I write to you nothing”: JA to AA, Dec. 25, 1798, AP, MHS.

28. “Thomas is my delight”: JA to AA, Jan. 25, 1799, AP, MHS.

29. February 18, 1799: DeConde, Quasi-War, 178.

30. “honor of the country”: Twohig, ed., PGW, III, 389.

31. “I beg you”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton. XXII, 500.

32. “event of events”: Mattern, ed., Papers of James Madison. XVII, 233.

33. “hoping that his friends”: Ibid., 244.

34. “fair applause”: Aurora, Feb. 27, 1799.

35. “This was pretty saucy”: AA to JA, Feb. 27, 1799, AP, MHS.

36. “I wish all other officers”: Works, XVII, 636.

37. Nor do I think: Ibid., 651.

38. “The public sentiment”: Ibid., 637-38.

39. “It always gives me pain”: Ibid., 662.

40. “genius in the command”: Ibid., 662.

41. “Genius in a general”: Ibid.

42. “It is far below”: Ibid., IX, IO.

43. “considerable difference”: Ibid., 20.

44. “that artful designing”: Ibid., 28.

45. “I have only one favor”: Ibid., 34.

46. “I pitied her”: JA to AA, Oct. 12, 1799, AP, MHS.

47. “I renounce him”: JA to AA, Oct. 12, 1799, AP, MHS.

48. “Any calamity”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 211.

49. “loaded with sorrow”: JA to AA, Oct. 12, 1799, AP, MHS.

50. “His eloquence and vehemence”: Works, IX, 255.

51. “The President has resolved”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XXIII, 545.

52. “It has been received”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 220.

53. “brightest, best and most peaceful” Ibid., 218.

54. “I have heard of” Ibid., 215.

54. “Wise and judicious”: Ibid., 229.

55. “I congratulate you”: JA to Cotton Tufts, Jan. 1, 1800, AP, MHS.

56. “Electioneering”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 217.

57. “in his private life”: Walt Brown, John Adams and the American Press, 126.

58. “Such papers cannot”: Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, 470.

59. “hate each other”: Aurora, March 6, 1800.

60. “I know it”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 555.

61. “You cannot, sir” : Ibid., 564.

62. “copies of extracts”: Ibid., XXIV, 487.

63. “The issue of this investigation”: Works, I, 572.

64. “as luxuriant”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 250.

65. nearly eighty years: Waring, Report of the Social Statistics of Cities, 27.

66. “I like the seat”: JA to AA, June 13, 1800, AP, MHS.

67. “Oh! That I could”: JA to AA, June 13, 1800, AP, MHS.

68. “most detestable”: Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 325.

69. “I do declare”: JA to William Tudor, Dec. 13, 1800, AP, #399, MHS.

70. “menaces”: Aurora, March 29, 1800.

71. “My countrymen!”: Ibid.

72. “without being attended”: AA to Thomas Adams, Aug. 15, 1800, AP, MHS.

73. Bred in the old school: Washington Federalist, Oct. 7, 1800.

74. “I cannot account”: Cullen, ed., Papers of John Marshall, IV, 240.

75. ... the government: Ibid., 256.

76. “The whole man”: AA to JA, Sept. 1, 1800, AP, MHS.

77. “But all is lost”: AA to William Smith, Sept. 6, 1800, AP, MHS.

78. “I am glad you are”: Thomas Adams to AA, Oct. 19, 1800, AP, MHS.

79. A Letter from Alexander Hamilton: See Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XXV, 169–234.

80. “But woods are all”: AA to Abigail Adams Smith, Nov. 21, 1800, AP, MHS.

81. “very dirtiest hole”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 257.

82. “Two of our hardy”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Nov. 28, 1800, AP, MHS.

83. “The lower class of whites”: Ibid.

84. His constitution: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 261.

85. “[I] would to God”: AA to Sarah Smith Adams, Dec. 8, 1800, AP, MHS.

86. “My little bark”: JA to Thomas Adams, Dec. 17, 1800, AP, MHS.

87. “For myself and family”: AA to Thomas Adams, Dec. 13, 1800, AP, MHS.

88. “I lose my sleep”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Jan. 15, 1800, AP, MHS.

89. “How mighty”: Works, IX, 577.

90. “carried his eggs”: JA to William Tudor, Dec. 13, 1800, #399, MHS.

91. undated account: Notes of Conversation Between AA and Thomas Jefferson, January, 1801. Note handwritten comment: “This conversation must have taken place in last days of January,1801 . CSA,” AP, #400, MHS.

92. “made me a visit”: AA to Thomas Adams, Feb. 3, 1801, AP, MHS.

93. “heavy heart”: AA to JQA, Jan. 29, 1801, AP, MHS.

94. “The President”: AA to JQA, Jan. 29, 1801, AP, MHS.

95. “farmer John of Stoneyfield”: JA to William Tudor, Jan, 20, 1801, AP, #400, MHS.

96. “The fire for some time”: Washington Federalist, Jan. 21, 1801.

97. “Who shall I nominate now?”: J. E. Smith, John Marshall, 14.

98. “The crisis is momentous”: Washington Federalist, Feb. 12, 1801.

99. “When the election”: Ford, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, IX, 297.

100. “The Revolution of 1776”: Aurora, Feb. 20, 1801.

101. “Sensible, moderate men”: Massachusetts Spy, March 18, 1801.

102. “Duke of Braintree”: Aurora, March 11, 1801.

103. The new navy: Hagan, This People’s Navy, 39, 43.

104. “I desire no other”: R.A. brown, Presidency of John Adams, 174.

11. REJOICE EVER MORE

1. “The only question”: JA to Cotton Tufts, Dec. 26, 1801, AP, MHS.

2. “a life of journeys”: JA to Colonel Joseph Ward, Feb. 4, 1801, AP, #120, MHS.

3. “The day is far spent”: MHS, Warren-Adams Letters, II, 344.

4. “No more elective office”: AA to JA, Jan. 25, 1801, AP, MHS.

5. “so old fashioned”: Works, IX, 582.

6. Massachusetts legislature: Works, I, 601.

7. been a shoemaker: JA to Thomas Adams, Sept. 9, 1801, AP, MHS.

8. “this cheerful mortal”: JA to Francis van der Kemp, Feb. 23, 1815, AP, MHS.

9. “I have commenced”: AA to William Smith, May 3, 1801, AP, MHS.

10. “from the window”: AA to Catherine Johnson, May 8, 1801, AP, MHS.

11. “Your father”: AA to Thomas Adams, June 12, 1801, AP, MHS.

12. “Men are weak”: JA to William Cranch, May 23, 1801, AP, MHS.

13. “how much wall”: JA to Thomas Adams, June 29, 1801, AP, MHS.

14. “Everything I read”: JA to Thomas Adams, July 11, 1801, AP, MHS.

15. “very strong things”: Ibid.

16. The only misfortune: Ibid.

17. “I pray God”: AA to Thomas Adams, July 5, 1801, AP, MHS.

18. “I am sure your brother”: AA to Thomas Adams, July 12, 1801, AP, MHS.

19. “a profession he never loved”: AA to Thomas Adams, July 5, 1801, AP, MHS.

20. “Her health”: JQA to JA, Sept. 4, 1801, AP, MHS.

21. I hope you will consider: JA to JQA, Sept. 12, 1801, AP, MHS.

22. “sort of fatherly look”: Thomas Adams to AA, Sept. 20, 1801. , AP, MHS.

23. “He has no propensity”: Ibid.

24. “very ill”: JQA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Sept. 23, 1801, AP, MHS.

25. Quincy!: “Adventures of a Nobody,” AP, #269, MHS.

26. “Her frame is so slender”: AA to Thomas Adams, Dec. 27, 1801, AP, MHS.

27. “weight of worry”: Ibid.

28. “I am your man”: Thomas Adams to JQA, Dec. 7, 1801, AP, MHS.

29. Bird, Savage: AA to Thomas Adams, April 26, 1803, AP, MHS.

30. selling his house: AA to Thomas Adams, May 8, 1803, AP, MHS.

31. release from jail: Malone, Jefferson the President, 35.

32. “cherished and warmed”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 271.

33. Sally Hemings: See Malone, Jefferson the President, 206–23; Lewis and Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

34. Meriwether Lewis: Malone, Jefferson the President, 210.

35. Federalist press: See New York Evening Post, Sept. 2, 7, 10, 13, 1802; Boston Gazette, Sept. 16, 1802; Gazette of the United States, Sept. 22, 1802; Columbian Cen-tinel, Oct. 9, 1802.

36. “decidedly good looking”: Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals, 23.

37. “very handsome”: Ibid.

38. Jefferson paternity of Hemings children: The results of a DNA study released in November 1998, together with other available evidence, indicate a high probability that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings’s children, Eas-ton Hemings, and was most likely the father of all her children. See Eugene A. Foster, et al., “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” Nature, November 15, 1998; also, “Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,” Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, January 2000.

39. “I believe nothing”: JA to Colonel Joseph Ward, Jan. 8, 1810, AP, #118, MHS.

40. “I give him up”: Ibid.

41. Callender and Sally: Ibid.

42. “a little corner of my heart”: AA to Thomas Adams, May 23, 1802, AP, MHS.

43. Mary Jefferson Eppes: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 268.

44. The friendship with which you honored: Ibid., 270.

45. “And now, sir”: Ibid., 273.

46. Until I read Callender’s: Ibid.

47. “My charities”: Ibid., 274.

48. John Quincy was suddenly replaced: Ibid., 277.

49. “I conclude with sincere prayers”: Ibid., 280.

50. “It is a delicate”: JA to Thomas Adams, April 2, 1803, AP, MHS.

51. “blue devils”: Thomas Adams to JQA, Dec. 15, 1803, AP, MHS.

52. “This is now in general”: JQA to JA, Jan. 31, 1804, AP, MHS.

53. “arch enemy”: DJA, III, 434.

54. “Hitherto my conduct”: JQA to AA, Dec. 22, 1803, AP, MHS.

55. Patience and perseverance: JA to JQA, Nov. 9, 1804, AP, MHS.

56. Is the present state: Old Family Letters, 62.

57. You and your excellent: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 890.

58. “My friend!”: Old Family Letters, 185.

59. [Samuel] Johnson: Ibid., 99.

60. “To rummage trunks”: Ibid., 106.

61. What must he say: Ibid.

62. There have been very many times: Ibid.

63. “There is something in my composition”: Ibid., 69.

64. “Our obligations”: Ibid., 182.

65. “The internal intrigues”: Ibid.

66. I call for my leavers: Ibid., 64.

67. “with very little animal food”: Ibid., 341.

68. It is an idea: Ibid., 111.

69. “an immense load”: Ibid., 137.

70. “This phrase ‘rejoice’”: Ibid.

71. “We stand well”: Ibid., 103.

72. “No civilized society”: Ibid., 63.

73. “If worthless men”: Ibid., 108.

74. “a jewel of a man”: Ibid., 294.

75. “one of the best men”: Ibid., 276.

76. “I am not subject”: Ibid., 235.

77. “I think aloud”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush. , II, 903.

78. “I live like a stranger”: Ibid., 891.

79. Mr. Madison and his lady: Ibid., 903.

80. “a superabundance”: Old Family Letters, 118.

81. “intriguer”: Ibid., 163.

82. “Jefferson has succeeded”: Ibid.

83. “Mr. Adams’s passions”: Warren, History, II, 675.

84. “I wish them not”: Old Family Letters, 226.

85. Josiah Quincy: Quincy, Figures of the Past, 61–62.

86. “If ever a nation”: Old Family Letters, 175.

87. “The period is not yet arrived”: AA to JQA, Feb. 1809, AP, #407, MHS.

88. “As to my son”: Old Family Letters, 225.

89. tore him to pieces: Ibid., 237.

90. “My days glide smoothly away”: JA to JQA, Jan. 15, 1811, AP, #411, MHS.

91. “I am well”: Old Family Letters, 285.

92. “It would divert”: Ibid., 285.

93. “the most afflictive”: Ibid., 288.

94. confined her under: Ibid., 289.

95. dark to view a comet: AA to JQA, Sept. 24, 1811, AP, #412, MHS.

96. “Neither the morals”: AA to JQA, Dec. 8, 1811, AP, #412, MHS.

97. “communicate it gradually”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 1104.

98. “the knife”: Ibid.

99. “From her account”: Ibid.

100. brothers named Coles: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 284.

101. “I always loved Jefferson”: Ibid.

102. “I only needed this knowledge”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 1110.

103. “And now, my dear friend”: Ibid.

104. “A letter from you calls up”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 291.

105. Laboring always at the same oar: Ibid., 291.

106. “I have given up newspapers”: Ibid.

107. “What an exchange”: Ibid., 294.

108. “a hideous tempest”: Ibid.

109. “I walk every fair day”: Ibid., 199.

110. “Your dream is out”: Old Family Letters, 453.

111. I rejoice in the correspondence: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush , II, 1127.

112. “Who shall write”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 451.

113. “Nobody, except perhaps”: Ibid., 452.

114. “not writing psalms”: John Pierce Memoirs, MHS.

115. “Without this our Union”: Cappon, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 311.

116. “I sincerely congratulate”: Ibid., 324.

117. “Never mind”: Ibid., 357.

118. “Montezillo”: JA to Francis Van der Kemp, Sept. 23, 1814, AP, #122, MHS.

119. “Whether you or I”: Ibid., 301.

120. “Checks and balances”: Ibid., 334.

121. “lashing and speering”: Ibid., 358.

122. “fast asleep”: Ibid., 347.

123. “You and I have passed”: Ibid., 358.

124. “You and I ought”: Ibid.

125. “The summum bonum”: Ibid., 335.

126. My mind: Ibid., 337.

127. “Your letter touches”: JA to John Adams (grandson), Feb. 2, 1812, AP, #413, MHS.

128. “War necessarily”:Old Family Letters, 224.

129. “I have been called”: JA to JQA, April 7, 1812, AP, #413, MHS.

130. The subjects of them: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1164.

131. “But time I hope”: Ibid.

132. “You apprehend ‘attacks’”: Old Family Letters, 317.

133. Examining the animal: Ibid., 322.

134. Tread gently: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 1171.

135. “away like the morning cloud”: Old Family Letters, 332.

136. “withered, faded”: Ibid., 333.

137. “inscrutable and incomprehensible”: JA to JQA, March 11, 1813, AP, #415, MHS.

138. They fill the air: JA to JQA, March 13, 1813, AP, #415, MHS.

139. “the invader himself”: JQA to JA, Aug. 10, 1813, AP, #416, MHS.

140. “I mourned over the fallen”: Ibid.

141. “Another of our friends”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 323.

142. “I know of no character”: Ibid., 328.

143. I damn nobody: JA to Francis Van der Kemp, May 28, 1813, AP, #95, MHS.

144. Samuel Tucker: JA to Matthew Carey, June 1, 1813, AP, #95, MHS.

145. “rejoice ever more”: Old Family Letters, 137.

146. “Rejoice always”: JA to JQA, June 18, 1813, AP, #95, MHS.

147. “My dear, my only daughter”: JA to Francis Van der Kemp, Aug. 9, 1813, AP, #95, MHS.

148. “She told her physician”: AA to JQA, Aug. 30, 1813, AP, MHS.

149. “The loss is irreparable”: AA to JQA, Sept. 13, 1813, AP, #416, MHS.

150. “Syllabus”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 369.

151. “The love of God”: Ibid., 374.

12. JOURNEY’S END

1. “I assure you”: JA to JQA, March 18, 1815, AP, #422, MHS.

2. “We must learn to know”: JA to Richard Rush, May 30, 1814, AP, #122, MHS.

3. “very anxious”: AA to JQA, May 30, AP, 1815, AP, #423, MHS.

4. “I seem to be rambling”: JA to JQA, May 14, 1815, AP, #423, MHS.

5. “be no better”: JA to George Adams and John Adams, Jr., May 3, 1815, AP, MHS.

6. “and your lady, too”: Ibid.

7. “dear boys”: AA to JQA, April 11, 1816, AP, #423, MHS.

8. “Death is sweeping”: JA to JQA, June 10, 1816, AP, #432, MHS.

9. “Winter in this country”: JA to JQA, Feb. 22, 1816, AP, #429, MHS.

10. Abigail prepared her will: Will of Abigail Adams, Jan. 18, 1816, AP, #429, MHS.

11. Colonel Smith: AA to JQA, June 10, 1816, AP, #432, MHS.

12. “here a pivot”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 43.

13. “I steer my bark”: Ibid., 467.

14. “But why am I dosing”: Ibid., 434.

15. $23,950 was agreed to: Malone, The Sage of Monticello, 176.

16. “I envy you”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 440.

17. He could “not live without books”: Ibid., 443.

18. “overwhelm me with books”: Ibid., 515.

19. “What would I give”: Ibid., 429.

20. “There is no doubt”: Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, 94.

21. “The clock would be simple”: Ibid., 214.

22. “Fool! Fool!”: Ibid., 263.

23. “Your father’s zeal”: AA to JQA, March 22, 1816, AP, #430, MHS.

24. “The voice of the nation”: AA to JQA, March 12, 1817, AP, #436, MHS.

25. “Yesterday was one of the most uniformly”: JA to JQA, Aug. 10, 1817, AP, #438, MHS.

26. “Oh, Grandmother”: AA to Harriet Welsh, Aug. 18, 1817, AP, #438, MHS.

27. “rather in awe”: Eliza Susan Quincy Journal, MHS.

28. “I never saw your father”: Benjamin Waterhouse to JQA, Jan. 12, 1818, AP, #442, MHS.

29. “very cold and the snow falling”: AA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Jan. 24, 1818, AP, #442, MHS.

30. “looking up newly”: AA to Louisa Catherine Adams, May 20, 1818, AP, #443, MHS.

31. “The dear partner”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 529.

32. “She has recovered”: Benjamin Waterhouse to JQA, Oct. 21, 1818, AP, #444, MHS.

33. “Your mother was pronounced”: Note of Harriet Welsh, Oct. 23, 1818, AP, #444, MHS.

34. “He came down”: Harriet Welsh to Louisa C. A. DeWint, ca. Nov. 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

35. “I cannot bear”: Ibid.

36. “seemingly conscious”: Thomas Adams to JQA, Nov. 1, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

37. “with great composure”: Ibid.

38. “the tenderest and most affectionate”: JQA to JA, Nov. 2, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

39. “My ever dear”: JA to JQA, Nov. 10, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

40. “The tidings of her illness”: Funeral Sermon for AA, Nov. 1, 1817, AP, #445, MHS.

41. Possessing at every period of life: Whitney, Sermon, 16.

42. “God bless you”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 529.

43. “While you live”: Ibid., 530.

44. to view Trumbull’s painting: JA to JQA, Dec. 7, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

45. “Colonel Trumbull came”: Eliza Susan Quincy Journal, Dec. 5, 1818, MHS.

46. “Truth, nature”: JA to John Trumbull, March 13, 1817, AP, #123, MHS.

47. “When I nominated”: Elza Susan Quincy, Dec. 5, 1818, MHS.

48. “caught the pip”: JA to JQA, Dec. 7, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

49. “It was not merely”: JQA to JA, Dec. 14, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

50. “All is now still”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 531.

51. “You, my dear sir”: Louisa Catherine Adams to JA, April 16, 1819, AP, #447, MHS.

52. “I have the most”: JA to Ward Nicholas Boylston, Sept. 2, 1820, AP, #124, MHS.

53. “We go on”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Jan. 1, 1820, AP, #449, MHS.

54. “The Psalms of David”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 394.

55. A rain had fallen: JA to Mr. DeWint, March 3, 1820, AP, #124, MHS.

56. “The town of Quincy”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Oct. 21, 1820, AP, #450, MHS.

57. “You have not extended”: JA to Mordecai Noah, July 31, 1818, AP, #123, MHS.

58. “health and spirits”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 569.

59. “I boggled”: Ibid., 571.

60. “Visited the President”: Quincy, Figures of the Past, 69.

61. I do not believe: Ibid., 80.

62. “I know it is high treason”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 551.

63. “at last the whites”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Jan. 13, 1820, AP, #449, MHS.

64. black cloud: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 571.

65. “armies of Negroes”: Ibid.

66. I have been so terrified: Ibid.

67. “This enterprise”: Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, 999.

68. “become a Hercules”: Ibid.

69. “all whites south of the Potomac”: Malone, Sage of Monticello, 340.

70. military academy: Ibid., 573-74.

71. “noble employment”: Ibid., 607.

72. “one of the most unpleasant”: Donald and Donald, eds., Diary of Charles Francis Adams, I, 64..

73. “They had eyes”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, June 3, 1821, AP, #452, MHS.

74. “President Adams seemed”: Eliza Susan Quincy Journal, MHS.

75. “No man has more cause”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, June 3, 1821, AP, #452, MHS.

76. “In the evening”: Quincy, Figures of the Past, 73.

77. “You have a fine capacity”: JA to Charles Francis Adams, Dec. 19, 1825, AP, #473, MHS.

78. “did no more than all the rest”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, May 10, 1823, AP, #460, MHS.

79. “It would be strange indeed”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 601.

80. “not the Lafayette I knew”: Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy, 406-7.

81. His sight is so dim: Nevins, ed., Diary of John Quincy Adams, 329.

82. “I let them do what they please”: Cappon. ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 526.

83. “He was married”: George Washington Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, Nov.20, 1824, AP, #466, MHS.

84. He ... was considerably: Quincy, Figures of the Past, 74.

85. “It must excite”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 609.

86. So deeply are the principles: Ibid.

87. “Every line from you”: Ibid.

88. “But physicians do not”: Benjamin Waterhouse to JQA, July 4, 1825, AP, #471, MHS.

89. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Adamses at Home, 29-32.

90. Anne Royall: Ibid., 32-34.

91. “He did not tear my face”: JA to Charles Francis Adams, Dec. 3, 1825, AP, #473, MHS.

92. “She entertained me”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 611.

93. “In this I could not”: Ibid.

94. “To the eyes of a physician”: Benjamin Waterhouse to JQA, May 12, 1826, AP, #475, MHS.

95. Like other young people: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 614.

96. “Theirs are the halcyon”: Ibid.

97. May it be to the world: Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. XVI, 181–82.

98. “The old man fails fast”: “The Diary of George Whitney,” #475, MHS.

99. “I will give you”: Ibid.

100. “When I parted from him”: John Marston to JQA, July 8, 1826, AP, #476, MHS.

101. “the old gentleman”: “The Diary of George Whitney,” AP, #475, MHS.

102. “This is the Fourth”: Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 428.

103. “The artillery of Heaven”: John Marston to JQA, July 8, 1826, AP, #476, MHS.

104. “Thomas Jefferson survives”: Susan Boylston Adams Clark to Abigail Louisa Smith Adams Johnson, July 9,1826 , AP, A. B. Johnson Papers, MHS.

105. “Help me, child!”: Ibid.

106. “bursting forth”: John Marston to JQA, July 8, 1826, AP, #476, MHS.

107. 4,000 people: Josiah Quincy to JQA, July 8, 1826, AP, #476, MHS.

108. held at public expense: Ibid.

109. “conducted in a more solemn”: Ibid.

110. “visible and palpable”: Nevins, ed., Diary of John Quincy Adams, 360.

111. “expanded greatness”:Selection of Eulogies, 156.

112. Webster speech: Ibid.

113. “Griefs upon griefs!”: JA to Francis Van der Kemp, Aug. 14, 1816, AP, #122, MHS.

Bibliography

MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

Abigail Adams Papers, American Antiquarian Society

Abigail Adams Papers, Carl Roach Library, Cornell University

Abigail Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

John Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

John Quincy Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Ellen Randolph Coolidge Papers, University of Virginia, Alderman Library, Special Collections

Cranch Family Papers, Library of Congress

William Cushing Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society

Francis Dana Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Papers of Elbridge Gerry, Library of Congress

Lafayette Papers, Library of Congress

Robert Treat Paine Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Timothy Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Shaw Family Papers, Library of Congress

Margaret Bayard Smith Papers, Library of Congress

Ezra Stiles Papers, Yale University

Samuel Tucker Papers, Harvard University

John Winthrop Papers, Harvard University

Levi Woodbury Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

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ARTICLES

Anderson, William G. “John Adams: The Navy and the Quasi-War with France.” American Neptune XXX, no. 2 (April 1970).

Appleby, Joyce. “The New Republican Synthesis and the Changed Political Ideas of John Adams.” American Quarterly XXV, no. 5 (Dec. 1973).

Bailyn, Bernard. “Butterfield’s Adams: Notes for a Sketch.” William and Mary Quarterly XIX, no. 2 (April, 1962).

Balinky, Alexander S. “Gallatin’s Theory of War Finance.” William and Mary Quarterly XVI, 3rd series, no. 1 (Jan. 1959).

Bowling, Kenneth R. “Dinner at Jefferson’s: A Note on Jacob Cooke’s ‘The Compromise of 1790.’” William and Mary Quarterly XXVIII, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1971).

Boyd, Julian P. “Silas Deane: Death by a Kindly Teacher of Treason?” William and Mary Quarterly XVI, 3rd series (April 1959).

Brown, Richard D. “Shay’s Rebellion and Its Aftermath: A View from Springfield, Massachusetts 1787.” William and Mary Quarterly XI, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1983).

Bruchey, Stuart. “Alexander Hamilton and the State Banks.” William and Mary Quarterly XXVII, 3rd series, no. 3 (July 1970).

Calkins, Carlos G. “The American Navy and the Opinions of One of Its Founders: John Adams, 1735-1826.” U.S. Naval Institute XXXVII, no. 2 (June 1911): 457.

Charles, Joseph. “Adams and Jefferson: The Origins of the American Party System.” William and Mary Quarterly XII, 3rd series, no. 3 (July 1955).

— . “Hamilton and Washington: The Origins of the American Party System.” William and Mary Quarterly XII, 3rd series, no. 2 (April 1955).

— . “The Jay Treaty.” William and Mary Quarterly XII, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1955).

“Diary of James Allen, Esq., of Philadelphia.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography IX (1885).

“Dr. Solomon Drowne.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 48 (1924).

“Extracts from the Diary of Dr. James Clitherall, 1776.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 22 (1898).

Farrell, James M. “John Adams’s Autobiography: The Ciceroian Paradigm and the Quest for Fame.” New England Quarterly LXII, no. 4 (Dec. 1989).

Ferling, John, and Lewis E. Braverman. “John Adams: Diplomat.” William and Mary Quarterly LI, 3rd series, no. 2 (April 1994).

— . “John Adams’s Health Reconsidered.” William and Mary Quarterly LV, 3rd series, no. 1 (Jan. 1998).

Foster, Eugene A., et al. “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.” Nature, Nov. 5, 1998.

Gelles, Edith. “Abigail Adams: Domesticity and the American Revolution.” New England Quarterly LII, no. 4 (Dec. 1979).

— . “The Abigail Industry.” William and Mary Quarterly XIL, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1988).

— . “A Virtuous Affair: The Correspondence Between Abigail Adams and James Lovell.” American Quarterly XXXIX (Summer 1987).

Gummere, Richard M. “The Classical Politics of John Adams.” Boston Public Library Quarterly, Oct. 1957.

Heinlein, Jay C. “Albert Gallatin: A Pioneer in Public Administration.” William and Mary Quarterly VII, 3rd series, no. 1 (Jan. 1950).

Henderson, H. James. “Congressional Factionalism and the Attempt to Recall Benjamin Franklin.” William and Mary Quarterly XXVII, 3rd series, no. 2 (April 1970).

Hutson, James H. “John Adams’s Title Campaign.” New England Quarterly XLI, no. 1 (March 1968).

— . “Letters from a Distinguished American: The American Revolution in Foreign Newspapers.” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress XXXIV, no. 4 (Oct. 1977).

Klingelhofer, Herbert E. “Matthew Ridley’s Diary During the Peace Negotiations of 1782.” William and Mary Quarterly XX, 3rd series, no. 1 (Jan. 1963).

Kurtz, Stephen G. “The French Mission of 1799-1800: Concluding Chapter in the Statecraft of John Adams.” Political Science Quarterly LXXX (Dec. 1965). Larson, Harold. “Alexander Hamilton: The Fact and Fiction of His Early Years.” William and Mary Quarterly IX, 3rd series, no. 2 (April 1952).

Lerche, Charles O., Jr. “Jefferson and the Election of 1800: A Case Study in the Political Smear.” William and Mary Quarterly V, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1948).

Lewis, Anthony M. “Jefferson’s Summary View as a Chart of Political Union.” William and Mary Quarterly V, 3rd series, no. 1 (Jan. 1948).

Meschutt, David. “The Adams-Jefferson Portrait Exchange.” American Art Journal XIV, no. 2 (Spring 1982).

Morison, Samuel Eliot. “Elbridge Gerry: Gentleman-Democrat.” New England Quarterly II (Jan. 1929).

Nash, Gary B. “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia.” William and Mary Quarterly XXX, no. 2 (April 1973).

Perkins, Bradford. “A Diplomat’s Wife in Philadelphia: Letters of Henrietta Liston, 1796-1800.” William and Mary Quarterly XI, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1954).

Prelinger, Catherine M. “Benjamin Franklin and the American Prisoners of War in England During the American Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly XXXII, 3rd series, no. 2 (April 1975).

“Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.” Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, January 2000.

Risjord, Norman K. “The Compromise of 1790: New Evidence on the Dinner Table Bargain.” William and Mary Quarterly XXXIII, 3rd series, no. 2 (April 1976).

Ritcheson, Charles R. “The Fragile Memory: Thomas Jefferson at the Court of George III.” Eighteenth-Century Life VI (Jan. and May 1981).

Schachner, Nathan. “Alexander Hamilton Viewed by His Friends: The Narratives of Robert Troop and Hercules Mulligan.” William and Mary Quarterly IV, 3rd series, no. 2 (April 1947).

Seed, Geoffrey. “A British Spy in Philadelphia, 1775-1777. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography LXXXV (January 1961).

Stinchcombe, William. “The Diplomacy of the WXYZ Affair.” William and Mary Quarterly XXXIV, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1977).

Tolle, Frederick B. “Franklin and the Pulteney Mission: An Episode in the Secret History of the American Revolution.” Huntington Library Quarterly, Nov. 1953.

Turner, Kathryn. “The Appointment of Chief Justice John Marshall.” William and Mary Quarterly XVII, 3rd series, no. 2 (April 1960).

Wilson, Douglas L. “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue.” Atlantic 27, no. 5 (November 1992).

— . “Thomas Jefferson’s Early Notebooks.” William and Mary Quarterly XLII, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1985).

REFERENCE SOURCES

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Wren, R. C. Potter’s New Cyclopaedia of Botanical Drugs and Preparations. Holsworthy, England: Health Science Press, 1975.

NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALS

Amherst (Massachusetts) Farmers’ Cabinet

Boston Evening Post

Boston Gazette Boston Independent Chronicle

Charleston (South Carolina) City Gazette and Daily Advertiser

Claypoole’s America Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Columbian Centinel (Boston, Massachusetts)

Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet and General Advertiser

Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia)

Gentleman’s Magazine (London, England)

Haverhill (Massachusetts) Gazette and Essex Patriot

Le Journal des Scavans (Paris, France)

London Chronicle

London Gazette

London General Evening Post

London Public Advertiser

Massachusetts Centinel (Boston)

Massachusetts Spy (Worcester)

New England Palladium

New York Commercial Advertiser

New York Daily Advertiser

New York Evening Post

Newburyport (Massachusetts) Herald

Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia)

Philadelphia Aurora

Philadelphia General Advertiser

Philadelphia Journal

Philadelphia Ledger

Porcupine’s Gazette and United States Daily Advertiser

Savannah (Georgia) Republican

St. James’s Chronicle (London, England)

Vermont Gazette (Bennington)

Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg)

Washington (D.C.) Federalist

Washington (D.C.) Gazette

Washington (D.C.) National Intelligencer

Index

Abdee, Phoebe,

Abdee, William,

Abdrahaman,

Active (U.S. ship),

Act Providing a Naval Armament (1797),

Adams, Abigail (JA’s granddaughter),

Adams, Abigail (Nabby) (JA’s daughter), see Smith, Abigail Adams

Adams, Abigail Smith (JA’s wife),

Atlantic crossings of,

in Boston,

child rearing of,

correspondence of, see Adams, John and Abigail, correspondence of; specific individuals

courtship of,

death of,

determination of,

diary of,

domestic activities of,

in East Chester,

and election of,

in England,

family background of,

in France,

French hospitality and,

as grandmother,

health problems of,

in Holland,

homesickness of,

inoculation of,

investment in government securities recommended by,

JA compared with,

JA’s devotion to,

JA’s first meeting with,

JA’s increasing political role as viewed by,

JA’s vice presidency and,

loneliness of,

marriage of,

nursing of,

opera, concert, and theater attendance of,

part in JA’s life played by,

patriotism of,

in Philadelphia,

physical appearance of,

as “Portia,”

portraits of,

power as viewed by,

pregnancies and childbirths of,

in Quincy,

reading of,

sea voyage feared by,

speech patterns of,

Tyler as viewed by,

in Washington, D.C.,

Washington’s death and,

Adams, Ann Harrod,

Adams, Charles (JA’s son),

Abigail’s correspondence with,

at Bush Hill,

death of,

Adams, Charles (JA’s son) (cont.)

education of,

Europe visited by,

health problems of,

inoculation of,

irresponsible and dissolute behavior of,

JA’s advice to,

JA’s correspondence with, romance and marriage of,

Adams, Charles Francis (JA’s grandson),

Adams, Edith Squire,

Adams, Elihu,

Adams, George Washington,

Adams, Hannah Bass,

Adams, Henry,

Adams, John:

Alien and Sedition Acts and,

ambition of,

in American Philosophical Society,

anxiety and doubts of,

Atlantic crossings of,

autobiography of,

birth of,

on Board of War,

book collecting of,

brilliant mind of,

British agents’ interception of letter of,

British soldiers defended by,

British views of,

cabinet of, see also specific individuals

on checks and balances in government,

childhood of,

as Christian,

as close observer,

clothes of,

in commercial treaty negotiations with England,

as commissioner to France,

on Committee of Five,

as Continental Congress delegate,

correspondence of, see Adams, John and Abigail, correspondence of; specific individuals

courage of,

death as preoccupation of,

death of,

decision not to become a minister made by,

despair of, diary of, see Adams, John,

diary of diplomatic convention broken by,

drinking of,

education of,

elected Vice President,

in election of

in election of,

emotional and mental instability attributed to,

entertaining side of,

fame and recognition of,

family background of,

as farmer,

as father,

feelings of failure in,

as Ferdinando Ramón San,

final acts in presidency of,

finances of,

first legal case of,

flirtatiousness and amorous disposition of,

French language skills of,

French Revolution and, frugality of,

garden tour of,

generosity and great-heartedness of,

as grandfather,

greatness predicted for,

hardworking nature of,

health problems of,

in Holland,

honesty and candor of,

honorary degree of,

horseback riding of,

humor of,

inauguration of,

independence of,

inheritance of,

inoculation of,

integrity of,

irritability of,

as lawyer,

legal studies of,

loneliness of,

as “Lysander,”

man-of-the-world skills lacking in,

manual labor of,

margin notes of,

marriage of,

at Massachusetts constitutional convention,

in Massachusetts legislature,

in meeting with Lord Howe,

as minister plenipotentiary to England,

as minister plenipotentiary to France,

monarchist tendencies ascribed to,

as New Englander,

newspaper writing of,

opera, concert, and theater attendance of,

party politics disliked by,

passion of,

patriotism of,

as peace commissioner,

perseverance and stubbornness of,

physical appearance of,

popularity of,

portraits of,

as President,

property purchased by,

prophecy of,

in Quincy,

reading of,

received as ambassador to the Netherlands,

as reluctant politician,

as revolutionary,

royal appointment declined by,

as schoolmaster,

sea power as viewed by,

social standing of,

sole peacemaker commission revoked for,

in Spain,

speeches of,

as surveyor of roads,

as talker,

temper of,

titles issue and,

turning point in life of,

vanity of,

vice presidency predicted for,

as Vice President,

virtue of,

walking of,

will of,

writing style of,

Adams, John, diary of,

Arthur Lee in,

Atlantic crossings in,

British and England in,

France in,

government and politics in,

Jefferson in,

observations on human nature in,

peace negotiations in,

Philadelphia in,

revival of,

women in,

Worchester period in,

Adams, John and Abigail, correspondence of,

Abigail’s complaints about,

Abigail’s handwriting in,

American Revolution and,

children in,

Continental Congress in,

during courtship,

criticism in,

forms of address in,

France and,

Franklin in,

geography in,

health problems in,

Holland and,

patriotism in,

peace negotiations in,

Philadelphia in,

power in,

presidency and,

slowness and unreliability of mail and,

smallpox in,

tenderness and affection expressed in,

trade goods in,

Washington in,

Adams, John (Deacon John) (JA’s father),

death of,

JA influenced by,

marriage of,

as selectman,

Adams, John (JA’s grandson),

education of,

Adams, John Quincy,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

Abigail’s proposed marriage for,

Atlantic crossings of,

birth of,

Charles’s badly invested savings of,

diary of,

education of,

in election of

in England,

finances of,

France visited by,

French language skills of,

on Hamilton,

hereditary succession fears and,

in Holland,

inoculation of,

JA compared with,

JA’s advice to,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s death and,

JA’s trust in,

Jefferson’s interest in,

as lawyer,

marriage of,

as minister to Prussia,

as minister to Russia,

as minister to the Netherlands,

Nabby’s correspondence with,

party crossing of,

as peace envoy to Ghent,

physical appearance of,

as post rider,

as President,

as “Publicola,”

Quincy visited by,

returns of, to U.S.,

romances of,

Russia first visited by,

as Secretary of State,

as Senator,

in Spain,

Washington’s views on,

Adams, Joseph (JA’s grandfather),

Adams, Joseph (JA’s great-grandfather),

Adams, Joseph (JA’s uncle),

Adams, Louisa Catherine (JA’s granddaughter),

Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson (JA’s daughter-in-law),

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

pregnancies and childbirth of,

in Quincy,

Adams, Mary,

Adams, Mrs. (Abigail’s fellow passenger),

Adams, Peter,

Adams, Sally Smith,

Adams, Samuel,

in American Revolution,

JA compared with,

JA’s correspondence with,

slavery opposed by,

Adams, Mrs. Samuel,

Adams, Susanna (JA’s daughter),

Adams, Susanna Boylston (JA’s granddaughter),

Adams, Susanna Boylston (JA’s mother),

Abigail’s relationship with,

death of,

health problems of,

illiteracy of,

marriages of,

social standing of,

Adams, Thomas Boylston,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

at Bush Hill,

disappearance of,

education of,

failure of,

health problems of,

inoculation of,

JA’s advice to,

JA’s correspondence with,

as lawyer,

marriage of,

in Quincy,

Adams-Onis Treaty (1819),

Addison, Joseph,

Admiralty Court,

Aesop,

Affleck, Thomas,

Alden, John,

Alden, Priscilla,

Alexander, William,

Alexandria, Va.,

Algiers, Alien Act (1798),

Allen, Ethan,

Alliance (U.S. frigate),

American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

American Daily Advertiser,

American Indians,

American Philosophical Society,

American Revolution,

Dutch role in,

events leading to,

French role in,

German mercenaries in,

independence and, see Declaration of Independence, U.S.; independence

Indians in,

JA’s participation in,

Mercy Warren on,

pamphlets and,

peace negotiations in,

prisoners of war in,

shortages in,

see also Paris, Treaty of; specific battles

Ames, Fisher,

Amherst, Lord Jeffrey,

Amsterdam,

banks in,

Anglican Christ Church,

Anti-Federalists,

Antwerp, art in,

Arguesseau, Henriette d,’

aristocracy,

hereditary,

natural,

Aristotle,

Army, British,

in Boston,

see alsospecific battles and generals

Army, U.S.,

disbanding of,

Hamilton’s role in,

Jefferson’s fears about,

Washington as commander-in-chief of,

Arnold, Benedict,

art, artists

gardening as,

JA’s views on,

Jefferson’s purchase of,

in London,

see also portraits; sculpture

Articles of Confederation,

Articles of War, British,

Articles of War, U.S.,

assumption plan,

astronomy,

Augusta, Princess of England,

Austin, Jonathan,

Austria,

Auteuil,

Bache, Benjamin Franklin,

death of,

JA as viewed by,

Bache, Margaret,

Baltimore, Md.,

Continental Congress in,

Bancroft, Edward,

Bankhead, Charles,

Bank of the United States,

banks:

Dutch,

London,

Paris,

in U.S.,

Baptists,

Barbary States,

Barkley, Gilbert,

Barnes sisters,

Barron, William,

Barry, John,

Bartlett, Josiah,

Bartram, John,

Bass, Joseph,

as JA’s traveling companion,

Bass, Seth,

Bath,

Bayard, James A.,

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de,

Beccaria, Cesare, Marchese di,

Beckley, John,

Behrent, John,

Bell, Robert,

Bellamy, Pierre,

Bently, William,

Bernard, Francis,

Biddle, Charles,

Bill of Rights, U.S.,

Billopp, Christopher,

Billopp House,

Bingham, Anne,

Bingham, William,

Binon, J. B.,

Bird, Savage & Bird,

Birmingham,

blacks,

free,

Jefferson’s views on,

in Shakespeare,

“Toussaint’s clause” and,

see also slaves, slavery

Board of War, see Continental Board of War and Ordnance

Bois de Boulogne,

Longchamps in,

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John,

Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon I, Emperor of France

Bonhomme Richard (U.S. ship),

Bordeaux,

Borland, Widow,

Boston, Mass.,

American Revolution in,

British abandonment of,

British in,

Continental Army in,

JA in,

JA’s hero’s send-off in,

JA’s homecoming in,

JA’s views on,

John Quincy in,

Philadelphia compared with,

protests in,

refugees from,

smallpox in,

Boston (U.S. frigate),

Boston Chronicle,

Boston Gazette,

Boston Harbor,

British warships in,

fortification of,

French fleet in,

lighthouse in,

Boston Massacre,

Boston Patriot,

Boston Tea Party,

Boston Town Meeting,

Boswell, James,

Bourbon, Mademoiselle de,

Bourke, Dr.,

Bowdoin, James,

Boylston, Susanna, see Adams, Susanna Boylston

Boylston, Zabdiel,

Braintree, Mass.,

Adams homestead in,

in American Revolution,

dysentery epidemic in,

First Church in,

legal cases in,

social life in,

Vassall-Borland place in,

see also Quincy, Mass.

Braintree (England),

Braintree Instructions,

Brandywine Creek, battle of (1777),

Braxton, Carter,

Briar Creek, battle of (1779),

bribery,

Briesler, John,

in England,

in France,

in Quincy,

Briesler, Mary,

Brillon, Madame (Anne-Louise de Harancourt Brillon de Jouy),

Brillon, Monsieur,

Brissot de Warville, J. P.,

Brooklyn Heights,

Browere, John Henry,

Brown, Andrew,

Brown, Lancelot (Capability),

Brown, Mather,

Bulfinch, Charles,

Bulloch, Archibald,

Bunel, Joseph,

Bunker Hill, battle of (1775), Burgoyne, John,

Burke, Edmund,

Burney, Fanny,

Burr, Aaron,

in election of

Hamilton’s duel with,

Bush Hill,

Calais,

Callender, James T.,

death of,

JA attacked by,

Jefferson-Hemings liaison reported by,

Jefferson’s payment to,

Reynolds Affair and,

Cambridge, Mass.,

Washington in,

see also Harvard College

Camden, battle of (1780), Canada,

in American Revolution,

Caribbean Sea,

Carmarthen, Lord,

Carr, Peter,

Carroll, Charles,

Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia,

Catholic Sisters of Charity,

Cato (Addison),

Caughnawaga Indians,

Cervantes, Miguel de,

Chaillot,

Champlain, Lake,

Chantilly, château at,

Charles I, King of England,

Charles II, King of England,

Charleston, S.C.,

battle of (1776),

fall to British of (1780),

Charlotte, Queen of England,

Charlotte Augusta Matilda, Princess of England,

Charlottesville, Va.,

Chase, Samuel,

Chastellux, Marquis de,

Chaumont, Comte de (Jacques Donatien Le Ray),

Chauncey, Charles,

Chew, Benjamin,

Christianity,

Jefferson’s reputed objections to,

Church, Angelica,

Church of England,

Cicero,

Cicero (U.S. ship),

Cincinnatus (U.S. ship),

civil war, predictions of,

Clarissa (Richardson),

Clark, John,

Clay, Henry,

Clinton, George,

Cobbett, William (Peter Porcupine),

Coles brothers,

Columbian Centinel,

Abigail’s obituary in,

“Publicola” series in,

Comédie Française,

Committee of Five,

Common Sense (Paine),

compromise of

Concord, battle of (1775),

Condorcet, Marquis de (Marie-Jean A. N. Caritat),

Congregational Church,

Congress, U.S.:

Alien and Sedition Acts and,

JA’s messages to,

JA’s speeches to,

Jefferson’s messages to,

in New York,

in Philadelphia,

Reynolds Affair and,

special session of (1797),

“Toussaint’s clause” and,

in Washington D.C.,

see also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.

Connecticut,

Continental Congress delegates from,

Constellation (U.S. frigate),

Constitution, U.S.,

presidency in,

ratification of,

vice presidency in,

Constitution (U.S. frigate),

Constitutional Convention,

Continental Army,

in Boston,

French in,

in New Jersey,

and Society of Cincinnati,

in South Carolina, supply problems of,

troop problems of,

Washington as head of,

see alsospecific battles

Continental Board of War and Ordnance (War Office; Board of War),

Continental Congress,

and Articles of Confederation,

Barbary States and,

Committee for Foreign Affairs of,

Committee of Five and,

Committee of Treaties of,

Committee on Spies of,

Common Sense and,

communication problems of,

debate over JA in,

dollar devalued by,

five-man peace commission established by,

Franklin’s correspondence with,

Holland and,

independence issue and,

JA as delegate to,

JA ostracized in,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s preamble and,

JA’s request for leave of absence from,

JA’s sense of abuse from,

JA’s trip to,

Jefferson at,

naval issues and,

peace commission’s break with orders of,

petition of,

ports opened to foreign trade by,

secrecy of,

State House yard and,

Continental Congress, first (1774),

background of delegates to,

Massachusetts delegation to,

Contrast, The (Tyler),

Convention of Mortefontaine (1800),

Coolidge, Joseph, Jr.,

Coombe, Rev. Thomas,

Cooper, Rev. Samuel,

Copley, John Singleton,

Cornwallis, Charles, Lord,

correspondence of John and Abigail Adams, see Adams, John and Abigail, correspondence of

Cosway, Maria,

Cosway, Richard,

Court of Admiralty,

Cranch, Betsy, Abigail’s correspondence with,

Cranch, Lucy, Abigail’s correspondence with,

Cranch, Mary Smith,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

death of,

Cranch, Richard,

Abigail influenced by,

death of,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s friendship with,

marriage of,

Cranch, William,

Crawford, William,

Cromwell, Oliver,

currencies:

colonial,

Continental,

lack of standardization of,

Cushing, Charles, JA’s correspondence with,

Dalton, Tristram,

Dana, Francis,

in election of

in Europe,

Danton, Georges-Jacques,

Davie, William,

Davila, Enrico Caterino,

Davis, Edward,

Deane, Silas,

Declaration of Independence, U.S.,

debate over,

effects on “spirit” of,

fiftieth anniversary of,

French translation of,

Jefferson’s drafting of,

planning of,

revision of,

signing of,

slavery and,

voting on,

Declaration of Rights, Massachusetts,

Declaration of Rights, Virginia,

Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, A (Adams),

Defoe, Daniel,

Delaware,

Continental Congress delegates from,

Delaware Bay,

Delaware River,

democracy,

Demosthenes,

Descartes, René,

De Senectute (Cicero),

d’Estaing, Charles-Henri Théodat,

Dexter, Samuel,

diary of John Adams, see Adams, John, diary of

Dickinson, John,

absences from Congress of,

independence opposed by,

pamphlet writing of,

Dickinson, Mrs. John,

Digges, Thomas,

“Discourses on Davila,”

Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, A (Adams),

Don Quixote (Cervantes),

Dorchester Peninsula,

Dorset, Duke of,

Duane, James,

Duane, William,

Dumas, Charles W. F.,

Dunglison, Robley,

Dunlap, John,

Dunmore, Lord,

Duplessis, Joseph-Siffred,

Dutch Republic, see Holland

dysentery epidemic (1775),

East Chester, N.Y.,

East River,

education,

JA’s views on,

see alsospecific schools and individuals

Egypt,

elections:

of 1788

of 1792

of 1796

of 1800

of 1803

of 1804

of 1824

electoral college,

Elk Hill,

Ellsworth, Oliver,

embargoes,

Emerson, Ralph Waldo,

England, English,

Abigail’s views on petition of reconciliation with,

American colonies taxed by,

in American Revolution,

Barbary States and,

in Boston,

Boston abandoned by,

constitution of,

Dutch relations with,

embargo on exports to,

fear of highwaymen in,

in French and Indian War,

French relations with,

French Revolution and,

gardens in,

JA as minister plenipotentiary to,

in JA’s preamble,

JA’s work published in,

John Quincy as minister to,

natural rights of,

navy of,

in peace talks,

property confiscated by,

Sewall’s views on,

Spanish America and,

U.S. relations with,

in War of

English Channel,

Enville, Duchesse d’ (Marie-Louise-Elisabeth de la Rochefoucauld),

Epictetus,

Eppes, Elizabeth,

Eppes, Francis,

Eppes, Mary Jefferson (Polly),

death of,

in London,

equality, JA’s views on,

Essay on Man Pope),

executive branch:

JA’s views on,

Jefferson’s views on,

Fairhill,

Farewell Address,

Federalist Papers,

Federalists,

Alien and Sedition Acts and,

in Callender’s attack on Jefferson,

in election of

French policy and,

High,

JA’s cabinet and,

JA supported by,

John Quincy as,

Louisiana Purchase opposed by,

Fenno, John,

Field, Esther,

in England,

in France,

Field, Joseph,

first Continental Congress, see Continental Congress,

first fishing rights,

Fitch, John,

Fitzherbert, Alleyne,

Florida,

food and diet,

French,

in Philadelphia,

in Quincy,

on ships,

Foreign Ministry, British,

Fort Ticonderoga,

artillery captured at,

Fort Washington, battle of (1776),

Fox, Charles James,

Fox, Gilbert,

France,

Abigail’s shock in,

in American Revolution,

Barbary States and,

British relations with,

JA as commissioner to,

JA influenced by,

JA’s approval of,

JA’s disapproval of,

JA’s feelings of failure in,

Logan’s views on,

monarchy restored in,

naval power of,

politeness in,

Spain as ally of,

spies in,

U.S. alliance with,

U.S. loan from,

see also French Revolution; Quasi-War; specific places

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld,

Franklin, Benjamin,

Abigail’s views on,

in art,

Arthur Lee’s conflicts with,

Barbary pirates and,

as commissioner to France,

on Committee of Five,

in Continental Congress,

death of,

French adoration for,

illegitimate son of,

JA compared with,

JA’s change in opinion of,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s parting with,

JA’s reputation blackened by,

JA’s respect for,

Jefferson’s advice from,

London years of,

Madame Helvétius’s relationship with,

as man of science,

in meeting with Lord Howe,

as minister plenipotentiary to France,

Montreal mission of,

as peace commissioner,

retirement of,

slavery and,

writings of,

Franklin, William,

Franklin, William Temple,

Frazier, Mary,

Free Masons,

French and Indian War,

French Huguenots,

French language,

Franklin’s knowledge of,

JA’s knowledge of,

John Quincy’s knowledge of,

French Revolution,

Directory in,

end of,

Jacobins in,

Reign of Terror in,

French Revolution (Wollstonecraft),

Freneau, Philip,

Fresh Brook,

Fries, John,

Friesland,

Gainsborough, Thomas,

Gallatin, Albert,

Galloway, Joseph,

gardens:

English,

in France,

Gates, Elizabeth,

Gates, Horatio,

in South Carolina defeat,

Gazette de Leyde,

Gazette of the United States,

Genêt, Edmé-Jacques,

Genêt, Edmund Charles,

geography, JA’s views on,

George III, King of England,

Declaration of Independence and,

JA compared with,

JA’s audiences with,

Jefferson presented to,

library of,

petitions to,

statue of,

Georgia:

Continental Congress delegates from,

legislature of,

Gérard, Conrad,

German (Pennsylvania Dutch) farmers,

German Moravians,

Germans, as mercenaries,

see also Hessians, in American Revolution

Gerry, Elbridge,

as Continental Congress delegate,

death of,

election of and,

as envoy to France,

JA’s correspondence with,

Ghent, Treaty of (1814),

Gilbert, Sir Geoffrey,

Giles, William Branch,

government:

happiness as aim of,

JA’s views on,

state,

see also republican government; specific branches

Grand, Ferdinand,

Grand, Marie,

Grand Banks,

Grand Hôtel Muscovite,

Grand Turk (U.S. ship),

Grasse, Admiral de,

Gravesend,

Gray, Harrison,

Greek,

Green, Mr.,

Greene, Nathanael,

Grenville-Temple, Richard, Lord Cobham,

Gridley, Jeremiah,

JA’s advice from,

Griswold, Roger,

gunpowder,

Hackney, village of,

Hague, The,

“Hail Columbia” (song),

Halifax,

Hall, John,

Hamilton, Alexander,

Abigail’s distrust of,

in Army,

assumption plan of,

background of,

death of,

election of and,

electoral college manipulated by,

as Federalist,

JA’s cabinet manipulated by,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s fears about,

Jefferson vs., retirement of,

Reynolds Affair and,

as Secretary of the Treasury,

Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler,

Hancock, John,

in Continental Congress,

as governor of Massachusetts,

as slave owner,

happiness:

JA’s views on,

virtue and,

Harlem Heights,

Harper, Robert G.,

Harrington, James,

Harrison, Benjamin,

Harrod, Ann, see Adams, Ann Harrod

Hartford, Conn.,

Hartley, David,

Harvard College,

Charles at,

description of,

JA at,

JA’s standing at,

JA’s visits to,

John Quincy at,

Hauteval, Lucien,

Haverhill, Mass.,

Hayward, Zab,

Heer Adams (Dutch ship),

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien,

Helvétius, Madame,

Hemings, Betty,

Hemings, Bob,

Hemings, James,

Hemings, Madison,

Hemings, Sally,

Hemmenway, Moses,

Henry, Patrick,

Herschel, Sir William,

Hessians, in American Revolution,

Hewes, Joseph,

highwaymen,

His Majesty’s Royal Bell Ringers,

Historia delle guerre civili di Francia (Davila),

history,

JA’s meditations on,

natural, JA’s advocacy of,

History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (Warren),

Hogarth, William,

Holbrook, Amos,

Holland, Province of,

Holland (Netherlands),

British relations with,

Golden Age of,

JA’s “militia diplomacy” in,

John Quincy as minister to,

U.S. embassy in,

U.S. financial aid from,

U.S. independence recognized by,

honor, Roman ideal of,

Hoochera, C. F.,

Hooper, William,

Hopkins, Stephen,

Hopkinson, Francis,

Hopkinson, Joseph,

Hôtel de Langeac,

Hôtel de Valois,

Hôtel du Roi,

Hôtel d’York,

Hôtel Valentinois,

Hottinguer, Jean Conrad,

Houdon, Jean-Antoine,

Hough’s Neck,

House of Commons, British,

House of Lords, British,

House of Representatives, Massachusetts,

House of Representatives, U.S.,

assumption plan and,

election of 1800 and,

election of 1824 and,

Franklin’s death and,

Jay Treaty and,

physical assault in,

titles issue in,

X, Y, and Z Affair and,

Howe, George Augustus, Lord,

Howe, Richard, Lord,

Congress’s meeting with,

Howe, Sir William,

Hudson River,

human nature:

JA’s study of,

Jefferson’s lack of interest in,

titles issue and,

Hume, David,

Humphreys, David,

Huntington, Samuel, JA’s correspondence with,

Hutcheson, Francis,

Hutchinson, Thomas,

Huxham, John,

immigration,

impressment,

independence,

Abigail’s views on,

British recognition of,

Common Sense and,

Dutch recognition of,

Jefferson’s views on,

opposition to,

see also Declaration of Independence, U.S.

Indian wars,

inflation,

influenza epidemics,

Ireland, Irish,

Irish Rebellion (1798),

Italy,

Izard, Ralph,

in Senate,

Jackson, Andrew,

Jacobin clubs,

Jay, James,

Jay, John,

as Chief Justice,

JA compared with,

JA’s correspondence with,

as peace negotiator,

as special envoy to London,

Jay Treaty (1795),

Jefferson, Isaac,

Jefferson, Jane Randolph,

Jefferson, Lucy Elizabeth (Jefferson’s daughter, d. age four),

Jefferson, Lucy Elizabeth (Jefferson’s daughter, d. age two),

Jefferson, Martha (Patsy), see Randolph, Martha Jefferson

Jefferson, Martha Wayles Skelton,

death of,

Jefferson, Mary (Polly), see Eppes, Mary Jefferson

Jefferson, Peter,

Jefferson, Thomas,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

Abigail’s first meeting with,

Abigail’s views on,

account books of,

American Revolution and,

in Amsterdam,

appearance of, in art,

atheistic views ascribed to,

cabinet of,

as commissioner in France,

Constitution as viewed by,

in Continental Congress,

death of, Declaration of Independence and,

in departure from Philadelphia,

in election of 1792,

in election of 1796, i

n election of 1800,

in election of 1804,

in England,

extravagant claims and “large stories” of,

family background of, finances of,

in France, French assignment turned down by,

French Revolution and,

as governor of Virginia,

Hamilton vs.,

health problems of,

as horseman,

inaugurations of,

instinctive silence of,

on JA,

JA compared with,

JA’s correspondence with,

at JA’s inauguration,

JA’s public controversy with,

JA’s renewed friendship with,

JA’s views on,

Kentucky Resolutions and,

Madison’s correspondence with, see Madison, James, Jefferson’s correspondence with

Maria Cosway’s relationship with,

“Mazzei Letter” and,

as minister to France,

personal tragedies of,

as President,

purchases of,

as Republican,

Reynolds Affair and,

in rumored cohabitation with slave women,

Rush as supporter of,

as Secretary of State,

slaves of,

as Vice President,

Washington’s death and,

will of,

writings of,

Jenings, Edmund,

Jews,

Johnson, Catherine,

Johnson, Joshua,

Johnson, Louisa Catherine, see Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson

Johnson, Samuel,

Jones, John Paul,

Jouett, Jack,

Journals of Congress,

Judah (servant),

Judiciary Act (1789),

judiciary branch, JA’s views on,

Kemble, John,

Kent, William,

Kentucky,

Kentucky Resolutions,

Knox, Henry,

Knox, Thomas,

Lafayette, George Washington,

Lafayette, Madame de (Adrienne Françoise de Noailles),

Lafayette, Marquis de,

La Fontaine, Jean de,

La Luzerne, Chevalier Anne-César de,

JA’s removal sought by,

Lambert, Luke,

Lambert v. Field,

Langdon, John,

Languedoc (French ship),

La Rochefoucauld, Duc de,

La Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de,

Latin,

Laurens, Henry,

British capture of,

in peace negotiations,

Laurens, John,

La Vauguyon, Duc de,

Leasowes,

Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (John Quincy Adams),

Lee, Arthur,

as commissioner to France,

JA’s correspondence with,

Lee, Charles,

Lee, Francis Lightfoot,

Lee, Henry (Light-Horse Harry),

Lee, Richard Henry:

in Continental Congress,

JA’s correspondence with,

in Senate,

legislative branch, JA’s views on,

see also Congress, U.S.; House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.

L’Enfant, Pierre Charles,

Lenôtre, André,

Letombe, Philippe-Henry-Joseph de,

Letter from Alexander Hamilton, A (Hamilton),

Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (Dickinson),

Lewis, Meriwether,

Lexington, battle of (1775),

Leyden,

Leyden, University of,

Library of Congress,

life masks,

Lincoln, Bela,

Lincoln, Benjamin,

L’Insurgent (French frigate),

Liston, Henrietta,

Liverpool (British sloop-of-war),

Livingston, Robert R.,

Franklin’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

Lloyd, James,

Locke, John,

Locke, Samuel,

Logan, George,

London,

Abigail’s views on,

Adams family houses in,

description of, Franklin in,

French ambassador’s ball in,

JA in, Jefferson’s visit to,

newspapers in,

Philadelphia compared with,

theater and concerts in,

Tories in,

London Daily Universal Register,

London Gazette,

London Morning and Daily Advertiser,

London Public Advertiser,

Long Island,

battle of (1776),

Louis XVI, King of France,

French Revolution and,

JA’s meetings with,

Louis XVIII, King of France,

Louisiana,

Louisiana Purchase,

Lovell, James,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

Loyalists, see Tories

Lucretia (U.S. ship),

Luzac, John,

Lynch, Thomas,

Lyon,

Lyon, Matthew,

Macbeth (Shakespeare),

McHenry, James,

election of and,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s outburst at,

McKean, Thomas,

Maclay, William,

on French Revolution,

Madison, James,

election of 1800 and,

French post considered for,

in House of Representatives,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

Jefferson’s views on,

as President,

as Republican,

retirement of,

as Secretary of State,

Madison, Rev. James,

Maine,

malaria,

Manchester, Duke of,

Marat, Jean Paul,

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France,

Marriage of Figaro, The (Beaumarchais),

marriages, arranged,

Marsh, Joseph,

Marshall, Christopher,

Marshall, John,

as Chief Justice,

as envoy to, France,

JA’s correspondence with,

as Secretary of State,

Marston, John,

Martha (British ship),

Maryland, Continental Congress delegates from,

Mason, George,

Massachusetts,

constitution of,

debt and,

delegation to Continental Congress from,

General Court of,

legislature of,

Shays’s Rebellion in,

Massachusetts Bay,

Massachusetts Bay Colony, arrival of Adams family in,

Massachusetts Bay Province,

Massachusetts Centinel,

Massachusetts Spy,

Massachusetts Supreme Court,

Mather, Cotton,

Matlack, Timothy,

matrimonial stories,

Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de,

Mayhew, Joseph,

Mazzei, Philip,

“Mazzei Letter,”

Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (Rush),

Mediterranean, Barbary States and,

mental illness,

Mercure de France,

Methodists, Methodism,

Mifflin, Thomas,

Milton, John,

Miranda, Francesco de,

Mississippi River,

Missouri,

Missouri Compromise (1820),

monarchy, monarchists,

absolute,

JA’s views on,

Jefferson’s views on,

Monmouth, battle of (1778),

Monroe, James,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

as President,

Reynolds Affair and,

Montgomery, Richard,

Monticello,

renovation of,

Morocco,

Morris, Robert,

Morristown, N.J.,

Morton, John,

Mount Vernon,

Mount Wollaston,

Murray, Judith Sargent,

Murray, William Vans,

Nantes,

Napoleon I, Emperor of France,

American commission and, crowning of,

North American empire plans of,

Napoleonic Wars,

end of,

Russia invaded in,

National Gazette,

Naturalization Act (1798),

Navy, British, see England, English, navy of

Navy, Continental,

Navy, French,

Navy, U.S.,

in Caribbean,

JA’s advocacy for,

Jefferson’s cutback of,

“subscription” ships for,

Nelson, Horatio, Netherlands, see Holland

neutrality policy,

Newburyport, Mass.,

New England, New Englanders,

British attempt at separation of,

effects of shipping embargo on,

grandeur predicted for,

Holland as viewed by,

JA’s views on,

in slave trade,

see also specific places

Newfoundland, U.S. fishing rights off,

New Hampshire,

New Haven, Conn.,

New Haven Gazette,

New Jersey,

Continental Congress delegates from,

defense of,

New Orleans, battle of (1815),

Newport, battle of (1778),

New York,

Continental Congress delegates from,

legislature of,

New York Advertiser,

New York City,

in American Revolution,

as capital,

election of 1800 and,

JA’s views on,

Philadelphia compared with,

New York Daily Gazette,

New York Journal,

New York Minerva,

Nicholas, George,

Nîmes, Maison Carrée in,

Noah, Mordecai,

Noailles, Adrienne Françoise de, see Lafayette, Madame de

Noailles, Jean de, Duc d’Ayen,

Noel, Nicholas,

Norfolk, Va.,

Normandy, Duke of,

North, Lord,

North Carolina,

North Sea,

Northwest, American,

Notes on the States of Virginia (Jefferson),

“Observations on Certain Documents . . .” (Hamilton),

Observations on Modern Gardening (Whately),

Ohio,

Olive Branch Petition,

Oliver, Andrew,

Onesimus,

Onslow, Lord Arthur,

opera,

Orations (Cicero),

Oswald, Richard,

Othello (Shakespeare),

Otis, James,

Otis, Samuel,

Otis, Mrs. Samuel,

Otto, Louis-Guillaume,

Oxford,

Page, John,

Paine, Robert Treat,

Paine, Thomas,

see also Common Sense

Palladio, Andrea,

Pamela (Richardson),

pamphlets, political,

Paradise Lost (Milton),

pardons,

Paris,

Abigail’s views on,

French Revolution in,

JA’s first visit to,

JA’s second visit to,

Jefferson’s houses in,

London compared with,

peace talks in,

theater in,

Paris, Treaty of (1783),

signing of,

violations of,

Parliament, British,

Stamp Act and,

Passy,

Patriot party, Dutch,

patronage,

Patty (servant),

Paul, Saint,

Pauline (hairdresser),

Peale, Charles Willson,

Peale, Rembrandt,

Penn, John,

Penn, William,

Penn’s Hill,

Pennsylvania, Pennsylvanians,

constitution of,

Continental Congress delegates from,

legislature of,

militia of,

religious tolerance in,

site of capital and,

Whiskey Rebellion in,

Pennsylvania Evening Post,

Pennsylvania Gazette,

Pennsylvania Journal,

Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery,

Perth Amboy, N.J.,

Petit, Adrien,

petitions, to King George,

Philadelphia, Pa.,

British agents in,

British evacuation of,

British occupation of,

as capital,

Christ Church in,

City Tavern in,

Constitutional Convention in,

description of,

disease in,

evacuated by Congress,

Francis Hotel in,

Franklin’s death and,

French presence in,

Genêt in,

“Grand Federal Procession” in,

JA in, JA’s route to,

JA’s views on,

mourning for Washington in,

New York compared with,

port of,

President’s House in,

return of Congress to,

Thomas in,

Tories in,

Philadelphia Aurora,

election of 1800 and,

Philadelphia Evening Post,

Pickering, Timothy,

election of 1800 and,

firing of,

JA’s correspondence with,

as Secretary of State,

Pilgrims,

Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth,

in election of 1800

Pinckney, Thomas,

pins, Abigail’s request for,

pirates, Barbary,

Pitt, William, the elder,

Pitt, William, the younger,

Pittsburgh, Pa.,

Plan of Treaties,

Plato,

Poor Richard’s Almanack (Franklin),

Pope, Alexander,

Poplar Forest,

Popple, Henry,

population growth,

Porcupine’s Gazette,

portraits,

of Abigail,

of JA,

Portsmouth, N.H.,

Portugal,

Potomac River,

poverty, the poor,

in Europe,

in Philadelphia,

Powel, Samuel, power:

Abigail’s views on,

JA’s views on,

Presbyterians,

press, freedom of the,

press gangs,

Preston, Thomas,

Price, Rev. Richard,

Priestley, Joseph,

Prince, James,

Princeton, N.J.,

battle of (1777),

privateers,

French,

Proclamation of Neutrality (1793),

Prospect Before Us, The (Callender),

prostitutes,

Protestant Reformation,

Protestants,

Prussia,

“Publicola,”

Puritans,

Putnam, James,

Quakers,

American Revolution supported by,

pacifism of,

slavery and,

Quasi-War (Half-War),

end of,

peace efforts in,

as undeclared sea war,

U.S. preparations in,

X, Y, and Z Affair and,

Quebec, battle of (1775-76),

Quincy, Edmund,

Quincy, Eliza Susan,

Quincy, Esther, see Sewall, Esther Quincy

Quincy, Hannah, see Storer, Hannah

Quincy Lincoln

Quincy, John,

Quincy, Josiah, Jr.,

Quincy, Josiah, Sr.,

Quincy, Josiah (Abigail’s cousin),

Quincy, Mass.,

Big House in,

Emerson’s visit to,

John Quincy’s visits to,

Josiah Quincy’s visits to,

Lafayette’s visit to,

Louisa Catherine’s visits to,

Monroe’s visit to,

Nabby’s visits to,

Peacefield (later Stoneyfield) in,

Thomas in,

Quincy, Samuel,

Ramsay, Allan,

Ramsay, Andrew,

Randolph, Edmund,

Randolph, Ellen Wayles,

Randolph, John,

Randolph, Martha Jefferson (Patsy),

Abigail’s proposed marriage for,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

marriage of,

Randolph, Thomas Jefferson,

Randolph, Thomas Mann, Jr.,

Ranelagh Gardens,

reason:

JA’s views on,

Jefferson’s views on,

Reflections on Courtship and Marriage (Franklin),

Reflections on the French Revolution (Burke),

religion,

freedom of, in

Massachusetts constitution,

see also specific churches and sects

Reni, Guido,

republican government,

JA’s views on,

Republicans, Republican party,

Callender as propagandist for,

and Callender’s attack on Jefferson,

in election of

in election of

in election of

French policy and,

JA’s inauguration and,

JA’s lack of cooperation from,

Jay Treaty and,

Reynolds Affair and,

Sedition Act and,

Washington criticized by,

Revere, Paul,

Revolutionary War, see American Revolution

Reynolds, James,

Reynolds, Joshua,

Reynolds, Maria,

Reynolds Affair,

Rhode Island,

Continental Congress delegates from,

Richardson, Samuel,

Richmond, Va.,

Richmond Examiner,

Richmond Hill,

Richmond Recorder,

Ridley, Matthew,

Rights of Man, The (Paine),

Rittenhouse, David,

Robespierre, Maximilien de,

Rochambeau, Comte de,

Rockingham, Lord,

Rodney, Caesar,

Rodney, Thomas,

Roebuck (British frigate),

Roman Catholic Church,

Roman Empire, Roman values,

Ross, John,

Rotterdam,

Rousseau, Jean Jacques,

Royall, Anne,

Rubens, Peter Paul,

Rumbold, Richard,

Rush, Benjamin,

in Continental Congress,

death of,

on JA,

JA’s correspondence with,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

Jefferson’s friendship with JA renewed by,

Jefferson supported by,

sanitary concerns of,

slavery opposed by,

in yellow fever epidemics,

Rush, Mrs. Benjamin,

Rush, Richard,

Russia:

John Quincy as minister to,

John Quincy’s first visit to,

Napoleon’s invasion of,

Rutledge, Edward,

in meeting with Lord Howe,

St. Eustatius,

San Domingo (Haiti),

Saratoga, battle of (1777),

Sartine, Gabriel,

Scottish mercenaries,

sculpture,

Sedgwick, Theodore,

Sedition Act (1798),

Sellers, Nathan,

Selling of Joseph, The (Sewall),

Senate, Massachusetts,

Senate, U.S.,

and envoys to France,

JA’s tie-breaking votes in,

Jay Treaty and,

John Quincy in,

in New York,

removal of cabinet officers by,

titles issue in,

Senate Manual (Jefferson),

Sensible, La (French frigate),

Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne),

September Massacres,

Sergeant, Jonathan,

servants,

in England,

in France,

Sewall, Esther Quincy,

Sewall, Jonathan,

as attorney general,

JA offered royal appointment by,

JA’s friendship with,

JA’s reunion with,

marriage of,

Sewall, Samuel,

Shakespeare, William,

Shaw, Elizabeth Smith,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

death of,

Nabby’s correspondence with,

Shaw, Rev. John,

Shaw, William,

Shays, Daniel,

Shays’s Rebellion (1786),

Shelburne, Lord William,

Shenstone, William,

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley,

Sherman, Roger,

Short, William,

Siddons, Sarah,

slaves, slavery,

Abigail’s views on,

American Revolution and,

Declaration of Independence and,

of Jefferson,

Jefferson’s denunciation of,

Jefferson’s reputed cohabitation with,

opposition to,

in Philadelphia,

rebellions of,

smallpox inoculation and,

of Smith family,

smallpox,

inoculation for,

Smith, Abigail (JA’s wife), see Adams, Abigail Smith

Smith, Abigail Adams (Nabby) (JA’s daughter),

Abigail’s correspondence with,

Atlantic crossing of,

birth of,

cancer of,

death of,

diary of,

in East Chester,

in England,

in France,

inoculation of,

JA’s correspondence with,

John Quincy’s correspondence with,

marriage of,

in New York,

physical appearance of,

portrait of,

pregnancies and childbirths of,

in Quincy,

reserve of,

Tyler’s romance with,

Smith, Adam,

Smith, Caroline,

Smith, Elizabeth (Abigail’s aunt),

Smith, Elizabeth (Abigail’s sister), see Shaw, Elizabeth Smith

Smith, Isaac,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

Smith, John Adams,

Smith, Louisa,

Abigail’s death and,

Smith, Mary, see Cranch, Mary Smith

Smith, Rev. William, Sr.,

death of,

slaves of,

Smith, Mrs. William, Sr.,

Smith, Sally, see Adams, Sally Smith

Smith, Thomas,

Smith, William, Jr.,

death of,

Smith, William Stephens,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

Abigail’s fears about,

death of,

in England,

JA’s correspondence with,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

marriage of,

proposed for Army,

speculative activities of,

Smith, William Steuben,

Smollett, Tobias,

Society of the Cincinnati,

South Carolina,

American Revolution in,

Continental Congress delegates from,

South Carolina (U.S. ship),

Spain,

in American Revolution,

U.S. relations with,

Spanish America,

Sparhawk, John,

Sparhawk, Thomas,

Stamp Act (1765),

State Department, U.S.,

see also specific secretaries

Staten Island,

States-General, Dutch,

states’ rights,

Stephens, Joseph,

Sterne, Laurence,

Stiles, Ezra,

Stockbridge, Joseph,

Stockton, Richard,

Stoddert, Benjamin,

JA’s correspondence with,

Storer, Charles,

Storer, Ebenezer,

Storer, Hannah Quincy Lincoln,

Strachey, Henry,

Stratford-on-Avon,

Stuart, Gilbert,

Sullivan, John,

Summary View of the Rights of British America (Jefferson),

Supreme Court, Massachusetts,

Supreme Court, U.S.,

Swift, Jonathan,

Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice de,

taverns:

JA’s stops in,

in London,

in Philadelphia,

taxation,

of American colonies,

of land,

Shays’s Rebellion and,

Whiskey Rebellion and,

Tennessee,

Thaxter, John, Jr.,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

in Europe,

“Their High Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries” (Adams),

Thomson, Charles,

Thornton, Matthew,

Thornton, William,

Thoughts on Government (Adams),

Thucydides,

titles issue,

Tories (Loyalists),

disarming of,

in London,

peace negotiations and,

on Staten Island,

Toussaint L’Ouverture, Pierre Dominique,

trade:

of American colonies,

of British,

of Dutch,

of France,

of U.S.,

treason,

of Arnold,

Treasury Department, U.S.:

Hamilton as Secretary of,

Reynolds Affair and,

treaties,

U.S.-British, ; see also Jay Treaty; Paris, Treaty of

U.S.-Dutch,

U.S.-French,

U.S.-Prussian,

Treatise of Feudal Tenures (Gilbert),

Trenton, N.J.,

battle of (1776),

Tripoli,

Tristram Shandy (Sterne),

True Sentiments of America, The,

Trumbull, John,

Truxtun, Thomas,

Tucker, Samuel,

Tucker, Thomas,

Tudor, William,

Tufts, Cotton, Jr.,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

Tunis,

Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, Baron de l’Aulne,

Twining, Thomas,

Tyler, Royall,

United States:

Barbary States and,

boundaries of,

British recognition of,

British troops in,

debts of,

Dutch recognition of,

economy of,

empire predicted for,

English relations with, see England, English, U.S. relations with

French relations with, see France, in American Revolution; France, U.S. alliance with; Quasi-War

moral shift in,

in peace talks,

of 1789

territory acquired by,

threats to union in,

unity of,

in War of 1812

westward expansion in,

United States (U.S. frigate),

Utrecht,

Valley Forge, Pa.,

van den Santheuvel, Bartholomeus,

van der Capellen tot den Pol, Baron Joan Derk,

van der Kemp, Francis,

JA’s correspondence with,

van Lynden van Hemmen, Baron,

Vassall, Leonard,

Vassall-Borland place, JA’s purchase of,

Vergennes, Comte de (Charles Gravier),

Franklin’s relationship with,

JA’s initial courtesy call with,

JA’s parting conversations with,

and JA’s second visit to France,

Jefferson’s relationship with,

La Vauguyon’s correspondence with,

peace negotiations and,

Vermont,

Verrières, Claudine-Geneviève,

Verrières, Marie,

Versailles,

veto power,

vice president:

diminishment of importance of,

election of,

frustrations of,

Virgil,

Virginia, University of,

Virginia, Virginians,

boundaries of,

capitol of,

constitution of,

Continental Congress delegates from,

debt of,

Dunmore’s escape from,

plantation houses in,

in 1789

and site of capital,

slavery in,

Virginia General Assembly,

Virginia Plan,

virtue,

government and,

of JA,

Voltaire (François Marie Arouet),

Ward, Samuel,

War Department, U.S.,

War of War Office, U.S., see Continental Board of War and Ordnance

Warren, James,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s denial of federal job to,

Warren, Joseph, death of,

Warren, Mercy Otis:

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA hurt and provoked by,

JA’s correspondence with,

Washington, D.C.,

burning of,

Capitol in,

JA’s first visit to,

John Quincy in,

President’s House in,

Washington, George,

Abigail’s views on,

as Army commander-in-chief,

in art,

cabinet appointed by,

as Continental Army head,

as Continental Congress delegate,

death of,

elected President,

Farewell Address of,

finances of,

French Revolution and,

health problems of,

Howe’s agreement with,

inaugurations of,

at JA’s inauguration,

JA compared with,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s damaged relationship with,

JA’s farewell visit with,

JA’s first meeting with,

JA’s regard for,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

modesty and reserve of,

New England tour of,

as President,

retirement of,

as slave owner,

Washington, Martha,

Washington Federalist,

Waterhouse, Benjamin,

JA’s correspondence with,

John Quincy’s correspondence with,

Watson, Elkanah,

Wayles, John,

Webb, Nathan,

JA’s correspondence with,

Webster, Daniel,

Webster, Noah,

Welsh, Harriet,

West, Benjamin,

West Indies,

Westminster Abbey,

West Point,

Weymouth, Mass.,

whale oil,

Whately, Thomas,

Whiskey Rebellion (1794),

White, Alexander,

White, William,

Whitehall Evening Post,

White Plains, battle of (1776),

Whitney, Rev. George,

Whitney, Rev. Peter,

Wibird, Parson Anthony,

Wilhelmina, Princess,

Williamsburg, Va.,

convention in (1776),

William V, Prince of Orange,

Wilson, James,

independence opposed by,

Winthrop, John,

Wirt, William,

Witherspoon, Rev. John,

Woburn Farm,

Wolcott, Oliver, Jr.,

and election of 1800

JA’s correspondence with,

Wolcott, Oliver, Sr.,

Wollstonecraft, Mary,

women:

Abigail’s views on,

French,

Worcester, Mass., JA in,

writs of assistance,

Wythe, George,

X, Y, and Z Affair,

Yale University,

Yard, Mrs. Sarah,

yellow fever,

York, Pa., Continental Congress in,

Yorke, Sir Joseph,

Yorktown, battle of (1781),

Young, Edward,

BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

John Adams

Truman

The Johnstown Flood

The Great Bridge

The Path Between the Seas

Mornings on Horseback

Brave Companions

David McCullough

MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK

The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt

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Copyright © 1981, 2001 by David McCullough

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

McCullough, David G.

Mornings on horseback: the story of an extraordinary family, a vanished way of life, and the unique child who became Theodore Roosevelt / David McCullough

Originally published: cl981. With new introd. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919—Childhood and youth. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.

E757.M45 2001

973.91’1’092—dc21

[B]  2001027005

ISBN 0-7432-1738-1

ISBN 978-0-7432-1-738-5

eISBN 978-0-7432-1-830-6

For Melissa

Contents

Introduction

Author’s Note

PART ONE

1. Greatheart’s Circle

2. Lady from the South

3. Grand Tour

4. A Disease of the Direst Suffering

5. Metamorphosis

PART TWO

6. Uptown

7. The Moral Effect

8. Father and Son

PART THREE

9. Harvard

10. Especially Pretty Alice

11. Home Is the Hunter

12. Politics

13. Strange and Terrible Fate

14. Chicago

15. Glory Days

16. Return

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Picture sections follow pages 160 and 320

Introduction

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ideas to convey in writing history and biography is that events past were never on a track. Things could have gone any number of different ways for any number of reasons almost any time, and they who lived in those other vanished years had no way of knowing how it would all turn out any more than we do. That the frail, frightened, peculiar little boy who is the center of this book would turn out to be the robust Theodore Roosevelt of history, symbol of American confidence and vitality at the turn of the twentieth century, is surely a case in point.

Theodore Roosevelt is a writer’s delight and, to a degree that I’m not sure I adequately conveyed in my original author’s note, I had a wonderful time writing this book. To begin with there was the freedom I felt in the kind of book it was to be. I had no intention or writing a conventional biography. I felt no requirement to begin at the beginning of my protagonist’s life or end at the end. I would concentrate instead on a handful of formative years, less than twenty, and close the story just as his great part in national life was about to begin. I had mainly to tell a family story and absent the weight of a lot of obligatory history.

Then there was the very great pleasure of working with the Roosevelt family papers at Harvard. I can’t imagine anyone in a graduate program at Harvard having a better time than I did over four years reading in the Houghton Library. And how good were the long conversations with the best of the Roosevelt storytellers—P. James Roosevelt of Oyster Bay and Sheffield Cowles of Connecticut, both kinsmen of Theodore Roosevelt and both gone now, and John Gable, director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, who knows more about Theodore Roosevelt than anyone alive.

I had the thrill of seeing North Dakota for the first time, the pleasure of meeting and talking to state historians, ranchers, men very like those Theodore Roosevelt knew. I remember one in particular who when I asked him if there were any expressions peculiar to the state said emphatically, “Oh, you betcha!” Another time I remarked on how the wind seems always to blow there. “They say,” he replied, “if the wind ever stops blowing in North Dakota, all the chickens will fall down.”

There were weekend expeditions with my family to Sagamore Hill, a house that speaks of the man and the family who lived there about as clearly as any house in America. And there was the pure joy of writing a story set in New York in what was one of its most vibrant, fascinating eras.

I knew nothing about the agonies of asthma when I began the book, nothing about taxidermy or fashionable nineteenth century sojourns on the Nile, and I learned a great deal about all such matters. But then it is what you learn by writing that gives the work its pull.

If there was one discovery or revelation that meant the most, it was coming to know Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., who is central to this book, as he was in the life of his small namesake. I think it is fair to say that one can not really know Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth President of the United States, without knowing the sort of man his father was. Indeed, if I could have one wish for you the reader, it would be that you come away from the book with a strong sense of what a great man Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. was.

Who is to say what would have become of little “Teedie” had he had a different kind of father? Or in what direction his career might have gone had his father not died so tragically when he did? But then, as I have said, there were always so many ways things could have gone differently.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH

New York,

February 2001

Author’s Note

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Theodore Roosevelt was in Pittsburgh about 1943. He was busy stealing the show in a Peabody High School production of Arsenic and Old Lace and I, at age ten or so, thought him sensational, and especially since in real life he was my oldest brother, Hax.

I have no idea how much or how little I knew of the historical TR before that night, but the impression that lasted was of a wondrously high-powered, comical, slightly loony, tremendously alive and appealing figure, all teeth, glasses, and mustache, who said “Bully!” at every chance and blew on a bugle and yelled “C-H-A-R-G-E!” at just the moment when it would bring the house down. I came away, in other words, with pretty much the impression of our twenty-sixth President that so many of us have grown up with, except that for me he happened also to be one of my very own family.

Years later, doing background reading on the Panama Canal, I encountered another Theodore Roosevelt—still the showman, still in command of the stage, but also shrewd, complex, a man of many gifts and masks—and it was what I read of his early life in particular that led to this book. My intention was not to write a biography of him. What intrigued me was how he came to be. Having written about the creation of two of the most conspicuous inanimate wonders of his era, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, and having acquired as a result great appreciation for the simple idea that such things don’t just happen, I was interested in knowing what was involved in the metamorphosis of this most conspicuous animate wonder. There were pieces of the puzzle that fascinated me—his childhood battle with asthma, for example, his beautiful southern mother, the adoration he had for his father. What, who, were involved in the forming of all that energy and persistence? How much of him was playacting or a composite of borrowings from others who were important to him?

The underlying theme would be the same as that of my earlier work—the creative effort, the testing and struggle, the elements of chance and inspiration involved in any great human achievement. The book would end when I thought he was formed as a person, at whatever age that happened, when I felt I could say, when the reader could say, there he is. San Juan Hill, the White House, the Canal, the trust-busting and Big Stick wielding, the Bull Moose with his “hat in the ring,” would all be after the fact, another story, so far as my interests.

But it was when I discovered the range and richness of surviving Roosevelt family correspondence—the many thousands of letters written not just by TR but by his mother, father, sisters, brother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, the private diaries and journals in the great Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library—that I realized what a truly marvelous and very large subject I had. The letters, only a small fraction of which have been published, offered the chance to get inside the life of a well-to-do Victorian American family—a very particular and vanished way of life—to go below the surface of their world, in a way that is seldom possible for a writer, except in fiction. It became the most engrossing work imaginable. The point that one of their number was to “make history” one day seemed almost immaterial. It was a story I would have wanted to tell had their names been something other than Roosevelt or had none of them done anything special later in life.

“During all this period New York was very much in the condition described in Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence,” writes Anna Roosevelt, Theodore’s older sister, in a private reminiscence that is part of the collection; “though naturally I did not realize it at the time,” she adds. Nor, importantly, did any of the family realize then that they were to be figures in history. The name Roosevelt was not yet a household word. National fame had not as yet touched any of the family and there was no reason to expect it might. And so there is an absence of affectation in almost everything they wrote to one another then, a wonderful candidness not always present in surviving correspondence from later stages.

Few of the Roosevelts could spell very well and punctuation for them, as for so many Victorians, was largely a matter of personal preference. Theodore, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, had the poorest spelling of all. He could handle “hippopotamus” or come close with “antediluvian,” even as a small boy, but words like “Chicago” or “forest” could prove too much for him. His brother, Elliott, had to write him at one point, “As you don’t know how to spell my name, I have entirely forgotten how to spell ‘yourn.’ Elliot does not spell Elliott, my dear Teedore.”

So for the benefit of the reader, the spelling in the writings quoted here has been corrected and punctuation made to conform to present standards, except in a few instances where the idiosyncrasy adds to the spirit of what is being said.

The volume of published work one must become familiar with when dealing with even part of such a life as Theodore led is almost overwhelming. It is not just that so much has been written about him and about other Roosevelts, but that he wrote and published so much himself and read so much that had a direct bearing on his life. Though a bibliography and source notes are included at the back of the book, I would like to express my particular indebtedness to two published works from the 1950s: the monumental The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (in eight volumes), edited by Elting E. Morison, John M. Blum, and John J. Buckley; and Carleton Putnam’s masterful Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886. Numbers of other books were helpful and a pleasure—Henry F. Pringle’s biased and lively Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Harbaugh’s The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, which is much the best one-volume biography of TR, John Morton Blum’s superb The Republican Roosevelt, Hermann Hagedorn’s Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, Nicholas Roosevelt’s Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him—but the Letters and the Putnam biography have been indispensable.

For his advice on research, his valuable comments on the manuscript, his friendship over the past four years, I thank especially Dr. John Allen Gable, Executive Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and author of the definitive The Bull Moose Years. I am also greatly indebted to Wallace F. Dailey, Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard, which in total comprises some seventeen thousand manuscript papers (mostly letters) and ten thousand photographs housed in the Houghton Library plus approximately twelve thousand volumes housed in the Widener Library. I thank Rodney G. Dennis, Curator of Manuscripts at the Houghton Library, and Martha Eliza Shaw and the others of the Houghton Reading Room staff who were so helpful. I salute, too, the resourceful John D. Knowlton of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for his efforts in determining what was concealed beneath an ink blot in one of TR’s diaries; I thank Timothy Beard of the New York Public Library’s genealogy division for sharing some of his latest findings on the remarkable private life of Robert B. Roosevelt. For the very thorough tour he gave me through TR’s home at Oyster Bay, his quick and helpful answers to my written queries over the years, I thank Gary Roth, Curator of the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.

In Mr. and Mrs. W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., of Farmington, Connecticut, who were so generous with their time and memories, I found invaluable living links with several key figures in the story. Mr. Cowles, who is the son of TR’s sister Anna, not only talked with me at length about his mother, his Uncle Theodore, his Aunt Corinne, but provided rare documentary material to be found nowhere else and was good enough to go over the manuscript and give me his views.

Other present-day descendants of the family who have been helpful include two of TR’s granddaughters, Sarah Alden Gannett and Edith Roosevelt Williams (Mrs. Gannett also read and commented on the manuscript); Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt of Oyster Bay, who is the granddaughter of Robert B. Roosevelt; and her son, P. James Roosevelt, who made a remark at lunch one day four years ago that did as much as anything to set the course of my work. Was there, I asked him, any important missing ingredient in the existing biographies of TR? “Yes,” he said. “No writer seems to have understood the degree to which he was part of a clan.”

In no part of the work have I been assisted by others quite so much as in my effort to get to the bottom of Theodore’s asthma, and most helpful in this respect has been Dr. Peter H. Knapp of the Boston University Medical Center, who is a leading authority on the psychosomatic aspects of the disease. My indebtedness to Dr. Knapp is very great. He took hours of his time to discuss the Roosevelt “case” with me, to guide me in my reading, and to go over my work as it progressed, telling me what to watch for in the family record, which were often quite different things from what I would have been watching for normally.

In addition to Dr. Knapp, the following physicians contributed ideas and/or shared with me their experiences in dealing with asthmatic children, for which I am most grateful: Tully Benaron, William H. Dietz, Richard Galdston, Milton Mazer, Shirley Murphy, and George Simson. And for their illuminating comments on the manuscript, I thank Dr. Robert Eisendrath and Dianthe Eisendrath.

Among the first things a layman discovers when trying to learn about asthma is that there is practically nothing in the literature on what the victim of an attack actually feels. (The best, most vivid account I could find was in a professional treatise published in 1864.) So for their willingness to talk openly and subjectively about the disease—something asthmatics commonly refuse to do because even talking about it can be painful for them—I am particularly grateful to Jeanne Crosby, Edward T. Hall, Jack D. Enns, and Cort Sutton. For sharing their experiences and insights as the parents of an asthmatic child, I am also grateful to Mr. and Mrs. John Curtiss. (Most of these interviews were conducted during an extended stay in New Mexico, where I was also fortunate to have access to the Medical Library of the University of New Mexico.)

During my time in North Dakota, I was offered help and hospitality at almost every turn, but wish to thank especially Liess Vantine and Frank E. Vyzralek of the State Historical Society at Bismarck; and in Medora and vicinity, Tom Adams, Mr. and Mrs. William Connell, William Herr, who is the wildlife specialist at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Joe L. Hild, who owns and runs TR’s old Chimney Butte Ranch, John O. Lancaster, Superintendent of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Harold and Sheila Schafer, Al Tescher, and Mayor Rod Tjaden; also, Harry Roberts of Dickinson and Mrs. Janet Buldhaupt of Beach.

My thanks to those who have assisted me at the Albuquerque Public Library, the American Museum of Natural History, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, the Georgia State Historical Society in Savannah, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Oral History Collection at Columbia University, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, the University of New Mexico Library, and the West Tisbury Public Library.

And to all of the following I am grateful for favors large and small, for advice, encouragement, and ideas: Thomas A. Ashley, Clarence A. Barnes, Jr., William Bentinck-Smith, Edith Blake, the late Bruce Catton, J. Felton Covington, Jr., Robert Ferguson, John and Ruth Galvin, John Hawkins, Woody Jackson, David Kahn, Jessica Kraft, George McCullough, Elinor and George Montgomery, Tony de Mores, Elting Morison, Royall D. O’Brien, Audre Proctor, Paul R. Reynolds, Robbin Reynolds, Philippa Roosevelt, Elizabeth Saltonstall, and Margot Street.

I thank my literary agent, Morton L. Janklow, and those at Simon and Schuster who have been such a pleasure to work with and who have contributed greatly: my editor, Peter Schwed; Kim Honig, Edith Fowler, Pat Miller, and Frank Metz.

Above all there is my family: Melissa and John McDonald, David, William, Geoffrey, and Dorie McCullough, who have played a larger part, helped more than they know; and my wife, Rosalee, who with her understanding of people, her editorial judgment, her good spirits, patience, and devotion, has been an unfailing inspiration.

And lastly, thanks to brother Hax for getting up there on the stage in the first place.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH

West Tisbury, Massachusetts

December 5, 1980

Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Greatheart’s Circle

1

In the year 1869, when the population of New York City had reached nearly a million, the occupants of 28 East 20th Street, a five-story brown-stone, numbered six, exclusive of the servants.

The head of the household was Theodore Roosevelt (no middle name or initial), who was thirty-seven years of age, an importer and philanthropist, and the son of old Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, one of the richest men in the city. Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt—Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, or Mittie, as she was called—was thirty-three, a southerner and a beauty. The children, two girls and two boys, all conceived by the same father and mother, and born in the same front bedroom, over the parlor, ranged in age from fourteen to seven. The oldest, Anna, was known as Bamie (from bambina, and pronounced to rhyme with Sammy). Next came ten-year-old Theodore, Jr., who was called Teedie (pronounced to rhyme with T.D.). Elliott, aged nine, was Ellie or Nell, and the youngest, Corinne, was called Conie.

Of the servants little is known, except for Dora Watkins, an Irish nursemaid who had been employed since before the Civil War. Another Irish girl named Mary Ann was also much in evidence, beloved by the children and well regarded by the parents—it was she they picked to go with the family on the Grand Tour that May—but in family papers dating from the time, nobody bothered to give Mary Ann a last name. Concerning the others, the various cooks, valets, coachmen, and housemaids who seem to have come and gone with regularity, the record is no help. But to judge by the size of the house and the accepted standards for families of comparable means and station, there were probably never less than four or five “below stairs” at any given time, and the degree to which they figured in the overall atmosphere was considerable.

The house stood in the block between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, on the south side of the street, and it looked like any other New York brownstone, a narrow-fronted, sober building wholly devoid of those architectural niceties (marble sills, fanlights) that enlivened the red-brick houses of an earlier era downtown. The standard high stoop with cast-iron railings approached a tall front door at the second-floor level, the ground floor being the standard English basement, with its servants’ entrance. A formal parlor (cut-glass chandelier, round-arched marble fireplace, piano) opened onto a long, narrow hall, as did a parlor or “library,” this a windowless room remembered for its stale air and look of “gloomy respectability.” The dining room was at the rear, again according to the standard floor plan. Upstairs were the master bedroom and nursery, then three more bedrooms on the floor above, with the servants’ quarters on the top floor.

Only one thing about the house was thought to be out of the ordinary, a deep porch, or piazza, at the rear on the third-floor level. Enclosed with a nine-foot wooden railing, it had been a bedroom before the Roosevelts tore out the back wall and converted it to an open-air playroom. It overlooked not only their own and neighboring yards, but the garden of the Goelet mansion on 19th Street, one of the largest private gardens in the city, within which roamed numbers of exotic birds with their wings clipped. Daily, in their “piazza clothes,” the children were put out to play or, in Bamie’s case, in early childhood, to lie on a sofa.

The house had been a wedding present from Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt—CVS to the family—whose own red-brick mansion on Union Square, six blocks south, was the figurative center of the Roosevelt tribal circle. The father of five sons, CVS had presented them all with houses as they married and the one given Theodore, youngest of his five, adjoined that of Robert B. Roosevelt, the fourth son, who was a lawyer.

With their full beards and eyeglasses, these two neighboring brothers bore a certain physical resemblance. The difference in age was only two years. Beyond appearances, however, they were not the least alike. Robert was the conspicuous, unconventional Roosevelt, the one for whom the family had often to do some explaining. Robert wrote books; Robert was bursting with ideas. He was a gifted raconteur, a sportsman, yachtsman, New York’s pioneer conservationist (fish were his pet concern), an enthusiastic cook, an authority on family origins. He was loud and witty and cherished the limelight, seeking it inexplicably in the tumult of Tammany politics. Until the Civil War, the Roosevelts had all been Democrats. As late as 1863, Theodore had still been an avowed War Democrat—one who supported the war and thus the Republican Administration—but when he and the rest of CVS’s line at last turned Republican, Robert alone remained in the Democratic fold and was never to be anything but proud of the fact. (”Our party is the party of the people!”)

Robert’s middle name was his mother’s maiden name, Barnhill, but in anticipation of what his political foes might make of this (”manure pile” or variations to that effect), he had changed it to Barnwell and it was as Uncle Barnwell that he was sometimes known to the small nieces and nephews in the house beside his.

Robert’s wife, Elizabeth Ellis Roosevelt, was called Aunt Lizzie Ellis to distinguish her from still another Aunt Lizzie in the family, and she too was considered “unorthodox.” At the back of her third floor—the floor corresponding to the piazza next door—she maintained a marvelous and odorous menagerie of guinea pigs, chickens, pigeons, a parrot, a monkey, “everything under the sun that ought not be kept in a house.” The monkey, her favorite, was a violent little creature that bit. She dressed it like a fashionable child, complete with ruffled shirts and gold studs. Once Aunt Lizzie Ellis aroused the neighborhood with the purchase of a cow that had to be led from East 20th Street into her back yard by the only available route, through the house, an event that, for excitement, was surpassed only by the removal of the cow, once Aunt Lizzie Ellis was threatened with legal action. On the return trip through the house the animal became so terrified it had to be dragged bodily, its legs tied, its eyes blindfolded.

To the children next door such occasions naturally figured very large, as did Uncle Barnwell with his talk of fishing and hunting, his yacht, and his flashy political friends. So it is somewhat puzzling that so little was to be said of him in later years. His immediate proximity would be passed over rather quickly, his influence barely touched on. He is the Roosevelt everybody chose to forget about. Politics undoubtedly had much to do with this, but more important, it would appear, was his private life. For in addition to all else, brother Rob was a bit lax in his morals. He was what polite society referred to as a Bohemian, the kind of man who kept company with “actresses and such.” An admiring later-day kinsman would describe him as an Elizabethan in the Victorian era and a story has come down the generations of the ladies’ gloves Robert purchased in bulk at A. T. Stewart’s department store, these in a violent shade of green. The gloves had been on sale, according to the story, and he distributed them liberally among his “lady friends,” with the result that for years those who knew him well knew also to watch for the gloves while strolling Fifth Avenue or driving in the park.

Ordinarily, such stories might prompt some question as to whether Robert only seemed scandalous—so very straitlaced was the family, so quick was “the best society” to leap on the least deviation from the prescribed code and call it, if not immoral, then indecent. But in truth Robert was something more than a mere rake or charming boulevardier. He was a man living a remarkable double life, keeping another woman and ultimately an entire second family in a house only a block or so distant on the same street, an arrangement that would come to light only long afterward as a result of genealogical research sponsored by some of his descendants. Her name was Minnie O’Shea, or Mrs. Robert F. Fortescue, as he had decided she should be called, and in 1869 she was already pregnant with their first child.

How much of this Theodore knew, how strenuously he disapproved, if at all, is impossible to say. But the contrast between the two could hardly have been more striking.

Theodore was invariably upright, conservative, the very model of self-control. He cared nothing for public acclaim, “never put himself forward,” as friends would remember. Theodore was the model duty-bound husband and father, a junior partner at Roosevelt and Son. He was a faithful communicant at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, who often attended two services on the same Sunday. He belonged to the Union League Club and the Century Association. He served on charitable boards, raised money for museums. Not in seven generations on the island of Manhattan had the Roosevelts produced so sturdy or so winsome an example of upper-class probity, or so fine a figure of a man—physically imposing, athletic, with china-blue eyes, chestnut hair and beard, and a good, square Dutch jaw. In his formal photographs, the eyeglasses removed, he is someone who will do what he has to, direct, sure of himself. Only the eyes raise questions, with their unmistakable hint of severity, which seems odd in a man remembered mainly for the “sunshine of his affection.”

Clothes concerned him. The choice of a suit, the right hat for the occasion, were issues of consequence. His suits were of the best quality and beautifully tailored. Appearances mattered. Indeed, it may be said that appearances figured quite as much in the life at 28 East 20th Street as everywhere else within the circumscribed world of New York’s “good old families.” “Did I tell you that he took the other end of the table at the dinner I gave to Captain Cook and behaved admirably?” Theodore writes of brother Rob to Mittie. “He was dressed perfectly, except for a colored cravat with his dress suit.”

Together at dinners and balls, he and the exquisite Mittie made a picture people did not forget. It was in the Roosevelt tradition to be solicitous to women. While their mother was alive, the five brothers stopped regularly every morning en route to work to pay her their respects. But Theodore seems to have genuinely preferred the company of women—he had an eye for feminine beauty, his children all remembered—and the attention he showered on Mittie was exceptional even for that day and those circles. An employee at one of his charities remarked that he had never understood the meaning of the word “gentleman” until the evening he watched Theodore Roosevelt escort his wife about the premises.

In all Theodore was a seemingly uncomplicated person. He had no particular gifts. He was not musical as Mittie was. He shared little of her love of art. He was not creative; he did not write or charm after-dinner audiences as Robert could. He dabbled in nothing. He was perfectly intelligent, to be sure; he enjoyed books, enjoyed the talk of lawyers, editors, and others who traded in words and abstract ideas, but he was unintellectual. In matters of taste he habitually deferred to his wife, refusing even to buy a bottle of wine unless she had passed on it. If he regarded himself as an authority on anything, it was horses.

But greatest of all was his interest in and feeling for children. He responded immediately to them, and they to him. “My personal impression,” a nephew would recall, “. . . is that he was a large, broad, bright, cheerful man with an intense sympathy with everything you brought to him. He loved children especially.”

From childhood he had been called Thee and as the youngest son, the Benjamin of the family, he had been doted on. He was Mama’s darling and did nothing but shine in her eyes until her dying day. In turn, he adored her and would credit any good qualities he had to her and her “settled notions.” She had been an event in the Roosevelt line, the first non-Dutch entry on the family tree. She was Margaret Barnhill of Philadelphia. Her background was English-Irish-Quaker. She was gentle but dominating and the first of the Roosevelts to espouse the spirit of noblesse oblige. Great wealth imposed obligations, she preached; the opportunities bestowed by private fortunes must be put to “some good purpose.” Bamie, as the oldest of her fathers children, could remember going as a very small child to call on her at the house on Union Square. There was a cavernous front hall with a floor of polished black-and-white marble and great mahogany doors with silver knobs and hinges that opened to the dining room. “In the dining room, where a bright soft-coal fire was always burning in the fireplace, between two south windows, we invariably found my grandmother sitting in her corner with her work basket on a table near her, and some books, always apparently delighted to see us, and with a most lovely smile.”

Through Theodore’s youth, dinner conversation in that same room, at his fathers end of the table, had been in Dutch. Short, homely, pink-faced, invariably punctual, CVS Roosevelt regarded his brood with rather quizzical large, round eyes that were made to look even larger by his small, square gold-framed spectacles. He was the essence of old-fashioned New York. “Economy is my doctrine at all times,” he had once informed Margaret Barnhill in the midst of their courtship, “at all events till I become, if it is to be so, a man of fortune.” And though Roosevelt and Son had been founded by his own father and grandfather, it was he, CVS, who had become the family’s initial man of fortune, the first Roosevelt millionaire. It was he who switched the family business from hardware to importing plate glass. And still more fortuitously, in the Panic of 1837, when Theodore was a child of six, he bought up building lots, “hither and yon,” on the island of Manhattan, all at a good price.

Theodore’s formal education had been limited and erratic, as his spelling gave evidence. There had been a private tutor through boyhood and never a lack of books at hand, but college was ruled out because CVS thought it would ruin him. (Weir Roosevelt, the oldest brother, had gone to Columbia College, but to study law, which apparently made it tolerable in the fathers eyes; Robert, in his turn, had become a lawyer without going to college, as was still possible then.)

In 1851, however, at age nineteen, Theodore was sent off on a Grand Tour, something his brothers had been denied and that Robert for one greatly envied. It was the year of the London Exhibition and the opening of the Crystal Palace, an event of obvious importance to a family in the glass business. He saw the Exhibition, traveled the Continent, even went on to Russia, which was unheard of. He improved his French, acquired a little German and Italian, and sent home dutiful, descriptive letters that were his mother’s joy and to Robert a large annoyance.

“I’m afraid, Theodore, you have mistaken the object of traveling,” Robert lectured. “It is not to see scenery, you can see finer at home. It is not to see places where great people lived and died, that is a stupidity. But it is to see men. To enlarge your mind, which will never be enlarged by looking at a large hill, but by conversing with, and seeing the bent of the minds of other people.”

A month later, after still more from Theodore on the churches and monuments he was seeing, Robert could barely contain himself.

I have it in mind to go to all the big stores in Broadway and write you an account. So look out as sure as you describe to me any more big buildings, you may know what to expect. Now answer seriously, have you been anywhere but to monuments, etc.? Have you been to a masked ball, a theater, an opera, or even into a French store where little girls tend the counters? Have you seen a Dutchman, a Frenchman, an Irishman; besides the porters who carried your trunks? If so, what did you say to them and what did they say to you? Have you seen anything odd or original? Where have you been, where are you going?

But six months later, Robert felt obliged to rescind.

Firstly, Advice. Don’t write any more experience in the lower walks of life, or moralize upon its wickedness. . . . Mother gets into a pigeon fit and thinks her “darling innocent” is going straight to destruction. And the old gentleman ruminates on the disappearance of the £1,000 and looks blank when it is suggested to him that he is supporting Theodore’s “French teacher.” The old lady takes it hard and no matter what you do perhaps you had better not write about it. You had better keep to towers and castles.

Russia—the overwhelming splendors of St. Petersburg, the squalor of Moscow—affected Theodore profoundly. “I scarce know terms strong enough to express my feelings. . . . Everything is in the extremes.” Conceivably it had taken Robert’s admonitions to bring him to see the human element; still, the kind of sensitivity that began to emerge in his letters and in his journal was very much his own. He toured a Moscow foundling hospital where every year some six thousand infants were received. On the edge of the city early one Sunday he watched a thousand prisoners start the long march to Siberia. A dignified, elderly figure he identifies in the journal only as Dr. Haase had come to bid the prisoners farewell. Nothing or no one that Theodore encountered in his travels seems to have impressed him as this man did.

He was dressed in the old style with silk stockings and slippers, his breast decked with honor. . . . He is one of the finest-looking old gentlemen I ever saw and his actions carry out his appearance. He went around among the prisoners asking them if they were well and content. . . when they were departing he distributed among those whom he thought deserving. It was more the universal feeling of kindness which prompted every movement than any particular action which I can adduce which evinced his character.

The prisoners must be fairly treated, the old man insisted, for at Judgment Day their word would count as much as that of anyone. Though a few of the sick had been put in wagons, the rest had started off on foot with the prospect of six months of continual walking before them.

To the great relief of his father, Theodore came home with no new revolutionary ideas or worldly airs. Nor, apparently, was it with the least misgiving that he entered directly into the family firm, downtown at 94 Maiden Lane. The Russian journal would be taken up and reread from time to time and one “treasure” among the few he had brought back, a small square of malachite supporting a small gilt Russian peasant pulling a gilt sledge, was to occupy a prominent position in the 20th Street parlor. Only after they were grown would the children become aware that it was anything other than a priceless work of art.

The impression is that the family business more or less ran itself. CVS had announced his retirement soon after Theodore joined the firm, and another brother, James Alfred Roosevelt, was made senior partner. James Alfred, as nobody disputed, had the best head for business. He was shrewd and tough, and he had married an Emlen from Philadelphia, a move which, in the words of one descendant, “did the family’s fortune no harm.” James, too, like his father, was made a director of the Chemical Bank, and the Chemical Bank, with real estate, was of greatest importance to the Roosevelts and their standing in the financial community. CVS had been a founding father of the Chemical Bank, the only bank in New York that had never failed to meet its obligations in gold, even during the Civil War.

The family’s real-estate holdings were lumped under what was called the Broadway Improvement Association, of which James Alfred was also head and chief spokesman.

So it was James Alfred, ultimately, who had the final say on all questions pertaining to money, a subject about which all Roosevelts cared deeply but which they preferred also to keep altogether private. When, in 1868, a publication called Gallaxy presented the names of New York’s ten bona fide millionaires, with CVS listed among them, Weir Roosevelt responded angrily in a letter to The New York Times that no man’s privacy was safe any longer. “I ask you whether it is the present opinion of the respectable newspapers that a rich man has no rights, or, in other words, whether the mere accumulation of property by a private citizen is of itself a sufficient offense against society to call for a public exposure and justify the interference of the press?”

One of Theodore’s rare observations on the atmosphere at Roosevelt and Son is contained in a love letter to Mittie written hastily at his desk in 1853, shortly before they were married. So wonderful was the mere thought of her, he said, it could even brighten a day at 94 Maiden Lane, “where such a thing as sentiment would be laughed at as a humbug worthy of Mr. Barnum’s collection.” The bookkeeper, he cheerfully informed her, had warned him never to marry a southern girl.

As a businessman Theodore appears to have been miscast. He had no apparent aversion to trade, or any philosophical conflict with moneymaking as such. (For a time he even thought seriously of leaving the family firm in order to make more in some other line, though what that might be he had no idea.) Rather he appears to have found little or no satisfaction in the work. His letters rarely touch on it. The one picture we get of him having any fun on the job, evincing any of his usual enthusiasm, is an account of a winter day in Washington when he scaled the snow-covered roof of the new Treasury Building to measure for skylights. He felt like a mountaineer, sometimes sliding thirty or forty feet down the roof. All he needed was his alpenstock, he said. Otherwise, the impression is of years at a desk going through the motions, performing dutifully as the proper Victorian breadwinner, a prudent, attractive figure, quite in the Roosevelt mold, but uninspired, unaggressive, and, probably, not very good at what he did.

The power rested in the older brothers hands. Theodore was free to do Europe at will, while James Alfred stayed on and ran things, and Theodore seems to have gone off to Europe—or to the country or to his eager philanthropy—at every chance.

As time went on, his crusades among the needy, his hospital and museum projects, became his true vocation. It was thus that he became one of the prominent men of the city, as truly good a good citizen as New York had ever known. “Whatever he had to do, he did all out,” remembered Charles Loring Brace, the pioneer social worker. To some, he seemed strangely driven. John Hay, another friend, spoke of his “maniacal benevolence,” and in letters to his wife Theodore himself infers occasionally that “with so much to do” he has no choice. “I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.”

Together with Brace and a friend named Howard Potter, he had helped establish the Children’s Aid Society, to do something for the city’s homeless children—”street rats” as the police chose to call them—whose numbers by 1869 probably exceeded twenty thousand. Largely through Theodore’s initiative a permanent Newsboys’ Lodging House had been established on West 18th Street, where nightly several hundred stray boys, most of them newsboys, were given a clean bed in a warm room for five cents, a fraction of what was charged by the lowest kind of commercial flophouse. It was Braces contention—the theme by which he appealed for funds and enlisted the efforts of men like Theodore—that decent society had no greater threat than the existence of a “class of vagabond, ignorant, ungoverned children.” The time would come, Brace warned, when these children would have the vote, “the same rights as ourselves”—a very different justification for Christian mercy from that espoused by Theodore’s old gentleman in Moscow, but one that carried Brace and his projects far.

The mission of the Children’s Aid Society was to bring “moral disinfectants” to the festering “crime nests” of New York. A kindhearted agent or “visitor” was first dispatched to the “infected quarter,” someone who could naturally befriend the homeless waifs, this being work that Theodore, for one, did extremely well. Then an informal religious meeting, or mission class, was established; then a reading room, then an industrial school or workshop. Presently came the Lodging House. But the long-range objective was to return as many of the children as possible to their own families, if such existed, or, more often, to ship them off to farms in the Middle West or beyond, to get them out of the city entirely. By 1869 some 4,500 children had been thus dispatched to Ohio, Illinois, and points beyond. In time more than 100,000 would be sent.

When Brace first asked Theodore if he might spend every other Sunday evening at the Lodging House, talking with the boys, Theodore declined, saying his “troublesome conscience” would not permit it. He would be there every Sunday.

He “threw himself” into the work, Brace remembered: “He knew them by name, he knew their histories . . . they would gather round him, and he would question each one as to what he was doing, and give him advice and sympathy and direction. You felt the moment Mr. Roosevelt was in the room that he was a help to those poor fellows.”

As generous with his money as his time, he gave regularly to this and other causes, and raised still more among his well-to-do friends, some of whom eventually learned to take out their checkbooks the moment he came into their offices. One man, on hearing that Theodore was going abroad, estimated it would save him at least a thousand dollars.

Importantly, Theodore’s influence was felt just at that stage in the city’s growth when it could have the greatest effect, a point he never lost sight of. He believed in New York, he said, not so much for what it was as for what it might become, the example it could set. No city offered more opportunity for those wishing to do something for the good of mankind; his joy, he said, was being connected with new work, worthy institutions in their infancy, the influence of which would be felt throughout the country. The year following the war he helped start the New York Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital, for the treatment of children deformed by spinal disease. With Joseph Choate, Pierpont Morgan, Howard Potter, and others he had founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. It was in the front parlor at 28 East 20th Street that the original charter for the Museum of Natural History was approved the evening of April 8, 1869.

No one seems ever to have spoken ill of him. A man who knew him in business for more than twenty years said he never heard him utter an angry word, never saw him out of sorts. When Albert S. Bickmore, the brilliant young naturalist, first came to the city with his idea for a natural history museum, it was to Theodore that he went, because he had been told that Theodore Roosevelt was “just the man” to make such a project a success. Thirty years later Bickmore could still quote Theodores response: “Professor, New York wants a museum of natural history and it shall have one, and if you will stay here and cooperate with us, you shall be its first head.”

Most memorable was what Brace called his “rich power of enjoyment of everything human.” Pious as he was, as solemn sounding as his religious speculations might become, he adored parties and would dance all night. Like the new President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, he had a passion for fine horses and to see him astride one of his own in Central Park was, as one friend remarked, to see the model of Christian manhood.

He would make the most of any situation, of every moment, often replenishing his energies with occupations or chance conversations that others would have found irksome or boring. “I amused myself by drawing the little there was in him out,” he would say of someone he met on a train.

Best were the pleasures of a morning walk or his books or a good cigar or what he called the quiet luxury of home life. He loved flowers, yellow roses especially, and the Palisades along the Hudson River. Separated from home and the beloved “home faces,” he could slip rapidly into abject homesickness and sound, on paper at least, most uncharacteristically plaintive. He felt bereft of real friends, he wrote to Mittie one such summer evening. “The city is deserted by all my acquaintances and I scarce meet anyone now in the Park that I know.”

I wonder in so large a city, living here all my life, how it comes that I have so few intimate friends; it seems strange, especially when I know that you consider me so very sociable. But I have no more time to moralize. Those who I love love me and I would not give up their affection for the lukewarm article called by that name by thousands.

To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was as though he was in league with them. As Ellie once told him, he was one of those rare grown men who seem never to forget that they were once children themselves—”just my ideal,” Ellie said, “made to govern and doing it so lightly and affectionately.” Sweetest of all was his undivided attention, the “sunshine of his affection.”

Day began with the three youngest poised at the foot of the long stairway waiting for his descent and their morning prayers together, this ritual being held on the library sofa, two of them seated to one side of him, the third wedged into what they regarded as the prime position between him and the arm of the sofa. Evenings, in the library, they would wait for the sound of his key at the door, then rush to greet him and troop after him up the stairs to his room to watch him dress for dinner. (He always dressed for dinner and with what seemed to them the most amazing speed.)

He taught them to ride and to climb trees. Conie remembered “the careful way in which he would show us dead limbs and warn us about watching out for them, and then, having taught us and having warned us, he gave us full liberty to try our wings . . .” As they grew older he tried to include them in his own outside activities, taking along one or more, for example, on his Sunday-night visits to the Newsboys’ Lodging House. Those evenings when he brought some friend of special interest to the house—John Hay, Matthew Arnold, Albert Bickmore—he saw that the children sat and listened to what was being said.

His own preachments were fundamental and heartfelt, and it would be hard to overemphasize the extent to which they charged the atmosphere. Cultivate a hopeful disposition, he told them. Accept the love of others and you will be loved.

“I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking.” (To show their love for him, they could improve their handwriting or learn to swim or memorize a passage from the Bible.)

“I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language.”

He hated idleness. Every hour must be accounted for and one must also enjoy everything one did. Get action, he said. Seize the moment. “Man was never intended to become an oyster.”

Deceit or cowardice was not to be tolerated. Courage he rewarded openly and sometimes with dramatic effect. At a rented country house in New Jersey one summer, he surprised the three youngest children with a new pony. When he asked who would jump on, Conie, then four, was the only one not to hang back, and so he declared the pony was hers, to the humiliation of her older brothers. “I think I did it,” she would write long afterward, “to see the light in Fathers eyes.”

That a great, bearded figure of a man was also one so readily touched by the sufferings of others, so tender-hearted with children, so sensitive to the pulls of conscience, seemed strangely incongruous to some who knew him. But to those closest to him this androgynous quality was the essence of his personality. Howard Potter, the friend who probably knew him best, saw him as a “singular compound of feminine and masculine qualities, lovable as a woman, and as strong as a man.”

To Teedie, the little namesake, he was at once the most magnificent creature on earth and quite frightening, but then Teedie was full of fears of all kinds, as he would acknowledge in time. Anna Bulloch Gracie, the elder Theodore’s pious and adoring sister-in-law, called him Greatheart. It had come to her on a Sunday morning as she watched him go off to church with his children—the warrior Puritan, Greatheart, from The Pilgrim’s Progress, stout Greatheart, guide and protector of wayfaring innocents, fearless leader in life’s purposeful journey. “Come now, and follow me, and no hurt shall happen to you from the lions. ...”

“There never was anyone so wonderful as my father,” Bamie remembered. And the fact that he swept in and out of the house, in and out of their lives, the fact that he was not always around as their mother was, made him seem all the more special and “wonderful.”

2

Of the four children it was Bamie who most closely resembled him; Bamie, who, to use her own words, never let herself be young, and who, as would be said, probably had the best mind in the family.

Bamie was the mainstay, then and for as long as she lived. For a girl born into New York society she was also severely handicapped. She was not in the least pretty, for one thing. Her dark-blue eyes were deep-set, the lids heavy, which made her look tired and years older than she was. In repose she could look painfully sad.

More seriously, she was also somewhat physically deformed. The standard family explanation for this has been that as an infant she had been dropped by a careless nurse. However, no mention of such an incident is to be found in family records dating from the time it supposedly occurred, or afterward. The one specific early reference to the problem is in a letter written by Grandmamma Bulloch, an observant member of the household in that earlier day. Writing of the infant Bamie, she said, “I am quite uneasy about her back. There is something wrong there. She cannot stand more than a second on her feet, then her countenance expresses pain, and she crumbles down.”

The problem, in fact, was Pott’s disease, the form of tuberculosis which softens and destroys the bones and which, when localized in the spine, causes hunchback. Known to have been a child crippler since the time of the Pharaohs, it was first identified in the eighteenth century by a British physician, Percivall Pott. Still, by the late nineteenth century, it remained a mystery and was thought to be incurable.

In Bamie’s case the effect was severe curvature of the spine and intense suffering. At age three, at the time of Teedie’s birth, she was fitted with her “terrible instrument,” a heavy steel-and-leather apparatus that left her immobile and rubbed a hideous sore on her back. The doctor came regularly each morning to wash and dress the sore and to strap her in again, and through the rest of the day she had to be picked up and carried from room to room or out to her sofa on the piazza. She could lie face down only. In the evening it was her father who removed the apparatus and at bedtime Grandmamma Bulloch would rub her legs until she fell asleep.

Her fathers devotion became the most important thing in her life. A summer when she had to be left behind at 20th Street while her mother, grandmother, the new baby, and Dora Watkins went off to the country was a summer of untold happiness because he was there with her so much of the time, because at the end of his business day he would come directly to her on the piazza, bringing her ice cream or fresh peaches or some small gift, because he would sit with her while she had her supper, then carry her to bed “with his very strong arms.”

She was also released from the “terrible instrument” that same summer, the summer of 1859, when she was four. He had found another doctor for her, Charles Fayette Taylor, an orthopedic surgeon who in some professional quarters was thought to be a quack. Pott’s disease was Taylor’s specialty. He treated it with what he called the “movement cure,” a form of physical therapy based on Swedish techniques that he had learned in Europe. Bamie was among his first patients and he not only transformed her daily regimen, giving her virtually a new life, but interjected into the family circle his conviction that physical well-being and mental outlook are directly correlated.

She was fitted with a radically different kind of back brace, a custom-made “spinal assistant” that was light in weight and designed so that she could be up and moving about, which, Taylor stressed, was the whole point. He wanted her moving about, both for her back and for what it would do to her spirits. Improvement was slow but unmistakable, and it was seeing this, seeing what Taylor had done for his own child, that led Theodore to establish the Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital with Taylor at its head.

A full cure was never to come, however. Through most of childhood she was required to lie down part of every day, and, by Roosevelt standards, her physical activity was limited. The rest of her life she wore a piece of ram’s wool on her back beneath her clothes in order to sit comfortably in a chair. She was not, by the time she attained her full growth, exactly a hunchback, but she did have an odd hunched stance. The small figure she presented to the world, or that she confronted in the hall mirror, was plainly “curious,” thick through the shoulders.

“Poor little thing,” her father wrote when she was seven. “I never think of Bamie without pain. It seems such a dreary life that is in store for her.”

He wanted her with him whenever possible. At some point during the war, on one of his periodic trips to Washington—the exact date is not known—he took her along and she sat on Abraham Lincoln’s lap. She would remember nothing of the event, only that she had been with her father.

In a family notable for its intense attachments, theirs was perhaps the most intense of all. She was emphatically “Papa’s pet.” He kept her photograph in a leather case and carried it with him wherever he traveled. His letters to “My own Darling Bamie” were overflowing with tenderness, with concern for her every move, with advice, warnings, and not a little baring of his own soul. “Try to cultivate a quiet sober style,” he would write, “and bottle up your spirits a little until I have possession of you. Then you may let them out again as much as you please.”

The one and only time he ever physically punished Teedie—possibly the only time he ever physically punished any of his children—was when, at age four, Teedie bit Bamie on the arm.

Bright, conscientious, she picked things up quickly (French, the piano) and her energy was very nearly the match of Theodore’s. “Dear busy Bamie,” Grandmamma Bulloch called her. But it was her odd, almost quaint maturity that set her off. She was “competent beyond her years,” even when very small. She had no interest in games or toys. She wished only to be “useful,” to look after her own needs, to look after the younger three, to whom she never seemed like anything but another grownup. Teedie, by way of introduction to his diary of the European tour, was to explain, “When I put ’We 3’ I mean Ellie, Conie, and I. When I put ’big people’ I mean Papa, Mama, and Bamie.” That she was plain and deformed seems never to have figured in their picture of her. Not once in all that Mittie wrote about her children is there even a trace of pity or worry over Bamie. Bamie was strength. Bamie was good sense, the one to lean on, to turn to for help. She was, as Teedie would tell her fondly, “a kind of little feminine Atlas with a small world on her shoulders.”

Of the youngest three, Ellie was the best-looking and the most convivial, and in many ways the most endearing. As a baby he had been “decidedly pretty.” At two he could speak more clearly than his older brother and in no time became larger, better coordinated, the natural athlete of the two. Little brother was big brother. He was also distinguished by a sweet, even temper and what seemed an inordinate fund of kindness for someone so young. Once, at about the age of seven, he had gone off for a walk wearing a new overcoat and returned without it. He had given it away, he explained, to a ragged child who had none and looked cold.

Unlike Bamie, whose hair was dark brown, he, Teedie, and Conie were all fair-haired and Conie was known for her “ardent” blue eyes.

Teedie, in Bamie’s expression, was the “great little home-boy” of the family. He was extremely frail and undersized for ten, a nervous, timid, often solitary child with bad color and what his mother described as a “quiet patrician air . . . his large blue eyes not looking at anything present.” His joy was in stories of high adventure, in birds and animals, almost anything to do with nature. “My mouth opened wide with astonish[ment] when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you,” he had written to his mother the spring before, in April 1868, when she was in Savannah. “I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mockingbird, get some of its feathers if you can.” He kept pet mice in a bureau drawer, and, in partnership with a cousin, West Roosevelt, had founded his own “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History” in the back hall on the fourth floor, a collection already comprising some several hundred specimens.

Teedie was an asthmatic. His attacks had started at about the age of three and more even than Bamie’s affliction they had had a profound effect on the life of the family—summer plans, sudden cancellations of dinner engagements, changes in plans of all kinds being determined time and again by the status of his health. During the first few days at any summer house or hotel, his mother would keep her bags packed, knowing from experience that some unknown something might trigger an attack and off she would have to go with him, back to the city or to try still another, different locale.

Conie, too, had “the asthma,” but very infrequently and never so seriously. Teedie, moreover, was beset by chronic stomach trouble, by headaches, by colds, fevers, and a recurring nightmare that a werewolf was coming at him from the bottom of his bed. Earlier in the year, in January 1869, he had fallen into such a low state that Mittie had taken him off to Philadelphia for a stay with her half sister, Susan, whose husband, Hilborne West, was a physician. Teedie, as Mittie said, kept everyone “on the stretch.” Rarely could he sleep without being propped up in bed or in a big chair, so difficult was it for him to breathe. For a time, his father had thought possibly the trouble had something to do with the furnace at East 20th Street.

The attacks were a dreadful experience for everyone. They happened nearly always at night and there was little anybody could do. Theodore would gather the child up in his arms and walk the floor with him for hours. Some nights, in desperation, he would bundle him up against the cold, servants would be roused to fetch the carriage to the door, and father and child would drive off in the dark in the hope that the sudden change of air might bring relief—which sometimes it did.

Like other parents of their social position, the Roosevelts did not wish to see their children “coarsened” by public schools. But mainly it was from worry over their health that all four were kept from school of any kind, public or private. They were tutored within the home walls and from within the home ranks by their own Aunt Anna, who, until her marriage to James K. Gracie in 1866, was, like Grandmamma Bulloch, a vital part of the household. At one point Teedie and Ellie were sent down the street to private classes only a stone’s throw from the house, these conducted by Theodore’s own boyhood tutor, but even so cautious a departure had proved unsatisfactory. The boys were withdrawn after only a month or two and not made to go again.

Since school played no part in their lives, they were cut off from their contemporaries. The only accessible—the only permissible—playmates were those within the family circle, namely cousins and the approved offspring of a few old family friends of comparable station and antecedents. Bamie seems to have had no childhood friends, while the youngest three had but one who had figured significantly thus far—little Edith Carow, who was Conie’s age and the daughter of Charles Carow, a lifelong friend of Theodore’s.

But then neither did any of them suffer from a lack of affection or stimulation. If anything, there was a surplus of both. Aunt Anna, who had no children, was as devoted as though they were her own. Grandmamma in her lace cap was famous for her “melts,” overwhelming outbursts of maternal, southern affection; and nurse Dora Watkins was considered so overly indulgent to the children as to be a possible hindrance to their health and/or moral character. Years after her death, the mere mention of Grandmamma’s name was enough to make the youngest three burst into tears.

The charming, erudite Dr. Hilborne West, the Philadelphia uncle, spent part of each summer with them, read and acted Shakespeare with all four children under the trees, and allegedly no one had more to do with their “early stirring of intellectual desires.” “The very fact that he was not achieving a thousand worthwhile things, as was my father,” wrote Conie years afterward, “the very fact that he was not busied with the practical care and thought for us, as were my mother and aunt, brought about between us that delightful relationship when the older person leads rather than drives the younger into paths of literature and learning.”

It was, plainly, a family of paradoxes: privileged and cushioned beyond most people’s imagining, yet little like the stereotype of the vapid, insular rich; uneducated in any usual, formal fashion but also uninhibited by education—ardent readers, insatiable askers of questions; chronically troubled, cursed it would often seem, by one illness or mysterious disorder after another, yet refusing to subject others to their troubles or to give in to despair.

Of the tawdriness and drudgery of the workaday world they knew almost nothing. They had never experienced drought or hunger or steerage or any of a dozen other ordeals common to so many Americans of the day. They were never without money or servants. They scarcely knew what it was to clean out a stall or put their hands in dishwater. When a cook got drunk one evening at the Union Square house and CVS went to see what the fuss was about, it marked the first time he had set foot in his own kitchen.

They knew themselves to be aristocrats, though it is unlikely they used that word: “people of good family” was preferred. They had little patience with bad manners, no use for social climbers, little knack for the kind of easy familiarity that businessmen and politicians traded on and that Europeans thought so very American. “Be careful always in chance acquaintances” was another of father Theodore’s admonitions to the children.

“Family” and “stocks” or “antecedents” were favorite topics. Their own position relative to that of the common herd was an accepted fact of life. Theodore was no more averse to using an expression like “our class” than was anyone else of comparable background. But if conscious of their position, they were also conscious of their duty. They had standards, standards which they never questioned. They were Roosevelts, but, being Roosevelts, that in itself could never be thought of as enough. Duty and family name demanded more.

And then, in addition, there was Mittie, in some regards the most fascinating of them all, “darling little Mittie,” a Roosevelt by marriage only.

CHAPTER TWO

Lady from the South

1

THE BULLOCHS OF GEORGIA were nothing like the Roosevelts of New York. For several hundred years the good, solid Roosevelts had kept to their mercantile pursuits, content with the same horizons. Seldom had any of them ventured beyond the confines of Manhattan Island for reasons other than business, and never longer than necessary. They had lived and applied their renowned family acumen, met and married their Dutch wives, bred, prospered, and died, generation after generation, all within a radius of about three miles. “The Roosevelt stock,” observed the New York World, “has always been noted for a tendency... to cling to the fixed and the venerable.” A move from one Manhattan address to another was as serious a disruption of the pattern as a true Roosevelt cared to suffer in a lifetime. CVS had been born in Maiden Lane; the family business had been located in Maiden Lane since 1797. When, in the 1830s, CVS at last succumbed to the tide of fashion and built the house on Union Square, at 14th Street and Broadway, he did so with the consoling thought that by going that far uptown he had at least relieved his progeny for several generations from ever having to move again.

One searches the Roosevelt family history nearly in vain for a sign of daring or spontaneity or a sense of humor. The family reputation for probity in business and personal conduct demanded certain restraints, of course, and so much uniform absence of color may have been partly disguise, another bow to appearances. There were also exceptions. One Nicholas Roosevelt, an uncle of CVS, had an interest in steamboats early in the century and made the first descent by steam down the Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. But he and a figure like Robert stand out against the rest of the line as conspicuous as mutations. It is said of James Alfred Roosevelt, for example, that if he ever had an unconventional thought in his life he kept it to himself. Of his private, domestic enthusiasms, it is recorded that he was inordinately fond of waffles.

About the only break Theodore had made from the established pattern was to leave the Dutch Reformed Church to join the Presbyterians; unless, of course, one considers his bringing Mittie Bulloch into the family.

The Bullochs, by contrast, were not only southern in background and outlook—antebellum slaveholding Georgia patricians—they were an entirely different breed, of Scottish blood mostly and “spirited,” as Theodore said of Mittie.

The first to reach the New World was James Bulloch of Glasgow, a scholar versed in Latin and Greek, who landed at Charleston, South Carolina, about 1729, which, as the Roosevelts measured such things, was rather late in the game, their own Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt having arrived in New Amsterdam in 1649. (All that is known of Claes Martenszen is that he was a farmer with a wife named Jannetje, and that he was called Kleytjen, which in the idiom of the day meant Shorty.) James Bulloch became a planter, married, and attained some standing in South Carolina politics before removing to coastal Georgia, where he received a grant of several thousand acres in the Sea Island district. His wife was Jean Stobo, also of Glasgow, who, with her mother and her father, Archibald Stobo, a noted Presbyterian divine, had set forth in 1699 as part of the ill-fated effort to found a Utopian Scottish colony in the jungles of Darién, on the Isthmus of Panama. The situation at Darién being hopeless, the expedition, a flotilla of three ships, turned back, and on the voyage home to Scotland the Stobos’ ship, Rising Sun, stopped at Charleston to take on water and supplies. The ship anchored outside the harbor, passengers remaining aboard, but the people of Charleston, hearing Stobo was so close at hand, requested that he come preach. So consequently, he, his wife, and daughter, Jean, were safely ashore the following day when a hurricane struck, sinking the ship and taking the lives of nearly all aboard. Stobo was at once offered a pulpit—the congregation being “obedient to the finger of Providence”—and in time he became a Charleston institution, his customary sermon running to such length that it was possible to leave in the middle, go home for a large midday meal, and return to find him still going strong.

Thus began the Bulloch line in America, the annals of which, by Mittie’s time, included one noted “radical,” several valorous soldiers, frontiersmen, politicians, young men who went off to sea, at least one scandal, a dozen or more handsome women, “even a French strain of blood.” Archibald Bulloch, a son born to James Bulloch and Jean Stobo, was the radical and a man of consequence in Georgia history. He was elected the first president of the Provincial Congress of Georgia and a delegate to the Continental Congress. In 1776 he became the first president and commander in chief of Georgia, only to die suddenly and mysteriously, and the Savannah burial vault in which he was placed long remained a subject of gossip and speculation since it had no inscription, no identifying mark whatsoever except a snake carved in the shape of a circle.

Archibald’s wife, Mary de Veaux, was the daughter of James de Veaux, judge of the King’s Court of Georgia before the Revolution and a colonel in the Continental Army. Archibald’s son, another James and a captain in the Continental Army, married Anne Irvine, the daughter of Dr. John Irvine, head of the Georgia Medical Society; and they, in turn, produced still another James—James Stephens as he was called—who was Mittie’s father and who managed to complicate the Bulloch family tree in such a way as to leave many people wondering how it could possibly be respectable.

The situation was as follows:

As a young man James Stephens Bulloch married Hester Elliott, who was the oldest daughter of John Elliott, a United States senator from Georgia and a widower. That was in 1817. A year later, Senator John Elliott was himself married to Martha Stewart of Savannah, who was young enough to be his daughter and who at some point prior to 1817 had turned down a proposal from James Stephens Bulloch. It is said the marriage was arranged by her father, a legendary figure named Daniel Stewart, General Daniel Stewart, a Revolutionary War hero who had decided to push on to the Florida frontier and thought his beautiful daughter would be better off staying behind as the wife of his friend John Elliott. But whatever the reason for the marriage, it made Martha the step-mother-in-law of her former suitor.

One child, James Dunwody, was born to James Stephens and Hester Bulloch before Hester died; and with the death of Senator John Elliott, Martha Stewart was left a widow with three children of her own, Susan, Georgia, and Daniel. By the standards of the day, she and James Stephens were middle-aged when they at last married: she was thirty-three; he, thirty-nine. Among her Elliott stepchildren, some of whom were older than she, it was also thought scandalous that “Mother” should be marrying “Brother” James Stephens.

From this union came Anna, Mittie, and, finally, Irvine, who arrived twenty-two years after Martha Stewart’s firstborn, Susan. In the course of this extended life as wife and mother, Martha Stewart Elliott Bulloch—she who became the Roosevelt children’s beloved Grandmamma—had to cope altogether with four categories of children: her Elliott stepchildren, her own Elliott children, her Bulloch stepson (who was also her step-grandson), and her own Bulloch children. The total came to fourteen.

Like his forebears, James Stephens was a low-country planter (cotton and rice), but also a banker, Deputy Collector of the Port of Savannah, and a director of the company that built the Savannah, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. Savannah was his home and Anna and Mittie spent their first years there. Then about 1839, when Mittie was four, James Stephens moved his large, composite household about 250 miles inland, to Cobb County in northwest Georgia, to what a few years earlier had been Cherokee country. There, in a settlement called Roswell, among rolling green hills twenty miles north of Atlanta, Mittie did most of her growing up, never considering her family as anything other than perfectly normal, though apparently the infinite number of Stewart, Elliott, and Bulloch aunts, uncles, cousins close and distant—the whole geometric progression of the Savannah kinships—was something only her mother could make heads or tails of. “The relationships in Savannah are more bewildering than ever,” sister Anna wrote Mittie during a visit to the coastal city after they were both grown women. “I would not be at all surprised to find out that Miss Harriet Campbell was my sister.”

Roswell, forever “home” to Mittie, was a mere dozen or so buildings, some exceedingly impressive, strung along a hilltop close by the Chattahoochee River. A coastal Georgian named Roswell King—once manager of the Pierce Butler plantation on Sea Island—had found the site while exploring for gold, and with his son Barrington laid out a future community with wide streets and a park. The idea was to make it a summer colony for a few wealthy friends, a refuge from the deadly fevers that plagued Savannah and the coastal lowlands during the hottest months. The elevation was exactly one thousand feet. “Exposure to cold and rain is hardly ever attended by serious consequences,” declared one observer. “No case of consumption has ever occurred in the country. The summer diseases are bowel complaints, etc.”

With the water power available, the Roswell Manufacturing Company, a small cotton mill, was also established by Barrington King, this in the valley below town.

Six or seven prominent Savannah families joined in the venture, built houses and, as time passed, spent more of each year there, living quite handsomely on incomes derived from holdings on the coast, where by the mid-1840s the slave population had advanced to some twenty thousand. There was a Roswell general store, a small “academy” for boys, another for girls, a white frame Presbyterian church, and a graveyard. The Barrington King family (nine children and a tutor) occupied Barrington Hall, a columned Greek Revival mansion with the incongruous New England touch of a widow’s walk. (The architect-builder of the house, and much else in town, including Bulloch Hall, was a Connecticut man named Willis Ball.) Phoenix Hall was the home of the Dunwody family, Great Oakes, Roswell’s red-brick manse, housed the Reverend Nathaniel Pratt, whose wife was a King. Holly Hill belonged to a Savannah family named Lewis.

Bulloch Hall stood a few hundred yards west of the King place, on the gentle knoll that formed the highest point in town. Bulloch Hall faced east, its deep veranda supported by four massive Doric columns: a white clapboard Greek temple set among giant oaks and Virginia cedars, magnolias, mimosa—the quintessence of the Old Plantation, classic Greece by way of Thomas Jefferson as interpreted by the Connecticut Yankee Willis Ball.

For the Roosevelt children, stories of the life in this house, the parties, the games of tableaux vivants, the constant stream of friends, family, neighbors, servants, all the people, white and black, recounted by the hour by their mother, aunt, and grandmother, were as magical, as different from what they knew, as anything in books. Mittie herself, with her liquid southern-gentry voice, her everlasting interest in people, her gift for mimicry, her overflowing romanticism, could not have been more unlike the Roosevelts her children encountered if she had been reared in some distant foreign land. She adored to tell stories and, as Conie said, no one told them better. Also, she had very southern ideas about the meaning of manhood. Inherent to her stories was a great love of the heroic. It was “Little Mama,” so exquisite and fragile, who could fire the spirit of adventure—impart to a child a sense of bloodline kinship with real-life men of action. The ancestral feats of daring, the family heroes the children were raised on, were all on her side; they were not Roosevelts, they were “Mama’s people.” James Dunwody Bulloch, the older half brother, had gone to sea as a midshipman in the Navy, become a captain of a packet ship, later a Confederate admiral assigned to secret missions in England. It was James Bulloch who built the famous Confederate raider Alabama, and Irvine Bulloch, Mittie’s younger full brother who served on the Alabama, was said to have fired the last shot in the fight with the Kearsarge off Cherbourg.

There were stories of old Senator Elliott’s daughter Corinne, for whom Conie was named, who with her two children was lost at sea when the steamer Pulaski sank in 1838, while her rich husband escaped on a raft; of Grandfather Stewart, the Revolutionary War general who left Georgia to fight Indians in Florida, marching off with his six sons, all of whom were more than six feet tall; of Georgia bear hunts and a black slave named Bear Bob, so named because a bear once tore away part of his scalp. The stories were at once bizarre, scary, always long ago and far away, always exciting. At night, with the onset of stomach cramps or an attack of asthma, they could soothe and distract as could almost nothing else, as we know from Teedie’s diaries. “It was all so picturesque, so different from northern life, that it made an indelible impression,” Bamie would remember.

In 1849, when Mittie was fourteen, James Stephens dropped dead of a heart attack while teaching Sunday school, and from that point on, to make ends meet, family sojourns in Savannah were dispensed with and Roswell became the permanent home. In the census of the following year, the widowed Martha, aged fifty, listed herself as a farmer. Her new son-in-law, Susan’s husband, Hilborne West, came on from Philadelphia to help manage things temporarily, but for all practicalities it was Martha herself who was in charge of household, children, crops, and those referred to always as “the servants.” As an agricultural enterprise it was nothing much. To rank as a true planter, one was supposed to have land and twenty slaves. Her slaves numbered nineteen, eight of whom were children. Still, it was no small task for a woman and she faced it gallantly.

That her Grandmamma Bulloch had owned slaves, “and all that implied,” seemed incredible, Bamie said, but also, somehow, very special. Daddy Luke had been the coachman; Mom Charlotte, the head housekeeper and cook. Mittie and Anna had been served hand and foot by a nurse called Mom Grace, but each also had her own slave child, her little black shadow, as was the expression. Mittie’s was called Toy, Anna’s, Bess; and Toy and Bess slept on straw mats on the floor of the girls’ bedroom. Another black child slept beneath Grandmamma’s big four-poster, “to run errands for her in the night,” it was explained, which probably meant to empty her slop jar.

Half brother Daniel Stuart Elliott once had to be sent abroad for a year of travel, so full of remorse was he. In a fit of rage he had shot and killed his “little shadow,” who by then, like Daniel Elliott himself, was no longer very little.

Guns, violence, savage death, episodes that seemed more like the stuff of fable or fantasy, were all part of the world Mittie spun. Ellie spoke for all her offspring when he called her his “sweet little Dresden china” mother; she seemed so delicate, like an exquisite work of art, as Conie said. Yet she could portray in marvelous detail how a pack of bloodhounds pulled a cougar to pieces or describe the midnight death struggle between a cougar and a half-naked black man, one of great-grandfather Daniel Stewart’s slaves, a story the impressionable little Teedie would remember all his life. The black man, “a man of colossal strength,” had been cutting through a Florida swamp in the dark of night, taking a shortcut to “see his sweetheart.” His torn body was found the next day with that of the cougar lying beside him.

How much the Roosevelt children were told of the duel fought by Daniel Elliott we can only surmise. But in 1857, the year before Teedie was born, Daniel Elliott shot and killed the son of a prominent Savannah family, Tom Daniell, in a duel fought with rifles on a mud embankment beside the Savannah River. There had been an argument at the Chatham Club, where Savannah’s “young bloods” met for billiards and cards and a good deal of heavy drinking. Daniell had thrown a glass of wine in Daniel Elliott’s face, which by the code duello meant but one thing. Daniel Elliott, who was an expert shot, had been willing to accept a reasonable apology and forget that anything had happened, but Daniell refused. Seconds were named, the whole grim, stilted ritual was acted out at a chosen spot on the opposite shore of the river, in South Carolina, where dueling had yet to be outlawed. At the signal both men fired and Daniell dropped, a bullet through the heart. The news caused a sensation in Savannah society—Daniell’s father, William Coffee Daniell, was a leading physician and a former mayor of the city—and Daniel Elliott was in disgrace. When it became known a year later that he would wed Lucy Sorrel of Savannah, one eminent chronicler noted privately, “Were I a lady, I would certainly be very loath to marry one who had the guilt of homicide upon his skirts.”

The Roosevelt children never knew their Uncle Dan—he died of tuberculosis during the Civil War—but his widow, Aunt Lucy Sorrel Elliott, and her two children, cousins Maud and Johnny Elliott, had come on from Savannah several times to spend summers with them in New Jersey. Another vivid southerner, another effusively affectionate female presence, Aunt Lucy was the sister of Gilbert Moxley Sorrel, who had been a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia at the age of twenty-six and credited as “the best staff officer in the Confederate service.”

Everything recalled of the life at Roswell was utterly fascinating, we are told in Conie’s recollections. “In the roomy old home with its simple white columns there was led an ideal life,” she thought. Her mother described picnics and riding parties, a life spent almost constantly in the out of doors, in all seasons, in unspoiled open country, with sweet-smelling trees and flowers in bloom. A particular variety of blue violet grew beside the house and the view of the valley to the west was especially lovely in the late-afternoon light. And there was the looping Chattahoochee, which ran the color of heavily creamed coffee.

Uncle Dan, whatever his tragic failings, was “brilliant,” with a particular love of art and music. He played the flute and James Dunwody—Uncle Jimmie—played the violin. Mittie and Anna sang together, Mittie alto, Anna soprano. “They apparently none of them had any particular education,” Bamie said, “but all of them had the most delightful gifts. They were all good-looking, and all had entrancingly stormy love affairs, rarely marrying the people whose lives we adored hearing about.” Anna had been engaged for a time to Henry Stiles of Savannah, who rode a Morgan horse no one could handle; Mittie had a running flirtation with one of the Kings, Tom, who thought the world of her.

For her children to picture Mittie as she was when their father first arrived on the scene required no effort of imagination, for in appearance and manner she had aged hardly at all. At thirty-three she looked to be in her early twenties. She was really quite extraordinary. Small, scarcely over five feet tall, very slender, she had tiny, perfect hands, and extremely fine features, the eyes of a soft, clear blue. Hers was a flawless, delicate little face, the complexion “more moonlight-white than cream-white,” and framed by a head of lustrous black hair that she and her French hairdresser could fuss over interminably. With company she was ever chattering, “bright and full of life,” “sweet and winning,” to quote some of her New York friends. She was “like some vision of exquisite beauty,” “so young, so beautiful and gentle, that she might almost have been a sister to her children.”

Many years later, in the early 1920s, in an altogether different time and world, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal drove out to Roswell to interview Mrs. William Baker, who had been Evelyn King in her youth, another of the nine King children, and who was still living, with one grandchild, in Barrington Hall. Mrs. Baker had been Mittie Bulloch’s closest friend and a bridesmaid in Mittie’s wedding. At eighty-seven she was the lone survivor of that whole generation in Roswell.

The reporter was a young woman who was then signing herself Peggy Mitchell; she was Margaret Mitchell, whose re-creation of the Old Plantation South in her Gone With the Wind would one day supplant all others in the popular mind. To what extent her book was fiction, how much she had based on actual people and places, were questions she would face repeatedly, once the book became famous, and her insistence that there was no real-life Scarlett O’Hara, no actual Tara to be found in the Atlanta vicinity, was no doubt sincere. Still, the combination of the beautiful dark-haired Mittie Bulloch with her tiny waist and perfect complexion and the aura of Bulloch Hall is remarkably close to what she created, in general outline and spirit if not in specific detail, and there is no question about the impress on the young writer’s mind of what she saw and heard at Roswell. She noted the “stately silence engendered by the century-old oaks,” the “atmosphere of dignity, ease and courtesy that was the soul of the Old South.” Walking through Bulloch Hall, she found the rooms “unbelievably” large and airy and tried to picture the bridal party that had once clustered on the main staircase.

“Weddings were great affairs then,” Mrs. Baker told her. People came from miles around and stayed for days in the big houses in the village. “Weddings were different from what they are now. The bride and groom didn’t rush off right after the ceremony. They stayed at home sometimes for a week or two, and everybody gave them parties.... Of course, Mittie Bulloch’s wedding was a very fine affair.”

The groom, however, had been an abolitionist from the North. “A very nice man he was, to be sure,” said Mrs. Baker. “But he was firm against slavery.”

2

Theodore Roosevelt went south to Georgia for the first time when he was nineteen, in 1850, prior to his Grand Tour. Mittie’s sisters husband, Hilborne West, had a sister who was the wife of Theodore’s brother Weir, and by this somewhat circuitous chain of communication, Theodore had picked up enough about the charms of Roswell and of the two beautiful Bulloch sisters to go see for himself. He sent a letter in advance, but somehow the letter did not arrive in time; so when he appeared at Roswell, arriving in the middle of the night, it was without advance warning and his knock at the door roused the whole house from a sound sleep. The first face he saw was Toy’s, peering through a crack in the door. He presented his visiting card, which she speedily delivered to the startled group upstairs.

He wound up staying several weeks and apparently for Mittie, too, it was love at first sight. She was then fifteen. A man who knew her at about this time in her life, a contemporary who became a prominent figure in Savannah, described her as a splendid horsewoman, as “full of spirit and courage as she was beautiful.”

She did not see Theodore again for nearly three years, not until the spring of 1853, when she came north to visit Susan and Hilborne West at their home in Philadelphia, and then to stay briefly with the Weir Roosevelts in New York, at which time she became tacitly betrothed. “Does it not seem strange,” she wrote Theodore soon afterward, “to think we should have met and become engaged, after having only known each other time enough to create a passing interest, then to be separated for almost three years. Sometimes when I think of it all I feel as though it were ordered by some high power.” Then, as an afterthought, she told him, “If I fail to please, and if ever you should fail, I might persuade Tom King to retire with me in the far West.”

Her mother approved the match. She had been “impressed favorably” by Theodore during his visit to Roswell. “I have never interfered with the matrimonial designs of my children,” she told him, “and never will when the object chosen is a worthy one.”

By early summer he was with Mittie once more at Roswell, promising as they sat alone one evening on the veranda to love her with all her faults, promising voluntarily, as she would enjoy reminding him. Once the engagement was formally declared and he had left for New York, she wrote:

Roswell, July 26,1853

THEE, DEAREST THEE,

I promised to tell you if I cried when you left me. I had determined not to do so if possible, but when the dreadful feeling came over me that you were, indeed, gone, I could not help my tears from springing and had to rush away and be alone with myself. Everything now seems associated with you. Even when I run up the stairs going to my own room, I feel as if you were near, and turn involuntarily to kiss my hand to you. I feel, dear Thee—as though you were part of my existence, and that I only live in your being, for now I am confident of my own deep love. When I went in to lunch today I felt very sad, for there was no one now to whom to make the request to move “just a quarter of an inch farther away”—but how foolish I am—you will be tired of this “rhapsody” . . .

Tom King has just been here to persuade us to join the Brush Mountain picnic tomorrow. We had refused but we are reconsidering.

She did go off to Brush Mountain, picnicked on chicken wings, bread and cheese, and had a “most delightful time.” Tom King built a bonfire as the sun went down and on the way home she rode with Henry Stiles.

I had promised to ride back with Henry Stiles, so I did so [she explained to Theodore], and you cannot imagine what a picturesque effect our riding party had—not having any habit, I fixed a bright-red shawl as a skirt and a long red scarf on my head, turban fashion with long ends streaming. Lizzie Smith and Anna dressed in the same way, and we were all perfectly wild with spirits and created quite excitement in Roswell by our gay cavalcade—But all the same I was joked all day by everybody, who said that they could see that my eyes were swollen and that I had been crying.

At a big family gathering in September she danced past midnight, as she told him. Another evening she and Anna put on a “grand supper party.” When one of her accounts of still another such occasion brought a piqued response from New York, she responded: “My dear Thee, I kiss a great many different people and always expect to. I cannot allow you a monopoly there. Why just think of what the world would be without kisses. I could not think of depriving my friends of that pleasure.”

They had agreed to a small wedding in November, but she changed her mind. She preferred December and she wanted to have bridesmaids, a decision he found mystifying. In the South, she informed him, a wedding was always done according to the wishes of the bride and her family; for a gentleman to interfere with the arrangements was quite unheard of.

Thee, I grant they may be different entirely, your northern customs, but will I ever be able to impress upon you the fact that it is a southern young lady and in a southern village that the wedding is to occur; consequently I must observe the rules and customs prevalent in that village. I cannot imagine you for one moment supposing I would take the step decided upon unless I had thought well of what I was doing.

“Capricious Mittie” she called herself. “How will you please me ever?”

She was having palpitations of the heart, which she thought “entirely nervous.” Under no circumstances was he to arrive any sooner than two days before the wedding. “It may be a southern idea, but remember it is a southern young lady,” she insisted still one more time. Then in mid-November, with only a month to go and feeling extremely agitated, she asked:

Dear Thee, how are you going to behave when we meet? If I see you first before them all, mind seriously please, don’t kiss me or anything of the kind. I would not let the brothers see you do so for worlds. I am in earnest. I would regard my affections as misplaced if you should take any liberties. Please read this carefully and act like a perfect gentleman.

She herself would be as dignified as possible in the presence of her bridesmaids, “so as to show them how to do the thing, particularly as I am much younger than any of them.”

The wedding took place at Bulloch Hall three days before Christmas—Thursday, December 22, 1853—the Reverend Nathaniel Pratt officiating. It was all she wished. The bridesmaids were sister Anna, Evelyn King, Mary Cooper Stiles, and Julia Hand. They were all in white, the bridesmaids in white muslin dresses with full skirts, Mittie in white satin with a long veil. “We carried flowers, too, and came down the wide steps of Bulloch Hall with the trailing clusters in our arms,” remembered Mrs. Baker. The ceremony was held in the dining room, the bridal party grouped at the folding doors. Fires burned in every fireplace; mahogany tables were crowded with hams, turkeys, “cakes of every conceivable kind.” Ice cream had been made with ice brought all the way from Savannah, a touch that especially impressed Theodore’s mother and father, who were the only Roosevelts present. “It was their first trip south,” said Mrs. Baker, “and like most northern people of that time, they were very ignorant about the South. Goodness only knows what they expected us to be like ...”

When it was time for dancing, brother Dan played the flute. (”That is the only music we can engage,” Mittie had explained to Theodore, “but he plays in such perfect time that it will be delightful.”) According to family tradition, brother Dan also fell head over heels in love with one of the bridesmaids who was already engaged to another and much older man, and who rode off leaving Dan broken-hearted. This romantic episode, it is further said, ended tragically in the girl’s unwilling marriage to the older man, to a duel and “much else that was unfortunate.” But since the only known duel in Dan’s stormy life, that with Tom Daniell, took place three years later and since Tom Daniell was both unmarried and Dan’s own age, the story is open to a good deal of question—unless, of course, an entirely different duel was fought earlier and did not prove fatal, in which case there would be no record of its ever having occurred.

The bride and groom stayed on at Roswell through Christmas and there were parties every night. Then they were on their way to New York. “Everybody packed up and went home,” Mrs. Baker said, “for it was all over and we were very tired.”

Mittie returned again to Roswell with Theodore a year and a half later, in the spring of 1855, bringing her new baby daughter. She had not been feeling right since the baby’s birth in January. Theodore worried intensely over her; she herself did not like the way she looked. “I do not think she will get strong until she breathes fresh air,” her mother had declared and Theodore emphatically concurred, as little as he happened to care for Roswell and the life there. His belief in the therapeutic powers of fresh air—country air, mountain air, sea breezes, almost any air other than that of the city—exceeded even that of his mother-in-law. He stayed in Roswell only long enough to pay his respects and see Mittie settled.

Mittie was in love as never before. “Darling, it would be impossible to tell you how I have missed you,” she wrote five days after he had gone. “I feel so a part of you I cannot do without you.”

... I do not know what I would not give to be in your arms, petted and loved. I love you inexpressibly ... I want to talk to you. I want to see you. I cannot live without you. . . . Write me everything about yourself and how you love me.

A day later she filled four pages with her love and longing: “You have proved that you love me, dear, in a thousand ways and still I long to hear it again and again.... darling, you cannot imagine what a wanting feeling I have.”

He was trying his best to feel at home, he wrote his first night back at East 20th Street. “It is of no use; everything is in apple-pie order but there is a kind of dreariness reigning everywhere, the one pillow on the bed positively gave me a shiver. I even handled the crib, which I used to regard as rather an encumbrance to our room, with a kind of reverence.”

Her brother Jimmie was in town and staying with him temporarily. They were greatly enjoying each other’s company, he told her, and “keeping late hours,” for which he was grateful. “Indeed, bed does not offer me the same inducements as of yore and I rather regret when the time comes for me to retire alone.”

He wrote nearly every day. May 13: “Everything begins to look like spring. . . . We have little glimpses of country over Mr. Goelet’s wall and the sounds of his numerous birds. ... It is just such a day as would give you a pleasant impression of a New York spring . . .” May 15: “I exerted all my taste to please you in the selection of my summer cravats this afternoon.” May 16: “You know how I love you, darling, and what an intense pleasure it would be now to carry you up to bed in my arms . . .” May 23: “I will be very glad to have charge of you again ...”

On May 24, in his last letter before leaving to bring her home, he told her he had bought a new felt hat especially for the trip, but that his mother had disapproved, saying felt would be out of place at Roswell. “If it must it must,” he told Mittie, “but I will first hear your opinion of it.”

As difficult for her as anything about her new life in the North was the separation from her mother and sister. She and Anna had been inseparable for as long as either could remember and the bond between them, they were both convinced, was of a kind others could never understand. If anything, Anna had suffered worse than Mittie in the time since the wedding. “If anyone mentions you rather suddenly I feel like screaming,” she wrote to Mittie. “I do not try to feel so, darling, but we were so happy together and it is all passed away.” She had thought they would never be “anything but Anna and Mittie, inseparable, always sewing, reading, walking, riding, talking incessantly together.” She consoled herself with the thought that at least they would be together in heaven.

But as things worked out they were all together again in less than a year. Mrs. Bulloch and Anna packed up and came north, moving in at East 20th Street to stay in 1856. So by the time the second baby arrived, the Roswell circle, or what remained of it, was happily reinstated under the same roof. Brother Irvine as well was an occasional member of the household, on vacations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Bulloch Hall, meantime, was left in the care of Daddy Luke and his wife.

Bulloch family finances appear to have been the real reason for this new arrangement. Mrs. Bulloch and Anna came to live with Mittie not just to be of help and comfort, but because they were extremely hard-pressed. To pay for the wedding and trousseau, for example, had required that four slaves be sold, including Anna’s own Bess. (According to one bill of sale, $800 was received from a John F. Martin for “one Negro woman named Bess, and her child John.”) “I hope that you will make so good a wife that Thee will never have cause to regret his not having married a girl with a fortune,” Mrs. Bulloch advised shortly before she and Anna moved in. Anna would be governess to Mittie’s children in return for her keep, and Mrs. Bulloch, it is known, received spending money from Susan West, to whom, on occasion, she wrote on cheap, blue-lined school paper, saying it was all she could afford.

The second baby arrived October 27, 1858, a Wednesday. Mittie had been feeling fine. After a morning’s shopping she had returned for lunch, then went to her room to rest, which is where her mother found her in great pain at about half past three. The house was at once in turmoil, servants flying off to find the family doctor, who, it turned out, was himself too sick to respond. Until another man was found, Mrs. Bulloch was “almost the whole time alone with Mittie,” as she told Susan. “Anna had taken Bamie over to Lizzie Ellis’—I sent over for her, but she was too unwell to come—I could not bear the idea of having no female friend with me, so sent for Mrs. Roosevelt and she came over.”

Mittie got “worse and worse” until quarter to eight that evening when “at last” the birth took place. As labor went, hers was, in her mother’s experienced eye, “a safe but severe time.”

No chloroform or any such thing was used, no instruments, consequently the dear little thing has no cuts or bruises about it. . . . Mittie has behaved throughout the whole time like a sensible woman, has objected to nothing that was right.

A few days later mother and child were doing splendidly. Mittie had no trouble nursing; the baby was in perfect health. “All quite well,” noted Mrs. Bulloch the morning of November 3, “. . . little Theodore is a week old . . . Mittie is quite motherly, likes to have him lying quite near her.” But it was not until December that Mittie came downstairs, which suggests she was suffering from depression, and it was then that Bamie was going through the worst of her ordeal with the back harness.

Two more pregnancies followed with little delay—Elliott was born in February 1860, a year and four months after Theodore; Corinne, in September 1861, a year and seven months after Elliott—which for Mittie meant three children in less than three years. And by the time Corinne was born, the Civil War had begun.

3

It was the great demarcation line in her life, the point at which her southern past was forever delineated as past and irretrievable. It put strains on her household, her marriage, her physical strength, and her emotions unlike anything in her experience. For her two oldest children, and for Teedie particularly, the war was the first news from the world outside to penetrate the secure haven of home and family. “Are me a soldier laddie?” he asked his Aunt Anna, as she tried to fit him for a little Zouave shirt the first year of the war. “I immediately took his own suggestion and told him he was and that I was the Captain,” she told Mittie, “... this kept him still for a moment or two!”

The story that on the occasion of a Southern victory Mittie hung a Confederate flag from the house on East 20th Street is a story with no foundation in fact; it never happened. A gesture so flamboyant would have been out of character, furthermore, and publicly disrespectful of her husband, which was simply not in her. The story is appropriate, however, in that the staid Roosevelt brownstone with its three passionately loyal Georgian ladies did indeed remain a stronghold of Southern sympathy; the colors of the Confederacy flew in spirit, if not in fact, undaunted, from the start of the conflict until Appomattox. On the news that Port Royal had fallen, early in November 1861, Grandmamma Bulloch cried for three days. Like all true southerners, she said, she would rather be buried in one common grave than ever live again under the Yankee government.

As time went on, with Theodore away—only with Theodore away—Mittie, she, and Anna made up packages of flannel shirts, woolen socks, scarves, combs, toothbrushes, and boxes of soap to be sent secretly (by way of Nassau in the Bahamas) to family and friends in the South. One of Bamie’s most vivid memories of life in the 20th Street house was of “the days of hushed and thrilling excitement” when these bundles were being put together, she and Teedie, at first, understanding little of what it was all about, “except that it was a mystery and that the box was going to run the blockade.”

In contrast to the Roosevelts, not one of whom went to war, Captain James Bulloch, young Irvine, and Daniel Elliott were all three fighting for the Confederacy, each having joined the cause as rapidly as possible. Captain James, who had been in command of a merchant ship when the war began, first sailed back to New York and turned the ship over to the owners before going south to be assigned his secret duties in England. Daniel enlisted as a private in the Georgia Volunteers, and Irvine, at age nineteen, left the University of Pennsylvania to sign on as a midshipman in the Confederate Navy. Virtually every able-bodied man Mittie had known in Roswell or Savannah was in uniform—including six of the Kings and Henry Stiles. Both Tom King and his brother Barrington were to die in the war, and another brother, Joseph Henry, would never fully recover from his wounds.

The least scrap of news from someone dear on the other side was an enormous event. Early in 1862, for example, through contacts in Washington, Theodore learned that Captain Bulloch had successfully run the blockade, bringing a “cargo of contraband goods” from Nassau to Savannah. (Actually, it was a shipload of military supplies—munitions, some fourteen thousand Enfield rifles, perhaps the most valuable cargo to reach the Confederacy during the entire war.) Any letter that got through to the house in New York became a treasure of untold import. Its contents would have to be immediately shared, read aloud, then copied down and sent on to Susan. “The amount of it is that Providence is on the side of the right,” wrote young Irvine in one such letter; “... the life [at sea] is as hard as it is exciting, as painful to be away from home and family as it is pleasant to think I am doing my all for my oppressed country.”

Saturday dinners at Grandfather Roosevelt’s house, one of the iron-bound rituals in her married life, became such a trial for Mittie, the air so thick with the “fulminations” of her northern in-laws, that she could no longer bear to go.

Reminiscing about her mother and the Roosevelts long afterward, Bamie would remark, “I should hate to have married into them at that time unless I had been one of them in thought. They think they are just, but they are hard in a way.”

In Theodore’s presence Mittie kept her sentiments to herself, as did her mother and sister. The evenings he entertained Union officers, Grandmamma retired early. “You know he does not feel as we do,” she explained to Susan, “and it is his own house. It jars upon my feelings, but of course I keep my room. Mittie can’t do this, and it is to please him that Anna does not absent herself.”

For Theodore the approach of the war had loomed as a tragedy beyond compare. Joining with prominent New York business people, he appealed to Congress to do everything possible to prevent it. He signed petitions, helped promote a huge anti-war rally. When it came, the war presented him with the most difficult decision of his life. And though only twenty-nine at the time and in magnificent health as always, he chose not to fight, a determination dictated, it is said, by the “peculiar circumstances” of his marriage: he did what he did out of deference to Mittie and her feelings, for all that he himself felt about the Union and the evils of slavery.

Possibly the teachings of his Quaker mother also played a part. Nor can it be overlooked that few he knew of comparable social or financial position and none of his brothers or kinsmen fought in the war. The gentry of the city gloried in the power of Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn”; they founded their Union League Club, and equipped the first units of black soldiers; they cheered heartily the regiments of Germans and Irish, the upstate farm boys who marched down Broadway. But they themselves chose not to march. It was simply not done—any more, say, than one would go into politics—and though this may not necessarily have been a measure of Theodores convictions or innermost desires, it at least meant his decision, within his own social circles, carried no stigma whatever.

He avoided the war by hiring a substitute. He paid to have some other man go in his place, which was both legal and costly. The sum he paid is not known, but the going rate, once the draft was initiated in 1863, was about $1,000, a figure far beyond the reach of the ordinary wage earner (the dollar then having toughly ten to fifteen times its present value), and went appreciably higher as the war dragged on and casualty reports became more appalling.

The regulation in the Conscription Act that permitted such an arrangement was as blatant a piece of class legislation as could be imagined. In essence, as one angry senator charged, it exempted the rich entirely. By paying a $300 commutation fee a man could become exempt from a particular draft call, but was still subject to subsequent calls. Hiring a substitute, on the other hand, provided permanent exemption. Substitute brokers operated in every northern city and the substitutes they sent to the Army were a sorry lot, largely criminals and drifters, who would desert at the first opportunity. The ordinary soldier had only contempt for such men and so the onus of the system, while the fighting lasted, was on the substitute rather than on the civilian who hired him. And the fact that in less than a year more than $12 million poured into the Treasury in draft-exemption fees of one or the other kind gives some idea of how many were eager to take advantage of the arrangement. A list of those who thus stayed out of the war would include nearly all the financial and industrial tycoons of the postwar era, and a future President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, not to mention most of the masculine element of New York’s “best society.”

According to Bamie, in a private memoir written in her old age, her father regretted the decision to his dying day. He “always afterward felt that he had done a very wrong thing in not having put every other feeling aside and joined the absolute fighting forces.” Conie, for her part, would further contend that the decision had a profound effect on his older son and namesake, for whom it became the glaring single flaw in the life of an idolized father and one he would feel forever compelled to compensate for. Neither Theodore nor his sons ever discussed the subject that we know of, but there was no doubt as to which side little Teedie was taking at the time. In their pretend games played on a bridge in Central Park, Bamie was always the Rebel blockade-runner, Teedie the government boat. Once, kneeling at his evening prayers with Aunt Anna, he implored the Almighty “to grind the southern troops to powder.”

For Mittie the thought of Theodore fighting against her brothers was abhorrent in the extreme. Still, it must have been with some inner conflict that she saw him spared—saw herself spared so much that other women were going through—by a system that was the antithesis of every standard of patriotism and gallantry by which she had been raised. For her brothers, or for any of the men she had known in the South, to pay somebody else to do their fighting for them would have been inconceivable. Nor could anyone of conscience blink the injustice of the system. When the Draft Riots exploded in New York in July 1863, largely in reaction to this injustice, the Roosevelt family was safely ensconced at an oceanfront hotel at Long Branch. It was hoped that order could be quickly restored, observed Mrs. Bulloch in the quiet of her room overlooking the sea, “but really I do not wonder that the poor mechanics oppose conscription. It certainly favors the rich at the expense of the poor.”

But though he refused to bear arms in the great crusade, Theodore was also incapable of sitting idly by. As he told Mittie in a letter from Washington: “I would never have felt satisfied with myself ... if I had done nothing and ... I do feel now that I am only doing my duty. I know you will not regret having me do what is right and I don’t believe you will love me any the less for it.”

He and two other wealthy New Yorkers, William E. Dodge, Jr., and Theodore Bronson, had conceived a plan whereby soldiers could send home part of their pay on a regular basis and at no additional cost to them or their families. The three men drafted a bill for an Allotment Commission and after months of lobbying in Washington succeeded in getting both congressional sanction and the backing of the President. Then followed still more months in the field, since the idea—all quite novel—had to be sold to the soldiers themselves, which proved a slow and arduous task. Theodore was away from home nearly two years all told and approximately half that time was spent going from regiment to regiment, by train, boat, but mostly on horseback in all weather and seasons.

Like his Newsboys’ Lodging House or the Orthopedic Hospital, the allotment plan represented another determined effort to help the helpless, those innocent victims of the war for whom the government had been doing nothing, thousands upon thousands of women and children made destitute by the absence of husbands and fathers serving in the Army. It was the family of the fighting man that concerned him, rather than the fighting man himself who was being asked to sacrifice that part of his pay which customarily fell into the hands of sutlers and other traditional camp followers.

For his own family the months of separation seemed endless and especially the first long stretch when he was in Washington.

“Teedie was afraid last night that there was a bear in your dressing room,” Mittie wrote. “He is the most affectionate, endearing little creature in his ways, but begins to require his papa’s discipline badly. He is brimming full of mischief and has to be watched all the time.”

One by one the children took sick. “You must not either get sick yourself or let the children do so,” he told her. Mittie had “her hands full with the fretful little sick things,” her mother noted; “. . . Thee has not returned . . . does not say when he will return.” Then Mittie was reporting Teedie “very unwell,” and though the word “asthma” never appears, it may have been at this point that the disease took hold. “I was up with him six or seven times during the night,” she wrote, saying little or nothing about her own health or what Conie was to call her “mental suffering.” Only once does she allow herself even a momentary flash of self-pity. It is night as she writes, that being the “only time unoccupied with the dear, troublesome little children deserted by their papa.”

She was constantly in his thoughts, she knew, from the letters that arrived, often several a week, which was more than she wrote to him.

Ever the man to take the direct approach, he had gone to the White House the morning he got off the train. “I obtained a room at Willard s,” he told her, “dressed myself and called upon Hay [John Hay, who was then Lincoln’s private secretary], explained my object in a few words and was immediately shown into the next room where the President sat.” Lincoln had listened “attentively,” read the few documents Theodore presented, “then at my request endorsed them.” Ten-year-old Willie Lincoln had come into the room “and the President’s expression of face then for the first time softened into a very pleasant smile.”

Mittie was instructed to address her letters in care of John Hay at the White House, for Theodore and the whimsical, boyish secretary had struck up the friendship that was to last a lifetime. One Sunday, in Lincoln’s absence, Hay invited him to share the presidential pew at St. John’s Church across Lafayette Square, and as the two walked down the aisle, many in the expectant congregation, seeing Theodore with his height and abundant whiskers, mistook him for Lincoln. Or such at least had been Theodore’s impression.

Mrs. Lincoln, who was of southern background, found him charming and included him in her circle, a somewhat ambiguous honor, given the variety of sycophants she chose to surround herself with. He was asked to accompany her on afternoon carriage rides and on one occasion she insisted that he go with her to shop for a hat. The night of her famous soirée in the newly redecorated White House, February 5,1862, he was among the select five hundred on her guest list and thus very pleased with himself. “I find that but six men under fifty are invited,” he told Mittie.

The party had come under severe attack in the press because of the expenses involved and the limited guest list, but for Mrs. Lincoln it had proved a social triumph—everybody who was invited came, “the largest collection of notables there ever gathered in this country,” Theodore crowed. “No one in the army lower than a division general, not even a brigadier, was invited. . . . Some complained of the supper but I have rarely seen a better and often a worse one. Terrapin, birds, ducks, and everything else were in great profusion.” It was called a ball and the Marine Band played in the vestibule, but at the President’s wish, there was no dancing, out of respect for “the national tribulation” and because upstairs young Willie Lincoln lay seriously ill. Theodore’s one criticism of the evening was of the number of police present.

He stayed the whole time at Willard’s Hotel, where in the bar and public rooms, amid clouds of blue cigar smoke, the endless dickering and dealing of war went on. (In his suite upstairs the pomaded Jim Fisk is said to have remarked, “You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you’ve got the guts to ask.”) Theodore was spending the better part of his time on Capitol Hill, “gaining experience daily in a political point of view.” Only after a month or more did his impatience begin to show. The problem, as his friend Dodge said, was “the utter inability of congressmen to understand why anyone should urge a bill from which no one could selfishly secure an advantage.”

Waiting for Congress to act, with little or nothing to do but bide his time, he himself took sick; but then, amazingly, a week of continuous exposure in the field, standing out in the cold and damp while talking to troops, cured him completely.

His first real success selling his plan was with a New York regiment which, at first glance, struck him as the “scum of our city.” An adjutant assigned to help was so drunk he could barely speak and did nothing as he was supposed to.

The delays were so great that I stood out with one of these companies after seven o’clock at night with one soldier holding a candle while I took down the names of those who desired to send home money. The men looked as hard as I have often seen before in our Mission neighborhood, but after a little talk explaining my object and reminding them of those they had left behind them, one after another put down his name, and from this company alone they allotted, while I was there, $600. ... I stood out there in the dark night surrounded by the men with one candle showing glimpses of their faces, the tents all around us in the woods. One man putting down $5.00 a month said, “My old woman has always been good to me and if you please change it to $10.00.” In a minute half a dozen others followed his example and doubled theirs.

In one forty-eight-hour spate of activity in Virginia, in the vicinity of Newport News, he emerged unharmed and unshaken from a derailed train, rode twenty-five miles on horseback (”As I had broken my eyeglasses I had to trust entirely to my horse who jumped over the ditches in a most independent manner”), used both his French and his German to proselytize in front of one New York regiment, then rode another twenty-five miles to talk to an Irish regiment, after which he spent one of “the most thoroughly Irish” nights of his life drinking with the officers until nearly dawn. The ride to Fortress Monroe the next day was “delightful”—a favorite Roosevelt word—and following lunch there with the officers he was on his way by boat back to Washington. His co-worker Bronson, he told Mittie, was so “used up” by the experience that he was quitting and going home. “Of course this makes me doubly homesick but I must see it through.”

Once, writing to say he was on his way home for a visit, he told her not to expect him until very late and to leave the front door unlocked. “I hope you will take a good long nap in the daytime,” he added.

Early in 1862, Mrs. Bulloch decided she must get through to Georgia to be with her son Daniel, who, she had learned, was dying of tuberculosis. “I think I am required there,” she said simply. A pass was needed and so this, too, Theodore undertook, pulling what strings he could, something he pointedly disliked. The problem, he explained to Mittie, was greatly compounded by the family connection with Captain Bulloch, whose success in running the blockade had made the name anathema in Washington. But then in a letter from Baltimore he suddenly announced the arrangements were set. Her mother and Anna could both go, on the condition that they would not return. He himself strongly advised against it, but if such remained their wish they were to meet him the Friday following at Barnum’s Museum in Baltimore and he would go with them by boat from Baltimore to Fortress Monroe, where he would see them off under a flag of truce. “Write me what you think will be her determination even if she is doubtful.” But Mrs. Bulloch had backed down at the last. The mere mention of her leaving, she explained to Susan West, was enough to make Mittie break down in tears. When word came that Daniel was dead, she expressed the one wish that she would never live so long as to know that Irvine too was dead or that Richmond had fallen.

With his work in Washington drawing to a close, Theodore regretted he had not kept a diary. “All those whom I have seen in social intercourse day by day will be characters in history,” he surmised, “and it would be pleasant hereafter [to read] my own impressions of them and recall their utterly different views upon the policy which should be pursued by the government.”

Interestingly, his letters contain little or nothing of his feelings about the war itself or the direction it was taking. There is no sorrow expressed over the butchery and waste of it, nor any excitement over its pageantry. “Tell Bamie that the streets are all lined with wagons,” he writes, “... that I have a soldier who always rides behind me to show me the way . . . and that several times soldiers have pointed their guns at me to make me stop when I was riding through their lines.” But that is about as far as he ever goes to suggest there is even a war in progress. It was his way of sparing Mittie, no doubt. The one note of tragedy in the entire picture he gives of wartime Washington is the death of the Lincolns’ son Willie.

On a Sunday in March 1862, with snow falling outside his hotel window, he seems to have been trying to boost both their spirits by telling her what several high-ranking officers had been telling him, namely, that the war would be over by May. Even so, he confessed to feeling very sad: “I wish we sympathized together on this question of so vital moment to our country, but I know you cannot understand my feelings, and of course I do not expect it.” This is the one known mention of even the existence of an issue between them, and to judge by the remembrances of their children, it was as demonstrative on the matter as either ever became.

The war, of course, did not end in May, but ground on for another three years. The work for the Allotment Commission continued, principally in upstate New York, he, Dodge, and Bronson having been named by Lincoln as New York’s three Allotment Commissioners. In one two-month stretch Theodore spent, by his own reckoning, thirty-one nights sleeping on trains. “Thee,” remarked his mother-in-law, “is a good young man. I really think if anyone ever tried to do their duty he does.”

He received no pay for his efforts and the consensus was that he, as much as anyone, was responsible for the program’s success. The grand total of the money sent home to soldiers’ dependents as a result ran to many millions of dollars.

His family’s health remained a constant concern the whole while. Mittie’s troubles are never spelled out very clearly in the surviving record, but the summer of their stay at Long Branch she was being subjected to treatments with ether, treatments that greatly alarmed her mother. (”I think it was really running the risk of losing her life, or her reason.”) Teedie’s asthma, now spoken of by name, grew steadily more alarming, the “sweet invigorating sea breeze” of Long Branch notwithstanding. No sooner had the family arrived at the hotel than he was hit by an attack and had to be rushed back to a doctor in New York; then returning from the city he was struck a second time and so Theodore and Mittie took him off to Saratoga, leaving the others in the charge of Grandmamma.

Elsewhere we read that Bamie suffered with eyestrain, that Mittie was again having “palpitations” and “much pain about the region of the heart.”

Troubles or not, Mittie kept pace with her husband and in a style the long indestructible Grandmamma was beginning to find exhausting and a bit inappropriate. In November 1863, when the Russian fleet paid a ceremonial visit to New York, a grand ball was staged at the Academy of Music, the great Russian Ball as it was to be remembered. Theodore took a leading part, served as secretary, lent his name to the announcements. “Thee was anxious for Mittie to go for political reasons,” Grandmamma told Susan, “and Mittie would not go without Anna. So they both went.” Grandmamma was not pleased. Life was too precious to be squandered on “trifles.”

So much activity “confuses me,” she wrote again from East 20th Street at the close of the year. “I think it ought to be a calm time for reflection. . . . But alas, there is too much gaiety. . . . There is so ’much to do’ as to leave little time to think. Mittie and Thee give a large party New Year’s evening. All day they will receive visitors. Just imagine how tiresome it will be.”

“The reception is going on downstairs,” she continued the next day. “Mittie and Anna are dressed beautifully and I hear the carriages constantly coming to the door.”

4

Grandmamma died the following autumn, October 1864, at age sixty-five, and was buried across the river in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, that incomparable Valhalla of nineteenth-century New York wherein are to be found so many of the kind—unsavory political bosses, Plymouth Church abolitionists—that the proud old southern lady could not abide. The following spring, in the first week of April, Richmond fell and a week later came Appomattox. The war was over. On April 25, with the city’s church bells tolling, Lincoln’s funeral procession marched up Broadway, and a photograph taken as it passed the CVS Roosevelt house at Union Square shows the heads of two small children in an open window on the second floor. It is believed they are Teedie and Ellie.

Of Mittie’s original thirteen brothers and sisters four were still alive. Captain James Bulloch and brother Irvine had survived the war but, because of their involvement with the Alabama, were excluded temporarily from pardon and so took up residence in Liverpool, England. Susan remained in Philadelphia and Anna, the year following, 1866, was married to James K. Gracie, a New York banker, and moved to a home of her own. The house at Roswell, like the whole town, had been miraculously spared in Sherman’s sweep through Georgia, but the old way of life there was ended forever. House and property were sold off.

Yet for all this—or perhaps because of it—Mittie entered upon a new life, very much renewed in spirit. She became, in the years immediately following the war, a figure of real consequence, or at least within the limits imposed by gender and the social order. To her already stunning physical beauty was now added the luster of success. She became a personage, quite as much as her husband, one of the great ladies of New York and one to whom society could naturally turn for example and leadership. She, the southerner, the outsider, ranked with Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mrs. Lewis Rutherford, Mrs. Belmont, and the two Mrs. Astors as one of those “gentle-woman of such birth, breeding and tact that people were always glad to be led by them . .. whose entertainments claimed most comment, whose fiat none were found to dispute,” to quote a contemporary authority, Mrs. Burton Harrison.

The great failings of the era, Grandmamma Bulloch had lectured, were “excessive extravagance and fondness for show.” One must always choose the best in the way of furniture and the like but “avoid ostentation.” But now, with her mother dead, Mittie did over the house, brightened up the parlor with pale French wallpaper, reupholstered the furniture in sky-blue damask. Her teas were attended by decorous little maids in lilac print dresses, white caps and aprons, and she invariably held center stage. In the “graciousness of her manner and that inherent talent for winning and holding the sympathetic interest of those around her,” wrote Mrs. Harrison, “I have seen none to surpass her.”

The one great mystery to Mrs. Harrison, as to others apparently, was why such radiant beauty and charm had failed to reappear among her four offspring. “Why nature, having found such a combination, should not be content with repeating it!”

Other transplanted southerners were to attain positions of influence in the city’s postwar era, including such notable fellow Georgians as Charles C. Jones and John Elliott Ward, both attorneys, and the fawning Ward McAllister, whose social edicts held sway for more than a generation (it was he who invented the “Four Hundred”). But no southern woman had quite the presence of Mittie Roosevelt, or would be remembered so fondly for her irrepressible southern ways.

On an evening when he was a guest at dinner, John Hay happened to mention spending some time with his sister and, as Bamie recalled, Mittie suddenly looked at him in astonishment. “You have a sister?” she said. “Yes, I have a sister,” Hay responded happily, “and I had a mother and a father, though I have always realized that you thought of me as being like Melchizedek, without beginning or end.”

“Mother was embarrassed,” wrote Bamie, “because, with her little aristocratic, southern feeling she had always considered Mr. Hay’s family connection as entirely negligible.”

She remained immutably herself. “There is nothing more like a Roosevelt than a Roosevelt wife,” it would be said within the tribe, but in her case this was patently not so and never would be.

Neither the sufferings of the poor nor the call of the Christian faith touched her in the way they did her husband. She played no part in his good works, and those speculations on life in the hereafter or the status of one’s soul, speculations that appear in Theodore’s correspondence (as in a large proportion of private correspondence from that high-Victorian day), are not to be found in what she wrote. She was not an agnostic exactly. It was just that for her religion never became the central, pervading part of life it was for Theodore, or that it had been for her mother. (“If she was only a Christian, I think I could feel more satisfied,” Mrs. Bulloch had lamented near the close of her life.) When Mittie found exhilaration or beauty in a church service, it was nearly always from the music.

In time to come a good deal would be said and repeated in print about her inadequacies and eccentricities. In the reminiscences of Roosevelt descendants who never knew her, she would be compared to her husband, measured against his strength, his Christian spirit, and nearly always to her disadvantage. And thus in many published accounts she has been kindly but pointedly dismissed as decorative and inconsequential, lovable enough in her way, but without weight, a sort of chatty, indolent, cliché southern belle prone to sick headaches and silly about money. The picture is not only unfair and inaccurate, it is considerably less interesting than the truth. As her letters and the observations of innumerable contemporaries attest, including those of her children and husband, she was an exceptional person in her own right, and a large part of that aliveness, the feeling for words, the warmth of personality that were to characterize the most outstanding of her children came from her.

The stories of her eccentricities are nearly all based on a later time in her life and seldom take into account several important factors. She was, for example, enormously fond of the color white and dressed in white more than any other shade, even in winter. In later years, as a widow, she seldom wore anything but white, which, to be sure, set her off as something out of the ordinary. But then one also finds in Theodore’s correspondence that he greatly preferred her in white and liked to picture her in white whenever they were apart.

She wanted things in her life to be clean—clean house, clean clothes, clean children. Feverish bursts of housekeeping would leave her so exhausted she had to take to her bed. She bathed daily and always twice—the first time to wash, the second to rinse. She also had a stubborn reluctance to do anything on time. But considering her background, such behavior is not especially bizarre or incomprehensible and may perhaps be seen as very human responses to the two aspects of northern city life that distressed her most—excessive dirt and excessive hurry. Beyond her walls, and not far beyond, was a world of squalor and disease of a kind she had probably never imagined before coming to New York—families living in rat-infested cellars, people by the thousands packed into foul tenements. Smallpox and scarlet fever were rampant; typhus was worst of all. In one miserable house on East 17th Street there were 135 cases of typhus in the single year of 1869. For someone raised in Roswell, Georgia, it was no easy thing living with such realities, any more than it was to accept as axiomatic the idea that life must be played out according to timetables and the dictates of the clock.

As for the lavish expenditures, they too came later, when, as it happens, there was a very large amount of Roosevelt money with which to be lavish. If she was extravagant in Theodore’s eyes, he apparently never said so. Indeed, in another of his letters dating from this earlier day, he tells her that she, by nature, is more economical than he and better suited to look after the family finances.

That she was and remained chronically troubled by sick spells and mysterious upsets is indisputable. She would be hit by what she called “my horror,” violent intestinal trouble of some kind, perhaps brought on by a nervous condition, and perhaps not. She was put on restricted diets; she did retire to her room on occasion, not to return for hours. But this, it must be stressed, was not uncommon among women of her day and for someone of such exquisite, fragile beauty it was almost expected. Theodore worried incessantly over her health, even when she appears to have been perfectly fine. It was his way of expressing his love for her. She was his to protect and care for. “I have always been accustomed to think of you as one of my little babies,” he tells her at one point, and at another implores, “Do not become a strong-minded woman.” “My loving tyrant,” she called him.

Yet there is no evidence that her health ever kept Mittie from doing anything she wanted to do, and there was no complaining on her part. It was she, not Theodore, who liked to stay up late talking, writing letters, who could quite literally wear him out with her “gaiety.” On the first trip to Europe, as will be seen, she could keep a pace—set a pace—that would have left most healthy women her age exhausted.

Her children adored her and found her no less remarkable in her way than their father. “I have just received your letter!” Teedie once wrote. “What an excitement. . . . What long letters you do write. I don’t see how you can write them.” She could quote Dickens, Shakespeare. She “rushed into conversation,” made conversation come alive. She was the first to see the humor in a situation. Teedie sternly praying that the Rebel troops be ground to powder had struck her as wonderfully funny, whereas Theodore, on hearing the story, had told him never to do it again. It was she who first insisted that Bamie be taken to the theater and to galleries, before the age when most children were permitted such things. It was she who induced Theodore to take them all abroad that spring of 1869.

Her “devotion wrapped us round as with a mantle,” wrote Conie; hers was “the most loving heart imaginable.” Yet “in spite of this rare beauty and her wit and charm, she never seemed to know that she was unusual in any degree . . .”

CHAPTER THREE

Grand Tour

1

THE ROOSEVELTS SAILED the afternoon of May 12 on the Scotia, finest of the Cunard Line’s paddle steamers and still, in 1869, the fastest ship to Europe. With Mary Ann, the nursemaid, they made a party of seven and we may picture them coming aboard in the bright sunshine of a spring day in New York, the ship’s deck crowded with trunks and porters and several hundred other passengers, everybody looking exceptionally well turned out (the Scotia offered only first-class accommodations), and many, like the Roosevelts, traveling with children and servants. Among the familiar faces were Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Seligman and their three children; Mrs. Jesse Seligman and her daughter; the actor Lester Wallock, who was traveling with his wife and two young sons; the Egerton Winthrops and their three children. (Egerton Winthrop, a cultivated, superior-looking figure, was literally right out of an Edith Wharton novel: he was to appear in The Age of Innocence rather thinly disguised as the arch snob Sillerton Jackson, who carried between his narrow temples “most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society.”)

To be going abroad was not the rare thing it once had been. Americans were crisscrossing the Atlantic, resolutely “doing” Europe’s galleries and monuments, hiking the Alps, taking the waters in a dozen different spas, filling the best hotels, in numbers that would have been unheard of before the war. So near and commonplace had Europe become, announced the popular travel writer Bayard Taylor, that he would write no more on the subject. It was the year of The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s often jeering declaration that a touch of Old World culture was neither beyond the ken of the ordinary citizen nor anything to be afraid of. “I basked in the happiness of being for once in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement,” Twain wrote of his sojourn abroad.

Those notable Americans discovering Europe as tourists that same year included such disparate figures as Jefferson Davis, who went for his health, and young Henry James, who was finding every other American he met “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.” Numerous wealthy Americans, moreover, had happily taken up residence abroad as a more or less permanent thing, and among their offspring, contemporaries of the Roosevelt children, were little Edith Jones (the future Edith Wharton), John Singer Sargent, and Jennie Jerome (the future Mrs. Randolph Churchill).

Still, for the Roosevelts it was a momentous undertaking, a first complete break from the established pattern of their lives, a first adventure as a family. In part, of course, they were going because it was the thing to do—for the “cultural enrichment” of the experience. The children would “benefit,” young as they were. Mittie had never been out of the country. She wanted to see her brothers in Liverpool and to be shown some of what Theodore had seen in his own earlier travels. But they were going also for Teedie’s health. Grandfather Roosevelt, who came to see them off, later wrote the child a little rhyme:

We all shall gladly see you back

Again at your home,

And hope that sickness may no more

Compel your feet to roam.

They were to be gone a year, which to the children seemed like forever. On the ride from the house to the pier, Teedie had cried most of the way.

The first several days at sea were so calm and clear that even Theodore, a lifelong sufferer from seasickness, fared quite well. Not until the fourth day out, a Sunday, when the wind picked up, did he and Teedie take to their berths. “As it was a little rough and I a little sick and being down,” Teedie wrote in his diary. “I could not go to [church] service.”

Mittie spent her days on deck, wrapped up happily in a chair, enjoying the view and the salt tang of the air, chatting, reading (a popular romance called The Heir of Redclyffe), writing long letters to Anna, and keeping a weather eye on Teedie, who alone of her four refused to have anything to do with the other children on board. Elliott, as she told Anna, had quickly become the leader of the children’s sports and played with the Winthrop children nearly all day.

The ship suited her perfectly. The air on deck was a bit sharper than she wished and the grand salon was invariably overheated, but she had grown to feel quite at home.

Six days out, as they entered the Gulf Stream, the weather turned warmer and Teedie at last found a friend. “I made the acquaintance of Mr. St. John, a most interesting gentleman from the West Indies,” he wrote that night. “We had a long talk in the cabin after supper.”

Mr. St. John—Thomas B. St. John, according to the passenger list—was traveling alone for his health and appeared to know no one. His name was pronounced “Singen,” Mittie explained to Anna. He was a “quaint little well of knowledge” who suffered from heart trouble and spoke barely above a whisper, but whose interest in the natural sciences “fills Teedie’s heart with delight.” Teedie had introduced him very formally. “Mama, have you conversed with Mr. St. John?” he asked, as she put down her book. “I feel so tenderly to Teedie,” she told Anna.

The afternoon of Friday, May 21, they were steaming through the smooth bottle-green waters of the Irish Sea, the coast of Wales on the starboard. By turns with a telescope, they picked out windmills and farmhouses along shore, then, with much excitement, the suspension bridge at Holyhead. By nightfall, having crossed some three thousand miles of ocean in nine days, they entered the Mersey at Liverpool.

It was one wild scene of commotion [said Mittie of their arrival]. Passengers all ready, luggage heaped up, children fretting (not mine) . . . Custom House officers busy examining the trunks . . . all done by the aid of lamps . . . Finally a tender neared us on each side. . . . Thee suddenly said here they are, Irvine and brother Jimmie. Imagine our excitement! One gentleman would stay with the trunks thusly. Thee would find a trunk, Irvine sit on it until another was found. . . .

One person only seemed oblivious to what was happening. Teedie sat off to himself in the salon, reading a book. “Strange child!” his mother mused. She must wake him up to the world, “and make him observe.”

She herself seems to have missed nothing, her own considerable powers of observation plainly heightened by an unbound delight in being where she was and who she was.

The first several days with her brothers were filled with breathless talk and laughter. It had been eight years since she had seen Captain James Bulloch, and her one brief meeting with Irvine in that time had been under such strained circumstances that it seemed more like something they had imagined. A year or so after the war he had returned to New York illegally under an assumed name, working his way across on a sailing ship in order to see Mittie and Anna for all of an hour. They had been told nothing of the plan. An unsigned note in the morning mail said merely that at three on Thursday a young man “of interest” would be in the mall at Central Park, standing beneath the third tree on the left, a red handkerchief about his neck. They did as directed and when the hour was up he left for his ship and the return voyage to Liverpool.

Now, at twenty-seven, Irvine was a lanky, clean-shaven, altogether proper southern expatriate and Liverpool businessman who, Theodore observed, smoked his pipe as if it were the serious duty of his life. At the moment, he was also much in love with the daughter of an American couple living in Liverpool, Ella Sears.

Irvine, Ella, Mr. and Mrs. Sears, “brother Jimmie,” his small children, and his wife, Hattie (Harriott Cross Foster, whom he had married before the war), converged on the hotel the first morning, Hattie hugging and kissing Mittie and crying profusely. After that there were drives in a varnished landau through Liverpool’s Princess Park and a longer excursion to the suburbs down country roads with hawthorn hedges in bloom. Mittie picked her first primrose and cowslip. (”You have no idea of my enthusiasm,” she told Anna. “You know every poet from Shakespeare mentions ‘sweet cowslip and primrose.’”) Another day, May 24, they went to brother Jimmie’s home at Waterloo, twenty minutes by train, where the children played on the beach and at dinner the “grown people” toasted the Queen’s birthday (Victoria had turned fifty) and sang and danced until time to catch the last train back to Liverpool.

James and Irvine Bulloch had established themselves in the cotton business in Liverpool and managed to survive as well as they did largely through the contacts James had made during the war. Of the two, James was plainly the leader, a big, vital man with a military bearing and resplendent muttonchop whiskers. No English colonel looked more like an English colonel. As the young captain of a U.S. mail steamer before the war, he had impressed Richard Henry Dana as the model American officer—in his book To Cuba and Back, Dana told what a pleasure it was to stroll the deck with a man of such good cheer and obvious ability—and now in middle age he was said to be the personification of Thackeray’s Colonel Newcome, the beloved ultimate gentleman of Victorian prose. He was kindly, reserved, rarely talked about himself or of his former exploits, which, as it happens, were again very much in the news. The Roosevelts had arrived—his little New York nieces and nephews were casting their eyes upon him for the first time—just as his former creation, the Alabama, had become a headline issue once again on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Alabama Claims, claims against Britain for damages done by the Confederate raider—his ship—had been made a thundering cause in Washington by the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Britain’s involvement with the Alabama had doubled the length of the war, Sumner claimed, and the damages therefore might exceed $100 million. (In fact, in her two years at sea the Alabama had destroyed fifty-eight commercial vessels valued at $6,547,000.) “When civilization was fighting a last battle with slavery,” Sumner declared in a famous speech, “England gave her name, her influence, her material resources to the wicked cause. ...” Popular opinion in the United States was strongly behind him. The speech had roused a response in the Congress and the country of a kind that set the British back on their heels. Cartoons in the British press at the time the Roosevelts arrived portrayed an American brigand, his belt full of revolvers and knives, calculating how much he might make John Bull pay. Publications normally friendly to the United States—The Spectator, The Pall Mall Gazette, the London Daily News—denounced Sumner and his claims and said the whole nation “would go to war twenty times over” rather than accept such a national humiliation.

The crux of the issue was the degree to which the government had knowingly participated in the creation of the Alabama and under what circumstances the ship had escaped from Liverpool to begin her reign of destruction—in other words, to what extent had James D. Bulloch been aided and abetted in his efforts. If ever there was a central character to a drama it was he, he being the one man who knew all that happened and why, and had this been another, later day, he would have been made a newspaper and television sensation, an international somebody, overnight. As it was, the arrival of his sister and her family remained the sole disruption in the sedate life he had fashioned in exile, and his treasured privacy survived intact.

To the Roosevelt children, he and Irvine were almost mythical in stature. Here were two of the heroic figures from Mittie’s stories, the real thing at last. Had some marvelous heroes from one of their books materialized before their eyes, the effect would not have been much greater. And most obviously stirred was Teedie, whose hunger for adventure in any printed or spoken form was insatiable and whose private musings on large matters of historic consequence were sometimes so out of proportion with his physical size and age as to be strangely amusing. (”Father,” he would ask apropos of nothing a little later on in the trip, “did Texas wish to annex itself to the United States?”)

“It was from the heroes of my favorite stories,” he would explain as a grown man, “from hearing of the feats performed by my southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father [that] I felt great admiration for men who were fearless . . . and I had a great desire to be like them.” To a crowd gathered in his honor at Roswell, he would one day tell in detail how his Uncle Irvine Bulloch had stuck to his post to the last as the guns of the United States corvette Kearsarge raked the Alabama. When the Alabama went down off Cherbourg, Irvine was among those survivors rescued by the British yacht Deerhound, and afterward he served on the raider Shenandoah, preying on whalers in the Bering Strait.

James Bulloch’s story was larger, more important, more the stuff of fiction. His influence on the boy was to be considerable.

His original mission, as defined in orders from Jefferson Davis, had been to build “with the quickest possible dispatch” six steam vessels in England, for which the Confederate Congress appropriated a total of a million dollars. He had arrived in Liverpool in June 1861, and the first ship, Florida, was ready in less than a year. Then followed the Alabama, originally known as No. 290, because she was the two hundred ninetieth ship built at the Laird yards in Liverpool. Launching of the Florida had greatly alarmed the American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, so everything concerning No. 290 had to be done under secrecy and with unstinting sensitivity on Bulloch’s part to the British laws that forbade the building of warships for belligerents. “I cannot exaggerate, sir, the caution and tact required to get a ship to sea with even the external appearance of a man-of-war,” he wrote to James M. Mason, the Confederate diplomatic agent in London. No. 290, furthermore, was to be no ordinary ship and he expected to be given her command.

He had designed her specifically as a commerce raider, rather than for combat with other warships—900 tons, 230 feet in length, and drawing, when provisioned and coaled, all of 15 feet. Rigged as a barkentine, she carried large fore and aft sails and handled as well under sail as under steam—as most such vessels did not—because he had devised a means whereby, in a matter of minutes, the propeller could be detached and lifted high enough out of the water not to slow her down. Top speed was to be about thirteen knots. John Laird, the builder, thought her the finest cruiser of her class in the world.

The plan was for the ship to leave Liverpool as an innocent-looking merchantman, to be armed later in the Azores. He picked the island of Terceira as the rendezvous, secretly arranged for the purchase of armaments and stores, and had these sent by another ship, again devising detailed instructions for every necessary step. All in all it was a brilliant performance and things were falling together nicely, until Charles Francis Adams, supplied by his own agent in Liverpool, presented the British government with proof of what was afoot. The situation could have gone either way, but the Queen’s Advocate went insane at this juncture; the documents supplied by Adams sat untouched for five crucial days, and Bulloch, determined to get the ship out of British waters, took her to sea himself, “very unexpectedly.” Only by the narrowest margin did he bring it off. He arranged for a British crew, and on the morning of July 29,1862, the still incomplete No. 290 started down the Mersey draped in bright bunting and carrying a large party of fashionable ladies and gentlemen who had been invited for a short trial run and a picnic lunch. Several customs officials were also aboard to see that “no international wrong” was perpetrated. But about noon, a tug came alongside, the guests were put off, and No. 290 sailed away—north through the Irish Sea—never to return. Bulloch had himself put ashore on the north coast of Ireland and made his way back to Liverpool. Three weeks later he was in the Azores seeing to final preparations before turning the ship over to Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate Navy, his superiors at home having decided his services on land were invaluable.

That he failed in a later attempt to build two ironclad rams at the Laird yards—ships which, in the long run, would have done far greater damage to the Union cause than did the Alabama—was due to the grim, unequivocal declaration by Charles Francis Adams to Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell that should the rams leave Liverpool, it would mean war.

Teedie’s allegiance to the Union side—to his father’s side—remained as passionate as always. Passing through Liverpool some months earlier, Jefferson Davis had enrolled his son in the same school at Waterloo attended by Teedie’s cousin, and when Teedie and Ellie ran into the Davis boy during a visit to the school, “sharp words ensued,” as Teedie reported proudly in his diary. But there could be no stigma surrounding James Bulloch, not ever. As an adult, Teedie would remember Uncle Jimmie as a “blessed” figure, “as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived . . . one of the best men I have ever known.” An important bond grew between them—important to each and to the writing of naval history—and this Liverpool visit of 1869 marked the beginning. It would be his very pro-Union nephew, ultimately, who persuaded James Bulloch to write the book only he could write, setting forth his part in the war and all he knew concerning the Alabama. (Called The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, it appeared in two volumes in 1883.) And James Bulloch, in turn, would provide invaluable assistance to his nephew’s own first effort as a historian, a study of the naval side of the War of 1812—all this taking place years after the Alabama Claims had been settled, the issue laid to rest.

The Roosevelts left Liverpool by train June 2, their party now increased to eight with the addition of a newly hired valet by name of Noel Paovitch. They were bound for the Lake Country and to Scotland, heading north, their first stop at Furness Abbey, the magnificent ruin of a monastery founded in the twelfth century in what had been the wilds of Icelandic-speaking Furness. It was a stop of only a night and a day and much that they were to see afterward was to be still grander in scale and more evocative in spirit, but the abbey was their maiden encounter with Europe’s truly ancient past. They were on their own as tourists for the first time.

A tremendous complex covering some sixty-five acres, the abbey was set in a hidden valley named Bekangesgill in Icelandic, or the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade, “from the deadly herb,” Mittie explained excitedly to Anna, “which with henbane grows here . . . two flourishing specimens of the former in one of the curved archways.” Once a remote empire unto itself, the abbey and its way of life had survived unchallenged for centuries. The buildings were of red sandstone—a monumental church, cloisters, quarters for the lay brothers and novices, the abbot’s private chapel, an infirmary, offices, school—and these with gardens and orchards and cemetery, as well as a modern hotel, were all contained within a great encircling wall. The end had come with Henry VIII and his break with Rome. The abbey was abandoned, roofs caved in, gates, windows, anything salvageable had been carted off long since. But the remaining shells of buildings were awesome. Among connoisseurs of ruins, of whom there were a great many in that Victorian day, they were considered among the choicest of all. What had been the floor of the abbey was now vivid green turf speckled with bluebells and buttercups and there were as yet no restrictions as to where one could walk or climb; everything was open to all comers and for children, a glorious playground.

The light of day was nearly gone when the Roosevelts arrived and a fine rain was falling, blotting out all but the barest outlines. It was only the next morning that the scale and power of the place burst upon them. The sun was shining, the day spectacular, with a few foamy clouds trailing overhead in a soft blue sky. The family was up and dressed by six and following breakfast set off with guidebooks in hand. The three small children, seeing the sweep of green turf, raced ahead, through archways, up broken staircases, then up a spiral stairway to the belfry, then to the top of what had been a water tower, where they “saw it all.” “When we three were on the belfry,” wrote Mittie, recounting for Anna the somewhat more sedate route she had taken with Theodore and Bamie, “on the opposite side were the three children peeping through one of the . . . lancet windows. . . . We beckoned to them and in a trice they all raced down, up the nave of the church and mounted the belfry steps. As I write . . . the children are climbing over the ’Porter’s Lodge’ (ruin). . . . It would be impossible to tell you all. . . .”

In the chancel, immediately in front of the high altar base, they stood before the stone effigy of a crusader, thought to be William de Lancaster, eighth Baron of Kendal, who died in 1246. By the way the moss had grown, the figure’s stone limbs and sword were perfectly delineated. From the cracked stone helmet of another effigy Mittie picked a dandelion. Thrilled by the whole romantic spell of the place she found herself “gazing at the wide open windows and thinking how the glorious light must have streamed through . . . over the high altar [and] down upon the monks as they sang their solemn chants or the moonbeams when at their midnight devotions.”

Her health was already improved, she told her sister. She had to watch what she ate, but could depict herself overall as “intensely interested and much freckled.”

We leave here at 5 PM for Windermere, where Noel and our baggage await us. . . . Thee and I wish for you incessantly. How you would appreciate it all. . . . I hurry to the close of this letter because I see Thee’s coattails flitting around the ruined Abbey and he shall not know more than I do about it.

In the days that followed, as they cruised Lake Windermere and went on by train to Edinburgh, the weather held clear and fair. Mittie wished only that there were more time. Scotland was both a return to the ancestral home of the Bullochs and a literary pilgrimage to the world of Sir Walter Scott, who, with his love of the legendary and valorous, his openair healthiness, his strong sense of the interlocking of human lives, appealed powerfully to the romantic Mittie. They saw Abbotsford, the sprawling stone mansion where Scott had lived like some feudal laird (”saw his clothes, . . . petrified things and armor and curiosities,” wrote Teedie), traveled to Dryburgh to pay homage at Scott’s tomb. In the Trossachs, the setting of Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake, Mittie felt “as though we were on magic ground.” One fine morning they hiked beside Loch Katrine, as Theodore marched along reading the poem aloud. “Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!”

“We had a charming drive on top of [the] coach, between Loch Katrine and Lomond,” Mittie told Anna, “and steamed up the latter . . . which was beautiful all the time. I could not help thinking of the highland songs dear mother used to sing. . . . ”

Then they turned south again, from Edinburgh to York, an exhausting, sooty eight hours “in the cars” relieved by some of the most appealing scenery of the whole trip: distant blue glances of the Firth of Forth, small white beaches, rolling surf, rolling country; then red-tiled Berwick-upon-Tweed and the Tweed emptying into the North Sea; then fields of sheep and cattle followed by Newcastle-upon-Tyne with its huddled houses and tall chimneys and thick yellow smoke. After this everything became more soft and green, more thoroughly English, Mittie thought, the hawthorn “perfectly lovely.” She adored landscapes with “everything like the most perfect picture.”

They were two days in York; then came Leamington (and Warwick Castle), Oxford, and, finally, London on June 21. Except for the time on trains, most every day was given to “hard sightseeing.” And if not exploring a Roman wall (at York) or exclaiming over the heroic proportions of a Saxon giant’s porridge bowl (at Warwick Castle) or seeing “some collages” (as Teedie wrote at Oxford), Mittie and the children were usually buried in their books, which, by the time they reached London, had been read and reread to such an extent that she had to go out and buy a “fresh lot.” A few months later, in Venice, Teedie would reckon that since leaving New York they had read fifty books.

At times the strain would show. Bamie’s feet had become so blistered in Scotland she could barely walk. Teedie’s asthma kicked up once before reaching London and Ellie too suffered several days with a bad throat, then took offense when told to ease up and miss part of one day’s touring. “I want to learn about things, too, like Teedie,” he insisted.

Yet the pace only quickened. In three weeks’ time there were repeated expeditions to the London Zoo and to the British Museum. They “did” Hampton Court, Kensington Gardens and Museum, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, and the “very wonderful” Crystal Palace, where the two boys were transfixed by a mechanical figure that played chess and they begged to go back again the next day. The zoo called for five visits.

She had seen “the real Rosetta Stone,” Mittie exclaimed in a letter to Anna following a day at the British Museum. She had seen the prayer book carried to the scaffold by Lady Jane Grey (”her own notes written in it!”), the original manuscripts of Pope’s Iliad, Scott’s Kenilworth, letters from Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Charles the First, Cromwell, George Washington. “Etc., etc.” From the Ladies’ Gallery at the House of Commons, she and Bamie watched the members nodding, laughing, doing “anything they pleased,” their hats on, while one of their number droned on about cattle plague.

Shopping at Sears & Wells, she had the three youngest children fitted in matching sailor suits, with white braid and red silk ties, Conie’s differing only in that it had a skirt. Time was made for riding lessons for the boys, Teedie’s wheeze notwithstanding, and for innumerable “splendid romps” in Hyde Park under the surveillance of Mary Ann or Noel Paovitch, the latter, somewhere along the line, having acquired a red fez.

Most evenings about six, Mittie and Theodore took an hour’s drive in the park and one Saturday, their last in London, they attended a party given by the Duke of Devonshire, a high point for Mittie and a chance to exercise her powers of observation (albeit with “furtive glances” only) for the benefit of sister Anna, whose interest in great houses, clothes, jewelry, and English gentry was apparently no less than her own. The following is only part of a letter written at top speed from the Netherlands several days later.

I wore my pale-green silk, lace cap arranged as a bertha and some lovely pale-pink real rosebuds in my hair which Bamie arranged prettily. We arrived at Devonshire House, Piccadilly W . . . . where we were met by policemen and servants in livery knee breeches, etc., now ushered into the first vestibule, more servants, into second vestibule, more liveried servants. Instead of being taken into dressing rooms, in this vestibule a servant behind a kind of counter covered with red cloth . . . took our cloaks, giving tickets in return. We ascended a beautiful wide winding staircase of pure white marble, glass banisters; about midway, a servant [who was] standing at [the] head of [the] stairs, then ushered us into the Saloon (I suppose), a beautiful very large room. Lord and Lady Frederick Cavendish [Lord Frederick was the son of the Duke of Devonshire] came up immediately, very cordially. She is a little like Mrs. Jimmie Dreer, taller, was dressed not very prettily but stylishly, deep-pink silk, trimmed with some lace, large diamond ornaments arranged on pink ribbon round [her] neck, which was tied behind in long streamers, wreath of pink roses and green leaves. Lord Frederick is [a] sweet, clean-looking person, very diffident, he is in the House of Commons. He introduced his father as “My father the Duke,” who had the broad blue ribbon and star of the Order of Bath, blazing with diamonds. He received us very cordially. I forgot to say “Your Grace,” but talked along quite pleasantly . . . [the] room was gold and white with beautiful pictures, soft carpet in half the room (the other half apparently inlaid and waxed), furniture and curtains blue and gold . . . this opened into [a] beautiful salon, frescoed, high ceiling lighted from above, furniture light blue and vapor color; in one corner [at a] table in [the] shape of [a] crescent, served by servants (some maids in caps) . . . delicious reviving tea in lovely little cups, then slices of bread and butter, cakes, and other very light things. There were lovely flowers; two small anterooms and supper rooms were all that were thrown open. The supper seemed only to consist of ices, and fruits, all in brilliant-looking glass and china. . . . All the people as they entered shook hands with their host and each other. I had no idea the English did this, as Americans are generally accused of doing so. Lady Frederick introduced several of her friends to me, among them the Duchess of Manchester, very brilliantly dressed in pink and lace; Lady Waterford, whom she said had been a great beauty, walked most splendidly. . . a tiara of diamonds, pearls wound in with her black hair. Lady DeViser (I think this was the name) in deep blue and Venetian point lace, red cherries in her hair; her daughter, Lady Bath, [a] sweet delicate, refined-looking person, plain white silk, no trimming except fine lace in [the] neck, [a] little white ostrich tip in her hair. There was one fat Begum in blue satin and lace who walked slowly about. . . leaning on or should I say leading about a deaf, dumb, blind, lame, very ill-looking stick covered with orders. There was an old gentleman with soft gray curls, excessively refined-looking . . . with an immense diamond ring. . . . I asked Lord Frederick who he was, but he did not know, said that he went very little out. I was disappointed because I had seen and been interested in this same old gentleman at the Conversazzione at the Kensington Museum. . . . When we were leaving, the servants would call out “Lord so and so’s carriage stops,” the way just as you read in Miss Edgeworth’s novels. I enjoyed everything very much but would have liked to have gazed more, had to content myself with furtive glances out the sides of my eyes. . . .

Teedie provided the single disruption of the London stay. His asthma returned and a doctor who was called to the hotel, finding nothing wrong with the boy’s lungs, recommended that he be taken to the seashore. So off Teedie had gone with his father to Hastings, by train, early Saturday, July 3. They registered at the Queen’s Hotel fronting on the sea and after a very man-sized midday dinner set out for a walk on the beach. As the day wore on, Teedie was treated to a ride in a goat cart and in the late-afternoon sunshine the powerful-looking bearded father and the sallow, spindly little son hiked the steep path up Castle Hill, to a castle ruin from Saxon times. From the hilltop they could look back on the town and their hotel with its turrets and flags flying. The sky and sea were beautiful. Everything was beautiful to the boy. The dinner that night was “the best dinner I ever had.”

At the close of the following day, Sunday, he would say simply, “This is the happiest day I have ever spent.” After church they had again hiked to the castle, where this time Theodore conducted a private outdoor Sunday school. Then they walked on several more miles, atop high limestone cliffs, the beach and surf far below. On the return trek they cheered the Fourth of July together with all the lung power they could muster, a “feeble attempt,” Teedie conceded, but “such fun.” Putting himself to bed that night, finding he had too little breath even to blow out his candle, he doused the flame in a tumbler of water and dropped blissfully off to sleep.

Back in London they found Mittie and Bamie at the National Gallery, making their way slowly through Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode. “Both had enjoyed Hastings very much,” Mittie wrote. Teedie was “decidedly better.”

2

The Grand Tour of the Continent that got under way at Antwerp was an enormously ambitious undertaking, given the means of transportation available, the size of the party, the ages of the children, the staggering quantity and variety of baggage to be looked after in that day of large, elaborate wardrobes. Even to a seasoned present-day traveler the course of the Roosevelts’ journey across the map of Europe looks slightly overwhelming.

They reached Antwerp July 14, 1869, and were scheduled to sail for home exactly ten months later on the Russia, departing Liverpool, May 14, 1870. Between times they would travel several thousand miles by countless different trains, by river steamer, lake steamer, and rowboat (across Lake Como), by carriage and stagecoach, on horseback, by mule, by donkey, and on foot (through much of Switzerland). They would stay at sixty-six different hotels in eight countries (including Monaco) and the numbers of porters required at each stop, the numbers of room clerks, ticket agents, and headwaiters who had to be dealt with—with or without the benefit of English—may be imagined.

After several days of sightseeing in Antwerp, The Hague, and Amsterdam, they started up the Rhine from Cologne, visiting Mainz, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Baden, and Strasbourg. They were in Basel by the end of July and from there made a long, looping path through Switzerland, south first, through the Jura Mountains to Bern, then on to Geneva. They cut southeast across part of France to Mont Blanc and Chamonix, then northeast up the valley of the Rhone to Visp. There was a stop at Zermatt. The children threw snowballs on top of the Eggishorn. They saw the Rhone Glacier, crossed the Grimsel Pass to Grindelwald, steamed down Lake Brienz to Interlaken, filling their lungs with a lake breeze scented by freshly cut hay. At Lucerne they spent a week with Theodore’s former colleague on the Allotment Commission, Theodore Bronson, and his family, after which came the requisite ascent to the Rigi-Kulm. In Zurich they stopped at the famous Hotel Baur au Lac, with its flower gardens and meticulously raked gravel walks. In all, they were six weeks in Switzerland, Theodore’s favorite part of Europe and the place, it was hoped, that would do the most for Teedie. “A course of travel of this sort,” an English physician had written, “. . . in a pure and bracing air, under a bright sky, amid some of the most attractive and most impressive scenes in nature, in cheerful company . . . will do all that the best medicines can do . . . and much that they never can accomplish.” Henry James, trudging over the Swiss Alps that same summer, described his exertions as “a pledge, a token of some future potency.”

After Switzerland came the Italian lakes, then Milan, followed by a week in Venice. From Venice, September 25, they went by night boat across the Adriatic to Trieste and from there to Vienna by train, one of the longest legs of the journey. They were another week in Vienna, after which they turned west to Salzburg and Munich before making the swing north to Berlin by way of Nuremberg and Dresden. From Berlin they doubled back to Cologne, arriving in time for Teedie’s birthday, October 27.

The month of November was spent in Paris. Then followed a tour of southern France (Dijon, Marseilles, Nice) en route to Italy for the winter. With the return of spring they were back in Paris for a second and last stay of nearly two months, after which they left for London, Liverpool, and the ship home.

In time-honored tourist fashion they gathered up quantities of guidebooks and keepsakes—photographs, rare coins, stamps, crystals, bits of rock, souvenir spoons—and like countless other Americans abroad, then and since, they took huge pleasure in running into other Americans abroad. But never did they take Europe lightly, or in the smug or mocking way some did. There were times of disappointment and disillusion—“sunny Italy,” their first week there, was “cold, dreary, smelly”—but far more often they were exhilarated or deeply moved by scenery, by art, architecture, the places of history. If few families could have afforded such a year, fewer still would have attempted anything so ambitious or kept to their schedule with such energy. They did everything that was expected. They saw Venice by moonlight; at the Volksgarten in Vienna they thrilled to the strains of “The Beautiful Blue Danube” as rendered by Professor Strauss himself. They climbed the Arc de Triomphe and saw Emperor Napoleon III ride by in the Tuileries; they climbed the Tower of Pisa; they climbed Vesuvius. They saw The Last Supper, Pompeii, St. Peters and the Pope (Pius IX)—all that was obligatory and considerably more. There was hardly a church of note, a palace or ruin or gallery or garden en route that escaped their collective perusal, all six—”the whole of us,” as Teedie said—generally going everywhere in a body.

Children took sick. Teeth had to be tended to (a morning in Berlin was lost at a dentists office), birthdays and Christmas were celebrated (with Mittie and Theodore putting on full dress for each such occasion). Correspondence had to be kept up. Word came of the panic on Wall Street that began September 24, Black Friday, and, later, of the death of Theodore’s brother Weir. Still, the pilgrimage went resolutely forward and the fact that there were no serious snags in the plan anywhere en route, no train tickets lost or timetables misread, no troubles with hotel reservations that we know of, speaks highly for Theodore, who, it appears, was responsible for all the advance arrangements.

On balance, probably Switzerland was the best time for everyone. Conie, recalling the trip in later years, would write fondly of “weeks in the great Swiss mountains” and “lovely times when we were not obliged to think of sculpture or painting.” The distances covered on their family hikes through the Alps seem almost incredible. On August 11, for example, crossing the Tête-Noire, Theodore went twenty-two miles, Bamie eighteen miles, Ellie twelve, Conie three. Mittie, the supposed invalid, walked nine miles, while Teedie went very nearly as far as his father, nineteen miles. On August 21, crossing the Grimsel Pass, Teedie walked twenty miles to Theodore’s twenty-two and this at an altitude of seven thousand feet! At Lucerne Ellie and Teedie were both sick, Teedie depressed and homesick, but then the trip to the heights of the Rigi rapidly restored all spirits.

Known as the “island mountain,” the Rigi stands by itself above lakes Lucerne and Zug, and to many thousand “sensitive souls” of that day the spectacle of sunset and sunrise from its summit, the Rigi-Kulm, was the climax of a visit to Switzerland. The “incredible horizon,” as Victor Hugo called it, takes in nearly three hundred miles, an utterly dazzling panorama of Alps on one side (to the southeast) and on the other, beyond the lakes, the lovely Zurich countryside reaching to the Juras. Traditionally one went to the top in time for sunset, as the Roosevelts did, then stayed the night at the hotel to be awakened before dawn by an Alpine horn, which the morning of September 4 sounded at quarter to five.

Rose immediately [Mittie wrote], but did not get out in time to see the first pink lights before the sun rising. All the panorama of high Alpine peaks visible . . . Litlis and its glaciers, Finisterahorn, Schreckhorn, Wetterhorn, Jungfrau, and Silverhorn and Blumis Alps. The Wetterhorn was beautifully peaked and covered with snow. A mass of thick clouds laid at the same level all around the Rigi in the early morning, looking something as a glacier, with its rifts of gray color, completely hiding the lower world.

“Down the mountain a different way,” exclaimed Teedie. “Papa and I walked most. . . . I had a splendid day.” Later, in Nice, writing in his diary of a descent from another mountain, this with a view of the sea, he would describe “little Mama and Bamie trying to follow as fast as they could, all of us laughing and talking about what a nice time we were having and that this was a second Switzerland.”

Teedie was the diarist of the trip. Two or three other journals were begun and fragments of some have survived. Mittie, in hers, has an eye for nature—she names trees, flowers, birds—and for the “romantic” spell of places like Lake Como. Conie has exceptionally good handwriting for a child her age and frequently demonstrates her own sense of the romantic. (”We got up when it was pitch dark,” she writes at San Remo, “. . . and Ellie and I went all over the garden and stood by the Mediterranean and heard the roaring waves as they came dashing in.”) But Teedie alone kept methodically at his record, never missing a day during the entire year, however much else was going on and no matter how miserable he felt.

The diary has survived intact and it is an amazing document filled with innumerable revelations, not the least of them concerning the author himself. In physical form, it is actually several small, cheap stiff-backed notebooks. The entries are in pencil, the pages are nearly all badly smudged and blurred, and the handwriting is dreadful, sometimes nearly impossible to read. But his eye for detail is exceptional and he can be startlingly thorough. “He takes a great deal of interest now in everything he sees,” Mittie reported to Anna. Some of his inventories of “sights” seen in a single day ran to as many as thirty or even fifty items. He is tremendously fond of castles and of armor and armaments of all kinds, of fresh raspberries and dogs of any size or breed wherever he finds them. He loves all things Roman—Pompeii, Hadrian’s Villa, Roman coins, Roman walls, the Colosseum. “I . . . was given by Papa what in my wildest dream I had never thought to have,” he says at Naples, “a Roman vase and coin. Just think of it!!!”

There is an obvious interest in nature, but of the birds and animals that figure in the running chronicle, it is the bear that has the strongest fascination—a dancing bear at Lake Windermere, a game of “wild bears and hunting” with Conie and Ellie in the park at London and again at the Tuileries in Paris, a bear clock that he sees in a shop at Bern. At Florence he takes pad and pencil to the zoo to do a drawing of a bear.

Another entry made at Florence, a mention of a visit to “Mr. Elliot’s where we saw a beautiful book of birds written by him,” is of particular interest, since this was Daniel Giraud Elliot, the great American ornithologist whose collection of bird specimens, the finest collection then extant, was about to be acquired by the new American Museum of Natural History. Daniel Elliot was tall and bearded and enormously dignified. As a child he too had been “delicate in health.”

The manner at times is wonderfully pompous. It is easy to imagine the response had he so expressed himself among other American boys his age. At the end of the day at Oxford he writes, “I had a headache and Conie and Ellie made a tremendous noise playing at my expense and rather laughed when I remonstrated. . . .” He declares of the route to Genoa, “this railroad is an abomination.” The standard word of approval is “splendid” and once in Florence he is forced to excuse himself from play in order to “arrange my pantaloons.”

That he was enjoying himself the large proportion of the time, and nearly always when his health was right, is apparent throughout. Page after page he is having “fine fun,” “a great play,” “great fun.” There are touches of humor (”We are to write all our letters four pages, so much the worse for our friends!”) and one surprising, pleasurable moment at Ellie’s birthday party in Rome when he is kissed by a little girl named Elliese Van Schaack “as the boy she loved best in the room.”

This memorable account of a battle that took place on the Pincian Hill in Rome is from the entry of January 15, 1870:

We had a splendid day today. Ellie went out to get a sword and gun and I went to Mrs. Dickey’s for Charlie. Going back . . . we met Ellie with gun and sword. He lent the gun to Charlie and I picked up some stones. I was a little rebellious soldier. Ellie struck me with his sword. We then got for my weapons a club and two javelins. We then encamped and as I was sentinel, I revenged the blows of the sword by running away. I ran to a small hillock of dust and caves and took my stand. Up they came and Charlie made at me with the gun and cut my hand with it. I struck him in the chest and he fell on his back. But Ellie was on me with his sword and had me on my knees but I hurled him on Charlie. I saw, however, that I would be beaten in another battle and I rushed down a steep hill and when we fought again I defeated them and rushed up to another position and again encountered and beat them. They were now forced to receive me as an honored soldier.

But the same honored soldier plays dolls and “baby” with Conie, and he can be withered by the least sign of disapproval or ridicule. One entire evening at Nice is written off as “miserable” because “Papa called us children bothers. . . .”

At supper [another night] Mama laughed at me a great deal and made fun of me because I always say “Pretty Papa, Pretty Mama” and made me feel (and I feel now) very cut and ashamed of myself and I don’t feel natural, though Mama and Papa both tried to make it up when they saw what she had done.

On being told that his Uncle Weir Roosevelt is dead, he turns to the diary and writes, “It is the third relation that has died in my short life. What will come?”

Best by far are the “fine sociable times” with Papa and Mama. “We went in the cars and had a tremendous play with Mama.” “I and Mama and Papa had a sociable time by the fire with my stampbook.” “Papa and I had a jolly walk.” “In the evening Mama told us incidents of her early life and adventures of my ancestors. . . .” “I had such nice real tea for supper and such a nice time we did have, especially Mama and I who petted each other up. . . . Did I say I had real tea.”

Mama is all-comforting, never angry. Papa leads the way. Papa makes the rules; Papa gives out the spending money and requires an accounting of how it is used. Papa, dressed for the Vienna Opera, is “more handsome than I ever saw him.” In a crowd at St. Peter’s, as the family waits for a glimpse of the Pope, a monk shoves Teedie out of the way and Papa springs forward to fling the man aside. Papa gives “a grand dinner” at the hotel in Rome and invites “22 persons!!!”

On a few occasions Papa appears not to have been at his best. He seems to step strangely out of character. In the entry for January 4, 1870, we are told how Papa tossed pennies to a crowd of beggar children outside Naples, but that when one child “transgressed” some rule Papa had made, Papa whipped him “till he cried.” (It was immediately following this incident, interestingly, that he presented Teedie with the Roman vase and coin.) Another time, surrounded by a horde of half-starved Italian women and children, Papa bought baskets of cake. “We tossed the cakes to them,” Teedie writes,”... fed them like chickens with small pieces, and like chickens they ate it. . . . We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it.” This was all great fun, according to Teedie. Papa was a marvel. “We made the crowds . . . give three cheers for the U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.”

Bamie is “such a kind sister,” but remains part of the adult world, more like a second mother. Ellie is “the chief” or “captain” in their games. Conie remains his favorite playmate.

Still, there runs a theme, a mounting refrain really, of the pleasure and pride in being the first to see or do something, an eagerness to set himself apart from the others, to distinguish himself, to get out ahead of them; or simply to be alone, absorbed in private thoughts. It begins as early as the shipboard friendship with Mr. St. John, which he had managed entirely on his own and in his own fashion. “I was the first one that got on the continent,” he writes of the landing at Antwerp. “I walked with Papa before the rest most of the way,” he says of their hike out of Switzerland over the Splügen Pass. On a September day beside Lake Como he sits in a shaded woodland “with no sound save the waterfall and the Italian breeze on my cheek. I all alone am writing my journal.” “I began my ascent of the snow-covered Vesuvius,” he writes the last day of 1869. “I soon passed the rest and left them far behind.”

For Mittie, it may well have been the happiest year of her life. To judge by Teedie’s account she was never once ill or even out of sorts. Ironically, she appears to have been the only one of the family who never took sick, who never missed a day.

Italy had thrilled her. She had led the children through one museum after another, often plunking one or the other of them before a favorite painting or piece of sculpture: “Now, darling, this is one of the greatest works of art in the world, and I am going to leave you here alone for five minutes, because I want you to sit very quietly and look at it. . .”

Arriving in Paris the second time, in early March 1870, she could still write glowingly of sights yet to be seen. “I have only been once inside the Louvre,” she told Anna. “We are going to commence vigorously this week, it is so fascinating.”

For reasons that remain obscure, it had also been decided that Bamie would stay on in Paris. She was to be put in the hands of Mile. Marie Souvestre, headmistress of Les Ruches, a private school for girls in Fontainebleau, outside Paris. Then in her mid-thirties, with a long, distinguished career ahead of her, the remarkable Mile. Souvestre was a woman of singular poise and great culture, but also an outspoken agnostic, and this, in view of Theodore’s feelings on religion, makes the decision a little puzzling and suggests that Mittie may have had the final say. In any event, a first visit to Fontainebleau to see the school was made March 19, and as brief as Bamie’s time there would be, Mile. Souvestre’s influence would carry far.

In one respect only had the year been a failure. Teedie’s health, far from improving, had been conspicuously wretched throughout, as his amazing diary also reveals. From what he writes and from observations and clues to be found in family correspondence, the year can also be seen as a substantial medical profile of a very sick little boy whose case was by no means simple.

CHAPTER FOUR

A Disease of the Direst Suffering

1

BRONCHIAL ASTHMA is among the most serious of childhood afflictions—baffling, capricious, expensive, and, in its acute stages, terrifying. It is also a family affliction and a severe one, which is something seldom understood by those who have never lived with an asthmatic child, for rarely does anyone beyond the immediate family or the medical profession see an actual attack or have any idea of the suffering involved. The child known by the outside world is the child between attacks who appears to have little or nothing the matter with him, who can play and carry on like most any healthy youngster, even hike twenty miles in the Alps. It is only those closest to him who know how tenuous such intervals are. For the parents it is “living with a time bomb.” The attacks, when they come, are a shattering, numbing experience—always, no matter how many times it has happened before. Nights are made a shambles, sleep is lost, nerves are frayed. Parents become intensely wary of anything that might bring on an attack. They grow increasingly protective, often engulfing in their good intentions. And if, as the years go by, the child shows no improvement, they begin feeling desperate and depleted; they see themselves caught in the grip of something altogether beyond comprehension and their ability to cope. Some mothers “just about go crazy” with worry.

On the third day of October 1869, her fifth day in Vienna, Mittie Roosevelt sat in the garden at the Schönbrunn Palace, writing still another long letter to her sister. Again that morning, as in London, it had been necessary for Theodore to rush Teedie out of the city for a “change of air.” By this point in their married life, she and Theodore had been living with Teedie’s asthma for about seven years.

This morning Thee and Teedie left us immediately after breakfast to spend the day and sleep tonight at [Bad] Voslau, an hour by rail from Vienna. Teedie . . . seems hardly to have three or four days’ complete exemption and keeps us constantly uneasy and on the stretch. For instance on Lake Como . . . it came to a point where he had to sit up in bed to breathe. After a strong cup of black coffee the spasmodic part of the attack ceased and he slept; consequently woke up partly restored. Had the coffee not taken effect, he would have gone on struggling through the night. . . . Thee had warded off one or two attacks with this coffee, but likes to keep it for our trump card. . . . On Saturday was exactly the fortnight since we reached Venice. These entire two weeks he has had nothing but diarrhea and threats of asthma . . . and this morning, as I said, they have gone out of the city for this little change of air. We had almost every day lovely weather in Venice and these few days in Vienna cloudless blue skies and soft breeze. So what it is that keeps up the attacks is a mystery.

How conversant she and Theodore were with the latest medical theories on asthma, what medical advice they were getting, we may only speculate; but their concern for health being what it was and given the frequent contact they had with physicians—Hilborne West, Charles Fayette Taylor, John Metcalfe, the family doctor—they probably knew as much as did any parents of that day. And while it is true that enormous strides have since been made in pulmonary medicine, the things then perceived were neither trivial nor tangential. Asthma had been recognized as a definitive clinical disease for more than a century. A hereditary tendency, the fact that there is a “genetic predisposition” to asthma, had been noted. A seasonal pattern was perceived by many physicians. Certain foods, certain odors, bed feathers, house dust, cat fur, as well as abrupt changes in temperature or humidity, were cited as specific irritants that could bring on an asthmatic “fit” and patients were advised accordingly.

Equally impressive was the mounting body of opinion that the key lay somewhere in the “neurotic character of the complaint.” The first experimental work on the psychological factors in asthma was not to come until the 1880s. Freud and his revelations concerning the unconscious world were further still in the future. But the idea that asthma might be somehow connected with the emotions was very old—allegedly Hippocrates had warned, “The asthmatic must guard against anger”—and from the early part of the nineteenth century increasing numbers of physicians had become convinced that states of grief, anger, joy, “nervous influences” or “passions of the mind” played a more important part than heretofore reckoned.

The fact that an asthmatic’s lungs may be quite “perfect”—as the doctor in London found Teedie’s lungs to be—had been determined as early as 1819 by the famous French physician René Laënnec, inventor of the stethoscope, who perceived no organic causes to which asthma could be attributed but listed “mental emotion” among the primary probable causes.

“A preternaturally nervous . . . temperament, if not the cause, wonderfully favors the attack of asthma,” wrote an American doctor named Joshua Bicknell Chapin in 1843. “Extreme nervous irritability not only invites the attack, but aggravates the symptoms and prolongs continuance,” he said, and elucidated on the frustrations of trying to pin down a specific dietary or environmental cause.

What will almost universally relieve one case, will as assuredly induce a paroxysm in another. Ordinarily the air of low situations is more congenial than mountain breezes. . . . Some suffer in a certain room, but are immediately relieved if removed to an opposite room in the same house. One cannot sleep or rest in one street, or lane, but slumbers quietly if removed to another part of the same village or city. Another can breathe freely if he can only be allowed to sit in a room filled with smoke to suffocation, but pure air is almost intolerable. . . . While one is benefited by a journey in the country, another will find more relief in the contaminated atmosphere of the densest mart. . . . Most will avoid a crowded assembly as they would a pesthouse; but I have a friend who always resorts to such a place when practicable, for a moment of private breathing.

All such cases, he surmised, “owed their origin to certain mental impressions, or emotions.”

In 1864, or two years after the infant Teedie’s asthma had begun, a highly important work was published in Philadelphia, a book of 256 pages titled On Asthma. The author was an English physician, Henry Hyde Salter, a very keen observer who as the father of an asthmatic child had “experienced the horrors” of the disease. Like Laënnec, Salter had found no abnormalities in the lungs of his asthmatic patients, no trace of the disease in either the respiratory or circulatory system, and hence concluded that the trouble lay in the nervous system. Asthma, a disease of “the direst suffering,” a disease “about whose pathology more various and discrepant ideas prevail than any other,” was “essentially a nervous disease.”

Sudden “mental emotion,” Salter said, could both bring on an attack and abruptly end one. He did not know why, only what he had observed. He reported on a patient whose attack ceased the moment he saw a fire outside the window and another who had his asthma stop when put on a fast horse. Still other patients found that as soon as they neared the doctor’s office their asthma vanished, “suddenly and without any apparent cause except the mental perturbation at being within the precincts of the physician.” The onset of an attack, he noted, was frequently preceded by a spell of depression or “heaviness” (what Teedie called feeling “doleful”), and twenty years in advance of what might be regarded as the first studies in the psychosomatic side of asthma he reported on a small boy who “found his disease a convenient immunity from correction.”

“Don’t scold me,” he would say, if he had incurred his fathers displeasure, “or I shall have the asthma.” And so he would; his fears were as correct as they were convenient.

The nature of an actual attack was described by Salter in accurate, vivid detail and with considerable sympathy for anyone who had to try to deal with the situation. Specific kinds of treatment were described, including the “beneficial influence of sustained bodily exertion.” It was the most comprehensive study on asthma that had as yet appeared, the definitive word, and either Hilborne West, Taylor, Metcalfe, or all three, must have known about it and so consequently would the Roosevelts, in part if not in whole. Much of what Salter wrote on the importance of exercise reads as if it might have been the very text for all Theodore was to preach to his small son and that the son himself would choose as his own lifelong creed. “Organs are made for action, not existence; they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well,” insisted Dr. Salter.

The common methods then used to confront an attack varied greatly and to the present-day reader seem excessively harsh. Emetics and purges were standard. The common way to avert an attack was to make the patient violently ill, to dose him with ipecac or with incredibly nauseating potions made of garlic and mustard seed and “vinegar of squills,” a dried plant also used for rat poison. Children were given enemas, plunged into cold baths. Whiskey and gin were used, laudanum (opium mixed with wine) and Indian hemp (marijuana). The patient was made to inhale chloroform or the fumes of burning nitrate paper or the smoke from dried jimson weed (Datura stramonium), another poisonous plant, coarse and vile smelling, that had been used in treating asthma in India for centuries. Many children were made to smoke a ghastly medicinal cigarette concocted of jimson weed and chopped camphor.

Black coffee may have been the Roosevelts’ “trump card,” as Mittie said, but Teedie was also made to swallow ipecac and smoke cigars. The purpose of the cigar was to subject the child to what, in essence, was a dose of nicotine poisoning. “In those who have not established a tolerance to tobacco,” explained Henry Hyde Salter, “its use is soon followed by a well-known condition of collapse, much resembling seasickness—vertigo, loss of power in the limbs, a sense of deadly faintness, cold sweat, inability to speak or think, nausea, vomiting.”

The moment such a condition could be induced, he said, “the asthma ceases as if by a charm.”

The picture of such loving parents as Mittie and Theodore inflicting punishment of this kind seems almost inconceivable. But they did, which, if nothing else, is a measure of the extremes to which a mother and a father will go to avoid a bad attack. Also, violent vomiting very often works, just as Salter said. It can in fact avert an attack and is still resorted to in certain situations. And black coffee, it happens, was also a sound choice; caffeine, a stimulant, is closely akin to theophylline, among those drugs used most frequently to treat present-day asthmatics.

The sensation of an acute asthmatic attack is that of being strangled or suffocated, only infinitely more complex. The whole body responds. When Victorians used the words “fit” or “seizure” they were close to the mark. The trouble is not just in the lungs. The central nervous system is involved, the endocrine system, both sides of the brain, possibly the stem of the brain as well. The agony is total, unlike that, say, of smashing a finger in a door, where the pain is concentrated at one point. And the largest part of the agony is psychological—inexpressible terror, panic.

“Witches in my chest” is an expression sometimes used by children, while most adult asthmatics find it impossible to give words to what they experience during an attack. A feeling like drowning is frequently mentioned—slow drowning—but not even that quite suits. In the words of one asthmatic, “If I were drowning I would know I was drowning and I was going to die and that wouldn’t be so bad. Asthma is just plain terrifying. . . . You may die . . . but your fear is you won’t.”

Many asthmatics cannot bring themselves to talk about their illness, largely, it would seem, for fear that the mere thought of an attack might bring one on. Ten-year-old Teedie, for all that he was capable of including in his diary about the contents of museums or the events of a day, writes nothing of the feelings he experienced when “very sick” or having “a miserable night.” In later years he would remain equally reticent—very uncharacteristically reticent—saying only that as a child he had been “wretched,” “suffered much” from asthma and that “nobody seemed to think I would live.”

For reasons that are still imperfectly understood, the attacks come nearly always at night, usually about three or four in the morning. Asthma is a disease of the night, which, for a small, impressionable child, can contribute greatly to its terrors. The onset may be sudden or gradual. The first stage is a tightening of the chest and a dry, hacking cough. Breathing becomes labored and shallow. The child starts to pant for air (”asthma” in Greek means panting). A high-pitched wheeze begins. The child has to sit up. If he tries to speak at all, it is in short, desperate bursts. Soon he is unable to speak or move, except with the utmost difficulty. He is battling for breath, tugging, straining, elbows planted on his knees, shoulders hunched high, his head thrown back, eyes popping. Fiercely as he pulls and gulps for air, what he gets is never enough. A distance runner near the point of collapse knows much the same agony, except he also knows he can quit running if he chooses. The asthmatic has no such choice, and there is no telling how long the agony will go on.

“I sat up for 4 successive hours and Papa made me smoke a cigar,” reads the entry describing an attack the night of the crossing to Trieste.

“Poor little Teedie is sick again . . .” reads part of a letter written by Bamie from Munich,

it was coming on all day yesterday, but in the evening he seemed a little better so Father went out—before his return, however, Teedie had a very bad attack. Mother and I were very much worried about the poor little fellow and at last Mother gave him a strong cup of coffee, which failed as he could not sleep but sat in the parlor to have stories of when Mother was a little girl told to him.

At another point in the diary, he writes that he was rubbed so hard on the chest “that the blood came out.” By whom he does not say.

The cause of the horrendous difficulty in breathing is a swelling of the bronchial tubes which lead to the lungs, specifically the branchlike extensions of the bronchial tree. The normal involuntary muscular action of these airways is not functioning as it should. The bronchial tubes are filling with mucus. They are in spasm, no longer dilating (contracting and releasing) properly; they narrow and close down. Hyperventilation occurs, as less and less air is pulled into the lungs. The feeling, it has been said, is of taking in mere spoonfuls of air, these reaching only the top of the lungs, “and you know that no more is going to penetrate, that everything under that has turned to lead, and you’re depending on that little tablespoon as fast as you can get it.” Back and chest muscles are put to tremendous strain. The heart is pounding. The child coughs and perspires and turns deathly pale, a ring of compressed white around the mouth. He is being strangled to death. And the alarm of those with him does nothing to relieve his own terrible anxieties.

But though the sensation is of being unable to take air in, the problem is actually the reverse; the air already inside cannot be expired as in normal breathing. It is the used air trapped within the swollen lungs that is keeping the child from breathing in the fresh air so desperately wanted. The struggle is to get the used air out.

If the severity of the attack continues, if his strength begins to fail, the child will start to turn blue—the sign that he is in “status asthmaticus,” very near death from asphyxiation. With modern drugs, with potent bronchodilators like epinephrine, ephedrine, or aminophylline, such a state can usually be avoided, the attack kept within bounds. Oxygen can also be given. But no such drugs, no nebulizers or oxygen tents, were available in the Roosevelts’ day. How near Teedie came to dying during the worst of his attacks, whether, for example, he actually ever turned blue, is impossible to determine.

Once the attack is ended, the ordeal at last over, the child commonly experiences an upsurge of good feelings, an exuberance unlike any other. Nothing seems too big or too difficult to tackle. The fact that Teedie could get up and do all he did the day after a bad attack—that his best, most strenuous days during the European year were often those immediately following his worst nights—fits the pattern exactly. The attack the night of the crossing to Trieste was among the most severe, yet the day after, literally within hours, having had almost no sleep, he was out happily exploring the city on his own. The day following he hiked two hours, “in the broiling sun,” up and back, to a castle on a hilltop in what is now Postojna, Yugoslavia.

For the parents of the child, however, there is little such relief. As the attacks grow worse, their worry and frustration are compounded accordingly, as Mittie’s letter from the garden of the Schönbrunn Palace amply illustrates. Still, such concerns, like asthma itself, remain largely private matters. It is not the severity of the child’s condition or the anguish of the parents that the outside world sees. It is the special treatment the child gets, the costly, sometimes ostentatious things done in his behalf—special medicines, doctors, emergency travel to some distant, exotic change of scene. And if there happens to be money in the family, then such “signs” of the seriousness of the case are heavily accentuated, for while any family may be willing in theory to try almost anything to help the child, the family of wealth can in fact try almost anything. Money being no obstacle, the rich can respond to asthma in ways the poor or even the moderately well-to-do cannot, and this was particularly so in the days before public clinics and health insurance.

With asthma and wealth combined in the same family, it is as if the drama of the problem—and asthma is nothing if not dramatic—can be played out on a much larger, showier stage. And naturally the leading player, the small, ailing child, becomes even more special and out of the ordinary, his influence on the family destiny larger by far.

So it was not merely that Teedie was acutely asthmatic, but that he was acutely asthmatic in conjunction with virtually all the relief, diversion, every advantageous change of scene or consideration that money could buy. When he set things spinning, as every asthmatic does, the result was quite different from what it would have been for a child of lesser station. An attack comes at home and he is whisked into the night in a family carriage pulled by magnificent, matched horses, a carriage that may be summoned to the door at a moment’s notice, whatever the hour. It is a very privileged kind of resolution to the crisis, not to mention an exciting one.

The ocean breezes at Long Branch do not suffice, so off he is taken to Saratoga. Visits to Philadelphia are arranged whenever need be. Or summers in the country. Or a year in Europe.

This is not to suggest that his suffering was any the less for such treatment—or that the burden he presented was any less heartrending for Mittie and Theodore—but to emphasize the special circumstances within which the problem was cast. For in the light of what has since become known about asthma, there is little question that the family milieu, the specific ways in which the family responds to the problem—as individuals and collectively—bear directly on the severity of the disorder, even the timing of attacks.

2

The exact role of the emotions in asthma is still elusive, after nearly a century of study. Recent investigations strongly suggest that the disease is physiological in origin: something about the asthmatic makes him abnormally susceptible to an irritant of some kind—an airborne allergen in most instances—and so in the beginning stages, many physicians now contend, asthma can be properly described as allergic. But the interplay of emotions may also figure in the allergic process itself—nobody really knows—and once the asthmatic “mechanism” or “habit” is established, the part played by the emotions in “triggering” attacks is indisputable. It is as if the patient has somehow established a freak circuit and the emotions can trip it, setting him off. The attack is not deliberate (though it can be), rather it is provoked by certain painful feelings—buried anger, guilt, fear of abandonment, fears of all kinds—or of tensions that need not necessarily be unpleasant, the approach of a birthday or Christmas, for example. “It isn’t that the emotions of the asthmatic patients are different from those of other people,” stresses a specialist, “it is that with them the effects of an upset can be explosive.” If the patient is a child, the causes are essentially “wrapped up in the fears which beset most children and which they find so hard to acknowledge or discuss.” More important than the feeling itself is the fact that it remains bottled up inside. Dust, animal dander, the pollen season, damp night air, a hundred and one impersonal, external factors may play a part, but the psychological factors weigh heavy in the balance and it is in this sense that asthma is understood to be a psychosomatic disorder, like duodenal ulcers or hypertension. A view frequently heard among experts in pulmonary medicine is that there is no such thing as a totally nonpsychosomatic case of asthma—a view that, understandably, is often difficult for parents to accept.

The medical paper regarded as the first study of asthma’s psychological side appeared in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1886, too late to have any effect on Mittie or Theodore Roosevelt. A Baltimore physician, John Noland Mackenzie, reported on a severely asthmatic patient, a woman in her early thirties, whose attacks could be brought on by everything from thunderstorms to overeating to perfume, but who was particularly susceptible to the smell of roses. She was unable to be in a room where roses were present for more than a few minutes without having a violent attack. But then Mackenzie found that the sight of an artificial rose produced exactly the same result, a discovery, he said, that “opens our eyes to the fact that the association of ideas sometimes plays a more important role in awakening the paroxysm . . . than the alleged vital property of the pollen granule.”

While the validity of Mackenzie’s experiment was to be challenged, it nonetheless inspired countless studies along similar lines, the results of which were often astonishing, Asthmatic children said to be sensitive to house dust, for example, have been hospitalized in rooms generously supplied with dust from their own homes, and in nineteen out of twenty cases no asthma has resulted. Physicians have developed techniques whereby patients can be talked out of an oncoming attack. Important work has been done in the “family dynamics” of asthma—chronic unresolved conflicts within the “family constellation” are probed for—and a major facility, the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital in Denver, Colorado, has been founded on the proposition that the best possible therapy for many acutely asthmatic children is to get them away from their families altogether.

Asthma is now commonly explained to parents as a form of behavior; the child is unconsciously “using” his affliction for purposes of his own. “We tend to use what is available to us to influence our environment or to solve our problems,” writes a leading authority. “Children with asthma have asthma available to them . . . [and] behavior, not verbalization, is the language of children.”

The likeliest source of the child’s anxieties, it has long been thought, is the mother. Asthma is repeatedly described as a “suppressed cry for the mother”—a cry of rage as well as a cry for help. The child has an intense fear of being abandoned by the mother or of any form of rivalry for her affection. If the advent of asthma coincided with actual separation from the mother—from either parent—this too is considered an important piece to the puzzle. Thus a present-day specialist analyzing Teedie’s case would take very seriously the fact that his troubles began during the Civil War, years of great confusion and tension for the Roosevelts, when Theodore was away months at a time and two new infants arrived on the scene to vie for Mittie’s attention. The whole “climate” of ill health within the Roosevelt household—Mittie’s palpitations and headaches and intestinal grief, Bamie’s troubles with her back, Conie’s asthma—would also be reckoned as much or more an environmental factor in Teedie’s asthma than, say, the quality of the air he happened to be breathing.

Oncoming attacks in his case were often signaled a day or so in advance by moods of dark melancholy or homesickness. “I feel very, very homesick tonight,” he writes one Friday in Lucerne. “Teedie threatened with asthma,” Mittie notes in her journal the same evening. The attack followed in less than forty-eight hours.

But in nothing the Roosevelts said or wrote during the year is there even a suggestion that his condition was the result of an allergy, or thought to be. There is no talk of the hay season, no obvious avoidance of dogs or cats or specific foods.

Nor, we find, is there a seasonal pattern to the attacks. As the diary shows, they came in every season, year around. They happen in city and country, in damp, cold climates and the heat of summer, at sea level and in Switzerland. No one time of year or environment seems to be any more beneficial or harmful than another. The fact that he was abroad—away from New York and anything at the 20th Street house that might have been the cause—did him no apparent good. If anything, the year abroad appears to have been his worst yet.

Indeed, from looking at the diaries one might be inclined to see the attacks as entirely random—that is if one were to note only where they occurred or in what season, rather than which day of the week. It is when the attacks are plotted day by day on a calendar for the years 1869 and 1870 that a distinct pattern at once emerges.

His asthma strikes on weekends, usually Saturday night or what was actually early Sunday morning. There are exceptions, ordinary weekdays when he is “rather sick” or “still sick.” Tuesday, October 26, the day before his birthday, his condition was serious enough to cause a hurried departure from Berlin, ahead of schedule, though in this instance apparently it was the sign of an oncoming attack, rather than an actual seizure, that set everyone in motion. (”I feel very doleful and sick and homesick and there is such a bustle my head aches. . . . Perhaps when I’m 14 I’ll go to Minnesota, hip, hip hurrah!”) But the number of times in which Sunday figures as his bad day is astonishing. The worst attacks, moreover, virtually all occur on Sunday.

His first illness of the trip, it will be recalled, the siege of seasickness, his one bad day aboard ship, occurred Sunday, May 16. In July he was rushed from London by train to spend the weekend of the fourth, a Sunday, at Hastings with his father. Sunday, August 29, at Lucerne, he writes, “I was very sick on the sofa and lay in bed all day. . . .” The bad night at Lake Como mentioned by Mittie in her Schönbrunn garden letter happened the weekend of September 11–12. The attack on the way to Trieste began at approximately three o’clock the morning of Sunday, September 26.

The following Sunday, October 3, was the morning Theodore took off with him from Vienna to Bad Voslau, the morning of Mittie’s letter.

The attack at Munich described by Bamie took place the following Saturday night and Teedie’s diary entry for that Sunday, October 10, reads: “I was very sick last night and Mama was so kind telling me stories and rubbing me with her delicate fingers. I was so sick in the morning that in the afternoon Father, Ellie, and I went to Starnberg.”

This made the third such emergency exit to spend a Sunday out of town. In Paris it would happen twice again. On two consecutive weekends, because of his condition, the child was hurried from the city to the fresh air of Fontainebleau, these expeditions coming immediately after the initial trip to see Bamie’s school.

The intriguing question, of course, is why this should have been so. Why the weekends? Why Sunday?

The pattern is too pronounced to be coincidental. How long it had been the pattern, what the timing of attacks may have been prior to that year abroad, is impossible to resolve, since there are no comparable records. References to his condition in earlier years rarely specify when the seizures came. Interestingly enough, however, the one bad time for which we do have a calendar date occurred on a weekend and reached its greatest severity on a Sunday. The letter in which Grandmamma Bulloch tells how Mittie and Theodore packed the child off from Long Branch to Saratoga—the first known mention of his asthma in family records—was written the day of their departure, Monday, June 22, 1863. The difficult time had been the day before.

Salter, in his book, had written on the strange “periodicity” of asthma among some patients, noting that a weekly cycle was not uncommon. His example was of a small boy whose attacks came every Monday morning, a pattern that appeared to be an effort to avoid school but that Salter attributed to the family routine of a large Sunday meal.

In Teedie’s case the answer may lie in the nature of Sunday itself, which in the Victorian era was still the Lord’s Day, the sanctified day of rest and the one day of the week when the head of the household was home from work and thus also available to his children. Among such properly devout families as the Roosevelts it was a day of rigidly prescribed dress and behavior, of formal family gatherings, of little or no play, of church, Bible readings, family prayers, evening hymn singing in the parlor. The Roosevelts “kept” the Sabbath. It was a day for letter writing, a quiet walk perhaps, and for Theodore, his weekly turn at the Newsboys’ Lodging House (with other children outside the home). Teedie, in his mature years, would remember it as a day “we children did not enjoy—chiefly because we were all of us made to wear clean clothes and keep neat.” The single redeeming feature was the chance to gather in the front parlor, a room of “splendor” with its cut-glass chandelier.

On the expedition across Europe, Sunday invariably meant church, wherever the Protestant variety could be found, and a day off from touring. The few Sundays when they did not attend church the children were required to remain quiet—to draw a church or memorize several verses from the Bible. It was permissible to look at things as the day went on, but not to do much. At Pisa one Sunday, the family went to see the tower, but not until the following day did they climb it.

As a very small child Teedie had also experienced a peculiar and memorable fear of church. It was a small incident that, in later years, made an amusing anecdote of the kind every Roosevelt loved to tell. But for him at the time it was no joke and should not be discounted.

Mittie had found he was so afraid of the Madison Square Church that he refused to set foot inside of it alone and so she pressed him to tell her why. He was terrified, she discovered, of something called the “zeal.” It was crouched in the dark corners of the church ready to jump at him, he said. When she asked what a zeal might be, he said he was not sure, but thought it was probably a large animal like an alligator or a dragon. He had heard the minister read about it from the Bible.

Using a concordance, she read him those passages containing the word “zeal” until suddenly, very excited, he told her to stop. The line was from the Book of John, chapter 2, verse 17: “And his disciples remember that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”

The Sundays he was sick in Europe he was seldom obliged to go to church. That certainly, the diaries show, was among the immediate, obvious consequences of a “bad night” or of merely being “a little sick,” even those Sundays when he was not whisked off to the country. During the first stay in Paris, for instance, he missed church three consecutive Sundays. (”I was sick and did not go out at all except for my Russian bath.”) In Rome, Saturday, January 8, 1870, he is “a little sick.” Sunday, January 9, he “did not go to church at all.” In Florence, Sunday, February 27: “As I was sick with a headache I and Ellie went out to the garden and made roads with stones. . . . No Sunday school.”

But the outstanding examples, of course, are the Sundays afield, out of London, Vienna, Munich, Paris, immeasurably wonderful times in the blessed open air, the best being those spent alone with Papa. The Sunday at Hastings was “the happiest day I have ever spent.” He did attend church in this instance, but Sunday school was conducted beside a castle wall, in view of the sea. The Sunday at Bad Voslau was again like Hastings, “viz, there were only the 2 of us,” and “we had Sunday school out. . .” “Papa and I went a long way through the wood and had Sunday school in them.” The Sunday away from Munich with Ellie also along was “splendid” and of the two escapades outside Paris he writes as follows:

Saturday, April 16, 1870

I had such a bad night that we went to Fontainebleau. We children went first. We played in the garden and woods. We had a nice time but in the night I was sick.

Easter Sunday, April 17, 1870

Today was the happiest Easter I ever spent. After breakfast and a walk in the woods alone, Mama, Papa, and all we children went out in the woods to hunt for violets. . . . We played . . . and then had Sunday school in the woods and picked cowslip and heard the cuckoo sing.

After dinner we all drove out through the woods to the rocks. We then walked all round the rocks and over crevasses. We saw a tree 1,400 years old and [an]other 300 years old. We saw a stream of pure and cold water. We had such a happy time.

Saturday, April 23, 1870

We went to Fontainbleau in the cars with Bamie. I had a bad time till two o’clock, when after dinner we went to the rocks and there we made such a scramble and went in dark caves and over big cracks, and up steep places and all over.

Sunday, April 24, 1870

We went in the park where on a sand bank we made tunnels 10 paces long. After dinner we went to the rocks where we jumped over crevasses and ran in them and had such fun. . . . In one of our rambles we saw very fresh traces of a deer.

All the stifling formality and constricted horizons of Sunday were at once transformed by the space and excitement of the natural world—by a tree 1,400 years old, streams of pure water, dark caves, and fresh deer traces. “If Raphael had only painted landscapes instead of church things,” he laments in the diary after a visit to the Vatican. To be with Papa, to have Papa’s undivided attention, to be off and away on an adventure together, was the ultimate joy. Any opportunity to be with Papa, then, later, made him feel better. (”Well, well, said Mr. Greatheart, let them that are most afraid, keep close to me.”)

Their day at Bad Voslau was nearly ruined by a chance encounter with a few of “Papas friends (or as I thought of them, enemies).” With their unexpected appearance, it became a “miserable time,” he writes, adding quickly, “but it was not Papa’s fault.”

Neither Mittie nor Theodore, nor any of the family, appears to have been aware of the timing of the attacks. Nor, apparently, was Teedie. Twice, however, he reports testily that Conie tries to get attention by faking she is sick. She complained she was too weak to walk, “and then went bouncing down the stairs . . . until she saw Mama, when she suddenly became very sick again (sarcastic).” Another time, “Conie was sick but her sickness always decreased when Mama was out of the room and she could not be petted.”

Both of these performances occurred on weekends, the first on a Saturday, the second on a Sunday, and at neither time did Teedie himself become ill. He was struck instead, in the first instance, by a siege of abject homesickness; in their hotel suite at Dresden he lay on the floor in the light of the fire pining away for “times at home in the country.” Of the morning of Conie’s own Sunday “sickness,” he further reports, “Papa, Bamie, Ellie, and I went to church but I did not like it.” Conie’s condition required that Mama stay behind.

Mama’s love and attention were magic. His physical need for her, the intense attachment he felt, are expressed with striking candor and frequency. In Paris they went together to the Russian baths six days in a row, to be subjected to clouds of steam and switches of fir boughs. She was with him through his headaches and stomach cramps. To pull him out of his doleful spells, she told him stories and looked at pictures with him. One evening in Paris she showed him a photograph of little Edith Carow and the effect was devastating. Her face, he noted in an air of grand tragedy, only “stirred up in me homesickness and longing for the past which will come again never, alack never.”

Whereas Papa made him drink black coffee or smoke a cigar or swallow ipecac (with “dreadful effects”), Mama soothed, petted, “rubbed me with her delicate fingers.” After a day of unremitting rain at Nice, when he was up late alone, “Mama came in and then she lay down and I stroked her head and she felt my hands and nearly cried because they were feverish. We had a fine sociable time. . . .” Papa took him to the doctor (in Vienna and Paris), and on the train from Berlin, it was Papa who made him get out for air at every station stop, despite the cold and the falling snow.

Why it was Papa nearly always who rushed him off to Hastings and the other places is an interesting point, since Mittie could have managed it as well, or she could have gone along with them to make a day of it. Or the whole thing could have been turned over to Bamie or a servant. Doubtless Theodore knew how large he loomed in the child’s eyes, how desperately the boy needed him. Almost certainly he wanted to give Mittie some relief, to get him away from her, for her benefit.

Another likely possibility, of course, is that Theodore himself, for all his piety and adherence to convention, enjoyed being off and away; he wanted a day of freedom every bit as much as did his small companion. If so, then the asthma was serving both their needs—it was doubly “convenient,” to use Dr. Salter’s word—and Teedie, conceivably, would have sensed as much. In some way for which there were no words he could have understood perfectly what those days meant to his father and this too would have figured in whatever troubling, complex combination of feelings lay at the heart of his troubles.

3

As different—as very different—as is every case of asthma from another, much of the impact of the disease is commonly shared by severely asthmatic children. Many of the same feelings and fears are engendered, many of the same perceptions of the world, and there is no reason to believe Teedie was an exception. For a child as acutely sensitive and intelligent as he, the impact of asthma could not have been anything but profound, affecting personality, outlook, self-regard, the whole course of his young life, in marked fashion. The asthmatic child knows he is an oddity; that somehow, for some reason no one can explain, he is a defective, different. But he knows also that his particular abnormality lends a kind of power. He knows, in ways a normal child can scarcely imagine, what it is to be the absolute center of attention. His attacks, horrible as they are, dreaded as they may be, are riveting to all who are present, his hold on his audience is total. Nothing can go on as usual, no one can remain indifferent to him, in the presence of an attack, and it is for no mere fleeting moment that he commands center stage. “A beheading is over in seconds,” observes one of the few chronic asthmatics who are willing to talk candidly. “A hanging—how long does that take? Three, four minutes, possibly five at the most. But an attack of asthma!”

The inclination, as time goes on, is to demand more and more attention—if not through asthma, then some other means.

Inevitably, as part of his way of coping with the world, the asthmatic also acquires a highly sensitized feeling for his surroundings. Of necessity he becomes acutely cognizant of the size and shape of rooms, the nearness of people and their comparative size, the whole look and feel and smell of spaces small and large, of fresh air, of skies and winds.

Ailments other than asthma, any of the inevitable knocks and scrapes of childhood, or of later life, are often taken with notable stoicism. It is as if having experienced asthma, he finds other pains and discomforts mild by comparison.

He has learned at an early age what a precarious, unpredictable thing life is—and how very vulnerable he is. He must be prepared always for the worst.

But the chief lesson is that life is quite literally a battle. And the test is how he responds, in essence whether he sees himself as a helpless victim or decides to fight back, whether he becomes, as Teedie was to say of a particular variety of desert bird, “extremely tenacious of life.”

Oftentimes it is a question of which parent is chosen to identify with and emulate.

In the history of asthma, among the most celebrated cases is that of the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), who thought his asthma, like his homosexuality, was rooted in the unconscious and was part of a price he had to pay for his creative gifts. “We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things,” Proust wrote, “but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy.... Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly.”

Some aspects of Proust’s case have a familiar ring. His mother, like Mittie Roosevelt, was a cultivated, sensitive woman. Being a Jew set her off from her Catholic husband and his background much as Mittie’s southern origins set her off from Theodore and the rest of the Roosevelts. Proust, like Teedie, had a younger brother, close in age, who was the stronger, more robust of the two. His father, however, unlike Theodore, was a distant and indifferent figure. As a child, Proust, also, had been considered too weak to live. His devotion to his mother was intense, overwhelming. Indeed, among those specialists who see asthma as a suppressed cry for the mother, Proust’s case is the classic example. “You demolish everything until I am ill again,” he once accused his mother, while on another occasion, he told her, “I’d rather have asthma and please you.”

Proust never saw himself as anything but a victim, Proust, sealed off in his cork-lined writing room, is the quintessential recluse. Following his mother’s death, he remained a semi-invalid, dying ultimately of respiratory complications.

Just as no two cases of asthma are ever exactly alike, so the response to the disease varies infinitely. In the end, it seems to depend on the individual. Many children “grow out” of it. For others it is a life sentence. Henry Hyde Salter’s prognosis was hardly encouraging. The asthmatic, he wrote, “knows that a certain percentage of his future life must be dedicated to suffering . . . and from many of the occupations of life he is cut off. . . his usefulness is crippled, his life marred. . . . The asthmatic is generally looked upon as an asthmatic for life.”

For Teedie, in some powerful way, father and the out of doors meant salvation, and Theodore, in his efforts to bring the shy child out of himself—in all the ways he encouraged confidence, gave diversion, companionship, set an example of strength—was, consciously or not, taking the best possible approach, given the circumstances. The goal, according to a treatise written a century later, is to make the child “a participant, not a spectator in his own care.” “I am to do everything for myself,” Teedie wrote proudly at the close of one of those days alone with his father.

As interesting perhaps as any line in the journal, in what it foreshadows, is one written at Nice, in which he reflects on a joyous day’s hiking. “It was,” he writes, “the first time I had walked up a hill of decent size for a long time and I felt quite refreshed.”

Walking—even a day of “severe walking”—was strongly recommended by Salter and other authorities, and horseback riding was considered the most beneficial exercise of all for asthmatics. Get action, Theodore had long preached. His beloved Bamie had been saved by the “movement cure” and by a doctor who believed in treating the patient as a whole being in mind and body.

“Organs are made for action . . .” Salter wrote; “they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Metamorphosis

1

May 25, 1870

This morning we saw land of America and, swiftly coming on, passed Sandy Hook and went into the bay. New York!!! Hip! Hurrah! What a bustle we had getting off.

They were on home ground at last, back to aunts, uncles, cousins, servants (”all our friends”), and pink-faced, important Grandpa; back to the perpetual life and hubbub of the biggest, best city in the best country in the whole wide world; to traffic clogged to a standstill and the familiar New York smell of coal smoke and cooking and horses and hay and horse manure—with a damp, salt-air touch of the East River. The house on East 20th Street was found to be exactly as remembered. Life picked up with amazing ease, at about where it had left off—afternoon calls, teas, tutors, lessons, books, Father’s morning paper, Father’s office week, and those rectitudinous Roosevelt Sundays. There was talk of business, which was good, and of Grandfathers new summer house at Oyster Bay, Long Island. Over the back wall Mr. Goelet’s garden was in its springtime glory.

One bright day, Red Cloud, chief of the Oglala Sioux, came riding down Fifth Avenue in an open carriage, a real-life warrior from the Dakota prairies wearing a stovepipe hat. There was a clamor in the papers for an eight-hour day and talk of “the engineering wonder of the age,” the East River Bridge, which was finally under construction. One of its two colossal towers was to rise at the foot of Roosevelt Street.

A new experimental passenger tube, the first subway, had been opened downtown and the building boom uptown was thought to be “marvelous.” Change was the order of the day, as always in New York, and a year was a long time to have been absent.

Some of what had transpired in the interval was not so marvelous, to be sure. The panic in September had sent shock waves among the established, old families. Bad enough that a couple of conniving parvenus like Fisk and Gould could have caused it all, but must they remain outrageously vulgar, flaunting their money and political pull? What did it portend if such men could attain the pinnacles of financial power? The Gould-Fisk scheme to corner the gold market had nearly worked, and their crony Tweed, the new Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, the most conspicuously corrupt politician in anyone’s memory, was riding higher than ever. He owned the mayor, judges, editors, even some Republicans, as was noted sadly at the Union League. No decent man could enter public life any longer “without imminent danger of losing caste.”

So surely it was with sinking hearts that Theodore, brothers Cornelius and James Alfred, and their father received word that brother Rob would shortly announce for Congress on the Tammany ticket.

But only with the onset of summer did life seem suddenly to bear down heavily on Theodore and Mittie. July brought a murderous heat wave, among the worst on record, and from France, where they had left Bamie, came news of the calamitous war with Prussia, which was declared July 15. No actual fighting took place for several weeks and Bamie herself happened to be hugely enjoying the excitement—she would tell in later years how French troops went marching past her school windows singing—but for her father especially it was a time of exceeding tension and worry, a condition felt by the entire household and one not greatly helped by his own fathers insistence that he do something about the child’s safety before it was too late.

Further, in combination with all this—or possibly as a consequence—Teedie, who had been “peculiarly well” since the return from Europe, went into a sharp decline. His attacks resumed, coming so often now that Theodore and Mittie had to take turns rushing him off to some country place or watering spot—to Saratoga or Oyster Bay, a rented house at Spuyten Duyvil, a summer hotel at Richfield Springs. Theodore began to wear thin. “I am away with Teedie again much to my regret,” he told Bamie in an undated letter written from his father’s place on Long Island. “He had another attack, woke me up at night and last night to make a break, I took him to Oyster Bay. It used me up entirely to have another attack come so soon after the last. I know and appreciate all the mercies for which I should be thankful but at the moment it seems hard to bear.”

To drop everything and leave with the boy at any emergency was becoming very difficult for him, he told her in another letter. He had much too much to do.

On August 10 Mittie wrote to Bamie, “Teedie had an attack of asthma on last Sunday night and Papa took him to Oyster Bay where he passed Monday night and Tuesday night. Of course, Teedie was in ecstasies of delight...”

By the time the fighting broke out in France and the vaunted armies of Napoleon III began their spectacular collapse, Bamie was across the Channel safe in the care of Uncle Jimmie Bulloch, her exodus having been arranged by Theodore through American friends in Paris named Lamson. It had gone smoothly according to plan. “Do not let them spoil you in Liverpool,” he chided her; he had troubles enough as it was. Her mother and Teedie were off to “take the waters” at Richfield Springs, for the second or third time, accompanied now by Uncle Hilborne.

“Your mother came back . . .” Theodore reported two weeks later, “Teedie still suffering... and they returned leaving me once more a bachelor.”

Two days later at Richfield Springs, on a Sunday, Teedie had another attack. “The spasm yielded,” Mittie reported, “. . . but [he] passed a wheezy miserable night and I have concluded to leave . . . for New York tomorrow, with the feeling that this last week Teedie has lost all he gained . . . and the sulfur baths and water proved no good.”

“I have just received bad news from your mother,” Theodore wrote to Bamie. “She returns with Teedie asthmatic again. His attacks have been more frequent. . . . All say that Denver City would be just the air for Teedie, but until he is older this seems impossible.”

That was on September 6, when his patience was all but gone. How soon afterward he and Teedie had their talk is not known, but probably it was soon. As Mittie later recounted the scene, he called the boy to him and addressed him as Theodore.

“Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should.” He must build himself up by his own effort. “You must make your body.” It was a summons and the offer of a counterpoise, a way, the one way, to right his own balance.

“It is hard drudgery to make one’s body,” the father said, “but I know you will do it.”

And with that, allegedly, the sorry little specimen threw back his head and declared he would do it.

Instead of Denver City he got Wood’s Gymnasium, Mittie accompanying him—and Elliott as well—for daily workouts under the direction of Mr. John Wood, whose young protégés included Sloanes and Goelets and Vanderbilts and whose tutelage was claimed to be as beneficial to character as to physique. She never missed a session and a more unlikely presence in a gymnasium is hard to picture. She sat alone patiently on a large settee against one wall, intent on every part of the program. Standing in front of a weight machine, body forward, head and chest up, arms out, Teedie pulled and hauled, hoisted the weights up from the floor, then let them ride slowly back down again, time after time. He and Ellie hammered away at punching bags, swung dumbbells, spent hours straining at the horizontal bars. After about three months of this, Mittie had John Wood equip their own back piazza with all the required apparatus and it was thus, under her direction (as Wood later acknowledged), that the famous family gymnasium came into being.

As the weeks and months rolled by—as winter came and Bamie returned from Liverpool, as Uncle Rob went off to his newly won seat in Congress, as a besieged and starving Paris at last surrendered to the Germans—Teedie plugged away at his dreary regimen. His sisters would later write that among the most vivid of all childhood memories was the sight of him out on the piazza struggling between the horizontal bars, “widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed.”

Long years afterward, reflecting on what had been on his mind at this critical juncture, he would tell a friend of certain lines from the Browning poem “The Flight of the Duchess” that had brought him up short. The passage described the overbred son of a noble line—”. . . the pertest little ape I That ever affronted human shape.”

So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,

This Duke would fain know he was, without being it; . . .

And chief in the chase his neck he perilled,

On a lathy horse, all legs and length,

With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;. . .

Suddenly, as he told the friend, he saw himself for what he was—an affront to human shape, boneless, all speed, no strength: a pretender. It was no good wishing to appear like the heroes he worshiped if he made no effort to be like them. Strength had to come first; one must be strong before everything else.

The sting of the poem was something quite different from and beyond a command to “make” a body. Now shame entered in. He felt “discovered.”

Yet for all he put himself through as time passed, lifting and hauling on weights, his progress was pathetic. He remained embarrassingly undersized and underweight, a scrawny frame with stick arms and stick legs. If he dared venture beyond the family circle, he counted on Ellie to be his protector in case of trouble. Two years later, traveling to Maine for his asthma, but alone, he would be humiliated by a couple of boys of about his own age who, to pass the time during a ride in a stagecoach, decided to make life miserable for him. When at length he tried to fight back, he found either one could handle him with easy contempt, to use his own words, “. . . handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet... prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.”

In overall health, he does appear to have improved somewhat, enough at least to lend encouragement. How much direct encouragement he was getting from Theodore, he never said. He did once remark later on, however, that his father “used now and then to say that he hesitated whether to tell me something favorable because he did not think a sugar diet was good for me.”

The attention Theodore devoted to Bamie, meantime—now that she was back in his “possession”—was striking.

Saturday became their special day together. Nothing was allowed to interfere with “our Saturdays,” she remembered. They would spend the morning on horseback in Central Park, usually dropping in at the Museum of Natural History, which was then temporarily located in the old arsenal just inside the park at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue. Or they might stop at one of his Children’s Aid Society schools. “We would get home for lunch very late,” she wrote, “and as a rule would find whoever was most interesting at the moment in New York lunching with us.” In the afternoon they would go for a drive or visit a hospital. He was exhausting, she said proudly. At the day’s end she was a “complete wreck—deeply attached to my father, but worn to a shred.”

In Mittie’s absences, Bamie ran the house for him. “Order it [dinner] at prompt quarter before seven,” reads a note he left her. He was expecting guests.

Menu as usual—raw oysters if small, soup, oyster coquilles, saddle of venison if in the house, or turkey, croquettes, quail, lobster salad, cheese and crackers, candied fruit, ice cream of course. Give John [the new butler] the wines and tell him and Mary [Ann] that I wish everything nice.

Her life was increasingly determined by such directives, and to her very great satisfaction. Nothing pleased her—nothing pleased any of them—so much as pleasing him. And he appears to have resolved that if she was to have none of her mothers beauty, not a trace of that porcelain delicacy deemed so essential by fashion and that he himself prized so in Mittie, if she was to be homely and handicapped and still have any kind of life, then she must make up for it in other ways. She would know how to manage, to take charge, and be everlastingly useful.

The story among Roosevelts of later generations was that she actually took over from her mother and ran the household from the time she was about fifteen, but this simply was not so. It was only that she seemed to be running everything, she was so capable and eager to cope. Spinsterhood seemed her certain destiny, but one could also be a force in this world, like Theodore’s fellow toiler in philanthropy, Louisa Schuyler, who, as was said, had the willpower of a captain of industry.

2

Alone of the family the boy had his alternative world, his own dark continent to explore.

Once, as a very small child, he had seen the face of a fox in a book and declared it was the face of God. Father, he said, had the head of a lion. He drew endless numbers of mice and birds, filled notebooks with written descriptions of ants, spiders, beetles, dragonflies, all such entries being “gained by observation.”

Nor was he ever anything but serious about his “career” in science, as he called it, the beginnings of which could be traced, he later said, to a dead seal he had seen laid out on a plank in a market on Broadway. He seems to have been about seven or eight at the time, which, interestingly, would correspond with his anguish over the “zeal” in the Madison Square Church.

“That seal,” he later wrote, “filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure.” He asked where it had been killed and was told in the harbor. He kept coming back to see it, day after day as long as it was there. He brought a pocket rule and measured it. He wanted to buy it for his “museum,” but wound up getting the skull only—a memorable incident, since it was one of the few times in his life when he had not gotten what he wanted.

Dozens of books had passed through his hands, beginning with David Livingstone’s mammoth Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, discovered when he was too young to read and barely big enough to lift it, but could gaze by the hour at the pictures. He liked the second part of Robinson Crusoe for its account of wolves, and then with the books of Captain Mayne Reid he was borne off spellbound to the Great West.

Captain Reid was among the most popular authors of the day and especially with boys. (Other contemporary devotees included young Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.) An Irishman, Reid had exchanged the life of a tutor for that of trapper and trader on the American frontier and his books—The Boy Hunters, Hunter’s Feast, The Scalp Hunters—were rollicking adventures, full of action, violence, and grand-scale visions of the out of doors. God was in nature—a force—and nowhere so plainly as beyond the Mississippi.

Unroll the worlds map [begins The Scalp Hunters], and look upon the great northern continent of America. Away to the wild West—away towards the setting sun—away beyond many a far meridian. . . . You are looking upon a land . . . still bearing the marks of the Almighty mold, as upon the morning of creation. A region, whose every object wears the impress of God’s magic. His ambient spirit lives in the silent grandeur of its mountains, and speaks in the roar of its mighty rivers. A region redolent of romance—rich in the reality of adventure.

Reid’s world was all that the boy longed for, one of great manly quests and boundless inspiriting freedom. In such settings, with such a life, one could be reborn, made brave, made strong. He read “enthralled,” curled in a chair or standing on one leg, “like a pelican in the wilderness,” the other leg raised and propped, foot on thigh, to make a bookrest.

What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch fires [says one hero] I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life.... My strength increased both physically and intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action. My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied my eyes reached to a more distant vision.

Along with his rollicking yarns Reid regularly provided descriptions of birds, animals, plant life, quantities of geology, geography—most of it quite accurate. A story suddenly stops so a Darwinian “chain of Destruction” may be dramatized. (A tarantula is killed by a hummingbird, which is eaten by a chameleon, which is done in by a scorpion lizard, which is swallowed by a snake, which falls prey to a kite; then the kite is the victim of an eagle and the eagle is shot by the boy-hero who is the “last link.”) Even proper zoological names may appear in the midst of a story, as though the reader will of course wish to know such things.

About noon, as they were riding through a thicket of the wild sage (Artemisia tridentata), a brace of those singular birds, sage cocks or prairie grouse (Tetrao urophasi), the largest of all the grouse family, whirred up before the heads of their horses.

On the heels of Reid’s books came those of J. G. Wood, an entertaining English writer who specialized in natural history, and by age ten or so, even before the trip to Europe, he was led by Uncle Hilborne, “my father in Science,” to On the Origin of Species. Later, staying with the Wests in Philadelphia, he would report to Theodore, “I go to the Academy every spare moment and am allowed to have the run of all the 38,000 books in its library. They have got quite a number of specimens, also.” Mittie, writing from a summer house at Dobbs Ferry, tells how Hilborne “talked science and natural history and medicine, etc., with Teedie, who craves knowledge.”

Summers now—those of ’71 and ’72, when Theodore rented a succession of country houses in the hills along the Hudson—were very near to paradise for the boy. No letup in lessons was permitted. (”I study English, French, German, and Latin now,” he wrote to Aunt Annie.) It was also a rule that at the dinner table they speak only French. But the drudgery of weights and parallel bars could be replaced with riding, swimming, running barefoot; and nothing, not even French, could offset the ecstasy of open fields and living things. As a family they all adored the country. Summers, Conie wrote, were “the special delight of our lives.” But Teedie led “a life apart,” his love of nature becoming a passion and one which they all had to learn to live with. There were snapping turtles tied to laundry tubs, a litter of newborn squirrels, their eyes still closed, that needed feeding with a syringe three times daily. A tree frog positioned beside the lamp on the parlor table “proved a remarkable fly catcher,” and when Mittie found he was storing dead mice in the icebox and ordered that they be thrown in the garbage, he despaired over “the loss to science.”

His reading became steadily more ambitious. He moved on to the works of Audubon and those of Spencer Fullerton Baird, the foremost American naturalist of the day (Catalogue of North American Birds, Review of American Birds, North American Reptiles, Catalogue of North American Mammals).

The first encounter with actual wilderness came the summer of ’71, in August, when Theodore initiated an expedition to the Adirondacks. Their destination was Paul Smith’s, on Lake St. Regis, a favorite summer hostel among well-to-do sportsmen and their families.

They all went—in true Roosevelt fashion, in a swarm—Theodore, Mittie, and the four children, Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Laura, Uncle Hilborne, Aunt Susy, and Cousin West. Theodore packed a copy of The Last of the Mohicans to read by the campfire after dark and he, Teedie, Ellie, Uncle Hilborne, and Cousin West, separating from the others (who happily remained at Paul Smith’s), spent three days roughing it “in the bush.” So at long last Teedie could write from personal experience of “those grand and desolate wilds,” write pages in his own journal that might have been penned by Captain Reid himself.

We wandered about and I picked up a salamander (Diemictylus irridescens). I saw a mouse here which from its looks I should judge to be a hamster mouse (Hesperomys myoides). We saw a bald-headed eagle (Halietus leucocephalus) sailing over the lake.

From the Adirondacks they went to the White Mountains, where the three boys climbed Mount Lafayette, and at no point in the journal for all the month of August is there even one mention of asthma.

That fall, at the American Museum of Natural History, it was officially recorded that the year’s acquisitions (in addition to a human hand bestowed by Mr. P. T. Barnum) included one bat, twelve mice, a turtle, the skull of a red squirrel, and four birds’ eggs presented by Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

A year later he was receiving lessons in taxidermy from a striking old man who had been the great Audubon’s own “stuffer.” John G. Bell, who kept a musty little taxidermy shop on Broadway, had been to Dakota Territory with Audubon and to the upper reaches of the Yellowstone. It was for him that Audubon named the Vireo belli. Once on the Yellowstone he had actually saved Audubon’s life by grabbing a rifle and shooting a wounded bull buffalo that was within feet of trampling Audubon to death. The boy would remember Bell for the rest of his life as a tall, white-haired figure in a black frock coat, “straight as an Indian,” who had done “very valuable work for science.”

Then, at a stroke, the summer of 1872, he was given a gun and a large pair of spectacles and nothing had prepared him for the shock, for the infinite difference in his entire perception of the world about him or his place in it.

The gun was a gift from Papa—a 12-gauge, double-barreled Frenchmade (Lefaucheux) shotgun with a lot of kick and of such simple, rugged design that it could be hammered open with a brick if need be, the ideal gun for an awkward, frequently absent-minded thirteen-year-old. But blasting away with it in the woods near Dobbs Ferry he found he had trouble hitting anything. More puzzling, his friends were constantly shooting at things he never even saw. This and the fact that they could also read words on billboards that he could barely see, he reported to his father, and it was thus, at summer’s end, that the spectacles were obtained.

They transformed everything. They “literally opened an entirely new world to me,” he wrote years afterward, remembering the moment. His range of vision until then had been about thirty feet, perhaps less. Everything beyond was a blur. Yet neither he nor the family had sensed how handicapped he was. “I had no idea how beautiful the world was . . . I could not see, and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing.”

How such a condition could possibly have gone undetected for so long is something of a mystery, but once discovered it did much to explain his awkwardness and the characteristic detached look he had, those large blue eyes “not looking at anything present.”

3

It was the world of birds—birds, above all—that burst upon him now, upstaging all else in his eyes, now that he could actually see them in colors and in numbers beyond anything he had ever imagined.

Normally, with summer ended and city life resumed, he would have had to wait until spring to return to the woods, but that same fall, in October 1872, the family set off for a second sojourn abroad, an even longer tour than the last, beginning with a winter on the Nile. So by mid-December, with gun and spectacles, he was tramping the shores of the “great and mysterious river,” knocking birds from the sky as rapidly as he knew how, happy as he had ever been.

The birdlife of the Nile is extraordinary. The river is a flyway and a winter haven for thousands upon thousands of birds. The air is thick with them—larks, doves, herons, kingfishers, and tremendous flocks of snow-white cattle egrets, which are called ibises locally, or “the farmers’ friends”; wild ducks of a dozen different varieties, geese and vultures and hawks, and magnificent black-and-yellow kites that sail like hawks against the sky, their wings golden in the sunshine. And he could see it all—”quite well through my spectacles.” At sundown once, outside Cairo, he watched for nearly two hours as tens, then hundreds of “ibises” came in to roost in the treetops of a distant island in the river, until the trees were “whitened with immense multitudes.” In an hour’s time another day he counted fifteen different species of birds.

But seldom was he content merely to look. As a serious scientist, he must collect, and from the day the family expedition set forth, heading “up south” on the river, the collecting—the killing—commenced in earnest. He downed his first specimen, a warbler, the first bird he had ever killed, December 13, the first morning on the Nile, a few miles above Cairo. He next very proudly “blew a chat to pieces” and in the days following, combing the riverbanks, wandering through groves of date palms, he fired away at just about anything in sight, killed a wagtail, a pelican, hawks, larks, doves, then an ibis. Christmas morning he was given another shotgun with which he found he could bring down five starlings with a single shot.

Theodore allowed he, too, had caught the spirit, so intense was the boy’s pleasure. Theodore seems to have shown no prior enthusiasm for killing anything. He was the sort of father who, at breakfast, would rescue a yellow jacket from the honeypot, cup it in his hands and carry it out the door to freedom. But now it was “Father and I” who “sallied out with our guns,” day after day, leaving the rest of the family on board the great Nile houseboat, or dahabeah, which Theodore had chartered for the trip. “Father and I went out shooting and procured eighteen birds,” reads one entry. On another foray he “procured” a grosbeak, a sand lark, four chats, a crested lark, a ringed plover, and a dove. Writing to sister Anna, Mittie described how at Thebes Teedie came to her with “eyes sparkling with delight”—a dead crane in his arms. It was, he noted, the biggest thing he had as yet killed.

No one appears to have objected to any of this. To him it was all “splendid sport.” Egypt was like another long summer of freedom, of brilliant skies and open space. Lessons in French and English taught by Bamie occupied only a few hours a day. Father was a steady companion.

Again his asthma vanished. He had never known such a winter, he wrote. To look over the desert gave one the same feeling as looking over the Great Prairies of America, said the boy who had never been west of Philadelphia but who knew his Cooper and Captain Mayne Reid. He was Natty Bumppo on the Nile. Or Rube Rawlings, Captain Reid’s version of Natty. He was Humboldt on the Orinoco, seeing new worlds with the eyes of science. Or John James Audubon, who in his time may have killed more varieties of birds than any man who ever lived.

Sky and river and birds became his element. Work, his “serious work,” was what gave the journey its “chief zest.” Only on Sundays was he required to put up his gun and abstain from the assault.

And in all there was something faintly comic about him. He had, as would be said, a kind of headlong, harum-scarum quality that was more Don Quixote than Humboldt. Bamie, remembering the big spectacles and the great gun slung over one shoulder, described how he would charge off astride a small donkey, “ruthlessly” in chase of “whatever object he had in view.” Appearing suddenly in the midst of other mounted tourists, his donkey out of control, he could be “distinctly dangerous,” as he and his gun bounced every which way.

Theodore wrote of plunging after him through a bog (both were on foot in this instance), doing his all to keep up” at the risk of sinking hopelessly and helplessly, for hours . . . I felt I must keep up with Teedie.”

The advent of gun and spectacles, moreover, had coincided with marked physical changes. He was rapidly growing out of his clothes. He was suddenly all wrists and anklebones, unkempt and shaggy, wearing his hair “à-la-mop,” as he said. River mud clung to shoes and trousers. “The sporting is injurious to my trousers,” he explained in mock annoyance.

The return to the dahabeah at the end of each day’s hunt, game bag full, was his chance to shine. He performed right on deck, in the still, hot afternoons, his taxidermy kit—knives, scissors, arsenic, tweezers, needle, thread, cotton padding, an old toothbrush—spread before him. He worked in the shade of a long, sun-bleached canopy, skinning the day’s kill, surrounded usually by odd members of the family, guests, or some of the boat’s crew.

The procedure was the same for each bird, large or small. It was placed on its back on a clean towel or sheet of paper. He opened the beak, put in a bit of cotton padding, then bound the beak tight with thread. The anus also was packed with a bit of cotton, to keep it from excreting blood and excrement and soiling the feathers. Then he parted the feathers from the hollow of the breast to the anus and with his knife made an incision, being extremely careful not to bear down any more than necessary. With his fingers he then began slowly to peel the skin away from the body, again working with the greatest care, so as not to tear the skin. The legs had next to be cut away, at the first joint, then the end of the spine had to be severed, again very carefully, leaving all tail feathers intact. If he became too hurried, if he tore the skin or flooded the feathers with blood, the job would be ruined.

The wings were cut with scissors near the body. Then the skin from the skull had to be peeled back with utmost caution and particularly around the eyes, the skin being pulled away up to the beak, at which point he would cut the neck at the base of the skull. This done he could clean out the brain, tongue, and palate, then pull the skin back over the skull. And once all that was accomplished he had only to skin the legs, wings, and tail, each in itself a ticklish process requiring equal care and patience.

It was, plainly, work neither for the squeamish nor for anyone accustomed to tossing things off in half-hearted fashion. Many adults might find it beyond them, even as spectators.

Once, dissecting a kestrel, he discovered in its crop (to his utter delight) the remains of a lark, a lizard, and several beetles.

Neither the game bag nor the taxidermy kit nor he himself smelled any too good apparently. It was, remembered Bamie, “to the discomfort of everyone connected with him” that he carried forth with his new passion.

4

“The traveler is a perfect king in his boat,” explained Lloyd’s guidebook to the Nile, and large, bearded Theodore Roosevelt might have served as the model. When not off with Teedie chasing after birds, he liked to sit on deck smoking his cigar or reading aloud to the assembled group from a heavy volume of Egyptian history. It was he who organized picnics ashore and planned their outings to the great monuments. Sundays he served as pastor to his fold, preaching on deck. Watching the shoreline slide by, he found that “everything carries me back to old Bible times.” Like countless other travelers on the river, he seems to have been filled with a sense of the everlastingness of life. These were the people who had held the Jews in bondage, he said, and they looked no different, he imagined, from what they had then. “We have even seen the magicians with their snakes in the public streets,” he wrote to Anna Gracie, “taking quietly scorpions and cobras out of their shirt bosoms, and the old bricks that gave the Jews so much worry are still made of mud and straw now lying on the bank as I look up.”

Once, in Cairo, Teedie had noted how “a beautiful Circassian lady, inmate of a rich man’s harem, was looking (with veil dropped) out of a window above us . . . and appeared to have no objection to being openly admired by Father.”

Mittie, from what she and others wrote of the journey, may be pictured rising early each day to get the morning air, a slim, youthful woman in white, lovely as the morning, and tiny beneath the sweep of canopy. Temperatures by midday were in the high seventies, mornings and evenings were more like October, and though her dyspepsia caused her to feel “pretty bad” at times, her spirits were high. The heavenly air and sunshine, the slow lulling rhythm of their progress on the river, stirred a sensual joy in the elements and in her own being. She relished the privacy and comfort of the boat, the “open air life with nothing to do,” “the splendid sun.” Theodore questioned how such advanced people as those of the ancient kingdoms could have worshiped birds and wolves. Mittie wrote, “In such a climate as this, I do not wonder that they became sun worshippers.”

As a way to travel there was really nothing like it. Henry Adams, who was also “doing” the Nile that winter in a dahabeah, said he had never known until then what luxury was. To Mittie it was the ultimate departure from life as usual. She was the Roosevelt who knew how to relax; the hours of peace and quiet, the service on board, suited her exactly. “The children have gone to bed,” she begins a letter about ten one evening. “I am seated in the little salon of our dahabeah. The door is open which leads to our deck, and by the lamp which is on the table there I can see Ibrahim, our waiter, ironing some of our linen. . . . Some of his front teeth are gone, but I love him still.”

The boat, the Aboul Irdan (Ibis in English), had a crew of thirteen, not counting the captain and steersman, a “first-class cook” and his assistant, plus two servants. As specified in the contract, it was well supplied with “everything (excepting wines and liquors) necessary for the comfort of the passengers.” Teedie describe it as “the nicest, coziest, pleasantest little place you ever saw.” Three meals daily were served in a paneled dining salon. There were staterooms for everyone, bath, divans on deck.

In total, in two months’ time, they traveled nearly twelve hundred miles on the river, from Cairo to the First Cataract at Aswan and back again, and along with climate and scenery and monumental ruins, they enjoyed a very social time, since they were actually traveling in a small convoy with two other parties. Four young Harvard men—Nathaniel Thayer, Augustus Jay, Francis Merriam, and Harry Godey—were aboard the dahabeah Rachel. Mr. and Mrs. Smith Clift of New York, with their daughters Edith and Elizabeth, were on the Gazelle.

Because of Egypt’s prevailing northerly winds, progress southbound, upriver on the Nile, was good most of the time. With sufficient wind they were under sail day and night. (It was also specified in the contract that day and night “one of the crew shall at all times of sailing hold the rope or sheet that is attached to each sail.”) Those times when the wind suddenly dropped, the river would take hold. “Sometimes we sail head foremost,” wrote Conie to her friend Edie Carow, “and sometimes the current turns us all the way around . . .” On days when there was no wind at all, the choices were to wait at anchor near shore, accept a tow from a steam tug, or start “tracking,” the immemorial system whereby the crew went wading ashore to drag the boat forward.

Initially, it had been suggested that a steam tug be hired at Cairo to tow the whole convoy of Americans to Aswan, but the Roosevelts declined, “as we go for the entirely different life,” Mittie explained. On the return trip they could ride with the current.

To the children, for the rest of their lives it would always be “that wonderful winter” on the Nile. “Our life on board I cannot describe,” wrote Ellie; “it is lazy I know and yet I have not a minute to spare.” Conie recalled “an absolute sense of well being”; Bamie, the “golden sunshine with never a moment’s rain.”

They were all three years older than they had been the first time abroad. It was not Teedie alone who was changing; they all were. Bamie, who at Vienna in another few months would make the first of her several debuts, turned eighteen at Aswan, an event celebrated with a family expedition by moonlight to the island of Philae. It had been discovered that she too was painfully nearsighted and like Teedie she was fitted with spectacles, but so great was her fathers power over her that when he said—in jest presumably—that he had no wish to present a daughter to society who wore such things, she put them away and refused ever to wear them.

She sits with him in a studio portrait made at about this point in her life, the only photograph we know for which he posed with any one child. It is in the classic Victorian father-daughter mode. There are yards of damask drapery, a tasseled bell cord, a pedestal, a painted backdrop of a garden wall. She has a footstool and sits hands in lap. Her feathered hat and tailored jacket, the large bow at her neck, are the height of fashion, and her small figure, for all that conceals it, is plainly that of a young woman. He studies her from behind, one elbow on the pedestal, only his head and upper torso revealed, which is what makes the picture so interesting. Father is seen quite literally on a pedestal, his pensive, adoring gaze fixed forever on the focal point of the arrangement, her plain, pale, but somehow very determined little face.

She was interested, very interested, in the Harvard foursome who came aboard to visit time after time, but then she realized all at once that it was Mittie they came to see; it was her “darling little mother” who so fascinated them, just as later in Europe Mittie would be taken for her sister, her younger sister.

“Still, we all became devoted friends,” she would recall by way of dismissing the incident, yet for her to have harbored no resentment, no jealously toward her mother would have been nearly inhuman, and one day her own son would confirm that she was in fact quite jealous of Mittie through much of her youth.

Her duties as tutor to the younger three were assumed without complaint. It was an effort, she said, that “taught me more than I had ever learned before . . . it did make us work, and that was what Father wished. . . .”

Elliott, still the larger, more robust of the two brothers, was an ingratiating youngster, as naturally sociable, open-faced, and now as carefully combed and particular about his appearance as Teedie was the opposite. He seemed to have little of Teedie’s hunger for attention. Conversation, friends, came easily. He loved to sing and to write nonsense verse and was good at both:

There was an old fellow named Teedie,

Whose clothes at best looked so seedy

That his friends in dismay

Hollered out, “Oh! I say!”

At this dirty old fellow named Teedie.

His gift from Papa at Christmas was a rowboat, by which he put off from the dahabeah to wander alone over the river at will, disturbing neither man nor beast so far as we know.

Possibly the most changed of all the children was Corinne, who at eleven was an infant no more, but a pert, unmistakably female little presence, quick to learn, quick to laugh or cry over not very much, yet sufficiently mature to be moved both by the majesty of Karnak and the “mystic” face of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson too was on the Nile that same season, and when, at Rhoda, he and his daughter anchored close by the Roosevelts, Theodore at once took his four to meet him. Later Emerson and his daughter, Ellen, returned the visit and Ellen in a letter has left us one of the rare observations on the children written by somebody outside the family. “Enchanting children,” she called them, “healthy, natural well-brought-up, and with beautiful manners.”

New Year’s Eve Theodore organized a party on deck that the children remembered as the high point of the trip. They were anchored at Minya, four dahabeahs tied up in the dark, another boat, Waterlily, with some people named Waitman, having joined the flotilla. With the newcomers, the Clift family, the Harvard men, and the Roosevelts there were fifteen to twenty people by the time everybody assembled. Theodore and Bamie made eggnog and young Francis Merriam started off the singing with something called “She’s Naughty but So Nice.” They did “Paddy, Come Over the Hill” and “Clochette, Clochette, She Was a Sad Coquette” and “Old Folks at Home”:

All up and down the whole creation,

Sadly I roam,

Still longing for the old plantation,

And for the old folks at home.

Champagne was uncorked at midnight and space was cleared for a Virginia reel. “Mamma joined,” wrote Conie, “and Father danced with Mr. Clift, he, ‘Papa,’ acting as a lady—’rather a large one, was he not?’”

But nearing Cairo on the return voyage, Theodore became downcast and sentimental. The boat must soon be turned over to other travelers who would neither know nor care anything about the times they had passed there. The boat was “not to be our home but only one more step on our journey of life.”

The picture is of a family strangely and most contentedly adrift, riding the timeless river, as in some dreamy romantic nineteenth-century painting, an incongruous Stars and Stripes luffing above a huge brown sail. It was a time of transition, as they all appreciated. Their life as a family was about to change dramatically; everything was to be different henceforth, something Theodore felt most acutely.

His own father was dead. Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, “merchant of the old school” (as said The New York Times), had “passed from the scene” July 17,1871. The loss to the family, their grief, had been profound. The old man had seemed inviolable, an institution unto himself, as a neighbor wrote. But with the estate settled, Theodore had been made a very rich man. Though the total left by his father has never been determined for certain, it appears to have been somewhere between $3 million and $7 million, which means Theodore’s share would not have been less than $1 million ($10 million or more in present-day dollars).

A fortune had come into his hands at what was the height of the postwar boom and this Egyptian winter was only among the immediate, more obvious consequences. (Such travel was “horribly expensive,” as Henry Adams had discovered. In two months Theodore spent something over $2,000, or about five times what the average American family had to live on for a year.) Of far greater consequence had been a decision to give up the house on East 20th Street and build anew uptown. Theodore and his brother James Alfred had bought adjoining lots on the south side of 57th Street, just west of Fifth Avenue, which would put them two blocks from Central Park, in the heart of what was becoming “the” section of town. Theodore was brimming with enthusiasm for the project. He and James Alfred had decided on adjoining houses. Their architect was Russell Sturgis, whose Gothic country estates were all the rage. Plans were drawn, approved, construction begun. It was to be no mere brownstone this time. Indeed, little would be spared in the way of expense. All the principal woodwork and furniture, for example, were being custom made in Philadelphia, after designs by still another fashionable architect, Frank Furness.

To uproot everyone from East 20th Street after so many years was no light decision, obviously, but probably a move somewhere would have been forced upon them in any event—with or without their new fortune—for the uptown tide was running strong.

Everything near 20th Street was turning commercial. Union Square was being overrun by the needle trades. The stately old Roosevelt house on Union Square had already been torn down to make way for a sewing-machine factory. Lord & Taylor was moving to new quarters at Broadway and 20th Street, less than a block from Theodore’s front door.

It was because the new house would not be ready until summer that Theodore had planned such an extended stay abroad. After Egypt, the family would tour the Holy Land, then stop in Vienna. By May they were to reach Dresden, where the youngest three were to be placed in the care of a German family, to be tutored in German for a few months. Mittie and Bamie would go on to Paris and Carlsbad, meantime, and he would return to New York to see to business and the final stages of the new house. Lucy Sorrel Elliott and her children—cousins Johnny and Maud—were living in Dresden temporarily, so such an arrangement seemed eminently sensible.

“If one allowed himself to dwell upon the moral to be drawn from all our surroundings here,” Theodore wrote near the end of their time on the Nile, “it would not be enlivening. Our gayest parties are made up to visit tombs .. . of those who have passed away centuries ago and whose names even are now unknown. . . . It is more painful to reflect upon the people gone than even the relics of their greatness.”

His father had died at the age of seventy-seven. He was now fortyone. His fathers dream of a permanent tribal enclave in the vicinity of Union Square and 20th Street had lasted all of twenty years. ”One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.”

But what chance he had for extended reverie seems open to question, given the activities of his older son the nearer they drew to Cairo and journeys end. The “collecting” reached a fever pitch during their last weeks on the river—sixteen pigeons one day, a peeweet, a zick-zack, two snipes, and eleven pigeons on another, never a day but Sunday when the gun ceased blasting. It must have seemed at times as if there were a war raging amid the palms, for the boy was a poor shot, missing many more times than he hit. Some days he hit nothing at all.

The grand total of birds killed during the two months came to something between a hundred and two hundred. He really did not know for certain. He had lost count.

PART TWO

CHAPTER SIX

Uptown

1

THE FOLLOWING SUMMER of 1873, alone in New York, Theodore kept steadily on the move. It was his way of fighting loneliness, he said, though the impression is of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. “You know I never approved of rusting out,” he wrote Bamie, which sounds more like him.

The “perpetual rush” of his day began at six in the morning and seldom ended before midnight. The once leisurely pace at Roosevelt and Son was a thing of the past. Orders for plate glass were pouring in and particularly from Chicago, where a new city was being built in the aftermath of the Great Fire. But there were, besides, questions to be settled pertaining to Roosevelt investments and Roosevelt properties. People like Louisa Schuyler came to discuss further good works, others to talk of business schemes needing Roosevelt money. His museums, the Children’s Aid Society, the Orthopedic Hospital, all suddenly required his attention, while work on the new house demanded that he look in there at least once a day, usually first thing in the morning.

He was staying at the Union League Club. Evenings he dined with friends; weekends, whenever possible, he went to the country. One letter mentions an “unexpectedly pleasant” visit with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish at his home in Garrison; in another he reports on a dinner across the river from Dobbs Ferry, “after which we took our cigars on the edge of the Palisades and enjoyed the last shadows of the setting sun.” He went cruising on Long Island Sound with the Aspinwalls on their yacht Day Dream. He bought an expensive new saddle horse named Fritz of which he was inordinately proud and a “very stylish” new T-cart for drives in the park. “Fritz goes beautifully,” he reported, “and it is glorious to be able to go into the country at once from our door . . .”

Seeing the finished house for the first time, he had been astonished by its size and beauty, astonished and tremendously pleased. There was no better-built house in New York, he declared. When he noticed that the architect had included imitation oak beams—beams done with plaster—in the ceiling of the front hall, he ordered that the ceiling be torn down. It “seemed hard to destroy so much beautifully finished work,” he explained to Mittie, but he knew how dissatisfied she would be with anything artificial. There would be real beams instead.

“I can see all who pass in Fifth Avenue nicely from your room,” he told Bamie, “and just came in time to save a bathtub from going, as originally intended, into your closet.”

Farther uptown, on the west side of Central Park at 77th Street, the new American Museum of Natural History was under construction. For the moment it was only a huge hole in the ground for one wing—this in the center of acres of mud and squatters’ shacks—but the plan was for a great red-brick fortress, going on and on, nearly Egyptian in scale, to house one of the most valuable scientific collections in the world. The architect was Calvert Vaux, who, with Frederick Law Olmsted, had laid out Central Park. Theodore, as a member of the committee for plans, had become familiar with every detail. The final complex was to cover fifteen acres, fill a space three times larger than the British Museum. Plate glass for windows and showcases, as it happens, was also to be supplied by Roosevelt and Son.

No other project so appealed to his pride, he wrote Mittie the day he inspected the site. He liked to imagine the value of such a collection for all those who, “like Teedie,” were in quest of scientific knowledge. If there was to be a monument to his own efforts on earth, to prove he had “done something” with his life, he wanted it to be this museum.

“I think without egotism this really would never have been carried through without my aid,” he told her.

His financial contribution to the project that year was $2,250, double what it had been before. When a $10 annual membership was organized, he and five other Roosevelts (brothers, cousins) were among the charter subscribers.

Sunday was his day to write letters. This period was the longest he and the family had been separated since the war and at times his concern for their well-being seems to have been no less than in those earlier years. (One letter is even mistakenly dated 1863.) Bamie was directed to “relieve your mother of every care possible.” Bamie must “bring her home able to undertake the cares of our large house.” Mittie was told to rest, to obey her diet, to avoid “indulgences,” to take every day at Carlsbad very seriously. Mittie must come home strong. “I am so anxious to see you home well, and so well that we will never be obliged to repeat this experiment.”

Her stay at the famous spa had been his idea. (”The more I think of it, the better I am pleased with my own self-denial.”) The regimen at Carlsbad, as he knew from her letters, was a far cry from their life on the Nile or at Vienna. She was living on zwieback and soft-boiled eggs and “nasty glasses” of mineral water, walking, reading, turning in no later than ten. His concern over “indulgences” must have struck her as mildly amusing.

But the main worry, as for so long, was Teedie. His asthma had returned almost from the moment they left the Nile, the first attack coming the Saturday night they reached Port Said after touring the Suez Canal. More attacks followed in the Holy Land, including a “bad” one. He was “very sick” with colic at Constantinople, “had the asthma” again on a cruise up the Danube. At Vienna he turned listless and gloomy. They were staying in the Grand Hotel, enjoying the best of everything. The city’s parks and gardens were in spring bloom. But the “big three” were preoccupied with things in which he could take no part. Theodore had been suddenly pressed into service as a substitute American commissioner for the Vienna Exposition; Bamie and her mother had been taken up by Viennese society, and were busy buying clothes, going to receptions and balls. To Teedie it was all “the most dreary monotony.”

In a letter to Theodore from Dresden, the boy asked forgiveness for his handwriting, since “the asthma had made my hand tremble awfully.” There were more attacks, violent headaches. Alarmed by what she heard, Mittie left Carlsbad for Dresden to find him wheezing badly and forced to sleep sitting up, as he had as a small child. What he needed, he told her, was a change of scene. So a few weeks later came word from the Swiss Alps that all was well. They were enjoying the “bluest of blue skies,” Mittie wrote. Teedie had “improved vastly,” Teedie “goes to bed well.”

In September when the terrible Panic of 1873 burst upon the country, Theodore was as incredulous as everyone else. There had been warnings and most notably a run on the Vienna bourse in May, at the time the Roosevelts were there. Some newspapers and financial specialists kept insisting the country was sound, even as railroads began to fail, that this was only another “Wall Street panic,” like that of 1869, and would soon pass. In fact, a great depression had begun, the worst of the century thus far, the causes of which were many and complex—the staggering costs of the Civil War and of the Franco-Prussian War, overspeculation in railroads, trade dislocations resulting from the opening of the Suez Canal, heavy borrowing to rebuild Chicago, too-easy credit, worldwide inflation. The heady postwar boom had ended with shattering finality. The suffering was to be widespread and of much longer duration than anyone as yet imagined.

It began in Philadelphia September 18 with the bankruptcy of Jay Cooke and Company. When the firm closed its doors shortly before eleven, it was as if the Bank of England had failed. In New York nearly forty banks and brokerage houses went under that same day. September 20 all trading was stopped, the Stock Exchange closed for ten days. “The failures continue in unheard-of numbers,” Theodore wrote Mittie from the quiet of his club. Banks were being mobbed. Henry Clews and Company, a Wall Street bastion, had gone down that afternoon (September 23). He pitied especially “poor Mr. Clews, who has made his business his life. He told me a short time since that he had not for years taken a holiday. . . . Now all. . . is swept away in a day.”

Mittie, again in Paris, wrote of feeling “very anxious” over the news from New York. “At supper last evening a note was handed [to me] telling of the suspension of three banks and [the] Union Trust Company.” But then this seems to have ended such distasteful topics. Their correspondence returns at once to private matters. She is buying china soap dishes for the new house and bolts of claret-colored cloth for new livery for the servants. He is hiring servants (a much larger staff will be needed). A marble mantelpiece has arrived; the new furnace is in and going “full blast.” A carpet she picked out earlier in Paris is in port. He has ordered gas fixtures that he hopes she will like and the old chandelier from the 20th Street library looks quite well, he thinks, in the room that is to be his study.

“I have left the billiard room without any chandelier at present,” he tells Bamie, “only side lights, so if you do find it will answer for dancing it will [not] be in your way.”

Everything on order from Philadelphia—furniture, woodwork, a huge hand-carved front staircase—was behind schedule. When the staircase arrived and was put in place, it missed its connection with the second floor by three feet. The architect had given the wrong measurements, with the result that the entire thing had to be taken out and remade.

The house was filled with ladders and workmen on October 5, the day Theodore moved in, and there was still considerable disorder and no front staircase when the family arrived on the Russia a month later to the day. But with Dora Watkins, Mary Ann, a footman named Frank, some four or five further additions to the “family below stairs,” including a Sophie, a Mary, a George, and a black groom named Davis, they moved in bag and baggage—”all the way up on 57th Street.” The new address was Number 6 West 57th Street.

A remark by Bamie years later that her mother’s European buying spree for the house “proved rather fatal to the family fortunes” would seem to have no basis in fact. Nothing—not the house or its furnishings or the panic—appears to have put the slightest dent in the family fortune. The one inconvenience suffered was the postponement of Bamie’s debut, which was to have taken place before Christmas. As it was, the party was given in January, and in the interim, to please her, Theodore arranged another dance in her honor in Philadelphia.

The house was a showplace, even by the extravagant standards being set in the vicinity along upper Fifth Avenue. There was no resemblance whatever to the house on East 20th Street. To move “uptown” was to move up in the world, but this was something more. The whole feeling was different, foreign. It was as if one had entered the domain of an altogether different family, another kind of people.

Rooms, hallways, mirrors, fireplaces, bookcases, furniture, everything was larger and infinitely more luxurious. There were tremendous mirrors everywhere, tasseled chandeliers, walls of glassed-in books, intricately carved sliding doors, paneled and tiled fireplaces, huge urns, inlaid woods, polished silver, Persian rugs on Persian rugs. East 20th Street had had a degree of restraint, even simplicity—or at least simplicity as understood by mid-Victorians. There the furniture had been largely the standard pieces for the standard domestic gentility. (Grandmamma Bulloch, it will be remembered, warned of “excessive extravagance and fondness for show.”) But the sumptuous pieces conceived by Furness were all one of a kind, all of rich inlaid woods and mighty in scale—great hand-carved, leather-upholstered, brass-studded dining-room chairs, heavy as thrones and broad enough to accommodate even the very largest of that era’s well-fed gentry; a bed for the master of the house and his lady that might have been commissioned for an oriental potentate.

No one knows what such things cost. A generation later they would be considered in “horrid taste,” “utterly ghastly,” and, except for the bed and one or two other pieces, they would be happily sold off for little or nothing. A generation after that each would be a rare and magnificent period piece.

Windows were few and heavily curtained, closing off the world beyond. On the top floor was a fully equipped gymnasium. (”We are going to have boxing lessons . . .” wrote Ellie; “it will be jolly fun.”) Space for Teedies museum was provided in the attic, his collection now greatly expanded by the birds from the Nile, each of which was to be properly identified with its Latin name on a little card printed in pink.

For Bamie’s “at home” debut, it is recorded, some five hundred invitations were sent, which gives an idea of how large a house it was.

How much of the interior look had been dictated by the architects, or to what degree it was expressive of Mittie or Theodore, is impossible to say. Nor is there any record of what the final bill came to. But it was the only time Theodore had everything built to order for him, and if, as he said, he expected to live out his days there, he obviously intended that no comforts be spared. Had his name not been Roosevelt, he might have been fairly accused of “ruinous display.”

To keep the two boys and Conie on an upward path that winter, he hired a new tutor, a young Harvard graduate named Arthur Cutler, in whose care Cousin West, the son of Theodore’s late brother Weir, was also placed. For several months, until Teedie began pulling ahead, the four youngsters worked at the same pace; but that summer—the summer of 1874—by which time Teedie was working six to eight hours a day at his studies, it was determined that he would be going on to college, whereas Ellie, most likely, would not. Teedie’s efforts under Cutler were directed exclusively to passing the entrance examination at Harvard, this choice having possibly been influenced by the four young men on the Nile, or, more likely, by Harvard’s preeminence in the field of natural science. Yale or Princeton would have been closer to home, Columbia closer still and there were family ties to Columbia. Harvard, however, produced men like Albert Bickmore, head of the Museum of Natural History. The whole approach to teaching the natural sciences had been transformed at Harvard by the late Louis Agassiz, whose son was curator of the new Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Harvard had broken all precedent and made a man of science its president, Charles Eliot, and included on its faculty such figures as Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the geologist, and William James, both of whom, like Bickmore, had been star pupils of the great Agassiz.

To his charitable efforts Theodore gave more and more of himself all the while, as the depression worsened and increasing misery was to be found everywhere. A decade earlier his money had enabled him to miss the war and now, like most of the very rich, he and his sailed high above the panic, quite untouched by it in any material way. But as in the earlier national tragedy, he was incapable of detachment or of withholding his compassion. “All that gives me most pleasure in the retrospect,” he preached to his older son, “is connected with others, an evidence that we are not placed here to live exclusively for ourselves.” He visited hospital wards, talked with the inmates of prisons, went into the slums to console and moralize. He urged the establishment of workhouses for vagrants. He toured the city’s dreadful asylums for the insane on Ward’s and Blackwell’s islands and was so sickened by what he saw that he led a delegation of city officials back to both places. In an insane time the plight of the insane especially became uppermost for him. He lobbied for better conditions and human care, for altogether different kinds of asylums, “where the patients could work out of doors, and gain strength and mental and physical health in useful occupations.”

He gave money, wrote letters, often working at his desk until two in the morning. Friends remarked at his energy and “industry.” Corinne, remembering all he managed to squeeze into a day, said he had the “power of being . . . focused.”

“Without his power of concentration and great physical endurance such a life would have been impossible,” said Louisa Schuyler. He made everything look easy, she said.

Together with Louisa Schuyler he tried to bring some system and order to the welter of charitable efforts going on in the city. They launched a new Bureau of Charities, the first of its kind, with Theodore as chairman, and enlisted the support of Charles Loring Brace, Abram Hewitt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and others. They decided to compile a list of all those on welfare in the city, something that had never been tried before, and in less than a month had ten thousand names. He was particularly alarmed, Theodore told reporters, by the hordes of begging children in the streets whose numbers were increasing daily.

But if the plight of the homeless and downtrodden was tugging him one way, the pleasures of his own extremely good fortune were certainly not going awasting. He embraced his heightened circumstances with open arms, living in style, living as never before, and apparently seeing nothing ambivalent or contradictory about that.

In the spring of 1874, a cornerstone ceremony was being planned for the Museum of Natural History. President Grant was to come on from Washington to do the honors and it was suggested that a silver trowel be specially made up by Tiffany. “My dear Mr. Haines,” wrote Theodore to a fellow member of the museum board, “by all means order the trowel, one must certainly have it and the President is entitled to a good one.”

And he seems to have taken much the same view concerning his own affairs—that he and his were also entitled to a good one, of most anything they wished. It was in these years of dreadful want that Theodore became a thoroughgoing sport, to borrow the word used by his older son in a later-day reminiscence. He was “the first American to drive four horses handsomely through New York—in style, in the good English style, with everything that belonged.” He enjoyed himself to the full—fine clothes, “meals with courses”—and a little more conspicuously every year. That “rich power of enjoyment of everything human” remembered by Charles Loring Brace now included his money as well.

One could be a moralist without being gloomy, one could work for the welfare of others without being an ascetic, his behavior seemed to say. He was “no ascetic,” declared Louisa Schuyler categorically and approvingly. To her, as to others, there was something wonderfully glamorous about him and this, in her eyes, made him an even stronger force for good. She had been observing him for years, from the time she first went to work as a teacher for the Children’s Aid Society, and of course she knew him socially (Miss Schuyler was a descendant of both General Philip John Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton). “I can see him now, in full evening dress, serving a most generous supper to his newsboys in the Lodging House, and later dashing off to an evening party in Fifth Avenue.”

To build support for the Orthopedic Hospital, he and Mittie gave a reception at 57th Street for their wealthiest friends, and with the occasion in full swing he signaled for attention, then dramatically threw back the doors to the dining room. On top of the great round dining table, against a background of heavy paneled walls with inlaid designs of lobsters, fish, and other such symbols of plenty, he had placed several pathetically cripple children, some sitting, some lying on their backs, all in various braces of the kind only large donations could provide. Conie stood beside the children to help show how the braces were fitted and how they worked. The effect was stunning. Mrs. John Jacob Astor III is said to have announced at once that “of course” Theodore must have help in his work.

He was, it was said, “neither spoiled by good fortune, nor soured by zeal.” He was interested in “every good thing,” to quote Louisa Schuyler one more time. To another friend, D. Willis James, “He seemed to be able to control the strongest affections of the heart, and to reach men who were not easily drawn into affection . . .”

Indeed, it is only in the private family correspondence and reminiscences that one finds even an occasional hint that life with such a person may not always have been easy. Mittie, in a letter from Europe to her “dearest old Greatheart Darling,” remarks out of the blue, “I wish you were not so good, it makes me sad.” And later:

I love you and wish to please you more than anyone else in the whole world and will do everything I can to please you . . . I think you have been perfectly lovely to me in your care of me always, and so good and indulgent and thoughtful, and I am so proud of you, and honor and respect you, so don’t be too hard upon me.

Then she adds, “I have decided that your dear letters are just a little plaintive and it rather comforts me to receive the ’Private’ letter to see that you have one little scrap of the devil in you yet.” (The “private letter” has not survived.)

Bamie, recalling her debut and the parties at which he was her escort, writes of “mingled feelings of pleasure and disappointment.” Knowing so few of her contemporaries had made that winter difficult; “and Father himself was so very young. . . and he was so popular that I felt like a wall flower.”

Sunday mornings he led them two blocks south to the new Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which opened its doors the spring of 1875.

There they prayed among Auchinclosses and Blisses, Livingstons and Wolcotts, “the most influential congregation” in the city, and listened to the word as preached by John Hall, the Irishman of golden tongue, as Beecher called him.

Mittie organized a dancing class for the youngest three—rounding up some forty children altogether—and encouraged Bamie in a new friendship with tall, graceful Sara Delano, who came down from her family’s estate on the Hudson to spend some of each winter season at 6 West 57th Street.

Mittie’s portrait was painted, a first for any of the family, and it must have pleased Theodore greatly. The face that looks out from the canvas is radiant, poised, quite as beautiful as she is described in so many contemporary accounts. Dressed for one of those society occasions he so enjoyed, she must have been something to see. Bamie described later how she looked as she left for a wedding at the Jay estate.

She had on an enormous crinoline and a perfectly exquisite white muslin dress over a pink silk lining, with all the little ruffles at the bottom edged with real lace, and the cloak, which was a very long sort of cape, matched the dress, and the bonnet tied under her chin with great pink ribbons and . . . on the brim of the bonnet was a great big pink rose with perfectly realistic little green dragonflies. She also had a parasol with a real ivory handle and the lining of pink covered with muslin and trimmed with real lace. She was considered one of the beauties at the wedding . . .

It was only at “the store” that things were not going so well any longer. The depression had produced not only business stagnation, but knife-edge competition of a kind that Theodore and James Alfred were unaccustomed to, and from domestic manufacturers of glass in particular. So rather than attempting to save their sagging import trade, the two brothers spent their time looking for new outlets for their money. They became financiers, James Alfred being the “guiding genius.”

City real estate still comprised a large part of the family fortune, and no one, even in these worst of times, had lost faith in the future of New York. The Chemical Bank, true to tradition, was also surviving the depression with flying colors.

Yet rich as these Roosevelts had become, they might have become richer still. (All things are relative, including the disappointment of missed opportunities.) Some years earlier the brothers had backed a copper-mining venture in Montana, the National Mining and Exploring Company, of which James Alfred was president. (Brother Rob, who had the least business sense supposedly, was the only one who bothered to go out to see the site.) The copper found did not amount to much. It was only with the discovery of gold that the venture proved “not without profit” to the family. The mines, however, were in the vicinity of Butte, in the heart, that is, of what would become one of the richest copper regions of all. Had deep mining been possible at the time, the Roosevelts might have become some of the richest men of their day.

It is said also that among those who came looking for Roosevelt backing was Alexander Graham Bell, who hooked up his newly invented telephone so that Theodore could talk from his desk to a room down the hall. While agreeing that it was an interesting device, with potential as a toy perhaps, Theodore thought it had no real future and refused to put money into it.

He was made a Supervisor of the Census, a director of the Bank of Commerce and of the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company. The glass import business was eventually sold to a British firm in 1876, after which Roosevelt and Son switched over entirely to private banking and investment. It was no longer to Maiden Lane that Theodore went each morning, but to new offices on Pine Street.

“What business I shall enter . . . I do not know,” his older son wrote, “for we have been forced to give up the glass business on account of the ‘panic.’” But were it not for this and one or two other chance remarks, one might conclude that such workaday concerns as business, or so disturbing a word as “panic,” never actually penetrated the charmed circle of family life, at the center of which, like some elegant patron saint, stood Theodore.

2

The best of times for him—for all of them—were at Oyster Bay. The years of random summer houses in New Jersey or along the Hudson were also behind now. In conjunction with the move uptown, he had decided to join the Roosevelt colony at the quiet little watering spot on Long Islands North Shore, beginning the summer of 1874. Oyster Bay itself was a mere hamlet of modest white clapboard houses built around the time of the Revolutionary War or earlier, many occupied by old local families with ties going back to the days of earliest settlement. The summer houses—the Beekmans’, the Tiffanys’, the Swan “place” —were of a different order and set on low wooded hills or bluffs beyond town and in view of the water.

The one Theodore “hired” was out Cove Road a short way from the village, a roomy, old white frame ark with long windows and a columned front porch reminiscent of Bulloch Hall. The requisite porch rockers faced the bay and the best air; the bathing beach was only a short walk across the road.

Now the customary family summer extended nearly four months, beginning as early in June as possible and lasting until late September or early October, the fashionable time to “return to town.”

Theodore took the same house year after year. He longed for a country place of his own, he told Mittie, and anticipated the day when he might own one. The children always assumed the house was theirs, that naturally he owned it. To them it was “home,” “dear home.”

“I had a very delightful visit at Oyster Bay at the Roosevelts’ and wish you could see their pleasant way of life there,” Theodore’s friend Joseph Choate wrote his wife. “They are only twenty-seven miles from New York, and in the midst of a country which doesn’t correspond in the least to your ideas of Long Island. Instead of the dreary sandy wastes of the South Shore, it is pleasant and well-wooded rolling country and apparently filled with quiet good people.”

The full complement of servants was in residence. As would be said, no Russians of the ruling class tucked away in a dacha were better tended or more safely removed from the unpleasantness of the world. The hard years of the depression, summers of breadlines and bloody labor violence, were times of “every special delight” at Oyster Bay, “the happiest summers of our lives.”

There were lovely mornings on horseback, with Father leading the cavalcade, long sparkling afternoons on the water. Everyone had his own horse or pony. There were rowboats, a sailboat, other large Roosevelt houses for children to charge in and out of, miles of shoreline to explore, woods and fields to tramp and shoot in. To the noisy troop of Roosevelt cousins were added the Elliott cousins, who came as guests, and two other “regulars,” Conie’s friends Edie Carow and Fanny Smith, whose well-to-do fathers, both old friends of Theodore’s, were experiencing “temporary reverses” due to the panic and could ill afford such vacations for their families.

Theodore had them put on theatrical productions and spent hours rehearsing them in their lines. (”But, Uncle, I am not a passionate man!” protested Johnny Elliott, upon being cast as the lover in something called To Oblige Benson.) At the dinner table, as the plates were being cleared, he would ask this child or that to get up and give an impromptu speech, an experience some of his young guests would remember until their dying day. “These Roosevelts were without inhibitions to an unusual degree,” wrote Fanny Smith. She loved them for their vitality, their kindnesses, their “explosions of fun.” To her they were “a family so rarely gifted as to seem . . . touched by the flame of the ’divine fire.’” Their gaiety was “unquenchable.” They were lovers of books and poetry. They invested everything they did with their own “extraordinary vitality.” Of Theodore Senior she remembered mainly the enthusiasm with which he entered into every activity, the inspiration he was. (It was she he picked for the female lead in To Oblige Benson—her first chance ever to put on makeup and play a part.) That he insisted on calling the house Tranquillity struck her as wonderfully inappropriate.

“How I will enjoy my holiday,” he wrote at the start of the second summer at Oyster Bay. When he was absent everyone felt let down. Teedie, who had begun calling himself Thee or even Theodore on occasion, wrote of the tonic it was just to be in his presence.

He will be with us now . . . enjoying his holiday with a vim. I wish he would not sit down on something black whenever he has on white trousers. At the close of the day he always has a curiously mottled aspect. Seriously, it is a perfect pleasure to see him, he is so happy and in such good health and spirits. We become quite stagnant when he is away.

3

There was, however, one rather serious problem casting a shadow on all these perfect summers and the winters between, a peculiar turn of events about which as little as possible would ever be said outside the immediate family. Ellie had started having strange seizures—fainting spells, a rush of blood to the head as it was described, even fits of delirium.

The trouble had begun the very first summer at Oyster Bay, when the boy was fourteen, and it was for this reason that Theodore ruled out college for him. Almost overnight his hitherto robust, confident second son, “the strong one,” the boy for whom there seemed to be no obstacles, had become the family’s chief concern, a victim of spells, a child afraid of the dark, afraid to sleep alone.

The policy seems to have been the less said the better. Not even Fanny Smith appears to have known there was anything wrong with Elliott, close as she was; or, if she did, she also chose to delete that part of the story. In her account, as in others, he remains only the perennial family charmer. To judge by what she, Conie, and others said of those summers, there were no problems, no bad days, no bad nights. Teedie, in one letter, observes that Ellie has been at times “very ill,” but then goes no further.

In later years, among later-day Roosevelts, it would be said Elliott suffered some form of epilepsy. There was no record of epilepsy in the family but then neither was there a record of asthma. The family physician attending him appears to have been baffled and diagnosed the trouble only as a nervous condition or “congestion of the brain.” The word “epilepsy” does not appear in the multitude of family papers dating from the time.

Descriptions of what exactly went on during these seizures are also fragmentary and inconclusive. But the chance that the problem was in fact epilepsy seems remote. More likely the trouble stemmed from some intense inner turmoil. That the boy was chagrined by his failure to keep pace with Teedie academically, that he worried excessively over his future, his ability to live up to his fathers expectations, are all quite evident and particularly in the confidences he shared with his father. Even before the return from Europe he had written of the extreme difficulty he was having with German, and a letter he mailed from Liverpool just before sailing for home could not have but touched Theodore deeply.

“What will I become when I am a man?” he had asked his father. “Are there not a very large number of partners in the store . . . I think Teedie would be the boy to put in the store if you wanted to be sure of it, because he is much quicker and [a] more sure kind of boy, though I will try my best and try to be as good as you if [it] is in me, but it is hard. But I can tell you that better when I get home and it does not look nice to read.”

In the fall of 1874, following the first summer at Oyster Bay, his condition was such that another sea voyage was arranged—still one more therapeutic “change of scene.” Theodore took him back to England on a business trip. But Ellie had a relapse at Liverpool. When Theodore left him behind with the Bullochs while he went on to Paris, a serious attack followed and Theodore had to be summoned at once.

The attack [Theodore wrote Mittie] has been decidedly the worst he has had and very difficult in character. It came from overexcitement but of so natural a kind that I foresee it will be very difficult to guard him from it. A pillow fight was perhaps the principal exciting cause; it was Harriott’s children. It produced congestion of the brain with all its attendant horrors of delirium, etc. The doctor says that there is no cause for anxiety as it is only necessary to avoid all excitements for two or three years and he will entirely outgrow it. He is perfectly well again now, but of course weak and confined to his bed. . . . Ellie’s sweetness entirely won the heart of the doctor as it has that of all the servants here. The doctor says . . . that the boy should lead a quiet life in the country and I have vainly puzzled my brain to think how this can be accomplished.

There were signs of improvement in another week. The one problem now, Theodore wrote, was nighttime. “He evidently still has a fear of being left alone at night (i.e., is nervous) although he stoutly denies it. He sleeps in my bed. I think it would be very wise for Theodore and himself to occupy the large bed in [the] back third-story room for while together. I should be afraid to leave him alone.”

A little later, in an affectionate letter to the son at home, Theodore said that, things being what they were, he, Teedie, would have to start acting more like the older brother. In some ways it may have been as important a directive as the one to make his body.

It is a pleasure to receive your letters and gives Ellie so much enjoyment to hear them read. His first inquiry is if there is anything from Teedie when a bundle of letters is brought in. You will have to assume more of the responsibilities of elder brother when we return. Ellie is anticipating all sorts of pleasures with you that he will not be able to realize, and it will require much tact on your part not to let him feel his deprivations too much.... His sickness at night, although worse, often reminds me of your old asthma, both of you showed so much patience and seemed more sorry on account of those about you than for yourselves. Aunt Ella is singing to him upstairs now; music often seems to soothe him when he is nervous.

“It is so funny, my illness,” Ellie himself wrote to his brother, “it comes from the nerves and therefore is not at all serious, but my body is getting so thin I can get a handful of plain skin right off my stomach, and my arms as well as my legs look like I have the strength of a baby. I jump involuntarily at the smallest sound and have a perpetual headache (and: nearly always in low spirits). . .”

The doctor came again and said the attacks were “hysteria.” “I scarce know how I will come back to active life again,” Theodore wrote Mittie.

Another trip was arranged for the boy that winter, almost from the time his father brought him home. He was sent south with the family physician, John Metcalfe, for several months of shooting and outdoor life and it did him wonders. “I have not had a respectable suit on since I left home, or a white shirt,” he wrote proudly, “and as I have to clean all the guns on our return from shooting you may imagine the state of my hands. I am very well and happy.” The one problem he acknowledged was homesickness, “sometimes.”

Curiously, Theodore then wrote to say that in the future he must always stand by Teedie, who was a “noble boy,” a charge Ellie took greatly to heart. Why Theodore did this, having so recently said almost the same thing to the other boy, is open to question. Possibly he felt that in Ellie’s case the best medicine might be a feeling of importance, the assurance from his father that he qualified for so manly a mission no less than ever and had his fathers confidence. Something of this same psychology may also, of course, have been behind what he wrote to Teedie from Liverpool, though in that instance, one senses that he did in truth need the boys help and was counting on him.

Whatever his reasons, the directive evoked a heartrending response from his distant and obviously very heartsick second son.

Dear Old Governor—for I will call you that not in public but in private for it does seem to suit you, you splendid man, just my ideal. . . My darling Father you have made me a companion and a very happy one. I don’t believe there is any boy that has had as happy and free of care life as I have had.

Oh, Father, will you ever think me a “noble boy”? You are right about Teedie, he is one and no mistake, a boy I would give a good deal to be like in many respects. If you ever see me not stand by Thee you may know I am entirely changed. No, Father, I am not likely to desert a fellow I love as I do my brother, even you don’t know what a good noble boy he is and what a splendid man he is going to be as I do. No, I love him, love him very very dearly and will never desert him and if I know him he will never desert me.

Father, my own dear Father, God bless you and help me to be a good boy and worthy of you, goodbye.

Your Son.

[P.S.] This sounds foolish on looking over it, but you touched me when you said always to stand by Thee in your letter.

Elliot’s closest friend by now was a cousin once removed, Archibald Gracie, and from the time Cousin Archie had been sent off to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, Elliott had been begging that he be allowed to go also. The following summer (1875) Theodore consented. But only weeks after arriving, the boy was stricken, first by nearly paralyzing homesicknesses, then by the most severe attacks to date.

“Yesterday, during my Latin lesson, without the slightest warning, I had a bad rush of blood to my head,” he wrote his father in a letter marked Private; “it hurt me so [much] that I can’t remember what happened. I believe I screamed out . . .

“Don’t forget me please and write often,” he added.

By December he was in no condition to remain. “Poor Ellie Roosevelt has had to leave on account of his health,” Archie Gracie wrote. “He has ’ever been subject to a rush of blood to his head’ and while up here exerted himself too much both physically and mentally. He studied hard and late. One day he fainted just after leaving the table and fell down. . . . His brother came up to take him home.”

That Theodore chose to respond as he did should come as no surprise. He had been warned to keep the boy from excitement, a quiet life in the country was what the doctor in England had advised, but he did exactly the opposite. Ellie was packed off to the wilds of central Texas, to “rough it” on an army post, Fort McKavett, where the officer staff included several friends of Theodore’s from the war years. The decision was made at once and Ellie was on his way, accompanied yet again by Dr. Metcalfe, who appears to have gone more for the promise of sport and adventure than out of any great concern for his patient.

“Do you know, Father, it strikes me it’s just a sell my being down here,” the boy wrote during a stop at Houston: “it’s a very pleasant one but a sell nevertheless, for I feel well enough to study and instead here am I spending all your money down here as if I was ill, I don’t believe I will ever be ‘weller’ than I am; it’s rather late to think of this but the Dr. evidently don’t think I’m sick and I am not, and altogether I feel like a general fraud, who ought to be studying.”

So it was Ellie, not his brother, who went first to try the great elixir of life in the West, who became the true-life Mayne Reid kind of boy-hunter on the prairie. The letters he wrote of his adventures were quite amazing—long, spirited, and wonderfully well written, disclosing his own full-hearted love of the hunt and the great outdoors (not to mention his own obvious appreciation for the Mayne Reid style). His brother was held spellbound. And it is hard to imagine Mittie and Theodore being anything but pleased and proud.

As time passed he wrote of “fearfully cold” nights about the campfire, of long days in the saddle and keeping company with “rough-looking chaps.”

I have not taken a drink or a smoke [he also reported to his father], but I do want to do the latter very much, I don’t care how much you laugh and I can see you do it just as plainly as you did that night in the study. It seemed rather hard at first to say “I never drink” or “I never smoke,” when asked about every five minutes of the day, for the young officers have unfortunately no way of spending their time but in one of the two of those employments, but it was a very difficult thing to do.

He was enjoying Texas “just as much as anyone ever enjoyed anything.” He slept one night on the floor of a log hut, sharing a blanket with a real “cowboy from way out west” and using a dog for a pillow, “partly for warmth and partly to drown the smell of my bedfellow.” It was all Teedie had ever dreamed of and the letters kept coming. Elliott’s health was perfectly fine and Theodore, who so recently wondered how he would ever get back to active life again, had embarked already on a new adventure of his own in politics.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Moral Effect

1

POLITICAL REFORM and the Roosevelt name had already been joined in the public mind well before Theodore took up the cause in 1876. Brother Robert had in fact become one of New York’s more celebrated champions of reform, albeit in a style quite his own and as one of “the other” party. Having happily accepted Tammany backing in his bid for Congress in 1870, Robert had turned on the notorious William Tweed in dramatic fashion less than a year later, in September 1871, the summer CVS died. He had denounced Tweed and Tammany electioneering tactics in a fiery speech at a mass meeting at Cooper Union, saying at one point that anyone caught tampering with a ballot box deserved to be shot on sight. Afterward, he served on the famous Committee of Seventy in its assault on Tweed, and once Tweed fell, Robert was looked upon as one of those distinguished few gentlemen-Democrats, figures of wealth and position, of whom New Yorkers could be most proud. He was commonly mentioned in the same breath with such reform Democrats as Abram Hewitt and the present governor, Samuel Tilden. He held no office any longer, but with his writing and after-dinner speaking, he kept himself in the forefront. While Theodore went about his philanthropy in his quiet way, Robert called for government action to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. In angry letters to the New York papers, he warned of uprisings unless something was done. People were starving, he said. “Let us try some plan and convince the poor that we have the blood of civilized men in our veins.” He called for the city to mount a program of public works, to give men jobs on the city payroll building docks and paving streets; and he was immediately denounced as a well-meaning fool. (”Absolutely the only protection which we can have against the dangerous tendency of laborers to crowd into large cities,” answered the Tribune, “is the sure punishment which nature brings, in want of work, suffering or starvation. If a workman is wise he will quit a city whenever he finds no employment, as he would quit a house infested with fatal disease.”)

Robert, too, of late, like Theodore, had been living in style, in a country house on Long Island, but at Sayville, on the South Shore, well separated from the other Roosevelts at Oyster Bay.

As it had taken Tweed to bestir the Democrat Robert into righteous wrath, so it took the scandalous Grant regime to inspire the Republican Theodore to join the great Republican reform crusade of 1876. The idea was to rescue the party from the hands of the professionals, which was no new idea in American politics certainly; nor did Theodore’s part call for any particular courage or personal sacrifice. Still, it was an experience of a kind he had not had before, and as with everything else he ever did, he entered wholeheartedly, certain the crusade was just, and thoroughly innocent, by all appearances, as to where it might be taking him. Brother Robert, from what may be seen in some of his private political correspondence, was seldom if ever innocent about anything, but now there were two Roosevelts having their say in their different ways. Theodore knew and admired the people leading the Republican reform movement; he enjoyed their company, enjoyed their obvious high regard for him. Mittie, it appears, thought little of such doings, but things seemed to follow very naturally, and before he knew it, Theodore was off to Cincinnati to his first convention.

At the head of the crusade were Senator Carl Schurz and George William Curtis, editor of Harper’s Weekly, two lifelong battlers for liberal reform—women’s rights, civil service reform—and true Lincoln Republicans, which was what Theodore liked to call himself. Curtis was the one Theodore knew best, a tidy, erudite man much in the Emerson mold, silver-haired and priestly. In his youth he had helped build Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, and a novel he wrote in the 1850s, a satire on New York society called The Potiphar Papers, was high among Theodore’s favorite books. Curtis, above all, was a moralist. He had made a career of preaching the public—political—duty of “the educated class.” (”While good men sit at home, not knowing that there is anything to be done, not caring to know; cultivating a feeling that politics are tiresome and dirty, and politicians vulgar bullies and bravoes; half persuaded that a republic is the contemptible rule of a mob, and secretly longing for a splendid and vigorous despotism—then remember it is not a government mastered by ignorance, it is a government betrayed by intelligence.”) He was totally sincere, highly influential, and not without political ambition of his own; he saw in Theodore, as he later said, the living example of what he preached. Theodore Roosevelt “walked these streets the image and figure of the citizen which every American should hope to be,” he would say. They were never close friends. They knew each other at the Union League and the Century, saw each other socially, on occasion. “I knew,” said Curtis, “that we thought alike in all the great interests of society.”

The light had failed in Washington, in the second term of Ulysses S. Grant. A country in the grip of hard times was confronted with thievery and fraud in nearly every department of the federal government, including the Presidents own staff. Scandal had followed scandal. A Secretary of the Navy had somehow profited by $300,000 beyond his apparent income. A giant Whiskey Ring had robbed the Treasury of an estimated $4 million. From Boston, Charles Francis Adams warned that unless strong action was taken the entire political system could collapse, and he was deadly serious as only an Adams could be.

When a Republican Reform Club was organized at the Union League at the start of the new year, Theodore joined at once and was soon looked to for leadership. In February, Adams’ son Professor Henry Adams of Harvard put out a call for a special conference of reformers, a very high-toned affair, he stressed, to be held in New York in advance of the national conventions. It was to be by invitation only, “for about 200 of the most weighty and reliable of our friends.” And when the conference got down to business at the Fifth Avenue Hotel the afternoon of May 15, Theodore was among those prominently mentioned to indicate how “weighty and reliable” a group it was. Others included Theodore Dwight Woolsey, former president of Yale, E. L. Godkin of The Nation, Frederick Law Olmsted, Brooks Adams, William Graham Sumner, Mark Hopkins, New York’s two most esteemed ancients, William Cullen Bryant and Peter Cooper, and the very young Henry Cabot Lodge of Boston, who, as secretary of the meeting, did most of the work. Nothing of consequence was accomplished—“Oh, they reenacted the moral law and the Ten Commandments for a platform, and have demanded an angel of light for President,” said a Tammany observer—nonetheless, it was as important a gathering of truly distinguished citizens as New York had seen in a long time, and if they took themselves a little too seriously as the “saving element” in politics, so too did many others. One out-of-town reporter, picking his way past the potted palms in the lobby of the hotel, observed for his readers, “Men whose names ring through the country and round the world were to be encountered at every step through the crowd, and upon every face not familiar was the plain stamp of intelligence and character.”

General Grant was himself the issue no longer, since by this time he had declined to run again. He wanted a third term, Grant said, no more than he had wanted a first and no one doubted that he meant it. What loomed now was an even more worrisome prospect, the candidacy of Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, a man of Theodore’s own generation, who was among the most fascinating, outrageous men of the era and the one Republican against whom every reformer could gladly join ranks. Conkling, a Stalwart (one steadfastly loyal to Grant), was considerably larger than life—tall, beautiful, enormously talented in the art of politics—and in the eyes of the “saving element,” evil incarnate. From the moment he let his presidential aspirations be known, there seemed to be a smell of brimstone in the air. Schurz, addressing the Fifth Avenue Conference, declared unequivocally that no machine politician could ever be the Republican standard-bearer, however brilliant he might be. And by the time he departed for the Republican National Convention, at the head of a sixty-man reform delegation, Theodore had instructions to “fight Conkling at all events.”

The essential, underlying corrupting force in public life, the evil of “practical” politics, the reformers insisted, was the party system and its sacrosanct creed of party loyalty. Public policy must be above party; the ideal candidate, as Henry Adams lectured young Lodge, was the man who cared nothing for party. And it was thus that the reformers were so ardently opposed to Conkling. Conkling was not a crook; his name had been linked with no scandals; nor had he any personal crudities of the kind associated with a reprobate like Tweed. What was so objectionable about Conkling was his utterly masterful, arrogant use of the very system they deplored. He was the ultimate professional. He loved power; he believed in power. He believed in “structure,” and for the keystone of his empire he had the Customhouse on Wall Street, the largest federal office outside Washington. His most valued lieutenant, Chester A. Arthur, was Collector of the Port of New York; all the Customhouse “boys” were his; and it was thus that he ruled the Republican Party in New York. In Washington, largely through his friendship with Grant, he had achieved a grip on patronage second to none. “Which one is Conkling?” visitors to the Senate gallery would ask, wishing to see the most powerful man in Washington City.

Conkling’s scorn for all reformers was monumental, which naturally endeared him to the party professionals and made him all the easier for the reformers to hate. To him they were “the dilettanti” and beneath contempt. At his most charitable, he called them “leaders without followers.” More often, he scoffed at their “snivel service” reform, ridiculed their idealism. “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Conkling once observed, “he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word reform.” Curtis and his kind were “the men-milliners” of politics, the goody-goodies; their masculinity was questionable.

Conkling himself, the picture of conspicuous manhood, stood six feet three, and was solidly formed beneath his extravagant clothes. He had built himself up with hard exercise, boxing and horseback riding. A leader ought to look the part, he believed. He walked as though he owned the world, stomach in, his great chest swelled. A worshipful reporter said it was the walk of a prince, but Congressman James G. Blaine, a fellow Republican, called it his “grandiloquent swell, his majestic, super-eminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut,” words that had stunned the House and that Conkling would refuse ever to forgive or forget.

Women thought Conkling gorgeous, which he was. He carried a sun umbrella and favored bright bow ties, fawn-colored vests and trousers, English gaiters, and gleaming pointed shoes. His beard was the color of burnished copper and it too was pointed. His hair was a darker red, thick and wavy, and he combed it to produce a single Hyperion curl at the center of his forehead. The curl—everything—was done for effect. His voice was rich and beautifully modulated. His thrilling stump speeches, delivered without notes, were all carefully memorized in advance and rehearsed on long walks in the country. He was a detail man, like every great performer. Had he chosen a career on stage, it was commonly agreed, he would have been a sensation.

Even his private life had about it a kind of forbidden, theatrical glamour. Though a married man with children he had for years been carrying on an affair with a fellow senator’s wife, the beautiful, ambitious Kate Chase Sprague. It was the sort of thing that simply was not done, but that everybody knew about. The explanation sometimes heard was that he was too good-looking to be pure.

For a master politician Conkling was an odd combination. He had little humor, no patience with those he thought beneath him intellectually. He remained haughty and insufferably vain, anything but a man of the people. He deplored the use of tobacco and whiskey and said so. He disliked reporters and crowds; he hated ever to be touched. But his gift for leadership was surpassing and he had a mind approaching genius.

To Theodore virtually everything about him was repugnant, and the fact that Conkling was a man of education and polish, the son of an eminent upstate jurist and scholar, the fact that Conkling’s man “Chet” Arthur was regarded as a thorough gentleman, belonged to the Union League and the Century, made Conkling’s power and treachery seem the more hateful. Also, Conkling represented something new in Theodore’s experience. Mr. Greatheart had done battle with ignorance and poverty and the Giant Despair, with cruelty and crippling disease; he had waded into unpleasant, unsung work of the sort others shunned; but nowhere along the line does he appear ever to have faced an individual adversary, and certainly none like “the Lordly Roscoe.”

Probably he and Conkling had met each other in times past, perhaps even as early as the war when Conkling was a young congressman and Theodore was making his rounds on Capitol Hill lobbying for the Allotment Commission. In any event, the prospect of taking the field against the seemingly impregnable giant of New York politics cheered Theodore tremendously. As his friend Howard Potter once observed, this most “lovable,” “tenderest” of men had a decided instinct for a fight.

2

In hindsight it would become clear that Conkling never had a chance for the nomination at Cincinnati and many would wonder what all the fuss had been about. But only in hindsight. Conkling himself, as shrewd a political judge as any, thought his hour had arrived. Further, his candidacy was based on the kind of precept that any serious politician would take to heart: he could carry New York against all comers, including Governor Tilden, who seemed certain to be the Democratic nominee.

As a matter of policy, Conkling never attended national conventions and he refused now to break that rule. He sent Chester Arthur to work in his behalf and to nobody’s surprise the official New York delegation, largest of all the state delegations, went “solid for Conkling,” with the single exception of George William Curtis. A Pennsylvania delegate, seeing the Conkling people file into their hotel, remarked that it was a mystery to him “where the Customhouse got bail for all those fellows.” In fairness it ought also to be noted that The New York Times and the Sun, both openly admiring of Conkling’s candidacy, were impressed most by the perfect decorum and obvious “quality” of the Conkling people. “It is conceded [said the Sun] that the men who are here urging the claims of ’the noble statesman from Oneida’ are the best dressed, the best-looking, and the best behaved of any of the outside deputations ...” The total number of Conkling “shouters” on hand was estimated at fifteen hundred.

Theodore and the New York Reform Club reached Cincinnati on June 10 and stretched their banner across the front of the Gibson House. They had agreed upon a candidate, Benjamin H. Bristow of Kentucky, Grant’s former Secretary of the Treasury, a man of impeccable record who had been responsible for uncovering the Whiskey Ring. Bristow clubs had cropped up around the country and the one in Cincinnati numbered three thousand people or more. So for the first few days things looked somewhat promising.

“You would never recognize your father in his new guise,” Theodore wrote enthusiastically to Bamie. He was doing all in his power to “work conversions,” discovering how it felt to be a “colporteur,” and not without results. “I have really brought one very important man to think with me and his action will be productive of much good. Several more are helpful and I fully appreciate how desirable and indeed necessary for the moral effect it was that we [the Reform Club] should come.” Richard H. Dana and James Russell Lowell of Cambridge were “perhaps the pleasantest additions” to his list of new friends, but then the number of friends already made was “legion.”

According to other accounts, he and his club worked “day and night” against Conkling and there is reason to believe Theodore was paying a large part of the club’s expenses while in Cincinnati. Temperatures were in the nineties, their hotel rooms “stewing hot,” as Lowell said. Lowell and others complained of the dirt and grime in the air. But nothing seemed to bother Theodore.

The leading contender for the nomination, as he explained to Bamie, was James G. Blaine, Conkling’s old nemesis. Blaine was an entirely different kind of man from Conkling—warm, captivating, a “magnetic” personality—yet no less the professional politician and scarcely less objectionable to Theodore and his fellow crusaders. Further, in light of events now only weeks old, it appeared Blaine was not exactly incorruptible. The sensation of the Mulligan letters had burst upon Washington. A Boston bookkeeper named Mulligan had produced letters in Blaine’s hand indicating that Blaine had once used his position as Speaker of the House to profit secretly in the sale of some western railroad bonds. On June 5, only nine days before the convention was to open, Blaine denied everything in an emotional speech before the House, and to the great rank and file of the Republican Party, and especially among Westerners, he stood vindicated; he was “Blaine of Maine,” the most exciting man in public life.

Strolling with Carl Schurz in Lafayette Square, just before Schurz left Washington for the convention, Blaine threw an arm about Schurz’s shoulder and said, “Carl, you won’t oppose me, will you?” But Schurz had no intention of supporting Blaine, whatever happened, nor did any of his followers. Some, in fact, like James Russell Lowell, had come to Cincinnati for the express purpose of stopping Blaine.

All the same, after less than twenty-four hours in Cincinnati, Theodore was sure Blaine stood far in the lead, a view he modified only somewhat with the news from Washington on Sunday, June 11, that Blaine had collapsed on his way to church and remained in a coma. A rumor swept the hotels that Blaine was dead and so the Conkling threat seemed greater than ever.

It was the following night, Monday, June 12, that Theodore made a speech from a balcony at the Gibson House. A band hired by the Reform Club “tendered a serenade” from the street below, where a large, friendly crowd had gathered. It was the first such speech he had ever made, and taking his instructions to fight Conkling quite to heart, he delivered the most vivid, biting attack on Conkling of the entire week, enjoying every moment—the whole noisy, torchlight spectacle, the excitement and approval in the faces below. It was “altogether like a scene from one of those electioneering Irish rows,” he told Bamie happily, “but all perfectly good [and] natural.”

“Mr. Roosevelt of New York, a Bristow man, got the floor of the balcony,” wrote a local reporter, “and made such a strong hit at Conkling that a convenient [Conkling] band put him down.” With the music blaring below, Theodore simply paused, waited his turn, then when the band stopped, he told the crowd it had just been treated to a perfect demonstration of how the forces of political corruption sought always to drown out every honest expression of respectable opinion. “The crowd cheered violently,” he reported to Bamie. “We were all in perfect harmony . . .”

We have no text of his speech, which is a shame, but it was the conviction and vigor with which he spoke, more than any one thing he said, that had the greatest force. Such was the force of the speech, in fact, that it earned him the everlasting enmity of the man at whom it was directed. The absent Conkling, upon learning what had been said, was not to forget or to forgive him, any more than he had James G. Blaine.

FRIENDS OF CANDIDATES WORKING WITH HEROIC ENERGY, read one headline. SUBLIME DISPLAY OF CONFIDENCE ALL AROUND . . . THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE IN THE STREETS AT NIGHT.

The actual convention got under way at noon Wednesday, June 14, inside the giant wooden Exposition Hall, and that afternoon George William Curtis, the only official reform delegate from New York, berated the “odious” Conkling machine as a menace to “the very system of our Government.” The one memorable oration of the convention, however, was delivered the next day—Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll’s famous nominating speech for Blaine, which, with its impassioned portrayal of the “plumed knight” of the party, sent delegates and spectators into paroxysms of approval and very nearly put Blaine over. Blaine’s recovery from his mysterious attack had been confirmed, and had the balloting begun after Ingersoll finished, Blaine almost certainly would have been the nominee. But it was turning dark outside and the gas lighting in the hall was said to be unsafe, so the vote was put off another day.

As it was, neither Blaine nor Conkling nor Bristow was chosen. A compromise candidate, the dark-horse governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, uninspiring but respectable, won on the seventh ballot. The party professionals at once lined up behind the nominee. (”How is New York?” a Hayes delegate is said to have asked Conkling’s man Arthur. “All right,” was the answer, “all the time for Hayes.”) And among the reformers the outlook was equally cheery, if not ecstatic, the Hayes people having convinced Schurz and Curtis that “the Governor” was one of them.

For his part Theodore came home from Cincinnati thoroughly satisfied. Conkling had been stopped and he himself had had the grandest kind of time. He felt, he told a reporter, like the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea, so thankful was he for the narrow escape from the disaster of a Conkling nomination.

By the time summer rolled around and the Democrats had proclaimed Governor Tilden their nominee, Theodore was once more immersed in life at Oyster Bay and probably as much at peace with himself and his prospects as he was ever to be. Ellie was home from Texas and thriving by all appearances. Teedie had been accepted at Harvard and would start in the fall. A letter he wrote to Bamie, who was with friends of Maine, provides one of the best pictures we have of the summer life that had become so dear to him, and the setting in which the family was to remember him best.

Oyster Bay

August 9, ’76

MY OWN DEAR LITTLE BAMIE,

I actually have a few minutes to myself by refusing sail with Elliott. Annie Gracie has gone with him, your mother is preparing for the Reading Class, Conie is at her lesson and Theodore out shooting specimens. I took answers to the Smiths at Laurelton this morning on my ride, accepting for a hop for the boys’ account. The ride was lovely. The morning delightful, and I did enjoy the woods intensely. I have just paid George his wages and parted with him so you will scarce recognize the family below stairs when you return. The cause of the suddenness of his departure is the appearance of a jealous wife to whom the servants have described in glowing terms his intimacy with Sophie, but I had already dismissed him to go as soon as I could find a good man. Davis will now be above until I find one.

Your mother is learning to swim and our baths are becoming the feature of the day, all else gives way to them. The competition between your mother and Aunt Annie runs high, your aunt is a little in advance. Conie and [Cousin] Leontine dive from Ellie’s boat after swimming out to it. The summer is passing delightfully away and my only regret is the rapidity with which it is going. Theodore’s departure for Cambridge is one of the straws that show that the time is approaching when the birds will leave their nest and I am very glad for them all to have such pleasant memories connected with this summer. Our pleasures tie us all so much together . . .

He was worlds away from politics, one might gather, and perfectly contented to have it so. But then late in September, in a letter to Teedie, who had departed for college, he mentions how a crowd of Oyster Bay Republicans came out from the village that evening to serenade him. He would have liked very much to make them a “Hayes speech,” he said, but Mittie locked the front door.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Father and Son

1

THEODORE SAW HIS SON off to Cambridge—off to become a “Harvard man”—from the little station stop at Syosset, Long Island, on September 27, 1876.

At seventeen the boy was as tall as he would grow, five feet eight inches, and he weighed at most 125 pounds. His voice was thin and piping, almost comical. The blue-gray eyes squinted and blinked behind thick spectacles, which, when he laughed or bobbed his head about, kept sliding down his nose. The sound of his laugh was described by his mother as an “ungreased squeak.”

In conversation he spewed words with a force that often startled people not accustomed to him, and this, with his upper-class New York accent, would be enough to set him off as something out of the ordinary at Harvard—even at Harvard—from the time he arrived. To many it seemed he had a speech impediment, and possibly the problem may have been associated with his asthmatic condition, physiologically that is; but it appears also to have been such an integral part of his make-up, so established a trait, that those within the home circle took no notice of it. They were as oblivious to this, apparently, as they had been earlier to his myopia. If he talked “funny,” they never thought so.

At Harvard, classmates soon learned to goad him into an argument for the sheer fun of hearing him. His large, extremely white teeth appeared to chop sentences to pieces. Words tumbled over one another. “At times he could hardly get them out at all,” remembered a friend, “and then he would rush on . . . as skaters redouble their pace over thin ice.”

The teeth and glasses were the outstanding features, though he preferred his ears, which were unusually small and close to his head. (”I don’t think my features separately are very good with the exception of my ears,” he would one day tell a sculptor. “I like my ears, they are good. I always notice the ears of everyone.”) His hands and feet too were unusually small, his feet actually dainty, a mere size five or six. The slippers he took with him to Harvard were his mother’s and they fit perfectly.

The great reformation of physique to which he had devoted so many hours would have been judged a flat failure by anybody unfamiliar with the circumstances. A classmate named Richard Welling, seeing him for the first time during a workout at the Harvard gym, could hardly believe his eyes. He confronted, Welling said, a “youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development” who was standing between two upright poles, gripping them with both hands and swaying forward and back, rising nicely on tiptoe at each forward thrust. “What a humble-minded chap this must be,” Welling thought, “to be willing to give such a ladylike exhibition in a public place.”

In a “Sporting Calendar” that he had kept at Oyster Bay the summer of 1875, it is recorded that he could do the hundred-yard dash in 12.25 seconds, broad-jump 13 feet, and clear the bar in the pole vault at 5 feet 8.5 inches—in all nothing very special for a boy of his age, but apparently better than his cousins could do and attainments of much pride to him. His health, though unquestionably improved over what it had been earlier, was still a worry and a burden. He was no more a model of good health than he was a strapping physical specimen. His health, like his physique, was impressive only in contrast to what it had been. Some of his sieges of colic, his headaches, the vomiting and diarrhea (his dreaded cholera morbus), appear to have been quite serious. In March, preparing for the Harvard examinations, he worried that he “lost so much time in my studies through sickness.” And after he had been accepted at Harvard, it was decided that for reasons of health he could not possibly live among other students in one of the dormitories. He was to have private rooms of his own and no roommate. Bamie—Bamie “the Major Generaless,” as Ellie called her—was sent on in advance to Cambridge that summer to find suitable quarters off campus. She chose his furniture, had the rooms painted, papered, saw that there was coal for the fireplace.

Except for the time in Dresden, he had never lived apart from the family, and even at Dresden he had Ellie and Conie with him, two cousins and an adoring aunt nearby, and lived with a German family. Harvard was to be his first solo venture into the world, as his father said, and the fact that his father had such faith in him probably counted for more than anything else. “As I saw the last of the train bearing you away,” Theodore wrote, “. . . I realized what a luxury it was to have a boy in whom I could place perfect trust and confidence . . .”

His preparation for Harvard under Arthur Cutler had been rigorous. The hardest work had been in mathematics, which was Cutler’s specialty and the subject in which he himself was most obviously deficient. In two years he had accomplished what would normally have taken three and did well on the entrance exams, but like so much else in his life, his tutoring had all been custom-tailored for him and experienced in the privacy of his own home. He was in all things still—in all save his imagination—”a great little home-boy,” as Bamie called him. He had never faced a real professor. He knew little about academic competition, to say nothing of the unwritten rules by which classmates determine who the good fellows are. Most freshmen could count on a certain number of ready-made friends from previous schools, and those from the Boston area—the great majority of the class—were already soaked in Harvard custom and tradition. He came knowing one other boy and that one not very well—John Lamson, of the family that had helped Bamie get out of France the summer of 1870. He apparently had never seen Harvard, knew nothing of Cambridge until the night he found his way to Number 16 Winthrop Street and the rooms Bamie had arranged on the second floor.

The picture we get from his summers at Oyster Bay is of a slight, tousled boy browned by the sun, clothes in disarray, who could barely keep still. As the tutor Cutler would write proudly in remembrance, “the young man never seemed to know what idleness was.” The collecting continued in earnest. (”At present I am writing in a rather smelly room,” he tells Bamie, “as the fresh skins of six night herons are reposing on the table beside me.”) He was busy with his field notes and scientific essays, including one remarkable composition titled “Blarina talpoides (Short-Tailed Shrew),” which appears to have been written sometime shortly before he left for Harvard. He had captured a male shrew and kept it in a wire cage for study, feeding it insects at first, then a live mouse, which the tiny shrew instantly attacked and killed. Fascinated by such ferocity in something so very small, the boy then put in a garter snake.

It did not attack at once as with the mouse [he observed] but cautiously smelt his foe . . . then with a jump the shrew seized it, low down quite near the tail. The snake at once twisted itself right across the shrews head and under one paw, upsetting him; but he recovered himself at once and before the snake could escape flung himself on it again and this time seized it by the back of the neck, placing one paw against the head and the other on the neck, and pushing the body from him while he tore it with his sharp teeth. The snake writhed and twisted, but it was of no use, for his neck was very soon more than half eaten through and during the next twenty-four hours he was entirely devoured.

“Certainly a more bloodthirsty animal of its size I never saw,” he wrote in wonder.

Socially he was generally ill at ease. With girls of his own age he could act theatrically superior—Fanny Smith would recall how he tapped her lightly on the top of her head with his riding crop—or become painfully shy and self-deprecating. At such times he would talk pointedly of Ellie’s superior attainments. Yet he rarely missed a chance to show off, with his shotgun or his memory for things he had read. As Fanny Smith observed, the summer before he left for Harvard, “If I were writing to Theodore I would have to say something of this kind, ‘I have enjoyed Plutarch’s last essay on the philosophy of Diogenes excessively.’”

To family and servants he was young lord of the manor, father’s “noble boy,” and in spirit he hungered for visions of noble quests and high valor. The Saga of King Olaf, the Longfellow epic, had been discovered and devoured by now. He adored The Song of Roland, read and reread the whole of the Nibelungenlied, taking it all very much to heart.

Another Oyster Bay youngster, Walt McDougall, later a well-known political cartoonist, remembered him as studious, nervous, and “somewhat supercilious besides.” But Fanny Smith confided to her diary that he was “such fun, the most original boy I ever knew,” and a lifetime later she would remember how, at formal dinners, she dreaded being seated next to him for fear he would get her laughing so uncontrollably she would have to leave the table.

The limits of his social world had been defined by Oyster Bay summers and the Monday dancing classes in New York under a dancing master named Dodsworth. The “ladies” at these sessions were only those of whom Mittie approved, naturally, and if anything, his own concern over decorum seems to have been greater than hers. Besides Fanny Smith his “great favorites” were Annie Murray, whom he judged both pretty and “singularly sweet,” and Edith Carow, for whom he had lately named his rowboat. When Edith “dresses well,” he observed, “and don’t frizzle her hair, [she] is a very pretty girl.” Fanny, he judged pure, religious, bright, well read, “and I think a true friend.” “The dancing class went off very well,” he noted one evening, “and was very orderly except that Mr. Dodsworth once had to stop the ladies from talking.”

Any expressions of endearment, however, were reserved for his “Darling Motherling,” as he and Ellie had begun calling her, and for Conie, now fifteen and flirtatious, who adored parties and to moon with him over “serious” poetry. Her health, like his, remained “delicate.” She was “Baby Conie” or “Little Pet Pussie,” a nickname in fashion among their “set” (Edith Jones, the future Edith Wharton, was another Pussie). They shared eager “intimacies” and in private correspondence with her, as with his mother, he could slip into a cloying baby-love-talk that no one in that pre-Freudian household thought a thing of. “Little Pet Pussie,” he would write from Harvard, “I want to pet you again awfully! You cunning, pretty, little, foolish Puss. My easy chair would just hold myself and Pussie.”

In the first letter he wrote to Mittie from Harvard, he told her how he had put her picture on his mantelpiece, “where I can always see Motherling.” He emphasized how “cosy” everything was, with a bright coal fire burning in the grate. “The table is almost too handsome, and I do not know whether to admire most the curtains, the paper or the carpet.”

His tone with her was very different from what it was with his father. With Father he must measure up, show the progress he was making along approved paths. But with Mittie, or with Conie, he could relax, ramble, even be “frivolous,” sounding at times very much the mama’s boy, or somebody’s parody of a preposterous little Harvard snob. He had been “down to New Haven” to see the Harvard football team play Yale; Harvard had lost, he explained to his mother, “principally because our opponents played very foul.” Yale was not at all to his taste. “The fellows too seem to be a much more scrubby set than ours.”

He tells her he is wearing her slippers, “which remind me of you all the time.”

In pursuing his new social career, he wished all at home to know, he was choosing his acquaintances exclusively from the “gentleman sort” and it was slow going, since he knew so little of anyone’s “antecedents.” “On this very account, I have avoided being very intimate with the New York fellows.”

Then, to his amazement, he discovered that numbers of his classmates had come to Harvard with no intention of getting an education. John Lamson, he reported indignantly, was there only to enjoy himself.

“Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies,” the elder Theodore wrote.

They all wrote to him, the letters going off at a rate of two, three, sometimes four a week. One from Liverpool from Uncle Jimmie Bulloch touched him so that it was all he could do to keep from weeping. Like his father, he reserved Sundays for correspondence. “Sundays I have all to myself, as most of the fellows are in Boston on that day. . . . Our ideas as to how it should be spent . . . are decidedly different ...” They must understand that he was not in the least homesick. Ignoring the countless nights he had suffered from asthma, forgetting the fears and loneliness and terrible feelings of inferiority he had lived with for as long as he could remember, he told his Beloved Motherling: “It seems perfectly wonderful, in looking back over my eighteen years of existence to see how I have literally never spent an unhappy day, unless by my own fault! When I think of this, and also of my intimacy with you all (for I hardly know a boy who is on as intimate and affectionate terms with his family as I am), I feel that I have an immense amount to be thankful for.” To Theodore he wrote, “I do not think there is a fellow in college who has a family that love him as much as you all do me, and I am sure that there is no one who has a father who is also his best and most intimate friend, as you are mine.... I do not find it nearly so hard as I expected not to drink and smoke . . .”

He was signing himself Thee, Jr., or Theodore, or, as time passed, Ted or Teddy or Tedo. He seemed not to know what he should be called.

On October 27, from Philadelphia, where he had gone to see the Centennial Exposition, his father wrote as follows, addressing him as Theodore:

I must write a few lines to my oldest boy on his eighteenth birthday. I cannot realize that you really are so old, and still it is a great comfort to find that you are approaching mans estate. I have worked pretty hard all my life and anticipate passing over to you many of my responsibilities as soon as your shoulders are broad enough to bear them. It has always seemed to me as if there was something peculiarly pleasant in the relations between a father and a son, the enjoyment of the father is so great as he cares for the boy and sees him gradually become a reasoning being, his mind and his physique both developing under his care and training, and above all his religious views becoming more fixed. As he approaches manhood the boy enjoys relieving the father of first the responsibilities which he has borne until that time, and those cares prepare the boy to take the fathers place in the great battle of life.

We have both been fortunate so far and have much cause for thankfulness to that one who has guarded and made our lives so much more happy than those of the many by whom we are surrounded. Indeed, it seems strange how few great sorrows I have been called upon to bear and you scarce one.

He wanted the boy to send him a complete description of his daily routine. How much exercise was he getting and of what sort? Did he find he was keeping up his health as well as at home?

The wonder was his health had never been better. It was quite the most remarkable development since leaving home. He was “in beautiful health,” he exclaimed to Mittie after having been away nearly two months; and he added confidently, “I do not think I shall have any difficulty at all on that score ...” His eyes had bothered him a little, but it was nothing to worry about. Most amazing of all, his asthma had disappeared. There had not been a sign of it since leaving home. Nor would there be that entire freshman fall, other than a brief flare-up in November, on the eve of his return for Thanksgiving, but it was so slight an attack that he never bothered to mention it until weeks afterward. To Bamie, at the time, he said it would be mistaken to picture him in anything other than perfect health, “entirely free of asthma,” and without a worry. His real troubles, he said, were math and “my rug, which will curl up at the edges, although I devote a half hour every day to stamping it back into shape.”

Not even a typically miserable, raw Cambridge winter set him back. Cambridge in January and February might have been a health resort, to judge by the state of his health. He wanted the name of a doctor, “in case of accidents,” and through Professor Henry Adams was put in touch with a local man, Dr. Morrill Wyman—an interesting choice, since Dr. Wyman happened to be a leading specialist in pulmonary ailments—but all he was ever treated for was a mild case of measles, a condition he found amusing.

His health was good, his outlook was good. There was too much going on to leave time even to be homesick, he wrote in February. “I have been very much astonished at this, and also at my good health. Excepting a little asthma in November, I have not been sick at all.”

The picture that emerges, sketchy as it may be, is of an almost miraculous transformation, an improvement of the kind often seen among present-day asthmatic children who are treated by removing them temporarily from their home lives and environments. Away from his family for the first time, he had a year of health like none he had ever known. He was “astonished.”

There was to be a misconception in later years that he conquered his childhood infirmities mainly through will power and body building, that he rid himself of asthma by making himself a strong man. But that is not quite the way it happened. First of all, he never would be rid of asthma entirely, and if there was a point at which he clearly found reprieve from suffering of the kind he had known, it came well before he attained anything like rugged manhood. It came when he went to Harvard, when he left home and was on his own in ways he had never been.

Returning to New York for the Christmas holidays, he sported a new beaver hat, a cane, and “English” side-whiskers. Several classmates came on for the New York parties—the first guests of his own choosing to be brought into the house. Mittie and Theodore put on a party in his honor. “We all like his friends so much,” reported Aunt Annie to Elliott, who was back in Texas for more Wild West therapy. “They seem to be such manly gentlemen. . . . Teedie is a lovely boy . . .”

His last day home he spent sleighing in the park with his father. The snow and the day were perfect, the horses in peak condition. “He went off most cheerfully to Cambridge again,” Theodore wrote. “He has had a glorious time . . .”

At Cambridge, he came suddenly to life socially. He was being asked to friends’ homes for dinner. He wrote now of an assembly dance at Brookline, of a sleighing party with “forty girls and fellows, and two matrons in one huge sleigh. . . . dragged by our eight horses rapidly through a great many of the pretty little towns which form the suburbs of Boston.” Another dance at Dorchester was “quite a swell affair.” He was playing cards, drinking coffee, taking dancing lessons. A Miss Wheelright, a Miss Richardson, a Miss Andrews, and a Miss Fisk began to appear in his letters. He was having a “pretty gay time” and happened also to be needing some money. A hundred dollars ought to do, he thought, though “by rights” it should be more. (A year at Harvard then could cost anywhere from about $500 to $1,500, depending on the style in which the student chose to live. The average was about $800. But for this first year the elder Theodore would pay $1,600—or roughly $17,000 in present-day money—and it was to be the boys most economical year of the four.)

He and another boy, Henry Minot, were already planning a collecting trip to the Adirondacks once classes ended in June. Henry Minot was his one close friend, the son of a prominent Boston family (the “antecedents” were quite acceptable), who, at seventeen, had already published a book on New England birds. He would bring Henry home one day, he wrote in a long letter to Mittie and Theodore; he was sure they would approve.

By the way, as the time when birds are beginning to come back is approaching, I wish you would send on my gun, with all the cartridges you can find and my various apparatus for cleaning, loading it, etc. Also send on a dozen glass jars, with their rubbers and stoppers (which you will find in my museum), and a German dictionary, if you have one.

He was in a world of his own, absorbed, bookish, happy. He had a manservant to black his boots and light his fire in the morning. A large black woman looked after his laundry. To please his father he began teaching Sunday school at Christ Church, opposite the town common, just outside Harvard Yard. Of Cambridge life in general, however, he cared nothing. Of the whole workaday world, or those happenings that filled the newspapers, he appears to have been oblivious. That fall, just before the national elections—if we are to believe the reminiscences of one or two classmates—he had marched in a demonstration for Rutherford B. Hayes. It was supposedly his first show of political interest and he is described responding with characteristic, theatrical anger, fists thrashing in the air, when a potato came flying from an upstairs window. But his own letters from that freshman year contain no mention of such an event, no mention of politics or of the election and its bizarre outcome—which is odd mainly in view of how greatly such events filled the thoughts of his beloved father.

2

The elder Theodore had first seen the Republican candidate in the flesh at the Philadelphia Exposition, during one of Hayes’s rare campaign appearances; and having seen him, Theodore felt even better about what had happened in Cincinnati.

“He talked very pleasantly,” Theodore wrote to his Harvard son, “and impressed one as being perfectly honest.” Most people found Hayes disappointing, dowdy. A reporter for The New York Times covering the same occasion despaired over the candidates “dreadfully shabby coat and shockingly bad hat, all brushed up the wrong way.” But Theodore concentrated on the face, finding in it no sign of “divided character.”

Theodore took most of what he knew of the campaign from his morning paper, the Tribune, as ardent a Hayes paper as any in New York, and his faith in Hayes held steady, even afterward, during the drawn-out winter months when nobody knew who—whether Hayes or Tilden—had been elected President. At first it seemed Tilden had. Tilden swept New York and nationally held a clear majority. But the votes in four states—Oregon and three in the Deep South—were in dispute, states that, if carried by the Republicans, would swing the electoral vote to Hayes. Republican “statesmen” rushed south to confer with election boards. Through February a special committee met daily in Washington to appraise the conflicting tallies, and outraged Democrats from all walks spoke of violence should the Republicans try to steal the election. In Columbus, Ohio, somebody fired a shot at Hayes’s house as he sat down to dinner.

Given the conscience he had, it is somewhat hard to picture Theodore wholly at ease with the declaration on March 2 that Hayes was the winner by a single electoral vote, but like countless others (including Hayes), he appears to have accepted the proposition that the Republicans really did carry all four of the disputed states and that claims to the contrary were but further evidence of the usual Democratic calumny. Like peaceable men of both parties he breathed a sigh of relief at Tilden’s refusal to contest the decision, and like every true liberal Republican he brightened at the news that Carl Schurz was to be the new Secretary of the Interior and that William Evarts, the eminent New York attorney and old Conkling foe, had been named Secretary of State. Even James Russell Lowell was to be rewarded with the post of minister to Spain.

Hayes’s inaugural address carried the memorable line, “he serves his party best who serves his country best.” And in another month came word of a full-scale investigation into the affairs of the New York Customhouse. A blue-ribbon investigating commission was announced, with John Jay, an old friend of Theodore’s, at its head. By the time Hayes made his first visit to New York as President in May, the hearings were under way downtown at the Customhouse and causing a stir wherever politics were talked. Quite obviously the Administration had decided it was time to cut Conkling down to size.

The record of what was going on behind the scenes is far from complete, but from all available evidence it appears that William Evarts was in charge of the assault. It was Evarts who proposed to Hayes that Chester Arthur be removed and that the new man at the Customhouse be Theodore Roosevelt.

Evarts was the law partner of Theodore’s close friend Joseph Choate, himself a crusading liberal Republican and somebody who had had ample opportunity to appraise Theodore’s executive abilities at close hand over many years. (It was Choate who, at Theodore’s request, had drawn up the original charter for the Museum of Natural History, for example.) And Evarts, too, had had his own dealings with Theodore only the year before, when Evarts headed a committee to raise the money for a pedestal for a promised gift from France of a giant Statue of Liberty. Theodore had served on the committee and served well, seeing at once the importance that so great a work—like his museums or the bridge to Brooklyn—would have to his beloved city.

At what point Theodore’s name was first broached for the Customhouse is impossible to determine, but judging by the attention he received during the days that the President was in town, it could have been as early as May. One gets the impression certainly that he was being looked over or lined up for something and it took no great acumen to see what an ideally suited choice for the post he was. Few men stood higher in the estimate of the community—or of those high-toned, high-placed liberals upon whom the Administration must count for support in any fight with Conkling. Theodore, moreover, had already proved himself admirably in a somewhat analogous situation at Vienna in 1873 when he stepped in as a commissioner at the Exposition. The authorized commissioner had been found to be dishonest and Theodore, at a moments notice, had righted a confused and embarrassing situation with both dispatch and tact, and the home papers had taken note.

His very name bespoke rectitude. Great wealth—supposedly—placed a man above such crass temptations as were traditional at the Customhouse. As a merchant and importer, he had ample knowledge of customs procedures. Yet with the Roosevelt family now divested of the glass trade, there could be no charge of conflicting allegiances. The point that Collector Arthur happened to be doing a rather respectable job, all things considered, was immaterial since the real target was Conkling.

Beyond all that there was William Evarts himself, who was not without his own ambitions concerning future control of party machinery in the state. A strong, reliable, honest man in the Customhouse—his man—would be as valuable to him as “Chet” Arthur was to Conkling. And the fact that Theodore had shown himself to be such a fiercely outspoken foe of Conkling meant he was not just a worthy ally but one whose appointment was guaranteed to enrage the unforgiving Conkling.

The Collectorship of the Port of New York was a government post like none other. Politically it was the ultimate plum. The power and responsibility attending the job were enormous, greater than those of most Cabinet officers; and the pay, as things were constituted, could exceed even that of the President.

Everything about the Customhouse was mammoth. If considered as a business operation, it stood in a class by itself, doing an annual dollar volume approximately five times that of the largest business office in the country. The revenues collected exceeded those of all the other American ports of entry combined. Roughly two-thirds of the country’s total tariff revenue was taken in at New York. Employees numbered more than a thousand. The building itself was colossal.

Customs collectors and clerks, importers, and customs brokers carried on their transactions in an echoing rotunda beneath a huge dome supported by marble columns, the desks of the collectors and clerks being arranged in concentric circles around a large four-faced clock at the center of the floor. Messengers darted in and out while visitors, there to enjoy one of the “sights” of downtown, watched from the periphery. Collector Arthur, tall, radiant, invariably dapper, paraded through to his private office usually around noon, ready for his official day.

The Collector had direct authority over the majority of employees. The next highest ranking officials were the Naval Officer, who was primarily a backup for the Collector; the Surveyor of the Port, who ran a staff of inspectors, weighers, gaugers, and “keepers of storage places”; and the Appraiser, whose people decided what incoming goods were worth and therefore determined the size of the duty to be paid. These officials had their deputies and the deputies had their deputies, and as previous investigations had shown, “overemployment” was standard down the line. Indeed, the customs service was notorious as an asylum for nonentities and has-beens, a kind of warm, dry dumping ground for failed merchants and broken-down sports with political connections, and for every kind of political hack. Numbers of customs service people were, of course, honest and hardworking. One, we know, was a genius, Herman Melville, who was finishing out his life in dreary anonymity as a customs inspector at a Hudson River wharf at $4 a day. But the opportunities for personal “rewards” in addition to salary—for emoluments, gratuities, and for plain bribery—were so great that almost any job could be made to pay handsomely.

Of greatest importance, and especially to those at the top, was the moiety system, as it was known, a practice deep in the grain at the Customhouse and quite within the law. It was the chief reason why the Collectorship was known as the best-paying job “within the gift of government.”

Instituted as early as 1789, the system provided that employees share in all fines and forfeitures. The idea had been to inspire perseverance among inspectors, but the temptation, naturally, was for inspectors to find discrepancies where there were none, in order to collect their share of the fine and also win favor with those at the top—the lieutenants of the New York machine—whose own shares would be substantial. Every importer resented the system but it was not until Chester Arthur’s first year as Collector, with the sensational Phelps, Dodge case, that their feelings turned to outrage. Theodore, with his ties to the Dodge family, could hardly have been more stunned, one imagines, had his own firm been the victim.

The case can be summarized briefly as follows:

Phelps, Dodge and Company, importers of copper, lead, zinc, and other metals, was among the most respected firms in New York. It was headed by William E. Dodge, Sr., and by his son, William E. Dodge, Jr., Theodore’s lifelong friend. In 1872 the senior Dodge was summoned to the office of a special agent at the Customhouse, a man named Jayne, and was informed privately that by undervaluing certain shipments his firm had been defrauding the government. Dodge, who had been an outspoken critic of Customhouse mores, was impressed with the extreme seriousness of the situation and given a choice. He could either settle out of court for the amount owed to the government, all of which had been figured down to the penny ($271,017.23), whereupon the case would be closed, or he could face a lawsuit and whatever costs and publicity that might entail, in addition to an ultimate fine that conceivably could exceed a million dollars. Never bothering to question the authenticity of the charge, Dodge paid up, only to learn that in actual fact the government had been cheated of nothing. The few undervaluations committed by his firm had been minimal, less than its errors of overvaluation. He had been the victim of an extortion. He spoke out at once, a congressional investigation resulted, and in 1874 Congress put an end to the moiety system. But the money paid by Dodge had been divided up meantime. The Collector, the Naval Officer, and the Surveyor of the Port—good Conkling men all—got some $22,000 each; special agent Jayne received roughly three times that for his part; and for legal services rendered, Senator Conkling received a sizable fee. Claiming he knew nothing of the details of the case, Collector Arthur survived the investigation untouched.

Though the fixed salary of the Collector was $12,000, which was more than that of a Cabinet officer, Collector Arthur’s real annual income from his position ranged around $55,000. The present-day equivalent would be $500,000 or more.

“We look back upon it, and we think . . . that we were fools,” Dodge had told the congressional committee. The government, he said, must have intelligent men in the Customhouse, men of high character and standing.

Theodore, Collector Arthur, and both Dodges were present with several hundred others at the lavish Chamber of Commerce banquet given for the President at Delmonicos the night of May 14. Dodge, Sr., in fact, was seated with John Jay, Schurz, and William Evarts at the head table. The Jay Commission was in its third week of hearings by this time and Schurz, the main speaker of the evening, was at his rousing best. The time had come for a “thorough reform of the public service of the country [loud applause]—the organization, I mean, of a public service upon sound business principles [renewed applause]. . . . The public service ought not to be a souphouse to feed the indigent, a hospital and asylum for decayed politicians [great cheering]. . . .” The expression on Collector Arthurs face through all this is not recorded.

Then the following afternoon, May 15, a soft, lovely spring day in New York, Theodore and Albert Bickmore escorted the President on a preview tour of the American Museum of Natural History, which was in its final stages before being officially opened to the public. They peered together at cases of Cherokee beadwork, arrowheads, spearpoints, and silver ornaments unearthed from burial mounds in Georgia.

Mittie was included at the reception for the President and Mrs. Hayes given that same evening by former governor Edwin D. Morgan at his Fifth Avenue mansion. And the morning of the sixteenth, when the President went downtown for an official welcome at City Hall, Theodore was again part of the official entourage, riding in the second carriage with old Thurlow Weed and Webb Hayes, the Presidents son. At the conclusion of still one more opulent affair that night, this at the home of John Jacob Astor III, Theodore and Mittie were asked to stay on for a small, private gathering with the President and the First Lady, as the wife of the Chief Executive was now being called.

In another few weeks rumors were in the wind of Arthur’s dismissal. Hayes refused to say anything officially until the Jay Commission completed its work, which consumed most of the summer, as witness after witness confirmed the worst suspicions of Customhouse corruption, inefficiency, waste, and stupidity. On June 22, however, Hayes issued an executive order forbidding party assessments of federal employees and forbidding federal employees any role in the running of party affairs—an order aimed squarely at Conkling and his “boys.” Chester Arthur, for whom nobody seems to have felt any ill will, was invited to Washington and quietly offered the consulship in Paris if he would simply resign, but this he refused to do. Presently, when the newspapers learned before he did that his resignation was to be requested, Arthur felt he had no choice but to stand fast. The New York Sun, a Democratic paper, speculated that perhaps Secretary Evarts’ real wish in bringing new management to the Customhouse was to foster some fresh Republican leadership in New York.

To date there had been no response from Roscoe Conkling, who had been abroad for the summer (Mrs. Sprague was currently living in Paris). It was not until September that he opened his attack, in a speech at a Republican state convention in Rochester, and with a savagery that appalled everyone, including many of his admirers.

Who were these men cracking the whip over him like schoolmasters, Conkling demanded, these man-milliners, these carpet knights of politics with their veneer of superior purity. George William Curtis, who had spoken in support of Hayes only moments before, sat muttering, “Remarkable! What an exhibition! Bad temper! Very bad temper!” Hammering on, glaring at Curtis, Conkling said no party was ever built on deportment or ladies’ magazines or gush. The speech was taken to be an unfortunate emotional outburst, the senator having momentarily lost hold of himself. The New York Times said he sounded like a maniac. But in fact it had all been quite carefully prepared and memorized, every breath of it timed for maximum effect.

“We are all excited here about politics just now, everybody outraged at the late performances at Rochester,” wrote Joseph Choate to his wife after spending the weekend with Theodore and the family at Oyster Bay.

For Theodore life went on all the same. He had become interested in a scheme to bring Cleopatra’s Needle to New York. He was busy at the office, busy as always with his good deeds, and working too hard, the family felt. In May he had taken a break to escort Bamie, Conie, Cousin Maud, and Edith Carow on a weekend visit to Harvard, and again in midsummer he and Bamie went off to stay with friends at Mount Desert Island in Maine. Back at his office later, he observed that he, the gay butterfly, had been reduced once more to a grub. Elliott had returned from Texas to stay and young Theodore was embarking on prodigious expeditions up and down Long Island Sound by rowboat, covering in one day as much as twenty-five miles. The long summer was a “capital time,” highlighted by a visit from Uncle Jimmie Bulloch. Then the first week in September Theodore went off to Saratoga to a State Board of Charities meeting to discuss the conditions of insane children.

The formal announcement that he was to replace Arthur at the Customhouse came in October. Two others—General Edwin A. Merritt and a lawyer with the majestic name of Le Baron Bradford Prince—had been picked to fill the posts of Surveyor and Naval Officer. The nominations went to the Senate on the twenty-fourth, by which time it was obvious that more than the fate of the Customhouse or the Conkling machine was riding on the outcome. At issue was the power of the presidency as measured against that of the Senate, and the realities of Senate politics being what they were, and in view of the decline of presidential power since Lincoln, the chance for a Hayes victory looked slim. For one thing, the committee through which the nominations would first have to pass was the committee on commerce, of which Senator Conkling was chairman. Still, Hayes remained firm. “I am clear that I am right,” he wrote in his diary. “I believe that a large majority of the best people are in full accord with me.” Senator George Edmunds, Republican of Vermont, was delegated to warn Hayes of the risks he was running and to ask that he “cooperate.” “We must cooperate in the interests of the country,” Hayes responded.

To the reformers, of whom very few were members of the United States Senate, it had become a test case.

Conkling’s committee sat on the nominations for another month and more, during which, to the delight of reporters, Conkling gave forth with some of the choicest invective of his career. Stopped one day in New York by a man from the Herald, Conkling observed that there were in total perhaps three hundred in the city who opposed him, “who believe themselves to occupy the solar walk and the milky way, and even up there they lift their skirts very carefully for fear even the heavens might stain them. . . . They would have people fill the offices by nothing less than divine selection.”

Theodore, meantime, was appearing at City Hall before the New York Board of Apportionment to protest, in behalf of the State Board of Charities, scandalous conditions in the city’s asylums for the indigent and the insane. (TERRIBLE CHARGES, read the headline in the Herald the morning after he had spoken his piece.) He denounced the mixing of criminals with the sick and the insane, deplored the wretched food, the rampant incompetence and “graver moral deficiencies” of the people employed to work in such places. The underlying problem, he insisted, was politics, the system by which every job was political and no one person could ever be held accountable.

To friends and admirers he seemed to have reached a new plateau of maturity and influence. The stature of the Collectorship would be raised to new heights the moment he took office, his admirers knew. One friend, D. Willis James, who had been away from the city for a year, wrote after seeing him again that fall that “he seemed to me another man,” so great was the change. “I was astonished. I was amazed at the growth . . .”

At age forty-six he was, as said the Tribune, “in the prime of vigorous manhood” and stood ready to do his duty. Naturally he stood ready to do his duty. “I will take the office not to administer it for the benefit of a party,” he told the papers, “but for the benefit of the whole people.” If confirmed he would serve without pay. Editorials praised the appointment. “Mr. Roosevelt is a gentleman above reproach and would unquestionably inaugurate a new order of things at the Customhouse.” George William Curtis said in Harper’s Weekly that the President could have found no man “of higher character or greater fitness.”

But the fight over the confirmation was one in which Theodore himself could take no personal part, conspicuous as he was made by the appointment; and his frustrations and worries compounded as weeks went by and nothing happened beyond talk and speculation. Greatly as he detested Conkling he was unable to speak out. He must bide his time, maintain perfect decorum and silence, and so passive a role did not sit at all well with him.

In secret he hoped he would be turned down, he later told young Theodore. To “purify” the Customhouse would be a task of unfathomable difficulty and he dreaded it. He knew what to expect at the hands of the politicians and the press.

To the rest of the family, meantime, he seems to have said as little as possible about the job or the changes it would mean for all of them; and to judge by the very little his son said about the subject in what he wrote from Harvard, none of them was overly concerned in any event. “Tell Father I am watching the ’Controllership’ movements with the greatest interest,” the boy added to the end of a letter to Bamie, suggesting he was ignorant even of the name of the job. But he also asked that his subscription to the Tribune be renewed and observed in another letter to Bamie in November that it looked as though their father would not get the Collectorship. “I am glad on his account, but sorry for New York.” His own triumph of the moment was “The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N. Y.,” his first published work, a pamphlet of three or four pages that he and Henry Minot had gotten up as a result of their trip the previous summer.

There was something in the papers about the Customhouse nominations nearly every day. On November 10, Senate Republicans caucused in “unusual secrecy” for five hours during which Conkling argued against any nomination made to succeed an officer dismissed without cause. On November 30, Conkling’s committee on commerce unanimously rejected the Customhouse appointments, and four days later when the Senate went into executive session to consider the full list of presidential appointments—circuit judges, Indian commissioners, postmasters—time was somehow never found to decide on any appointments to the customs service. Since the current session of Congress expired that same day, the Administration would thus be required to send those particular nominations to the Senate all over again with the start of the next session. Conkling was not merely stalling for time to line up the votes he needed, but giving the Administration opportunity to see the light and drop the matter altogether.

By now the story filled the front pages. Following a Cabinet meeting on December 4, it was reported that a compromise was in the making. Allegedly, to appease Conkling, Theodore Roosevelt would not be named again for the Collectorship. Conkling, it was understood, might accept some other nominee, but not Roosevelt under any circumstances. But on December 6, Hayes told a delegation of New York congressmen who had come to speak for Collector Arthur that his nominees were “good men” and he would make no changes. He sent his customs service list to the Senate later the same day and the Senate went into executive session at once.

Conkling challenged Hayes for not giving due cause for removing Arthur. He denounced Hayes personally, ridiculed the civil service passages in Hayes’ annual message to Congress issued the day before. Conkling was “forcible, witty, and severely sarcastic.” He also proved himself grandly inconsistent by supporting the nomination of a new customs Collector at Chicago to replace someone being removed without explanatory cause.

“I am very much afraid that Conkling has won the day,” young Theodore wrote to his father.

On December 11, the committee on commerce confirmed the appointment of Edwin A. Merritt and rejected those of Theodore Roosevelt and Le Baron Bradford Prince. The vote in the Senate came the afternoon of the twelfth, when the doors of the Senate were again swung shut for another executive—secret—session. Conkling’s speech this time was one of his major orations, reputedly one of the three most brilliant performances of his political career. He spoke last and for nearly an hour and a half. From an undisclosed source a reporter put together a vivid picture of the scene, of Conkling striding up and down the aisle as he spoke, his voice gathering strength until he was shouting “and [he] clinched every sentence with violent gestures.” He tore into the Administration, as before; he defended his dear and loyal friend Arthur. He denied “in an excited manner” that the Customhouse was in any way a political machine. But the climax came with his attack on Theodore Roosevelt. “He said Mr. Roosevelt was his bitter personal enemy, who had lost no opportunity of denouncing him, and he appealed to Senators to protect him and the four millions of people he represented.” It was because Roosevelt was his enemy that the Administration had picked Roosevelt for the job in the first place. The appointment, Conkling said, had been made solely to destroy and humiliate and dishonor Roscoe Conkling and he would not have it.

The vote came at eight that evening and of the Republicans a mere six refused to go along with Conkling. The nominations of Theodore and Le Baron Bradford Prince were rejected by a count of 31 to 25. “In the language of the press,” wrote Hayes in his diary, “’Senator Conkling has won a great victory over the Administration.’ . . . But the end is not yet. I am right, and shall not give up the contest.”

Theodore, who is not known ever to have kept a diary, wrote to his older son the following Sunday evening.

6 West 57th Street

December 16, 1877

DEAR OLD THEODORE,

As usual I sit down to my desk in my little room after the others have gone to bed. You know that it is not the want of the will that makes me a poor correspondent, but even tonight when I had passed over the newsboys to Mr. Blagdon’s care and anticipated a quiet evening we have been obliged to devote ourselves to others. People have been calling, including Mr. [Albert] Bierstadt, who came in late to ask me to dine with him and gave some very interesting descriptions of the manner in which he made his studies of the buffalo.

A great weight was taken off my shoulders when Elliott read the other morning that the Senate had decided not to confirm me, no one can imagine the relief. To purify our Customhouse was a terrible undertaking which I felt it was my duty to undertake but I realized all the difficulties I would encounter and the abuse I must expect to receive. I feel now so glad I did not refuse it. The machine politicians have shown their colors and not one person has been able to make an accusation of any kind against me. Indeed, they have all done me more than justice. I never told your mother but it would have practically kept me in the city almost all the time in summer and that would be no joke. I feel sorry for the country, however, as it shows the power of the partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests. I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

What he failed to mention was that in the final weeks of the battle he had been stricken with severe intestinal pains, of which he apparently wished the boy to know nothing. Bamie, however, had already sent word on and in a letter to her written from Cambridge that same Sunday he said he was “very uneasy about Father.” Did the doctor think it anything serious, he asked. “Thank fortune, my own health is excellent, and so, when I get home, I can with a clear conscience give him a rowing up for not taking better care of himself . . . The trouble is the dear old fellow never does think of himself in anything.”

3

Theodore died less than two months later. He had his good days, mornings when the pain subsided as if by miracle and he and Bamie would go for a drive. Through one long remission—the week after Christmas, with young Theodore home—he actually seemed to be recovering. But even then his confidence and cheer were a front. When the American Museum of Natural History had its grand opening on December 22, he was too ill to attend. Again President Hayes took part and Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, was the main speaker. It was described in the papers as “one of the most brilliant daylight assemblages that New York has ever seen,” and for Theodore, by all rights, it should have been a day of days, a moment of acclaim and restitution after what he had been through since October. Of his defeat at the hands of Senator Conkling, he had been willing to say only that he remained “definitely hostile” to machine politics in any form.

The first sign that there was something seriously wrong with him had come less than forty-eight hours after he had written the long letter to young Theodore, his final letter to the boy so far as is known. The diagnosis then was acute peritonitis, which was regarded as extremely alarming. As one of young Theodore’s friends would write, “You couldn’t have your appendix out then, you didn’t know the word, you got something they called peritonitis, or inflammation of the bowels, and usually died.” But as later determined, he was, in fact, dying of cancer of the stomach—of a malignant, inoperable tumor of the bowel that was growing rapidly.

The anxiety that swept through the family may be felt even in such brief entries as to be found in a diary kept by Anna Gracie.

Tuesday, December 18

Ellie stopped on his way downtown, and his father was taken very ill about 4 o’clock this morning. Bamie’s party tonight. I saw Thee before I went into [the] drawing r[oo]m, very ill. Conie sat with him until two o’clock.

Thursday, December 20

All day at 57th St. Thee desperately ill.

Friday, December 21

First ray of hope, dear Thee will be better of this attack of peritonitis, but the disease is no better.

Sunday, December 23

Took tea at 57th St. Thee so ill but more comfortable.

Monday, December 24

Spent tonight at 57th, arranged table and stockings of children’s things. Thee more easy but very weak.

Tuesday, December 25

Saw dear Thee a short time before we went to church. Afternoon sat with him while Bamie rested. He made us all but Mittie go in to Xmas dinner . . .

“Can I do anything for you and Mrs. Roosevelt?” asked Louisa Schuyler in a note to Bamie. “I mean by way of sitting downstairs to answer messages and notes—or anything of the kind?” “Xmas. Father seems much better,” wrote young Theodore, who was keeping a “Private Diary” of his own once again and who left for Harvard after New Year’s convinced his father had passed the crisis.

They said goodbye to each other January 2, and according to later entries in the new diary, Theodore told him he was the dearest of his children and had never caused him a moment’s pain. There had been a heavy snowfall. The city was a winter scene from Harper’s Weekly and the boy and the family coachman, bundled to the ears, were not a hundred feet from the door, heading for the boat, when their sleigh tipped over and they were dragged off down the street by the horses like a snowplow—all “rather good fun,” as the boy said. He expressed no particular concern for his father in the letters that followed from Cambridge, nor in his diary, but then neither was he being told anything of the actual situation. It had been decided that he should be spared any worry. With Henry Minot, he had now joined the Nuttall Ornithological Club of Cambridge, before which, on the evening of January 28, 1878, he presented a paper on certain aspects of the English sparrow problem.

As the days passed, Theodore’s physical pain became excruciating. Mittie seldom left his side. But they all took their turns watching over him—Anna Gracie, James Alfred, who came in from next door, Bamie, Elliott, Conie, the maid Mary Ann. They sat and read aloud to him, or they just sat. “I have sat with him some seven hours,” Conie told Edith Carow. “He slept most of it but at times was in fearful agony. Oh, Edith, it is the most frightful thing to see the person you love best in the world in terrible pain . . .” He was suffering so, she said, that his hair was turning gray.

The morning of February 7 he was either sufficiently free from pain or sufficiently sedated to be taken for a sleigh ride, Bamie riding in the seat beside him; and that afternoon there was a letter from young Theodore that pleased him enormously. “I was with your dear father when your mother read your letter to him out loud,” wrote Anna Gracie. “You would have felt more than repaid for the exertion of writing such a cheery, long letter to him, if you could have seen the expression of his face. . . . His whole face lighted up with a beautiful smile when she read the figures out of the two examinations you have just passed. . . . I have not seen him look so pleased and like himself for a long time.”

The next morning, early, he and Bamie went off again, though this time, on return, he was again in agony. The doctor was sent for. Carriages came and went through the rest of the day as friends called to express their concern and to ask if there was anything they could do. Word of his condition had also reached the newspapers by now and the day following, Saturday, February 9, a crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside. It was there hour after hour as the day passed. Conie would remember it as a “huge” crowd, which perhaps it was, and most heartrending to her, as to all those who came and went, were the numbers of ragged children who stood waiting—his newsboys and orphans. The scene, as recalled, seems so very Victorian as to be not quite real, like some sentimental deathwatch from Dickens. One imagines the wind whipping the snow. (Actually it had turned warm and rain fell several times during the day.) But the children were there at the steps to the house waiting for news of the man who doubtless meant, just as Conie said, more to them than any other human being.

A telegram was sent telling young Theodore to return at once. Three doctors were rushed to the house. James Alfred and Aunt Lizzie stood by on the first floor. Cornelius and Laura arrived, as did Anna and James Gracie. Counting the servants there were at times as many as twenty people in the home.

The end did not come until nearly midnight. Of the long day itself, there is only one firsthand account. It was written by Elliott, whose devotion to his father over the past week or more had been heroic. He had hardly taken time to eat or sleep. He was ill, close to a complete collapse, his “young strength . . . poured out,” as Conie remembered, even before the day began. The account, given here with only a few minor deletions, appears to have been written soon after Theodore died, possibly the following day, the “terrible Sunday” when young Theodore arrived by the night boat from Boston.

Feb. 9, 1878

This morning at ten while I was sitting in my room smoking, Corinne ran in and said, “Ellie, Father wants to be moved, will you come upstairs?” I went immediately and found Father still under the influences of sedatives, sitting in the rocking chair in the morning room. As I came in he beckoned to me. I ran to him and . . . my arms about him, he got up and with my help tottered to the mantel. Here suddenly his face became distorted with pain and he called out loud for ether. I left him, got the bottle and taking him in my arms put him on the sofa and drenching the handkerchief I held it on his face. Mother, Bamie, and Mary Ann came up and we sent for the doctor. This was 10:15. From then until 11:30 all the strength I had could barely keep him on the sofa. He never said anything but “Oh! My!” but the agony in his face was awful. Ether and sedatives were of no avail. Little Mother stood by with a glass of water which I drank at intervals, being deathly sick. Pretty soon Father began to vomit after which he would be quiet a minute, then with face fearful with pain [he] would clasp me tight in his arms. . . . The power with which he would hug me was terrific and then in a second he would be lying, white, panting, and weak as a baby in my arms with sweat in huge drops rolling down his face and neck. . . . At 11:30, thank God, the doctor came. I ran up to the Ellises, found Dr. Thomas and returned to find the doctor about to give Father chloroform. On its application Father became quiet instantly but the two doctors despaired of his life and from then until 1:30 Mother sat at his head and I by him with the chlo[roform] and handkerchief. We put him from one chlo[roform] sleep into another . . . Dr. Polk relieved Mother and I at 1:30 when we tried to take a bit of lunch. The afternoon Dr. Polk, Mother, Uncle Jim, [Dr.] Thomas, and I were by his side all the time. . . . At 6:30 Mother and I went down and tried to eat dinner. I felt so sick I stayed to smoke a cigar and after felt well and more myself. I sat in the little room with Uncles Corneil and Jim and Aunts Laura and Lizzie and little Mary Ann. Going upstairs at 7:30 I found the servants in the hall waiting with scared faces in Corinne’s room, Aunt A[nna], B[amie], and C[onie] all in tears. Mother, Dr.’s Polk and Goldthwait and Uncle Jimmie by the bedside. Father seemed the same but his pulse much feebler. Dr. P[olk], Bamie, and C[onie] went to bed. Uncle Jim came up and Mother and the two uncles and Dr. G[oldthwait] and watched. Oh, my God, my father, what agonies you suffered. . . . So it went on. At eleven fifteen he opened his eyes. I motioned to the Dr. who applied the tube and brandy to his mouth. He did not make an effort to suck even. We put the glass up and dropped it [the brandy] down. He turned sharp to the left and throwing up his arms around, he gave one mighty clasp and then with a groan of pain turned over and with his right hand under his head and left out over the side of the sofa began the gurgling breathing of death. “Call the doctor.” “Bamie—Corinne.” “Mother, come here for God’s sake quick.” And then Dr. Polk sitting by his side. Mother kneeling by him, Bamie by her. The little Baby [Corinne] trembling and crying, kneeling by me on his left side and all the rest standing near. His eyelids fluttered, he gave three long breaths. It is finished. No, my God, it cannot be. “Darling, darling, darling, I am here,” cried my little widowed mother. I knelt down and prayed, “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy will be done, Thy will be done.” As the last breath left his body the little clock on the table struck one—one half past eleven. Thirteen and a quarter hours of agony it took to kill a man broken down by three months’ sickness.

We got the girls and Mother to bed. The uncles watched the dead. I lay down on the sofa in Father’s dressing room but not to sleep . . .

4

He was extolled from a half-dozen pulpits and by the editorial pages of nearly every newspaper in the city, by lifelong friends, fellow philanthropists, and political reformers during memorial tributes at the Union League and the State Charities Aid Association. He was praised for his “high moral purpose” (in the Tribune), his “singular public spirit” (Evening Mail), his “generous public spirit” (Telegram), his contributions to science and art (Evening Post), for “using great opportunity for the best end” and preserving the honor of a great family name (The New York Times).

George William Curtis, in what he wrote for Harper’s Weekly, called him “an American citizen of the best type—cheerful, hearty, sagacious, honest, hopeful, not to be swerved by abuse, by hostility or derision.” Godkin, in The Nation, said New York should take heart in such a life: “We believe, the mere fact that New York could even in these later evil years produce him, and hold his love and devotion, has been to hundreds of those who knew him and watched his career a reason for not despairing of the future of the city.”

His “sweet strong influence,” his “magnetic power in influencing others,” the “stirring summons” of his example, were all mentioned repeatedly. “What a glorious example!” a friend wrote to Bamie. And in the other sympathy notes that poured into the house most people seemed to be saying in one way or other that they felt better for having known him.

At the family’s request there were no flowers at the funeral. Eight pallbearers—William E. Dodge, Jr., and Howard Potter among them—carried the plain rosewood coffin out of the house after a brief family service in the front parlor. The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church was filled to overflowing. There were two thousand people, perhaps more, within the huge nave as the coffin was borne down the sloping center aisle to the altar. Two preachers officiated, John Hall and the venerable William Adams, Theodore’s former pastor at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and now head of the Union Theological Seminary, whose voice broke several times in the course of his remarks. Burial was at Greenwood Cemetery, in the family plot, beside Mittie’s mother, the funeral procession crossing the East River in Brooklyn by ferry under a cold winter sky.

Secluded once more at 57th Street, the devastated family hardly knew which way to turn, let alone how to face what Conie called “the blank” of life without Father. Anna Gracie was staying on, to be near Mittie. Everyone drew nearer. Conie was to remember “something infinitely inspiring” about those days. Father had preached that one must live for the living, and so “[we] felt that our close family tie must be made stronger rather than weaker by the loss . . .”

What Mittie felt we cannot begin to know. A month later she would write to young Theodore simply, “It is so hard to have parted with him. I think of him daily and almost hourly . . . long to have him with us. It must be a comfort to you to know that you never gave your dearly loved and prized father anything but pleasure.”

Years later Bamie would say only that “Of course, after his death, we all had to work out our own salvation.”

Elliott, we know, was shattered. It was as if, in the convulsive grip of his father’s arms, he had had something crushed irreparably within. Theodore’s death was the ultimate disaster from which he would never quite recover.

To young Theodore it was all a “hideous dream.” His mother and sisters were suffering the worst, he wrote to Henry Minot, and “it was best that Fathers terrible sufferings should end.” But in his Private Diary he let go, pouring out pain and bewilderment and presently a torrent of longing and loneliness and angry self-judgment. He began within hours after the funeral, describing the suspense of his ride home on the night boat, the “bitter agony when I kissed the dear, dead face and realized he would never again on this earth speak to me,” the sound of the first clod of earth striking the casket.

“He was the most wise and loving father that ever lived: I owe everything to him.”

His anguish spills across pages, for weeks, months. Back at Harvard, alone in his room, he wrote of little else:

Sunday, March 3

Have been thinking about Father all evening, have had a good square breakdown, and feel much better for it.

Wednesday, March 6

Every now and then there are very bitter moments; if I had very much time to think I believe I should go crazy . . .

Saturday, March 9

It is just one month since the blackest day of my life.

Sunday, March 10

. . . had another square breakdown.

Sundays, with all their memories, were the hardest for him. It had been a Sunday, “that terrible Sunday,” that he had “kissed the dear, dead face.”

In the margin of his Bible he writes “February 9,1878” beside a verse of the 69th Psalm: “I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.”

Twice, in different letters, he reaches out to Bamie. With Father gone, he says, she must help him. She must take Father’s place in his life. “I know only too well the dull, heavy pain you suffer,” he wrote, “and I know too that it . . . has been easier for me . . . for here I live in a different world . . . I am occupied busily all the time.” Still, she must stand by him. She must tell him what to do. “My own sweet sister, you will have to give me a great deal of advice and assistance, now that our dear father is gone, for in many ways you are more like him than any of the rest of the family.” Henry Minot, his closest friend at Harvard, has “left college!” he reports in dismay to her that spring. “His father has taken him away and put him in his office to study law.” To Henry himself he writes of how greatly he misses “someone to talk to about my favorite pursuits and future prospects.”

With Father gone, nothing seems to have any purpose. “Am working away pretty hard,” he reports in May; “but I do not care so much for my marks now; what I most valued them for was his pride in them.”

Other times he seems insistent that Father had not “gone.” “I almost feel as if he were present with me,” he tells his mother; and it is emphatically in the present tense that he writes, “Every event of my life is tied up with him.” Father’s words keep coming back with a vividness that is “really startling.” During a brief visit to Oyster Bay just before exams, he picks up the journal he kept during the winter on the Nile and finds that “every incident is connected with him.” He walks about the empty house and “every nook and corner . . . every piece of furniture . . . is in some manner connected with him.” “Oh, Father, Father, how bitterly I miss you, mourn you and long for you,” he writes June 7, still at Oyster Bay. “All the family are wonderfully lovely to me,” reads the next entry, “but I wish Mother and Bamie would not quarrel among themselves.”

Then Sunday, June 9, in the dim light of the little Presbyterian church at Oyster Bay, he sees Father sitting beside him in the corner of the pew, “as distinctly as if he were alive.”

Father was the shining example of the life he must aspire to; Father was the perfect example of all he himself was not. Grief turned to shame and a sense of futility. He felt diminished by the memory of the man. “Looking back on his life it seems as if mine must be such a weak, useless one in comparison.” He was engulfed by self-doubt. Self-reproach bordered on self-contempt. How could such a wonderful man have had a son of so little worth, he asked. One especially difficult Sunday he brooded over “how little use I am, or ever shall be . . . I am so much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.” He had failed his father when his father had needed him most and for this, in the light of his own conscience, he stood condemned.

He did everything for me, and I nothing for him. I remember so well how, years ago, when I was a very weak, asthmatic child, he used to walk up and down with me in his arms . . . and oh, how my heart pains me when I think I never was able to do anything for him during his last illness!

“Sometimes, when I fully realize my loss,” he writes, “I feel as if I should go mad.”

Conie would recall sitting with him by moonlight on a high point called Cooper’s Bluff, overlooking Long Island Sound, and listening while he recited Swinburne in a high-pitched singsong voice:

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

But there were notable chinks in all this gloom, moments even in the diary when he was unable any longer to deny his own good cheer or outright exuberance. It was only a few weeks after Theodore’s death when he confided to Conie that he felt not nearly so sad as he had expected to. He is “astonished,” he says later in the diary, at how readily he goes about his daily life “as if nothing had happened.” And as summer begins he is feeling so very good at times, his spirits so high, that he can no longer hold back. “I could not be happier,” he writes, but then immediately feels obliged to justify this. It would be “wrong,” he says, for him to be anything other than cheerful; “. . . and besides, I am of a very buoyant temper, being a bit of an optimist. Had a glorious 20-mile ride on Lightfoot, cantering the whole time.”

It was a summer of tremendous highs and lows. At Harvard, the week before his final examinations, his asthma had returned. (It was for “being forced to sit up all night with the asthma,” he explains, that he did so poorly in French.) He had yearned as never before for the “wilds” of Oyster Bay, to be in the woods again, to be on horseback, to be out alone on the water in his rowboat. One day in July he rowed alone all the way across the Sound to Rye Beach and back again. Elliott was the sailor, as Conie explained, while “Theodore craved the actual effort of the arms and back.” He “loved to row in the hottest sun, over the roughest water, in the smallest boat. . .”

He ran, he hiked, rain or shine; he blasted away with a new Sharps rifle at birds, bottles, almost anything in sight. On one “tramp” he went twenty-five miles “through awful places.”

Some days in the diary he seems about to burst with his joyous outdoor freedom. He turns to one of his father’s favorite passages in the Bible: “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing . . .” “Oyster Bay is the perfection of a place for fellows,” he declares. “I wonder if anyone could have a happier time than I...” It is August 9, a date he has marked heavily in black, as it is now six months since Theodore’s death.

Yet one senses a darker undercurrent, a kind of desperate, underlying frenzy bespeaking anger and fear. The pace of his activities is punishing, sometimes cruel. It is as if he is striking back at something, taking it out on Lightfoot, his horse, taking it out on himself—do or die, literally. Annoyed by a neighbor’s dog on a morning ride, he shot and killed it, “rolling it over with my revolver very neatly as it ran alongside the horse,” he reports in the diary. The horse he rode so hard day after day that he all but ruined it.

From one or two comments he and others made long afterward, it appears there was also a romance that summer with Edith Carow, and that it too blew up in a fit of anger. The diary says nothing of any of this, but years later he would tell Bamie how close he and Edith had been, and that “we both of us had . . . tempers that were far from being of the best.”

By midsummer he was down with stomach troubles (his dreadful cholera morbus), then hit “pretty hard” by an attack of asthma in early September en route to the genuine wilds of Maine. He went with cousins West and Emlen and a doctor named Thompson. “Look out for Theodore,” the doctor is said to have advised their Maine guide. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.”

His fathers fatal illness, it had been concluded among the family, stemmed from a hike he had taken in Maine the previous summer. Theodore had strained himself somehow mountain climbing, during the stay at Mount Desert with Bamie. Beyond that there seemed no possible explanation why someone of such vigor—such a “splendid mechanism”—could have been brought down. With his Maine guide, a large, bearded, kindly man named William Sewall, a man as large as Theodore had been, the boy now hiked twenty, thirty miles a day, all such feats being recorded in his diary, just as during another summer in the mountains of Switzerland when he was ten.

“I feel sorry for the country...” Theodore had told the boy in his last letter. “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.” He would keep his fathers letters always, the boy vowed. They were to be his “talismans against evil.”

Death and political defeat had coincided in the life of “the one I loved dearest on earth.” It is not known for certain that he or others in the family made a direct connection between what had happened at the hands of Senator Conkling and the tragedy that befell Theodore and thus all of them so soon afterward. But it is almost inconceivable that they would not have made such a connection and have felt it deeply.

President Hayes, true to his word, had refused to concede defeat over the Customhouse. That same summer of 1878, with Congress in recess, he simply fired Chester Arthur and put Edwin Merritt in his place. The appointment was subsequently endorsed by the Senate (the Democrats had since gained a majority), the Conkling forces were rolled back. So had Theodore lived, he would have been made Collector after all, and his political fortunes thereafter might have been considerable. Instead, he had died a loser. If not exactly killed off by Conkling, he had been unhorsed, made to look foolish and impotent in a battle known to the entire country.

So what should a noble boy and namesake make of that? How should one respond to the downfall of Greatheart?

It is easy enough to speculate about all this, tempting to see an edge of vengeance in the career that was to follow. Allegedly, the family resolved to have nothing more to do with politics. But in fact we really do not know what was resolved, if anything. The future was very much on the young man’s mind; this we do know from the Private Diary. “I should like to be a scientist,” he declared only a few months after Theodore’s death. He felt he had aged since the tragedy. He tried to picture himself a man as head of a family of his own. “I so wonder who my wife will be! ‘A rare and radiant maiden,’ I hope; one who will be as sweet, pure, and innocent as she is wise. Thank heaven I am at least perfectly pure.”

“How I wish I could ever do something to keep up his name,” he would write in the diary. For the moment, however, having had a private talk with James Alfred, he decided to think only of his remaining two years at Harvard, resolving to study hard and to conduct himself “like a brave Christian gentleman.”

PART THREE

CHAPTER NINE

Harvard

1

“YOU BELONGED TO HARVARD, and she to you.” The bond was everlasting, asserted William Roscoe Thayer, Harvard ’81, who was a biographer and historian and for twenty-three years editor of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, which lent certain weight to anything he said. Moreover, “she” in that day—Theodore’s day—had been a “crescent institution ... in the full vigor of growth” and this “crescent spirit,” Thayer said, had been of enormous benefit to all fortunate enough to have been there at the time, however insensitive some were to what was happening to them.

Theodore, recalling his Harvard years, would credit Harvard mainly with providing him an especially good time.

The growth and change had begun well before either he or Thayer arrived on the scene. In 1869 Charles W. Eliot had been named president at age thirty-five and after that Harvard was not the same. Eliot insisted that Harvard become a modern university, and, by stages, instituted what has become known as the elective system. He enlarged the faculty, overhauled the Law School and the Medical School, raised money as never before, and commenced the greatest building boom in Harvard’s long history up to that time. A scientist by training, he held that science and the humanities were not incompatible; further, that to be educated in science was to be educated for the future. He believed, as he had said in his speech at the opening of the Museum of Natural History in New York, that science was “the firm foundation” for man’s faith in himself and in what he called “the present infinite Creator.”

Eliot wished the Harvard student to be treated like an adult, to flourish in an atmosphere of academic freedom. He got rid of petty disciplinary rules, so that by Theodore’s time the old rule book of nearly forty pages had been reduced to one of five. In back of his elective system was an unshakable faith in the instinctive capacity of free human beings to follow the path that was best for them. No one could master anything worthwhile “without a deal of drudgery,” but then with so much that was so urgent and difficult in school life—in any life—it seemed “superfluous to invent other disagreeableness, whether for children or for men.” “Do you think it is a wise parent who invents disagreeable tasks for his children, or enforces any observance simply because it is disagreeable?” He was a turning point for Harvard and for American education, and as an example of serene, Unitarian, Boston sagacity and rectitude none could match him. To those like William Roscoe Thayer who viewed the college as one big family, he was the supreme father whose influence—whose outlook and standards—touched all. He was large and straight, “with the back of an oarsman,” and unforgettable, since most of the right side of his face was covered by an ugly, liver-colored birthmark. He believed in public service and in duty. On a gate to the Yard he would have inscribed:

Enter to grow in wisdom

Depart better to serve thy country and thy kind.

His personal motto was a saying of one of his Overseers, Edward Everett Hale: “Look up and not down; look out and not in; look forward and not back, and lend a hand.”

But generations of Harvard undergraduates would also remember him stalking through the Yard looking neither left nor right and recognizing no one. They did not like him, for all the new freedoms he brought. He would be remembered for the few rules he enforced more than for the many he did away with. Owen Wister, a freshman in Theodore’s junior year, called him a “flagstaff in motion.” To others he was New England’s “topmost oak.”

Along with his liberal reforms, Eliot also brought a variety of memorable personal views. He disapproved of sermons that mentioned “that scoundrel King David,” for example, and he believed in the benefit to mind and body of strenuous physical activity in the open air. A morbid mental condition, he once told his own son, was of physical origin. He himself could work twelve hours a day and not feel tired. As part of his preparation for life, every boy ought to be able to row a boat and ride a horse, swim a mile and hike twenty-five miles. He approved of football, but had the odd idea that the ball carrier ought always to do the manly thing and hit the most resistant part of the enemy’s line, not look for holes. Baseball he did not much care for because it depended too much, he said, on the pitcher and the pitcher resorted too often to deceptions. The curve ball, a recent innovation, was to his way of thinking a low form of cunning.

The Harvard campus then, like the enrollment, was still comparatively small. About fifteen dissimilar buildings, mostly of red brick, stood near or facing a main parklike quadrangle, the Yard, as it had long been known, which was crisscrossed with straight gravel paths, shaded by numerous elms, and loosely framed by a low rail fence. Massachusetts Hall, built several generations before the Revolutionary War, was the oldest building. Thayer, Matthews, and Weld halls were new since Eliot had taken over. And just beyond the Yard, set apart between Cambridge and Kirkland streets, stood the great red-brick Memorial Hall, the university’s most magnificent building, which had been completed the year Theodore arrived as a freshman. It overtopped the trees with its turrets and pinnacles. Within was a huge central dining hall, or commons, hung with portraits, a theater, and a vaulted transept, the great marble-floored Memorial Hall proper, consecrated to the sons of Harvard—the Union sons only—who had fallen in the Civil War. The walls were lined with white marble tablets, each with the names of the war dead, student-soldiers fallen in battle, arranged by class and with eloquent inscriptions in Latin—“CONSUMMATI IN BREVE EXPLEVERUNT TEMPORA MULTA.” There was no comparable memorial to the war anywhere in the country. “The effect of the place,” wrote Henry James, “is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honor, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor. . .”

What, one wonders, was the effect on an impressionable youth whose father had hired a substitute?

The famous Museum of Comparative Zoology, the “Agassiz Museum,” where Theodore spent a good part of his junior and senior years, was another several blocks beyond Memorial Hall, opposite the Divinity School.

That was all to the north of the Yard. To the south and southwest were Harvard Street (later Massachusetts Avenue), where the Boston horsecars ran, and Harvard Square (actually a triangular junction of Harvard, Boylston, and Brattle streets), where a variety of modest shops clustered about the University Bookstore, the telegraph office, and the Cambridge Bank.

Winthrop Street, where Theodore lived, was two blocks from Harvard Street, in the direction of the Charles River. The quickest route was down Holyoke. The two-story frame house—Mrs. Richardson’s boardinghouse—stood on the southwest corner of Holyoke and Winthrop.

A student’s room at Harvard, by tradition, was his sanctuary. “Its occupant for the time being is its master,” we read in a contemporary account. “He can do as he will in it; lock his door and be not at home; admit all comers; sit alone and read or study, or sit with his congenial friend and talk out whatever he may have the good fortune to have in mind.” One was expected to have a personal library in view (“nothing furnishes a room so well”), a few sporting prints, family tintypes on the mantel, a tennis racket on the wall, and sufficient furniture (”nothing need match”) to suggest “solid comfort.” A convenient spittoon was usually of polished brass, but the fancier kind, of porcelain with hand-painted rosebuds, was not uncommon.

Theodore’s quarters, all four years, were those Bamie had picked for his freshman year and consisted of a living room or study and a small bedroom behind, to which various “improvements” had since been added. (”I had Harry Chapin in here the other day to look at the new bookcase,” he had written Bamie in his sophomore year, “... and after he had examined it he exclaimed, ‘Jove! Your family do act squarely by you!’”)

Harvard undergraduates numbered just over eight hundred, and at a time when only about one American in five thousand went to any college, let alone Harvard, they were an extremely privileged lot. They were not all the sons of rich men, as popularly supposed, and President Eliot’s own particular interest was in those of modest means, who, in his view, constituted “the very best part” of Harvard. But then they were hardly representative of the country that, by Eliot’s lights, they were supposed to serve. Judged by the color of their skin, the churches they attended, the number of syllables in their names, by almost any such criteria, they were as homogeneous an assembly of young men—and as unrepresentative of turbulent, polyglot, post-Civil War America—as one could imagine. It was not just the comparatively small scale of Harvard that gave it a “family” feeling, they all looked alike. There was virtually no diversity to be seen, except by the practiced eye, and then it was usually measured by such things as money or “family” or the cut of one’s clothes. William Roscoe Thayer, warming to his undergraduate memories, would write of the exceptional opportunity Harvard had afforded to meet students of many different views and from all parts of the country, but in fact the decided majority came either from Boston or from towns close by. A study of Theodore’s Class of 1880 shows that nearly two-thirds came from within a hundred-mile radius of the Harvard campus. Harvard, moreover, was supplied year in, year out by the same New England schools. In the case of Theodore’s class, more than half had come from Andover, Exeter, St. Paul’s, Noble’s, Hopkinson, Adams Academy, and other such prestige training grounds. A high-school boy from some point beyond New England was a rarity (there were about a dozen among the 171 who finally graduated).

The same surnames appeared in class after class. In Theodores there were a Blodgett and a Cabot, a Guild, a Morison, a Quincy, and a Saltonstall. The Saltonstall, Richard Middlecott, was actually the sixth of his line to attend Harvard; the first, Nathaniel, graduated in the Class of 1695.

There were no blacks in the Class of 1880, suffice it to say, and no foreign students. There were exactly three Roman Catholics, but no Boston Irish, no Italians, Swedes, or Latin Americans, no one with a name ending in an i or an o; and there were no Jews. Full-page cartoons in the Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine, were sometimes crudely anti-Irish, anti-Semitic, or mocking of Negro aspirations.

“If you asked me to define in one word the ‘temper’ of the Harvard I knew,” reflected a contemporary named Samuel Scott, “I should say it was patrician, strange as that word may sound to American ears. . . .”

Birth of course counted for much, prominence in athletics was naturally a help, but scholarly attainments per se went for very littie, I fear. A certain amount of money was necessary, for a man had to dress decently and share in the pleasures and convivialities peculiar to youth, but wealth as wealth was no passport to anything in that community. . . .

This code, unwritten yet all pervading and all powerful, is difficult to define. Over and above the copybook virtues, it insisted upon a composure of manner, a self-suppression and a sense of noblesse oblige that were in happy contrast with the blatant self-assertions, the unbridled enthusiasms and misconceived doctrines of equality that were characteristic of the country in general. It gave its approval to those who understood that modesty was compatible with manliness, who knew how to combine self-respect with respect for authority and for the opinions of others, and who were firmly convinced that it was truer sport to lose the game by playing fair than to win it by trickery.

I think I am not exaggerating this influence in the college life.... It was all rather narrow and provincial, perhaps, but I still believe that those who were really in sympathy with such a discipline greatly benefited by it, while those who were not, must have been in some way affected by it.

About the only remaining vestige of “old Harvard” in the way of rules was compulsory chapel every morning at 7:45, from which a student could be excused only for reasons of health—for an asthmatic condition, for example—an option Theodore never exercised. Otherwise the student could live much as he chose, so long as he performed up to the mark academically. The elective system had also evolved sufficiently by Theodore’s time so that in his junior and senior years a student was free to pick just about any course he cared to.

The faculty, though still comparatively few in number, was strong in most areas, and when the names of the larger Harvard-Cambridge literary-intellectual community are included, the list is truly awesome.

Emerson, Phillips Brooks, and Charles Francis Adams were Overseers, as was the elder Theodore’s friend from the Cincinnati convention, Richard H. Dana. Francis Parkman (then at work on his Montcalm and Wolfe) was a member of the Corporation, and Longfellow, former professor of Belles Lettres—Old Poems, as he was called—could be seen strolling on Brattle Street in his familiar brown overcoat. The renowned botanist Asa Gray, Darwin’s chief spokesman in America, was officially retired from the faculty, but was still at work and also much in evidence. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler taught geology and zoology, and the younger faculty—all recruited since Eliot took over—included Charles Dunbar, Harvard’s (and the country’s) first professor of political economy; William James, who taught anatomy and physiology; and Charles Eliot Norton (Eliot’s cousin), who offered “Lectures on Modern Morals as Illustrated by the Art of the Ancients.” Recently, Henry Cabot Lodge had been installed to teach a new course in the history of the United States.

But by tradition Harvard students and Harvard professors were a different species and in this at least tradition held sway. Contact between them, apart from the lecture hall or classroom, was minimal. Henry Adams, who had given up teaching in 1877, found it nearly impossible to get students to talk to him. Others on the faculty, like the students, preferred it that way. To involve themselves in the lives or interests of undergraduates was simply not part of their job.

“Don’t take it upon yourself... to ask questions or offer observations in recitations,” the undergraduate newspaper, the Crimson, advised light-heartedly in Theodore’s freshman year. “Your questions would bore the students, and your observations would bore the tutors. And don’t talk to the tutors out of hours.”

In opposition to the Eliot ideals of academic freedom and individual initiative stood a modish student pose of indifference, not to mention the plain laziness that came as naturally to Harvard undergraduates as to any others. “We ask but time to drift,” sang Theodore’s friend George Pellew, class poet, in a Hasty Pudding show during their senior year:

We deem it narrow-minded to excel.

We call the man fanatic who applies

His life to one grand purpose till he dies.

Enthusiasm sees one side, one fact;

We try to see all sides, but do not act.

. . . We long to sit with newspapers unfurled,

Indifferent spectators of the world.

If everyone “flocked” to hear Charles Eliot Norton, it was because his course was a “snap”; while Henry Cabot Lodge, who was known to be difficult, soon had almost no students. “My system was simple,” Lodge later explained, “to make the students do as much work for themselves as possible and have them lecture to me.” His classes shrank from fifty students to three.

“A boy could go completely to pieces and there was no one whose job it was to know anything about it,” remembered a classmate of Theodore’s, who, like many, viewed the Eliot Epoch as a disaster. “There never was a worse time for a boy to be in Harvard.”

In Washington a historic blow for temperance had been struck by Lucy Hayes, the first First Lady with a college degree. “Lemonade Lucy” had banned all alcoholic beverages from the White House. (At state dinners, said William Evarts, the water flowed like champagne.) But no such edict stood in the way of Harvard undergraduates in these years of the Hayes regime. “Students got drunk then” was the terse assessment of another in Theodore’s class, John Woodbury. Even Charles Eliot, looking back, would concede that there had been “much intemperance,” though he thought it had been mainly in the clubs and particularly the Porcellian, the summit of Harvard’s social hierarchy. (He had thought the same of the Porcellian in his own undergraduate days and had refused to have anything to do with it.)

They drank whiskey, which was relatively cheap and easy to get. They drank French champagne and Burgundy, and endless quantities of beer and ale, which were cheapest of all, and shandygaff, a mixture of beer and ginger ale. (For Sunday mornings a concoction of ginger ale and rum was thought “just right.”) The favorite local stop was a grogshop called Carl’s below sidewalk level on Brighton Street.

There were at Harvard, said Scribner’s Magazine, “lads of good morals and lads with an inclination toward unwholesome experiment.” A Boston paper, angry over a student disturbance in one of the theaters, wrote that seeing the world to such young men meant only “gazing with watery eyes upon half-clad ballet girls and burlesque actresses, and hovering about them, later, like flies about a carcass.”

One wonders if the elder Theodore may have known more of Harvard life than he let on when he advised his son to take care of his morals first. Or if the decision to postpone any thought of Ellie going to college suggests something more than concern for his health alone, if possibly the father had sensed even then what the boy’s susceptibilities were.

The sharpest division within the undergraduate body was between those who were the sons of Boston’s elite and those who were not, and the line between them was clearly understood. In Theodore’s class the “set” or “high set,” “the club crowd” as it was also known, was composed of perhaps twenty-five young men, or no more than ten percent of the class. They were mainly all Bostonians and thought to be very rich and quite impressed with themselves. Their clothes were English in cut. They carried slim canes or walking sticks and wore the heavy gold watch fobs of the kind customarily worn by men twice their age. Several—Robert Bacon, Ralph Ellis, Josiah Quincy, Richard Saltonstall, Minot Weld—parted their hair in the middle, which to the average American was the hallmark of the pampered snob. General Grant was only the best known of those who disliked on sight any man whose hair was parted in the middle.

“The set had a new suit of clothes for every day of the week,” remembered a classmate named Rand, who because of Harvard’s alphabetical seating system was able to observe one such higher being, Josiah Quincy, at close range. Rand sat beside Quincy in class through all four years, yet Quincy never “deigned” to speak to him once. Quincy may have been the worst example, Rand conceded. Bacon and Saltonstall, for instance, would say hello.

But for those few non-Bostonians whom the set found acceptable, the Harvard years could be quite pleasurable, for their society included not just the “right” clubs, but entrée to the “right” families. As Owen Wister, a Philadelphian, observed, “pleasant doors in Boston, and round about in Milton, Brookline, and Chestnut Hill, stood open” to a world of “gentlefolk” who were truly hospitable—”not mere entertainers”—who could talk of books and horses and winters in Rome. It made all the difference, he thought, in how one benefited from Harvard.

Those students—that small minority—who insisted on taking their studies seriously, who worked hard and made no effort to conceal their academic ambitions, were known as “digs” and were naturally outcasts. Socially, they had no chance. As the Crimson advised, only a little in jest, digs might be “eminently worthy” as people and it was “well to have a pleasant, bowing acquaintance with them, for they may turn out in the future to be very great men,” but their manners, like their clothes, were “apt to be bad; and except at class elections, their friendship is of no sort of use.”

Still, anyone who did not take seriously the academic side of life—or who did not appear to take it seriously—was expected to “go in” for something else (the air of indifference notwithstanding), and athletics rated above all. The late 1870s would be regarded afterward as among the most brilliant years in the history of Harvard athletics. Football, like so much else at Harvard, was new—still spelled as “foot ball”—but already great status attached to anyone who played. (The Harvard-Yale “match” that Theodore saw in his freshman year was only the second time the two colleges had played each other in football and the first game in which the teams were limited to eleven men each, rather than fifteen.) In baseball Harvard was “repeatedly victorious” and Harvard’s eight-oar crew defeated Yale three years running—in ’77, ’78, and 79. Harvard’s color, as of 1875, had been officially designated as crimson—rather than magenta as before—and to wear the crimson on the playing field or as an oarsman on the Charles was the quickest way to notoriety and acclaim. In Theodore’s time there was never any question as to the most popular man in the class. He was Robert Bacon, “the manly beauty,” captain of the football team, heavyweight boxing champion, winner in the hundred-yard dash and the quarter mile, number seven on the crew. The Class of 1880 was known then and later as Bacon’s class.

2

The difference between Theodore’s final two years at Harvard and the first two was enormous. In the first two he had discovered he could handle the work and function reasonably well socially. His name, background, all that comprised his own “antecedents,” had also proved an advantage, something that was not to occur very often again in his life. He had fallen in immediately and quite naturally with the young Brahmins and their respective families, after which, with the death of his father, he had become a subject of great sympathy among them. But it was not until his junior year that he found himself a social success all at once. “People knew who he was,” as said William Roscoe Thayer. Indeed, he enjoyed a celebrity of a kind, for the first time ever. He knew things were to be different almost from the day he arrived at Cambridge that fall of 1878 and the feeling was heady.

“All the fellows greeted me with enthusiasm,” he writes in his diary, September 27. “Funnily enough, I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back,” he tells Mittie a little later, “having been elected into several different clubs.”

In no time he belonged to nearly everything one was supposed to—the Hasty Pudding Club, the “Dickey” (DKE), the lofty Porcellian—and several others as well. The night of his initiation into the Porcellian, which occupied several rooms over a store on Harvard Street, he got “‘higher’ with wine than I have ever been.” “Of course” he was “delighted to be in,” he reported to Bamie; “there is a billiard table, magnificent library, punch room, etc., and my best friends are in it.”

Apart from the drinking, he embraced the new life with open arms. (He suffered so from a hangover the morning after the Porcellian rites—his “spree”—that he drank but sparingly, if at all, from then on. Besides, he noted, “Wine always makes me fighty.”) He was savoring partridge suppers at “the Pore,” served by a dignified liveried black man named George Washington Lewis. He was picking up expressions like “Jove” and “dear old boy.” “Pore men” were “perfect trumps.”

“Roosevelt was right in this group in every way,” recalled classmate Rand. Roosevelt would talk to others if the occasion arose, Rand said, “though such did not often occur.”

“Please send my silk hat at once,” he demanded in a letter to Mittie written on Porcellian stationery, “why has it not come before?”

He was regarded as a “little fellow” and richer even than his elegant friends, and while this may have been no guarantee of success, it did lend an aura. Henry Jackson, one of the Bostonians who had gone to New York for the Christmas parties their freshman year, would remember for the rest of his life the splendor of the “Roosevelt establishment” on 57th Street. (Real-life butlers and footmen were not ordinarily part of domestic life among Bostons best families.) In his junior year, furthermore, Theodore kept his own horse in Cambridge, something few could afford, and during his senior year he drove a smart little tilbury, or “dog cart,” which pleased him no end. With horse, cart, whip, and lap robe, he had, he said, “as swell a turnout as any man.”

He spent his money in grand style, as he would never have dared were his father alive. His inheritance from his father, he had been informed by Uncle James Alfred, was $125,000, and from this he could expect an annual income of approximately $8,000 a year, a princely sum. It was, for example, considerably more than the salary of the president of Harvard. On $5,000 a year Charles Eliot kept a comfortable home, entertained, owned a summer house, a boat, and put his own two sons through Harvard. But Theodore, as he wrote in his diary, judged himself only “comfortable, though not rich,” which may have been the way Uncle James Alfred had expressed it to him by way of encouraging a degree of financial caution.

For additions to his wardrobe in his junior year, we know from his neat accounts, he spent $685.80 (in a day when the best suit cost about $35); in his senior year, he spent a whopping $761.59 more on clothes. This was more for clothes than some students had to cover all expenses. And clothes and club dues combined for those same two years added up to $2,400, a sum the average American family could have lived on for six years.

Just to stable the horse cost more than $900 a year. In present terms it would correspond to spending an annual $12,000 on clothes and clubs, plus another $9,000 or more to have a car at college.

But while it is hard to imagine him daring to live quite so lavishly under his father’s eye, it is also obvious that, consciously or not, he was actually behaving very like his father—that side of the father that was the dandy, the lover of fine horses, expensive clothes, the best clubs. Once, as Theodore would later relate, his father had given him a brief lesson in economy—this in view of his possibly entering a life of science wherein he could expect to earn little or no money. The great trick was to “keep the fraction constant,” his father had said. If one could not increase the numerator, then he must reduce the denominator. But it would have been an extremely unobservant boy indeed who failed to sense the kind of figures the father himself had to be working with in his own “fraction.” Expenditures on the order of those the family was accustomed to obviously added up to a very large denominator indeed, but they also implied an equally large or larger numerator. The elder Theodore was a rich man who knew how to spend money—to enjoy his money—and the son, thus far, was doing the same. And extravagant as he might appear, he was still spending less than his income.

He could hardly have been more conspicuous, it seems—or more energetic. He was a figure of incessant activity (as he himself said), of constant talk, constant hurry, a bee in a bottle. He rowed on the Charles in a one-man shell (and posed for a photographer wearing rower’s skullcap and knee breeches, barefoot and bare-chested, arms folded and his whiskered face set in a defiant scowl). He took boxing lessons and enrolled in Papanti’s Dancing Class. (”. . . am very fond of dancing,” he would note in his diary; “it is my favorite amusement, except horseback riding.”) He wrestled and went off on long hikes of the kind President Eliot approved. “He was always ready to join anything,” remembered Richard Saltonstall, who became the nearest thing to a close friend. He was “forever at it,” said another man. There was no one who possessed such an amazing array of interests, said John Woodbury, who came to be one of his most steadfast admirers.

He joined the Rifle Club, the Art Club, the Glee Club. (Even if unable to carry a tune, he could help raise money.) He was vice president of the Natural History Society, helped start a Finance Club, and was named to the editorial board of the Advocate, the undergraduate magazine, which in turn “opened the door” to the O.K. Society.

His grades were excellent. In his junior year, his best academically, he carried nine courses—German, Italian, themes, forensics, logic, metaphysics, Philosophy 6 (as Dunbar’s course in political economy was known), Natural History 1 (geography, meteorology, and structural geology), and Natural History 3 (elementary zoology)—and finished with an 87 average. During his senior year, in addition to his thesis, he began work on a book, his study of the naval side of the War of 1812; and though his grades were down some from the year before, he finished with an overall average high enough to qualify him for Phi Beta Kappa.

It was hard for others to imagine how he could possibly do all that he did, quite aside from his social schedule, which with the advent of Alice Lee in his life consumed as much of his time—or more—than everything else. There was always the possibility, of course, that his involvement with the extracurricular activities and organizations was something less than met the eye. The editor of the Advocate, for example, could not recall that Theodore ever attended a board meeting and knew of only one article he had written.

Nor, for all his joining, did he seem to belong in the way others did. There was always something “different” about him. The “unchastened eagerness” that one was supposed never to show was what showed most of all. He was wholly—constitutionally—incapable of indifference. He was the kind who spoke up in class. The strange, shrill manner of speech persisted. George H. Palmer, his professor of metaphysics in his junior year, remembered that he “sort of spluttered” as he spoke, his thoughts charging on faster than his mouth could handle them. The sound, said Palmer, was something like water coming out of a thin-necked bottle. Yet he would be heard and at length if necessary. Shaler, the geologist, a man of tremendous bearing and his own expansive enthusiasms, is said to have exclaimed on one such occasion, “See here, Roosevelt, let me talk, I’m running this course.”

Crossing the Yard between classes, he scurried when one was supposed to saunter. At the gymnasium some afternoons he could be seen skipping rope (!) and his rooms on Winthrop Street were said to contain live lizards, snakes, and other such “loathsome” creatures, so intense was his passion for natural science. In fact, he may have kept nothing of the kind at Winthrop Street—Richard Saltonstall, who lived on the floor below, remembered no caged animals, or anything, for that matter, which was the least out of the ordinary about Theodore’s rooms, and a photograph said to be of his living room looks not unlike any number of others from the time, except for a few mounted birds in bell jars to be seen on top of a bookcase. But the story was one everybody liked (then as later), which was more important. It was “Teddy exactly,” off to himself with his books and bird skins and creepy live things, and it became standard. Robert Bacon is supposed to have been so repulsed by the mere thought of Theodore’s quarters and all therein that he refused to go near the place.

Forty years later, sorting out his own personal recollections of “Roosevelt at Harvard,” William Roscoe Thayer remembered thinking of him as chiefly comical, “a joke ... active and enthusiastic and that was all.” Thayer had certainly perceived no portents of greatness, though one spring day in Theodore’s senior year, they had talked about the future. They were sitting in a window seat in Charles Washburn’s room in Holworthy, overlooking the Yard, and Theodore had said something to the effect that he might try to help the cause of better government in New York, though he hardly knew how. Thayer’s only reaction, as he remembered, was to look hard at Theodore and ponder to himself “‘whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities which he appears.’”

The ever-admiring John Woodbury seems to have been alone in his forecast of distinction. Woodbury, as he said later, figured Theodore might amount to something—as a professor of history perhaps—if only because he seemed to know what he wanted.

To most others he remained likable but peculiar (”queer”), and much too intense for comfort. “Some thought he was crazy,” said Woodbury.

Martha Cowdin, a Boston debutante known to all the class because she was engaged to Robert Bacon, described Theodore as “not the sort to appeal at first.” He was too eccentric, she said, too ambitious, while Bacon, by contrast, was “a wonderful normal human being.”

“He danced,” said Rose Lee, sister of Alice, “just as you’d expect him to dance if you knew him—he hopped.” Charles Washburn remembered how he ate chicken “as though he wanted to grind the bones.”

Washburn was one of the relative handful of classmates “good and true” whose friendship mattered most to Theodore. The others were Saltonstall, Bacon, Harry Chapin, Henry Jackson, Harry Shaw, Jack Tebbets, and Minot Weld. They were Boston to the bone, and following graduation, with but few exceptions, they would settle happily in good, predictable Boston careers in banking, finance, or the law. (Jackson, who chose medicine, returned to a position on the Harvard faculty.) Their names figure time and again in Theodore’s letters and in the pages of his diaries. Saltonstall—“Old Dick”—a large, well-fed young man with a big, soft, bland face, is certified “my most intimate friend,” with Harry Shaw coming second. And since Saltonstall was also Theodore’s entrée to the Lee household at Chestnut Hill, and thus to Alice, he would always be regarded in a different light from the others. By their senior year Saltonstall qualified for the highest rating possible: “Old Dick I place on par with the Roosevelts.”

There were also two acknowledged “dig friends” who should be mentioned, both New Yorkers—George Pellew, the class poet, who afterward became a writer for the New York Sun, and Richard Welling, later a prominent New York attorney and reform crusader. Welling was a particularly interesting young man, a serious student and a powerful physical specimen. It was he, during their freshman year, who had been so astonished by Theodore’s namby-pamby workout at the gymnasium, and once, sometime later, during a skating expedition to Fresh Pond, he had discovered how very mistaken he had been in that first impression.

The day was bitterly cold, with a furious wind blowing, and the ice was much too rough. Any sane man would have given up and gone home, Welling recalled, but Theodore had kept exclaiming his delight as they beat their way across the pond, arms flailing, neither knowing how to skate very well. The harder the wind blew, the more miserable Welling felt, the greater Theodore appeared to be enjoying himself. (Welling actually remembered him shouting, “Isn’t it bully!” but then Welling wrote his account of the incident a very long time afterward.) “Never in college was my own grit so put to the test,” Welling said, “and yet I would not be the first to suggest ‘home.’”

They were out on the pond nearly three hours. Only when it became too dark to see did Theodore at last say that perhaps they ought to stop. Had there been a moon, Welling surmised, they might have gone on until midnight.

Like some of the other stories, this one could be taken two ways, as proof either of an indomitable will—what Welling called Theodore’s amazing vitality—or of mental imbalance.

He would be remembered reading by the fire in a room full of friends, unmindful of their talk or the fact that his boots were being singed. In another story he flies into a rage when a drunken clubmate does an imitation of his facial contortions—the teeth, the thrusting jaw. In still another he becomes so flustered on entering Eliot’s office that he announces, “Mr. Eliot, I am President Roosevelt.”

The truth of such anecdotes is hard to gauge. Even the best-known of the Harvard stories may be largely apocryphal. It appeared first in The Saturday Evening Post some twenty years later, in an article by Owen Wister. Alice Lee, “pretty ... in nice furs,” is said to have been watching from the balcony as Theodore fought for the Harvard Athletic Association’s lightweight boxing cup in the spring of his junior year. The setting was the Harvard gymnasium—the “old” gymnasium, as it would be known, since it was shortly replaced by a larger, more up-to-date building—and his opponent was the defending lightweight champion, a senior named C. S. Hanks. When the referee called time at the end of a round and Theodore dropped his guard, Hanks is said to have landed a smashing blow on the nose that produced a great spurt of blood and angry booing and catcalls from the crowd—whereupon Theodore raised an arm for silence. “It’s all right,” he said, “he didn’t hear him.” Then, with bloody face, Theodore stepped over to Hanks to shake his hand and we are left to imagine the effect on the girl in the balcony.

That Theodore fought Hanks and lost on March 22, 1879, is a matter of record. Hanks was entered at 133 1/2 pounds, Theodore at 135, and Hanks was much the better of the two, “punishing Roosevelt severely,” according to an account that appeared in The New York Times. But the old gymnasium had no balcony and no women were present. In his diary, where he never let modesty stand in the way if there was something of which he was proud, Theodore states only the fact that he was beaten. The Times reports no display of high sportsmanship, nor does the Advocate in its comments on the event, and to picture a reporter of that day passing up a scene such as Wister described is a little hard to imagine. Fiction was Wister’s specialty and the mere thought of his friend Theodore seems at times to have inspired the Parson Weems in him. Another eyewitness to the Hanks-Roosevelt bout, a man named George Spalding, who was sitting beside Wister, called Wister’s account “the most barefaced egregious manufactured history ever conceived.”

Theodore never became a champion boxer at Harvard, never distinguished himself at any sport. He was not a good or natural athlete. He had no interest in organized athletics, played on no team and shunned—because of his poor eyesight—any game that involved a moving ball, with the exception of lawn tennis, the new game, which he played socially only and poorly.

He was, to be sure, a rabid competitor in anything he attempted. He was constantly measuring his performance, measuring himself against others. Everybody was a rival, every activity a contest, a personal challenge. “As athletes we are about equal,” he wrote the summer between his junior and senior years, comparing himself to his brother; “he rows best; I run best; he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling or boxing; I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun, etc., etc.” On another expedition to Maine later that summer, he climbed Mount Katahdin carrying a forty-five-pound pack and noted in his diary that both Cousin Emlen and Arthur Cutler had given up in exhaustion long before reaching the top.

Theodore, his cousin Maud Elliott had once observed, “always thought that he could do things better than anyone else.” But the impression is more of somebody who wants to prove, who must prove, he could do things better than anyone else.

Of course, one had to maintain a certain perspective. All rivals were not equal. Writing Bamie about his academic record the fall of his senior year, he put the matter succinctly and, apparently, in total seriousness.

“I stand 19th in the class, which began with 230 fellows,” he said. “Only one gentleman stands ahead of me.”

The memory of his father could still leave him “desolate and heartsore.” Those lone spells of brooding, however, the painful diary entries, were far fewer now, confined almost exclusively to special or commemorative calendar days—the eve of departure for Christmas vacation, an anniversary of his father’s death, or his own birthday.

“Oh, how little worthy I am of such a father,” reads the most anguished of such passages in the diary from his junior year. “I feel such a hopeless sense of inferiority to him; I loved him so.... But with the help of God I shall try to lead such a life as he would have wished, and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him. I am very . . .”

The next page, consisting of seven lines, has been carefully blotted out in heavy black ink. Apparently, he had gotten drunk again, or was still sorely distraught over what had happened the night of the Porcellian initiation. For under laboratory conditions, by back-lighting the page, it has been possible to determine two and a half lines of the seven he chose to censor: “angry with myself for having gotten tight when . . .”

“May God help me to live as he would have wished,” he repeats one more time, this in his senior year, as he turns twenty-one.

Morally, he had tied himself to the mast. He did not smoke—and never would—and he remained preeminently “pure,” as he said. He abhorred foul language, and humor smacking of what he called smut. One expression of righteous indignation to be found in the diary, this on the news that Cousin Cornelius had married a French actress, might be a line from an English drawing-room farce: “He is a disgrace to the family—the vulgar brute.”

The Sunday-school classes at Christ Church continued regularly each week for a total of three and a half years. He quit only in January of his senior year when it was discovered that he was a Presbyterian, not an Episcopalian. He must either join the church, he was informed by the rector, or go.

“I told the clergyman I thought him rather narrow-minded,” he wrote Mittie. He then started teaching a mission class in the poorest section of Cambridge.

His health was superb, better even than during the first two years. Apparently he had but one bout with asthma all his junior year and none his senior year.

The attack during his junior year had again coincided with a trip to Maine, another arduous hunting expedition like the one before, again under the guidance of Bill Sewall, only this time in the dead of a Maine winter. “The first two or three days I had asthma,” he reported to his mother, “but, funnily enough, this left me entirely as soon as I went into [the logging] camp.” Beyond that he said no more on the subject. It was his joy in the wilds that he wanted to share with her. He had never beheld anything so beautiful as the Maine woods in winter. He had killed a buck and trapped a lynx, he also told her proudly.

He was a steadfast correspondent, certainly, however busy he was, and as he liked to remind those at home, writing was slow work for him. The words never came easily, a letter always took more time than they would ever suppose. His longest letters were to his “own sweet Motherling” and he signed himself now as his father had, as Thee.

Of the world at large, of events in the daily papers, he apparently thought no more than in previous years. The one odd note was a passing remark in an eight-page letter to Mittie written early in his junior year. He was enjoying especially Dunbar’s lectures in political economy, as well as Palmer’s course in metaphysics. These, he wrote, were even more interesting than his natural-history courses.

3

Long afterward, looking back, he would say he had left Harvard little prepared for “the big world.” He thought what he had learned at Harvard of considerably less value than what he had learned at home. Further, he blamed Harvard for killing the old boyhood dream of a career in science. The emphasis, he said, had been entirely wrong for him, almost exclusively on laboratory work and the minutiae of biology, none of which appealed. (”I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician.”) Had Harvard encouraged the active life of a field naturalist, a career like those of his boyhood heroes—Audubon, Baird—things might have gone differently, he implied.

On the surface this would seem a sad and ironic commentary and especially if, as appears, Harvard had been chosen in the first place for its strength in the natural sciences. But there is little reason to believe that the young man at Harvard would have given anything like the same explanation, had he been asked. To judge again by what he said in the diary, he enjoyed particularly the time in the laboratory; and if grades are a fair index, it was in the sciences that he did his very best work at Harvard, scoring in the 90s in three of his four science courses in his junior and senior years, and an 89 in the fourth.

His boyhood dream, he later charged, had been the victim of a “total failure” on the part of the science department “to understand the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists, including what could be done by outdoor naturalists.” Yet a more outgoing outdoor naturalist, a more inspirational teacher than Nathaniel Southgate Shaler would have been extremely difficult to find. Shaler was the antithesis of the laboratory recluse and Shaler was the dominant spirit of the Natural History Department, which had all of three professors. His geology field trips were famous. (”If he hears you call him old man,” said a student, “he’ll walk your damned legs off.”) Reporters sometimes went along to describe the experience—the huge love of nature he exuded, his humor and unending intellectual enthusiasm. In the Agassiz tradition Shaler was “thoroughly human”; he wrote, he traveled, he was refreshingly outspoken. “He was much like what Roosevelt later became,” remembered President Eliot, “very energetic and large hearted.”

Indeed, every sign is that the boyhood vision of a lifework in natural history faded for Theodore in spite of the way science was taught at Harvard, rather than as a consequence. Not even Shaler could hold him. The fact that he had no praise for Shaler in later years, no Shaler stories of the kind so many of his contemporaries told, may not mean much, since he was often to be silent on people who had mattered in his life, and particularly, it would seem, if he felt they had somehow abandoned him, or he had abandoned them. The only Harvard professor he was to remember fondly, A. S. Hill, in the English Department, was also the only one he was known to have openly disliked as an undergraduate.

The fairest judgment seems to be that he had found other interests—such as the Dunbar lectures and Alice Lee. If Harvard failed him, or let him down, it was in other ways.

He never found any real intellectual excitement there, for all his good grades. He was never inspired to reach or push himself academically. At no point did he churn with intellectual curiosity or excitement. He was conscientious about his work and could give it all his concentration when need be. Like his father, he had the power of being “focused,” and because of this—and because he very carefully organized his time—he gave the impression of working relatively little. Richard Saltonstall, for one, was under the impression that he was pretty much coasting.

When President Eliot was asked long afterward if there was anything he could say as to the influence of Harvard on Theodore, he responded “No.” Eliot’s recollection of Theodore as an undergraduate was vague. He could recall only a “feeble” youth with prominent teeth, a boy who probably read a good deal but never got “to the bottom of things.”

He had had no real contact with Eliot, as almost no one did. William James, from whom he had taken anatomy in his sophomore year, made no apparent impression. The names of Emerson or Dana or Parkman fail to appear anywhere in his letters and diaries. Also, for someone supposedly enthralled by the works of Longfellow—someone so deeply moved by the heroic theme of King Olaf— it seems odd that he never reports sighting the Great Man himself, or makes any effort to go see him.

Nor, as time would tell, did Harvard provide him with any lasting male friendships. He was never anything but proud of his Harvard affiliations. He liked being known as a Harvard man. He would return for reunions. He would report dutifully on his career for class biographies and recall with conspicuous pride—and, on occasion, with something less than strict regard for the truth—his various undergraduate accomplishments. He would claim, for example, to have held Harvard’s lightweight boxing crown; and in describing his academic record, he would remember finishing in the top ten percent of his class, which was also inaccurate, since at graduation he stood number 21 out of 171.

Of his Porcellian connection he was proudest of all. The day would come when, in a letter from Washington, he would inform Kaiser Wilhelm II of the engagement of his daughter Alice, his own firstborn, and include the wonderful news that it was to be a match with a Porcellian man.

But his Harvard friendships were to become peripheral very rapidly. Except for Henry Minot, the departed friend from his freshman year, he had found no one with whom he shared common interests, beyond the social or athletic. Years later, having interviewed a number of those who had known him best, another Harvard man, the writer Hermann Hagedorn, would conclude that Theodore must have been lonely as an undergraduate. Several said they thought he had had few real friends. “I have discovered no one who was intimate with him and few who were sympathetic,” Hagedorn noted privately. “Most of his classmates simply did not like him,” he was told by Mrs. Robert Bacon.

It is certain, however, that Theodore had an extremely good time at Harvard, just as he remembered. When, midway through his junior year, he writes, “Truly these are the golden years of my life,” he means every word. He “can’t conceive of a fellow possibly enjoying himself more.” “I doubt I shall ever enjoy myself as much again” is the emphatic declaration as his junior year ends. If he knew others thought him peculiar or “bumptious,” as one professor said, he never let on.

For Mittie, in the fall of his senior year, he provided this memorable social log:

Cambridge, October 20, 1879

DARLING MOTHERLING,

I have just returned from spending Sunday with the Guilds, cousins of Harry Shaw, who live out at Forest Hills near the Minots. I drove over there in my cart, and the ride home this morning was delicious. Yesterday (Sunday) Harry Guild and I drove over to the Whitneys’ to take tea.

Last Monday I drove Jack Tebbets over to call on the Miss Bacons, who are very nice girls. Wednesday I dined at the Lees’, and spent the loveliest kind of an evening with Rosy, Alice, and Rose. The two girls [Bamie and Corinne] must come on to Boston next month if only to see Chestnut Hill; and, by Jove, I shall be awfully disappointed if they don’t like it. Mamie Saltonstall’s birthday was on Friday; I gave her a small silver fan chain. Saturday I spent all the morning playing tennis with the two Miss Lanes; I forgot to say that on Thursday they took Dick and myself to call on the Chinese professor. We had a most absurd visit.

This afternoon I am going to drive Van Rensselaer over to Chestnut Hill; tomorrow he and I take tea and spend the evening at the Lanes’. Wednesday Harry Shaw and I give a small opera party to Mr. and Mrs. Saltonstall, Rose, and Alice. Thursday six of us—Harry Shaw, Jack Tebbets, Minot Weld, Dick Saltonstall, Harry Chapin, and myself—are going to take a four-in-hand and drive up to Frank Codman’s farm, where we will spend the day, shooting glass balls, etc.

He did have fun, time after time. And he did fall in love, head over heels.

“I have certainly lived like a prince for my last two years in college,” he begins one of the most candid and heartfelt entries in the diary, a summing up written shortly after graduation.

I have had just as much money as I could spend; belonged to the Porcellian Club; have had some capital hunting trips; my life has been varied; I have kept a good horse and cart; I have had a dozen good and true friends in college, and several very pleasant families outside; a lovely home; I have had but little work, only enough to give me an occupation, and to crown all infinitely above everything else put together, I have won the sweetest of girls for my wife. No man ever had so pleasant a college course.

He counted himself a success, and that too was an altogether new feeling.

CHAPTER TEN

Especially Pretty Alice

1

THEY MET THE FIRST TIME on October 18,1878, which is to say they met early that same heady autumn of Theodore’s junior year when suddenly everything seemed to be going so right for him. He had his “burst of popularity” and found the girl of his dreams, his “‘rare and radiant maiden,’” all within about ten days.

The eighteenth was a Friday. Classes were over for the week and in the afternoon Dick Saltonstall had driven him out to Chestnut Hill in a buggy to meet his family and spend the weekend. It was a ride of only six miles, but through open country most of the way, hills brilliant with fall color, and Theodore’s first impression, almost from the hour they arrived, was of coming home.

The two great neighboring homesteads of the Saltonstalls and the Lees might have been Oyster Bay mansions and the two large, active families into which he was at once gathered might have been Roosevelts.

The houses were within calling distance of each other, about fifty yards distant, with hayfields and orchards and woodland falling away down the hillside. A connecting path ran from the Saltonstall back door on a gradual uphill slope to the Lee place, past the Saltonstall barn. The Saltonstalls faced east, the Lees south; but the houses were of the same vintage and much the same in scale and appearance—huge and Victorian, with clapboard siding and an endless number of windows, high porches, high, peaked gables, tremendous red-brick chimneys, and long kitchen wings. The kitchen alone at the Saltonstalls’ was as big as a barn (quite large enough to serve as an additional Saltonstall dwelling, years later, when it was cut off and removed from the main house). And the Lee house was larger even than the Saltonstalls’.

Leverett Saltonstall, Dick’s father, and George Cabot Lee, the father of Theodore’s heart’s desire, were two wealthy, important, middle-aged Bostonians, dignified, good friends, brothers-in-law, and as steeped in Harvard as one could possibly be. (Leverett had been in the Class of 1848; George, in the Class of 1850.) Leverett, an attorney, had given up his regular practice to dabble in one thing and another, including politics; George was a Lee of Lee, Higginson and Company, the Boston banking and investment firm. Indeed, there was no more exemplary figure of good, old, Boston financial stability than George Lee, he being the keeper of the famous vaults at Lee, Higginson. Another of the firm, Colonel Henry Lee, some fifteen years before had hit upon the idea of a safe-deposit vault beneath the State Street headquarters, the first such vault in the country, but George had become its manager. A small, compact man with a high forehead, high color, and a white mustache, he was known to be “prudent, assiduous, a lover of detail,” a little gruff in manner but kindly withal, and totally reliable. To have your money securely invested, in the Boston vernacular of that day, was to be “as safe as Lee’s vaults.”

They were men certainly of whom the elder Theodore would have approved. The one notable difference in their outlook and his was political, since both were Democrats, and Saltonstall, in particular, harbored bitter enmity toward almost all Republicans as a consequence of the 1876 election. Sent by the National Democratic Committee to witness the tally of disputed votes in Florida, he had seen the presidency being stolen before his eyes and refused ever to forget it.

Saltonstall’s wife was George Lee’s sister, Harriett Rose, which made the Saltonstall and Lee children first cousins. Dick was the oldest of five Saltonstall children, followed by Rose, Mary, Phillip, and eight-year-old Endicott. Alice—Alice Hathaway—was the second of six Lee children, five girls and one boy. Rose, or Rosy, Lee was her older sister. Then followed Harriett, Caroline, Isabella, and George, who was nine. Their mother was Caroline Haskell Lee.

So together the two households comprised what amounted to one very large family of fifteen, and with five or six full-time servants for each house, with horses to ride, surrounding countryside to explore, fireplaces in every room for chill October nights, this was everything Theodore could have wished for, the whole atmosphere being “so homelike,” as he said.

Alice was seventeen. Theodore was nineteen, the same age his father had been when he first reached Roswell and found his Princess from Afar in another large country house on a hill. What Alice was wearing when he first saw her, whether they were at the Saltonstalls’ or the Lees’ house, or somewhere along the path between, we do not know; but as he told her later, she affected him in a way he had never experienced before. The feeling was instantaneous. He loved her, he later wrote, as soon as he saw her. And she was “my first love, too.”

She was, by every surviving account, extraordinarily attractive, slender, graceful in her movements, and “rather tall” for a girl of that era, five feet seven, which meant that with shoes on she was as tall as he. Her hair was a honey-blond and done in fashionable “water-curls” about her temples, in “the Josephine look.” Her eyes were extremely blue, her nose just slightly tilted. She is described repeatedly as “radiant,” “bright,” “cheerful,” “sunny,” “high-spirited,” “enchanting,” “full of life,” the same words one finds in descriptions of Mittie Bulloch at that age. She loved games, as Mittie did; she wore white; she was full of humor and flirtatious (”bewitching,” Theodore said); her birthday was in July, as Mittie’s was.

Saturday morning, accompanied by Dick and one of his sisters, she and Theodore walked in the woods together. In the afternoon they all drove to Milton, to the Ellerton Whitney estate, for dinner and tea. “We spent the evening dancing and singing, driving back about 11 o’clock,” he reports in his diary. Sunday, after church, just the two of them went “chestnutting” and three weeks later he was back again for another Sunday, to see the Saltonstalls ostensibly.

Invited for Thanksgiving, he could write proudly at the day’s end, “They call me by my first name now.”

As time passed they were to cover countless miles in country walks together, she more than keeping up with him with her “long, firm step.” They played tennis, at which she was quite good; they went to dances, dinners, and endured what appears to have been an unending quantity of tea and talk and always in the best company.

“Snowed heavily all day long,” reads one Saturday entry in the diary. “But in spite of the weather I took a long walk with pretty Alice . . . spent most of the remainder of the day teaching the girls the five step and a new dance, the Knickerbocker. In the evening we played whist and read ghost stories.” He had a rug made for her from the lynx he trapped in Maine. She made him a pair of slippers (to replace Mittie’s presumably); and it was that spring that he had his horse shipped on to Cambridge so he could ride to Chestnut Hill on his own whenever he chose. (”It was the best stroke I ever made getting him on here.”)

To judge by what he said in his letters home, he was having a “capital time” with any number of Boston girls—Jennie Hooper, Nana Rotch, Lulu Lane, Bessie Whitney—and when he mentioned Alice, even in the supposed privacy of the diary, it was usually in the same breath with Rose Saltonstall, as if there were no difference in their appeal to him. Nor did he neglect to include periodic references to others from his “past.” “Remember me to Annie and Fanny, and give my love to Edith—if she’s in a good humor,” he wrote to Corinne; “otherwise my respectful regards. If she seems particularly good-tempered tell her that I hope that when I see her at Xmas it will not be on what you might call one of her off days.”

Once he ventured to declare in the diary, “The more I see of Rose Saltonstall and Alice Lee the more I like them, especially pretty Alice.” By spring he felt up to saying the same thing (and in almost identical words) to Bamie, adding quickly, “All the family are just lovely to me.”

“I want you particularly to know some of my girl friends now,” he wrote to Corinne, expecting that she, Mittie, Bamie, and Aunt Anna might show up for Class Day. “They are a very sweet set of girls,” he assured her.

Through that summer, until he left for Maine (and to see Alice en route), he appeared to have little or nothing on his mind, exactly as if Alice Lee did not exist. Her name never appears in the diary rendition of his days at Oyster Bay. He writes instead of “the same active, out-of-door life that I always enjoy so much.” He is thinking mainly about “getting into beautiful condition,” spending “the whole time out in the open air; and at night am always tired enough to sleep like a top. Naturally I am in magnificent health and spirits.” A “pretty little Miss Hale” from Philadelphia turns up as a guest of Uncle James Alfred and family. “I take her out rowing quite often.” Another of “the prettiest girls in Oyster Bay” is a Miss Emily Swan, with whom he has had “several very pleasant rows and rides.” He walks with Bamie and “Pussie,” he walks with Mittie, who is “just too sweet and pretty for anything.” On August 11 he reports, “I am teaching pretty Miss Emily Swan to play lawn tennis.”

But it was all an elaborate deception, according to what he revealed later. In truth he had already proposed to Alice. He had made up his mind to marry her as early as that Thanksgiving at Chestnut Hill. He had even recorded the decision in the diary at that time, but then, thinking better of it, carefully removed the page with a straight razor. The proposal came sometime in June, to judge by things he said later, and from the diary, one gets the impression it was on the evening of the twentieth, Class Day, for which none of the Roosevelts had made an appearance. There were parties most of the day—an afternoon tea dance at the new gym, a dinner at the Hasty Pudding Club—and after dark, from about eight o’clock until ten, he and Alice sat together in a window at Hollis Hall “looking at the Yard beautifully lighted and listening to the Glee Club.” He had “never seen her look so lovely,” he wrote. “We then went and danced at Memorial [Hall].”

But whatever the time or setting, she turned him down, or at least put him off.

As he wrote later to Henry Minot, he had “made everything subordinate to winning her.” His entire last two years at Harvard, as he saw them, were in “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”

“See that girl?” Mrs. Robert Bacon would remember him saying at a Hasty Pudding function. “I am going to marry her. She won’t have me, but I am going to have her!”

The showy little dog cart was acquired as his senior year got under way and it was now that the expenditures on clothes took their biggest jump. His campaign was rolling. He enlisted all the help he could get. Early in November, he arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Alice, and her sister Rose to visit Mittie at 57th Street. Two weeks later Bamie and Corinne made their appearance at Chestnut Hill, where they were given dinners at both the Lee and Saltonstall houses. On November 22 he put on a lunch in their honor at the Porcellian, complete with wine and flowers, the table set for thirty-four guests, including Alice and her mother.

He escorted Rosy Lee to a tennis party and had “lovely fun” dancing with her at a Harvard Assembly. He took “dear and honest” (and very homely) Rose Saltonstall driving in his “swell” dog cart. He talked poetry and theology with the rather august Leverett Saltonstall most of one long evening.

Other young men, meantime, circled about Alice as moths to a flame (in the words of another of her cousins), and with the return of winter Theodore was beside himself. He is described wandering sleepless through the woods near Cambridge “night after night.” Obsessed with the idea that somebody else would run off with her, he sent abroad for a set of French dueling pistols, which it is said he actually succeeded in getting through the Customhouse “after great difficulty.” One winter night when he was off on another of his wanderings in the woods, somebody telegraphed New York and Cousin West, now a medical student, had to come on immediately to see what could be done for him.

Then, over the Christmas holidays, the course of the romance took an abrupt turn. Alice came back to New York for a second visit, accompanied by Rosy and Dick and Rose Saltonstall. It becomes “an uproariously jolly time.” There is a theater evening. Parties are given in Alices honor by Aunt Anna and Aunt Lizzie next door. New Year’s Day Elliott stages a lunch and a dance at Jerome Park. It is a sparkling winter day with fresh snow on the ground and everyone rides to and from the party in three big sleighs.

On Sunday, January 25,1880, again at Cambridge, he could announce unequivocally in his diary, “At last everything is settled . . .”

I drove over to the Lees’ determined to make an end of things . . . and after much pleading my own sweet, pretty darling consented to be my wife. Oh, how bewitchingly pretty she looked! If loving her with my whole heart and soul can make her happy, she shall be happy; a year ago last Thanksgiving I made a vow that win her I would if it were possible; and now I have done so, the aim of my whole life shall be to make her happy, and to shield her and guard her from every trial. . .

He was off at once on a flying visit to New York to “tell the family,” all of whom were “very much surprised,” according to his impression. By February 2, he had bought her a diamond ring.

Feb. 3 Snowing heavily, but I drove over in my sleigh to Chestnut Hill, the horse plunging to his belly in the great drifts, and the wind cutting my face like a knife. My sweet life was just as lovable and pretty as ever; it seems hardly possible that I can kiss her and hold her in my arms; she is so pure and so innocent, and so very, very pretty. I have never done anything to deserve such good fortune. Coming home I was upset in a great drift, and dragged about 300 yards holding on to the reins, before I could stop the horse . . .

Feb. 4 Superb sleighing, took Dick out for a long drive. The engagement is not to come out till a week from Monday; it is awfully hard to keep away from her.

Feb. 13. . . I do not think ever a man loved a woman more than I love her; for a year and a quarter now I have never (even when hunting) gone to sleep or waked up without thinking of her; and I doubt if an hour has passed that I have not thought of her. And now I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose.

He began sending advance notices to a few select friends, to Hal Minot, to Edith Carow and Fanny Smith. To Mittie, who seems to have been greatly distressed, he wrote, “Really you mustn’t feel melancholy, sweet Motherling; I shall only love you all the more.”

The formal announcement was made February 14. When Mittie, Bamie, Elliott, and Corinne arrived three days later, he drove them to a “great family dinner at the Lees’.” Later, at the Hasty Pudding Club, too excited to sleep, he played billiards until dawn.

“Alice,” said Mrs. Robert Bacon long afterward, “. . . did not want to marry him, but she did.”

Alice, in her own words, felt as if in a dream, to have “such a noble man’s love.” She loved Theodore deeply, she wrote to Mittie, in answer to a letter welcoming her into the Roosevelt fold, “and it will be my aim both to endear myself to those so dear to him and retain his love. How happy I am I can’t begin to tell you, it seems almost like a dream.”

A date for the wedding was a subject no one had broached as yet, and when she told Theodore she wanted to be married the following autumn, he anticipated a “battle royal” with her father, who apparently thought she was too young to be in any rush and would have welcomed a long engagement. “I most sincerely wish I had you here to assist me,” Theodore wrote Bamie. But then Mittie proposed that he bring Alice home to live at 57th Street, once they were married, and it was thus that he “carried the day” when the confrontation took place. “Indeed,” he told Corinne, “I don’t think Mr. Lee would have consented to our marriage so soon on other terms.”

To Mittie he now announced, “I wish to send invitations to all my friends and acquaintances in New York; so couldn’t you send me on a visiting list of all the people I know or ought to know? I want to include everybody, so as to rub up their memories about the existence of a man named Theodore Roosevelt, who is going to bring a pretty Boston wife back to New York next winter.”

2

6 West 57th Street

MY DEAR MRS. WARD,

Will you take a cup of tea with me on Monday next, the 12th, at 4 o’clock.

I wish to present to you Miss Alice Lee of Boston who with her mother will be visiting us then.

Miss Lee is a very lovely young girl of eighteen and is just engaged to my oldest son, Theodore, who does not graduate from Harvard until June.

I think I can rely upon your interest, my dear Mrs. Ward, in my son’s engagement and I am anxious to welcome you to my home among a few of my friends. . . .

Hoping to welcome you then, my dear friend, on April 12th. I am faithfully yours—

M. B. ROOSEVELT

April 5, 1880

The note was one of the many Mittie sent off in her own hand on her monogrammed cream-colored stationery that spring of 1880 and there were to be a very great many more, several hundred at least, before the year ended. It was as if time and circumstances and all those rites of passage expected by proper society had conspired to put her at center stage as she had not been since her own engagement. And with so much expected of her—her particular grace and “example” often critical to the success of an occasion—she appears to have played her part with nothing but pleasure, and flawlessly. One New York paper was to write of her “brilliant prowess” as a hostess. “All the entertainments that she gave . . . were stamped with the spirit of good cheer, high breeding, and elevating conversation. Few houses have entertained so many guests and none has made of guests so many friends.”

Her small tea of April 12 had been preceded by a family reception for Alice on April 8 and was followed by a large evening affair on April 13 at which she and Alice made a striking picture receiving their guests in front of the ornate mantelpiece in the dining room at 57th Street. In December she would stand in the same spot, Corinne on her right this time, Alice on her left, at Corinne’s coming-out party, hothouse flowers banked on all sides, rooms so full of people it was difficult to move about.

Between these two occasions, in about seven months’ time, she would give perhaps twenty dinner parties and an equal number of teas; she would see the 57th Street house closed for the summer—silver packed, furniture shrouded with slipcovers—and move to Oyster Bay (on May 29). She would attend Theodores graduation at Cambridge (June 30); entertain a steady stream of guests at Tranquillity through the summer; settle issues among her servants; fret over Theodore’s health; see Theodore and Elliott off to the West for a hunting trip; have Tranquillity put in order for Theodore’s honeymoon; reopen the 57th Street house and arrange an “apartment” for Theodore and Alice on the third floor; attend the wedding at Chestnut Hill; plan Corinne’s party; issue the invitations for Corinne’s party; and adjust to the idea that Elliott was going off to hunt big game in India.

Theodore’s romance, moreover, was but one of several with which she must play a part.

It was at one of her April dinner parties at 57th Street, a week or so after the reception for Alice, that Bamie’s friend Sara Delano first met James Roosevelt of Hyde Park, a dignified member of the Hudson River “branch,” who was twice Sara Delano’s age and a widower. “He talked to her the whole time,” Mittie remarked to Bamie when the evening was over. “Why, he never took his eyes off her!” Sara, like Bamie, had resigned herself to the probability of lifelong spinsterhood and would credit Mittie ever after for the way things turned out. On May 7, following up on an invitation from “Squire James,” Mittie took Bamie and Sara for a visit to Hyde Park, a day Sara was to remember as among the most important in her life. “If I had not come then,” she would tell her son years later, “I should now be ’old Miss Delano’ after a rather sad life!”

Sara Delano and James Roosevelt were married at Algonac, the Delano estate on the Hudson, that October, a few weeks before Theodore and Alice were married. In November Sara and James sailed for a European honeymoon, taking the Germanic. On the same ship was Elliott, who was en route to India by way of London.

Cousin West was in love with Fanny Smith (she turned him down when he proposed), and Corinne, too, was being actively courted by a large, demonstrative, florid young Scot, a friend of Elliott’s named Douglas Robinson, heir to a real-estate fortune, who, like Alice, spent part of that summer with the family at Oyster Bay, his booming voice adding a new note—like that of a calliope, Theodore thought—to the usual sounds of summer.

Corinne was thought “clever” (Fanny Smith said she had “genuine intellectual power”) and though no beauty she had, at eighteen, a certain vitality and natural femininity that appealed to men and women. Beside Alice or Mittie, Corinne looked rather plain, but between her and Bamie, she was much the more attractive to the eye and her two brothers and her male cousins made a great fuss over her. She was a little taller than Mittie, with tiny hands and delicate features. For her summer reading this year she had undertaken Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

The same big porch rockers tilted back and forth at Tranquillity as in years past. The blue bay and sunshine were no different from other summers, or any less a tonic. The familiar, noisy games went on in timeless fashion and in the midst of it all Mittie herself often seemed a timeless summer note, “the mother in white . . . seated in state on the lawn,” a book usually in hand, or talking on in her easy, unchanged Georgia way to Sister Anna or Lucy Elliott. Only the strong-willed Bamie seems to have lost patience with her on occasion.

Nothing could ruffle Mittie. Corinne, who treasured especially her mothers warmth and spontaneity, saw in her also a steady enduring strength—of a kind different from Bamie s, but strength all the same. A “perfect readiness to meet all situations,” Corinne called it.

Mittie approved of Douglas Robinson, it appears; and having accepted Theodore’s decision, she had taken Alice to her heart quite literally as one of her own. Elliott may have become a worry by now; it is impossible to know for certain.

Elliott had begun working for Uncle James Gracie at a bank downtown and in summer commuted to and from Oyster Bay. As some writers have said, Elliott may also have begun already to drink more than was good for him, and so the trip west in August could have been as much for his benefit as for Theodores. Returning to Chicago after a week’s hunt in Iowa, Theodore would write to Corinne of their brother’s joy in “the change to civilization.”

As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy smash “to keep the cold out of his stomach”; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening shandygaff.

But the letter is so plainly Theodore’s idea of humor—tall-tale humor out of the Wild West—that it suggests there was no “problem” as yet. That he would treat a subject of such seriousness in so open and bantering a vein would seem a sign that neither he nor Elliott nor any of them was very concerned.

As Elliott and Theodore proceeded on their western expedition, it was Elliott who got on most readily with the people encountered—male and female—some of whom, according to Theodore, were “pretty rough.” Elliott’s natural, easy way with people cut across barriers of class or background, an attribute Theodore could only admire, and doubtless Elliott’s past experiences in Texas gave him confidence of a kind Theodore lacked.

“Last Sunday night we got this motley crew together to sing hymns,” Mittie read in one of Theodore’s letters, this dated August 25,1880, from a farm in Illinois; “thanks to Elliott it was a great success. It was all I could do to keep a sober face when I saw him singing from the same book with the much-flattered Mrs. Rudolf and Miss Costigan.”

The trip had been badly planned. With no clear idea where to go, they kept trying different spots, first in Illinois, then Iowa and Minnesota, taking time out in Chicago between each foray to recuperate and figure their next move. The flies were dreadful in Illinois and on a lake in Iowa they both nearly drowned when their rowboat capsized. But they saw it as their last chance for an adventure together, entirely on their own, which probably would have been reason enough for going in the first place, quite aside from Theodore’s health. “I enjoy being with the old boy so much,” Theodore said. “I am so glad ... we two brothers have been able at last to be together,” wrote Elliott. “All the happier we are solely dependent on each other for companionship. . .”

Theodore had become violently ill during a midsummer visit to Bar Harbor with Alice, Rose, and Dick Saltonstall. He had weathered his final examinations at Harvard, Class Day, graduation, the excitement of having Alice as a guest at Oyster Bay, all with no ill effect, only to be struck down in embarrassing fashion in far-off Maine. He was hit by violent diarrhea, his old cholera morbus (”very embarrassing for a lover,” as he told Corinne), and to Mittie he declared a trip west would be just the thing to put him back on his feet and build him up.

What he did not tell her—or Alice or Elliott, so far as we know—was that he had also received some extremely disquieting news from the college physician as far back as March. He had gone for a routine physical examination, at the conclusion of which Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant told him he had “heart trouble.” Of what variety, or whether that was even discussed, we do not know and it was only years later that Theodore ever talked about the incident. But apparently he was warned he must live a quiet life, choose a relatively sedentary occupation. He was to avoid strenuous physical exertion—he was not to run up stairs, for example. He responded at once and defiantly, telling the doctor he could never live that way, that he would do exactly the opposite.

He was sick again in Minnesota, at the Red River bordering on Dakota Territory, their farthest point west. An attack of asthma had him gasping so that he spent the night sitting up in order to breathe. The day after he was in such pain with colic he could hardly walk. Yet only a few days before, writing from Chicago, Elliott had described him as looking like a new man, “as brown and well as can be,” the picture of health. “I think he misses Alice, poor dear old beloved brother. But I try to keep him at something all the time and certainly he looks a hundred percent better than when he came out.”

For all the grouse, geese, snipes, sharp-tailed plovers, ducks, and grebes they managed to kill—in excess of four hundred birds—the shooting was “not as good as expected.” They had hunted on foot, not horseback. There had been no whirlwind rides over the prairie as in a Mayne Reid adventure. They had never reached the “real West,” the “Far West,” as Theodore called it. The whole episode had been very tame and colorless in contrast to what Elliott had experienced in Texas or what he could expect in the wilds of India.

As once Theodore had stayed safely at home with his studies while Elliott went off to Fort McKavett, so now he would settle in with his “little pink wife” while Elliott circled the world. But plainly there was an element of escape to Elliott’s forthcoming adventure. He was getting out before Theodore returned, abdicating his place as man of the house, and to “a far better man,” he assured Bamie in another letter from the western trip.

Thee is well able and no mistake—shrewd and clever, by no means behind the age. What I have often smiled at in the old boy are I am now sure some of his best points—a practical carrying out in action of what I, for example, am convinced of in theory, but fail to put in practice.

Theodore wanted Elliott to be his best man at the wedding and declared further that if, because of his India plans, Elliott was unable to be there, then he wanted no best man—all of which pleased Mittie greatly.

“Theodore is in the city now . . . wild with happiness and excitement,” wrote Fanny Smith in her diary on October 15. “I went with him to see the wedding presents he is going to give Alice. I hope she is very fond of him.”

He had spent several thousand dollars on a sapphire ring, other jewelry and more gifts for her. He would begin saving, he vowed, once they were married. Two days ahead of the others, he departed for Boston.

They were married on a perfect New England fall day, the height of Indian summer, Wednesday, October 27,1880, Theodore’s twenty-second birthday, at noon in the Unitarian Church at Brookline. Mittie had invited Fanny Smith and Edith Carow to come on to Boston with the family and so they were both in the pew beside her, along with Bamie and the Gracies. Corinne was a bridesmaid. Elliott stood beside his brother with the ring and Theodore, when it came time for his vows, responded, as Fanny Smith said, “in the most determined and Theodorelike tones.”

One of the servants in the Lee household, Alice’s nurse from childhood (recorded only as Christina), ran the two miles from the house to the church, having missed the last carriage when it departed, and arrived just in time for the ceremony.

Alice made a stunning bride. Some weeks before, on a flying visit to Boston after his western trip, Theodore had found her “the same as ever and yet with a certain added charm” he was unable to describe. “I cannot take my eyes off her,” he wrote in his diary; “she is so pure and holy that it seems almost profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly; and yet when we are alone I cannot bear her to be a minute out of my arms.”

The reception was in the grand tradition—at home, with music, food, dancing, servants with trays of champagne, the bride the center of everyone’s attention, the big house where she had grown up bright with sunshine streaming through long windows.

On their wedding night the couple stayed in Springfield, at the Massasoit House, and from there the following day went directly to Oyster Bay for a honeymoon of two weeks. A proper European honeymoon had been postponed until summer, Theodore having since decided, at the urging of Uncle Robert) to enter the Columbia Law School.

Early the first week of November, a few days before Elliott sailed, Mittie received word that they were “living in a perfect dream of delight” at Tranquillity, waited on hand and foot by two faithful Roosevelt servants—the ever reliable Mary Ann, the groom Davis—and by a local woman named Kate, who did all the meals. “The house is just perfection,” Theodore told her; “Kate cooks deliciously, and Mary Ann is exactly the servant for us; and Davis does his part beautifully too, always sending in his respects in the morning to ’the good lady’ as he styles Alice.”

Breakfast was at ten, dinner at two, tea at seven. Except for the servants and a big black-and-white collie named Dare, they had the place to themselves. The summer “crowd” had long since departed. The big summer houses stood silent in the golden autumn light.

They played more tennis, went on more walks and for long drives over the hills in the family buggy. At night they read aloud from Keats and Sir Walter Scott before a log fire. Their one contact with the outside world was the morning paper. Once, on November 2, Theodore had Davis drive him over to East Norwich so he could cast his first vote in a presidential election, for the Republican, James A. Garfield, and his running mate, none other than Chester Arthur.

“There is hardly an hour of the twenty-four that we are not together,” he wrote in his diary a few days later. “I am living in a dream land; how I wish it could last forever.”

Saturday, November 13, Mittie welcomed them home at 6 West 57th Street.

3

That winter in New York was the busiest and possibly the happiest time Theodore had ever known. Even the most frenetic days at Harvard had never been quite so full. For Alice, after the pace of life at Chestnut Hill, the change must have been overwhelming.

Theodore at once took up the part of his father, presiding at the head of the family table, presiding Sunday evenings in his father’s old place at the newsboys’ dinner, beginning their first Sunday in New York. He was elected a trustee of the Orthopedic Hospital and the New York Infant Asylum. And for the Roosevelt women now, at least figuratively in his charge, he became the main source of news from “downtown,” the perfect escort to the theater and the opera, the whip hand on sleigh rides through the park or along Riverside Drive. Reading aloud to them from Mark Twain’s latest, A Tramp Abroad, he would laugh so uproariously that he could hardly go on, turning “literally purple,” as Corinne said.

At meetings of the St. Andrews Society he chatted with Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune and with others who had known his father. He joined a Free Trade Club, organized a whist club, started to work seriously on the naval history he had more or less toyed with the year before. By mid-February Corinne could also report in a letter to Douglas Robinson that “he has been going to Republican meetings steadily this week, and gives us most absurd accounts of them.”

And all of this, meantime, was only tangential to the new career in the law.

From 57th Street to the Columbia Law School, then located in the battered, old Schermerhorn house on Great Jones Street, was a distance of about three miles—fifty-four blocks down Fifth Avenue—and he walked it regularly every morning, leaving the house around 7:45, arriving in time for an 8:30 class. Classes over, he sometimes stopped in at the Astor Library, across Lafayette Place, to do research for the book, then walked home again. The six-mile round trip, he remarked apologetically, was the only regular exercise he was able to work into his day, given all he had to do.

“The law work is very interesting,” he said in his diary; and again, “I like the law school work very much.” Some afternoons, when not at the Astor Library, he read law in the offices of Uncle Robert, who was back in the news again as one of the new reform trustees of the Brooklyn Bridge, now in its eleventh year of construction and still unfinished.

Before dark, if there was snow, he would bundle Alice into the sleigh and strike off to the north, through the park or crosstown to the Hudson. “I love to take my sweet little wife up the Riverside Park,” he wrote shortly before Christmas; “it is a beautiful drive now, with the snowy palisades showing in fine relief against the gray winter skies, as with the dark waters of the Hudson, covered with ice, at their feet.”

Once, on a sleighing party along the Hudson, the elder Theodore and Mittie had gone as far as one of their summer “cottages,” at Riverdale, where Mittie insisted on getting out to inspect the place. The snow was deep and Theodore had picked her up and carried her in his arms, only to step in a hole and over they had gone. “She enjoyed it like a child,” he happily told the family afterward. “Your Uncle Jimmie and Mrs. Dodge looked shocked.”

“When my sweetest little wife can’t go,” reads another of the diary entries, “I always take dear little Mother. It is lovely to live as we are now.”

But the quantities of energy expended on his studies and sleigh rides, the historical research, the daily constitutionals in every kind of weather, or his clubs and meetings and charities, seem almost secondary to what went into “the season,” the New York social whirl that dominated the winter and took front rank in the running diary account he maintained so conscientiously. From the night of Corinne’s debut, December 8—the “great ball at our house” when Alice wore her wedding dress and white flowers in her hair—there was something going on, some reception, dinner, musical, or spectacular society ball, nearly every night of the week. He and “pretty Alice” were an immediate triumph as part of the ultra-fashionable “young married” set, “taken up” and fussed over by what Edith Wharton called “the little inner group of people who, during the long New York season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently undiminished zest.”

There was a “jolly little dinner” at the lselins’, a “very pleasant little party” at Aunt Annies, dinners at the Leavitts’, the Griswolds’, the Weekeses’, the Keans’, the Morans’, the Tuckermans’, the Stuyvesant Fishes’, a musical at the Betts’, a dinner for twenty-four at home, and several large dinners given by Mrs. William B. Astor, Jr.—the Mrs. Astor—who was homely and without charm and so laden with chains of diamonds as to be immobile, but who, with her social counselor. Ward McAllister, reigned over New York society. The Roosevelts and the Astors were “family” now, after a fashion, since Mrs. Astors daughter Helen had married young James Roosevelt Roosevelt—”Rosy” Roosevelt—who was the son of Sara Delano’s James by his first marriage.

There were theater parties and “small suppers” afterward, a box at the opera Monday nights, the Mendelssohn Concert series. There were private dances by candlelight at Delmonico’s that often lasted until three in the morning, the Patriarchs’ Ball and the Family Circle Dancing Class (the F.C.D.C.), these latter two the inspiration of Ward McAllister and already regarded as time-honored social institutions.

“Dinner at Delanos’,” reads the diary entry for Monday, January 11, 1881, at the start of a new week on the social calendar; “sat between Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Drayton.” The night following came a “very jolly theater party and supper at Tuckermans’;” the night after that, a “great ball” at the Astors’. On Friday, January 14, Theodore, Alice, and some thirteen others, including Bamie, Corinne, and Douglas Robinson, went off to Niagara Falls by private railroad car.

Saturday, January 15 Ideal day; perpetual spree. Saw falls, rapids, and whirlpool; took long sleigh rides, ended trip with every kind of dance in evening. Took hotel by storm. Everybody so jolly and congenial.

Sunday, January 16 Sleighed to church. Went under Falls; grand sight. Took night train for N.Y. Ghost stories and songs. Trip is the success of the season.

Monday, January 17 Went to Patriarch Ball.

It was “the greatest kind of fun.” He knew how to pace himself, he said. “I never stay more than two minutes with any girl and so don’t get talked out.” Corinne, he claimed, was a “great belle” of the season, while Alice grew ever more dazzling. With her on his arm he could not help being the center of attention. “Alice is universally and greatly admired; and she seems to grow more beautiful day by day . . . and oh, how happy she has made me!” The attentions showered on her at every party seem only to have pleased and flattered him. The old wild jealousy, any thoughts of dueling pistols, were all in the past apparently.

For her own part, meantime, Alice had also joined a tennis club and the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (”now we are one in everything,” said Theodore emotionally), and formed a bond with her new mother-in-law that, from the evidence we have, must have been extraordinary. If one chose to marry a Roosevelt, Douglas Robinson was to remark, one ran the risk of being “bullied or ignored or hung on the family like a tail to a kite,” but Alice is not known to have shared or ever to have expressed any such feelings and the love she and Mittie had for each other would be talked about for years.

There was no friction between them and it was not as though Alice was an unfelt presence. Practicing at the piano in the corner of the parlor, she played loud enough to be heard through the wall of the adjoining Roosevelt house. She entered into conversation—Mittie found her “so companionable”—and for all her sunny spirit appears to have had no fear of expressing exasperation or impatience with some of her husband’s ways. (In another of Owen Wister’s vignettes involving the spilling of Roosevelt blood, Theodore is described working away at his War of 1812 studies, alone in the library, standing on one leg, checking through a book on navigation while making little sketches, his desk a sliding panel that pulled out from the bookcase. Alice bursts in on him and exclaims, “We’re dining out in twenty minutes, and Teddy’s drawing little ships,” whereupon “Teddy” charges to the third floor, cuts himself shaving, and is at once attended by the adoring wife and other resident female Roosevelts who “take measures” to save his collar from being stained.)

At times, too, she questioned the need for such everlasting activity in their lives. While Theodore and Bamie thrived on the tightly packed schedule—“Oh, Energy, thy name is Bamie!” Theodore once hailed his adored sister—Alice seems to have felt something alien in the pellmell rush of New York life, just as Mittie had when she first came to the city as a bride. Racing down the street with Corinne to catch a horsecar one morning, Alice had panted out, “Do you always have to run to catch anything in New York?” And Corinne, writing reflectively to Elliott later in the day, had agreed it was true, they were indeed constantly rushing to catch something or other. “Sometimes we succeed,” she said, “and sometimes we do not, and it is not particularly satisfactory either way.” Only within the home walls was life “intensely satisfactory.”

During the flurry of excitement surrounding Corinne’s engagement to Douglas Robinson later that winter, Alice seems to have remained largely in the background. The engagement was a peculiar business—eagerly supported by Theodore and Bamie and looked upon by Corinne as a great mistake from the moment she agreed to it. She had no wish to be married. She had a horror of marriage, as she told her ardent Douglas in a variety of ways, one letter after another, he having departed from New York almost immediately after the announcement to check over some landholdings in West Virginia.

She had interests other than marriage, she insisted, interests she knew he regarded as “unwomanly.” Her favorite nights at home were those when Theodore came bursting in from one of his political meetings “full of it all.” Douglas was her “dear old fellow,” to be sure, but she was utterly unable to say she loved him and would not until she did. But following an afternoon ride with Theodore up Riverside Drive, she wrote, “Such a lovely long talk as we had ... He is very fond of you, Douglas, and said there was not a single other man he knew except you that he would like me to marry.” “Sometimes,” she wrote later, “I think if I could have one talk with my father it would be all right.”

Alice and Corinne became close companions, shopping together, making social calls, reading aloud to each other. With Bamie, Alice seems to have acted with a certain restraint, that same edge of respect, even deference shown by others toward Bamie since childhood. If at a party she found herself caught in conversation with some formidable someone whose mind ranged beyond her own, she wished always, Alice said, that Bamie could be there to take her place. One rainy evening toward spring, when Mittie was not feeling well, the three young women—Alice, Corinne, and Bamie—sat with Mittie in her room talking at length of their own lives and ambitions. Bamie would have preferred to live in more stirring times, she said, and to have taken a prominent part. “What a splendid queen she would have made,” wrote Corinne to Douglas. “With you and Teddy as prime ministers and Elliott as master of ceremonies, you might have ruled the world!!”

The one false note in the picture was the inclusion of Douglas Robinson—a gesture of kindness on Corinne’s part—for there could never be but one prime minister to Queen Bamie; no one could possibly be regarded on a par with Theodore in the eyes of his two sisters, then or ever. Their love for him was a force, a presence precluding, as it would turn out, any feelings of comparable intensity for any other man—as Corinne herself had all but said already to her long-suffering, distant suitor.

And possibly, everything considered, it was Alice’s acute awareness of this, her seemingly instinctive understanding of how very much Theodore meant to the other Roosevelt women and her pleasure in their presence in her married life, that speaks most for her character. As Corinne herself observed long afterward, Alice was wholly unselfish about sharing Theodore with his adoring, now entirely female family. It was this that endeared her most to them and made her at once one of them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Home Is the Hunter

1

Some years afterward, reflecting on the personality of Theodore Roosevelt, a friend and fellow politician by the name of John S. Wise wrote that it would be mistaken to picture Theodore as resembling his father. He had never known the father, Wise acknowledged. “But from all accounts of him he was one of the gentlest, most lovable, public-spirited and popular men that ever lived in New York City.” Theodore, however, had not inherited “the gentler traits” of the father. “In his sturdiness and love of life’s battles and enterprises, he much more resembled his uncle, Mr. Robert Roosevelt, who had been my friend and associate these many years.”

Then Wise spoke of the Roosevelt he liked best, about whom the general public knew little or nothing, Elliott, “the most lovable Roosevelt I ever knew.”

He was one of my earliest acquaintances in New York and our attachment grew from the moment of our first meeting until his death. Perhaps he was nothing like so aggressive or so forceful a man as Theodore, but if personal popularity could have bestowed public honors on any man there was nothing beyond the reach of Elliott Roosevelt.

Little that counted for “home news,” the news he hungered for, was lost on Elliott during his time away, so thoroughly, so conscientiously was he posted by Mittie, Bamie, Theodore, Corinne, and by the ever sympathetic Aunt Annie, whose affection for him surpassed even what she felt for the other three of her sisters children. “At present I have thirty-two! letters to answer,” he declared at one point in his travels. Aunt Annie alone, we know, wrote him a total of sixty-one times.

He was apprised of the ups and downs of Corinne’s romance and from four or five different perspectives. Word of her engagement left him “flabbergasted.” (“Is Bamie showing any signs of the same thing?” he asked Theodore excitedly from Hyderabad.) He was posted on the departure of “the two innocents” (Alice and Theodore) for their summer abroad. He heard how Theodore had climbed the Matterhorn.

“I have tried to make Corinne understand she’s not to marry unless she is sure,” Mittie was still writing in August.

Theodore’s reunion with Uncle Jimmie Bulloch in Liverpool had been a huge success . . . Theodore and Alice were home again. (”Teddy brought out from London with his dress suits two or three satin waistcoats—purple, pale yellow, and blue, and one rich black silk one,” wrote Mittie. “. . . Emlen has been quite contemptuous about them, and you should hear Douglas standing up for Teddy”) Theodore was “going in” for politics, as a candidate for the State Assembly. . . . Theodore was elected by a margin of fifteen hundred votes.... Uncle Jim’s new house at Oyster Bay was up to the second story.... Father’s old friend Theodore Bronson had died in Paris. . . . Edith Carow had given Theodore and Alice a party and Theodore led an impromptu cotillion. . . . Theodore’s book was finished and delivered to the publisher.

“Has not our dear Thee done well,” Elliott wrote Bamie from Kashmir.

Their letters took anywhere from two to three months to catch up with him, once he got to India, and there was no little frustration in hearing things so long after the fact, and particularly since other news often reached him astonishingly fast. When James A. Garfield was shot in Washington in July, much of the world knew about it in a matter of days. Word of Garfield’s death in September—and of the ascension, incredibly, of Chester A. Arthur to the presidency—reached Elliott in Delhi not much after it did Theodore in Liverpool.

Of his own adventures he could hardly say enough. His travels became ultimately a trip around the world.

Through social contacts in London made possible by the James Roosevelts and with the help of a letter he carried from Secretary of State Evarts, introducing him as the son of the eminent Theodore Roosevelt of New York, he had no trouble making himself welcome among Her Majesty’s forces in India. Arriving at Bombay in mid-January he was put up at the Byculla Club and provided with a full-time servant who slept outside his door. There were lunches (”tiffins”) in his honor, a round of elaborate dinners.

“I would not trust myself to live here,” he wrote Mittie. “There is no temptation to do anything but what you please . . .

“At seven Aya brings me my coffee and cigarette,” he went on, describing a typical day, “and I sit on the veranda lazily taking in all the beauties of the early morning—

At my feet directly under me is the race track and the horses are being taken round for a morning spin. Some of them, beautiful Arabs, bounding by with that long easy stride so sure an indication of the dash and go of the breed. Over the field, beyond the belt of green waving trees yonder, stretches the ocean; as the mist slowly rises, see the boats lazily drift along. To sit and read and think for an hour here is perfect happiness. But the bath is ready by eight, I am dressed for nine o’clock breakfast with Mr. Clark of the Bombay Club, where I go in a buggy or gig, the “hansom” of the city. “Stewed sole—egg toast—prawn curry and beer cup” does not make a bad beginning for the day. A little business, a good deal of sporty talk, and the papers bring a fellow very quickly to M. Vouillon’s two o’clock tiffin in my honor. I cannot describe it, it was all too Arabian night-like. The rich peacock feather hand punka, the delicious perfume, the delicate dishes and still more delicate wines, the quiet service—no sound of boots for the boys go without them, and the clothes make no noise. They are certainly wonderful servants. The afternoon, a call on the Governor of Bombay—and a visit to the Apollo Bunder [a popular rendezvous for fashionable Bombay]—to pay my respects to Mme. Vouillon, who drives in a handsome C-spring landau, two Sikhs, a coachman in scarlet and gold and she herself a beautiful woman, beautifully dressed, looks particularly well, as she is set off by the odd contrast—though there are many other as perfect turnouts and pretty women. Kittredge drives me to the Club, I dress and sit on his right at a dinner he gives me. A fairly fitting ending to the eastern day, a dinner of six, each man his own servant to wait on him and a boy to keep him cool. Then bed—almost in the open air. . . .

To his hosts he was a refreshing novelty—an American sportsman of impeccable taste and manners, a good shot, handsome, high-spirited, a born gentleman. The hard-drinking, polo-playing officers wished only “to give me the best of times.”

En route to Kashmir, as the guest of Sir Salar Jung, regent of the Nizam of Hyderabad, he was escorted to an evening banquet through lines of black men holding flaming torches, dined in the open court of a palace beside a fountain filled with floating candles. He was shown a room made entirely of china, furniture as well. On another day, in company of his British host, Colonel Hastings Fraser, he was received by Sir Salar as though he were a visiting prince—the colonel in full uniform, Elliott in black coat and top hat. “Just fancy your young brother talking, aye, and advising with two of the most celebrated men in these parts,” he wrote Bamie.

On a tiger hunt south of Hyderabad, arranged by Sir Salar, he traveled by horse, by elephant, and by palanquin, a large, covered litter carried on poles by sixteen men. Camp gear was transported by forty camels and there were horses enough to mount the full party of about two hundred men. It was “roughing it” of a rather different kind, he wrote. The usual evening meal “in camp” consisted of soup, salmon, various chicken or veal cutlets, broiled chicken, tongue, wild duck, “gulow” and rice, six or seven different curries, then possible snipe or Welsh rarebit, cheese, and coffee. “And a big pitcher of cooled beer and soda water, which has been in a wet blanket and fanned all day. Each one of us has his pitcher and it is good. The heat gives one an awful thirst...”

The tiger he shot was one of the largest ever seen locally and he was at once a great hero. “Three hours after the blood had been running she weighed 280 lbs.,” he wrote Theodore in a state of utter euphoria. “Her length was 9 feet 1 1/2 inches, height, 3 ft., 7 in.” The “brute” had been “glorious” in her final agony as she made her last charge and he “finished her... with a spare shot from the Bone Crusher—by George, what a hole that gun makes.”

If only his “brave, old Heart of Oak Brother” could have been with him. Here was “sporting work worthy of the Roosevelt name.”

“It is the life, old man. Our kind. The glorious freedom, the greatest excitement. . . . How everything here would have pleased your fondness for the unusual and the dangerous.”

In the parlor at 6 West 57th Street, watching her husband’s reaction to such letters, Alice worried he might at any moment drop everything and leave for India himself. “Poor dear Teddy... longs to be with you and walks up and down the room,” wrote Mittie, “. . . when Alice appealed to him, he smothered her with kisses.”

“This is your last hunt,” Theodore advised solemnly, “so stay as long as you wish . . .”

Dora, Mary Ann, Daniel the butler, were thrilled by his letters, Mittie told him, and so pleased to be remembered by him. Alone of all the family, he regularly inquired for the servants in his letters.

The claws of the tiger would be made up for her as a necklace, Mittie was told. Skin and head were being shipped to London, where Sir John Rae Reid, “the mighty hunter,” would see that a proper rug was prepared. In other letters came word that three crates of skins, heads, and horns were on the way, two crates of painted woodwork from Kashmir, another of silver and gold works, tea sets.

But a siege of fever at Srinagar had also left him feeling and looking like a “perfect bag of bones.” And he was upset terribly by the human wretchedness to be seen everywhere. How could beings created in the image of God be brought so low? “And how easy for the smallest portion to sit down in quiet luxury of mind and body—to say to the other far larger part—lo, the poor savages. Is what we call right, right all the world over and for all time?”

In Europe, at virtually the same moment, traveling by boat with Alice on the Rhine, Theodore puzzled over the numbers of castles on shore. The Age of Chivalry, he speculated, must have been lovely for the knights, but gloomy indeed for those who had to provide the daily bread.

On hearing that Theodore and Alice had purchased land at Oyster Bay on which to build their dream house, Elliott told Theodore wistfully that he too might build something there one day. “We will all live there happily as in old times . . .”

“It delights me beyond bounds to see the way you have ’gone in’ for everything as a son of the dear old father should,” he went on, “and I will come back ready and eager to put my shoulder by yours at the wheel, Thee.”

“How proud of you [I am], Thee, in your life so useful and so actively led at home,” he wrote another time. “Will it be any help to have me one of these days go round with you to back you in your fights, old man?”

Do take care of yourself now for everybody’s sake, the little wife’s (to whom give my best love), the family’s, and mine. I tell you, Thee, I shall need you often in your good old strong way to give a chap a lift or for that matter if I am on the wrong road a blow to knock me back again.

For the sheer pleasure of living, he said in another letter, this to Bamie, he had never known anything to equal his time in India. But a life lived solely for pleasure was not in the cards; it was not “‘our way,’ for that means life for an end.”

In Ceylon he brought down two elephants, killing the second only after it had chased him through the jungle for two and a half hours, Elliott running as fast as he could the whole time. He had hit it in one eye with his first shot, but that had not slowed the animal in the slightest: “. . .it was only after I had put sixteen bullets into him that his great, crushing weight fell down in the bamboos.”

From Ceylon he went to Singapore and from there to Saigon, in the teeth of a typhoon. Saigon had “the quaint air of old France . . . much shipping and an air of thrift and quiet comfort that reminded one more than anything else of a prosperous southern city in the old days, say in Louisiana.” At Hong Kong he took a side trip to Canton, riding an “ordinary American river steamboat” up the Pearl River, “really into China proper.”

That was late in December 1881, or about the time Theodore was making ready to leave for his first session in the Albany legislature. In January, from the neat, curtained privacy of Aunt Anna Gracie’s house on West 36th Street, Aunt Ella Bulloch, in New York for a brief visit, wrote Elliott of the long conversation she and “Teddy” had just had, “mostly about you, darling.”

“The dear old fellow is back from Albany on a short leave and spent an hour with me . . . and we gloried in you together, Teddy exclaiming, ’What a fellow that is!’”

I was so glad to find that Teddy too thinks so highly of your power of influence with others. He spoke of the differences between you in this respect with such noble generous warmth and said that where he would naturally wish to surpass other men, he could never hold in his heart a jealous feeling toward you. Then we talked of his book and his political interests. Thee thinks these will only help in giving him some fame, but neither he says will be of practical value, or giving him advancement, but says he must begin again at the beginning.... So that you will both in point of fact start your career together, he having gained this intermediate experience while you gain yours in a different way during your travels. Thee is a dear “grand” old fellow in very truth. . . . Sometimes he reminds me so much of you . . .

Then the morning of March 11, 1882, having been gone a year and four months, Elliott walked through the front door at 6 West 57th Street and a week or so after that, having dined privately with him, having listened to his stories, Aunt Annie, we know from her diary, was in church, head bowed, praying to God “to cure him”—but of what, whether of some mysterious Oriental fever or of his old “nervous” seizures or of drinking, is not known. “Ellie is very ill” is all she says in another entry.

Whatever the problem, it does not seem to have held him back. He was asked by the James Roosevelts to be a godfather for their infant son, Franklin Delano, an honor that touched him deeply, as he wrote in reply, and one he would have declined had not “my dear mother . . . persuaded me that I should accept.” (The small ceremony took place at Hyde Park’s St. James Chapel on March 20, just nine days after his return.) And when Corinne was at last married that April, he performed his supporting part admirably, convinced like everyone else—everyone but Corinne—that Douglas Robinson was the ideal match, “a good fellow . . . worthy of our bright, innocent little girl.” Theodore gave her away before a flower-banked altar at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church; the reception followed at 6 West 57th Street; Corinne, it is said, spent the better part of the day weeping.

“My little heart,” Elliott had written her from India, “if I could only take you in my arms and kiss you this evening, pet you and love you. . . . Ah! My little love ... I smile to myself now as I recall the old dreams about you, Baby Sister, now a big woman going to be married . . .”

“Why if you don’t take him [Douglas Robinson],” reads another letter, “you and Old Nell will keep house in some cozy country corner all by ourselves . . .”

“Dear Elliott has been such a loving, tender brother to me,” Corinne once told Douglas. Elliott was so much more sensitive than other men, so much more understanding and considerate of her feelings and of her shortcomings, never dogmatic or judgmental. “How different people are,” she mused; “there is Teddy, for instance, he is devoted to me too, but if I were to do something that he thought very weak or wrong, he would never forgive me, whereas Elliott no matter how much he might despise the sin, would forgive the sinner . . .”

“If you were my brother or cousin,” she explained to Douglas, “how freely I could say I love you dearly. That kind of love I give absolutely. . .”

In time Elliott joined with Theodore and Douglas, Poultney Bigelow, and Cleveland Dodge (the son of William, Jr.) to start a New York Reform Club, the first meeting being held in the library at 57th Street. (”The respectable, educated, refined young men of this city should have more weight in public matters,” Theodore told a reporter somewhat pompously.) Elliott also joined Douglas and Archibald Russell in the real-estate business downtown at 106 Broadway. The firm was renamed Robinson, Russell, and Roosevelt, new stationery printed. So at twenty-two, Elliott appeared to be on his way in the world of serious affairs, his adventuring over.

He lived at home, meantime. Indeed, having faced the beasts of the jungle, having seen and doubtless experienced more of the “big world” than any at home—or that they could have even imagined, one expects—he now found himself quartered at Mittie’s insistence in a small room just off hers, exactly as though he were a small boy in need of watching and mothering.

She called him her “comfort child.” He was the son who had given her greatest solace and who, until his travels, had stayed closest to her. She adored him, openly, happily. She spoiled him. And he as openly welcomed her love and attention. “My special charge,” he called her, since his father sometime in his final agony had charged him to look after her.

“Ah! Dear one, if you love me, your son, does he not love you?” he had written her from Madras. “I tell you yes, little Motherling, and so tenderly.” She was never to worry over a thing. “Tell me all, I have broad shoulders and am amply strong. When I come back, dear, I come to see you alone. Not to leave you again . . .” And another time: “Remember Father left me particularly to care for you and at any time you want me no other mortal thing shall keep me from being with you. Trust Nell.”

Among the reasons he liked Douglas Robinson as much as he did was Robinson’s fondness for Mittie, who of late, Elliott conceded privately, was showing a “slight unevenness.” A few of her long-standing peculiarities—her chronic tardiness, her need for order and cleanliness—had become considerably more pronounced. To judge by some accounts she was becoming really quite odd. In an exchange that took place many years later, a recorded conversation between a daughter of Corinne’s, Mrs. Joseph Alsop, Jr., and Bamie’s son, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., the situation was portrayed as follows:

MRS. ALSOP: Then, she [Mittie] had an absolute passion for cleanliness. Well, it was a phobia.... Mother would, with peals of laughter, tell me things she would do, and it would sound to me exactly as though she were talking about a crazy person. Not to be able ever to be on time.... Then she had a library closet where she tied and untied bundles of different kinds. She and the maid worked all the time in the library closet. . . . She had a white chenille net that she wore on her hair to keep the dust out. She always took two baths—one for the soap, and then she got out and it was run again by the maid and she got in again, so as to wash the soap off. Then when anybody came to see her if she was in bed a large sheet was put down, particularly if the doctor came. And when she said her prayers a sheet was put down so that she wouldn’t touch the floor.

MR. COWLES: She was crazy!

MRS. ALSOP: Oh, yes, of course, she was; but crazy, according to my mother, in a perfectly delightful, charming and companionable way. . . . The whole thing is very fascinating.

But what makes it still more “fascinating” is the very contrary impression Mittie made on so many others at the time who found her anything but odd or laughable. Most notably there was Sara Roosevelt, Cousin Sally, a woman of strong mind and will who was never known to suffer fools. She thought the world of Mittie, invited Mittie to visit her at Hyde Park, where Mittie sometimes stayed for as long as a week, Cousin Sally obviously preferring her company to that of almost anyone else of that generation. “I was very proud when she came and stayed with me,” Cousin Sally would recall. (Her diary entry from the time reads, “I love having her. We have read together, admired Baby, driven with James, tea’d at Mother’s.”)

Theodore, too, was proud to bring his political friends to the house, sure of the impression she and Alice both would make. To Elliott she remained “the beautiful center of our home worship.” If she babied him, he accepted that with good grace and with what Fanny Smith called a “caressing” kind of humor. Describing his new sleeping arrangement, he would say, “Now when my little mother feels cold at night, she comes in and puts an extra blanket on me, so that I wake up perfectly roasted, and when she is warm, she comes in and takes the covers off me so that I wake up frozen.”

The great tiger-skin rug was stretched before the parlor fireplace, where it dominated the entire room. The front hall now was lined with the heads of other animals Elliott had shot. Once, as he was about to leave India, Mittie had written, “I am very jealous that you gave some of your trophies away in Bombay, when I value even a tail of a mouse that is my darling Elliott’s trophy!” Her interest in every detail of his letters describing the tiger hunt had been, as she said, quite as intense as that of Theodore.

Those nights when he came in late from parties, or not at all, she left little penciled notes. “My darling son, I have missed you all evening. Sleep well, darling, and call Mother if you wish her.”

2

While Theodore went churning back and forth to Albany, making speeches, railing against corruption in high places, getting his name in the papers day after day, Elliott was preoccupied principally with becoming a man-about-town. He was drinking more than he should—but then so did many others of his set and there is nothing to suggest that anyone found him offensive.

In appearance, he was a taller—by two inches—and only somewhat handsomer version of his brother, not the Apollo-like figure portrayed in some later accounts. He and Theodore had each grown a mustache by this time—Elliott’s being the thicker, more successful effort—both were parting their hair in the middle, or nearly so, and Elliott, too, now wore metal-rimmed spectacles. Seen from a distance, in riding attire, say, or waving from a sailboat out on the Sound, either could easily be taken for the other. Appearing at the Newsboys’ Lodging House for the first time, immediately after his honeymoon at Oyster Bay, Theodore had been amazed when the boys started stamping and cheering. “As soon as they saw me, they mistook me for you,” he had explained to Elliott. “I thought it pretty nice of them; they were evidently very fond of you.”

It was Elliotts effortless charm, his generosity and humor, his way of talking to people—as if he had never found anything quite so fascinating as what the other person had to say—that made him so very attractive. He was glamorous in much the way his father had been—and as Theodore most obviously was not—and this, with the aura of his recent adventures, plus a certain bravura and suggestion of decadence, made him enormously appealing to women especially. He had none of the self-righteousness which in his brother put some people off; and little or none of Theodore’s combativeness or bombast. Isaac Hunt, a friend of Theodore’s in the legislature, described Elliott as “a smooth, quiet [compared to Theodore], nice fellow.” Unlike Theodore he had not an enemy in the world.

Reading through surviving reminiscences, one senses that Elliott was very like some of his Bulloch forebears, that he would have been quite at home with the young bloods at the Savannah Club in days past. And it was not simply the women in the family who fawned and fussed over him, or melted before his attentions. “If he noticed me at all,” wrote Fanny Smith, “I had received an accolade and if on rare occasions he turned on all his charm, he seemed to me quite irresistible.”

(“He drank like a fish and ran after the ladies” was Edith Carow’s less charitable summation, years later. “I mean ladies not in his own rank, which was much worse.”)

As befitting a gentleman and a Roosevelt, he gave time to the Orthopedic Hospital, took an occasional turn Sunday evenings at the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He was also understood to be “working up” his travel notes, compiling his letters and journal entries, with the thought of doing a book on big-game hunting. Few Americans had been to India, or experienced all he had, and since he did write well, the possibilities in the idea were genuinely promising. But somehow nothing ever came of this. He seemed incapable of pulling things into focus, or of seeing a piece of work through to completion, as his brother could. To write his Naval War of 1812, Theodore had forced himself to master every nuance and technical term of seamanship—Theodore, who never particularly cared for sailing, who disliked long sea voyages. Theodore had plowed through everything in print on his subject, tracked down original documents to amass volumes of statistics on fighting ships, armaments, crews. He had started out knowing no more about his subject than anyone else and with no experience or training in historical research. At times he felt he had taken on more than he could handle. “I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me,” he had written Bamie from The Hague, where, in the midst of his European honeymoon, he was still hammering away at the book. And had he not been able to spend several weeks soon after that soaking up “advice and sympathy” from the “blessed” Uncle Jimmie Bulloch in Liverpool, he might not have brought it off. But persist he would, and though the end result, his first published opus, was often dry and tedious in the extreme—much of it virtually unreadable to anyone without a prior interest in the subject or in the author (one can only sympathize with poor Alice or Mittie trying to make headway in such a book)—it was also scrupulously thorough, accurate, fair, and would remain a definitive study.

“‘It’s dogged as does it,’” Theodore liked to say, quoting a line from Trollope. He admired “staying power” in anyone. It was a hunter’s virtue, he said. Yet the most celebrated hunter of the moment seemed not to have it, as he himself recognized. He was lacking, said Elliott, “that foolish grit of Theodore’s.”

Long afterward, when Elliott did at last try his hand at serious writing, it was in fiction, a well-handled, revealing short story that was never published. It is about a New York society figure living abroad—a woman he calls Sophie Vedder—who is described as having “so many friends, so many good and lovable qualities,” but who is also plainly bound for a tragic end. “Live and let live” is her motto. “Never miss an opportunity of enjoying life, no matter at what cost, and when the end comes, well, take it cheerfully.” There will be no dirges played at her funeral, she boasts, only Strauss. “My life has been a gamble. I have lived for pleasure only. I have never done anything I disliked when I could possibly avoid it.... I hoped against hope that something would turn up and pull me through. It was the hope of a gambler.” “Poor Sophie, what a frivolous, useless thing you are,” he has her say to herself at the last, as she is about to pull the trigger in front of her mirror. “Still, you never did anyone any harm but yourself. . .”

When Elliott began spending time with a society belle named Anna Hall, the whole family took heart. The Halls were Hudson River gentry, with Ludlows and Livingstons in their background. Anna, the oldest of four Hall sisters, had been raised at Tivoli-on-the-Hudson, twenty miles above Hyde Park, where she was schooled by a painfully pious, self-absorbed father who never worked and who for years, before an early death, required that she walk up and down the lawn with a stick pressed against the small of her back to instill the “carriage” of a lady. She was tall, golden-haired, like Alice Lee, but unlike Alice, prim and cool, and where Alice was lovely-looking, fresh, radiant, Anna was something more. She was stunning, regal, with a magnificent figure and large, haunting blue eyes. She was “made for an atmosphere of approval,” as a friend said. In London a few years later, the poet Robert Browning became so infatuated with her beauty that he asked if he might just sit and gaze while she had her portrait painted.

Elliott was dazzled. A courtship proceeded. Letters were exchanged, his addressed to “My dear Miss Hall,” hers to “My dear Mr. Roosevelt.” He sent flowers, took her driving in the park.

They were seen at parties. They knew the same people; their families, of course, knew one another and all about one another. One Sunday evening she went with him to meet his newsboys, and according to Fanny Smith, it was at a house party at Algonac, the Delano estate on the Hudson, over Memorial Day in 1883, that he asked her to marry him. Apparently she accepted, though no one was told for another several weeks.

“I am honestly delighted,” wrote Theodore to Corinne from Richfield Springs, where he was convalescing, taking the waters as he had as a child. Alice had announced she was pregnant and Theodore had been hit by an attack of asthma as bad as any in years, in addition to a siege of cholera morbus worse even than that of the summer before their marriage. But Ellie’s news was something they could all be glad about. It would do “the dear old boy” great good, said Theodore, “to have something to work for,” “to marry and settle down with a definite purpose in life.” In measured brotherly fashion, Elliott was told it was “no light thing to take the irrevocable step,” while Aunt Annie reminded him, “You must be very pure and very true now that you have secured the right to guard, love and cherish so sweet a girl as Anna.”

When, at summer’s end, Theodore picked up and went west again for his health and some shooting, to Dakota Territory this time, for two weeks in the “real West,” he went alone, Elliott being preoccupied. Anna, not Mittie, now wore the tiger-claw necklace. Elliott was riding to hounds at Hempstead, on Long Island, playing polo at Meadow Brook. At Tivoli one weekend he suffered some kind of relapse or seizure—”My old Indian trouble,” he explained to Anna—and had a difficult time getting back to New York on the train. He was injured at polo several times. He played extremely well, but with an ardor bordering on recklessness. Some nights, nursing a sprain or a “beastly leg,” he would sit alone brooding and smoking in his room at 57th Street, and Anna worried that he was keeping something from her. “I know I am blue and disagreeable often,” he wrote, “but please, darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.”

Theodore and Alice had moved into a house of their own, on West 45th Street, next door to Corinne and Douglas, who in April had become the parents of a son, Theodore Douglas Robinson, the first of the new generation. Theodore by now had also purchased more than a hundred acres of prime land at Oyster Bay, on Cooper’s Bluff, then sold parcels to Bamie and Aunt Annie, so they could build beside him. His stable was already going up on the ninety-five acres he had kept for himself.

Theodore had any number of irons in the fire. He had taken a flier in cattle in Wyoming, investing $10,000 in a ranch run by a Harvard classmate. Theodore had put another $20,000 into G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the publisher of his Naval War, in order to make himself a limited partner. And though he had gone to the Dakota Bad Lands ostensibly to shoot a buffalo while there were still a few left to shoot, he returned to announce he had launched a cattle venture of his own. He talked proudly now of “my ranch in Dakota.”

As a politician, Theodore was already seen as a phenomenon, often abused or made a laughingstock by the opposition papers, but a somebody nonetheless and a bright, rising star in the eyes of the men his father had set such store by. Theodore, as everyone said, was on his way, his life had taken hold, while Elliott had only Anna Hall.

Their wedding, “one of the most brilliant social events of the season,” took place at Calvary Church downtown, in the neighborhood of the old house on East 20th Street, on December 1, 1883. Theodore was best man and it was the last such occasion at which the whole family was present.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Politics

1

It was, as would be said, no ordinary thing for a young man of wealth and social position, a son of the “solid, old quiet element,” to go of his own accord down into the great bear pit of politics—thrash it out, survive or fall, in “the rough hurly-burly of the caucus, the primary, and the political meeting.” But the impression that Theodore was virtually the only such young man of his day, or that he did what he did against the wishes of family and friends, is mistaken—as mistaken as was the doctrine so earnestly espoused then that any such young man would automatically raise the level of political morality and serve as inspiration for more of his kind to join the good work. New York already had a sterling example of such high ambition in Seth Low, the young reform mayor of Brooklyn, who was a Columbia College graduate and heir to the Low shipping fortune; nor should it be forgotten that another recent Harvard graduate was Boies Penrose of Philadelphia, who had been in the class behind Theodore’s. Penrose too was descended from a wealthy, distinguished line. He was a “lover of vigorous outdoor sports,” an aspiring author, and he too started off exactly as Theodore, by running for the state (Pennsylvania) legislature as a gentleman champion of reform. But Penrose was to become another of the era’s flagrant political bosses, overbearing, power obsessed, the antithesis of the reform spirit. Penrose was a perfect, Harvard-cultivated, Harvard-sounding aristocrat—and when among his political cronies, to quote one biographical sketch, “capable of conduct and utterances which caused the judicious to grieve and moved the pious to indignation.”

Theodore said later it was a combination of curiosity and “plain duty” that led him into politics, and that “I intended to be one of the governing class,” which may be taken as another way of saying he wanted power. In the novel The Bostonians (1886), Henry James would portray a leading character as “full of purpose to live . . . and with high success; to become great, in order not to be obscure, and powerful not to be useless.” The description would apply perfectly to Theodore. Obscurity, one imagines, would have snuffed him out like a candle.

He claimed also, years later, that a “young man of my bringing up and convictions could join only the Republican Party,” a curious observation in view of the large number of Democrats within his own “intimate” circles—Uncle Robert, father-in-law George C. Lee, the Saltonstalls, the Delanos, the Hyde Park Roosevelts, his friend Poultney Bigelow. Nor does it suggest how tenuous old party ties had become among Republicans of comparable social background and moral sensitivities as a result of the Grant scandals, the stolen election of 1876, or the dominance of such figures as Conkling and Blaine.

In any event, no one in the immediate family objected to his trying for the Assembly. Rather, it was quite the opposite. He received their most enthusiastic support and from Bamie especially, whose interest in his career was to serve him well. She and Corinne clipped everything written about him, filling large scrapbooks as time passed. Corinne told her devoted Douglas that he too had better begin taking part. “If there is one thing I like particularly,” she said, “it is public spirit.”

In afteryears Theodore would remember the prominent clubmen, businessmen, and lawyers who had “laughed at me,” warning that political parties were composed of riffraff, “saloon keepers, horsecar conductors, and the like.” But at the time, he happily talked politics with William Waldorf (“Willie”) Astor, who had served in the state legislature and was then running for Congress. And the fact is his strongest backing came from the most influential of his father’s friends—the ultimate clubmen, businessmen, lawyers—who lent their immediate support, attesting publicly to his “high character . . . honesty and integrity.” Among his very prominent backers were Joseph H. Choate, J. Pierpont Morgan, William Evarts, Elihu Root, and Morris K. Jesup, and it was support he gratefully acknowledged at the time. “I feel that I owe both my nomination and election more to you than to any other one man,” he wrote Joseph Choate, for example, following his initial run for the Assembly. At a testimonial dinner at Delmonico’s attended by three hundred leading figures in white tie and tails, he was praised to the skies by none less than Chauncey Depew, the after-dinner speaker of the day, who described himself as a “cordial friend” of the late Theodore (and who mused privately that the son looked about eighteen).

Robert Roosevelt approved emphatically and, despite party differences, asked the powerful Democratic assemblyman Michael C. Murphy, chairman of the City Affairs Committee, to keep an eye out for the young man once he reached Albany, and it was thus that Theodore was put on Murphy’s committee first thing.

Within his own social set he was a hero. “We hailed him as the dawn of a new era,” remembered Poultney Bigelow, “the man of good family once more in the political arena; the college-bred tribune superior to the temptations which beset meaner men. ‘Teddy,’ as we all called him, was our ideal.”

As near as can be determined all of three people disapproved—Uncle James Alfred, cousins Alfred and Emlen. “All my friends stand by me like trumps,” he says in his diary, “except for Al, Em, and Uncle Jim.”

“We thought he was, to put it frankly, pretty fresh,” recalled Cousin Emlen, who added the ultimate condemnation: “We felt that his own father would not have liked it. . . The Roosevelt circle as a whole had a profound distrust of public life.” But this recollection—frequently quoted later—was offered long after the fact, when Emlen, a somewhat stuffy man to begin with, had become considerably more so. Writing to Bamie in that earlier day, as he began work as a bookkeeper at Roosevelt and Son, Emlen said he wished he might do something for his country. “It is very plain that our young men must take a more active interest in our government, something more than mere voting and talking.” For a while, he trailed along with Theodore to meetings at Morton Hall, the district Republican headquarters, but dropped out because, as he later said, “I did not relish the personnel of that organization.”

Unaccountably, Theodore did. He was fascinated by the likes of big Jake Hess and Joe Murray, two machine “pols” if ever there were. Hess, the district leader, was a German Jew and a City Commissioner of Charities and Corrections (who, as a consequence, knew not only of the work done by the elder Theodore, but appreciated the political value of the young man’s name). Murray, a Hess lieutenant, was an Irish Catholic and onetime Tammany heeler who had worked his way up from the very bottom of the political heap in time-honored fashion, by being resourceful, loyal, and, on occasion, good with his fists. Murray appealed strongly to Theodore. Murray’s vision of the spoils system—as different from what Theodore had been raised on as were Murray’s religion and his background—was unequivocal. As Theodore later explained, “Not to insist on the spoils when you get into office and share them equitably among your political friends seemed [to Murray] almost as dishonorable as not to pay your debts.”

The membership of the Twenty-first District Republican Association was a “mixed lot,” Morton Hall itself nothing more than a big, dingy room over a saloon on East 59th Street. Some wooden benches, brass spittoons, and framed pictures of General Grant and Levi P. Morton comprised the principal “appointments.” Jake Hess ran things from a dais at one end, seated at a small table upon which rested a single pitcher of ice water.

“They rather liked the idea of a Roosevelt joining them,” Theodore recalled when talking some years afterward with a visitor from England who was gathering material on the “good government” movement. “I insisted on taking part in all the discussions. Some of them sneered at my black coat and a tall hat. But I made them understand that I should come dressed as I chose.... Then after the discussions I used to play poker and smoke with them.” His intent, he said, had been to get inside the machine.

It was only when he reached Albany, however, that he realized what an extraordinary world he had entered. A new “Legislative Diary” was begun, filled with a whole new cast of characters, some as closely observed as various rare birds in the boyhood field journals. There was much the same feeling of wonder and discovery, a little as though he were back on the Nile seeing fauna of unimaginable shapes and kinds and plumage.

The other 127 members of the Assembly consisted of farmers, mechanics, a half-dozen liquor dealers, a cooper, a butcher, a tobacconist, a compositor, a typesetter, three newspapermen, thirty-five lawyers, and a pawnbroker. Roughly a third of these he judged to be crooked. Approximately half the Democrats came under the category of “vicious, stupid-looking scoundrels.”

Appraising his fellow members on the City Affairs Committee, he found his Uncle Rob’s friend, Chairman Murphy, to be a tall, stout Fenian, “with a swollen, red face, a black mustache, and a ludicrously dignified manner; always wears a frock coat (very shiny) and has had a long experience in politics—so that to undoubted pluck and a certain knowledge of parliamentary forms he adds a great deal of stupidity and a decided looseness of ideas as regards the 8th Commandment.” Another Democrat named Shanley was shrewder than Murphy and easier to get along with, “being more Americanized,” but equally dishonest. Higgins was “a vicious little Celtic nonentity from Buffalo”; Gideon, “a Jew from New York who has been a bailiff and is now a liquor seller.” Dimon, a country Democrat, was “either dumb or an idiot—probably both,” and still another notable Democrat, a physical giant named McManus, he described as “a huge, fleshy, unutterably coarse and low brute . . . formerly a prize fighter, at present keeps a low drinking and dancing saloon . . . is more than suspected of having begun his life as a pickpocket.”

The leading lights in his own party were hardly less objectionable. One senior Republican, the veteran Thomas Alvord from Syracuse, was a “bad old fellow.” Of another, John Rains, he wrote, “he [has]. . . the same idea of public life and civil service that a vulture has of a dead sheep.”

He liked a gigantic, one-eyed Civil War general named Curtis, and a German from Cattaraugus County named Kruse was a “capital fellow.” Peter Kelly, a young Democrat from Brooklyn, was an ardent believer in Henry George and thus much else in the way of doubtful “abstract theories,” but on “questions of elementary morality, we were heartily at one.”

His favorites were two freshmen Republicans named Isaac (”Ike”) Hunt and William (”Billy”) O’Neil. Hunt, a tall, thin, melancholy young man, was a lawyer from Watertown and “thoroughly upright.” O’Neil, who kept a crossroads store in the Adirondacks, became “the closest friend.” Both were as untried and as ambitious nearly as Theodore, and would take his side on issues again and again.

Nothing seemed to intimidate him. Though all of twenty-three, though unmistakably the youngest member of the Assembly, he plunged ahead, deferring to no one, making his presence felt. It was a spectacle not to be forgotten. Whatever astonishment or incredulity he felt concerning his fellow members was more than matched by their response to him. One Albany reporter of long experience, seeing him on the floor of the Assembly, watching him wipe his eyeglasses, thought to himself, “What on earth will New York send us next?”

“We almost shouted with laughter,” recalled Ike Hunt, “to think that the most veritable representative of the New York dude had come to the Chamber.”

Hunt had seen him first at a Republican caucus held one evening in a committee room at the State House.

He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult. He had on an enormous great ulster . . . and he pulled off his coat; he was dressed in full dress, he had been to dinner somewhere. . . . [Later] I was standing right by the fireplace, and Teddy got up and looked around and bolted over to where I was. He said, “You are from the country”—which was the most crushing thing he could have said to me . . . I was standing there and was laboring under the hallucination that nobody would ever think I was from the country, but that is what he said to me. And he proceeded to go into all the details of how we got along and how we managed our affairs . . . and how we did everything in the country.

As at Harvard, the impression among many was that he had a speech defect of some odd kind. Hunt was sure of it. “He would open his mouth and run out his tongue and it was hard for him to speak.” The New York Sun called it a Dundreary drawl, to go with his English side-whiskers. When, in his maiden speech, he used the expression “rather relieved,” it was printed in the Sun as “r-a-w-t-h-e-r r-e-l-i-e-v-e-d.”

Wishing to gain attention on the floor he would stand at his place, stretching far forward over the desk, calling, “Mr. Spee-kar! Mr. Spee-kar!” his voice often shifting suddenly from tenor to penetrating falsetto.

“I do not speak enough from the chest,” he told Mittie, “so my voice is not as powerful as it ought to be.”

The new gold-rimmed spectacles and their fluttering black ribbon, his gold watch fob, the part in his hair, the narrow cut of his clothes, made him known at once. For reporters for the Sun, the World, and other Democratic papers, he was the fairest kind of game and they went right after him. He was called a “Jane-Dandy,” “his Lordship,” “weakling,” “silly,” “Oscar Wilde,” “the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt,” “little man,” the fun always at his expense. The World reported that his trousers were cut so tight that when making his “gyrations” before an audience “he only bent the joints above the belt.”

Yet despite all this, and a trivial, patronizing maiden speech, he left no doubt that he was there to accomplish something—”to do the right thing.” The Republican papers also gave him every chance and he made friends steadily. As his Maine guide, Bill Sewall, once observed, “wherever he went he got right in with people.” Some at Albany, like Hunt and O’Neil, and two reporters, George Spinney of The New York Times and William Hudson of the Brooklyn Eagle, quickly perceived how much more there was to him than the bizarre mannerisms and foppish clothes. They saw something in the glittering gray eyes. They listened to what he was actually saying. If he was “green as grass,” said Spinney, he was also “a good-hearted man to shake hands with, and he had a good, honest laugh . . . not an affected laugh ...” He worked hard; he obviously cared and wanted to learn. “You could see that there was an uncommon fellow,” said Spinney, “distinctly different.”

The great question was whether he would prove to be what Tammany Hall’s leading political philosopher, George Washington Plunkitt, would call a “mornin’ glory”—the usual high-principled, blue-blooded amateur who “looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time.”

The eagerness with which he had approached Hunt the first night, firing questions about Hunt’s experiences in the country, was only a light warm-up. Spinney called him a walking interrogation point. Theodore would literally stand a man against a wall, “boring in,” as Spinney said, for half an hour. At breakfast in the dining room of the old Delavan House, down the hill from the Capitol, he would sit talking and reading a stack of morning papers, going through the papers at tremendous speed. “He threw each paper, as he finished it, on the floor, unfolded,” remembered William Hudson, “until at the end there was, on either side of him, a pile of loose papers as high as the table for the servants to clear away. And all this time he would be taking part in the running conversation of the table. Had anyone supposed that this inspection of the papers was superficial, he would have been sadly mistaken. Roosevelt saw everything and formed an opinion on everything ...”

The Assembly was elected annually. Theodore’s first term, in 1882, ran five months, from January 1 to June 2; his second term, in 1883, just four months, from January 1 to May 4. So in those two years he was actually in Albany a total of only nine months. Yet the change in him was amazing. Even by the close of the first term, according to Spinney, he knew more about state politics than nine out of ten members. He was chronically impatient, impulsive, and could be inconceivably impolitic (a “perfect nuisance”), but he grew steadily. “He made me think of a growing child,” said Hunt. “You know you take a child and in a day or two their whole character will change. They will take on new strength and new ideas, and you can see them growing right up.... He would leave Albany Friday afternoon and he would come back Monday night and you would see changes that had taken place. . . . New ideas had taken possession of him. He would run up against somebody and he got a new perspective. . . . He would be entirely changed, just like a child.”

He and Theodore boarded at the same house. Hunt always knew when it was Theodore returning from a weekend, because Theodore would swing the front door open and be halfway up the stairs before the door swung shut with a bang.

2

Much of what happened in the beginning was unexceptional. He had won his seat about as handily as expected, the Twenty-first being New York’s safely Republican “brownstone” district. (His opponent had also helped. He was a former director of the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum who had been dismissed for incompetence, exactly the sort of political hack the elder Theodore had tried to drive from office in his campaigns for asylum reform. Even the man’s name sounded like one specially contrived for some low character out of the nightmare world of the madhouse, Dr. W. W. Strew.)

And many of the positions he took on issues his first term were about as would have been expected, conservative, unspectacular—that is until the Westbrook Scandal. He opposed salary increases for New York policemen and firemen, opposed a bill that would have set the minimum wage for municipal workers at $2 a day, and for such stands he was hailed as a “watchdog” over the people’s money. He favored supplying New York with pure water.

But it was also in his first term, even before the Westbrook affair, that he became involved with the Cigar Bill, as it was known, and though his part in the issue was to receive none of the notoriety of the Westbrook affair, the experience was one from which he learned a great deal.

The Cigarmakers’ Union had introduced a bill to outlaw the manufacture of cigars “at home” in the tenements of New York, a system of long standing and the sole livelihood for thousands of the city’s poorest families. The bill was referred to the City Affairs Committee and Theodore found himself named to a subcommittee of three to look into the matter. Of the other two members, one, a Republican, had little use for the bill but intended to vote for it, he said, because of labor strength in his district. The second member, a Tammany man, confided candidly that he would vote no because that was what was required of him by “certain interests.” This left Theodore the deciding vote, and as yet none of them had been to see the conditions the bill was designed to stop.

“As a matter of fact, I had supposed I would be against the legislation,” Theodore remembered, “and I rather think that I was put on the committee with that idea, for the respectable people I knew were against it; it was contrary to the principles of political economy of the laissez-faire kind.”

There had been cigarmakers’ unions in New York since the Civil War and they had accomplished almost nothing. A prolonged strike in 1877 had been a complete failure, and the unions, bankrupt and without discipline, would have remained little more than debating societies had not a few determined young men taken charge, the most able of whom was Samuel Gompers. It was Gompers who had drawn up the new bill, the first important law against the exploitation of workers, and it was Gompers who prevailed on Theodore to make an inspection tour and see for himself, an invitation Theodore at first refused, because, in Gompers’ words, “he disbelieved the conditions which I portrayed to him.” Gompers had previously gathered his own information by going from tenement to tenement posing as a book salesman offering a set of Dickens.

Gompers was short, squat, almost gnomelike, opinionated and a good talker. He also believed in action, quite as much as Theodore, and at thirty-two was practically a contemporary. But he came from an entirely different world. He had been born in a London slum, the son of a cigar-maker. He was a Jew and had known only work and deprivation his whole life. So the two of them, going the rounds of the sweatshops, made an improbable pair. Once Theodore had seen for himself, Gompers remembered, “his whole manner toward me changed.”

Nothing had prepared Theodore for the wretchedness he beheld, the stench and filth. Some scenes would stay with him the rest of his days.

I have always remembered [he would write nearly forty years later] one room in which two families were living.... There were several children, three men, and two women in this room. The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food. The men, women, and children in this room worked by day and far into the evening, and they slept and ate there. They were Bohemians, unable to speak English, except that one of the children knew enough to act as interpreter.

It was because so few legislators knew of such conditions, Gompers said, that nothing was done to change the system or alleviate the distress. Simply to survive, such people had to work twelve to eighteen hours a day. Infectious disease was rampant among them. The manufacturers owned the tenements and so for the majority of workers there seemed no way out.

His rounds with Gompers were enough to settle Theodore’s mind. It made no difference how many theories of economics or of the rights of the individual might argue against the bill, he would back it. He returned for two further inspection tours, once with his two subcommittee colleagues in tow, another time by himself. When the Cigar Bill came out of committee, he spoke for it on the floor, and when it failed to come up in the Senate—because a lobbyist for the manufacturers stole the official copy—he resolved to carry the fight in the next term. He had by no means been converted to a union sympathizer, he was no “sentimentalist,” as he would say, but for possibly the first time in his life he had come face-to-face with certain extremely unpleasant realities that struck him as intolerable, a side of American life he had been unwilling to believe existed until seeing it with his own eyes.

Gompers would remember his “aggressiveness and evident sincerity.”

But the Cigar Bill, really everything he took a hand in that first session, was put in the shadows by his sudden call, on March 29, for the investigation and impeachment of a State Supreme Court judge, T. R. Westbrook, who, it appeared, was in league with the notorious Jay Gould.

The resolution was, as Hunt said, a bombshell. It was not that Theodore was exposing some awful new truth—Gould’s “association” with this particular judge had been dealt with in the papers, and in The New York Times in some detail—but that he, a very small fry in the legislature, was challenging not only the judiciary but the likes of Gould, who was understood to have more power than any man in the United States; Gould, who controlled something like ten percent of the country’s railroads; who now also controlled the Western Union Telegraph Company, and through it, the Associated Press; who owned the New York World, which published or withheld news however he wished; who had his own spies and agents and whose personal fortune was of a kind to make those of such “old money” aristocrats as the Roosevelts appear minuscule. (On a March day in 1882, when word began circulating that he was broke, Gould had called Russell Sage and one or two others into his office and spread before them on his desk a few of his securities—$23 million of Western Union stock, $12 million of Missouri Pacific Railroad, $19 million of “other stocks.”) Furthermore, few men had such a long-standing, proved reputation for largess in and about the corridors of the State House at Albany.

That the “best society”—Theodore’s constituency—scorned the whispery little Gould was no secret. He had been refused membership in the New York Yacht Club; he was never seen at Mrs. William Astor’s balls because he was never invited. It is even said James Alfred Roosevelt personally threw Gould out of his office on one occasion. Indeed, Gould was held contemptible by a great variety of decent people and was so despised by some whom he had destroyed along the way that he required plainclothes police protection day and night.

But scorn also had its limits, and while no gentleman could condone such shady dealings or ruthlessness of the kind Gould practiced, or accept him as a social equal, few prudent, ambitious men would ever openly attack him. Further, several of the city’s most important business people saw no reason not to join him in his ventures if it was to their advantage. They could make their peace with Gould in a purely business way readily enough and without apparent qualm. Having gained control of the Western Union Company the year before by the most blatant kind of piracy, Gould had had no trouble bringing in as board members such figures as John Jacob Astor and J. Pierpont Morgan. As head of his more recently acquired Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, the centerpiece of the Westbrook Scandal, Gould had installed Cyrus Field, who was famous as the promoter of the first Atlantic Cable and was one of New York’s most socially prominent “good citizens.”

Theodore had happened on the Westbrook affair through his friend Hunt. In conjunction with work he was doing on an investigative committee, Hunt had learned that certain lawyers, assigned by the courts as receivers for insolvent insurance companies, were taking exorbitant fees and with court approval. Hunt had gone down to New York to the county clerk’s office and searching through the files found that such fees not only amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that they had all been allowed by the same judge, T. R. Westbrook. When Hunt returned to Albany and recounted his findings to Theodore, the name rang a bell—The New York Times had earlier charged Westbrook with complicity in Gould’s sudden acquisition of the huge Manhattan Elevated—so Theodore now went to New York to talk to the city editor at the Times, Henry Loewenthal, and to ask to see what the Times had in its files. This turned out to be quite a lot. Theodore was at the newspaper’s offices much of the day and afterward invited Loewenthal back to 57th Street, where they talked until well after midnight.

In his book, The Naval War of 1812, Theodore had devoted a large part of his energies to refuting the recognized authority on the subject, an English author named William James, whom Theodore found to be much in error and attacked on point after point. Often, he seemed more intent on destroying James than in telling his story. But he did it by going to documentary sources, seeing for himself, and here the situation was the same. He was attacking a figure of established authority, but only after having done the necessary spadework.

In the picture that emerged, Westbrook was plainly Goulds pawn, even to the point of holding court in Gould’s private office at the Western Union Building. As Westbrook said himself in a letter to Gould—a letter the Times had somehow obtained but not published—he was “willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion” to protect Gould’s interests.

Recognizing the tremendous future in store for any rapid-transit system in New York, Gould had decided he needed the Manhattan Elevated. His scheme, as usual, was to harass and intimidate the existing owners at every opportunity, drive the stock down below its true value, then begin buying. He was joined in the venture by Russell Sage, possibly the shrewdest of all Wall Street freebooters, and all the while his editors at the World kept up a running attack on the owners of the Manhattan Elevated, implying they were corrupt, the company insolvent. But even more effective for Goulds purposes was his judge, Westbrook, who at the proper moment declared the company bankrupt and appointed two of Goulds people as receivers. The stock fell to a fraction of its previous value and once Gould had taken over a major share of the stock and the price suddenly rebounded, the judge as suddenly reversed himself, declaring the company miraculously solvent. He ordered that its affairs be removed from the hands of the receivers and entrusted to management, which appeared to be Cyrus Field but which in fact was Gould. In the World, the editors said they “never believed but that Manhattan would be rescued by men who have the brains and the means to make the most of it.”

In days gone by, when Gould had been starting out on his rise to power, his first lawyer was T. R. Westbrook.

Theodore had been warned to tread lightly and no sooner was his call for an investigation put before the Assembly than it was stalled through parliamentary maneuver (tabled for further discussion), the leadership on both sides manifestly wishing no part of it.

He was warned again, only now, too, by an old family friend, someone he never identified except as a “member of a prominent law firm.” Theodore was taken to lunch and was advised patiently that while it had been fine of him to make the “reform play,” he had done enough. It was time he left politics and identified himself with “the right kind of people,” those who in the long run “controlled others” and reaped rewards “worth having.” Theodore was appalled. Did this mean, he asked, that he must give in to the “ring”? It was naïve, said the friend, to imagine a mere political ring of the sort the newspapers pictured. The real “inner circle” was one of businessmen, judges, lawyers, and politicians all “in alliance,” and this was the point: the successful man had to win his success by the backing of these same forces, whatever his field.

Late the afternoon of April 5, the official day nearly over, “the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt” was up again calling, “Mr. Spee-kar! Mr. Spee-kar!” He wanted his resolution debated and voted on with no further delay. “No! No!” shouted “bad old fellow” Tom Alvord. But Theodore kept talking, “clearly and slowly,” for another ten minutes, his voice filling the huge chamber. He went through Westbrooks conduct step by step, attacking Gould by name, calling him a shark and a swindler whose dishonesty was a matter of common knowledge. The members sat in absolute silence, listening to every word. As the Times commented the next morning, for any public man to speak so, “calling men and things by their right names in these days of judicial, ecclesiastical, and journalistic subservience to the robber-barons,” required “some little courage.”

I am aware that it ought to have been done by a man of more experience, and, possibly, an abler source than myself, but as nobody else chose to demand it [the investigation], I certainly would in the interest of the Commonwealth of New York . . .

There was no applause when he finished, only the hum of great muffled excitement. Ten minutes remained until closing time at five, and had Theodore known how to bring the issue to vote right then, it might have carried. As it was, Tom Alvord very smoothly intervened. Alvord had been Speaker of the Assembly the year Theodore was born. He stood now in the aisle, leaning on his cane, recalling slowly how often in his career he had seen good men shattered by irresponsible, unsubstantiated charges. Possibly there should be an investigation, possibly he would support such an investigation, he said. But there need be no hurry—indeed, “the young man from New York” would be well advised to take a little time to reflect on the wisdom of his actions.

So the clock ran out, nothing was accomplished.

The issue could be ignored no longer, however. There had been an immediate response in the press to what Theodore had said and, except for the World, nearly all laudatory. With his first major speech he had made himself known throughout the state. Goulds representatives in Albany were also busier than usual. A special messenger from John Kelly, head of Tammany Hall, came on from New York at once by night train.

Theodore tried again the next morning and again he was outmaneuvered. He forgot to specify the kind of vote he wanted. The Speaker called for a standing vote and the whole body started bobbing up and down so rapidly nobody could keep count. The clerk’s tally, the only one that mattered, was 50 for, 54 against.

Another try in the afternoon fared better. Theodore waited for a lull, when many members had wandered away from their seats. “I demand ayes and nays,” he remembered to say this time, and though the count was still short of the two-thirds majority needed for such an investigation, there were now more members voting with him than against, and from then on his support gathered rapidly. Public indignation had been roused and as a consequence the change of heart among his colleagues was astonishing. On April 12, the Assembly voted the investigation by a margin of 104 to 6.

For most of what remained of the session, the matter was in the hands of the Judiciary Committee, and when the committee presented its report at the end of May, it was a whitewash. The judge was said to have done nothing for which he should be impeached. Apparently the committee had been “turned” by three bribes of $2,500 each, a reasonable sum, it was thought, for decisions of such large import.

Theodore was up on his feet once more, expressing himself as forcefully as he knew how. The effect, said Hunt, was “powerful, wonderful,” and to no avail. The vote sustained the committee report; the judge was not to be touched.

The pressures brought to bear on individual members had been enormous. Virtually the entire Democratic Party had lined up behind Westbrook, and the afternoon of the final vote the lobby was crawling with “prominent men from all over the state,” there to see exactly who voted which way. Ike Hunt had been called on by a fellow lawyer from his hometown and reminded of how once Westbrook had decided a case in his, Hunt’s, favor. “Now you don’t want to go to work and destroy a good judge like Judge Westbrook,” Hunt was told. Years afterward, Hunt would concede that Westbrook had been a respectably good man, until he “got in that thing and sharpers got him . . .” And Theodore, too, in retrospect, said he never knew if Westbrook was corrupt or not. “He may have been; but I am inclined to think that, aside from his being a man of coarse moral fiber, the trouble lay chiefly in the fact that he had a genuine . . . reverence for the possessor of a great fortune as such. He sincerely believed that business was the end of existence, and that judge and legislator alike should do whatever was necessary to favor it.”

The Assembly disbanded two days later. The Westbrook Scandal faded into the background. Westbrook himself was later found dead in a hotel room in Troy, whether by suicide or natural causes remained a mystery. Gould and Russell Sage held on to the Manhattan Elevated, but disposed of Cyrus Field, leaving him financially ruined. The distinguished Field, unlike Gould or Sage, actually knew something about the elevated system and thought it should be run as an institution of public service. Gould had needed Field’s name and his money, and the trusting Field had foolishly concluded that Gould was his friend.

For Theodore, prospects had never looked so bright. It was said, by the Evening Post, that he had accomplished more good than any man of his age and experience had accomplished in years. (The Evening Post at the moment was being edited by Carl Schurz.) George William Curtis singled him out for national attention in Harper’s Weekly.

It is with the greatest satisfaction that those who are interested in good government see a young man in the Legislature who . . . does not know the meaning of fear, and to whom the bluster and bravado of party and political bullies are as absolutely indifferent as the blowing of the wind.

More important, no one in Albany could dismiss him as a lightweight any longer. Henceforth, as Hunt recalled, he was to be “considered a full-fledged man worthy of one’s esteem.” He had worked an almost miraculous change.

Running again the fall of 1882, he carried his district by better than two to one, and in the face of a victorious Democratic ticket headed by a reform candidate for governor, the mayor of Buffalo, Grover Cleveland. Back at Albany again, he was made the Republican nominee for Speaker, a somewhat empty honor in view of the overwhelming Democratic majority, but one which put him at the head of his party in the Assembly at the age of twenty-four. It was almost inconceivable prominence for one so young and inexperienced, let alone so unconventional. The papers began writing about the Cleveland Democrats and the Roosevelt Republicans. Theodore now was called to the governor’s office to confer on pending legislation. Remembering the two of them together, William Hudson of the Brooklyn Eagle would write, “The Governor would sit large, solid, and phlegmatic, listening gravely to the energetic utterances of the mercurial young man, but signifying neither assent nor dissent. Not infrequently taking silence for acquiescence, Roosevelt would go away thinking he had carried everything before him.”

“There is great sense in a lot of what he says,” Cleveland would remark of Theodore, “but there is such a cocksuredness about him that he stirs up doubt in me all the time. . . . Then he seems to be so very young.”

He was seldom out of sight, seldom still. “Such a super-abundance of animal life was hardly ever condensed in a human being,” said Hunt. If Theodore had a failing, in Hunt’s estimate, it was only that he wanted to set everything to rights instantly, and it was because of this that the second term was not what either of them anticipated. Success had gone to his head, Theodore later said, though the second term was hardly the disaster he felt it was, and in what it revealed about him as a human being, it was, if anything, more interesting than the first.

His sudden rise may be explained in part by other, earlier developments involving his father’s old enemy, Conkling. An unexpected dissolution of power had occurred just before Theodore ran for his first term and again the Customhouse was the issue. Early in 1881, the newly elected President, Garfield, had refused to follow Conkling’s dictates concerning the appointment of a Collector. In a fury Conkling resigned from the Senate, his friend and ally, New York’s other senator, Thomas C. Platt, going along with him. Both men had expected to be quickly vindicated and reinstated by a compliant legislature at Albany and thus to return to Washington stronger than ever. But it had not worked out as planned. Most people thought Conkling had made a fool of himself; the legislature turned on him and chose another in his place. Inconceivable as it seemed, the giant Conkling had come crashing down; his political career was ended. “I am done with politics forever,” he announced, and he meant it. He resumed the practice of law on Wall Street, his clients including Jay Gould. In Albany his minions were left “wandering around like wild geese without a gander.” Conceivably Tom Platt might have stepped in then, instead of later—Platt being a “great man for organization”—but Platt had been discovered in a compromising position with a young woman and was forced to retire from the scene in disgrace. Very possibly he had been framed. To quote Ike Hunt, “Jimmy Husted and some of them peeked over the transom and saw Tom one night in the hotel.”

All this left the old party machinery in disarray and provided opportunity of a kind not known for years for ambitious newcomers. The game had opened up just as Theodore commenced to play. Moreover, the reform spirit was gathering momentum on all sides—it was what had swept Cleveland into office—and so for someone like Theodore the timing could not have been better. In Washington that January, as Theodore started his second term, Congress was passing the Pendleton Act, the country’s first civil service reform legislation, which, irony of ironies, would be signed into law by ex-Collector Chester A. Arthur. When the bill went before the Senate, not a single Republican voted against it.

His first months back in Albany Theodore lashed out at the New York City Board of Aldermen (”miserable and servile tools”) and went after Jay Gould again, calling on the Attorney General to bring suit to dissolve the Manhattan Elevated. Sounding much like his Uncle Robert, he warned of a great popular uprising unless legal action was taken against such corrupt corporations. A bill comparable to the Pendleton Act was before the Assembly and this too he championed, gladly joining forces with the Democrat Cleveland.

He never doubted the moral virtue of any of his own positions or of the need to punish the wicked. (At one point he called for the return of the public whipping post as punishment for any man who inflicted brutal pain on a woman or a child.) Every issue was seen as a clash between the forces of light and dark. His side was right; the other was the side of corruption or self-interest. Among the several hundred clippings being pasted into the scrapbooks at 6 West 57th Street was one containing a remark by a New York editor that “there is an increasing suspicion that Mr. Roosevelt keeps a pulpit concealed on his person.”

So when suddenly he reversed himself on still another issue involving Jay Gould and the Manhattan Elevated, then took the floor to deliver an emotional apology for his earlier stand, he was the talk of the Capitol.

The Five-Cent Bill, as it was called, had been introduced to reduce by half the ten-cent fare on the elevated railway. It was seen as a way to strike a blow at the haughty Gould, who was supposedly reaping huge concealed profits, and, of course, to please the many thousands who rode the elevated railway. Theodore, like nearly everybody else in Albany, gave the bill his support—until Grover Cleveland, in a brave, forceful message, insisted it was unconstitutional, since it violated commitments made by the state in the company’s original charter. Cleveland vetoed the bill and sent it back, expecting the decision would prove ruinous for him politically.

The day the message was read in the Assembly, Theodore got the floor as quickly as possible. Like others, he realized Cleveland was right and that his own position had been wrong. He said this, which was somewhat remarkable in itself, but then he went on:

I have to say with shame that when I voted for this bill I did not act as I think I ought to have acted, and as I generally have acted on the floor of this House. . . . I have to confess that I weakly yielded, partly in a vindictive spirit towards the infernal thieves and conscienceless swindlers who have had the elevated railroad in charge and partly to the popular voice of New York.

For the managers of the elevated railroad I have as little feeling as any man here. If it were possible, I would willingly pass a bill of attainder on Jay Gould and all of Jay Goulds associates. . . . I regard these men as furnishing part of that most dangerous of all dangerous classes, the wealthy criminal class. Nevertheless, it is not a question of doing justice to ourselves. . . .

We have heard a great deal about the people demanding the passage of this bill. Now, anything the people demand that is right it is most clearly and most emphatically the duty of this Legislature to do; but we should never yield to what they demand if it is wrong. . . . If the people disapprove our conduct, let us make up our minds to retire to private life with the consciousness that we have acted as our better sense dictated; and I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I had acted as I ought not to.

It was a speech that was to be published and quoted widely as illustrative either of his rank duplicity and opportunism or of his innate decency. It was a wrenching confession, a little sermon, a crystallized declaration of political philosophy; noble and self-serving. To profess shame in oneself was something a politician did not do if he liked his job and it was something Theodore found personally distasteful and almost never indulged in, even among those closest to him. Any ostentatious baring of one’s transgressions smacked of self-pity or a desperate craving for attention, he thought. “Never indulge yourself on the sinner’s stool,” he would lecture his friend Owen Wister. “If you did any harm, that won’t undo it, you’ll merely rake it up. The sinner’s stool is often the only available publicity spot for the otherwise wholly obscure egotist.” Yet here he was doing exactly that.

His expression “the wealthy criminal class” was new and original and would not be forgotten. The righteousness he bespoke was the old Roosevelt family theme, the burden and spur of “our way.” (”I know I am blue and disagreeable often,” Elliott had told Anna Hall, “but please, darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.”) Probably Theodore had not the least idea how arbitrary and self-righteous he sounded.

The reaction in the press and among other members was immediate and almost entirely adverse. The Tribune and one or two papers upstate said it took a special kind of courage to confess a lack of courage, but elsewhere he was dubbed a weakling and a bogus reformer, which doubtless hurt very much. Even the loyal Evening Post found it strange that he could think so little of the views of the people unless those views coincided with his own; and though ridicule in the World was to be expected, the remarks published there must have been the most painful of all. “It is quite bad enough that a son of Theodore Roosevelt could have brought this discredit upon a name made honorable by the private virtues and public services of the father,” said the World; friends of the late Theodore could only take satisfaction that at least he had been spared seeing the boy make a public spectacle of himself.

When the Five-Cent Bill was put before the Assembly, Theodore voted against it, with the majority as it turned out, but in doing so was parting company with Hunt, O’Neil, and others of his closest allies.

He was acting as though he were under some kind of emotional strain, seemed not to know how to handle himself. A day or so later he made another grandstand play on the floor, suddenly tendering his resignation from a committee when the Assembly refused to go along with the committees recommendation. The speech turned into a wild, childish diatribe against the whole Democratic Party. It was as if, like the tiny shrew in the cage, he would fling himself at the great Democratic snake and tear it to pieces before anyone knew what happened.

“The difference between our party and yours,” he shouted across the aisle, “is that your bad men throw out your good ones, while with us the good throw out the bad.” The entire history of their party was rotten.

You can run down the roll from Polk, the mendacious, through Pierce, the Copperhead, to Buchanan, who faced both ways. You can follow the record of their party from its inception down to this time. . . . You can take the record made by their party now in this House; the shameless partisanship they have displayed; the avidity they have shown for getting control of even the smallest offices . . .

When in an interview held in the quiet of the Harvard Club in New York, many years later, Ike Hunt referred to Theodore as “the most indiscreet guy I ever knew,” it was moments such as this that he had in mind. “Yesterday, in a speech,” reported the New York Observer, “Mr. Roosevelt got up and said in effect that he couldn’t have his own way in that House and he wouldn’t stand it, so there!”

As it was, the Assembly merely refused to accept his resignation and passed on to other matters.

“Billy O’Neil and I used to sit on his coattails,” remembered Hunt. “Billy O’Neil would say to him: ’What do you want to do that for, you damn fool; you will ruin yourself and everybody else!’” Even Michael C. Murphy, the questionable guardian chosen by Uncle Rob, he of the swollen red face and shiny frock coat, could be heard from his seat nearby saying in fatherly fashion, “Now, Theodore, now, Theodore . . .”

But toward the end of the session another, smaller incident occurred, a different kind of apology having more to do with his make-up as a human being than with any question of moral principle. In his scathing attacks on the Democrats he had been concentrating on a particular member from Staten Island, the elderly Erastus Brooks, whom he picked on repeatedly. Brooks finally spoke up in his own defense and with great feeling, hitting hard at Theodore. When the speech ended and Brooks’ friends gathered about to congratulate him, Theodore came pushing through, tears in his eyes, holding out his hand. “Mr. Brooks,” he said, “I surrender. I beg your pardon.”

Success had come to him too fast, he later said; he had lost his perspective, “and the result was I came an awful cropper and had to pick myself up after learning by bitter experience the lesson that I was not all-important and that I had to take account of many different elements in life.”

All the same, his legislative record surpassed that of the first term. The civil service bill was enacted. And so also was the Cigar Bill—by both houses this time—though after a protracted battle in the courts the Cigar Bill was to be found unconstitutional. The judges sided with the manufacturers, whose counsel, former Secretary of State William Evarts, argued that socialism and communism were in back of the bill and that such home industry was actually beneficial to the “proper culture of growing girls.” In its final judgment, in 1885, the New York Court of Appeals asked how possibly a cigarmaker’s health and morals could be improved by forcing him from his home and its “hallowed associations.”

Theodore had spoken for the bill both in the Assembly and at a hearing in the governor’s office. Conceding at one point that the measure was in a “certain sense a socialistic one,” he said the terrible growing extremes of poverty and wealth in the cities demanded something be done, even if it meant modifying certain doctrines and principles. No children raised under conditions such as he had seen in the tenements would ever be fit for citizenship, he argued, echoing the old theme espoused by Charles Loring Brace and by his own father. In the end, however, he had resorted to the plea that the measure be passed if for no other reason than hygiene, an appeal which seems to have had no small influence on the preponderant number of cigar smokers among his colleagues.

3

Elected a third time in the fall of ’83, he returned to Albany in advance of the new session, late the December of Elliott’s wedding, determined to be named Speaker. The Republicans had gained a majority in the Assembly, largely because of what he and his Roosevelt Republicans had accomplished the session before, and so it seemed his time was ripe. But he lost when John J. (”Johnny”) O’Brien, Republican boss of New York City, an old Conkling henchman, once one of the Customhouse “boys,” withdrew his support at the last moment. Senator Warner Miller (Platt’s replacement in Washington) had shown Johnny “the valuables in the Treasury” that could become available were he to see his way clear to voting the right way. O’Brien had been the first powerful figure among the “regulars” to line up behind Theodore, and a main reason for Theodore’s confidence. Many of Theodore’s admirers had been skeptical at the time, sure that something was afoot.

The defeat was a bitter blow. He had wanted the job badly and felt he had earned it. The day after Christmas he had hired a suite at the Delavan House, the somewhat seedy hotel where he often took breakfast and where in years past so many other political fortunes had been won or lost. Old Thurlow Weed and William Seward, Tweed, Conkling, Chester A. Arthur, had all practiced their craft in the lobby and corridors and private suites of the Delavan, cajoled and traded, entreated, listened, charmed, bribed, threatened, flattered unmercifully, all in the endless give-and-take of political maneuver. And Theodore, as he said, had managed “a stout fight.”

The problem was the prospect of the political year ahead. A presidential election was in the offing, a Republican national convention less than six months away. Rivalry in the party, along the old Stalwart-Half-Breed lines, was as intense as ever, the Blaine people feeling it was their turn at last. And given the importance of New York at the convention, not to say in the general election, there was abnormally high interest in who was to occupy the Speaker’s seat at Albany. To the professionals it was business of the most serious kind. Scouting the lobby of the Delavan just after Christmas, one reporter remarked on the numbers of “friends of the Administration in Washington” who were present, “friends of United States Senator Miller . . . representatives of the Customhouse . . . friends of the corporations.”

Refusing to align himself with any faction, Theodore had declared, “I am a Republican, pure and simple, neither a ’Half-Breed’ nor a ’Stalwart’; and certainly no man, nor yet any ring or clique, can do my thinking for me.” But he was called “unsound” by the professionals—”That young fellow might go off like a rocket,” one of them warned. The Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds joined ranks against him and that decided it. At the party caucus New Years Eve the position of Speaker went to a “regular,” an underwear manufacturer from Little Falls named Titus Sheard.

Theodore knew in advance he was beaten and it was he who moved that Sheard’s nomination be made unanimous. Allowing that the defeat left him “chagrined,” he would claim later that by waging his own fight he had assured his standing as floor leader and consequently accomplished more than he would have as Speaker. Achievement was “the all-important thing,” position mattered “only in so far as it widened the chance of achievement.”

His Cousin Emlen, recalling the eagerness with which Theodore persisted, said he was “the most ambitious man I ever knew ...”

As recompense he was named chairman of the City Affairs Committee. Within days he had issued three major bills, one to reduce the power of the New York City aldermen and strengthen the office of mayor, another to put a limit on the city’s debt, and a third to raise the license fee for the sale of liquor. None was designed to please the “regulars,” but the first, the Reform Charter Bill, as he called it, was the one aimed directly at what he, like many others, saw as the fundamental cause for big-city political corruption. The aldermen, the legislative side of city government, were an amorphous and anonymous body to all but the professionals and those who did business with them. Yet the power wielded by the aldermen was tremendous, including, most importantly, the power of approval over the appointment of department heads. City government in New York had become an exceedingly big business, with a payroll of some $12 million and twelve thousand jobs, making it a larger employer, for example, than the Carnegie iron and steel works. But the aldermen, those who really ran the city (taking their orders from the bosses), were cloaked in very carefully maintained obscurity. Scarcely any voter could name even one alderman or explain what his duties were. Who was to tell who was accountable, let alone remember at election time. Which was exactly as the machine wished to have it.

The remedy, according to reform theory, was to simplify and concentrate power; and to make power as conspicuous as possible: give someone the responsibility and hold him responsible, that someone being the mayor. And the model was the business corporation. “Some one man must be given the power of direction,” preached Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn; “... they [the public] understand that power and responsibility must go together from the top to the bottom of every successful business organization.”

The arrangement by which Seth Low ran Brooklyn was exactly what Theodore hoped to attain in New York. Theodore knew a good deal about Low, not only from what had appeared in the papers, but through Uncle Robert, who had worked with the young mayor as part of his duties concerning the Brooklyn Bridge, that great work now having been finished at last. Low functioned under a new Brooklyn city charter put in effect in 1882 and unlike any other. It made the mayor of Brooklyn the real, as well as the nominal, head of government, with absolute authority over the appointment of police commissioner, fire commissioner, health officers, treasurer, tax collector, and on down the line. This, said Low, was “a great and direct gain . .. because it creates and keeps alert a strong public sentiment, and tends to increase the interest of all citizens in the affairs of their city.” And by “all citizens,” he, Theodore, and other high-minded gentlemen concerned with municipal reform had specifically in mind the hordes of immigrants who, like Theodores cigarmakers, spoke little English, who were illiterate, bewildered by the political system, and thus easily manipulated by the political bosses (who, as it also happened, knew considerably more about these same people and what their real needs were than did the high-minded gentlemen concerned with municipal reform). It was not that the system must be simplified merely for the average citizen, but for what Seth Low called “the simplest citizen.”

In Brooklyn the results were astounding. In Brooklyn more people had voted in the election for mayor than in the election for governor. And having such power as Seth Low had, said Low himself, “appeals to the best that is in a man as strongly as it exposes him to the fire of criticism if he does not do well.”

To strip the New York aldermen of their power—those “creatures” of the bosses, as Theodore called them—and give New York a mayor like Seth Low struck nearly everybody but the bosses as eminently sensible, and so with his Reform Charter Bill Theodore had placed himself squarely in the forefront of a very popular cause. Quite rightly he saw it as his most important effort since entering politics.

Samuel Gompers had been impressed by his aggressiveness. On January 15, or less than a week after introducing the Reform Charter Bill, Theodore was made head of a special committee to investigate New York City government. Four days later, at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York, he opened hearings into the affairs of the city’s Department of Public Works, which of late, under the direction of Commissioner Hubert O. Thompson, had shown an increase in expenditures of some sixty-five percent and with no discernible benefit to the city. Thompson was well known in Albany, where he spent a disproportionate amount of his time “conferring” at the Delavan House. Early in his first term, Theodore had picked him out as among the most blatantly odious and fascinating political “creatures”—”a gross, enormously fleshly man with full face and thick, sensual lips; wears a diamond shirt pin and an enormous seal ring on his little finger.” And though Thompson, who had had prior experience with investigative hearings, succeeded in making the first session something of a joke at Theodore’s expense, it was Theodore’s intention to keep the hearings going at the hotel every Friday, Saturday, and Monday until the job was done.

It was a chance at last to do battle, good against evil, in New York itself and in what he liked to call “the full light of the press,” light he very obviously loved. He relished the publicity and he relished the battle itself. He loved a fight, more even than his father had. It was possibly the chief reason he loved politics, needed politics. He was never more pleased with himself than when he had made a “stout fight.” The political allies he cared most for were those who were fighters, who were “fearless,” like Joe Murray. He loved the camaraderie of such men. Of Billy O’Neil, the “best friend,” he would write, “we stood shoulder to shoulder in every legislative fight.”

Experience, moreover, had already taught him a grudging respect for the rogues who fought against him, who, too, were fearless and forthright in their fashion. Indeed, he preferred them to what he called the “parlor reformers,” “the timid good men” who stood on the sidelines. Unhappily, “blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined.” It was exactly because politics was a bear pit that he wanted in.

“A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth,” advised Henrik Ibsen in his 1882 play, An Enemy of the People. Theodore never wore anything but his best trousers; he was every inch the “dude” the newspapers portrayed; he made no pretense by word or dress at being anything other than wellborn, never resorted, as Boies Penrose did, to being “one of the boys” by talking or acting like one of the boys. But in a political fight he fought tooth and claw. As the journalist Mark Sullivan would observe, “Roosevelt did not regard politics as a gentleman’s sport, to be played in the spirit of a private duello, with a meticulous code about choice of time and place. Roosevelt had a trait of ruthless righteousness.’”

Years later, writing about his father’s old friend John Hay, Theodore made an acutely revealing observation—revealing of his own nature. The problem with Hay, he said, was his unwillingness to “face the rather intimate association which is implied in a fight.”

One must never shrink from what was “rough in life”; one must never recoil or flinch in the face of a Jay Gould or a Hubert O. Thompson. He had marked another verse in his Bible: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

Also, as Charles Eliot once observed, a man in a fight had little chance to be lonely.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Strange and Terrible Fate

1

HE FELT FINE. He felt better, in fact—about his work, about himself, his future—than he had in a long while.

At his worst, he got what he called his “caged wolf feeling.” To be confined, hemmed in, to have nothing to do, was unbearable. Boredom was something he had had to deal with so rarely in life that when he had to he hardly knew how to respond. The hotel at Richfield Springs the summer before had been torture. He complained of it more than the asthma that sent him there. “I have a bad headache, a general feeling of lassitude, and am bored out of my life by having nothing whatever to do,” he told Corinne, “and being placed in that quintessence of abomination, a large summer hotel at a watering place for underbred and overdressed girls, fat old female scandal mongers, and a select collection of assorted cripples and consumptives.”

Of late in Albany he had even begun boxing again, taking sparring lessons for the first time in five years. “I felt much better for it,” he wrote Alice January 22,1884, “but am awfully out of training. I feel much more at ease in my mind and better able to enjoy things since we have gotten under way; I feel now as though I had the reins in my hand.”

The winter of his first term she had come with him to “that dear, dull, old Dutch city,” but the year after, for his second term, she remained behind in New York, in the brownstone on West 45th Street, and more recently, because of her advancing pregnancy, she had moved back with Mittie once more. So now with the hearings in session at the Metropolitan Hotel, he was staying on at 57th Street three or four nights a week.

In all regards the personal, domestic side of his life was wholly satisfactory. Uncle James Alfred worried that he was spendthrift, but appears also to have been the only one who did. His income was substantial, not quite $14,000 a year, or nearly twice what it had been before he was married. James Alfred had been looking after his “affairs” exceedingly well. The income from Roosevelt and Son alone had been nearly $8,000 the previous year. In addition there were returns from a variety of railroads in which James Alfred was himself actively involved (the Mobile and Ohio, the Rochester and Pittsburgh, the Shenango and Allegheny). There were dividends from Uncle Jimmie Gracie’s J. K. Gracie Company, from the Union Trust, and from his own Wyoming cattle investment. His salary as an assemblyman, his only earned income, was $1,200 a year.

What Alice contributed, from money or investments of her own, was never spoken of, but considering her background it was probably a respectable sum; and in any event, they knew there was a great deal to fall back on, if need be, in both families. By the way he was spending—buying the 45th Street house, buying property at Oyster Bay, sinking no small amounts in this and that—he obviously felt there was plenty to spend, plenty more where that came from. At the time he decided to buy in as a partner with George Haven Putnam he handed Putnam a check for $20,000, which, as he did not seem to understand, was approximately twice what he had in his account. But the difficulty was smoothed over at once by James Alfred, who borrowed the difference out of Theodore’s “expectations.”

To return from the political battlefields to his “own sunny darling” was all he had dreamed marital bliss might be. He knew no greater happiness than to be with her in his own sitting room at 45th Street, playing backgammon “before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me.” The house, since rented to Elliott and his bride, had been the first and only home of their own, and for the benefit of the two maids who ran it, Aunt Anna Gracie had drawn up a detailed program for cleaning, cooking, and so forth, a manuscript of several pages that included one directive Theodore thought memorable. “’Every morning the cook should meet the ashman with a pail of boiling water,’” he would read aloud to friends, then question what the ashman might have done to deserve a scalding.

Seeing old friends on the street, he would insist they come home with him to see Alice. He was sure she was a great asset to him in his political career and told her so. Now, when the hearings broke up at week’s end, he would bring two or three others from the committee home to 57th Street. “All of the men were perfectly enchanted with their visit to our house . . .” he wrote her from Albany January 28, after one such occasion. “They could hardly believe that Mother was really our mother; and above all they praised my sweet little wife.” One man, Tom Welch, a Niagara Falls Democrat whom he liked particularly, told him he had never seen anyone look prettier than Alice, a remark Theodore thought she would enjoy since she was then a little more than eight months pregnant.

Her confinement precluded any social life of the kind that had once occupied so much of their time, and this suited him perfectly. Such a life led to nothing, he had decided.

He had shaved off his side-whiskers, given up keeping a diary. The Newsboys’ Lodging House and the other good works of his father’s no longer interested him and he gradually gave them up also. He had gone into such activities, he would explain, in the same spirit as the Sunday-school classes at Harvard, because of his father, but it had not worked. He had no patience with simple, unsung altruism. “I tried faithfully to do what Father had done,” he later told the author Jacob Riis, “but I did it poorly . . . in the end I found out that we have each to work in his own way to do our best; and when I struck mine, though it differed from his, yet I was able to follow the same lines and do what he would have had me do.”

He had also abandoned the law. It was not just that his political life was growing larger, crowding out other things, but that other things seemed to be falling away as in some very natural process. Part of the previous summer had been spent in Uncle Robert’s office, but Theodore was not to return there again and he had not been back to the Columbia Law School in more than a year. He had become, he later said, sadly disillusioned by the law. In the careers of the corporation lawyers one was supposed to admire and emulate he saw little that was “compatible” with his own ideals. Lawyers, it appeared to him, were trained to serve clients, not justice. “The caveat emptor side of the law, like the caveat emptor side of business, seemed to me repellent; it did not make for social fair dealings,” he wrote long afterward in his memoirs.

There is the possibility, of course, that he simply found the law dull and had too much else he would rather be doing. The philosophical conclusions may have been those of the older man, a career’s-end distillation of accumulative disrespect for certain kinds of legal giants, and thus as open to question as his subsequent views on the teaching of natural history at Harvard. The few specific references he made to his law work at the time are actually quite positive. Still, the thesis offered by the old family friend at lunch, the unnamed member of the prominent law firm who appeared in the midst of the Westbrook Scandal, was more than just “incompatible” with his idealism; it revolted him. And if that were not sufficient, the spectacle soon after of the vaunted William Evarts mouthing nonsense about the sanctity of the home as cause for perpetuating the cigar sweatshops must have made very clear the priority of client over “social fair dealing.” Theodore then, as later, equated a law career with moneymaking, not with social service, and as he also said then, as later, his inheritance had liberated him from moneymaking.

Oddly, for all his quick success in politics, the passion and energy he exuded, he was still unable, or unwilling, to accept politics as his life-work. He never spoke of it as a career or calling. To have announced he was a professional politician, or openly aspired to that, would have been awkward, to be sure, since “professional” was considered synonymous with “corrupt.” It was only as a gentleman doing his part in the public interest—as a temporary volunteer, so to speak—that he could maintain a reputation for independence and integrity. A degree of disinterest in a political future had obvious political value; it was part of what made him “different,” less vulnerable to the ways by which the obviously ambitious are bought or held in check. But even among the few with whom he was most candid, he admitted to no clear vision of a lifework. In the parlance of later-day psychologists he had still to find an occupational identity, and it troubled him. His plight was nothing like that of his brother, but, by the same token, he was by no means as resolved and focused as implied by his soaring performance.

It was only within the last six months, for example, that he and Alice resolved to build on the land he had bought at Oyster Bay. At one point, earlier, he thought seriously of settling upstate at Herkimer, in the Mohawk Valley, where Douglas Robinson’s family had a large estate. “I hardly know what to do about taking a place up here,” he wrote Bamie in the fall of 1882, she being the one to whom he still invariably turned for serious counsel on serious questions; “it would be lovely to have a farm, and fortunately Alice seemed enchanted with the country. The only, or at least the chief, drawback, is the distance from New York. Still, if I were perfectly certain that I would go on in politics and literature I should buy the farm without hesitation; but I consider the chances to be strongly favorable to my getting out of both . . .”

The Oyster Bay house, once decided on, was his first commitment to the future. And certainly there was nothing equivocal or tentative about the plans that evolved—once he, Alice, Mittie, Bamie, Aunt Anna Gracie, and architects Lamb and Rich had hiked over the site, savored the view, and picked the spot. He knew too little of architecture, he said, to say what ought to be done on the outside, but on “inside matters” he was “perfectly definite.” As he later told an editor for the magazine Country Life in America, “I wished a big piazza . . . where we could sit in rocking chairs and look at the sunset; a library with a shallow bay window looking south, the parlor or drawing room occupying all the western end of the lower floor . . . big fireplaces for logs . . . I had to live inside and not outside . . .”

The house was to be enormous, suggesting a future for Alice, at least, of unending pregnancies. Along with his other wishes, the plans called for ten bedrooms, excluding maids’ rooms.

Everything bespoke solidity, permanence, comfort, security, family. The foundations were to be nearly two feet thick. There were eight fireplaces, four on the first floor, four above, twenty-two rooms in all. The materials, interestingly, were to be of the most ordinary kind. No fine paneling or costly plasterwork was called for. Doors, windows, doorframes, and the like were all of the common, inexpensive variety. Frills were dispensed with. Size, command of the hill, were what seemed to matter. It was the way he liked his food, simple but plentiful, heavy on the plate.

The “outside cover” supplied by the architects was Queen Anne—brick on the ground floor, then shingles and a slate roof. The final cost was to be something just under $17,000.

It should be called Leeholm, he decided. From the front piazza they would be able to see a whole, long sweep of Long Island Sound and, on clear days, Connecticut beyond. Now, in winter, the trees bare, the water dominated the panorama and was a deep vivid blue, different from summer. In summer, after dark, they would be able to see the lights of the Fall River steamers as they passed in the distance.

Albany, February 6, 1884

DARLING WIFIE,

How I did hate to leave my bright, sunny little love yesterday afternoon! I love you and long for you all the time, and oh so tenderly; doubly tenderly now, my sweetest little wife. I just long for Friday evening when I shall be with you again.

Today I sparred as usual; my teacher is a small man and in the set-to today I bloodied his nose by an uppercut, and knocked him out of time.

In the House we had a most exciting debate on my Reform Charter Bill, and I won a victory, having it ordered to a third reading. Tomorrow evening I am to dine at the Rathbones’, at half past seven; it was very kind to ask me, but I do not anticipate much fun.

Goodbye, sweetheart.

Her pregnancy appears to have been without incident. Mittie had once remarked how “very large” she looked, but no one seems to have been concerned about her, and with the baby expected any time, he apparently had no misgivings about being away from her. Albany was five hours by train.

In another letter also written February 6, he told her he had given one of his “best speeches” the day before, and if she was looking in the papers that day, she saw that others agreed. “Mr. Roosevelt’s argument... was conclusive and unanswerable,” said the Times. “Mr. Roosevelt,” according to the Evening Post, had made “a speech admirable both in clearness and force.” A headline in the Herald spoke of “MR. ROOSEVELT’S BRILLIANT ASSAULT ON CORRUPTION.”

“I propose to put the power in the hands of the men the people elect,” he had said. “At present the power is in the hands of one or two men whom the people did not elect.” It was being called the Roosevelt Bill now. A rally in its support was to be held at Cooper Union the next week.

2

On Friday, when he returned to 57th Street, he found that Mittie was “quite sick” with what appeared to be a cold, and that Corinne and Douglas had left their infant son in Bamie’s charge while they went off to Baltimore for a long weekend.

The weather was miserable, chill and damp. There had been no sign of the sun for days. Monday, Mrs. Lee arrived on a morning train. Theodore put in another day at the hearings downtown, then left for Albany first thing Tuesday morning.

Later that day, Tuesday, the twelfth, Alice went into labor and some time that night a baby girl was born. Telegrams went off the next morning announcing the news that mother and child were doing well. Ike Hunt would remember Theodore, “full of life and happiness,” accepting the congratulations of his friends. But then a few hours later a second telegram arrived and Theodore, looking suddenly “worn,” rushed for the next train.

The Times that morning called it suicide weather. It covered most of the Northeast—rain, unending fog, rivers over their banks. In New York, traffic barely moved on the rivers, so thick was the fog. Trains were hours behind schedule. Corinne and Douglas, who had received a telegram at Baltimore and started for New York, would remember crossing through thick fog by ferry from New Jersey, then taking the elevated train uptown, everything moving at a crawl.

They were the first to reach the house. Corinne would remember walking from the elevated station to 57th Street and seeing a single light through the fog in a third-story window. She went up the front steps a little ahead of Douglas. The door was thrown open and Elliott stood in the doorway, the light from the hall behind him, a terrible look on his face. If she wished to see her baby, he said, she should do so before coming in. The baby was at Aunt Annie’s. “There is a curse on this house! Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too.”

The time was approximately 10:30. Mittie, the doctor said, was dying of typhoid fever; Alice, of Bright’s disease. Theodore did not arrive for another hour.

By the time he reached her bedside and took her in his arms, Alice barely knew who he was. He stayed there, holding her, until some time just before three in the morning when he was told that if he wished to see his mother again, he must come at once.

Mittie died at three o’clock the morning of February 14, her four children at her bedside. Alice lingered on another eleven hours. Alice died at two that afternoon, Theodore still holding her.

The first man to rise when the Assembly convened the next day said he had never in his years at Albany stood in the presence of such sorrow. Six others spoke, including three of Theodore’s most hostile opponents, all visibly shaken. In an unprecedented gesture of respect, the Assembly voted to adjourn until the following Monday.

Saturday in New York, the morning of the double funeral service, skies were clear, the temperature back down in the twenties. Theodore, his face a mask, sat in the front pew with Elliott, Bamie, Corinne, and Alice’s father. Again, as six years before, the enormous church was full; except that now two rosewood coffins stood at the altar. The familiar faces scattered among the more than two thousand who had gathered included Astors, Vanderbilts, Harrimans, but also Speaker Titus Sheard, Johnny O’Brien, and Mayor Seth Low. They sang “Rock of Ages”; Dr. John Hall prayed for the bereaved and for the four-day-old baby, weeping openly as he spoke. Then two hearses clattered off down Fifth Avenue, followed by carriages carrying the immediate family. Burial was at Greenwood, beside Grandmamma Bulloch and Theodore.

Again disease had struck and destroyed and changed everything. The life of the family had seemed an unending, tragic struggle against one cursed disease after another—Pott’s disease, asthma, cancer, whatever nameless disorder plagued Elliott—and now came typhoid and nephritis, or Bright’s disease, chronic inflammation of the kidneys. Mittie, whose precautions against dirt and contamination had seemed silly and obsessive, died of contaminated food or water, of the acutely infectious bacteria Salmonella typhosa. Typhoid fever, an ordeal of usually several weeks, had killed her in five days. It had appeared at first as though she had only a cold, because that is how typhoid begins. Little that mattered was done for her, because there was little anyone could do, given what was known, what was available. And it had been the same for Alice. Two summers before, the country had learned about Bright’s disease when the Associated Press carried a story saying President Arthur was ill with it. The story was denied, on authority of the President, but the feeling remained that Arthur was a dying man, since Bright’s disease in adults was almost inevitably fatal. That it had gone undiagnosed in Alice all that winter seems odd. Plainly neither she nor any of the family had any idea there was something the matter with her. And though none of the family was to challenge or investigate the part played by her doctor, some of her friends would later contend that the doctor had been guilty of criminal negligence.

No one knew how possibly to justify or explain such tragedy. There were no answers save “God’s will” or fate, “strange and terrible fate,” Theodore said. The sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life, the sense that the precipice awaited not just somewhere off down the road, but at any moment. An asthmatic childhood had shown that life could be stifled, cut off, unless one fought back, and all Papa’s admonitions to get action, to seize the moment, had the implicit message that there was not much time after all. Father had died at forty-six; Mittie had been only forty-eight; Alice, all of twenty-two, her life barely begun. Nothing lasts. Winter waits.

3

“He does not know what he does or says,” wrote his old tutor, Arthur Cutler, the day of the funeral. Yet three days later Theodore was back in Albany, and the day following, at ten in the morning, he was in his seat as usual and that afternoon he took up where he had left off, arguing for his Reform Charter Bill. In one of the speeches given in sympathy the week before, an old Republican named Lucas Van Allen, a man who had opposed Theodore time and again, prayed Theodore be given the strength “to work bravely in the darkness.”

Now week after week, on into March and April, he did little but work, shunting back and forth from Albany to his hearings by night trains. He reported a flood of bills out of his City Affairs Committee—seven, nine, fourteen a day. His outpouring of work, of words printed and spoken, of speeches delivered, of witnesses grilled, of interviews, of inspection tours (of conditions at New York’s infamous Ludlow Street jail), of headlong, concentrated energy was utterly phenomenal, surpassing anything he had ever done before and causing those close at hand to wonder how much longer he could maintain a hold on himself. One day in March he reported fifteen bills out of committee, then six more at a night session; and even then his work for the day had only begun. Dissatisfied with a report on his hearings that had been drafted by counsel for the committee, he wrote an entirely new version at a single sitting, working through until morning.

He didn’t want to [Ike Hunt recalled], but he did it. He started in at night and he wrote all night long and he got his breakfast and still continued to write. The House opened and he came up to the House and he wrote that report, and as soon as he got a sheet of foolscap written in long hand the page was right there to take it down to the printer because the committee had got to report that morning. But Teddy would get up and say, “Mr. Speaker, that bill so-and-so with reference to so-and-so is all right,” and then he would sit down and commence to write again. Finally, he said, “There it is, I am finished.” I sat right in front of him. I said, “There won’t be any continuity to that report, I don’t believe.” He said, “Don’t you worry.” In a little while the printer came up with the report all printed and Teddy went out and read it to the committee and they signed it and that was the report that was handed in.

Of his personal tragedy, he would say nothing. “You could not talk to him about it,” Hunt remembered. “. . . He did not want anybody to sympathize with him.”

“I have taken up my work again; indeed, I think I should go mad if I were not employed,” he wrote in answer to a sympathy note from Carl Schurz, who a number of years before had survived the death of his own wife by pouring himself into his work in just such manic fashion.

“Teddy was as sweet and gentle as ever on Sunday,” wrote Corinne after one of his weekends in the city, “but he feels the awful loneliness more and more, and I fear he sleeps little for he walks a great deal in the night and his eyes have that strained red look.”

Within days after the funeral, it had been decided to sell 6 West 57th Street. It was put on the market and snapped up at once by an immensely wealthy old friend of the elder Theodore’s, a fellow director of the Museum of Natural History, John S. Kennedy, who, with his banking firm, J. S. Kennedy & Company, was closely involved with James Alfred in the financing of the Great Northern Railroad. The family had until May to be out of the house. Theodore left it to Bamie to handle the details and to sell his own place on West 45th Street. “That year seems a perfect nightmare,” she would recall, “parting with all the places we had cared for, dividing everything that had always meant home and deciding how to recommence life.”

Several hundred condolence letters had to be answered, and again it was Bamie who bore the major burden. There were letters from Bullochs in Savannah, recalling “the beautiful, angelic and active girl I knew and loved so well”; from friends made abroad (”It seems such a short time ago when we were together on the Nile ...”); and from people like Aunt Lucy Elliott, who must be answered at length. “If baby is living who will take it?” wrote a cousin from Charleston.

In the interval between her mother’s death and the hour when Alice died, Bamie had sent off a wire to Liverpool and in a strong, clear hand Uncle Jimmie Bulloch had written in reply, “The cable has never carried through the depths of the sea a sadder message than it has brought us today. . . . Our anxiety about dear Alice adds to our unhappiness, but we will doubtless learn how it fares with her.”

I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking, her father had drummed into her. Faced with the decision of whether to proceed as planned with the house at Oyster Bay, whether to sign with the contractor, Theodore decided to go ahead with it, but wanted Bamie to supervise the job, to tend to all details. He wished no part of the project, only to have it finished.

Nor was he interested in his baby, Alice, as she had been christened the Sunday after the funeral, and so she too was entrusted to Bamie, who now bought a house of her own on Madison Avenue, “furnishing it with my share of the 57th Street things.” Theodore, for the house at Oyster Bay, was to have the furniture from the master bedroom.

“It seems,” wrote Conie, remembering her mother, “as if there were so few that one really cared for.” She longed for Mittie. Even her joy in her own child seemed changed somehow, depreciated with Mittie gone.

Baby is lying on the bed taking his lunch by me [she wrote Elliott]. Though he is my greatest comfort and delight, still so much of my pleasure in him is changed, for I never was so happy as when I saw her with him. She loved him so extravagantly . . .

On the day Alice died, Theodore had made a large X on the page for February 14 in an otherwise empty diary for the year 1884, and beneath he wrote only, “The light has gone out of my life.”

Later in the year, working at a small table in a cabin in the Dakota Bad Lands, he wrote a memorial for private publication.

She was born at Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, on July 29,1861; I first saw her on October 18, 1878, and loved her as soon as I saw her sweet, fair young face; we were betrothed on January 25, 1880, and married on October 27th, of the same year; we spent three years of happiness such as rarely comes to man or woman; on February 12, 1884, her baby girl was born; she kissed it, and seemed perfectly well; some hours afterward she, not knowing that she was in the slightest danger, but thinking only that she was falling into a sleep, became insensible, and died at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, February 14, 1884, at 6 West 57th Street, in New York; she was buried two days afterward, in Greenwood Cemetery.

She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; and there had never come to her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy as a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be but just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her.

And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went out from my life for ever.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Chicago

1

May 31, Chicago—Fast and thick the delegates to the convention are flocking into this city. . . a canvass of the members of the convention here shows Blaine to be in the lead. . . .

IN THE GILDED, MIRRORED COMFORT of the Palmer House barbershop, where, as every visitor to Chicago learned soon enough, the floor was inlaid with silver dollars, they sat waiting for a morning shave, smoking their first cigars of the day, or, if not that, spitting tobacco juice with amazing accuracy, some among the Californians—those newly arrived by the “Blaine Train”—looking, as one man said, as if they had walked in from the Pacific Coast. They talked of Blaine’s strength in the West, of the send-off they had had at San Francisco, of stops the day before, Memorial Day, at places like Marshalltown, Iowa, where several thousand people were waiting at the depot to cheer them on. They studied the plan of the convention floor published in the morning Tribune or read aloud a quote from Tom Platt that “for every kicker who does bolt, Blaine will get two Irish votes in exchange.” Such observations as “It’s Blaine’s turn now” and “Arthur can’t carry New York” were also exchanged as the long line of barbers went about their business. Then shaved, combed, made fragrant with a splash of bay rum, their bright red-and-white BLAINE badges in place, they went out to join the fun.

In the marble lobby of the hotel there were still more of them, talking, reaching for outstretched hands, huddled in threes and fours. At the Grand Pacific Hotel, four blocks away, they were even more numerous. At Blaine headquarters upstairs Titus Sheard of New York was already claiming 341 Blaine votes on the first ballot, a mere 70 shy of what was needed to nominate, and by midday in the bar and the main dining room, they were clinking green glasses in toasts to the next President of the United States, James Gillespie Blaine.

Reporters were struck by their exuberance, their confidence, and the contrast with the Arthur people, who were so plainly downcast and uninspired. “Whenever you meet a Blaine man,” complained the correspondent for The New York Times, “he seizes you and pours into your ear the same old story. ’Everybody wants him. The great West cries for him. The Middle States yearn for him.’” “All were filled with enthusiasm,” noted another reporter, “and the most enthusiastic were filled with whiskey.” Some ambitious orators like to climb up on the lobby furniture in order to make known their theories for the salvation of the country.

They were the rank and file of the party, as they were fond of saying, from city and country alike, as Tom Platt stressed. Theodore, in a letter to Bamie, would describe them as mainly “good, ordinary men, who do not do very much thinking, who are pretty honest themselves, but who are callous to any but very flagrant wrongdoing in others, unless it is brought home to them most forcibly, who ’don’t think Blaine any worse than the rest of them’. . .”

It was their feelings for Blaine that made them such a force to reckon with. Blaine’s only power was the devotion he inspired through force of personality (demagoguery, Theodore and his friends called it). Blaine controlled no patronage, no machine, held no keys to the Customhouse or the Treasury. His home state of Maine had no political importance nationally. And though in recent years he had served quite ably as Garfield’s Secretary of State, and could be thus fairly described as a “statesman,” he did not even hold public office any longer. Blaine was adored for being Blaine—for his very real human warmth and love of people, his brains and loyalty, and “that gorgeous surplus of personal grace called magnetism.” He remained, since the Ingersoll speech at Cincinnati eight years before, the “Plumed Knight” of the party, the Republican’s Republican whose mere presence on a platform could work magic wherever Republican fortunes were in trouble. At the last national convention, also held in Chicago, his forces had carried their fight through thirty-six ballots before Garfield was named. It had been Blaine who handed his friend Garfield the nomination at the last and it had been Conkling who kept the nomination from Blaine; and now with Conkling out of the picture, Blaine’s people were bound to let nothing stand in the way.

The famous visage—the long, pale face with its luminous dark eyes and silvery beard—was to be seen everywhere about the hotels and in store windows, but the idol himself, like President Arthur, remained in Washington. Ironically, with the prize closer to his reach than at any time before, Blaine no longer craved it as he once had.

Also, in April, only weeks before the convention, the old burden of the Mulligan letters had been resurrected in brilliant, vicious fashion by a famous full-color cartoon that the opposition was busily passing out in Chicago, just in case there was anyone left who had not seen it. It had appeared in Puck. Blaine was displayed as “The Tattooed Man,” stripped to his undershorts before a tribunal of his Republican peers. The tattoos were all his old sins—”Mulligan Letters,” “Little Rock RR Bonds,” “N Pacific Bonds,” “Corruption”—and his famed personal magnetism was revealed to be nothing more than a cheap “magnetic pad” worn about the neck.

Nor was the old “saving element” of the party any less adamant in its opposition to Blaine than in times past. Virtually everyone from the Fifth Avenue Conference who was still active in politics was lined up against him—Schurz, Curtis, Godkin, Lodge—and some, like Schurz, talked openly of bolting the party if Blaine was the nominee. They saw him as morally obtuse and the most “venal” of apologists for the spoils system. He had been too close all his career to “the wealthy criminal class,” and to Jay Gould in particular. About the only thing they would not do to stop him was support Chester Arthur. Theodore, writing to Lodge shortly before leaving for Chicago, described the choice as between the Blaine devil and the Arthur deep sea, though of the two, Blaine was “the most dangerous man.”

The puzzling thing about Arthur was that he had turned out to be quite a respectable President. Since Garfield’s murder in 1881, he had been a surprise to almost everybody. His record was a good one. He had conducted himself with great dignity, denied old cronies special license. (“He isn’t ‘Chet’ Arthur any more,” Johnny O’Brien observed wistfully, “he’s the President.”) He had supported the Pendleton Act, the national indebtedness had been cut, the cost of domestic postage reduced. At his urging a decrepit wooden navy was being phased out, new steel cruisers built. The country was prospering. Times were so good that when General Grant’s Wall Street firm of Grant and Ward failed that spring, it “created only a temporary disturbance” in the overall business picture.

With his height and elegant tailoring, Arthur also looked more like a President than any of his Republican predecessors. He had insisted that the somewhat dowdy old Executive Mansion be brought up to standards (according to the taste of the day), and that official hospitality be raised from the depths of the Hayes years. Modern plumbing was installed in the White House, and the first elevator. Louis Tiffany of New York had done over the Red, Blue, and East rooms, and the showpiece of the new look was a jeweled Tiffany glass screen, fifty feet in length, that now divided the main corridor from the public north vestibule. At Arthur’s invitation, Madame Christine Nilsson and other opera singers performed at state dinners, where, customarily, there were flowers in abundance, as well as small bouquets of roses at every lady’s place, boutonnieres for the men, and gilt-edged place cards embossed with the national coat of arms in gold. There could be as many as fourteen courses with seven or eight wines, each with its proper glass. It was said that Arthur had brought more tact and culture to the White House than anyone in memory, and if such influential figures as Schurz and Curtis thought little better of him than in days gone by, Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher thoroughly approved. “I can hardly imagine how he could have done better,” Beecher was quoted as saying. More important for the moment, he was liked by businessmen and could count on strong support from those on the federal payroll and from black politicians and party workers from the South. Of the 820 accredited delegates converging on Chicago, something over 100 were government employees.

Arthur had made little effort to get the nomination and professed he did not want it. His representatives on the scene were badly organized, poorly financed. When a New Yorker showed up with a suitcase full of cash amounting to $100,000, all for the Arthur cause, Arthur, by cable from Washington, ordered that the money be returned. But Arthur’s forces also included such able men as Elihu Root, such thorough professionals as Johnny O’Brien, who had no doubt that he wanted another term.

Besides Arthur and Blaine, there were a half-dozen different dark horses and favorite sons whose strength, if combined, could conceivably stop Blaine. There were John Sherman of Ohio and John A. Logan of Illinois, both United States senators, dainty little Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, and Robert Todd Lincoln. There was talk of Senator Sherman’s more famous brother, William Tecumseh Sherman, and of George William Curtis. But the only one with any substantial support, other than the two front-runners, was the candidate the reformers had settled on, the man upon whom Theodore was banking his fortunes, Senator George Franklin Edmunds of Vermont. Edmunds was the Bristow of this seasons crusade. He was bearded, scowling, capable, incorruptible, eligible, contentious, colorless, devoid of humor, and the very one, it had been decided, to rescue the party and restore it to the high ideals of the founders. (That Blaine, too, had been among the founders was a point left unsaid.) Theodore, so far as is known, had never met Edmunds, nor does he appear to have been aware that it was Edmunds, back at the time of his fathers nomination for the Customhouse, who made a special trip to the White House to urge Hayes to compromise with Conkling and choose another, more acceptable man.

The drumbeat for Edmunds had begun as far back as January, when Harper’s Weekly described him as “in full sympathy with the intelligent progressive spirit,” an “inflexible Republican of spotless personal character,” and it had been Curtis who led the campaign thereafter, joined by George Jones of The New York Times, Godkin of The Nation, President Eliot of Harvard, Andrew D. White, who was president of Cornell, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Of the bare handful of actual politicians who announced for Edmunds the two most frequently mentioned were John D. Long of Massachusetts, who was a congressman and former governor, and Theodore, who in that spring of furious, headlong work and sleepless nights had done all he could to further the Edmunds cause, and with notable results. At the state convention at Utica in April, working at fever pitch, he had neatly outmaneuvered the Blaine and Arthur forces and seen that the four who were elected as delegates-at-large to the national convention were all Edmunds men, he himself and Andrew D. White receiving the most votes. Henry Cabot Lodge, also newly elected as a delegate-at-large from Massachusetts, had written to suggest that they combine forces at Chicago, and that in the meantime they make a run down to Washington to see what Edmunds support could be found. The Washington trip proved nothing, except that Theodore and Lodge got to know each other. Lodge stopped over in New York, spending a weekend at 6 West 57th Street amid packing boxes and bare floors. “We are breaking up house,” Theodore had warned, “so you will have to excuse very barren accommodations.”

When Theodore departed for Chicago on the Pennsylvania Limited the evening of May 30, he traveled in a private car with the same two who had led his father’s one political crusade in 1876, Schurz and Curtis. (Again as in 1876, Schurz was going to the convention as an observer.) And when Theodore and Curtis were seen checking in at the Grand Pacific Hotel the next morning, amid the swarming Blaine crowd, they were at once the subjects of much talk and speculation. Curtis, with his white bangs and sallow, priestly look, was a face everyone knew. Theodore, according to the New York Evening Post, was “more specifically an object of curiosity than any other stranger in Chicago.” He was the boy wonder of Albany, New York’s “Cyclone Assemblyman,” the youngest delegate at the convention. Curtis and his cartoonist, Thomas Nast, had been giving Theodore handsome attention in Harper’s Weekly that spring. In one Nast cartoon he had been shown holding a whole sheaf of reform bills as Governor Grover Cleveland signed them into law.

They were there to work for Edmunds, Theodore told reporters. He was carrying a bamboo cane and wearing a “clipper” straw hat, the brim of which, on the underside, was bright blue. He talked extremely fast. He had “a mouth full of regular white teeth like a young lady,” it was noted, and his gold-rimmed spectacles kept sliding down his nose. He was asked by a man from the Chicago Tribune what he might do should Blaine be the nominee. Would he bolt the party? “I will not speak for the others, but for myself I say freely that under no circumstances will I cast a vote for either Blaine or Arthur in this convention. But I am a Republican, and should one or the other of them be nominated, then I will support him.”

Curtis, who was standing at his side, let the remark pass, but by saying what he had to the Tribune, Theodore had guaranteed that in a matter of hours it would be available in print for every delegate in town.

Later in the day, when Theodore, Curtis, and Schurz walked into the main dining room and stood waiting for a table, they looked, said one man, “as if the fate of the nation was in their keeping. Perhaps it is.”

Lodge, who arrived from Boston that same day, seems to have known from the start that there was no way to stop Blaine. And indeed to any experienced observer it looked as though the convention was already decided, three days before it officially opened. By nightfall New York reporters were cabling their home offices that the Blaine boom had “burst all bounds.”

Bits of good news . . . came thick and fast to cheer the partisans of Blaine and keep their enthusiasm at the boiling point. . . . To sum it all up, the drift today has been decidedly toward Blaine. He was never so near the nomination. . . .

Thousands more poured into the city the following day, Sunday, June 1, and it was emphatically “ANOTHER BLAINE DAY.” As a Boston correspondent observed, few people went to church. In New York the Times gave notice that if Blaine was nominated, the Times would abandon the Republican Party.

Monday, the papers were saying Arthur was clearly beaten and the word from the Arthur people was that if the nominee could not be their man, then it must be Blaine, which was about the same as saying Blaine was nominated. If noise and cheap enthusiasm were to be the deciding factors, said The New York Times indignantly, then Blaine was a certain victor. A sure sign, supposedly, was the swing to Blaine by the Ohio congressman William McKinley. No one talked of issues or programs, only of winning in November.

The first news of consequence came Monday night, and it was then that Theodore and Lodge went to work. Theodore, almost alone of the delegates, it would seem, was sure Blaine could be beaten.

The National Committee, dominated by Blaine people, had announced that the name to be placed in nomination for the honor of temporary chairman, the name to be put before the convention first thing in the morning, was that of Powell Clayton, a former Arkansas governor and Grand Army general who had lost an arm in the war and whose personal reputation was very low. Clayton, who had come to Chicago uncommitted, had offered his fourteen Arkansas votes to the Arthur people in trade for a Cabinet seat. “Not for forty nominations,” Arthur responded by wire, and so Clayton went immediately to see the Blaine people. He and Tom Platt, it was known, had been closeted most of that afternoon. (His Conkling past behind him, his “bit of scandal” in the Albany hotel fading from memory, Platt had “thrown in” with Blaine and as head of the New York Blaine delegates was realistically viewed as one of the two or three most important men at the convention.)

Naming Clayton had been a silly move by the Blaine people, the crudest kind of arrogance, and insulting to a large number of delegates. Even the most case-hardened veterans of political compromise were visibly stunned. Chauncey Depew is said to have received the news with his mouth hanging open, speechless for perhaps the first time in his career.

Theodore saw it at once as a chance to force a fight and test Blaine’s strength at the outset. Lodge came rushing to him with much the same idea and so the two “pulled together and went in for all we were worth,” as Theodore said. They were up most of the night, working the hotel corridors, seeing everyone they could. To challenge a decision of the National Committee at the start of a convention was unheard of. “Many of our men were very timid,” Theodore reported to Bamie, and chief among the “weak-kneed ones” was George William Curtis.

Just finding somebody willing to stand as a candidate against Clayton proved difficult and apparently it was Theodore’s personal appeal that made the difference. The volunteer was former Congressman John R. Lynch, a black delegate from Mississippi, who was pledged to Arthur.

When, at ten the next morning, the different delegations began forming up in the hotel lobbies for the march to the convention hall, Theodore had had perhaps two hours’ sleep. The day, June 3, 1884, marked his debut in national politics, his first chance on the national stage.

2

Probably he had his mind on business only as the march began—out of the hotel into the glare of the morning. But the day was spectacular, clear and surprisingly cool for June, and Chicago itself on such a day, and at that particular moment in history, could be a tonic. Four years earlier, when stopping there with Ellie, he had called “Chicagoe,” as he spelled it, a “marvelous city.” Chicago was the new America, the real thing, full of “go-aheadism,” as everyone heard from its outspoken citizenry. It exuded “a sense of big things to be done.” If Chicago had faults, it was because Chicago was “young yet”; Chicago was the “Phoenix City of America,” risen out of its own ashes, as the saying went. One could take heart in Chicago, from new life, energy, enterprise, even grandeur, springing forth from tragedy.

The parade to the Exposition Hall was under way by eleven, the crowds falling back and making way for the delegates to pass. They marched two by two in the glaring sunshine, everybody adorned with his proper badge. Their party, for all its failings, its scandals and fallen idols, was still the party of Lincoln, the party that saved the Union, freed the slaves, restored the national credit. Even to so sensitive a moralist as George William Curtis it remained “the party of the best instincts, of the highest desires of the American people.” Many men were Republicans as they were church elders or lodge brothers. It was as if one belonged to an order. Their loyalties, their faith and pride in party, were often deeper, more vital to their self-respect and sense of worth than they could express. Delegates to Republican national conventions, as Mark Sullivan noted, sometimes had their official badges cast in gold and passed them along in their wills as precious relics. When a man like Tom Platt talked about the depth of James G. Blaine’s loyalty to the party, he did so knowing full well the emotional content in those words—”loyalty” and “party.” He felt it himself, even Tom Platt. They all did, or nearly all. “What I liked about him [Blaine] then, as always,” Platt remembered, “was his bold and persistent contention that the citizen who best loved his party and was loyal to it, was loyal to and best loved his country.”

The line of march was east, toward the lake, along Adams Street to where it joined wide, wood-paved Michigan Avenue. The Exposition Hall, pale green with much glass and a red roof, stood straight ahead on the other side of the avenue, and from all its turrets, domes, and gable ends, a hundred or more flags and banners were flying in the breeze, flying and floating exactly as flags are supposed to, against a clear blue sky. The hall had been built expressly to show that Chicago could rise from the disaster of the Great Fire. It stood at the edge of a broad park and beyond the park was the lake, at the moment nearly violet in color and flat as a tabletop. Above the main portico hung a single, tremendous sign: NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONVENTION.

The crowd converging from all directions, stopping traffic, backing up at six or seven different entrances, was estimated at ten thousand. The scalpers’ price for tickets was $50.

The parading delegates entered through the main door, then moved along a passage beneath the back gallery which opened all at once on to several acres of faces turned in their direction. The Iowans came in first, followed by Rhode Island. Congressman McKinley—short, solid, close-shaven—walked at the head of the Ohio delegation.

The Pennsylvanians wore brilliant blue neckties and cream-colored plug hats and matching cream-colored silk handkerchiefs in their coat pockets, a spray of lily of the valley on the lapel. The New Yorkers, seventy-two in all, largest of the delegations, had white badges with gold fringe and as they started down the aisle the band struck up “When First I Put This Uniform On.” A Chicago reporter thought them “fine-looking fellows” and observed that nearly all were wearing the latest low-cut shoes. “The leader was Mr. George William Curtis with his handsome white whiskers. . . . He had on his arm Theodore Roosevelt who bowed right and left to delegates and newspapermen.” Theodore was wearing his straw hat. Immediately behind walked Andrew D. White and bringing up the rear was Tom Platt.

They had the priority position, four rows front and center. Curtis sat on the aisle, beside the New York pennon. As the others were getting settled, Theodore was seen to vault lightly over several chairs to sit directly in front of Curtis, after which Andrew D. White negotiated a seat beside Theodore. Platt, meantime, sat at the far end of the row from Curtis and appeared to have nothing more on his mind than the slow, rhythmic stroking of his beard.

The setting looked like nothing else so much as a tremendous, dressed-up railroad terminal. An enormous vaulted ceiling was carried overhead by iron girders, these springing upward from long clerestory windows through which great shafts of sunshine slanted onto portions of the crowd like theatrical spotlights. The ironwork was painted red; the ceiling, pale blue; and red-white-and-blue bunting, state flags, and shields of every color banked the galleries.

The stage was at the west end of the hall and back from the stage was a still higher platform reserved for a thousand or more who qualified as “distinguished persons.” Directly above this point, suspended at an angle of about sixty degrees, was a colossal sounding board, hung from the ceiling, a duplicate of which could also be seen at the other end of the hall. The combined surface of these two devices was twenty-five thousand square feet, about half the area of a football field, and their combined acoustical effect was quite amazing. A speaker on stage, talking in a normal voice, could be heard anywhere in the hall and the hall sat about twelve thousand people.

The stage itself was a big semicircle with a long, curving prow now all but buried in still more bunting. A speaker’s stand was flanked with battle flags. There were potted palms and several large bouquets of flowers and two large portraits of Washington and Lincoln.

Members of the press, of whom there were no less than eight hundred in attendance, were arranged behind a line of tables on a raised platform immediately in front of the stage. Then across the entire main floor, from the press section to midpoint in the hall, were the cane-seated oak chairs for the delegates, row after row, divided into three equal sections. The pennons marking each reserved section were of blue silk lettered in gold, one for each of the thirty-eight states, eight territories, and the District of Columbia. The boundary line between the delegates and all other ticketholders was a white picket fence running across the center of the hall, from which point the floor sloped steadily uphill to the bleachers at the very back. At the center of the bleachers, directly below the second sounding board, was a thirty-piece band under the direction of “Professor” Johnny Hand. The overhead galleries, running the length of the hall on two sides, were perhaps fifty feet above the main floor.

The opening gavel of the Eighth Republican National Convention fell at 12:28. A slender young clergyman with yellow hair stepped to the rostrum and with hands behind his back thanked God for Plymouth Rock, Yorktown, Appomattox, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Republican Party, then prayed for—in vain, as it happened—”dignity of temper” in the forthcoming campaign. The chairman of the National Committee, a senator from Minnesota named Sabin, spoke of Chicago as sacred ground (Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield had all been nominated in Chicago), after which he put Powell Clayton’s name before the convention.

Immediately, Lodge was on his feet calling to substitute Lynch of Mississippi. Lodge, tidy, prim, full-bearded, and close-buttoned, spoke without passion, as though he wished merely to express a polite difference of opinion. He offered the name of Lynch, he said, with no view of attempting to make a test vote, but simply to strengthen the party. His manner was described as “supercilious.”

Others demanded to be heard. The Blaine people claimed that any challenge to the National Committee would subject the party to needless divisiveness. The opposition insisted that the convention had the right to do as it pleased. Meantime, if we are to believe one of those observing the scene from the press section, the “rather dudish-looking” Roosevelt and the “properly English” Lodge “applauded with the tips of their fingers, held immediately in front of their noses.”

Then it was Theodore’s turn. “Up from the midst of the Empire State Delegation rose a slight, almost boyish figure,” wrote the admiring correspondent for The New York Times. “Everybody knew the man, for there is not a State headquarters which he had not visited in his canvass for Edmunds, and scarce an individual delegate with whom he had not conversed in a straightforward, manly way, carrying conviction even when he could not convert.” He had handed someone his hat and climbed onto his chair. It was said he looked like a college boy.

“It was the first time I had ever had the chance of speaking to ten thousand people assembled together,” he would tell Bamie.

He had one hand on his hip. A reporter described how his “slight frame shook with the effort to make himself heard.”

“Mr. Chairman . . . I hold it to be derogatory to our honor, to our capacity for self-government, to say that we must accept the nomination of a presiding officer by another body; and that our hands are tied . . .” He asked that the vote on the temporary chairman be taken by an individual poll of the delegates. “Let each man stand accountable . . . let each man stand up here and cast his vote, and then go home and abide by what he has done.”

It is now, Mr. Chairman, less than a quarter of a century since, in this city, the great Republican Party for the first time organized for victory and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who broke the fetters of the slave and rent them asunder forever. It is a fitting thing for us to choose to preside over this convention one of that race whose right to sit within these walls is due to the blood and treasure so lavishly spent by the founders of the Republican Party. And it is but a further vindication of the principles for which the Republican Party so long struggled. I trust that the Honorable Mr. Lynch will be elected temporary chairman of this convention.

Then, as quickly, he was back in his seat again, the “warmest applause” ringing in his ears, and once five or six others had spoken, the roll was called. Lynch won—Blaine had lost—by a margin of forty votes.

So for the moment, for one exhilarating, fleeting afternoon, it looked as if Blaine might be stopped after all. Certainly, he could not be nominated on the first ballot. In New York the Evening Post hailed the all-night efforts of Roosevelt and Lodge as a brilliant flanking movement. The New York Times singled Theodore out as not only the most conspicuous of the Edmunds men, but the most effective. But what the vote had actually done was to show that the balance of power was held by the reform contingent, the Edmunds people: the “Plumed Knight” could be stopped, but only if they were to give up on Edmunds and agree to Arthur, or resolve a way to unite the Edmunds and Arthur forces behind some acceptable alternative, such as John Sherman. It was clearly a case of Blaine against the field and the field could win only by uniting, which seemed just about hopeless, given the known preference of the Arthur people for Blaine as their second choice.

That night at the Grand Pacific, as a glee club hired by the Arthur forces paraded about the lobby singing the praises of the President, Theodore went back to work.

Wednesday, June 4, was taken up with routine business. The weather was cloudy and warm. “Young Roosevelt alone was buoyant. . .” The one bit of excitement was a resolution put forth by the Blaine people—an old Conkling resolution from the previous convention—calling for every delegate to pledge in advance his support of the nominee, irrespective of who it might be. It was aimed directly at George William Curtis and Curtis was instantly on his feet. The color was drained from his face, his hands clenched. Curtis had a magnificent voice—a famous voice—and he spoke now with what was described as “electric” intensity: “A Republican I came into this convention. By the grace of God, a Republican and a free man I will go out of this convention.” The resolution was withdrawn.

Thursday, June 5, petitions for women’s suffrage were read and referred to committee, there to die; the party platform, replete with praise for a high tariff and the gold standard, was read aloud in its entirety by William McKinley. Again the weather was correspondingly gray and dull, and again Theodore was extremely active, “quick, watchful, rather enjoying his brief lease on public life.” An Ohio delegate, Joseph Foraker, would later relate that he had found one conference with the indefatigable New Yorker “so trying upon the strength and the mental operations” that he was barely able to make it back to the convention hall that evening for the nominating speeches.

Sixteen nominating speeches were delivered, beginning at 7:35 and lasting more than five hours. Every seat was taken, every foot of standing room. The night was hot and close and thousands of little fans were moving in the mellow gaslight. Outside, thousands of people crowded about the building, waiting for whatever news was shouted down from those inside who were seated in the last rows of the galleries, up along the line of clerestory windows.

Senator Shelby Cullom of Illinois nominated his colleague Logan; the principal speaker for Arthur was an elderly unknown from Troy, New York, named Martin Townsend, who was obviously unprepared; John Sherman was nominated by Foraker of Ohio; and the two speeches for Edmunds were delivered by John D. Long, a noted speaker, and George William Curtis. Theodore thought the speech by Long the finest he had ever heard. It struck the old theme of the Hayes inaugural: country before party. “We are here as Republicans, and yet. . . not in the interest of the Republican Party alone. Even in this tumultuous excitement, we feel that. . . we are here in the interests of the people and all the people . . . of the country and the whole country.” And then Long said, “Gentlemen, I nominate the Honorable—aye! the Honorable—George F. Edmunds of Vermont.”

But the overwhelming, unforgettable event of the night was the nominating speech for Blaine and what it did to the audience. No one could remember having witnessed anything comparable. It was one of the most memorable events in the whole history of national political conventions. To some it was appalling. Andrew D. White called it a scene “absolutely unworthy of a convention of any party, a disgrace to decency.” Godkin, from what he was told, would dismiss it as “a mass meeting of maniacs.” Theodore, in a moment of calm reflection afterward, would concede to Bamie that it had been “most impressive.”

The speaker was a blind man, Judge William H. West from Bellefontaine, Ohio, a tall, gaunt, white-bearded figure in an ancient blue cloak that reached nearly to the floor, who was led to the stage and up the steps by a small boy. He “stood looking with his sightless eyes towards the vast throng,” wrote Theodore, “. . . his voice rang like a trumpet. . .”

He had been in Chicago in 1860, said the speaker. He had been there when they nominated Abraham Lincoln.

Four and twenty years of the grandest history in recorded times have distinguished the ascendancy of the Republican Party. The skies have lowered and reverses have threatened, but our flag is still there, waving above the mansion of the Presidency. . . . Six times, in six campaigns, has that symbol of union, freedom, humanity, and progress, been borne in triumph . . .

The cadence was Biblical and he looked as if he might have been present at the Creation.

Gentlemen, the Republican Party demands of this convention a nominee whose inspiration and glorious prestige shall carry the Presidency.... Gentlemen, three millions of Republicans believe that the man to accomplish this is the Ajax Telamon of our party, who made and whose life is a conspicuous part of its glorious history. Through all the conflicts of its progress, from the baptism of blood on the plains of Kansas to the fall of the immortal Garfield, whenever humanity needed succor or freedom needed protection or a country a champion, wherever blows fell thickest and fastest, there, in the forefront of the battle, was seen to wave the white plume of James G. Blaine, our Henry of Navarre. . . . Nominate him, and the campfires and beacon lights will illuminate the continent from the Golden Gate to Cleopatra’s Needle. Nominate him, and the millions who are now waiting will rally to swell the column of victory that is sweeping on. In the name of the majority of the delegates from the Republican States and their glorious constituencies who must fight this battle, I nominate . . .

But he never completed his sentence. It was as if the huge auditorium had been rocked by an explosion. The noise was horrendous. Delegates were cheering, screaming, stamping their feet, shouting at the tops of their lungs. They climbed onto chairs, leaped and danced about in the aisles, grabbed one another in great bear hugs and went spinning around in circles. There were hats spinning on the tops of canes held overhead, hats flying into the air. Bonnets, coats, canes, umbrellas, thousands of white handkerchiefs, were waving frantically. People were singing, weeping. Flags and banners were being stripped from the walls. The noise went on and on. It was “pandemonium universal and all-pervading,” a scene “never equaled and utterly indescribable.” And just when everyone’s energy seemed to have been spent, somebody came down the aisle and onto the stage carrying a huge American flag on a long staff at the top of which rode a helmet of pink and white roses surmounted by a waving snow-white plume, “the helmet of Navarre.”

“. . . James G. Blaine of Maine,” Judge West was able to exclaim at last, a half hour later, and then “another great roar went up like the noise of many waters, sweeping in great waves of sound around the hall, and the crowd without. . . answered in a muffled roar, which echoed within.”

Here and there on the floor, chiefly among the Massachusetts and New York delegations, could be seen small islands of silent men who sat with their arms folded and who, from the looks on their faces, might have been at a funeral.

Nothing said in the other speeches mattered greatly. Everything after the West speech was anticlimactic and by the time it was decided to adjourn, the hour then being past midnight, there was little doubt as to what would happen the next morning.

Yet once again Theodore and Lodge worked through the night. As a last-ditch effort they tried to unite the Arthur and Edmunds forces behind John Sherman, working behind closed doors with an Ohio delegate, a political nobody who was also attending his first convention and learning a great deal, Mark Hanna. Another idea was to stampede the convention for Robert Lincoln.

“It is a life or death struggle for the Republican Party in Chicago,” wrote the editor of The New York Times as the paper was put to bed that night in New York. “. . . [Blaine’s] nomination means a disastrous defeat for the Republican Party, and from that defeat the party would never recover except under other leaders and perhaps another name. The party has assuredly fallen upon evil days.” The Times had decided at this late hour to support Robert Lincoln.

“It quickly degenerates into ‘anything to beat Blaine,’” said a Chicago reporter who was on the scene.

It is eager, bitter, and peculiar. Dudes and roughs, civil service reformers and office-holding bosses, shorthairs and college presidents—many men of various kinds of ambition or selfishness join in midnight conferences. . . . Logan refuses all combination. The Lincoln boom collapses. . . . To throw Arthur to Edmunds is impossible. To transfer Edmunds to Arthur is merely to send Logan and Sherman to Blaine. Logan will not have Edmunds; the Edmunds men do not want Logan. Arthur also prefers Blaine to Sherman . . .

The balloting began the morning of the fourth day, Friday, June 6, the hall as packed as the previous night. “It was a tumultuous crowd, but a very good-natured one [noted a Chicago reporter]. . . . Tally sheets are ready, pencils are out, the delegates who are still toiling with the weak and weakening the stubborn, hurry to their places, while the gavel keeps up its heavy staccato.”

Blaine did not win on the first ballot, nor the second, nor the third, but he kept gaining, while Arthur held steady and Edmunds kept slipping, so that by the end of the third ballot Blaine needed only thirty-six votes for the nomination. The opposition could only fight for time. Foraker moved to recess, and when a delegate from Pennsylvania challenged him, Theodore was up shouting that the motion was not debatable or amendable. Blaine people pushed their way across the stage to the chairman, surrounding him. Theodore and the Pennsylvania delegate stood on their chairs shouting at each other, but the noise of the crowd was so great it was impossible to hear what they were saying. Theodore, thrashing his arms in the air, “vociferated and gesticulated in a dramatic manner amid the cheers and jeers of the vast audience . . .” No one was seated any longer, most people were standing on their chairs. Theodore was trying to get on stage to ask a question, and getting nowhere until he thrust aside “several officious persons who were attempting forcibly to exclude him.” But then William McKinley, the conventions great conciliatory figure, emerged from the crowd on stage, raised a small, pale hand, and “lo! as if Canute had found the sea obedient, the Blaine men drop into their seats, wipe their brows and puff out their short breath. . . . The storm is over.”

“The gentlemen representing the different states here have a right to the voice of this convention upon this subject,” said McKinley in a resolute voice, “and, as a friend of James G. Blaine, I insist that all his friends shall unite in having the roll of states called ...”

A vote was taken on the move to adjourn and the Blaine forces voted it down.

So it was on the fourth ballot that Blaine carried the day, Logan released his Illinois delegation, 34 votes, to Blaine. Minutes later Ohio made it final.

The final vote for Blaine was 541; for Arthur, 207. Edmunds ended with only 41. In one of the galleries Carl Schurz took out his watch and remarked to a neighbor, “This is the hour and minute which will go down in history as marking the death of the Republican Party.”

The crowd was euphoric, as the night before, “crazy with rapture . . . sheer ecstasy.” The band was playing and somewhere in the distance a cannon boomed. There was a motion to make the nomination unanimous and William McKinley came pushing down the aisle to where Theodore and Curtis sat. He urged one or the other to go to the platform and speak for Blaine, but neither would budge. When Curtis shook his head, wrote one of the many reporters who were watching the whole interchange, it was not in anger but in sorrow. A reporter took hold of Theodore by the arm as he started toward the exit. He had nothing to say, Theodore insisted. His face was crimson, his “eyes flashed with indignation behind his gold-rimmed spectacles as he contemplated his first real defeat.”

“I decline to say anything ...”

“But you will certainly support Blaine, will you not?”

“That question I decline to answer. It is a subject that I do not care to talk about.”

“Will you not enter the campaign in the interests of the Republican Party?”

“I am going cattle ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and part of the fall. What I shall do after that I cannot tell you.”

He brushed off another reporter by telling him to wait a week. To the man from the Times he said that by tradition he was expected to support the nominee, but refused to say more.

“A grave would be garrulous compared to me tonight,” he told still another man, this one from the Boston Transcript, but then suddenly he said that picking Blaine was the greatest possible blunder—and that he would support him.

Lodge and Curtis were being besieged with the same questions. “Don’t hit a fellow because he’s down,” Lodge responded. “I think on the whole I may join the machine and keep in politics. This country is in such a hurry it can’t stop for reform.”

Curtis, in Theodore’s presence, said he had been a Republican too long to break from the party now.

The convention ended that evening with the naming of John A. Logan as Blaine’s running mate. Logan, a profane, contentious figure, had been an excellent commander in the Union Army and in politics a “thick-or-thin” Grant supporter. He was on the ticket to please the old Conkling crowd and to bring in the soldier vote. It was Logan who, in 1868, had conceived the idea of Memorial Day. Blaine, like Cleveland, had hired a substitute during the war.

At the White House Chester A. Arthur sent off a cable pledging his “earnest and cordial support.” Two weeks later, he would confide to a friend that he was indeed suffering from an advanced case of Bright’s disease and did not have long to live.

Jubilant crowds surged through the streets of Chicago most of the night, tying up traffic for blocks around the main hotels. Bonfires burned at several street corners; one, in front of the Vickers Theater, gave off such heat that passing horses were injured. Rockets flashed from housetops; “people—young and old—formed impromptu processions and marched . . . howling like madmen: ’Blaine, Blaine, hurrah for Blaine!’”

Bulletins reported similar demonstrations for Blaine in Pittsburgh, Dayton, Princeton. In San Francisco all business was suspended. The city had “gone wild.”

It was also that night, about midnight, according to one of the editors of the Evening Post, Horace White, that Theodore came into the Independent committee room at the Grand Pacific, where White was busy composing a dispatch to the New York office, predicting a revolt among the Independent Republicans. Theodore sat down, according to White’s account, and White read aloud what he had written, asking at the end if he had made it strong enough. No, he had not, said Theodore, his fury and fatigue having caught up with him. “If I were writing it, I would say, ’any proper Democratic nomination will have our hearty support.’” He thought the best Democrat would be Cleveland.

By midmorning the following day, Saturday, June 7, however, Theodore had packed and checked out. “ROOSEVELT TAKES TO THE WOODS,” scoffed a headline in the World. Roosevelt and Curtis, alone of all the delegates, had pouted and sulked like whipped schoolboys, said a Midwestern paper.

But then two days later came a report from St. Paul, Minnesota, quoting Theodore as saying, “I shall bolt the nomination of the convention by no means. I have no personal objections to Blaine . . . I believe Blaine will be elected. . . . I have been called a reformer but I am a Republican . . .” He had been interviewed by a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press during a stop en route to the Bad Lands. The story was picked up all over the East—the New York Tribune carried it on the front page—and so suddenly whether he was in or out of the party, with Blaine or against him, was cause for an uproar.

“ROOSEVELT’S RECANTATION REGARDED AS HIS POLITICAL DEATH WARRANT,” announced the World, while the Evening Post insisted the whole thing was a hoax and sent off a wire to Medora, in the Bad Lands, calling for a denial. The Times decided to say nothing of the reported statement, so certain were the editors that it was false.

“Theodore, beware of ambition!” observed the Daily Globe in Boston. The Evening Transcript speculated that the story was the work of “some bungling Western reporter” (a remark some readers of the Transcript probably considered redundant). “If Mr. Roosevelt’s remarks are reported aright,” declared the author of a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, “they are among the most startling effects of modern practical politics.”

The so-called repudiation from Medora was dated June 12, an enigmatic telegram saying, “To my knowledge had no interview for publication; never said anything like you report. May have said I opposed Blaine for public reasons not personal to myself.”

So cheered were the editors of the Boston Transcript by this news that they put out an extra edition.

On June 16 came another telegram, but again there was no telling where he stood on Blaine, whether he was bolting the party or not.

“Just saw my alleged St. Paul interview for the first time. It is wholly fictitious. I never was interviewed on this subject, and never said anything even approximately resembling what was reported.”

To the editors of the World it was all becoming wonderfully ludicrous.

The gallant young man rushed away from the Chicago convention full of heat and bitterness. Now that he has expanded his lungs with the rarefied air incident to the high altitudes of the earth and cooled his intellectual brow in the streams which flow down from regions of virgin snow he might confer a favor on mankind by simply saying explicitly whether he is for or against Blaine.

In Boston, meantime, the revolt had begun in no uncertain terms. A meeting of the Massachusetts Reform Club had been called at the Parker House the very next day after the nominations in Chicago. Blaine was denounced, and a committee was organized to work for his defeat in November. Charles W. Eliot and Theodore’s old classmate Josiah Quincy were principals in the movement. Most of those Theodore had known on the Harvard faculty were bolting the party (with the exception of Shaler, who was already a Democrat). Both James Russell Lowell and Richard H. Dana, his father’s two friends from the ’76 convention, were bolting.

In New York the Times ran columns of letters from Republicans who were joining the exodus. Schurz, Godkin, and the editors of the Times had already renounced Blaine, and so, too, by now had Curtis, who, in spite of what he said at Chicago and for all that the party had meant to him, was unable to go along with such a nominee. On June 14 Harper’s Weekly came out against Blaine. On July 5, in an editorial, Curtis put the magazine squarely behind Grover Cleveland, and when at Chicago the next week, the Democrats made Cleveland their candidate, the effect among influential Republicans exceeded anyone’s expectations. The staunchly Republican New York Times announced its support for Cleveland. Henry Ward Beecher was leaving the party. So was Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn. So was Theodore’s senior partner in the publishing business, George Haven Putnam, who called the Republican nominations “a farce and an absurdity, not to say an anachronism.” Even J. Pierpont Morgan was bolting. And along with Curtis, Schurz, Godkin, Lowell, Dana—all those with whom the elder Theodore had worked with such verve and conviction in ’76—there was even added the name of Benjamin H. Bristow.

Henry Cabot Lodge, who continued to say, as he had at Chicago, that he would stand by the nominee, was being denounced by old friends and admirers as little better than a traitor. He was no longer invited to dinner. Some in Boston who had known him all their lives were refusing even to speak to him. “Mr. Lodge maintains that he has changed his mind,” remarked one man. “I call it not a change of mind but a change of soul.” Schurz, in a kindly letter of advice, urged Lodge to come to his senses.

You are a young man. You have the great advantage of affluent circumstances. You have the promise of an honorable and useful career before you. . . . The course you are now in danger of following . . . will unite you more and more in fellowship with . . . the ordinary party politicians. The more you try to satisfy them the less you will satisfy yourself.

“Whatever the result of the election, the parties will remain,” Lodge answered Schurz with cold logic. “By staying in the party I can be of use. By going out I destroy all the influence for power and good I may possess. . . . If I am to be banned because I vote according to what I believe . . . I will fight against such treatment with all my strength.”

Lodge said later that he and Theodore had made a pact before Chicago to stand by the nominee even if it was Blaine, which is precisely what Theodore had told the Chicago Tribune he would do, the first morning at the Grand Pacific. It was also what he had told the Boston Transcript he would do within an hour after Blaine was nominated. But the last week in June, Lodge received a letter from the Bad Lands dated the seventeenth. “I am absolutely ignorant of what has been said or done since the convention,” wrote Theodore, “as I have been away from all newspapers for ten days. I hope soon to be back when I will see you and decide with you as to what we can do.”

A day or so later a second letter reached Lodge. He was heading east in another week, Theodore wrote, “as I wish to see you at once. You are pursuing precisely the proper course; do not answer any assaults unless it is imperatively necessary; keep on good terms with the machine, and put in every ounce to win.” He was writing under certain difficulties, Theodore said, being in a cattleman’s hut and having just spent thirteen hours in the saddle. In a postscript he repeated again that he had not seen a newspaper since leaving Chicago.

3

Without question, the Chicago convention was one of the crucial events of Theodore’s life, a dividing line with numerous consequences. He had carried the fight against Blaine with all that was in him, and if he had lost, if, as he told Bamie, it had been “an overwhelming rout,” no one could fault him for not trying, and the impression he had made in this first appearance on the national political stage was phenomenal. He was still all of twenty-five years old; it had been his first national convention. Yet from the first day he had proved himself a force to reckon with, by friend or foe, and the attraction he had for newspaper attention was the kind every politician dreams of. He was a natural politician. He had a born genius for the limelight, for all the gestures and theatrics of politics. In his undersized, overdressed way he had presence. Unquestionably, he had nerve.

He understood the part reporters play and knew exactly how to play to them. He was wonderful copy, easy—a pleasure—to write about, however one felt toward him. Also, for many who wrote about him, there was the underlying excitement of discovery: here was somebody with a future. In his best “notices” he was portrayed as “fearless,” “courageous,” “manly,” “tireless,” “plucky and unyielding,” as “the most interesting” man on hand, the “young chief,” as “an earnest direct speaker, who will be listened to whenever he speaks.” The Chicago Tribune, a Blaine paper, had called him “brilliant” and lauded his gallantry, placing him alongside Curtis as a standard of moral rectitude and character. He had been “young Casabianca Roosevelt [who] ’stood on the burning deck whence all but him fled’...” The Chicago Times called him very simply “the most remarkable young politician of the day,” and then made the point that he had had to get where he had in politics despite his background. “The advantage of being a self-made man was denied him. An unkind fortune hampered him with an old and wealthy family.”

Those who had fought for Edmunds with him—Lodge, Andrew D. White, John D. Long—had been enormously impressed. Andrew D. White, the Cornell president, would remember the rest of his life this “first revelation of that immense pluck and vigor . . . nothing daunted him.”

Possibly the most fervent of all admirers through the week at Chicago had been George William Curtis, who at lunch one day at the Grand Pacific is said to have pushed back from the table, placed his napkin beside his plate, waited a few seconds, then responded as follows to a reporters question about “young Roosevelt.”

You’ll know more, sir, later; a deal more. . . . He has integrity, courage, fair scholarship, a love for public life, a comfortable amount of money, honorable descent, the good word of the honest. He will not truckle nor cringe, he seems to court opposition to the point of being somewhat pugnacious. His political life will probably be a turbulent one, but he will be a figure, not a figurehead . . . or, if not, it will be because he gives up politics altogether.

As important as anything, as time would show, was the bond formed with Lodge. Chicago marked the beginning of the first lasting male friendship Theodore had ever made outside the family; and like another friendship also formed at that same convention—between McKinley and Mark Hanna—the political consequences were to be far-reaching.

In some respects Lodge was an improbable choice. Eight years Theodore’s senior, he struck most people as unbearably superior and fastidious, cold, calculating, a man who appeared to find any but his own patrician kind extremely distasteful. But Lodge was also fiercely loyal to his friends. He had tremendous energy, wide-ranging interests, a keen mind. He was a scholar, wellborn, wealthy. He loved history and literature, long walks, horses, and Harvard University. He was a fellow member of the Porcellian. By 1884 he had already published five books and yet was ambitious for a political career, despite his obvious handicaps. (He was called “Lah-de-dah Lodge,” among other things, and the sound of his voice was once compared to the tearing of a bed sheet.) Furthermore, he liked Theodore and let Theodore know it. They were fellow spirits in many respects and the difference in age made Lodge something of the big brother Theodore had never had. “I can’t help writing you,” he would tell Lodge some years later in a letter from New York, “for I literally have no one here to whom to unburden myself; I make acquaintances very easily, but there are only one or two people in the world, outside my own family, whom I deem friends or for whom I really care.”

And beyond all that Lodge was a fighter. “I have never been able to work so well with anybody before,” Theodore would tell him.

So . . . he had been in the roughest political fight of his experience and though beaten badly he had fought in a way no one would forget or that he need ever be ashamed of. He had commanded attention. He had found a friend, given a speech before the largest crowd he had ever seen, heard one speech he thought brilliant, heard another by a blind man whose voice “rang like a trumpet” and swept the convention. He had seen the voice of the people in action and had been both awed and a little appalled. But he had also perceived that Arthur failed because, as he wrote Bamie, Arthur had “absolutely no strength with the people.” Probably, he had drawn from the experience the lesson that in politics “strength with the people” is what ultimately counts. He was glad to have been present, he also told her; it had been a “historic scene.”

Interestingly, neither he nor any of those who wrote about him at such length ever mentioned the tragedy of February or the burden of grief he carried.

But the overriding importance of the Chicago convention for Theodore was that it marked the point at which he chose—had to choose—whether to cross the line and become a party man, a professional politician. He made no formal announcement of his support for Blaine until he had seen Lodge that July, but from all he had already said it is clear he knew what he would do even before leaving Chicago; he only needed, as he later said, time to cool down and think things over. Like Lodge, he was opening himself to heavy abuse from friends and from those admiring members of the press whose favor counted so much to him. Like Lodge, he could be accused of gross ambition, of moral backsliding, of betraying his own high-minded kind. And such condemnation could be extremely painful. Still, as he had said in a letter to Bamie soon after leaving Chicago, Blaine had been the “free choice of the great majority” of Republicans. It had been a fair fight, and while he found Blaine repellent, there was something about stalking off, quitting the game because he lost, that was even more repellent, quite apart from whatever personal ambition he harbored. He had no sentimental attachment to majority rule. “It may be,” he told Bamie, “that ’the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty-one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty-nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.” But voice of God, devil, fool, whatever it was, he must abide by it, both out of some fundamental sense of fair play and out of plain determination to have a stake in political power. If he bolted, he knew, he would be finished, out of politics except in some chance or peripheral fashion. He would be an outsider, devoid of that “inside influence” he knew to be essential if he was ever to accomplish anything. He had arrived at the point where he must decide whether he was to be a “mornin’ glory” or the real thing.

A writer of the day, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, who kept close watch on Theodore’s career and became a later-day confidant, said that with the nomination of Blaine, Theodore confronted “what in many respects was the most serious crisis of his career. . . . He insisted upon deciding the question himself, and in his own way and time.”

Similarly, a kinsman, the author Nicholas Roosevelt (son of Cousin West), was to write years later, “After watching American party politics closely for more than half a century. I am of the opinion that if TR had run out on the party in 1884, his political career would have been finished then and there.”

Yet apart from the more obvious difficulties of the decision, there was the break it meant for Theodore with so much that his father had stood for. He was severing himself from his father’s approach to public service, deserting his father’s old friends, all the people his father had so admired. It was now, far more than when he entered the legislature, that he was taking the step his father would almost certainly have disapproved. Had Blaine or Conkling been nominated at Cincinnati in ’76, there is little doubt what his father would have done.

Two years before, in February 1882, Theodore had written what, in the context of his decision on Blaine, is a very important letter. It was addressed to an old friend and admirer of his father s, the noted philanthropist and reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell.

I honestly mean to act up here [in the Assembly] on all questions as nearly as possible as I think Father would have done, if he had lived. I thoroughly believe in the Republican Party when it acts up to its principles—but if I can prevent it I never shall let party zeal obscure my sense of right and decency. What my success as a politician may be I do not care an atom: but I do wish to be able to end my work here with an entirely light heart and clear conscience.

The most striking and appropriate example of what would most likely have happened to him, had he bolted, is the case of Seth Low. Low refused to support Blaine, maintaining he was not a Republican mayor but the mayor of all the people in Brooklyn. As a consequence he never again received the wholehearted backing of the Republican organization, and his political career never came to much.

Theodore spent three days in New York with Bamie and his child, then several days at Chestnut Hill with the Lees before going to Lodge’s summer home at Nahant on Boston’s North Shore. The two of them spent a warm Friday evening sitting on a porch looking at the sea and talking until quite late. The following day, Saturday, July 19. Theodore made his statement to the Boston Herald.

I intend to vote the Republican presidential ticket. While at Chicago I told Mr. Lodge that such was my intention; but before announcing it, I wished to have time to think the whole matter over. A man cannot act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he cannot possibly do both. . . . I went in with my eyes wide open to do what I could within the party; I did my best and got beaten; and I propose to stand by the result. . . .

I am by inheritance and by education a Republican; whatever good I have been able to accomplish in public life has been accomplished through the Republican Party; I have acted with it in the past, and wish to act with it in the future . . . I am going back in a day or two to my western ranches, as I do not expect to take part in the campaign this fall.

People like William Roscoe Thayer felt “dumbfounded.” “We thought of him as a lost leader,” Thayer remembered. Owen Wister was convinced Theodore had come under the maleficent influence of Lodge, “his evil genius.” At the State Street offices of Lee, Higginson and Company, where he was working as a clerk in the vaults, Wister overheard Henry Lee remark to George C. Lee, “As for Cabot Lodge, nobody’s surprised at him; but you can tell that young whippersnapper in New York from me that his independence was the only thing in him we cared for, and if he has gone back on that, we don’t care to hear anything more about him.”

In New York he was denounced as “a crank and a nuisance.”

Young men like Mr. Roosevelt owe all their force in politics not to party fidelity [wrote the Evening Post], but to popular confidence in their absolute integrity. . . . In fact, the function of such men is to stand firm against bursts of party folly or baseness, until the popular conscience has time to act. . . . There is no ranch or other hiding place in the world in which a man can wait for Blaine and the Mulligan letters to “blow over,” for they will never blow over until justice is done.

Alone of those who had bolted, George William Curtis admitted privately that Theodore, in staying with the party, had “played the game fairly.”

Theodore seemed immensely relieved, once the step had been taken. “Most of my friends seem surprised to find that I have not developed hoofs and horns,” he wrote Lodge jauntily from New York before leaving again for the West. Next, he was writing from his ranch. “You would be amused to see me, in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.” He had changed his mind about the fall campaign, he said. Lodge could count on his help.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Glory Days

1

The cowboy as folk hero was still an emerging phenomenon in the 1880s, at the time Theodore went west. The mythic figure of present understanding had yet to take shape in the popular mind—the success of the dime novel and the new Wild West shows notwithstanding—largely because Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, the first true “western,” was still in the future, as were the magazine illustrations and paintings of Frederic Remington and Theodore’s own books and articles. For it was these three upper-class “Ivy League” easterners, Wister and Roosevelt of Harvard, Remington of Yale, in their efforts to catch “the living, breathing end” of the frontier, who produced what in most respects remains the popular version of the “real West” and its leading player, the cowboy. In New York, meantime, as Clarence Day relates in Life with Father, a small boy of proper upbringing could still be informed by an all-knowing parent that cowboys were no better than tramps, wild fellows who put up with dreadful food and the worst possible accommodations.

But a ranchman (also called cattleman or stockman) was quite another matter, as Theodore was to stress in the first of two books on his time in the West, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which was to be published in a limited, exceedingly elegant quarto-sized edition priced at an unheard-of $15, and dedicated “To that keenest of sportsmen and truest of friends, my brother Elliott Roosevelt.”

Part of the mark of the ranchman was his attire, which, though similar to that of a cowboy, was of considerably finer materials, as Theodore explained. A ranchman’s saddle, bridle, spurs, revolver, and the like were all of the first quality. A ranchman spoke (or wrote) of his men, his herds, and the quantity of horses he maintained (”on my own ranch there are eighty”). A ranchman had ample time for hunting and good books. (”No ranchman who loves sport can afford to be without Van Dyke’s Still Hunter, Dodge’s Plains of the Great West, or Caton’s Deer and Antelope of America . . .” Theodore wrote. “As for Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell, and the other standbys, I suppose no man, East or West, would willingly be long without them.”) It was a life, he said, closely akin to that of the old southern planters.

The great appeal, of course, was the freedom and “vigorous open-air existence.” It could do wonders for the spirit, wonders for one’s health. It was also quite fashionable at the moment, a point he need not stress to those who would pay the $15 for his book, and it could be extremely profitable, which he did mention in the second and far better book, though with a cautionary reminder that financial disaster, too, was possible. The danger was a severe winter, he wrote prophetically, in advance of the winter of 1886.

Theodore’s interest in the Dakota Bad Lands probably began with Commander Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the former naval officer and audacious entrepreneur who in 1880 masterminded the transporting of Cleopatra’s Needle (a 69-foot monolith weighing 220 tons) from Egypt to Central Park, a daring, difficult, and justly celebrated feat. Gorringe had bought up an abandoned government cantonment located on the Northern Pacific Railroad where the railroad crossed the Little Missouri in upper Dakota Territory, just east of the Montana line, in the heart of the northern Dakota Bad Lands. The idea had been to establish a hunting camp for eastern sportsmen, along the lines of Paul Smith’s in the Adirondacks. And when Theodore made his initial trip to the Bad lands in 1883, to get his buffalo, he was to have gone with Gorringe, who for some unknown reason backed out at the last moment.

But it could have also been his publishing partner George Haven Putnam who first told Theodore about the Bad Lands and/or about Gorringe, since it was Putnam who put out The Great Northwest for the Northern Pacific Railroad, the book containing the first glowing account of the Bad Lands and their charms. Or if not Putnam, it could have been any of a number of others with an interest in cattle and the West, including his own father-in-law, George C. Lee, since Lee, Higginson and Company, like many eastern banks and investment firms, was much involved in the “beef bonanza.” Eastern and European money was going into cattle in a grand way and among those jumping in were numerous Roosevelt family friends and fellow Harvard men. The Wyoming ranch Theodore invested in earlier was known as the Teschemacher & DeBillier Cattle Company. Hubert E. Teschemacher and Frederic DeBillier were in the Class of ’82 at Harvard, Owen Wister’s class, and their partner Richard Trimble, a classmate of Theodore’s and fellow New Yorker, was probably the one who enticed Theodore into that venture and schooled him on the potential profits involved. Teschemacher had decided to become a ranchman after reading a newspaper article in Paris. Trimble was to be long remembered in Wyoming strolling among his cattle with a pet poodle.

A classmate named Sanford Morison was also “pioneering” in Dakota Territory near Edmunds. Robert Bacon, now employed at Lee, Higginson, had put money in the Teschemacher & DeBillier venture, as well as in another Wyoming outfit called Riverside Land and Cattle, which was currently paying dividends of nine and a half percent. Henry L. Higginson himself was involved with the great Union Cattle Company, as was Alexander Agassiz. In New York the Seligmans were major backers of the immensely profitable Pioneer Cattle Company, and Poultney Bigelow’s father, the diplomat John Bigelow, was another of those tied into Teschemacher & DeBillier. Abram Hewitt was involved in the Gorringe venture and the biggest and most publicized splash of all in the Bad Lands was being made by a young French aristocrat, one Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores, recently of the French cavalry, who was the husband of Medora von Hoffman, daughter of the Wall Street banker Louis A. (“Baron”) von Hoffman.

To be off to one’s ranch in the Wild West, or the ranch one had taken a “flier” in, or better still, to be just back from one’s ranch full of stories, looking brown and fit, was all the rage. Ranching was in the aristocratic tradition—requiring courage, horsemanship, offering deliverance from the tedium and pettiness of trade. It was adventurous. It was romantic. Ranching, wrote Theodore, had “little in common with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century. . . the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman.” The cowboys happened also to be much better fellows and pleasanter companions than, say, farmers or farm workers; “nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath.” Cowboys, “except while on . . . sprees,” were “quiet, rather self-contained men, perfectly frank and simple, and on their own ground treat a stranger with the most whole-souled hospitality . . .”

Hundreds, possibly as many as a thousand, “dudes” were scattered over the West and more would follow, drawn often by what Theodore was to write of the life and by his warning that it was a life soon to vanish. He wrote of the adversities to be prepared for (broiling heat, hailstorms, rattlesnakes), the kinds of horses to expect (very different from eastern mounts), of the stars at night and endless reaches of prairie, of the guns to bring.

Of course every ranchman carries a revolver, a long .45 Colt or Smith & Wesson, by preference the former. When after game a hunting knife is stuck in the girdle. This should be stout and sharp, but not too long, with a round handle. I have two double-barreled shotguns: a No. 10 chokebore for ducks and geese made by Thomas of Chicago; and a No. 16 hammerless built for me by Kennedy of St. Paul, for grouse and plover. On regular hunting trips I always carry the Winchester rifle, but in riding round near home, where a man may see a deer and is sure to come across ducks and grouse, it is best to take the little ranch gun, a double-barrel No. 16, with a 40-70 rifle underneath the shotgun barrels.

His description of his own ranch “home” on the Little Missouri was every man’s dream of a place in the West.

In the hot noontide hours of midsummer the broad ranch veranda, always in the shade, is almost the only spot where a man can be comfortable; but here he can sit for hours at a time, leaning back in his rocking chair, as he reads or smokes, or with half-closed, dreamy eyes gazes across the shallow, nearly dry riverbed to the wooded bottoms opposite, and to the plateaus lying back of them. Against the sheer white faces of the cliffs, that come down without a break, the dark-green treetops stand out in bold relief. In the hot, lifeless air all objects that are not nearby seem to sway and waiver. There are few sounds to break the stillness. From the upper branches of the cottonwood trees overhead—whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver and sigh all day long—comes every now and then the soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away . . .

Wister called it a “perfect picture.” Wister himself would be on his way in 1885, in search of health and big game in Wyoming, as guest of Teschemacher, DeBillier, and Trimble. “This life has a psychological effect on you,” Wister would write to his mother. “. . . You begin to wonder if there is such a place as Philadelphia anywhere.” His impression of cowboys at that time was that they were “a queer episode in the history of the country” and “without any moral sense whatsoever.”

The picture Theodore had given Lodge of his own ranchman’s costume was understated. He had spent a small fortune to look the part. Besides the big hat, the buckskin shirt, chaps, bridle, and silver spurs, he had fancy alligator boots, a silver belt buckle, beautifully tooled leather belt and holster, a silver-mounted bowie knife by Tiffany. His silver belt buckle was engraved with the head of a bear; the silver spurs had his initials on them. His Colt revolver was engraved with scrolls and geometric patterns and plated with silver and gold. On one side of its ivory handle were his initials; on the other side, the head of a buffalo to commemorate the one he shot in 1883. The buckskin shirt, all beautifully patterned and fringed, had been made to order by a woman in the Bad Lands and was part of a complete buckskin suit. He gloried in dressing up in his regalia and posing for pictures. He was in the saddle all day, he had told Bamie in June, “having a glorious time here.”

Returning from the East in midsummer he brought Bill Sewall along and Sewall’s nephew, Wilmot Dow, a rugged and resourceful man in his twenties, who, like Sewall, was an old companion from past hunting trips in Maine. They were to help out, now that he was expanding his operations. Looking the Bad Lands over, the large, homespun Sewall told Theodore it was no country for cattle. Theodore told him he was wrong and knew nothing about it. Sewall, in the privacy of a memorable letter to his family in Maine, described it as “queer country,” “a dirty country and very dirty people on an average” (so much for his impression of cowboys). “Tell the boys,” he continued, “they are better off there than here unless they could get hold with some rich man as we have and that is hard to do . . . tell all who wish to know that I think this [is] a good place for a man with plenty of money to make more, but if I had enough money to start here I never would come here.”

2

The Bad Lands cattle boom had begun in 1883, the year Theodore made his first visit and his initial $14,000 investment there. Several big Texas cattle companies, pushing their herds farther and farther north in search of new range lands, had discovered the Bad Lands, and because the Northern Pacific Railroad had also penetrated the area just then, and was eager to see it developed, the buildup of cattle and money came quickly. Experienced cattlemen and eastern and European money people alike saw at once that the Bad Lands were not all the name implied.

To French-Canadian fur trappers exploring the area a hundred years before, it had been les mauvaises terres à traverser—bad lands to travel through. It was as if the rolling prairie land suddenly gave way to a weird other world of bizarrely shaped cliffs and hummocks and tablelands, these sectioned and sliced every which way by countless little ravines and draws and by the broad, looping valley of the Little Missouri River, which, unlike the Big Missouri, flowed north and in summer was not much more than a good-sized stream. It was a region of “startling appearance,” “of strange confusion,” extending some two hundred miles along the river, a kind of Grand Canyon in miniature, the work of millions of years of erosion on ancient preglacial sediments. Stratified layers of clay, clays as pale as beach sand, were juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous dark seams of lignite. Some formations had the overpowering presence of ancient ruins. The leader of an early military expedition against the Sioux described the landscape as hell with the fires out—though in some places, where seams of lignite had caught fire, the ground literally smoldered.

George Armstrong Custer, who spent several days snowbound in the Bad Lands en route to the Little Big Horn in 1876, called it worthless country, and Frederic Remington, when he arrived for a first look some years after Theodore, saw it as “a place for stratagem and murder, with nothing to witness its mysteries but the cold blue winter sky.”

In an effort to make it a tourist attraction, the Northern Pacific tried renaming it Pyramid Park and described the geological curiosities to be found, along with the bracing air, the good shooting, and opportunity for some real “rough riding.”

But the cattlemen saw it differently from everyone. Unlike the other Bad Lands to the south (those of present-day South Dakota, which are geologically quite different), these were green along the river bottoms and green above, on the tops of the tablelands. “What a wondrous country it was for grass!” remembered the veteran cattleman John Clay of his first visit in the summer of ’83. There was “grass and more grass” in the bottom lands and up along sweeping valleys: little blue-stem grass, “good as corn for fattening,” and curly buffalo grass, “making unexcelled winter feed.” Men like Clay and greenhorn money people alike were “dazzled by the prospects.” The land was all public domain. The grass was free for the taking. There was water; and the very outlandishness of the terrain promised shelter from winter storms. Possibly fifty thousand cattle were driven into the Little Missouri basin that first summer alone.

The big Texas outfits included the Berry-Boice Cattle Company (the “Three-Sevens” brand), Towers & Gudgell (the “OX”), and the still larger Continental Land and Cattle Company (the “Hashknife”). These were “the real cattlemen.” The smaller ranchers were nearly all from the East or from Canada and Europe. They were primed on such newly published authoritative works as The Beef Bonanza: or How to Get Rich on the Plains, and they were mostly all young (Bill Sewall, who was not yet forty when he arrived, would be known as “the old Mennonite”). There were the four Eaton brothers from Pittsburgh, who had been among the earliest arrivals; A. C. Huidekoper was from Meadville, Pennsylvania, and was a kinsman of a Harvard classmate of Theodore’s, Frank Huidekoper. Gregor Lang and his teenage son, Lincoln, were from Scotland and had the financial backing of Sir John Pender of London. Lloyd Roberts was from Wales; Alfred Benson was an Englishman; Laval Nugent was the son of an Irish baronet; J. A. Van Eeghan, son of a prominent Dutch family, was “wayward but attractive,” a fine musician, and could supposedly wire New York for money anytime he wished.

It was at Gregor Lang’s ranch that Theodore had put up during his initial visit in ’83, and it was from conversations with Lang, Howard Eaton, and two young Canadians named Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield that he had decided to join forces with the Canadians, whose rude cabin beside the Little Missouri was known as the Chimney Butte or, alternatively, the Maltese Cross Ranch. Theodore had handed over a check for $14,000 to buy 450 head of cattle, a small start, but the direct, trusting way he did it made an impression. “All the security he had for his money,” remembered Sylvane Ferris, “was our honesty.”

He bought no land, then or later. Like everybody in the area but the young Marquis de Mores, he was a squatter. And then, after just two weeks, he had been on his way home, having killed his buffalo and all but killed his guide, Joe Ferris, a brother of Sylvane. The chase had carried them pell-mell for seven days over some of the wildest, most difficult terrain in the Bad Lands. Twice they found a buffalo and each time Theodore had shot and missed. Exhausted by the pace Theodore set, Ferris kept praying things would get so bad they would have to give up. It rained incessantly, but Theodore’s joy was not to be extinguished; every new adversity seemed a refreshment. It was Fresh Pond all over again, Theodore exclaiming, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” For two days they had nothing to live on but biscuits and rainwater. Remembering the expedition long afterward, Ferris would be no less incredulous. “You just couldn’t knock him out of sorts. . . . And he had books with him and would read at odd times.” When at last he shot his buffalo, just over the Montana line, Theodore broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars. “I never saw anyone so pleased in all my life,” remembered Ferris.

The dominant figure, the dominant force and center of attention in the Bad Lands, however, was the Marquis de Mores, who on April Fools’ Day in 1883, or six months before Theodore first appeared on the scene, cracked a bottle of Mumm’s champagne over a tent peg to found the town of Medora, named in honor of his wife. He had plans far more ambitious than mere cattle ranching, as he announced; he had come to found an enterprise unlike any in the West. “It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours,” said the deadly serious Frenchman in his nearly perfect English.

He was just Theodore’s age and like Theodore a passionate lover of hunting and the outdoors. Other than that, they had little in common. The Marquis was tall, spare, and supremely fit, a product of St. Cyr and of Saumur, regarded as the finest cavalry school in the world. He was a superb horseman, a crack shot. Included with his baggage the day he arrived on the Northern Pacific was a silver-headed bamboo walking stick filled with ten pounds of lead—to exercise his dueling arm, it was explained. One held the stick straight out at arm’s length for several slow counts, “thusly.” He was black-haired, dark-eyed, his handsomeness the most obvious thing about him, but it was a handsomeness of the Victorian stage-villain variety, to judge by the pictures we have. His tremendous black mustache was waxed to perfection.

In duels in France, he had already killed two men. Seen heading off on one of his forays along the Little Missouri, he looked like a mounted arsenal—weighed down with two huge Colt revolvers, two cartridge belts, a heavy-caliber rifle cradled in one arm, a bowie knife strapped to one leg. He was as well a professed anti-Semite, a devout Roman Catholic, and a royalist who liked to tell his new neighbors of his aspirations to the French throne and how the fortunes he would pile up in the Bad Lands were to be applied to that purpose.

Theodore seems not to have encountered the Marquis in person until his return in 1884, by which time the Marquis’s town and enterprise were much in evidence.

His plan was to revolutionize the beef industry by butchering cattle on the range, there in the Bad Lands beside the railroad, and thus eliminate the cost of shipping live animals all the way to Chicago. That dressed meat could be transported almost any distance in the new refrigerator cars without spoilage had already been demonstrated. So, the Marquis reasoned, why not put the packing plant where the cattle were? It would do away with the Chicago middlemen, which would mean lower prices for the consumer, which in turn would produce an ever greater demand for beef.

He had picked the eastern side of the river for his site, just back from the Northern Pacific’s bridge, and directly across from the old cantonment. His wife, it appears, had been provided by her father with an income of $90,000 a year, and this plus backing from his own family gave him, as he said, little worry over finances. He himself would head the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, while his father-in-law, Baron von Hoffman, was listed as treasurer.

He brought in hundreds of carpenters and masons to build his town and packing plant. He drew up plans, ordered equipment. Within a year or less he had bought up twenty-one thousand acres of land. He bought cattle, brought in twelve thousand sheep, and announced plans to raise cabbages, these to be fertilized with offal from the packing plant and shipped east in his refrigerator cars. He was not wanting in imagination. Another idea was to produce pottery from Bad Lands clays. Yet another was to ship Columbia River salmon from Portland to New York, at a profit of $1,000 a carload according to his estimates.

He had intended originally to make do in a tent until his own house was ready, but finding the tent a bit more inconvenient than expected, he had a private railroad car delivered and put on a siding. “I like this country,” he remarked to one of his employees, “because there is room to turn around without stepping on the feet of others.”

But in fact he seemed incapable of doing anything without stepping on feet or sensibilities. The West, despite its aura of freedom, its apparent absence of rules and regulations, was a place—an economy, a way of life—based on very definite rules, mostly all unwritten. If there was nothing illegal or even illogical about bringing in sheep or buying up land in country where nobody else owned any or believed in owning any, it conflicted with local custom and was thus, by the prevailing ethic, extremely dangerous. Worst of all, he had begun fencing his land, and when fences were cut, as he had been warned they would be, he as quickly replaced them. When three drunken cowboys shot up the town and vowed to kill him on sight, he prudently took a train back to Mandan to ask the territorial justice of the peace what he ought to do. “Why, shoot,” he was told.

The next time the same threesome went on a rampage, the Marquis and his men were waiting by a bend in the river outside of town. It may have been an ambush—cold-blooded murder as Theodore’s friends the Langs said—or it may have been self-defense as the Marquis pleaded in court. Either way, one of the three cowboys, a skinny, long-legged nineteen-year-old named Riley Luffsey, was dead with a bullet in his neck. The Marquis was acquitted after two highly publicized hearings in Mandan and resumed his projects as before, acting as though he were unaware of how many now despised him. Medora grew by leaps and bounds, becoming overnight one of the wildest cow towns in the West, the sort of place, as Theodore once remarked, where pleasure and vice were considered synonymous. But it also had a hotel and a brick chapel built for Madame de Mores, a brick house with a picket fence to accommodate father-in-law von Hoffman during his visits, and a breezy little newspaper, The Bad Lands Cow Boy, the mission of which was “to preach King Cattle to all men.”

“Again and again is the fitness of the Bad Lands for a cattle country brought to our notice [declared the paper in an early issue]. . . . We have yet to hear of a solitary head ever having died in the Bad Lands from exposure.”

There are now in the Bad Lands many cattle men who have had experience in every cattle country in the United States [read another item]. . . . We have questioned many of them and the invariable answer has been that nowhere in the United States is there a better cattle country than the Bad Lands.

And what was good for beast was good for man, claimed the editor-publisher, twenty-two-year-old Arthur T. Packard, who was newly graduated from the University of Michigan. “There is a wonderful amount of electricity in this atmosphere,” he explained. “... This prevalence of electricity is doubtless one cause of the great vitality of anyone who lives in this climate. It takes hard and continued labor to tire a man in this country, and then a rest of a few minutes is sufficient to completely restore his energies. No one feels that lassitude so common in the East.”

Most important of all, by the summer of 1884, a gigantic, up-to-date packing plant was in operation. Cattle were being slaughtered; dressed Bad Lands beef was rolling east in the Marquis’s new refrigerator cars. It was all but impossible not to be impressed. In New York, in an article about the Marquis and his efforts, the Times described Medora as a “thriving, bustling” town with nearly one thousand people and a big future. It had become obvious to everyone “that the foreigner was not so crazy after all.” The Marquis, said the Times, was a man of “good sense” who ran a “wonderful business,” and in time would become “one of the great millionaires of the country.”

“Before long some of my wealthy friends in France will come over to build tanneries, glue factories and horn works, and so establish interests that will tend toward a speedy development of the country,” a reporter for the World was told by the Marquis, who when not in the Bad Lands lived at the fashionable Brunswick Hotel on Fifth Avenue. “My neighbors are all wealthy American ranchers. . . . We all work together and are on the best of terms.”

He had completed his own house, “the château,” as everyone in Medora called it, and Madame de Mores was in residence much of that summer. In truth, the château was an oversized frame farmhouse. There was nothing especially grand about it, except that it was large (twenty-six rooms), and since it stood in full view of town on top of a bare promontory across the river, it looked even larger. It was painted a light gray, with red shutters and a red roof. A deep porch stretched around two sides. And once the Madame’s big square piano had arrived by train from St. Paul and a staff of twenty servants had taken up their duties, it became in the minds of the local citizenry as much a château as any on the Loire.

The Madame was small and pretty, with fine features and an abundance of dark-red hair. In country almost devoid of women, she would have been talked about endlessly and regarded as a great lady however modest her attainments. But she was a superb horsewoman, spoke several languages (seven, allegedly), painted in watercolors, played Liszt and Verdi on the big piano. A local woman remembered her as “one of the most dignified, stately, and aristocratic women I ever met.” Perched sidesaddle on one of the magnificent mounts the Marquis had also had shipped from the East, with her face shielded from the fierce Dakota sun by a huge black “sugar loaf” sombrero, the Madame looked not much bigger than a child. Yet she was reputedly a better shot than her husband (he insisted she was), and on a hunting expedition with him in the Big Horns, she killed three bears, including a grizzly. He had a special hunting coach built for her, equipped with folding bunks, kitchen, china, silver, and linens.

Gregor Lang and his son, who detested the Marquis—it was they who buried Riley Luffsey the day after the killing—had warned Theodore about him, but Theodore maintained a cordial, if somewhat formal, relation, as was befitting two gentlemen. They had attended a meeting of the local stockmen’s association held at the railroad depot that June and later took a few days out to go by train together to Miles City, Montana, to volunteer for a vigilante campaign against rustlers and horse thieves, but were turned down because their faces were too well known. Theodore was a dinner guest at the château on several occasions as time passed, and the Marquis and Madame de Mores, we also know, dined with Theodore and Bamie at Bamie’s house in New York. Meals at the château were prepared by a French chef, served on the Madame’s blue Minton china, and accompanied by selections from her husband’s wine cellar. With her travels (she had met the Marquis in Cannes) and culture, not to mention her love of shooting, she must have been a very refreshing note for Theodore. Bamie, years later, would remark that “Theodore did not care for the Marquis, but he was sorry for his wife . . .”

Theodore had told Bamie in June that the outlook for making a business success of ranching was ”very” hopeful. “This winter I lost about 25 head, from wolves, cold, etc.; the others are in admirable shape, and I have about a hundred and fifty-five calves. I shall put on a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business.” With such confidence and excitement in the air at Medora, with the buildup the Marquis was getting in the eastern papers, one could hardly blame him. Like his sisters and brother, he had also by now come into his share of Mittie’s trust fund, some $62,500. So at a stroke he more than doubled his investment in cattle, sinking an additional $26,000 into another one thousand head. But while this represented a very serious commitment on his part—a full $40,000, or roughly twenty percent of his total resources—his was still a small operation compared to some others. According to the county census of the following year, he was running some forty-five hundred head of his own, while such outfits as Berry-Boice and Towers & Gudgell were running four to six times that number.

In August, with Sewall and Dow on hand, he established a second ranch, known as the Elkhorn, where he and they could live to themselves, rather than with Merrifield and Ferris at the Maltese Cross. Like the Eaton brothers’ Custer Trail Ranch and the Langs’ ranch, the Maltese Cross was south of Medora and only seven miles out. The new spot he had found was in the opposite direction, north, or downstream on the river, and more than thirty miles from town, the packing plant, and the railroad. His nearest neighbors would be ten to fifteen miles away. He wanted to be off to himself where he could write, and it was the ranch house Sewall and Dow built for him there, in a clump of cottonwoods by a bend in the river, that he was to describe at length in such passages as the one quoted earlier. It was begun in October, after Theodore had left again for the East, and by Bad Lands standards it was sumptuous, with eight rooms, numerous windows, a stone fireplace, and a cellar that Theodore was to use as a darkroom for processing his photographs. “I designed the house myself,” Bill Sewall would remember proudly, “and it was a sizable place, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and seven feet high, with a flat roof and a porch where after the day’s work Theodore used to sit in a rocking chair, reading poetry.”

The other ranchers called him Theodore or Roosevelt; the cowboys, Mr. Roosevelt, as he wished, or Four-Eyes or Old Four-Eyes out of hearing, and their initial impressions were about what one would have expected. Once, in an effort to head off some stray calves, he immortalized himself along the Little Missouri by calling to one of his cowboys, “Hasten forward quickly there!”

He was only an average rider and never learned to handle a rope very well, as he would readily admit. But there came a moment one night in a bar across the Montana line in what was then known as Mingusville (present-day Wibaux) when he stood up and in quiet, businesslike fashion flattened an unknown drunken cowboy who, a gun in each hand, had decided to make a laughingstock of him because of his glasses. Theodore knocked him cold with one punch. As Theodore later explained, the man had made the mistake of standing too close to him and with his heels close together.

After the “saloon incident,” he was looked on with new respect—it “gained him some reputation,” as Bill Sewall said. But more important as time went on, he “did all the regular work of the cowboy,” “worked the same as any man,” asking no favors and never complaining. Sewall, who had known him since he was eighteen, spoke of him in letters home as “a very fair fellow” and “as good a fellow as ever.” “He worked like the rest of us,” Sewall would recall, “and occasionally he worked longer than any of the rest of us, for often when we were through with the day’s work he would go to his room and write.”

Once, seeing one of his ablest cowboys about to put the Maltese brand on an unbranded stray found on Gregor Lang’s range, Theodore dismissed him on the spot. The cowboy could not understand. “A man who will steal for me will steal from me,” Theodore said. “You’re fired.”

Sometimes that first year, as Bill Sewall also remembered, Theodore could become “very melancholy... very much down in spirits.” It made no difference what became of him, he told Sewall; he had nothing to live for.

“‘You have your child to live for,’ I said. ’Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can,’ he said. ’She never would know anything about me, anyway. She would be just as well off without me.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ’... you won’t always feel that way... you won’t always feel as you do now and you won’t always be willing to stay here and drive cattle . . .”

Whatever it was Theodore felt for the Bad Lands was quite beyond Sewall. Anybody who preferred such a place to the East, Sewall wrote his brother, “must have a depraved idea of life or hate himself or both.”

Theodore saw grandeur and mystery. The Bad Lands were “dreary and forbidding,” they were “as grim and desolate and forbidding as any spot on earth could be,” and he felt he belonged. “The country is growing on me, more and more,” he had written Bamie in June, “it has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own . . .” The Bad Lands looked, he decided, the way Poe sounds.

The words “loneliness” and “solitude” appear repeatedly in what he wrote. He writes again and again of “great dreary solitude” and “melancholy pathless plains,” “the deathlike stillness.” “Nowhere,” he writes in 1884, “not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. . . . Nowhere else does one seem so far off from all mankind ...”

Loneliness and desolation, a sense of exile, were old themes in the literature of the West, literature he knew and loved. Parkman, to whom he would dedicate one of his own later works, wrote in The Oregon Trail of “something impressive and awful” about the prairie. Parkman, the first Harvard man to venture beyond the Mississippi and go home to write about it, had found “something exciting in the wild solitude of the place.” Parkman, before Theodore was born, had written of “green undulations like motionless swells of the ocean”; Theodore writes that “the grassland stretches out in the sunlight like a sea.” “The very shadow of civilization lies a hundred leagues behind,” wrote Parkman. “Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age long past,” Theodore says.

“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie!” was the cowboys’ song.

But in some of what he wrote it is as if Theodore has found a way at last to unburden what he could never talk about. The voice of a mourning dove in his own cottonwoods seems ever “far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.” And later, having seen winter there, he would write:

When the days have dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seem never-ending, then all the great northern plains are changing into an abode of iron desolation. Sometimes furious gales blow out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger. They roar in a thunderous bass as they sweep across the prairie or whirl through the naked canyons; they shiver the great brittle cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that cluster in the gorges sing like the chords of an Aeolian harp. Again, in the coldest midwinter weather, not a breath of wind may stir; and then the still, merciless, terrible cold that broods over the earth like the shadow of silent death seems even more dreadful in its gloomy rigor than is the lawless madness of the storms. All the land is like granite; the great rivers stand still in their beds, as if turned to frosted steel. In the long nights there is no sound to break the lifeless silence. . . .

But as in the summer following his father’s death, this in the West also had its flights of exhilaration, of pure soaring exuberance more than matching the depths of his other moods. Again he is incapable of holding himself down. Something within refuses to be subdued. In the West, in his gaudy regalia, on his horse, he can be something entirely different from the man he had been.

He was on the frontier he had dreamed of and imagined for as long as he could remember, living a life free of more than just fences. More even than Harvard or politics it was a world without women. Background, family, all the conventions of polite society, counted for nothing. Nobody knew him; nobody knew his family or cared particularly. “Everybody in New York has always known everybody,” wrote Edith Wharton, describing “the tight little citadel” of the New York they both knew so well. Here everybody was a stranger and liked it that way. It was customary not to ask too many questions about a man’s past. “What was your name in the States?” another old song began. In Medora alone there were three men who went by the name Bill Jones. Antecedents counted for nothing and Theodore felt himself a new man. “You would be amused to see me . . .” he had written to Lodge, which was another way of saying, “You would hardly know me.” He felt, he wrote, “as absolutely free as a man could feel.”

Life here was elemental, he said. He was constantly in the midst of birds and animals. The letters and literary efforts alike are filled with deer, antelope, buffalo, bighorn sheep, pack rats and mice, the howling of wolves at night, birds on the wing, birds stalking the mud flats of the river, a great golden eagle, the gaudy black-and-white magpies that are so common to the Bad Lands, meadowlarks that sang like no meadowlarks he had ever heard: “this I could hardly get used to at first, for it looks exactly like the Eastern meadowlark, which utters nothing but a harsh disagreeable chatter. But the plains air seems to give it a voice . . .”

Most marvelous of all was his horse, Manitou. Manitou was the “best and most valuable animal on the ranch,” “a treasure,” “as fast as any horse on the river,” “very enduring and very hardy,” “perfectly sure-footed,” “willing and spirited.” There was never such a horse as “good old Manitou” and there were never such mornings as those of the “long, swift rides” over the prairie with his men, when Manitou carried him on and on endlessly in the “sweet, fresh air,” under a crystal sky . . .

and the rapid motion of the fiery little horse combine to make a man’s blood thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lightheartedness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness and freedom of the life he is leading. As we climb the steep sides of the first range of buttes, wisps of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the valley; when we come out on the top of the first great plateau, the sun flames up over its edge, and in the level, red beams the galloping horsemen throw long, fantastic shadows. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough . . .

From the Elkhorn to the Maltese Cross Ranch was a distance of forty miles. And it was all extremely “rough riding.” To get from the Elkhorn to Medora, following the river, meant crossing and recrossing the river more than twenty times. One day, as he told Bamie proudly, he covered seventy-two miles between dawn and darkness.

“I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition of mine,” he tells her at another point. “We are so very rarely able to, actually and in real life, dwell in our ideal ’hero land,’” he tells Corinne.

What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch-fires, I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life [Captain Mayne Reid had written]. . . . It grew upon me apace. The dreams of home began to die within me; and with these, the illusory ideas of many a young and foolish ambition. Died away, too—dead out of my heart—the allurements of the great city—the memory of soft eyes and silken tresses . . . all died away, as if they had never been, or I had never felt them!

My strength increased both physically and intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and a vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action. My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied that my eyes reached to a more distant vision. I could look boldly upon the sun, without quivering in my glance.

With his horse and his Winchester rifle, he felt like a figure from other days; and the rifle, like the horse, was the finest thing of its kind and of greatest importance to him. It was a lever-action 45-75 Winchester (Model 1876) that had been custom made to his specifications—”stocked and sighted to suit myself.” It was engraved with deer and buffalo and antelope, but more than that, “the best weapon I ever had . . . handy to carry, whether on foot or on horseback . . . comes up to the shoulder as readily as a shotgun . . . deadly, accurate . . . unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded.” Not since his father presented him with his first gun had anything pleased him so much and not since the winter on the Nile had he known such shooting.

On August 18 he set out on an expedition to the Big Horns in Wyoming three hundred miles to the southwest. “How long I will be gone I cannot say,” he wrote Bamie. He took Bill Merrifield with him and a man named Lebo, who did the cooking and drove the team, and who at one point made the mistake of calling him Theodore, instead of Mr. Roosevelt, and was told not to do it again. They traveled by what Theodore described as a light prairie schooner drawn by two horses.

Days later, seeing a chance rider who agreed to serve as a mail carrier, Theodore wrote again to Bamie.

I am writing this on an upturned water keg, by our canvas-covered wagon, while the men are making tea, and the solemn old ponies are grazing round about me. I am going to trust it to the tender mercies of a stray cowboy whom we have just met, and who may or may not post it when he gets to “Powderville,” a delectable log hamlet some seventy miles north of us.

We left the Little Missouri a week ago, and have been traveling steadily some twenty or thirty miles a day ever since, through a desolate, barren-looking and yet picturesque country, part of the time rolling prairie and part of the time broken, jagged Bad Lands. We have fared sumptuously, as I have shot a number of prairie chickens, sage hens and ducks, and a couple of fine bucks—besides missing several of the latter that I ought to have killed.

Every morning we get up at dawn, and start off by six o’clock or thereabouts, Merrifield and I riding off among the hills or ravines after game, while the battered “prairie schooner,” with the two spare ponies led behind, is driven slowly along by old Lebo, who is a perfect character. He is a wizened, wiry old fellow, very garrulous, brought up on the frontier, and a man who is never put out or disconcerted by any possible combination of accidents. Of course we have had the usual incidents of prairie travel happen to us. One day we rode through a driving rainstorm, at one time developing into a regular hurricane of hail and wind, which nearly upset the wagon, drove the ponies almost frantic, and forced us to huddle into a gully for protection. The rain lasted all night and we all slept in the wagon, pretty wet and not very comfortable. Another time a sharp gale of wind or rain struck us in the middle of the night, as we were lying out in the open (we have no tent), and we shivered under our wet blankets till morning. We got into camp a little before sunset, tethering two or three of the horses, and letting the others range. One night we camped in a most beautiful natural park; it was a large, grassy hill, studded thickly with small, pine-crowned chalk buttes, with very steep sides, worn into the most outlandish and fantastic shapes. All that night the wolves kept up a weird concert around our camp—they are most harmless beasts.

As it turned out, they were gone nearly two months. They did not return until October 5. In that time Theodore shot and killed quantities of duck, grouse, prairie chickens, sage hens, doves, rabbits—more than a hundred birds and small game—as well as elk, deer, and bear. On August 29 he killed two blacktail bucks with a single shot and at a distance of more than four hundred yards. (“I went back and paced off the distance. . . . This was the best shot I ever made.”) He killed a blacktail doe, several elk, including a yearling calf, because, he later said, the party was in need of meat.

The blacktail buck, he wrote, was one of the most noble-looking of all deer. “Every movement is full of alert, fiery life and grace, and he steps as lightly as though he hardly trod the earth.” The bugling of the elk seemed such a beautiful, musical cry, he wrote, it was “almost impossible to believe that it is the call of an animal.” Yet he would kill either at any chance, he would drive himself to his physical limits to kill such animals, and to no one who was a hunter need he ever explain why. He was in the Big Horns when he shot his “best” elk of the trip, “killing him very neatly” at a distance of about seventy-five yards.

That was on September 12, somewhere along a branch of Ten Sleep Creek, at about nine thousand feet, the nearest sign of civilization being the army post at Buffalo, Wyoming. They had left their wagon behind twelve days earlier, packed into the mountains with supplies enough for two weeks. He shot the elk in the late afternoon, removed the head, and then, just before dark, crossing a patch of burned-over forest, he saw the “huge, half-human footprints” of a grizzly. The next day, September 13, he confronted “the great bear” and killed it.

“I was very proud over my first bear,” he would write in his Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. His brother, he said, had killed tigers in India, but never a grizzly, and though it would be “hard to say” which was the more savage, he himself was sure a grizzly, with its size and strength, its teeth as large as a tiger’s, its tremendous claws, could “make short work” of any tiger. And his, he stressed, was a “monstrous” bear, nearly nine feet in height, weighing about twelve hundred pounds. Until then neither he nor Merrifield had ever seen a grizzly, dead or alive.

Everything had happened very suddenly. It was all over in a matter of seconds. They had returned to where the elk was shot and found the bear had been feeding on the carcass during the night. From the size of the tracks they knew the bear was enormous. The tracks strayed off and they followed, moving noiselessly over a pine-needle forest floor, on and on in the half-light beneath tremendous pines. Presently, they picked up very distinct prints in the dust of a game trail that led across a hillside, where the terrain was broken by hollows and boulders. Then at a windfall, the trail veered off into a thicket. They could still follow the tracks, by claw-marks on the fallen trees and by bent and broken twigs.

They started slowly into the thicket and all at once there was the bear. Merrifield saw it first and Theodore, his rifle cocked, stepped forward. The bear was not more than twenty feet off, in among some young spruces. It turned and reared up on its haunches, then, seeing Theodore, dropped down again on all fours.

“I found myself face to face with the great bear,” he was to tell Bamie, “. . . doubtless my face was pretty white, but the blue barrel was as steady as a rock. . . I could see the top of the bead fairly between his two sinister-looking eyes; as I pulled the trigger I jumped aside out of the smoke, to be ready if he charged, but it was needless . . . as you will see when I bring home his skin, the bullet hole in his skull was as exactly between his eyes as if I had measured the distance with a carpenter’s rule.”

Between them, in the next few days, he and Merrifield killed three more grizzlies, including a cub that Theodore shot, as he noted, “clean through him from end to end.” And then, their horses loaded down with elk heads, antlers, bearskins, they started down out of the mountains and by September 19, having reached their wagon and repacked, set off on the three-hundred-mile trek back to the Bad Lands.

Three of the elk heads were magnificent, exactly the thing for the house at Oyster Bay, as he told Bamie.

So I have had good sport; and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent over much thought; and moreover I have at last been able to sleep well at night. But unless I was bear hunting all the time I am afraid I should soon get as restless with this life [as I] was with life at home.

I shall be very, very glad to see you all again. . . .

Long afterward he was to write, “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ’mean’ horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.”

3

In autumn in the Bad Lands the light is luminous, the immeasurable sky something to take the breath away. Cottonwoods along the Little Missouri are a blaze of gold. Then, in no time at all, autumn is over and winter descends, the Bad Lands are the end of the world.

A fierce north wind was blowing the sand so hard one could hardly see, Bill Sewall wrote as early as October 19,1884. In December the temperature hit 26 below, then one night it got down to 65 below. In February he was writing his brother in Maine, “I never saw cold weather till this winter.” He and Dow had the cabin finished and “my grit is good,” Sewall said, “but I believe it is a better country to live in at home than here . . .”

Theodore had gone East the first week in October, immediately upon returning from the Big Horns, to see his Baby Lee, as he called her, and to take a part in the Blaine campaign as he had promised Lodge he would. In November he was back again—Blaine had lost, Grover Cleveland had won, and Theodore, convinced his own political career was finished, had decided that it was definitely as a writer that the world would hear from him. This made his fourth trip to the Bad Lands in little more than a year and his first taste of a Dakota winter. But then he departed again before Christmas, not to return until spring.

In describing the ranchman’s “very pleasant” life, Theodore would stress that the ranchman, though bound on occasion to experience hard work and hardship, need not “undergo the monotonous drudgery attendant upon the tasks of the cowboy.” A ranchman had time for hunting expeditions of a month or more, for reading or writing. But some ranchmen had also—as he did not say—the choice of not being there at all, which is what he chose more often than not. His own Bad Lands years, as they were to be known, lasted from 1883 to 1886, but in that time he was unable to keep away from New York for more than a few months at a stretch. He crossed the continent on the Northern Pacific time after time, Pullman porters came to know him by name. He never “disappeared into the West,” as Wister put it. His time in the Bad Lands, taken altogether, added up to little more than a year and most of his best writing about his home on the range was written at home in the East. As Wister was to write The Virginian in Charleston, South Carolina, and Remington to do much of his best work in a studio in suburban New Rochelle, New York, so Theodore was to write of raging Dakota blizzards and spring roundups in his “house on the hill” at Oyster Bay. As it was for Wister and Remington, the West for Theodore was a fountain of inspiration, and it was not the length of time he spent there that mattered, but the intensity of the experience.

The most immediate and important benefit of his time in the Bad Lands was what it did to restore him in body and spirit. But he had also found a subject and, with it, found he could write as he had not before—not certainly in his naval history—with life and feeling. Some of his writing on the West was to be repetitious and overly sentimental. Still the scenes and events he pictures were drawn from direct experience, from real people, real places, all closely observed. If he was never really a cowboy, but (as he stressed) a ranchman, and largely an absentee ranchman at that, he did take what he saw greatly to heart, recognizing also that he had arrived at the very last hour, that the “great free ranches,” “the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live,” were about to vanish forever.

Returning in mid-April for a stay of two months, he “put on” another thousand head of cattle (at a cost of another $12,500), lunched with the Marquis at the château (they discussed the rigors of the Meadow Brook hunt), and then in mid-May he started south with his “outfit” to take part in his first spring roundup, as rugged a physical test as he had ever been put through in his life and the best chance he had thus far to see cowboys in action.

“Invariably he was right on the job holding his own with the best of them . . . with all his natural intensiveness,” Lincoln Lang remembered. “Riding circle twice a day, often taking the outer swing, taking his turn on day-herd or night-guard duty, helping with the cutting-out operations, branding calves . . . he was in the saddle all of eighteen hours per day . . . like the rest of us . . .” After a time, as he himself recalled, “all strangeness . . . passed off, the attitude of my fellow cowpunchers being one of friendly forgiveness even toward my spectacles.”

The roundup involved the Langs, the Eatons, the Huidekoper outfit, the “Three-Sevens,” and the “OX,” every ranch big or small in the Little Missouri basin, a hundred men or more, nearly a thousand horses, thousands upon thousands of cattle, taking in a territory of perhaps ten thousand square miles. It was, as A. C. Huidekoper remembered, “a very vivid affair . . . like a reunion . . . There is a great deal of life. . . . The ponies are fresh and some buck hard, the men shout, ’Stay by him,’ ‘Go to him,’ and if a man is thrown they shout with glee.” Breakfast was at three in the morning, dinner about ten o’clock in the morning.

By custom, the men drew straws for their horses at the start of the day and the morning Theodore drew a mean, bucking horse he climbed on and, as Lincoln Lang said, “gave us all an exhibition of the stuff he was made of . . . he had his grip and like grim death he hung on. . . . Hat, glasses, six-shooter, everything unanchored about him took the count. But there was no breaking his grip . . . he stuck ...”

“I rode him all the way from the tip of his ear to the end of his tail,” Theodore later remarked.

Thrown by another horse, he landed on a stone and broke a rib. Still another horse pitched over backward on him and broke something in the point of his shoulder, “so that it was some weeks before I could raise the arm freely.” Still he kept on, saying nothing of the pain. He appears never to have excused himself for any reason from any part of the work. He was “very thorough in whatever work was assigned to him [and]... game to the core,” remembered John Goodall, one of the Marquis’s men, who was foreman of the roundup. “He would grab a calf or a cow and help drag it right into the fire to be branded,” Bill Merrifield recalled. “He could rassle a calf just as good as anybody. He used to be all over dirt from head to foot.”

Some days he rode as much as a hundred miles. The dust and heat were terrific. On stifling hot evenings the mosquitoes would rise from the river bottoms in great clouds to make the nights “one long torture” for men and horses. One night in early June, when the roundup had reached a point a little south of the Maltese Cross, a lightning storm stampeded the herd. Theodore was among those on night duty and there was nothing a cowboy dreaded more, nothing so dangerous as a stampede at night.

For a minute or two I could make out nothing except the dark forms of the beasts running on every side of me, and I should have been very sorry if my horse had stumbled, for those behind would have trodden me down. Then the herd split, part going to one side, while the other part seemingly kept straight ahead, and I galloped as hard as ever beside them. I was trying to reach the point—the leading animals—in order to turn them, when suddenly there was a tremendous splashing in front. I could dimly make out that the cattle immediately ahead and to one side of me were disappearing, and the next moment the horse and I went off a cut bank into the Little Missouri. I bent away back in the saddle, and though the horse almost went down he just recovered himself, and, plunging and struggling through water and quicksand, we made the other side. . . . I galloped hard through a bottom covered with big cottonwood trees, and stopped the part of the herd that I was with, but very soon they broke on me again, and repeated this twice. Finally toward morning the few I had left came to a halt.

It had been raining hard for some time. I got off my horse and leaned against a tree, but before long the infernal cattle started on again, and I had to ride after them. Dawn came soon after this, and I was able to make out where I was and head the cattle back, collecting other little bunches as I went. After a while I came on a cowboy on foot carrying his saddle on his head. . . . His horse had gone full speed into a tree and killed itself, the man, however, not being hurt. I could not help him, as I had all I could do to handle the cattle. When I got them to the wagon, most of the other men had already come in and the riders were just starting on the long circle. One of the men changed my horse for me while I ate a hasty breakfast and then we were off for the day’s work.

By the time he had finished that “day’s work” he had been in the saddle nearly forty hours and worn out five horses. “I can now do cowboy work pretty well,” he wrote Lodge a day or so later.

In his next book, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, most of which appeared first as a series of articles in Century Magazine, these illustrated by Remington, he wrote of the cowboy with an appreciation not to be found in the work of previous writers. He was, as Wister said, the pioneer in taking the cowboy seriously. He wrote of their courage, their phenomenal physical endurance. He liked their humor, admired the unwritten code that ruled the cow camp. “Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty are not tolerated,” he observed. “There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one’s word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work.” It was, of course, exactly the code he had been raised on. (Recalling his father years later, he would use very nearly the same words: “He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.”) The cowboy was bold, cared about his work; he was self-reliant and self-confident. Perhaps most important of all, the cowboy seemed to know how to deal with death, death in a dozen different forms being an everyday part of his life.

It was not only to the meadowlark that the plains air gave new voice and spirit. Theodore was looking different, even sounding different from what he had. The change is cited in numerous surviving accounts and appears to have become obvious by the time the roundup ended. He himself was to describe the experience as “superbly health-giving.”

The spectacled dude who appeared on the scene the year before had been “a light little feller.” “I have seen him when you could have spanned his waist with your two thumbs and fingers,” remembered a cowboy named Roberts. From what Bill Sewall wrote, it appears Theodore had suffered from both asthma and stomach trouble that first year, and Bill Merrifield, recalling their hunting trip in the Big Horns, would tell how Theodore “ate heart medicine,” whatever that may have been. But after this Bad Lands spring of 1885—the point, by all signs, that marks the final turn in his lifelong battle for health—no such references are to be found again. He is even called “rugged” in an account in a St. Paul paper written in late June as he headed home again. “Rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health, Theodore Roosevelt passed through St. Paul yesterday, returning from his Dakota ranch to New York and civilization,” we read in the Pioneer Press. In New York later, in the Tribune, another reporter wrote of “his sturdy walk and firm bearing,” again attributes not to be found in previous accounts.

Theodore, remembered William Roscoe Thayer, had become “physically a very powerful man . . . with broad shoulders and stalwart chest, instead of the city-bred, slight young friend I had known earlier.”

When Theodore passed through Pittsburgh on the Chicago Limited later that summer, on his way back to Medora, another reporter thought he had put on perhaps thirty pounds. “But what a change. . . . The voice which failed to make an echo in the . . . [Albany] capitol when he. . . piped ’Mistah Speakah,’ is now hearty and strong enough to drive oxen.”

4

The summer of 1885 the Marquis was indicted again, taken to court still another time on the old Riley Luffsey murder charge, and again, after a travesty of a trial, he got off. But in the meantime, he was kept in jail at Mandan and the story was splashed across the newspapers east and west. Alone, brooding in his cell, the Marquis saw it all as a conspiracy by his business enemies—the Chicago beef trust—to destroy him, and in this he may have been partly correct. But his notion that Theodore, too, had a hand in his troubles was nonsense.

Rumors of bad blood between Theodore and the Marquis had circulated off and on since the time they both arrived in the Bad Lands and these were now picked up by the papers. Sometime that spring, apparently, Theodore and several of his men had delivered a hundred head of cattle to Medora only to find that the Marquis had decided to disregard the agreed-to price. There had been a moment when they stood face-to-face with a number of others looking on. Theodore had asked the Marquis if he had not quoted a higher price the day before and the Marquis said he had, but that there had since been a drop in the Chicago market. Theodore asked the Marquis if he was not going to stick to his original figure, and when the Marquis said no, Theodore said nothing, then turned and ordered that the animals be driven out of the yards and back to the range. Neither man, however, had since expressed any hard feelings over the episode and they had continued to exchange the usual pleasantries.

Numbers of local people claimed later that a showdown between the two had been inevitable all along and were they two figures in a western we would know it had to come. In what actually took place, however, it is the part played by the Marquis that is particularly fascinating, since it is so at odds with the whole violent pattern of his life.

Four days after he was imprisoned at Mandan, the Marquis sent Theodore a letter that Theodore immediately took to be a challenge to a duel. Conceivably the Marquis meant is as just that, but not likely; the whole tone of the letter suggests otherwise. It was dated September 3 and read as follows:

MY DEAR ROOSEVELT,

My principle is to take the bull by the horns. Joe Ferris [Theodore’s old hunting guide, now a storekeeper in Medora] is very active against me and has been instrumental in getting me indicted by furnishing money to witnesses and hunting them up. The papers also publish very stupid accounts of our quarreling—I sent you the paper to N.Y. Is this done by your orders? I thought you my friend. If you are my enemy I want to know it. I am always on hand as you know, and between gentlemen it is easy to settle matters of that sort directly.

Yours very truly,

Mores

I hear the people want to organize the county. I am opposed to it for one year more at least.

Plainly the Marquis wanted Theodore as a friend. Nor would a formal note designed to provoke a duel close with some offhand postscript about another wholly irrelevant subject. In any event, Theodore answered at once that he was emphatically not the Marquis’s enemy, but that if the Marquis was threatening him, then he, Theodore, stood “ever ready to hold myself accountable . . .”

But there was no duel because the Marquis kept his head and let the matter drop. Theodore was sure he had called the man’s bluff—the Marquis had “backed off,” he would later boast. Others, including several who had no use for the Marquis, were equally sure he had done nothing of the kind. “Whatever else is to be said for or against de Mores,” wrote Lincoln Lang, “even his worst enemy could not accuse him of cowardice . . .” The Marquis, it was argued, made nothing of Theodore’s response because the Marquis had never challenged him in the first place.

Had there been a duel—with rifles, pistols, swords (Theodore wanted Winchester rifles at twelve paces)—almost certainly Theodore would have been killed. So it can be fairly said for the Marquis that his unaccountably cool head in this instance spared Theodore for other things.

Passing through Mandan sometime later, Theodore took time out to go to the jail to see the Marquis and is said to have found him sitting on his bunk calmly smoking a cigarette, but nothing is known of what was said.

Life at the Elkhorn had changed considerably, meantime. Will Dow had gone home to Maine to be married and returned bringing his new bride, as well as Mrs. Sewall and the Sewalls’ small daughter, who was the same age as Baby Lee. “We were all a very happy family,” Sewall wrote. That was in the summer of 1885. The next year Theodore was at work on another book, this a biography of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and seemed, Sewall thought, as happy as he had ever known him.

“I miss both you and darling Baby Lee dreadfully...” he wrote Bamie. “Yet I enjoy my life at present. I have my time fully occupied . . . so have none of my usual restless, caged wolf feeling. I work two days out of three at my book or papers; and I hunt, ride and lead the wild, half adventurous life of a ranchman all through it. The elements are combined well.”

He wished only that Bamie would send on some toys for the Sewall child. He thought a big colored ball, some picture blocks, letter blocks, a little horse and wagon, and a rag doll would be perfect.

But time was running out. The Marquis’s empire had already begun to come apart by then, that is, a whole year before the tragic winter of 1886-87. A stagecoach line from Medora to Deadwood proved a failure. The Marquis’s sheep turned out to be the wrong breed for the climate, and more than half died. His powerful father-in-law began questioning expenditures, then withdrew his financial support.

Yet none of this seemed to faze the young entrepreneur. Like another celebrated Frenchman of the day, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was then promoting his doomed attempt at a Panama canal, the Marquis talked only of success and dazzled reporters with still more innovative schemes to come. He would open his own retail stores in New York and sell his Bad Lands beef at three cents a pound below the going price. Good beef at a good price for the workingman was his dream. Stock in his National Consumers Meat Company was listed at $10 a share. His shareholders, he said, were to be the common working people (just as de Lesseps was counting on the common people of France to pay for his canal). The slogan for the bright-red stores, three of which actually opened in New York, was “From Ranch to Table.”

But the stock issue failed. Pressures—from the railroad interests, the Chicago packers, the retail butchers—were too strong. Even had the Marquis been a more adroit businessman, it is unlikely he could have survived. It is also true that his range-fed beef simply did not taste as good as beef fattened in the Chicago yards.

The packing plant was shut down in the fall of 1886. It is not known what the venture had cost, and estimates on the Marquis’s losses vary from $300,000 to $1.5 million. But it is also possible that he lost nothing at all, such was the eventual market value of his landholdings.

He and Madame de Mores were gone before winter came. The château was left exactly as it was, as though they would return at any time. And Theodore too had departed by then. “Overstocking may cause little or no harm for two or three years,” he had written that fall in one of his articles for Century, “but sooner or later there comes a winter which means ruin to the ranches that have too many cattle on them; and in our country, which is even now getting crowded, it is merely a question of time as to when a winter will come that will understock the ranges by the summary process of killing off about half of all the cattle throughout the Northwest.” There had been little or no rain all summer, the growing time for grass. The range was bone-dry and still more cattle were being driven in from the south; one outfit brought in some six thousand head. Prices fell drastically. Sewall and Dow, shipping off to Chicago what was marketable from Theodore’s herd, found the price they received was less than the cattle had cost. So they decided it was time they got out of the cattle business. “Sept. 22, 1886, squared accounts with Theodore Roosevelt,” reads the entry in Sewall’s diary. By early October the Sewalls and the Dows had departed for Maine.

Storm on top of storm, blinding snows, relentless, savage winds, the worst winter on record swept the Great Plains. In the Bad Lands, children were lost and froze to death within a hundred yards of their own doors. Cattle, desperate for shelter, smashed their heads through ranch-house windows. The snow drifted so deep in many places that cattle were buried alive and temperatures hovered at about 40 below. People locked up in their houses could only wait and hope that elsewhere conditions were not so bad. A few who could not wait blew their brains out.

The losses, when they were tallied up in March, were beyond anyone’s worst estimates. Not a rancher along the Little Missouri had come through with half his herd. The average loss was seventy-five percent. Theodore, when he finally returned to survey the damage, called it a perfect “smashup.” He rode for three days without seeing a live steer.

He would come back as time went on, every other year or so, but only for hunting, never again in the same spirit, and he seldom stayed more than a week or two. All told he had invested $52,500 in cattle, which, added to another $30,000 spent on his cabin, on wages, travel, equipment, made a total of $82,500. Eventually he sold off what little he had left in the Bad Lands, added up his losses and arrived at a figure of $20,292.63. But beyond that, of course, he had lost the interest on the investment—five percent over a period of nearly fifteen years—which figured to about $50,000. So the complete loss was more on the order of $70,000, or in present-day money, about $700,000.

So the glorious Bad Lands days had lasted all of three years, and numbers of other ranchers, like Theodore, gave up and went on to other things. Howard Eaton, for example, resettled in Wyoming, to found one of the best-known dude ranches in the West.

The subsequent career of the Marquis was one most people who had known him preferred to put out of their minds. Following a tiger hunt in India, he went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The Chicago beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He turned to politics, launched a crusade to save France, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and went parading about Paris at the head of a gang of toughs, all of them dressed in ten-gallon hats and cowboy shirts. With the collapse of the French effort at Panama, he joined with the unsavory Edouard Drumont, a notorious anti-Semite, in an attempt to blame that failure too on the Jews. It was this mania that led eventually to the Dreyfus Affair, and the Marquis, before he went storming off to Africa, kept himself in the forefront. His platform rantings set off riots, and in a series of duels with important Jewish army officers he became known as one of the most dangerous duelists in France.

The Marquis was himself murdered in June 1896 by a band of Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa, where he had set off on a lone, harebrained scheme to unite the Muslims under the French flag in an all-out holy war against the Jews and the English. He seems to have been mourned only by his children and by Madame de Mores, who remained his stout defender until her dying day.

Once, on the morning of April 11, 1886, the spring before the disastrous winter, in the little town of Dickinson, forty miles east of Medora on the Northern Pacific, a young physician, a Vermonter named Victor Hugo Stickney, had come out of his office about noon on his way home to lunch when he saw “the most bedraggled figure I’d ever seen come limping down the street.” The man was covered with mud, his clothes in shreds, and he struck Stickney as “the queerest specimen of strangeness that had descended on Dickinson in the three years I had lived there.”

He was all teeth and eyes.... He was scratched, bruised and hungry, but gritty and determined as a bull dog. He was actually a slender young fellow, but I remember that he gave me the impression of being heavy and rather large. As I approached him he stopped me with a gesture asking me whether I could direct him to a doctor’s office. I was struck by the way he bit off his words and showed his teeth. I told him that I was the only practicing physician, not only in Dickinson but in the whole surrounding country.

“By George,” he said emphatically, “then you’re exactly the man I want to see. . . . My feet are blistered so badly that I can hardly walk. I want you to fix me up.”

I took him into my office and while I was bathing and bandaging his feet, which were in pretty bad shape, he told me the story. . .

The story, one Theodore was to tell many times and one that was to be told about him for years after he had left the Bad Lands, was of his last and biggest adventure in the West and may be summarized briefly as follows. It has the ring of the adventure stories he had loved so as a boy, but it also happened just as he said.

Earlier in March, having just returned to the Elkhorn after a winter in New York, Theodore was informed by Sewall one morning that a boat, a light, flat-bottomed scow that they kept on the river, had been stolen in the night by someone who had obviously taken off in it downstream. They suspected the culprit was a man named Finnegan, who lived upriver, toward Medora, with two cronies of equally bad reputation. So in the next few days Sewall and Dow put together a makeshift boat, and after waiting for a blizzard to pass, the three of them took off in pursuit, pushing into the icy current on March 30, Sewall steering.

It was a matter of principle, Theodore later said. “To submit tamely and meekly to theft or to any other injury is to invite almost certain repetition of the offense . . .”

They were three days on the river before catching up with the thieves, their boat charging along between snow-covered buttes and weird Bad Lands configurations that looked to Theodore like “the crouching figures of great goblin beasts.” He had brought along some books to read and his camera, expecting there might be a magazine article in the adventure. Each man had his rifle. The second night the temperature dropped below zero.

The next day, at a point about a hundred miles downstream from where they had started, they spotted the missing boat and going ashore found Finnegan and his partners, who surrendered without a fight. (”We simply crept noiselessly up and rising when only a few yards distant covered them with the cocked rifles.”) From there they spent another six days moving on down the river, making little headway now because of ice jams, and taking turns at night guarding the prisoners, who because of the extreme cold could not be bound hand and foot. Food ran low and the cold and biting winds continued. But not the least extraordinary part of the story is that during these same six days after catching the thieves, Theodore, in odd moments, read the whole of Anna Karenina, and “with very great interest.” (Tolstoy was truly a great writer, he would tell Corinne in a letter written at Dickinson the day after his encounter with Dr. Stickney. But had Corinne noticed the unmoral, as opposed to the immoral, tone of the book? “Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages?” For his own part Theodore found Anna “curiously contradictory; bad as she was, however, she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Vronsky had some excellent points. I like poor Dolly—but she should have been less of a patient Griselda with her husband.”)

At a remote cow camp Theodore was able to borrow a horse and ride another fifteen miles to the main ranch, at the edge of the Killdeer Mountains, where he got supplies and hired a team, a wagon, and a driver. And then came the roughest part of the escapade. It was agreed that Sewall and Dow would continue downstream with the two boats and that he, Theodore, would go with the three captives overland heading due south some forty-five miles to Dickinson, where he could turn them over to the sheriff. The captives rode in the wagon with the driver; Theodore walked behind, keeping guard with his trusty Winchester. So by the time Dr. Stickney saw him he had walked forty-five miles in something less than two days with no sleep and had at last deposited his prisoners in jail.

When Stickney and others at Dickinson asked why he had not simply shot or hanged the thieves when he first found them and saved himself all that trouble, Theodore answered that the thought had never occurred to him.

“He impressed me and he puzzled me,” wrote Stickney years afterward, “and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar and at the same time the most wonderful man I had ever come to know. I could see that he was a man of brilliant ability and I could not understand why he was out there on the frontier.”

At Dickinson’s Fourth of July celebration that summer, Theodore was asked to be the “orator of the day.” It was the first time Dickinson (population: 700) had made an all-out occasion of the Fourth and Dr. Stickney, who in a lifelong career of patching up broken cowboys and delivering babies at remote ranches would become as legendary locally as Theodore or the Marquis, was the presiding officer. The crowd was also the largest ever seen in Stark County and included about half of Medora, its citizens having come over on the same train as Theodore. A parade led by the Dickinson Silver Cornet Band included a wagon drawn by four white horses carrying thirty-eight little girls dressed in white, representing the states of the Union. According to one Medora man, everybody got caught up in the spirit and wanted to be part of the parade, with the result that there was no one left to watch it except two drunks who were beyond watching anything.

Somebody named Western Starr read the Declaration of Independence and the crowd joined in singing “America, the Beautiful.” Another speaker, well practiced in oratorical flourishes, spoke in advance of Theodore, his theme the size of the country on its one hundred and tenth birthday; and then it was Theodore’s turn.

I am peculiarly glad to have an opportunity of addressing you, my fellow citizens of Dakota, on the Fourth of July, because it always seems to me that those who dwell in a new territory, and whose actions, therefore, are peculiarly fruitful, for good and for bad alike, in shaping the future, have in consequence peculiar responsibilities. . . . Much has been given to us, and so, much will be expected of us; and we must take heed to use aright the gifts entrusted to our care.

The Declaration of Independence derived its peculiar importance, not on account of what America was, but because of what she was to become; she shared with other nations the present, and she yielded to them the past, but it was felt in return that to her, and to her especially, belonged the future. It is the same with us here. We, grangers and cowboys alike, have opened a new land; and we are the pioneers, and as we shape the course of the stream near its head, our efforts have infinitely more effect, in bending it in any given direction ... In other words, the first comers in a land can, by their individual efforts, do far more to channel out the course in which its history is to run than can those who come after them; and their labors, whether exercised on the side of evil or on the side of good, are far more effective than if they had remained in old settled communities.

So it is peculiarly incumbent on us here today so to act throughout our lives as to leave our children a heritage, for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse. . . . If you fail to work in public life, as well as in private, for honesty and uprightness and virtue, if you condone vice because the vicious man is smart, or if you in any other way cast your weight into the scales in favor of evil, you are just so far corrupting and making less valuable the birthright of your children. . . .

It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.

I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity; like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world. We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. Here we are not ruled over by others, as in the case of Europe; we rule ourselves. All American citizens, whether born here or elsewhere, whether of one creed or another, stand on the same footing; we welcome every honest immigrant no matter from what country he comes, provided only that he leaves off his former nationality, and remains neither Celt nor Saxon, neither Frenchman nor German, but becomes an American, desirous of fulfilling in good faith the duties of American citizenship.

When we thus rule ourselves, we have the responsibilities of sovereigns, not of subjects. We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them. In a new portion of the country, especially here in the Far West, it is peculiarly important to do so; and on this day of all others we ought soberly to realize the weight of the responsibility that rests upon us. I am, myself, at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner; I am proud, indeed, to be considered one of yourselves, and I address you in this rather solemn strain today, only because of my pride in you, and because your welfare, moral as well as material, is so near my heart.

On the train back to Medora later in the day, Theodore sat with Arthur Packard, the editor-proprietor of The Bad Lands Cow Boy, and remarked to Packard that he thought now he could do his best work “in a public and political way.” “Then,” responded Packard, “you will become President of the United States.”

What impressed Packard was that Theodore seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion.

Remembering how it all had ended in the Bad Lands, Bill Sewall was to write, “We were glad to get back home—gladder, I guess, than about anything that had ever happened to us, and yet we were melancholy, for with all the hardships and work it was a very happy life . . . the happiest time that any of us have known.”

Of Theodore’s status as things wound up, Sewall said simply: “When he got back into the world again, he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for a livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Return

1

SHE REMAINED “the strong good wise old sister,” sole survivor of the original “big people.” In January she had turned thirty-one. So she was well established now as a spinster, the role everyone had long since consigned her to. Family and friends spoke of her attributes of character, her poise and wonderful vitality, seldom ever of her looks. “She has no looks,” a friend once remarked. “She is very nearly ugly—she is almost a cripple, and yet no one for a moment thinks of those things.” She was prized for her wit, her breadth of knowledge, her insights, her strong, logical approach to things. “In many ways hers was the best mind in the family, and her personality one of the most dominant and fascinating,” we read in the reminiscences of a Roosevelt of the next generation. There was a subtleness to her not present in her brothers or her sister, she was more of a diplomat, she had more ballast, as it was said. She was stable, capable, a “powerful” figure with a strong sense of duty, and the resources of energy she drew upon, somewhere in her small misshapen frame, seemed greater even than Theodore’s. She was constantly busy—”dear busy Bamie”—but more than that her energy and activity stirred others into motion. Anyone around her for long got going, doing things. She liked minding other people’s affairs, liked responsibility, and because she was so extremely dependable, she was depended upon time and again.

She was, as another of the next generation would say of her, “intensely on-the-ball.” She seemed always to know what was going on, in the world and in the family. She made it her business to know and to keep the others abreast, with letters, clippings, telegrams if necessary. She was the indispensable gatherer and dispenser of vital Roosevelt information, out of thoughtfulness in part, but also because she knew that was what was expected of her and it gave her influence if not exactly control. How would he know anything of importance if it were not for Bamie’s correspondence, James Alfred Roosevelt once remarked while traveling abroad, and her letters to Theodore in the Bad Lands had arrived some weeks by the bundle.

She could deal with “situations” better than anyone, the others felt. In time of need or crisis she was the first person they turned to. When Elliott’s wife, Anna, gave birth to her first child on October 11,1884, after months of family worry, because of what had happened to Alice, it was Bamie they wanted on the scene to help.

“Bamie’s telegram at 11:30 this morning brought us the joyful news,” reads a message from Aunt Anna Gracie. The child had been christened Anna Eleanor—Anna for her mother and for Bamie, Eleanor for her father, Ellie—but she was to be known only as Eleanor and in time would become deeply attached to Bamie, depending on her for the love and understanding she desperately needed and could find nowhere else. Indeed, for the two children born to her two brothers in the year 1884—Theodore’s Alice and Elliott’s Eleanor, two very individual, very different little girls—Bamie was to be childhood’s primary source of kindness, stories, humor, guidance, sympathy, interest, and from what each was to write of her in later years there is no question as to the influence she had on their lives or their utter devotion to “Auntie Bye.” (Bye and Bysie were nicknames her father had sometimes used and that Theodore and others used interchangeably with Bamie as time went on.)

In the world of blond, blue-eyed Alice, now approaching age three, there was no more marvelous figure. Except for summers, when she stayed with her grandparents at Chestnut Hill, she was with Bamie constantly, and no one, as she later said, had such importance. “Always Auntie Bye meant more to me than anyone.” Auntie Bye was “always the mainstream somehow,” it was she who “brought the generations together.”

“Auntie Bye provided . . . a great warmth and pooling of the generations. . . . It was that.”

She used to tell me stories about her, Father’s, Uncle Elliott’s, and Corinne’s childhood, and about Grandfather and Grandmother Roosevelt, what they looked like and the things they did—how Grandfather Roosevelt drove a four-in-hand, how he used to bring them peaches when he came home in the afternoon. . . . She told of the sad, difficult times during the Civil War when Grandmother Roosevelt’s brothers were fighting on the southern side, she living in New York with her northern husband. There were stories too about their trips abroad when they were children, of the time when she was in school near Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. I used to make her describe to me over and over the soldiers marching past, singing, on their way to the fighting.

More wonderful still, Auntie Bye would tell the child about her own real mother who was in heaven. “She was the only one who did,” Alice remembered years afterward. “You see none of the others ever mentioned her. . . . Oh, she said how pretty she was and how attractive she was and how fond Auntie Bye was of her . . . things of that sort.”

“Auntie Bye had a mind that worked as a very able mans mind works,” remembered Eleanor. “She was full of animation, was always the center of any group she was with . . . wherever she lived there was an atmosphere of comfort. . . . The talk was always lively . . . and, young or old, you really felt Auntie Bye’s interest in you.”

To Eleanor she was “one of the most interesting women I have ever known.” Alice, in an interview years later, said Auntie Bye would have been President had she been a man—”because she had such determination . . . [and] an extraordinary gift with people.”

“Her hair was lovely, soft and wavy,” remembered Eleanor. “Her eyes were deep set and really beautiful, making you forget the rest of the face, which was not beautiful. . . . To young people ... she was an inspiration . . .”

If she had a fault it was an instinct for the cutting or caustic remark about those who were perhaps not quite so “on-the-ball” as she, an ability “to stick the knife in” with a word or two, and not without certain pleasure. Yet no one seems to have been damaged as a result. And as Corinne’s daughter—her second child, Corinne Douglas Robinson—was to remark, “She was such a tremendous personality that you wanted to be in her favor.”

As in childhood, because of her back, Bamie was required still to lie down part of each day. She still wore a piece of ram’s wool as a cushion on her back, to ease the discomfort of sitting, and the evidence is that, sitting or standing, she was in pain much of the time, though she never said so.

She read widely, saw a great deal of a few particular friends, visited, entertained constantly, and made one long trip to Mexico and California that spring of 1886, traveling in “the most ideal way,” by private railroad car as the guest of Cousin Sally, still among her closest friends, and James Roosevelt, whom she regarded as “the most absolutely honorable upright gentleman” she knew. Her best friend was Mrs. Whitelaw Reid—Elizabeth Mills Reid—whose husband owned the Tribune and who, somewhat like Bamie herself, would be remembered as a “queer, little dumpy figure, but bursting with vitality and intelligence.”

Her joy was in good talk. She was in her element in stimulating company, with friends who traveled, with artists, men of affairs, “people who wrote,” Theodore’s political friends—”every kind of person,” as Eleanor remembered proudly. All the Roosevelts were talkers, but with Bamie conversation was an art form. She was never torrential, as Theodore could be when off on one of his subjects. She often listened more than she spoke. Corinne was more imaginative, mercurial and gregarious like Theodore. Bamie chose her words with care. But she could, by all accounts, draw out the very best in people; even in the dullest guest she could find something and make that person shine under her encouragement. (”I amused myself by drawing the little there was in him out,” her father had written Mittie of someone he had met on a train.) But she could also pick up at once on virtually any subject. “She grasped everything immediately,” remembered a cousin.

Her letters, it is said, suggest little of the life and originality that characterized her talk. Something happened in conversation that did not on paper. She was somebody people wanted to meet and when they did they opened up to her, as they did not to others. Theodore, who was enormously proud of her, kidded her about the “incongruous” circle she attracted, but also saw her as the center of a future salon and hoped, for his own benefit, that she might take that role very seriously.

He called her “the Driving Wheel of Destiny and Superintendent-in-Chief of the Workings of Providence.”

Theodore mattered most of all. He gave focus to her life; he was her consuming interest, her favorite subject, her primary means of selffulfillment. His child, his house, his health, his career, his future, had become uppermost in her life. The house on Madison Avenue was maintained as much for his as for her own use, as his base of operations in New York. “I always insisted that we did not live together,” she later explained, “that we only visited one another.” That way, she said, a breakup, if it ever came, would be easier for both of them. Her teas and “evenings” were for his benefit often as not; the parties—summer dinner dances, hunt breakfasts—she gave at Sagamore Hill (as he had renamed the Oyster Bay house) were designed to bring him back into society, back to the life he knew.

She wanted him to return to politics. She was certain it was where he belonged and she both encouraged whatever she thought beneficial to his career and discouraged anything she thought potentially detrimental. She strongly encouraged his friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, and included Lodge now in her correspondence as though he were one of the family. (“Theodore would not be happy out of public affairs,” Lodge concurred early in what was to be a lifelong correspondence with Bamie.) When Theodore gave her his account of capturing the thieves, she (with Lodge) strongly advised against his doing it as an article for Century, sure that such heroics might strike an eastern audience as a bit extravagant and self-aggrandizing. (”I shall take good care,” he promised her, “that the pronoun ‘I’ does not appear once in the whole piece.”)

She felt she was closer to him than anyone. She knew what he was spending on his cattle venture, and like James Alfred, she worried about it; she knew what the Oyster Bay place had cost, having overseen its construction from the start; she knew what was in his checking account, what his bills were, because in his absences she paid them. “Can you send me at once three or four blank checks from my checkbook?” he writes at one point from the West. “I need them immediately. Darling old Bysie, as usual I am bothering you with my affairs.”

Politics fascinated her and she had followed every step of his career with intense interest. Moreover, she knew how much that interest meant to him, how few people mattered to him in the way she did and how much he needed her approval of all his exploits. In some letters, such as the one describing his battle on the convention floor at Chicago or the one about the bear hunt, it is as if he carries with him his own proscenium arch and is performing for her alone, his audience of one. “Look how well I am doing,” he seems to be saying to her again and again, just as he had done at Harvard when writing to her or to their father.

Possibly more than anyone in the family, she knew how much of himself he withheld from view—the tenderness in him, the overriding attachment to home, to family, how much of the “great little home-boy” he remained at heart.

Women, she knew, did not greatly interest him and this made her role in his life all the more exceptional. He did not enjoy the company of women the way their father had, or as Elliott obviously did. Until that summer, and the mention of a Mrs. Selmes at Mandan, there had been nothing since Alice’s death to suggest the slightest interest in any woman beyond the Roosevelt circle. Tilden Selmes was a young lawyer, a Yale man and neophyte rancher; his wife, Martha Flandrau Selmes, was the daughter of a distinguished Minnesota jurist and historian, Charles Eugene Flandrau. Theodore had been a guest at their Mandan home on several occasions in August and September and “the singularly attractive” Mrs. Selmes was somebody he wanted Bamie to know about. “She is, I think, very handsome,” he wrote; “... she is very well read, has a delicious sense of humor and is extremely fond of poetry—including that of my favorite, Browning, as well as my old one, Swinburne.” Other accounts of Mrs. Selmes and several surviving photographs bear him out—she was indeed a vivacious and strikingly beautiful young woman—and unquestionably she impressed him as few women ever had or ever would (he was to refer to her, as time went on, as “the wonderful Mrs. Selmes”), but the fact that there was also a Mr. Selmes would, for Theodore—and doubtless for Bamie also—have precluded any thought of a romantic involvement. The contribution Mrs. Selmes makes to what can be pieced together of the larger story is a recollection, offered years later, of Theodore pacing the floor during one of his visits, muttering audibly that he had no “constancy.”

2

In the last days of August 1886 The New York Times carried a small social item reporting the engagement of ex-Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt to Miss Carow of New York and then, on September 5, a retraction, which was doubtless placed in the Times by Bamie:

The announcement of the engagement of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, made last week, and which came from a supposedly authoritative source, proves to have been erroneous. Nothing is more common in society than to hear positive assertions constantly made regarding the engagement of persons who have been at all in each other’s company, and no practice is more reprehensible.

Theodore was notified as to what had happened and Bamie waited for his answer. It came by return mail in a letter from Medora dated September 20. What the Times had reported was true, he told her. “I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean to marry her.” How anyone had found out was a mystery to him. “You are the first person to whom I have breathed one word on the subject.” He had hoped to be able to tell her before this, but that had been impossible. He would explain everything when he saw her.

I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages [his remarkable letter continued]; I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character. You could not reproach me one-half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself. Were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead. No matter what your judgment about myself I shall assuredly enter no plea against it. But I do very earnestly ask you not to visit my sins upon poor little Edith. It is certainly not her fault; the entire blame rests on my shoulders.

Bamie could keep Baby Lee, she was told. Nor should she feel obligated to inform the others; he would take care of that himself by letter. Meantime, he wanted nothing said to anyone beyond the immediate family.

Bamie and Corinne were both taken totally unawares by this news. Nor were they at all pleased.

Edith Carow was, of course, a very known and admired quantity, as close to the family as anyone could be, very like “family,” no less than ever. She was someone they had both continued to see on a regular basis, until just that previous spring when Edith’s widowed mother, due to straitened circumstances, sold her house and departed with Edith and another daughter for an indefinite stay in Europe. “It makes me quite blue,” Corinne had written at the time.

Edith was lovely-looking, with a mind of her own and wide-ranging interests. If somewhat reserved by Roosevelt standards and somewhat disapproving of fashionable society, she had a quiet kind of dignity and a will to match Bamie s, which was the problem. “They didn’t want it at all,” said Alice years afterward, “because they knew her too well and they knew they were going to have a difficult time with her, that she would come between them and Father.”

Doubtless they too wished Theodore had more “constancy.” Ideally, by the prevailing, romantic code, he would never remarry—as a testimony of his love for his beautiful dead wife, his first and only great love. Or, at the least, a decent interval of several more years would have been expected, during which the widower brother and the spinster sister could carry on just as they were and quite happily.

He was home by early October. He and Edith, Bamie learned, had been secretly engaged for nearly a year. It had been the previous September in Bamie’s front hall that they had met one day by chance, having until then seen little or nothing of each other since Alice’s death. Theodore had started calling on her in New York after that—quietly, discreetly, and though he even asked Edith to attend a hunt ball at Sagamore Hill in October, apparently no one imagined there could be anything between them. In November he had asked her to marry him and she had said yes, with the understanding that the engagement would be kept secret until a more propitious moment. He had returned to the Bad Lands in March; in April she sailed for Europe. “What day does Edith go abroad, and for how long does she intend staying?” he had inquired innocently, almost as an afterthought, in a letter to Corinne, the same letter with his observations on Anna Karenina, written at Dickinson the day after bringing in the thieves. “Could you not send her, when she goes, some flowers from me? I suppose fruit would be more useful, but I think flowers ‘more tenderer’ as Mr. Weller would say.”

Bamie, whatever misgivings or pain she felt, was ready to stand by him. In the face of his overwhelming good health and high spirits it is hard to imagine her doing anything else. He was ready to embrace life again. He was also being asked by the Republicans to run for mayor of New York, almost from the moment he had his bags unpacked, an offer he at once accepted, to her great delight, even though, as they both appreciated, he had little chance of winning. . . . Get action! Seize the moment! It was to be a three-way race. His opponents were the Democrat Abram Hewitt and a Labor candidate, Henry George. Hewitt, distinguished in manner, admired as an “enlightened” businessman, had been a friend of their fathers and appeared the likely winner. Henry George was the author of Progress and Poverty, famous as the great exponent of the single-tax scheme, and a fiery speaker who drew huge street-corner crowds and gave newspaper editors and propertied people a bad case of the jitters. Theodore set up headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and Bamie, by all signs, could not have been happier. The office of mayor, since the passage of Theodore’s Reform Charter Bill, was one of real consequence.

He was called “the Cowboy Candidate” and the Times at one point claimed he was in the lead. “We haven’t had campaign headquarters that looked so much like business in this county since ex-President Arthur was chairman of the county committee and carried things with a rush,” one party worker was quoted as saying. “It seems like old times and warms the cockles of an old-time Republican’s heart. This is just glorious . . .”

So convinced was Theodore that he had no serious chance of being elected that he bought two tickets under false names—Mr. and Miss Merrifield—on the Etrura, which was due to sail for England on Saturday, November 6, or four days after the election. Bamie had agreed to go with him to London, where he and Edith were to be married. The only thing she would not agree to was any talk of her keeping the child.

“It almost broke my heart to give her up,” Bamie was to recall years later. “Still I felt. . . it was for her good, and that unless she lived with her father she would never see much of him . . .” It was remembering what she had felt as a child for her own father, the knowledge of what his love had meant to her own life, she said, that made her decide as she did.

In a letter to Edith Carow dated October 23, Bamie wrote in a swift, strong, somewhat illegible hand:

MY DEAREST EDITH,

You will be astonished at another letter so soon, but though of course Theodore writes you of everything, still you wish to hear what I try to write; of the wonderful enthusiasm he certainly inspires; never mind what the results . . . it is astounding the hold that he has on the public. . . . Douglas has been as always a trump, having organized “the Roosevelt Campaign Club of businessmen” which brings in many active workers. Theodore breakfasts and sleeps at home where he is very comfortable . . . by half after nine he is in the Headquarters at the Fifth Avenue, never leaving except for lunch and dinner... even then he can but spare a short time; he is very bright and well considering the terrific strain which of course will be worse constantly until the second [of November] is past. It is such happiness to see him at his very best once more; ever since he has been out of politics in any active form, it has been a real heart sorrow to me, for while he always made more of his life than any other man I knew, still with his strong nature it was a permanent source of poignant regret that even at his early age he should lose these years without the possibility of doing his best and most telling work; in that there should be the least chance that he might find his hold over the public gone when he once more came before them and this is the first time since . . . [Albany] days that he has enough work to keep him exerting all his powers. Theodore is the only person who had the power, except Father, who possessed it in a different way, of making me almost worship him and now it is such a desperate feeling to realize that in all this excitement I cannot help him in the least except that he knows how interested I am. I would never say or write this except to you, but it is very restful to feel how you care for him and how happy he is in his devotion to you . . . I go back again tomorrow [to Sagamore Hill] to remain over the Hunt Ball. I wish you were to be there this year also as you were last. . . I send you the pieces from this morning’s Times, they are samples of what appear daily, of course, the favorable side, but those most against him can find nothing but his youth, supposed wealth, and being born a gentleman to say as detrimental. . . .

“Theodore is radiantly happy and we sail on Saturday for England,” she wrote on Election Day to Lodge’s wife, Nannie.

Edith will be in London and they are to be married there early in December. . . . Edith we have known intimately always. She is very bright and attractive and I believe absolutely devoted to Theodore so I think their future looks most promising. . . . Today is of course politically one of intense excitement to me personally and apparently to New York generally. Theodore, Douglas and a number of men have been in to lunch and tonight I shall simply haunt the streets. . . .

Abram Hewitt was swept into office as expected, and as Bamie later observed, he “made an admirable mayor.” Henry George ran second and Theodore, for all the excitement he had generated, finished third. Large numbers of Republicans, fearful that a vote for Theodore might increase George’s chances of winning, had voted instead for Hewitt. Historically, it would stand as one of the most interesting campaigns the city had ever seen and at the age of twenty-eight Theodore was the youngest man who had ever been a candidate for mayor. “At least I have a better party standing than ever before,” he wrote to Lodge, who had just been elected to Congress.

Friday night, after the horse show, their last night before sailing, Bamie and he worked together until nearly daybreak addressing the last of the engagement announcements.

Afterword

ANNA

In the summer of 1895, to the astonishment of all the Roosevelt tribe, Bamie announced her engagement to Navy Commander (later Admiral) William Sheffield Cowles, a large, dignified, placid man from Connecticut. She was forty, he nearly fifty, and at age forty-three, she gave birth to a son, William Sheffield Cowles, Jr. In the years Theodore was President she established a home on N Street that became known as “the little White House.” As Eleanor was to recall, “There was never a serious subject that came up while he was President that he didn’t go to her at her home on N Street and discuss it with her before making his decision. He talked things over with her, that was well known by all the family. He may have made his own decision, but talking with her seemed to clarify things for him.”

In her middle years Bamie became almost totally deaf, yet few people ever knew since she learned to read lips, and later still, living in Connecticut, she suffered intensely from arthritis, a condition she refused to discuss. Recalling an evening at her Connecticut home, when she sat in a wheelchair talking and laughing with Cousin Sally’s son, Franklin, who by then was also in a wheelchair, a family friend remarked, “You felt such gallantry in all of them, you know, such humor, such complete elimination of any problem about bodies.”

Though devoted to her husband, her own dear “Mr. Bearo,” she refused to let him call her Bamie or Bye, only Anna, and her feelings for him were never what they were for her brother Theodore, who remained the center of her universe for as long as he lived.

Bamie died in August 1931, at the age of seventy-six.

THEODORE

With the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Theodore became at forty-two the youngest President in history and possibly the best prepared. He had by then served six years as a reform Civil Service Commissioner (under Presidents Harrison and Cleveland), two years as Police Commissioner of New York City, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on the eve of the Spanish-American War, as a colonel in the Rough Riders—and “hero of San Juan Hill”—as Governor of New York, and as Vice President. He was also the first President born and raised in a big city, and the first rich man’s son to occupy the White House since William Henry Harrison. He was a well-to-do, aristocratic, big-city, Harvard-educated Republican with ancestral roots in the Deep South and a passionate following in the West, which taken all together made him something quite new under the sun.

As President he was picturesque, noisy, colorful in ways that amused and absorbed the press, worried the elders of his party, and delighted the country. To his admirers he was “the outstanding, incomparable symbol of virility in his time” (Mark Sullivan), “a stream of fresh, pure, bracing air from the mountains, to clear the fetid atmosphere of the national capital” (Harry Thurston Peck), “the most striking figure in American life” (Thomas Edison); while to others, some of whom had once been his friends, he was “that damned cowboy” (Mark Hanna), a man “drunk with himself” (Henry Adams), “an excellent specimen of the genus Americanus egotisticus” (Poultney Bigelow). The cartoonists had a field day. But he was also a President with a phenomenal grasp of history, who spoke German and French (in a style entirely his own) and knew something of the world from having traveled abroad from the time he was a child. More important, he was as able an executive as ever occupied the office. He loved being President, loved the power, for what he could accomplish with it.

He settled the great anthracite coal strike of 1902 by entering the mediation as no President had done before. He initiated the first successful antitrust suit against a corporate monopoly, the giant Northern Securities Company (and when his fathers old friend J. P. Morgan came to Washington to demand an explanation, such action served only to harden his resolve). He “took the Isthmus” and built the Panama Canal, and served as peacemaker in the Russo-Japanese War, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. And he was openly proud of all his achievements.

As President, the boy who adored hero stories, and who idolized Captain James Bulloch, built a new Navy and sent a fleet of battleships around the world on a good-will mission. As President, the asthmatic child who craved the out of doors—for whom the unspoiled natural world had literally meant life itself—increased the area of the national forests by some forty million acres, established five national parks, sixteen national monuments (including the Grand Canyon), four national game refuges, fifty-one national bird sanctuaries, and made conservation a popular cause. As President, the son of the first Theodore Roosevelt made the White House “a bully pulpit,” preached righteousness, courage, love of country, “The Strenuous Life”—which, everything considered, may have been his greatest contribution. Once, when the old family friend Louisa Schuyler asked how he “felt the pulse” of the country, his response was: “I don’t know the way the people do feel... I only know how they ought to feel.”

Ironically, he who had worried that he might never live up to his father’s name loomed so large in his own time that he obliterated his father’s name. Only one Theodore Roosevelt was to be remembered, once his father’s generation had passed from the scene.

His devotion to the memory of his father, a feeling of his father’s presence in his life, remained with him to the end. “My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew,” he would say. It was to him he felt he must be true. In the study at Sagamore Hill between small portraits of Lincoln and Grant, he hung a large oil portrait of his father. Four duplicate portraits had been done posthumously from a photograph, one for each of the four children, and Theodore placed his so the pale-blue eyes kept steady watch over him at his desk. His first day in the White House following McKinley’s death was September 22, his fathers birthday. (Had he been alive then, in 1901, the elder Theodore would have been seventy.) “I have realized it as I signed various papers all day long, and I feel that it is a good omen,” he remarked to Bamie and Corinne, who with their husbands were his only guests at dinner that evening. “I feel as if my father’s hand were on my shoulder.”

Among his first acts as President was to have all those Victorian embellishments introduced by Chester A. Arthur, including the fifty-foot Tiffany screen, torn out and the house restored to its original “stately simplicity.”

His highest-ranking Cabinet officer, the Secretary of State, inherited from McKinley, was his father’s friend John Hay. (In 1905 Theodore named another of his father’s friends, Elihu Root, to succeed Hay; when Root resigned in 1909, Theodore filled the position with his Harvard classmate Robert Bacon.)

“It was peculiarly pleasant having you here. How I wish Father could have lived to see it too!” he wrote to Uncle Rob following his inauguration in 1905. “You stood to me for him and all that generation, and so you may imagine how proud I was to have you here.” (Uncle Rob was in his seventy-sixth year. Following the death of Aunt Lizzie Ellis, in 1887, he had married Mrs. Minnie O’Shea Fortescue.)

Of his mother Theodore was to say comparatively little. But to some who had known her, he was more a Bulloch than a Roosevelt. The New York Sun in 1900 quoted an unnamed New Yorker, a transplanted “old-time southern gentleman” of social prominence: “I have always thought, and others who knew Miss Bulloch in Savannah have quite agreed with me, that it was from his mother that Governor Roosevelt got his splendid dash and energy.”

Of Alice Lee, Theodore was to say nothing. Nor, supposedly, was her name ever spoken within the new family he and Edith established. To judge by his Autobiography (1913) she never existed; their romance, his first marriage, never happened. Whether this was his doing or Edith’s remains an issue of debate among later-day Roosevelts. The one possible explanation to be found in his own writings is a comment in a letter to Corinne concerning a mutual friend whose life had taken a tragic turn.

I hate to think of her suffering; but the only thing for her to do now is to treat the past as past, the event as finished and out of her life; to dwell on it, and above all to keep talking of it with anyone, would be both weak and morbid. She should try not to think of it; this she cannot wholly avoid, but she can avoid speaking of it. She should show a brave and cheerful front to the world, whatever she feels; and henceforth she should never speak one word of the matter to anyone.

His own brave and cheerful front was what the world knew him for, what the large proportion of his countrymen most loved him for. No one seemed to do so much or to enjoy what he did so thoroughly. Yet his favorite contemporary poet was Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose themes were loneliness and the burden of personal memory. The robust, quick-stepping, legendary “T.R.” was a great deal more pensive and introspective, he dwelt more on the isolation and sadness inherent in human life, than most people ever realized. Black care, for all the phenomenal pace he maintained through life, clung to him more than he let on.

He kept at his writing. In his public career, it is estimated, he wrote 150,000 letters. He also wrote his own speeches and presidential messages, and more than twenty books dealing with history, literature, politics, and natural history. His Autobiography is particularly interesting if read with a view to all that is left out. (Not only does he make no mention of Alice Lee or their marriage, he neglects to mention his sisters by name and devotes all of three sentences to his mother. He leaves out his race for mayor of New York—the one resounding political defeat of his early career. He says nothing of his father’s actions at the time of the Civil War, just as he says nothing about Elliott’s tragic life and other lesser family “failures.”)

Judged by almost any criteria, his second marriage was an unequivocal success. Edith, a person of marked intelligence, poise, and common sense, brought “wonderful balance” to his life. She was, “in many ways, as formidable a figure as Bamie, or even as Theodore,” said a cousin. “It is curious and notable that few great men have had closely related to them three women of such exceptional intelligence and gifts as those of Bamie, Corinne and Edith.”

The second marriage produced five children—Theodore, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin—to whom their father was openly, passionately devoted. He read to them at night, told ghost stories (of which he knew many), joined headlong in their games (pillow fights, hide-and-seek, running obstacle courses down the halls of the White House); he bounced with them in the haymow at Sagamore Hill, led them on long morning excursions on horseback, exactly as his father had done and over the same hills, a half dozen of their cousins or friends usually joining the cavalcade. “To be with him was to have fun,” remembered one of the cousins, “if for no other reason than that he so obviously was having a good time himself.” “I love all these children and have great fun with them, and am touched by the way in which they feel that I am their special friend, champion, and companion,” he wrote Edith’s sister. The letters he wrote his children—from Cuba, the White House, Panama, whenever separated from them—were to become famous when published as a best-selling book the year of his death.

Yet there is evidence that being his child could be very difficult. Just before the Spanish-American War, when the family was living in Washington, young Ted, who had asthma, began suffering from severe headaches or “nervous prostration,” because, as the family doctor was convinced, his father was driving him too hard. At the doctor’s urging, the boy was sent to stay with Bamie in New York, where the headaches and other ailments quickly went away. “Hereafter I shall never press Ted either in body or mind,” Theodore wrote Bamie. “The fact is that the little fellow, who is peculiarly dear to me, has bidden fair to be all the things I would like to have been and wasn’t, and it has been a great temptation to push him.”

Theodore continued to ride, shoot, hike, spar, row, play tennis. He never did kill a tiger, but of the other most fearsome beasts of the wilds he could claim at least one of each—as all the world was made aware. His knowledge of the large animals of North America probably surpassed that of anyone of his day. The last letter he wrote, like the first that we know of, had to do with birds.

A book was about the only thing that could make him sit still and his love of books lasted as long as he lived. He read everything and anything, sometimes two books in an evening, and his favorites—the Irish sagas, Bunyan, Scott, Cooper, the letters of Abraham Lincoln, Huckleberry Finn—he read many times over.

The two cousins who had been closest to him in boyhood, Emlen and West, had families of their own close by at Oyster Bay. Emlen was Theodore’s financial adviser and West, who was a physician, delivered two of Theodore’s children.

His health was not particularly good in later life, appearances to the contrary. He was dogged by all his old ailments, by stomach trouble, insomnia, chest colds, and by asthma from time to time. Poor eyesight was a lifelong handicap. Sailing off to fight in Cuba in 1898, he carried a dozen extra pairs of glasses in his pockets and in the lining of his hat, and a blow suffered during a sparring match in the White House blinded him permanently in his left eye, something about which the public was to be told nothing. He put on weight (he weighed over two hundred pounds when he was President) and as time passed he was bothered with rheumatism or gout, he did not know which. “I am falling behind physically,” he told his son Ted as early as 1903.

When he died, in his sleep at Sagamore Hill in the early hours of January 6, 1919, he was sixty years old, yet seemed much older. But by then, since leaving the White House, he had fallen out with his hand-picked successor (Taft); broken up the 1912 Republican National Convention; launched his own Progressive (”Bull Moose”) Party; campaigned again for President; been shot in the chest by a fanatic in Milwaukee (his glasses case and a folded copy of a speech in his breast pocket saved his life); lost the 1912 election; he had hunted big game in Africa, flown in a plane, led an exploring expedition in the Amazon jungles (during which he contracted malaria, lost fifty pounds, and again nearly died); campaigned to get the country into the First World War; and suffered the loss of a son, Quentin, the youngest, who was killed in aerial combat behind German lines in 1918.

Theodore was buried with a minimum of ceremony on a bitter cold day in a small cemetery at Oyster Bay, just off the road between Tranquillity and Sagamore Hill. Of the things said in his memory, among the simplest and best is this by a friend since childhood, Edith Wharton:

... he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed . . .

ELLIOTT

Elliott’s tragic life ended in August 1894, at age thirty-four, after a torturous battle with alcoholism. His marriage had become a shambles, he had been involved in a paternity suit, threatened suicide more than once, and was placed in various institutions in Europe and the Middle West for the “cure,” beginning the winter of 1891 when Bamie escorted him to a sanitarium in the Austrian Alps, at Graz. Determined that nothing go amiss, she persuaded the head of the sanitarium to break the rules and let her have a room also, so she could keep watch over him.

In 1892 his wife, Anna, died of diphtheria. In May 1893 his son and namesake, “little Ellie,” died of scarlet fever. “Poor Elliott is wandering about New York. Heaven knows where,” wrote Edith the following summer. “He rarely spends a night in his rooms ... drinks a great deal... will not come to Sagamore ... it wears on Theodore dreadfully and if he gets thinking of it he cannot sleep.”

Corinne and Douglas Robinson tried to keep track of Elliott, going regularly to his hotel. Theodore eventually gave up on him. “He can’t be helped,” he told Bamie. Little Eleanor, who was being looked after by her Grandmother Hall, came to visit at Sagamore Hill in the spring of 1894. “Poor little soul,” wrote Edith to Bamie, “she is very plain. Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future, but as I wrote to Theodore, the ugly duckling may turn out to be a swan.”

In that last year of his life Elliott was living under an assumed name with a mistress on West 102nd Street, “like some stricken, hunted creature,” Theodore wrote to Bamie, who was in London. “His house was so neat and well kept,” Theodore continued, “with his Bible and religious books, and Anna’s pictures everywhere, even in the room of himself and his mistress. Poor woman, she had taken the utmost care of him, and was broken down at his death.”

I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now [Theodore later wrote to Corinne]. He is just the gallant, generous, manly, loyal young man whom everyone loved. I can think of him when you and I and he used to go round “exploring” the hotels, the time we were first in Europe; do you remember how we used to do it? And then in the days of the dancing class, when he was distinctly the polished man-of-the-world... Or when we were off on his little sailing boat for a two or three days’ trip on the Sound, or when we first hunted . . .

Eleanor, who had idolized her father, would strive to be as brave and selfless as he had wanted her to be, guided by Bamie and encouraged by Theodore, who, in 1905, while President, gave her away at her wedding to Cousin Franklin, for whom Elliott had once served as godfather.

CORINNE

The youngest of the four, Corinne lived until February 1933, or long enough to know that another Roosevelt had been elected President. More gregarious even than Theodore, she became a figure and patron in literary circles, and among her own large, loud, spirited family she thrived especially on talk and roars of laughter and huge dinner parties. On an evening when Fanny Smith and her new husband, James Parsons, were going to Corinne’s house for dinner, Fanny is said to have advised him, “Now, don’t forget! Talk as loudly as you possibly can and answer your own questions!”

While her marriage to Douglas Robinson survived satisfactorily, Corinne never found it in her heart to love him. Like Bamie, her strongest affection was reserved for Theodore, who, she said, “was truly the spirit of my father reincarnate.” Together with Bamie after his death, she organized a reconstruction of the 20th Street house as a memorial, complete in every detail, exactly as it was when they were growing up. She lectured on the subject of Theodore Roosevelt, and wrote and published poetry in his honor, as well as My Brother Theodore Roosevelt, an adoring book of personal memories.

Like so many others she never ceased to be amazed by her brother or to be inspirited by his power of curiosity, by that delight in so much else other than self, which, with courage, had carried him forward since childhood. Walking beside him on the White House grounds one spring morning she watched him stop, stoop, pick up, and examine a minute feather, which he held between thumb and forefinger. “Very early for a fox sparrow,” he said.

Notes

The following abbreviations have been used throughout these notes:

All family correspondence cited is from the Theodore Roosevelt Collection unless otherwise indicated.

PART ONE

1. GREATHEART’S CIRCLE

Recollections of life in the house on East 20th Street and heartfelt, often effusive descriptions of Theodore Senior are to be found in the later-day writings of all the Roosevelt children but Elliott: Bamie in a series of unpublished reminiscences (TRC); Theodore in his Autobiography; and Corinne in My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (referred to here as Robinson). Of the many family letters dealing with domestic details perhaps the most revealing are those written by Martha Stewart Bulloch (Grandmamma) to her daughter Susan West (also TRC). Among secondary sources Nathan Millers The Roosevelt Chronicles provides a good general account of family roots and branches.

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22 “gloomy respectability”: TR, Autobiography, 8.

22 Goelet garden: B reminiscences.

23 Robert Roosevelt on family origins: It was RBR, in 1903, with his nephew in the White House, who clarified for the public (in a letter to the N.Y. Sun, May 25) how the name Roosevelt was to be pronounced. “In English when we try to distinguish the long from the short ‘o’ we get into trouble. In Dutch they do not. The double V is simply the long ‘o’. The word ‘Roos’ means rose and is pronounced in identically the same way under all circumstances and in all combinations. So the first syllable of the President’s name is ‘Rose’ pure and simple.”

25 Aunt Lizzie Ellis and her misadventures: B reminiscences.

24 Robert an Elizabethan: N. Roosevelt, Front Row Seat, 15.

24 Robert and the green gloves: interview with Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt.

24 Robert and Minnie O’Shea: interview with Roosevelt genealogist Timothy Beard.

24 “never put himself forward,” “sunshine of his affection”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 42, 15.

25 TR Sr. on Roberts attire: TR Sr. to MBR, June 29, 1873.

25 TR Sr. the perfect gentleman: Riis, 11.

25 Mittie passes on the wine: Robinson, 18.

25 “My personal impression”: W. Emlen Roosevelt to Hagedorn, Hagedorn files (TRC).

25 TR Sr.’s feelings for his mother: TR Sr. to B, July 22, 1870.

26 Margaret Barnhill Roosevelt and the spirit of noblesse oblige: N.Y. World, Feb. 11, 1878.

26 Bamie’s description of the Union Square house: B reminiscences.

26 “Economy is my doctrine”: quoted in Churchill, 104.

26 CVS rules out college: N.Y. World, Feb. 11, 1878.

27 “I’m afraid, Theodore”: RBR to TR Sr., Aug. 1, 1851 (WSCC).

27 “I have it in mind”: RBR to TR Sr., Aug. 30,1851 (WSCC).

27 “Firstly, Advice”: RBR to TR Sr., Feb. 20, 1852 (WSCC).

28 “I scarce know terms”: TR Sr. to his mother, Aug. 13, 1851 (WSCC).

28 “He was dressed”: TR Sr., Russian journal, Aug. 24, 1851 (WSCC).

28 The gilt Russian and sledge on the square of malachite is one of the numerous original pieces to be seen in the restoration of the 20th Street house. Its value in the eyes of the children is described by TR in his Autobiography (page 8).

29 James Alfred’s marriage to an Emlen does the family fortune “no harm”: P. James Roosevelt to the author.

29 Chemical Bank meets obligations in gold: Cobb, 46. See also, History of the Chemical Bank, 111.

29 Broadway Improvement Association: Cobb, 46.

29 Weir Roosevelt responds to Gallaxy article: N.Y. Times, Apr. 25, 1868.

29 “where such a thing as sentiment”: TR Sr. to MBR, Aug. 18, 1853.

29 Bookkeepers views: TR Sr. to MBR, Aug. 2, 1853.

30 TR Sr. scales the Treasury Building: TR Sr. to MBR, Feb. 2, 1860.

30 “Whatever he had to do”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 25.

30 “maniacal benevolence”: John Hay to TR Sr., Feb. 4, 1862 (WSCC).

30 “as much as I enjoy loafing”: TR Sr. to MBR, June 29, 1873.

30 Twenty thousand homeless children: Brace, 31.

30 Clean bed for five cents: Lynch, 269-70.

30 Brace sees society threatened: First Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1854), quoted in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 21, 1869.

31 Approach taken by the Children’s Aid Society: 16th Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1869), quoted in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 21, 1869.

31 “troublesome conscience”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 26.

31 “He knew them by name”: ibid., 24.

31 Friends take out checkbooks: Riis, 447. One foresees saving a thousand dollars: Nation, Feb. 14, 1878.

31 TR Sr.’s feelings for New York: TR Sr. to MBR, Sept. 28, 1873.

32 Original charter for the American Museum of Natural History approved in 20th Street parlor: Bickmore, 12.

32 “Professor, New York wants a museum”: ibid., 17.

32 TR Sr.’s “rich power of enjoyment”: Brace, 325.

32 TR Sr. on horseback: Rev. Henry C. Potter, quoted in the N.Y. Tribune, Feb. 18, 1878.

32 “I amused myself”: quoted in Putnam, 41.

32 TR Sr.’s fondness for yellow roses: Robinson, 207.

32 “The city is deserted”: TR Sr. to MBR, July 10, 1873.

33 “just my ideal”: E to TR Sr., Mar. 6, 1875 (FDRL).

33 Morning prayers on the sofa: TR, Autobiography, 13-14.

33 Lessons on climbing trees: Robinson, 8.

33 Preachment on accepting the love of others: ibid., 88.

33 “I always believe in showing affection”: TR Sr. to B, July 31, 1868.

33 TR Sr. on unselfishness: Robinson, 88.

34 Hatred of idleness: TR, Autobiography, 11-12.

34 “never . . . become an oyster”: TR Sr. to Mrs. J. A. Roosevelt, Dec. 25, 1851 (WSCC).

34 “I think I did it”: quoted in Putnam, 31.

34 “singular compound”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 47.

34 Fear of father: TR to Edward Sanford Martin, Nov. 26, 1900, Letters, II, 1443.

34 “Come now, and follow me”: Bunyan, 269.

34 “never was anyone so wonderful”: B reminiscences.

35 “uneasy about her back”: MSB to Susan West, Apr. 29,1858(?).

35 Care for Bamie: In a letter to Susan West dated Dec. 1858, Grandmamma Bulloch writes: “We get up and have breakfast. At ten, or half past ten, Dr. Davis comes to adjust the apparatus. Then stories must be told or stories read all of the time during the operation to keep her from crying. Under her arms, her back and chest are bathed first with water, and then alum and water to prevent chafing. Then the abscess has to be washed with castile soap and water and greased. . . . Then the Dr. puts on the apparatus again. She then has her lunch and is put to bed to take a little nap. Sometimes she sleeps, sometimes she does not. At one she is taken up and changed, takes her dinner at two, then goes out a little while if the weather is good. When she comes in again it requires constant effort to amuse her and keep her quiet. In the evening about half past seven she goes through the same process with the apparatus as in the morning except Thee fixes her instead of the Dr. Then she is put to bed and I rub her little legs until she goes to sleep.”

35 TR Sr. and Bamie: B reminiscences.

36 Charles Fayette Taylor and the “movement cure”: article in The Stethoscope (published by the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center), Dec. 1956; MSB to Susan West, Aug. 22, 1859. See also, DAB.

36 Ram’s wool for back: interview with W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

36 Bamie’s appearance: E. Roosevelt, This Is My Story, 57.

36 “Poor little thing”: TR Sr. to MBR, May 31 [n.d.].

36 Abraham Lincoln’s lap: interview with W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

36 TR Sr. and Bamie’s photograph: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 10, 1873.

37 “Try to cultivate”: TR Sr. to B, undated.

37 Teedie punished: TR, Autobiography, 10.

37 “When I put ’We 3’”: TR, Diaries of Boyhood, 11.

37 Ellie gives away his coat: E. Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game, IX.

37 “ardent” blue eyes: Parsons, 18.

37 “great little home-boy”: Robinson, 45.

37 “quiet patrician air”: MBR to Anna Gracie, June 14, 1869.

38 “My mouth opened wide”: TR to MBR, Apr. 28,1868, Letters, I, 3. This is the earliest known letter by TR.

38 TR’s natural history collection: TR, “Record of the Roosevelt Museum” (TRC).

38 TR Sr. walks the floor with TR: TR, Autobiography, 15; TR to Edward Sanford Martin, Nov. 26, 1900, Letters, II, 1443.

39 Influence of Hilborne West: Robinson, 54.

40 CVS goes to the kitchen: TR Sr. to MBR, Aug. 28, 1853.

40 “careful . . . in chance acquaintances”: TR Sr. to E, Jan. 6, 1877 (FDRL).

2. LADY FROM THE SOUTH

With few exceptions almost everything published about Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt has been superficial and misleading. It is mainly in her own unpublished correspondence—letters numbering in the many hundreds to her husband, children, and sister Anna—that she emerges as a person of vivid personality and great interest. Of her children’s published recollections the most sympathetic and admiring are those of Corinne in My Brother Theodore Roosevelt.

For background details on the Conscription Act and the entire substitute system during the Civil War, the author is indebted to the late Bruce Catton.

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41 Roosevelts “cling to the fixed”: N.Y. World, Feb. 11, 1878.

41 CVS sees move uptown as final: ibid.

42 James Alfred’s fondness for waffles: reminiscences of his son Emlen, private collection of Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt.

42 Claes Martenszen known as Shorty: Cobb, 9.

42 Rev. Archibald Stobo arrives at Charleston: Pringle, 8; also Wallace, 57.

43 “even a French strain of blood”: B reminiscences.

43 Mystery surrounding Archibald Bulloch’s grave: Harden, 55.

43 Bulloch family history can be found in The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, XV, 1907; J. G. B. Bulloch, A History and Genealogy of the Families of Bulloch and Stobo and of Irvine of Cults; B reminiscences; and in the biographical notes provided by Robert Manson Myers in his monumental The Children of Pride.

44 “The relationships in Savannah”: Anna Gracie to MBR, Apr. 8, 1858.

44 Background on Roswell has been drawn from Leckie, Georgia; Martin, Roswell; and Temple, First Hundred Years.

45 “Exposure to cold and rain”: quoted in Temple, 109.

45 Barrington Hall: Like Bulloch Hall, indeed like most of the old Roswell mansions, Barrington Hall still stands, looks very much as it did in Mittie’s day.

46 Corinne Elliott Hutchison lost on the Pulaski: Myers, Children of Pride, 1559.

46 Story of Bear Bob: TR, Autobiography, 7.

46 “It was all so picturesque”: B reminiscences.

46 Bulloch slaves: Seventh Census of U.S., 1850, Georgia Slave Schedule.

47 Daddy Luke, Mom Charlotte, Toy, and Bess: B reminiscences.

47 Daniel Stuart Elliott kills his “little shadow”: ibid.

47 Battle between the slave and the cougar: TR, Hunting Trips, 22-23.

47 Duel with Tom Daniell: Gamble, 249-56.

48 Gilbert Moxley Sorrel “the best staff officer”: quoted in Myers, Children of Pride, 1682.

48 “In the roomy old home”: Robinson, 10.

48 “none . . . had any particular education”: B reminiscences.

49 “more moonlight-white”: Robinson, 18.

49 Friends’ descriptions of Mittie: condolence letters to B, Feb. 1884 (TRC).

49 Margaret Mitchell’s visit to Roswell: Atlanta Journal, June 10, 1923.

50 TR Sr.’s first visit to Roswell: B reminiscences.

50 “Does it not seem strange”: MBR to TR Sr., June 9, 1853.

51 “I have never interfered”: MSB to TR Sr., May 21, 1853.

51 “I promised to tell you”: MBR to TR Sr.; also quoted in Robinson, 13-14.

51 “promised to ride back with Henry Stiles”: MBR to TR Sr., July 27, 1853; also quoted in Robinson, 14.

52 Dancing past midnight, world “without kisses”: MBR to TR Sr., Sept. 22, 1853.

52 “it is a southern young lady”: quoted in Putnam, 16.

52 “Capricious”: MBR to TR Sr., Sept. 27, 1853.

52 “It may be a southern idea”: MBR to TR Sr., Oct. 12, 1853.

52 “how are you going to behave”: MBR to TR Sr., Nov. 13, 1853.

53 “how to do the thing”: MBR to TR Sr., Oct. 12, 1853.

53 Baker recollections: Mitchell interview, Atlanta Journal, June 10, 1923.

53 “much else . . . unfortunate”: B reminiscences.

54 “I do not think she will get strong”: MSB to TR Sr., 1855.

54 “Darling, it would be impossible”: MBR to TR Sr., May 1, 1855.

54 “You have proved that you love me”: MBR to TR Sr., May 2, 1855.

54 “dreariness reigning everywhere”: TR Sr. to MBR, May 1, 1855.

54 “bed does not offer”: TR Sr. to MBR, May 6, 1855.

55 Sister Anna laments separation: July 1, 1854; Sept. 1854.

56 Grandmamma’s account of TR’s birth: MSB to Susan West, Oct. 28, 1858; also partly quoted in Putnam, 22-23.

56 Baby doing splendidly: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 1 and Nov. 3, 1858.

57 “Are me a soldier laddie?”: Anna Gracie to MBR, Sept. 9, 1861.

57 Mittie hangs a Confederate flag: TR denied any truth to the story in a letter to Rev. J. L. Underwood. See Underwood, 216.

57 Grandmamma wishes to be buried in a common grave: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 16, 1861.

57 Mittie and Anna send packages: B reminiscences; also MSB to Susan West, Dec. 18, 1862.

58 Letter from Irvine: quoted, MSB to Susan West, Feb. 10, 1863.

58 Mittie breaks with traditional Saturday dinners: Dec. 15, 1861, she writes to TR Sr.: “I went down [to his fathers house] yesterday to dinner but, Thee, something occurred there which has made me determine not to dine there again . . . I felt my blood boil . . . I could not touch another mouthful. . . Thee, I wish I could see you tonight.”

58 “I should hate to have married into them”: Abbott, Letters of Archie Butt, 278-79.

58 “You know he does not feel as we do”: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 29, 1862.

59 TR Sr. helps with anti-war rally: Churchill, 126.

60 TR Sr. “felt that he had done a very wrong thing”: B reminiscences.

60 Corinne sees influence on TR: interview, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

60 War game in Central Park: B reminiscences.

60 Prays for Almighty to “grind . . . troops to powder”: Robinson, 17.

60 “poor mechanics” oppose draft: MSB to Susan West, July 14, 1863.

60 “I would never have felt satisfied”: TR Sr. to MBR, Jan. 1, 1862.

60 “Teedie was afraid” of a bear: MBR to TR Sr., Nov. 13, 1861.

61 “You must not. . . get sick”: TR Sr. to MBR, Dec. 6, 1861.

61 Mittie has “hands full”: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 18, 1861.

61 Up “six or seven times”: MBR to TR Sr., Dec. 9, 1861.

61 “children deserted by their papa”: MBR to TR Sr., Nov. 13, 1861.

62 TR Sr. goes to the White House: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 7, 1861.

62 Mistaken for Lincoln at church: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 10, 1861.

62 Shops for Mrs. Lincoln’s hat: Robinson, 26.

62 TR Sr.’s account of the White House ball is contained in two letters to Mittie, Feb. 5 and Feb. 6, 1862.

63 Gaining political experience: TR Sr. to MBR, Dec. 6,1861.

63 “utter inability of congressmen”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 19.

63 “The delays were so great”: TR Sr. to MBR, Jan. 1,1862; also quoted in Robinson, 22-23.

63 Forty-eight-hour adventure in Virginia: TR Sr. to MBR, Oct. 14, 1862; also quoted in Robinson, 30-31.

64 “hope you will take a good long nap”: TR Sr. to MBR, Dec. 19, 1861.

64 TR Sr. arranges for Grandmamma to get through the lines: TR Sr. to MBR, Feb. 14 and Mar. 1, 1862.

64 Wishes he had kept a diary: TR Sr. to MBR, Feb. 27, 1862.

65 “Tell Bamie”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 10, 1861.

65 Death of Willie Lincoln: TR Sr. to MBR, Feb. 21, 1862.

65 “I wish we sympathized together”: TR Sr. to MBR, Mar. 2, 1862.

65 “Thee is a good young man”: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 15, 1862.

65 Mittie risking life or reason: MSB to Susan West, June 23, 1863.

66 Grandmamma on the Russian Ball: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 9, 1863.

66 “too much gaiety”; downstairs, carriages at the door: MSB to Susan West, Dec. 30, 1863.

67 Mrs. Burton Harrison’s views on Mittie: Harrison, 278-79.

68 Mittie’s exchange with Hay: B reminiscences.

68 “nothing more like a Roosevelt than a Roosevelt wife”: interview with Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt.

68 “If she was only a Christian”: MSB to Susan West, Dec. 15, 1863.

69 TR Sr. preferred Mittie in white: letter dated Dec. 27, 1861.

69 Bursts of housekeeping: MSB to Susan West, Jan. 9, 1863.

69 Mittie more economical: TR Sr. to MBR, Jan. 23, 1862.

70 Thinks of her as “one of my little babies”: TR Sr. to MBR, June 16, 1873.

70 “loving tyrant”: MBR to Anna Gracie, Jan. 12, 1873.

70 “just received your letter”: TR to MBR, Apr. 28, 1868, Letters, I, 3.

70 Mittie amused by prayer: TR, Autobiography, 13.

70 Takes Bamie to theater: MSB to Susan West, Feb. 8, 1864.

70 “devotion wrapped us round”: Robinson, 18.

3. GRAND TOUR

Unless otherwise indicated this chapter has been drawn from TR’s boyhood diaries for the years 1869 and 1870, the originals of which are in the Theodore Roosevelt Collection. Background on James D. Bulloch and the building of the Alabama has come from Rush and Woods, Official Records; Kell, Recollections; Meriwether, Semmes; and from Bulloch’s own Secret Service.

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71 Scotia fastest ship to Europe: N.Y. Times, July 25, 1866.

71 Fellow passengers: ibid., May 13, 1869.

71 Sillerton Jackson: Wharton, Age of Innocence, 10.

72 “I basked in the happiness”: Kaplan, 42.

72 “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar”: Edel, 304.

72 Rhyme by CVS: (TRB).

73 Mittie meets Mr. St. John: Robinson, 42.

73 “It was one wild scene of commotion”: MBR to Anna Gracie, May 1869.

74 “Strange child!”: ibid.

74 Irvine’s secret return: Robinson, 36-37.

74 “You have no idea of my enthusiasm”: MBR to Anna Gracie, undated.

75 Richard Henry Dana’s impression of James D. Bulloch: To Dana it seemed a great shame that men of the caliber of Captain Bulloch had to give up careers in the Navy in order to make a better living. “By night, I walk deck for a couple of hours with the young captain,” Dana wrote. “After due inquiries about his family in Georgia, and due remembrance of those of his mother’s line whom we loved, and the public honored... the fascinating topic of the navy, the frigates and the line-of-battle ships and little sloops, the storms, the wrecks, and the sea fights, fill up the time. He loves the navy still, and has left it with regret; but the navy does not love her sons as they love her. On the quarter-deck at fifteen, the first in rank of his year, favored by his commanders, with service in the best vessels, making the great fleet cruise under Morris, taking part in the actions of the Naval Brigade on shore in California, serving on the Coast Survey, a man of science as well as a sailor—yet what is there before him, or those like him, in our navy?” (To Cuba and Back, 13-14.)

75 Bulloch like Thackeray’s Colonel Newcome: TR, Autobiography, 14.

75 “When civilization . . . fighting a last battle”: Donald, 374.

75 Response in British press: London Times, May 25, June 11, 14, and 17, 1869.

76 “Father, did Texas . . . annex itself’: MBR to Anna Gracie, June 11, 1869.

76 Heroes in books and among southern kinsfolk: TR, Autobiography, 30.

76 Talks of Irvine in speech at Roswell: N.Y. Times, Oct. 21, 1905.

78 “as valiant... a soul as ever lived”: TR, Autobiography, 14-15.

78 TR’s influence on James D. Bulloch: TR to MBR, Sept. 14, 1881, Letters, I, 52. “I have persuaded him to publish a work which only he possesses the materials to write,” TR reported proudly to his mother.

78 Furness Abbey: background from Lefebure, English Lake District; details of the Roosevelt visit from MBR’s long letter to Anna Gracie dated June 3, 1869.

80 “on magic ground”: MBR to Anna Gracie, June 11, 1869.

80 TR Sr. reads from Lady of the Lake: ibid.

80 Excursion on Loch Lomond: ibid.

81 “I want to learn about things, too”: ibid.

81 Sights seen at the British Museum: MBR to Anna Gracie, July 15,1869.

82 “I wore my pale-green silk”: ibid.

83 Asthma in London: TR to Edith Carow, July 10,1869, private collection of Sarah Alden Gannett.

84 TR douses candle in tumbler: MBR to Anna Gracie, July 15, 1869.

84 Teedie “decidedly better”: ibid.

85 “A course of travel of this sort”: Forbes, 12-13.

85 “a token of some future potency”: Edel, 296.

86 “lovely times when . . . not obliged to think of sculpture or painting”: Robinson, 49.

86 Long-distance hikes: The figures quoted, from TR’s diaries, are substantiated by other references. Aug. 16, 1869, TR Sr. writes to Anna Gracie, “Teedie and Ellie have walked today thirteen miles each and are very proud of their performance, although Teedie has been farther several times.” (Quoted in Putnam, 63.)

87 Details on the Rigi-Kulm: Baedeker, Switzerland (1869).

87 “Rose immediately”: MBR diary, Sept. 4, 1869.

88 “He takes a great deal of interest now”: MBR to Anna Gracie, June 11, 1869.

91 “Now, darling, this is one of the greatest works of art”: Robinson, 48.

91 “We are going to commence vigorously”: MBR to Anna Gracie, [n.d.] 1869.

4. A DISEASE OF THE DIREST SUFFERING

In addition to material from the Roosevelt papers this chapter is based on extensive interviews with asthmatics, the parents of asthmatics, and physicians specializing in the treatment of asthma. Those technical writings that have been most helpful include Kemp, Understanding Bronchitis and Asthma; Travis, Chronic Illness in Children; Knapp, “The Asthmatic Child and the Psychosomatic Problem of Asthma”; Knapp, “The Asthmatic and His Environment”; and Knapp, Mathé, and Vachon, “Psychosomatic Aspects of Bronchial Asthma.”

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93 Asthma as a family affliction: see essay by Miriam Pachacki in Travis, 189-94; Liebman, Minuchin, and Baker, “The Use of Structural Family Therapy in the Treatment of Intractable Asthma.”

94 “genetic predisposition” already noted: Rosenblatt, “History of Bronchial Asthma,” in Weiss and Segal, 11.

95 “neurotic character of the complaint”: Thorowgood, 35.

95 Work by Laënnec: Rosenblatt, in Weiss and Segal, 9.

95 Findings of Joshua Bicknell Chapin: Chapin, 13-14.

96 Findings of Henry Hyde Salter: Salter, 33-34.

96 “Organs are made for action”: ibid., 102.

97 Ways to avert an attack: Chapin, 16; Rosenblatt, in Weiss and Segal, 10.

97 Salter on the use of tobacco: Salter, 120-21.

97 Agony of an asthmatic attack: interviews with Cort Sutton and Edward T. Hall. Of published accounts of the anxieties experienced, the finest by far is still that written by Salter more than a century ago, On Asthma, 61.

98 “If I were drowning”: interview with Edward T. Hall.

98 “wretched,” “suffered much”: TR to Edward Sanford Martin, Nov. 26, 1900, Letters, II, 1443; Autobiography, 15.

98 “nobody seemed to think I would live”: TR quoted in N.Y. World, Nov. 16, 1902.

98 Smokes a cigar: this treatment also described in MBR’s Oct. 3,1869, letter to Anna Gracie.

98 “Poor little Teedie is sick again”: quoted in Putnam, 64.

99 Bronchial tubes in spasm: see Weiss, Bronchial Asthma.

99 “everything under . . . turned to lead”: interview with Mrs. John Curtiss.

101 Interplay of emotions and the asthmatic “habit”: see especially Pachacki, in Travis, 189-94; Kemp, 28.

101 “It isn’t that the emotions . . . are different”: Kemp, 33.

102 Experiment with house dust: Knapp, Mathé, and Vachon, in Weiss and Segal.

102 “We tend to use what is available”: Pachacki, in Travis, 190.

103 “suppressed cry for the mother”: Travis, 168-71; Knapp, in Schneer, 245.

103 TR Sr.’s absence during the Civil War: “the syndrome of the absent father” is described by Pachacki, in Travis, 191.

104 Hurried departure from Berlin: Robinson, 45.

105 Grandmamma’s description of the departure for Saratoga and the first known mention of the word “asthma” in the Roosevelt papers are contained in her letter to Susan West, June 22, 1863.

105 “periodicity”: Salter, 35.

105 Sunday a day “we children did not enjoy”: TR, Autobiography, 8.

105 The story of TR and the “zeal” is from Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 19-21, and was written in cooperation with TR. Yet, curiously, in one of his own essays, “The Bible and the People” (Works, XIII, 647-48), TR tells the story as though it had happened to another little boy.

109 “let them that are most afraid”: Bunyan, 294.

109 Asthma lends a kind of power: see Liebman, Minuchin, and Baker, “The Use of Structural Family Therapy in the Treatment of Intractable Asthma.”

109 “A hanging—how long does that take?”: interview with Cort Sutton.

110 Life as a battle: Travis, 174-75.

110 “We enjoy fine music”: quoted in Miller, Nostalgia, 189.

110 Proust’s case: see especially Knapp, “The Asthmatic and His Environment.”

111 Salter on the asthmatics future life: Salter, 18.

111 Making the child “a participant, not a spectator”: Travis, 183.

111 Horseback riding as therapy: Thorowgood, 64.

5. METAMORPHOSIS

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112 Red Cloud on Fifth Avenue, eight-hour day, East River Bridge: N.Y. Times for June 1870.

113 “without imminent danger of losing caste”: Nevins and Thomas, 246.

113 Heat wave: N.Y. Times, July 1870. Thirty-five people died of heat prostration in the city in one day (July 19).

113 French troops singing: Longworth, 20.

113 CVS anxious about Bamie’s safety: TR Sr. to B, [n.d.] 1870.

113 TR “peculiarly well”: TR Sr. to B, July 20, 1870.

114 “I am away with Teedie again”: TR Sr. to B, undated.

114 “Do not let them spoil you”: TR Sr. to B, Aug. 15, 1870.

114 “Your mother came back”: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 1, 1870.

114 “The spasm yielded”: MBR to B, Sept. 5, 1870.

114 “bad news from your mother”: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 6, 1870.

115 “You must make your body”: Robinson, 50.

115 Sessions at Woods gymnasium: interview with John Wood, N.Y. World, Jan. 24, 1904.

115 “widening his chest”: Robinson, 50.

115 Impact of “The Flight of the Duchess”: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 39-40.

116 Humiliated by boys in Maine: TR, Autobiography, 30-31.

116 “he did not think a sugar diet was good for me”: TR to Quentin Roosevelt, Nov. 4, 1914, Letters, VIII, 829.

116 Bamie’s Saturdays with TR Sr.: B reminiscences.

117 “Menu as usual”: July 11, 1872.

117 Fox the face of God: Robinson, 23.

118 Incident of the dead seal: TR, Autobiography, 16.

118 Favorite reading: ibid., 17-19.

118 “Unroll the world’s map”: Reid, Scalp Hunters, 7.

119 “What with the wild gallops”: ibid., 19.

119 “chain of destruction”: Reid, Boy Hunters, 105.

119 “About noon”: ibid., 333.

119 Uncle Hilborne introduces TR to Darwin: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 38.

119 At the Academy “every spare moment”: TR to TR Sr., Sept. 18, 1872, Letters, I, 6.

119 Hilborne “talked science”: quoted in Putnam, 78-79.

120 Studying English, French, German, and Latin: TR to Anna Gracie, July 7, 1872, Letters, I, 6.

120 Summers “the special delight”: Robinson, 51.

120 Teedie lives “a life apart”: ibid., 36.

120 Newborn squirrels and tree frog: TR, “Notes on Natural History,” Aug. 1872 (TRC).

120 “the loss to science”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 8.

120 Expedition to Paul Smiths: TR, diary, Aug. 1871 (TRC).

121 TR’s contributions to the museum: Third and Fourth Annual Reports of the American Museum of Natural History.

121 “stuffer” John G. Bell: Herrick, 253; Adams, Audubon, 461; TR, “My Life as a Naturalist,” Works, V, 385-86.

121 First gun: TR, Autobiography, 20-21.

121 Spectacles open “an entirely new world”: ibid.

122 Sees birds on the Nile: TR, diary, Dec. 3, 1872; Jan. 8, 1873 (TRC).

122 Kills first bird, Dec. 13: TR, diary (TRC).

123 TR Sr. rescues yellow jacket: MBR, diary, Aug. 27, 1869 (TRC).

123 “Father and I” shoot eighteen birds: TR, diary, Dec. 31, 1872 (TRC).

123 “eyes sparkling with delight”: MBR to Anna Gracie, Feb. 3, 1873.

123 The look of the Great Prairies: TR, diary, Dec. 3, 1872 (TRC).

123 “serious work” the “chief zest”: TR, Autobiography, 22.

123 Comic figure on a donkey: Robinson, 57; B reminiscences.

124 TR Sr. has trouble keeping up: Robinson, 57.

124 “The sporting is injurious to my trousers”: Robinson, 60.

124 Skinning procedure was the same then as now. See Labrie, Amateur Taxidermist.

125 “traveler is a perfect king”: quoted in Bull and Lorimer, 44.

125 TR Sr. reads Egyptian history: Robinson, 58.

125 “back to old Bible times”: quoted in Putnam, 91.

125 Circassian lady and TR Sr.: TR, diary, Dec. 7, 1872 (TRC).

126 Mittie relishes weather and privacy: MBR to Anna Gracie, Jan. 12,1873.

126 “In such a climate”: MBR to Anna Gracie, Feb. 3, 1873.

126 Henry Adams on the Nile: Ford, Letters of Henry Adams.

126 “The children have gone to bed”: MBR to Anna Gracie, Jan. 12, 1873

126 Aboard the Aboul Irdan: copy of the original contract between TR Sr. and Antonio Sapienza, dragoman, Dec. 10, 1872 (WSCC).

126 “nicest, coziest, pleasantest little place”: TR, diary, Dec. 12, 1872 (TRC).

126 Harvard men and Clift family: B reminiscences.

126 “Sometimes we sail head foremost”: Robinson, 57.

127 “as we go for the entirely different life”: quoted in Putnam, 82.

127 “Our life on board”: E to Archibald Gracie, Dec. 15,1872 (FDRL).

127 Moonlight expedition to Philae: TR, diary, Jan. 18, 1873 (TRC).

127 Bamie and Mittie: B reminiscences; interview with W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

128 There was an old fellow named Teedie”: E to Archibald Gracie, Sept. 5, 1873 (FDRL).

128 Visit with Emerson: Robinson, 63.

128 Ellen Emerson’s impression: quoted in Rusk, Emerson, 470.

128 New Year’s party: ibid., 59; also C to Edith Carow, Feb. 1, 1873.

129 Flying the Stars and Stripes: E to Archibald Gracie, Dec. 15, 1872 (FDRL).

129 CVS Roosevelt estate as high as $7 million: W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., and Corinne Robinson Alsop to Hermann Hagedorn, Dec. 1954 (TRB); as low as $3 million: P. James Roosevelt to the author.

130 Cost of Nile winter: original contract previously cited (WSCC).

130 Union Square house demolished: Nevins and Thomas, 422.

130 “If one allowed himself to dwell”: quoted in Putnam, 91.

131 Total birds killed: TR to Anna Gracie, Feb. 9, 1873.

PART TWO

6. UPTOWN

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135 Fighting loneliness: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 24, 1873.

135 Business from Chicago: Cobb, 51.

135 Weekend activities: TR Sr. to B, July 17 and Aug. 9, 1873.

136 “Fritz goes beautifully”: TR Sr. to B, Oct. 9, 1873.

136 Tears down plaster beams: TR Sr. to MBR, July 20,1873.

136 “can see all who pass”: TR Sr. to B, June 29, 1873.

136 Windows and showcases: Hellman, 27.

136 “I think without egotism”: TR Sr. to MBR, July 20, 1873.

136 Annual contributions: Fifth and Sixth Annual Reports of the American Museum of Natural History.

137 Letter misdated: TR Sr. to B, July 17, ’63 [1873].

137 “so anxious to see you home”: TR Sr. to MBR, June 6, 1873.

137 Pleased with “self-denial”: TR Sr. to MBR, June 16, 1873.

137 Return of asthma: TR, diary, Feb. 22, 1873 (TRC).

137 TR Sr. pressed into service at Vienna: newspaper clippings, Robert B. Roosevelt Papers, New York Historical Society.

137 TR in the doldrums: Putnam, 101.

137 “hand tremble awfully”: TR to TR Sr., June 29, 1873, Letters, I, 11.

138 Switzerland works wonders: MBR to TR Sr., Aug. 17, 1873.

138 Panic of 1873: Nevins, Emergence of Modern America, 290-304.

138 “poor Mr. Clews”: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 24, 1873.

138 Mittie “anxious”: MBR to TR Sr., Sept. 21, 1873.

138 Mittie on shopping spree: B reminiscences.

138 New furnace going: TR Sr. to MBR, Sept. 21, 1873.

138 Carpet in port: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 24, 1873.

139 Billiard room: ibid.

139 Trouble with staircase: B reminiscences.

139 Return on Russia: N.Y. Times, Nov. 6, 1873.

139 Mittie and the family fortune: B reminiscences.

139 Interiors at 57th Street: photographs (TRB).

140 Top-floor gymnasium: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 50.

140 “boxing lessons”: E to Archibald Gracie, Nov. 16, 1873 (FDRL).

140 Teedie’s Nile specimens: Several of these, with their original cards, are at the American Museum of Natural History.

141 “All that gives me most pleasure”: TR Sr. to TR, Oct. 6, 1874.

141 The “power of being . . . focused”: Robinson, 3.

141 Schuyler on “power of concentration”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 10-11.

142 Work with Bureau of Charities, remarks to reporters: miscellaneous clippings, scrapbook (TRC).

142 Incident of the silver trowel: Hellman, 23-24.

142 “no ascetic”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 11.

142 “I can see him now”: ibid.

143 Crippled children on the dining-room table: Robinson, 5.

143 “neither spoiled by good fortune”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 52.

143 Interested in “every good thing”: ibid., 10.

143 “control the strongest affections”: ibid., 33.

143 “wish you were not so good”: MBR to TR Sr., June 2, 1873.

143 “love you and wish to please”: MBR to TR Sr., Oct. 15, 1873.

143 “mingled feelings”: B reminiscences.

144 Dancing class for forty: MBR to B, Nov. 11, 1874.

144 Sara Delano friendship: letters to B, 1876, 1877 (FDRL).

144 Mittie’s portrait: it now hangs at TRB.

144 Mittie in her finery: B reminiscences.

144 Chemical Bank weathers the panic: According to History of the Chemical Bank, the old institution remained “a veritable beacon light of returning confidence” in 1873 when it declared a dividend of 100 percent.

145 Roosevelt venture in Montana mining: an undated clipping from a publication called Copper (TRC).

145 TR Sr. and Alexander Graham Bell: Mrs. TR, Jr., Day Before Yesterday, 37-38.

145 TR Sr.’s various activities: TR Sr. to B, June 6, 1875.

145 “What business I shall enter”: TR to Anna Fisher (Dresden, Germany), Feb. 5, 1876, Letters, I, 14.

146 “I had a very delightful visit”: quoted in Martin, Choate, 329.

146 Times of “every special delight”: Robinson, 89.

146 Mornings on horseback, Father in the lead: ibid., 8.

147 “But, Uncle”: Parsons, 32.

147 Fanny Smith’s recollections: ibid., 18-26.

147 “How I will enjoy”: TR Sr. to B, June 6, 1875.

147 “He will be with us now”: TR to B, July 25, 1876, Letters, I, 15.

148 Ellie at times “very ill”: TR to Anna Fisher, Feb. 5, 1876, Letters, I, 14.

148 Illness thought to be epilepsy: ARL, interview with Hermann Hagedorn (TRB).

148 “congestion of the brain”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 9, 1874.

148 “What will I become”: E to TR Sr., Sept. 19, 1873 (FDRL).

149 “The attack . . . decidedly the worst”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 9, 1874.

149 “fear . . . alone at night”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 14, 1874.

149 “pleasure to receive your letters”: TR Sr. to TR, Nov. 23, 1874.

150 “It is so funny, my illness”: E to TR, Nov. 22, 1874.

150 “scarce know how”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 27, 1874.

150 “not had a respectable suit”: quoted in E. Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game, 6.

150 “Dear Old Governor”: E to TR Sr., Mar. 6, 1875 (FDRL); also quoted in Lash, 31-32.

151 “Yesterday, during my Latin lesson”: E to TR Sr., Oct. 1,1875 (FDRL); also quoted in E. Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game, 6.

151 “Poor Ellie Roosevelt”: quoted in Lash, 33.

152 “just a sell my being down here”: Jan. 14,1876, quoted in E. Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game, 26.

152 “have not taken a drink”: ibid.

152 Enjoying Texas; dog for a pillow: E to TR Sr., Jan. 9 and 12, 1876 (FDRL); latter also quoted in Lash, 33-34.

7. THE MORAL EFFECT

None of the Roosevelt children, for all they wrote about their father, mentioned a thing about his political activities. Nor have any of TR’s biographers touched on this side of the family story; rather, the impression given is of a wholly apolitical patriarch. Only Jacob Riis, in his Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen, even mentions, in a sentence, the fact that TR Sr. attended the Cincinnati convention. So it has been primarily from contemporary newspapers and TR Sr.’s own correspondence that this account has been drawn.

For material on Roscoe Conkling, the author has relied on David M. Jordan’s Roscoe Conkling of New York, Donald Barr Chidsey’s The Gentleman from New York, and Gentleman Boss, the superb biography of Chester A. Arthur by Thomas C. Reeves.

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154 Robert Roosevelt’s activities: miscellaneous clippings, letters, notebooks in the Robert B. Roosevelt Papers, New York Historical Society; also DAB.

155 “Let us try some plan”: N.Y. Tribune, Aug. 28, 1877.

155 “Absolutely the only protection”: ibid.

156 TR Sr.’s fondness for The Potiphar Papers: letter to MBR, May 31,1853.

156 “While good men sit at home”: Norton, Orations, 269.

156 “the image and figure”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 51-53.

156 Grant scandals: White, Republican Era, 365-74.

156 Charles Francis Adams warns: ibid., 366.

156 Fifth Avenue Conference: N.Y. Times, May 16, 1876. See also, Garraty, Lodge, 44-47.

156 “weighty and reliable of our friends”: Ford, 273.

157 “Oh, they reenacted the moral law”: Garraty, Lodge, 47.

157 The “saving element”: N.Y. Tribune, May 17, 1876.

157 “Men whose names ring”: Boston Evening Transcript, May 16,1876.

157 “fight Conkling at all events”: quoted in Jordan, 239.

157 Ideal candidate according to Adams: Ford, 279.

158 “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism”: quoted in Jordan, 279.

158 “grandiloquent swell”: quoted in Muzzey, 61.

158 Conkling’s appearance: from a reporters account, N.Y. Commercial Gazette, June 18, 1883, quoted in Reeves, 42-43.

158 Too good-looking to be pure: Chidsey, 116-17.

159 A mind approaching genius: see Depew, 77-79.

160 Conkling thought his hour had arrived: Chidsey, 203.

160 “bail for all those fellows”: quoted in Reeves, 93.

160 Convention excitement, activities: N.Y. Sun, N.Y. Times, N.Y. Tribune, N.Y. Herald, Cincinnati Daily Gazette.

160 “You would never recognize your father”: TR Sr. to B, June 13, 1876.

161 “Carl, you won’t oppose me”: Fuess, 220.

161 TR Sr.’s attack on Conkling: Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 13, 1876. See also, Shores, 247-48.

162 Headlines: Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 14, 1876.

162 Curtis on Conkling: quoted in Muzzey, 104.

162 “How is New York?”: quoted in Reeves, 96.

8. FATHER AND SON

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165 An “ungreased squeak”: quoted in Putnam, 78.

166 “At times he could hardly get them out”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 20.

166 Likes his ears: Fraser, “Sculpting TR.”

166 Richard Welling’s first impression: Welling, “My Classmate Theodore Roosevelt.”

166 “Sporting Calendar” entries: Aug. 21, 1875 (TRC).

166 Time lost “through sickness”: TR to MBR, Mar. 4, 1876, Letters, I, 15.

166 Bamie picks his rooms: “Theodore would prefer you decide upon and take his rooms,” TR Sr. writes B, May 22, 1876.

167 “As I saw the last of the train”: TR Sr. to TR, Sept. 28, 1876.

167 Never knew “what idleness was”: Cutler, unpublished memoir dated Sept. 18, 1901 (TRC).

167 “rather smelly room”: TR to B, June 20, 1875, Letters, I, 13.

168 TR’s description of the shrew: quoted in Cutright, 36-37.

168 Theatrically superior: Parsons, 28.

168 “If I were writing to Theodore”: quoted in Robinson, 96.

168 King Olaf, Song of Roland, Nibelungenlied: TR, Autobiography, 19, 326, 23.

168 “somewhat supercilious”: McDougall, 129-30.

168 “such fun, the most original”: Parsons, 34.

169 “and don’t frizzle her hair”: TR to C, Feb. 5, 1877, Letters, I, 23.

169 Dancing class “very orderly”: quoted in Putnam, 121.

169 “Little Pet Pussie”: Mar. 27, 1877, quoted in Robinson, 98.

169 First letter to Mittie: TR to MBR, Sept. 29, 1876, Letters, I, 16.

170 “opponents played very foul”: TR to MBR, Nov. 19, 1876, ibid., 20.

170 The “gentleman sort”: TR to B, Oct. 15, 1876, ibid., 17.

170 “antecedents”: TR to C, Nov. 26, 1876.

170 Lamson there only to enjoy himself: TR to B, Nov. 12, 1876.

170 “Take care of your morals”: quoted by TR in a letter to MBR, Mar. 24, 1878, Letters, I, 33.

170 “Sundays I have all to myself’: TR to B, Oct. 15, 1876, Letters, I, 17.

170 “never spent an unhappy day”: TR to MBR, Oct. 29, 1876, ibid., 19.

170 “not... a fellow in college”: TR to TR Sr., Oct. 22, 1876, ibid., 18.

171 “in beautiful health”: TR to MBR, Nov. 19, 1876, ibid., 20.

171 “rug, which will curl”: TR to B, Nov. 26, 1876.

172 In touch with Dr. Wyman: TR to MBR, Jan. 18, 1877, Letters, I, 22.

172 “a little asthma in November”: TR to TR Sr. and MBR, Feb. 11, 1877, ibid., 26.

172 Asthmatic children removed from home lives: see Purcell, “The Effect on Asthma in Children of Experimental Separation from the Family.”

172 “We all like his friends”: Anna Gracie to E, Jan. 5, 1877 (FDRL).

172 “He went off most cheerfully”: TR Sr. to E, Jan. 6, 1877 (FDRL).

173 Sleighing party: TR to C, Feb. 5, 1877, Letters, I, 23.

173 Cost of a year at Harvard: King, 18; also, Grant, “Harvard College in the Seventies.”

173 “send on my gun”: TR to TR Sr. and MBR, Feb. 11,1877, Letters, 1,26.

173 TR in Hayes parade: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 51-52.

174 “He talked very pleasantly”: TR Sr. to TR, Oct. 27, 1876.

174 Hayes shot at: Russell, 99.

175 Evarts proposes TR Sr. for Customhouse: Barrows, 327.

175 Evarts’ past work with TR Sr.: ibid., 469.

176 Above crass temptations: Nation, Nov. 1, 1877.

176 Collectorship and the Customhouse: see Reeves, 62-63, 67-68.

177 Melville a customs inspector at $4 a day: Howard, 284.

177 Phelps, Dodge case: see Reeves, 82-83; also Lowitt, 276-81.

178 “We look back . . . we were fools”: quoted in Reeves, 82.

178 Delmonico’s banquet: N.Y. Times, May 15,1877.

179 TR Sr. escorts Hayes on museum tour: ibid., May 16, 1877.

179 TR Sr. rides with Hayes entourage: ibid., May 17, 1877.

180 Conkling at Rochester convention: Jordan, 278-79.

180 “all excited here about politics”: quoted in Martin, Choate, 329.

180 TR Sr.’s interest in Cleopatra’s Needle: interview with W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

180 TR Sr. leads group for Harvard visit: TR to C, June 3, 1877, Letters, I, 28.

180 Butterfly reduced to a grub: TR Sr. to B, Aug. 15, 1877.

180 Saratoga charities meeting: N.Y. Times, Sept. 8, 1877.

181 “I am clear”: Williams, Hayes, Diary.

181 “even up there they lift their skirts”: N.Y. Herald, Nov. 9, 1877.

181 “TERRIBLE CHARGES”: N.Y. Herald, Oct. 31, 1877.

181 Denounces management of city’s asylums: N.Y. Times, Oct. 31, 1877.

182 “he seemed to me another man”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 34.

182 “in the prime of vigorous manhood”: N.Y. Tribune, Oct. 30, 1877.

182 “Tell Father I am watching”: TR to B, Oct. 14, 1877, Letters, I, 29.

183 Republicans caucus in secrecy: N.Y. Times, Nov. 11, 1877.

183 Compromise reported: ibid., Dec. 5, 1877.

183 Nominees called “good men”: ibid., Dec. 7, 1877.

183 Afraid Conkling has “won the day”: TR to TR Sr., Dec. 8,1877, Letters, 1,30.

183 Conkling’s speech of Dec. 12: N.Y. Times, N.Y. Tribune, N.Y. Evening Post, Dec. 13,1877.

184 Calls TR Sr. his “bitter personal enemy”: N.Y. Tribune, Dec. 13, 1877.

184 “the end is not yet”: Williams, Hayes, Diary.

185 “uneasy about Father”: TR to B, Dec. 16, 1877, Letters, I, 31.

186 “brilliant daylight assemblages”: N.Y. Times, Dec. 23, 1877.

186 “couldn’t have your appendix out then”: Wister, 17.

186 Entries from Anna Gracies diary: (TRC).

187 Schuyler note: Dec. 22, 1877 (TRC).

187 New “Private Diary”: Dec. 25, 1877 (LC).

187 Sleigh upsets: TR to B, Jan. 19,1878.

187 “sat with him some seven hours”: quoted in Putnam, 147.

187 “I was with your dear father”: Anna Gracie to TR, Feb. 8 [1878].

188 Crowd gathered: Robinson, 105.

188 “young strength . . . poured out”: ibid., 104.

188 Elliott’s account of his father’s death: (TRC).

190 Newspaper tributes: scrapbook (TRC).

191 “What a glorious example!”: condolence note (TRC).

191 “something . . . inspiring”: Robinson, 105.

191 “hard to have parted”: MBR to TR, Mar. 8, 1878.

191 “work out our own salvation”: B reminiscences.

192 “best . . . sufferings should end”: TR to Henry Minot, Feb. 20, 1878, Letters, I, 31.

192 Private anguish: Private Diary (LC).

192 Marks 69th Psalm: TR’s personal Bible (WSCC).

193 “easier for me”: TR to B, Mar. 17, 1878, Letters, I, 32.

193 “My own sweet sister”: TR to B, Mar. 3, 1878.

193 “working away pretty hard”: May 7, 1878, Private Diary (LC).

193 “as if he were present”: TR to MBR, Feb. 28, 1878, Letters, I, 32.

193 Private feelings of remorse and inadequacy: all drawn from June entries, Private Diary (LC).

194 Swinburne on Cooper’s Bluff: Robinson, 100-101.

194 Not so sad as expected: TR to C, Mar. 3, 1878, Letters, I, 32.

195 “Theodore craved”: Robinson, 102.

195 “For ye shall go out with joy”: Isaiah 55:12.

195 “we both of us had . . . tempers”: TR to B, Sept. 20, 1886 (TRB); also quoted in Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 58.

195 “Look out for Theodore”: Sewall, “Bill Sewall Remembers TR,” clipping (TRC).

195 TR Sr. strained himself: B reminiscences; Robinson, 104.

196 “talismans against evil”: Robinson, 106.

196 “‘A rare and radiant maiden’”: TR was especially fond of Poe, so this undoubtedly refers to “The Raven” (“For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—”).

PART THREE

9. HARVARD

Among the greatest of all pleasures in the research for this book has been the chance to work with material in the Harvard University Archives—photographs, scrapbooks, class records, class biographies, memorabilia of all kinds dating from the years when TR was an undergraduate. Of published works the most valuable has been the two-volume biography Charles W. Eliot, by Henry James.

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201 “You belonged to Harvard”: Thayer, 15.

201 “crescent institution”: ibid., 16.

202 Science “the firm foundation”: quoted in N.Y. Times, Dec. 23, 1877.

202 Petty rules: see Morison, Three Centuries, 357-58.

202 Rule book reduced: Hawkins, 110.

202 “a deal of drudgery”: James, Eliot, II, 44.

202 “Do you think it is a wise parent”: ibid., 45.

202 Eliot and Hale motto: ibid., I, 317.

202 Looking neither left nor right: Harry Rand, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

202 Eliot was disliked: James, Eliot, I, 311.

202 “flagstaff in motion”: Wister, 20.

203 “that scoundrel King David”: Eliot, “Eliot of Harvard.”

203 Mental condition has physical origin: James, Eliot, II, 38.

203 Disapproves of baseball: ibid., 69.

203 Memorial Hall: The great building still stands, though in somewhat neglected condition. See also Whitehill, 12-14.

203 “The effect of the place”: James, The Bostonians, 208-09.

204 “Its occupant... is its master”: Martin, “Undergraduate Life.”

204 “to look at the new bookcase”: TR to B, Nov. 9, 1877, Letters, I, 30.

204 One in five thousand went to college: Putnam, 134.

205 Harvard said to offer diversity of student views and backgrounds: Thayer, Roosevelt, 15.

205 Records for the Class of 1880: Harvard Archives.

205 Three Roman Catholics: Class of 1880, Secretary’s Report, Number 1, Commencement 1880, Harvard Archives.

205 Humor anti-Irish, anti-Semitic, and mocking Negro aspirations: see Lampoon, Mar. 7, Oct. 24, and Dec. 19, 1879.

205 Scott on Harvard “temper”: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

206 Asthmatics excused from chapel: William Hooper, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

207 Younger faculty recruited by Eliot: James, Eliot, I, 254-55.

207 Students and professors a different species: Santayana, “The Academic Environment at Harvard.”

207 “Don’t take it upon yourself”: Crimson, Oct. 6, 1876.

207 “We ask but time to drift”: quoted in Pringle, 32.

207 “My system was simple”: Garraty, Lodge, 51-52.

208 “A boy could go completely to pieces”: Harold Fowler, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

208 “Students got drunk”: John Woodbury, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

208 Eliot on “intemperance”: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

208 “unwholesome experiment”: Martin, “Undergraduate Life.”

209 Rand’s recollections: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

209 “pleasant doors”: Wister, 19-20.

209 Crimson on “digs”: Sept. 28, 1876.

210 Class of 1880 known as Bacon’s class: John Woodbury, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

210 Thayer’s recollections: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

210 “Funnily enough”: TR to MBR, Oct. 8, 1878, Letters, I, 34.

210 “delighted” to be in the Porcellian: TR to B, Nov. 10, 1878, Letters, I, 35.

211 “send my silk hat”: TR to MBR, Jan. 11, 1880, Letters, I, 42.

211 Jackson on splendor at 57th Street: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

211 Few could afford a horse: Grant, “Harvard College in the Seventies.”

211 TR’s financial position and expenses for 1877,1878, 1879, and 1880 are all to be found in his private diaries (LC).

211 Eliot’s salary: Eliot, “Eliot of Harvard.”

212 “keep the fraction constant”: TR, Autobiography, 26.

213 “ready to join anything”: Richard Saltonstall, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

213 Academic achievement: for a complete account of TR’s grades at Harvard, see Letters, I, 25-26.

213 “sort of spluttered”: George H. Palmer, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

214 “See here, Roosevelt”: Wilhelm, 35.

214 Saltonstall remembered no caged animals, nothing unusual: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

214 TR chiefly “a joke”: Thayer, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

214 “‘whether he is the real thing’”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 21.

214 Foresees future professor of history: John Woodbury, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

214 Martha Cowdin (Bacon) recollections: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

215 Rose Lee on TR dancing: ibid.

215 “Old Dick . . . on par with the Roosevelts”: Diary, Oct. 1, 1879 (LC).

215 Welling’s account of the skating expedition: “My Classmate.”

216 Rage at drunken classmates imitation: William Hooper, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

216 Wister’s version of the boxing match: Wister, 4-5.

216 N.Y. Times account: Mar. 23, 1879.

217 Spalding’s denunciation of the story: letter to the editor in Time, Dec. 14, 1931 (TRC).

217 “As athletes we are about equal”: Diary, July 30, 1879 (LC).

217 “always thought that he could do things better”: quoted in Putnam, 100.

217 “Only one gentleman stands ahead of me”: TR to B, Oct. 13, 1879, Letters, I, 41-42.

218 Words under the ink blot: A laboratory examination of the diary page was made at the authors request by the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, working with the Library’s Preservation Office.

218 “He is a disgrace”: Diary, Oct. 23, 1878.

218 “I told the clergyman”: TR to MBR, Jan. 11, 1880, Letters, I, 43.

218 “The first two or three days”: TR to MBR, Mar. 16, 1879, ibid., 37.

219 Prefers political economy to natural history: TR to MBR, Oct. 8, 1878, ibid., 33-34.

219 Blames Harvard for killing interest in natural history: TR, Autobiography, 26-27.

220 Shaler: Shaler’s inspirational powers are attested to again and again. “Students whose unimaginative lives had never carried them beyond home and prep school and Harvard Square sat in Shaler’s presence and saw the face of the earth becoming an endless wonderland,” writes Rollo Walter Brown in Harvard Yard, 106. See also William Roscoe Thayer’s memorial essay on Shaler in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine.

220 TR’s dislike for A. S. Hill: John Woodbury, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

220 Saltonstall recollection: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

220 Eliot recollection: ibid.; also Pringle interview notes (TRC).

221 Claims to have held lightweight crown: biographical sketch prepared for an Albany newspaper editor, May 1, 1884, Letters, I, 67.

221 Claims to have been in top ten percent: TR, Autobiography, 25.

221 Note to the Kaiser: Morison, Three Centuries, 427.

221 Hagedorn observations: Hagedorn interviews (TRC).

221 “the golden years”: TR, Diary, Dec. 21 1878 (LC).

221 “can’t conceive . . . possibly enjoying himself: TR, Diary, May 8, 1879 (LC).

221 “ever enjoy myself so much again”: TR, Diary, June 28, 1879 (LC).

222 Letter of Oct. 20, 1879: Letters, I, 42.

222 “I have had just as much money”: Diary, May 5, 1880 (LC).

10. ESPECIALLY PRETTY ALICE

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224 Lee and Saltonstall homesteads: Though greatly altered in appearance, the two houses still stand and amid surroundings that are very little different.

225 Leverett Saltonstall and George Cabot Lee: biographical sketches in (Harvard) Class of 1848 and Class of 1850, as well as miscellaneous clippings, Harvard Archives.

225 “safe as Lee’s vaults”: Amory, 66.

226 Atmosphere “so homelike”: TR, Diary, Oct. 18, 1878 (LC).

226 “Call me by my first name”: ibid., Nov. 28, 1878.

227 “Remember me”: TR to C, Nov. 10, 1878, Letters, I, 36.

227 “especially pretty Alice”: TR, Diary, Jan. 26, 1879 (LC).

227 “All the family . . . just lovely”: TR to B, Apr. 20, 1879, Letters, I, 38.

227 “I want you particularly”: TR to C, May 20, 1879, Letters, I, 40.

227 Summer activities at Oyster Bay: TR, Diary, entries for July 1879 (LC).

228 Class Day evening with Alice: ibid., June 20, 1879.

228 “made everything subordinate”: TR to Henry Minot, Feb. 13, 1880, Letters, I, 43.

228 “one all-absorbing object”: July 5, 1880, quoted in Putnam, 194.

228 “See that girl?” Mrs. Bacon quoted in Pringle notes (TRC).

229 Dueling pistols: Pringle interview with Mrs. Thomas Lee (a cousin of Alice’s), Pringle notes (TRC).

229 Cousin West sent for: C to Pringle, letter dated Sept. 22, 1930, Pringle notes (TRC).

230 “you mustn’t feel melancholy”: TR to MBR, Feb. 8,1880, Letters, I, 43.

230 “Alice . . . did not want to marry him”: Mrs. Bacon quoted in Pringle notes (TRC).

230 “it will be my aim . . . to endear myself”: ALR to MBR, Feb. 1880.

230 “wish I had you here”: TR to B, Mar. 1, 1880, Letters, I, 44.

231 “don’t think Mr. Lee”: TR to C, Mar. 8, 1880, ibid.

231 “invitations to all my friends”: TR to MBR, Mar. 11, 1880, ibid.

232 “brilliant prowess”: N.Y. Sun, Feb. 17, 1884.

232 Mittie’s activities: miscellaneous family correspondence; Anna Gracie’s diary for 1880 (TRC).

232 “He talked to her the whole time”: Kleeman, 101.

233 “If I had not come then”: Davis, 37.

233 “genuine intellectual power”: Parsons, 29.

233 “readiness to meet all situations”: Robinson, 18.

234 “As soon as we got here”: TR to C, Sept. 12, 1880, Letters, I, 46.

234 “Last Sunday night”: quoted in Putnam, 203.

235 “I am so glad”: E to B, Aug. 29 [1880] (FDRL).

235 Warning of heart trouble: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 63-64.

235 Asthma and colic: Putnam, 207.

235 “brown and well”: E to B, Aug. 29 [1880] (FDRL).

236 “Thee is well able”: ibid.

236 Wants no best man if not Elliott: TR to B, May 11, 1880.

236 Fanny Smith’s diary entry: Parsons, 43.

236 “Theodorelike tones”: ibid.

237 “cannot take my eyes off her”: quoted in Putnam, 209.

237 Law school urged by Uncle Rob: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 69.

237 “perfect dream of delight”: TR to MBR, Oct. 31, 1880, Letters, I, 47.

238 TR turning purple: C to Douglas Robinson, Feb. 10, 1881.

238 “going to Republican meetings”: ibid.

239 Law work “very interesting”: TR, Diary, Nov. 24, 1880 (LC).

239 Likes law school “very much”: ibid., Dec. 4, 1880.

239 Loves to take Alice sleighing: ibid., Dec. 22, 1880.

239 “She enjoyed it like a child”: TR Sr. to B, Feb. 18, 1871.

239 “the little inner group of people”: Wharton, Age of Innocence, 48.

240 Alice “greatly admired”: TR, Diary, Dec. 11, 1880 (LC).

241 Douglas Robinson on being married to a Roosevelt: quoted in Butt, I, 175.

241 Alice’s playing heard through the wall: Emlen Roosevelt to B, Feb. 21, 1881.

241 Mittie finds Alice “so companionable”: MBR to E, Dec. 25 [1880] (FDRL).

241 Wister vignette: Wister, 24.

241 “Oh, Energy, thy name is Bamie!”: TR to B, Apr. 1, 1877.

241 “Do you always have to run”: C to E, Dec. 6, 1880 (FDRL).

241 “Sometimes we succeed”: ibid.

242 “Such a lovely long talk”: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 17, 1881.

242 Alice’s feelings about Bamie: ALR to B, Sept. 8, 1881.

242 Talk in Mittie’s room: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 19, 1881.

243 Alice shares TR: C to Pringle (TRC); also Pringle, 49-50.

11. HOME IS THE HUNTER

Unless shown, the details of Elliott’s adventures in India and Ceylon, as well as quotations from his letters home, are from Hunting Big Game in the Eighties, a collection of his letters and journal entries from this period that was compiled and edited by his daughter, Eleanor. The observations of John S. Wise are from his Recollections of Thirteen Presidents.

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245 “Is Bamie showing any signs”: E to TR, Mar. 23, 1881.

245 “have tried to make Corinne understand”: MBR to E, Aug. 7, 1881 (FDRL).

245 “Teddy brought out from London”: MBR to E, Dec. 4,1881 (FDRL).

245 Edith Carow’s party: ibid.

245 “Has not our dear Thee”: quoted in Lash, 37.

246 Letter from Evarts: original (FDRL).

247 “Three hours after the blood had been running”: E to TR, Mar. 6,1881.

248 “brave, old Heart of Oak Brother”: E to TR, Apr. 24,1881.

248 “It is the life”: ibid.

248 Alice worried: B to E, Dec. 7, 1880 (FDRL).

248 “Poor dear Teddy”: MBR to E, Dec. 7, 1880 (FDRL).

248 “This is your last hunt”: TR to E, Dec. 6, 1880 (FDRL).

248 Servants pleased to be remembered: MBR to E, Aug. 7, 1881 (FDRL).

248 Upset by wretchedness: quoted in Lash, 38.

248 Speculates on Age of Chivalry: TR to B, Aug. 21, 1881, Letters, I, 50.

248 “We will all live there happily”: E to TR, Mar. 23, 1881.

248 “It delights me beyond bounds”: ibid.

249 “How proud of you”: E to TR, Aug. 8, 1881.

249 “Do take care of yourself”: E to TR, Apr. 24, 1881.

249 Not “‘our way’”: quoted in Lash, 39.

249 Letter from Aunt Ella Bulloch: Jan. 8, 1882 (FDRL).

250 Anna Gracie worries over Elliott: Anna Gracie diary, Mar. 30, Apr. 5, 1882 (TRC).

250 “dear mother . . . persuaded”: quoted in Davis, 54.

250 “My little heart”: E to C, Nov. 29, 1881 (FDRL).

251 “Why if you don’t take him”: E to C, June [n.d.] 1881 (FDRL).

251 “such a loving, tender brother”: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 19, 1881.

251 “If you were my brother”: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 31, 1881.

251 “The respectable . . . young men”: N.Y. Tribune, Oct. 13, 1882.

251 “comfort child”: MBR to E, undated note (FDRL).

252 Mittie’s “slight unevenness”: E to Douglas Robinson, May 9,1881 (FDRL).

252 Remarks about Mittie by Mrs. Alsop and W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.: interview transcript, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.

253 “I was very proud”: Kleeman, 129-30.

253 “I am very jealous”: MBR to E, Dec. 4, 1881 (FDRL).

253 “My darling son”: MBR to E, undated (FDRL).

254 “they mistook me for you”: TR to E, Nov. 21, 1880 (FDRL).

254 Hunt’s impression: Harvard Club Transcript (TRC).

254 “If he noticed me at all”: Parsons, 29.

254 “drank like a fish”: from notes made by Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt after a conversation with Edith Carow Roosevelt, Jan. 1941, courtesy of P. James Roosevelt.

255 “can’t get it into words”: TR to B, Aug. 21, 1881, Letters, I, 50.

255 Indebtedness to Uncle Jimmie Bulloch: see Introduction, Naval War (Works, VI).

255 “that foolish grit”: quoted in Lash, 37.

255 Elliott’s unpublished short story: typescript (FDRL).

256 Anna Hall admired by Browning: Lash, 50.

256 “I am honestly delighted”: TR to C, July 1, 1883, Letters, I, 61.

256 “to marry and settle down”: TR to MBR, July 8, 1883, Letters, I, 62.

257 “You must be very pure”: Anna Gracie to E, July 1, 1883 (FDRL).

257 “old Indian trouble”: quoted in Lash, 46.

257 “I know I am blue”: ibid.

257 $10,000 in Wyoming ranch: Putnam, 334.

257 $20,000 in G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Pringle, 54.

258 “one of the most brilliant social events”: quoted in Lash, 47.

12. POLITICS

The remembrances and observations of George Spinney and Isaac Hunt quoted in this chapter are from an interview conducted by Hermann Hagedorn at the Harvard Club, New York City, in 1923, and are referred to below as Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC). For background on Jay Gould and his conquests, Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons has been especially useful.

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260 “capable of conduct and utterances”: DAB.

260 “intended to be one of the governing class”: TR, Autobiography, 59.

260 “full of purpose to live”: James, Bostonians, 137.

260 “could join only the Republican Party”: TR, Autobiography, 58.

260 “one thing I like particularly”: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 14, 1881.

260 “saloon keepers, horsecar conductors”: TR, Autobiography, 59.

261 “I feel that I owe”: TR to Joseph Choate, Nov. 10, 1881, Letters, I, 55.

261 Depew at Delmonico’s: Depew, 158-60.

261 Uncle Rob and Michael Murphy: Pringle, 69-70.

261 “We hailed him as the dawn”: Bigelow, 276.

261 “All my friends”: TR, Diary, Oct. 22, 1881 (LC).

261 Emlen Roosevelt to Hagedorn (TRC); also quoted in Pringle, 57.

261 “It is very plain”: Emlen Roosevelt to B, July 13, 1876.

261 “did not relish the personnel”: Emlen Roosevelt to Hagedorn (TRC); also Pringle, 57.

261 Jake Hess, Joe Murray, the decor at Morton Hall: see TR, Autobiography, 59-60.

262 “Not to insist on the spoils”: TR quoted in Shannon, 15.

262 “They rather liked the idea”: ibid.

262 TR’s views of other assemblymen: from TR’s Legislative Diary, Appendix I, Letters, II.

263 Views on Curtis, Kruse, Kelly, Hunt, O’Neil: TR, Autobiography, 67-69.

264 “What on earth”: Nevins, Cleveland, 139.

264 “came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult”: Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

264 N.Y. Sun on TR: Jan. 25, 1882.

265 N.Y. World on TR: Apr. 15, 1883

265 “he got right in with people”: Sewall, 6.

265 “He threw each paper”: Hudson, 144-45.

267 “As a matter of fact”: TR, Autobiography, 82-83.

267 Gompers: DAB; Putnam, 301.

268 “I have always remembered”: TR, Autobiography, 83.

268 “aggressiveness”: quoted in Harbaugh, 40.

269 Gould spreads his stocks on the desk: Myers, Great American Fortunes, 491.

269 Gould unacceptable socially: Josephson, 205.

269 James Alfred Roosevelt and Gould: Cobb, 55.

269 Gould and the Manhattan Elevated: Josephson, 209-12; Putnam, 261-72.

270 Hunt puts TR on to Westbrook: Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

270 TR sees Loewenthal: ibid.

270 “willing to go to the very verge”: TR, Autobiography, 79.

271 N.Y. World view: Oct. 18, 1881.

271 Advice from family friend: TR, Autobiography, 80.

272 “I am, aware”: N.Y. Times, Apr. 7, 1882; also, Works, XIV, 7-11.

272 Clerk’s tally: Putnam, 266.

273 Bribes: Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

273 “He may have been”: TR, Autobiography, 79.

273 Gould and Cyrus Field: Josephson, 211.

274 “The Governor would sit large”: Hudson, 146-47.

275 “like wild geese without a gander”: Hunt, Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

276 “a pulpit concealed on his person”: unidentified clipping, Scrapbook (TRC).

276 “I have to say with shame”: N.Y. World, Mar. 3, 1883; also quoted in Putnam, 285.

277 “Never indulge yourself”: quoted in Wister, 21.

278 Reactions of N.Y. Evening Post and World: Scrapbook (TRC).

278 “The difference between our party and yours”: quoted in Putnam, 287-88; also, full speech in Works, XIV, 16-21.

279 N.Y. Observer. Mar. 10, 1883.

279 “Now, Theodore”: quoted in Pringle, 70.

279 Erastus Brooks incident: recalled by Assemblyman F. S. Decker (TRC).

279 Court ruling on the Cigar Bill: TR, Autobiography, 84-85; also Harbaugh, 40-42.

280 Admirers skeptical of O’Brien support: N.Y. Times, Dec. 27, 1883.

281 Reporter notes “friends of the Administration” in Delavan lobby: N.Y. Evening Post, Jan. 2, 1884.

281 “I am a Republican”: TR to Jonas S. Van Duzer, Nov. 20, 1883, Letters, 1,63.

281 “That young fellow”: N.Y. Times, Dec. 29, 1883.

281 “most ambitious man”: Emlen Roosevelt to Hagedorn (TRC).

282 Larger employer than Carnegie: Reeves, 46.

282 Seth Low on city government: Low in Bryce, I, 650-66.

283 TR on Hubert O. Thompson: TR, Legislative Diary, Appendix I, Letters, II.

284 “we stood shoulder to shoulder”: TR, Autobiography, 67.

284 “blamelessness and the fighting edge”: ibid., 88.

284 Mark Sullivan observation: Sullivan, II, fn. 221.

284 Unwillingness to “face the rather intimate association”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jan. 28, 1909, Letters, VI, 1490.

284 “The wicked flee”: Proverbs 28:1.

284 Eliot on a man in a fight: Brown, Harvard Yard, 25.

13. STRANGE AND TERRIBLE FATE

page

285 “I have a bad headache”: TR to C, July 1, 1883, Letters, I, 61.

285 “I felt much better for it”: TR to ALR, Jan. 22, 1884, Letters, I, 64.

286 James Alfred worried: TR to E, Nov. 28, 1880 (FDRL).

286 Income and sources: TR, Diary, 1883 (LC).

286 $20,000 to Putnam: Pringle, 54.

286 “before a bright fire”: TR, Diary, Jan. 3, 1883 (LC).

286 Anna Gracies instructions: Parsons, 44-45.

287 Friends to see Alice: ibid.

287 “All of the men”: TR to ALR, Jan. 28, 1884, Letters, I, 64.

287 End to social life: The social doings of Elliott and his wife, meantime, were a pet topic in the papers. When Mrs. Astor’s ball was front-page news that January, Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt’s importance in The New York Times account was second only to that of Mrs. Astor. “Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt wore white tulle and green velvet and silver. It was made with a long train and a low neck, fastened with a diamond. Pearls and diamonds were the ornaments,” reported the Times, Jan. 22, 1884.

287 “I tried faithfully”: Riis, 36-37.

287 Disillusioned by the law: TR, Autobiography, 57.

288 “I hardly know what to do”: TR to B, Sept. 15, 1882, Letters, I, 57.

289 Remarks to Country Life: Hagedorn, Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, 7.

289 Final cost $17,000: ibid., 9.

291 Hunt’s recollections: Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

291 Corinne’s account of return to 57th Street: C to Pringle, Sept. 1930, Pringle notes (TRC).

292 Mittie’s death at three o’clock: TR, memorial to MBR (TRC).

292 Double funeral service: N.Y. Times, Sun, and Tribune, Feb. 17, 1884.

292 Chester A. Arthur and Bright’s disease: Reeves, 317-18.

293 Talk of criminal negligence: Mrs. Robert Bacon, Pringle interview, Pringle notes (TRC). Since Mrs. Bacon’s husband was then employed at Lee, Higginson, it is possible that the Lee family too had similar thoughts concerning Alice’s death.

293 “He does not know what he does”: quoted in Sewall, 11.

293 “bravely in the darkness”: quoted in Putnam, 389.

294 Hunts account of all-night work: Hagedorn files (TRC).

294 “I have taken up my work”: TR to Carl Schurz, Feb. 21, 1884, Letters, I, 66.

294 Schurz and the death of his wife: Fuess, 219.

294 “as sweet and gentle as ever”: C to E, Mar. 4, 1884 (FDRL).

294 Sale of 6 West 57th Street: B reminiscences.

295 “That year seems a perfect nightmare”: ibid.

295 Condolence letters; J. Bulloch cable: (TRC).

295 Alice entrusted to Bamie: B reminiscences.

295 “so few that one really cared for”: C to E, Mar. 4, 1884 (FDRL).

296 Memorial to Alice: (TRC).

14. CHICAGO

Newspapers of the late nineteenth century, in a day when it was still not possible technically to publish photographs, reported events in a vivid, pictorial style seldom found in present-day journalism; and since newspapers then were also intensely competitive and openly partisan politically, the coverage of a national convention to be found in the files of almost any great paper of the era is especially alive and colorful, filled with detail. The papers referred to for this account of the Republican National Convention of 1884 include The N.Y. Times, N.Y. Sun, N.Y. Tribune, N.Y. Herald, N.Y. Evening Post, N.Y. World, Chicago Tribune, Boston Transcript, and the Washington Post. Excerpts from various speeches have all been taken from Proceedings of the Eighth Republican National Convention Held at Chicago, Illinois, June 3, 4, 5, and 6,1884.

page

297 “Fast and thick the delegates”: N.Y. Times, June 1, 1884.

297 California delegates in the Palmer House barbershop: a composite of several newspaper accounts, but especially Chicago Tribune, May 31,1884.

298 “All were filled”: N.Y. Sun, June 1, 1884.

298 TR to Bamie: June 8, 1884, Letters, I, 71-72.

299 “Tattooed Man”: cartoon by Bernard Gillam, Puck, Apr. 16, 1884.

299 TR to Lodge: May 26, 1884, Letters, I, 70.

300 “He isn’t ‘Chet’ Arthur any more”: quoted in Reeves, 260.

300 Failure of Grant and Ward: Rhodes, 205.

300 Arthur transforms the White House: Reeves, 268-71.

300 Beecher endorsement: ibid., 368.

300 Orders return of $100,000: ibid., 374.

301 Harper’s Weekly on Edmunds: Feb. 2, Mar. 1, 1884.

301 State convention at Utica: for a thorough account see Putnam, 413-24.

301 Washington trip with Lodge: Lodge journal, Mar. 20,1885, Massachusetts Historical Society.

302 “We are breaking up house”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 5, 1884, Letters, I, 69.

302 To Chicago in a private car: N.Y. World, June 6, 1884.

302 Evening Post appraisal of TR: May 31, 1884.

302 Nast cartoon of TR and Cleveland: Harper’s Weekly, Apr. 19, 1884.

302 “mouth full of regular white teeth”: N.Y. Tribune, June 6, 1884.

302 Statement to the Chicago Tribune: Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1884.

302 “as if the fate of the nation”: N.Y. Herald, June 1, 1884.

303 Lodge doubts Blaine can be stopped: Lodge journal, Mar. 20, 1885, Massachusetts Historical Society.

303 “Bits of good news”: N.Y. Tribune, June 1, 1884.

303 McKinley a sign: ibid., June 3, 1884.

303 “Not for forty nominations”: Stone, Fifty Years, 150.

304 “pulled together”: TR to B, June 8, 1884, Letters, I, 72.

304 “Many of our men”: ibid.

304 “Chicagoe” a “marvelous city”: TR to B, Sept. 2, 1880.

305 Badges cast in gold: Sullivan, II, 215.

305 “What I liked about him”: Platt, 185.

306 “The leader was Mr. George William Curtis”: Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1884.

306 Platt stroking his beard: N.Y. Times, June 4, 1884.

308 “rather dudish-looking” TR: unidentified newspaper account quoted in Foraker, 167-68.

308 “Up from the midst of the Empire State”: N.Y. Times, June 4, 1884.

308 “It was the first time”: TR to B, June 8, 1884, Letters, I, 72.

308 TR’s speech: Proceedings, 10; also, Works XIV, 37-38.

309 N.Y. Times praise: June 4, 1884.

309 “quick, watchful, rather enjoying”: N.Y. Tribune, June 6, 1884.

310 Andrew White’s scorn of the convention: White, Autobiography, 204.

310 “his voice rang like a trumpet”: TR to B, June 8, 1884, Letters, I, 72.

312 “It is eager, bitter, and peculiar”: Chicago Herald, quoted in Bryce, II. (Bryce thought so highly of the Herald’s coverage of the convention, thought it such a classic bit of political Americana, that he included it in the Appendix of his own classic work.)

313 “It was a tumultuous crowd”: ibid.

313 TR tries to get on stage: N.Y. Times, June 7, 1884.

313 McKinley calms the storm: Chicago Herald, quoted in Bryce, II.

314 “This is the hour”: quoted in Fuess, 286.

314 “I decline to say anything”: N.Y. World, June 7, 1884.

314 “A grave would be garrulous”: Boston Transcript, June 7, 1884.

315 Arthur pledges support, confides he does not have long to live: Reeves, 381.

315 TR’s encounter with Horace White: White, letter to N.Y. Times, Oct. 20, 1884. TR, in answer to the Times (Oct. 21), expressed surprise that any gentleman would so divulge a private conversation. He had been “savagely indignant at our defeat,” TR said, as explanation of his own behavior.

316 Pioneer Press interview and newspaper response: clippings in B’s scrapbook (TRC).

316 “The gallant young man”: N.Y. World, June 27, 1884.

316 Reaction in Boston: Nevins, Cleveland, 157.

317 Letters to the Times: N.Y. Times, June 8, 1884.

317 Putnam response: Nevins, Cleveland, 157.

317 “Mr. Lodge maintains”: William Everett quoted in Garraty, Lodge, 80.

317 Schurz advice: quoted, ibid., 81.

318 Lodge answer: July 14, 1884, Lodge Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

318 Lodge on pre-Chicago pact with TR: Lodge journal, Mar. 20, 1885, Massachusetts Historical Society.

318 “I am absolutely ignorant”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 17, 1884, Letters, I, 73.

318 “precisely the proper course”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 18, 1884, ibid., 75.

319 Chicago Tribune tribute: June 7, 1884.

319 Chicago Times tribute: quoted in the N.Y. Evening Post, June 6, 1884.

319 “first revelation of that immense pluck”: White, Autobiography, 205.

319 “You’ll know more, sir, later”: quoted in Riis, 69.

320 “I can’t help writing you”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Oct. 11, 1895, Letters, I, 484.

320 “never been able to work so well”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Aug. 12, 1884, ibid., 77.

321 “It may be that ’the voice of the people’”: TR to B, June 8, 1884, ibid., 71.

321 “the most serious crisis”: Bishop, 35-36.

322 View of Nicholas Roosevelt: N. Roosevelt, Roosevelt, 97.

322 Letter to Josephine Shaw Lowell: Feb. 24, 1882, Letters, VIII, 1425.

323 TR’s statement to the Boston Herald: see also, N.Y. World, July 21, 1884.

323 “We thought of him as a lost leader”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 55.

323 “As for Cabot Lodge”: Wister, 26.

323 “Young men like Mr. Roosevelt”: N.Y. Evening Post, July 21, 1884.

324 “Most of my friends”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, July 28,1884, Letters, 1,75.

324 “You would be amused”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Aug. 12, 1884, Letters, I, 77.

15. GLORY DAYS

The standard work on TR’s time in the West is Hermann Hagedorn’s Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (here referred to as Hagedorn, RBL), which was based on interviews with a number of the principals in the story and appeared in 1921. And though it is plainly flawed by Hagedorn’s almost blind adulation of TR and by the use of fictitious names for any characters presented in a bad light, it remains the single most valuable source for what was one of the most important periods in TR’s life. Hagedorn’s Bad Lands notes for the book are also part of the great Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard.

Material in this chapter concerning the influence of Remington, Wister, and TR on the overall aura of the cowboy West has been drawn chiefly from G. Edward Whites The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience (1968); background for eastern investment in the cattle empire comes from Gene M. Gressley’s excellent Bankers and Cattlemen (1966). Of the several articles from North Dakota History relied upon, the most useful have been “Ranching in the Dakota Badlands,” by Ray H. Mattison, referred to here as Mattison, and “The Career of the Marquis de Mores in the Badlands of North Dakota,” by Arnold O. Goplen, referred to as Goplen.

Of TR’s own voluminous published accounts, the best is Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, which is included with Hunting Trips of a Ranchman in Volume I of the collected Works (page numbers below refer to that edition).

page

325 Clarence Day on cowboys: Day, 12.

326 TR’s recommended reading: TR, Hunting Trips, 11.

326 Warns of financial disaster: ibid., 17; also TR, Ranch Life, 290.

326 Gorringe interests: Hagedorn, RBL, 8-10.

327 Teschemacher and the Paris paper: Clay, 76.

327 Trimble and his poodle: Forbis, 216.

327 Bacon, Agassiz, the Seligmans, et al.: Gressley, Bankers.

328 “little in common with the humdrum”: TR, Ranch Life, 274.

328 “nor are the mechanics”: ibid., 278.

328 “Of course every ranchman carries”: TR, Hunting Trips, 27-28.

328 “In the hot noontide hours”: TR, Ranch Life, 309.

329 “perfect picture”: Wister, “The Young Roosevelt,” in Works, I, 260.

329 “This life has a psychological effect”: quoted in White, Eastern Establishment, 123.

329 “wonder if there is such a place as Philadelphia”: ibid.

329 “a queer episode”: ibid., 132.

329 TR’s costly regalia: see Wilson, 44.

329 “having a glorious time”: TR to B, June 17, 1884, Letters, I, 73.

330 Sewall’s observations: Mattison, “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”

330 Bad Lands terrain: TR’s own descriptions in both Hunting Trips and Ranch Life; also, Winser, The Great Northwest, the Northern Pacific Railroad’s 1883 guidebook, and Clark, The Badlands.

330 Hell with the fires out: remark attributed to General Alfred Sully, 1864.

331 “a place for stratagem”: quoted in White, Eastern Establishment, 104.

331 “What a wondrous country”: Clay, 90.

331 Large and small ranchers: Mattison.

332 “All the security he had”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 43.

332 “By Godfrey”: ibid., 36.

332 Ferris recollection: Ferris, “When Roosevelt Came to Dakota.”

332 Champagne over a tent peg: N.Y. Times, Sept. 21, 1884.

332 “It takes me only a few seconds”: Hagedorn, RBL, 61.

333 Marquis had already killed two men: Dresden, 20.

333 Wife’s income $90,000: Goplen.

333 Twenty-one thousand acres, twelve thousand sheep, salmon shipments: ibid.

334 “I like this country”: Hagedorn, RBL, 335.

334 “Why, shoot”: Dresden, 60.

334 Pleasure and vice synonymous: TR, Hunting Trips, 7.

334 “preach King Cattle”: Bad Lands Cow Boy, Feb. 7, 1884.

335 “Again and again is the fitness”: ibid., Feb. 21, 1884.

335 “There are now in the Bad Lands”: ibid., Mar. 13, 1884.

335 N.Y. Times reports on Medora and the Marquis: Sept. 21, 1884.

335 Marquis quoted in N.Y. World: Dresden, 90.

335 The château: Except for a big box elder beside the back door, the house looks today no different from what it does in old photographs and is furnished throughout just as it was. The Marquis and Madame de Mores left everything behind—trunks, children’s clothes, his books, rifles, the lead-filled walking stick, her china and watercolors. The property now belongs to the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

336 “most dignified, stately, and aristocratic”: C. O. Armstrong quoted in Goplen.

336 Madame kills bears: Bismarck Weekly Tribune, Sept. 4, 1885.

336 Langs bury Luffsey: Lang, 75.

336 TR and Marquis turned down as vigilantes: Putnam, 461.

337 “Theodore did not care for the Marquis”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 338.

337 “lost about 25 head from wolves”: TR to B, June 17,1884, Letters, I, 73.

337 TR’s share of Mittie’s trust fund: Putnam, 337.

337 Additional $26,000 in cattle: Hagedorn, RBL, 94.

337 “I designed the house myself”: Sewall, 19. (The house is gone, but the site today looks as it did in TR’s time. One can sit among the cottonwoods and look over the river to the distant plateaus and understand perfectly why he so adored the place.)

338 “Hasten forward”: Hagedorn, RBL, 101.

338 Fight in the Mingusville bar: TR, Autobiography, 125-26.

338 “gained him some reputation”: Sewall, 43.

338 “He worked like the rest of us”: ibid., 39.

338 “A man who will steal for me”: Hagedorn, RBL, 256.

338 Exchange between TR and Sewall: Sewall, 47-48.

338 “Must have a depraved idea”: Mattison, “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”

339 “The country is growing on me”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 105.

339 Bad Lands looked the way Poe sounds: TR, Hunting Trips, 11.

339 “Nowhere . . . does a man feel more lonely”: ibid., 151-52.

339 Parkman and TR on sea of grass and being far afield from civilization: Parkman, 34; TR, Ranch Life, 274, 307.

339 Sound of the mourning dove: TR, ibid., 309-10.

339 “When the days have dwindled”: ibid., 341.

340 Edith Wharton on New York: Age of Innocence, 30-31.

340 Voice of the meadowlark: TR, Hunting Trips, 12.

341 Praise for Manitou: ibid., 28-29.

341 “and the rapid motion”: TR, Ranch Life, 329.

341 “fulfilling a boyish ambition”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 105.

341 “in our ideal ‘hero land’”: quoted in Robinson, 138.

341 “What with the wild gallops”: Reid, Scalp Hunters, 19.

342 “the best weapon I ever had”: TR, Hunting Trips, 27.

342 Lebo and TR: Hagedorn BL notes, Merrifield interview (TRC).

342 Letter to Bamie: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 179-80.

343 “I went back and paced off the distance”: TR, Diary, 1884 (LC).

343 Describes blacktail buck: TR, Hunting Trips, 116-17.

344 Bear hunt and kill: TR, Diary, 1884 (LC).

344 Remarks on Elliott’s tiger: ibid., 231.

345 “I found myself face to face with the great bear”: TR to B, Sept. 20, 1884, Letters, I, 82.

345 “So I have had good sport”: ibid.

345 “all kinds of things of which I was afraid”: TR, Autobiography, 55-56.

345 Sewall on Bad Lands winter: Mattison, “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”

347 An additional $12,500: Hagedorn, RBL, 255.

347 TR lunches at the château: TR to Lodge, May 15, 1885, Letters, I, 90.

347 Two fine accounts of a Bad Lands roundup, besides what TR wrote, are to be found in Huidekoper, 29-36, and Lang, 176-200.

347 “Invariably he was right on the job”: Lang, 185.

347 “all strangeness . . . passed off”: TR, Autobiography, 105.

347 “a very vivid affair”: Huidekoper, 29.

347 “gave us all an exhibition”: Lang, 183-84.

348 “I rode him all the way”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, fn. 289.

348 Broke something in his shoulder: TR, Ranch Life, 320.

348 “very thorough in whatever work”: Burdick, 12.

348 “He could rassle”: Hagedorn BL notes, Merrifield interview (TRC); also quoted in Putnam, 524-25.

348 TR’s account of the night stampede: TR, Autobiography, 107-08.

349 “can now do cowboy work”: TR to Lodge, June 5, 1885, quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 299.

349 “Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty”: TR, Ranch Life, 325.

349 “He would not tolerate”: TR, Autobiography, 9-10.

350 “I have seen him when”: unidentified clipping, Hagedorn BL notes (TRC); also quoted in Putnam, 527.

350 Asthma and stomach trouble: Sewall, 41.

350 “ate heart medicine”: Hagedorn BL notes, Merrifield interview (TRC).

350 “Rugged, bronzed”; quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 308.

350 “a very powerful man”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 57.

350 “But what a change”: Pittsburgh Dispatch, Aug. 23, 1885, quoted in Putnam, 530.

351 Marquis’s Sept. 3 letter to TR: (TRC); also quoted in full (postscript included) in Putnam, 537-38.

352 Marquis “backed off”: TR to Bill Sewall, Dec. 28, 1893, quoted in Sewall, 102.

352 Lang on the Marquis: Lang, 75. Huidekoper, too, took the same view as Lang, except that Huidekoper also greatly admired the Marquis as a person: “The Marquis was a fine man and game as a pebble; when they tell the story of Roosevelt backing him down, they are sure guessing wrong.” (Huidekoper, 27.)

352 TR wanted Winchester rifles at twelve paces: Sewall, 27.

352 TR sees Marquis in jail: Hagedorn, RBL, 344.

352 “all a very happy family”: ibid., 38-39.

352 TR to Bamie: May 15, 1886, Letters, I, 101.

353 Marquis launches retail stores: Goplen.

353 Marquis done in by the beef trust: Dresden, 140-46.

353 Loss estimates: Goplen.

353 TR on “overstocking”: TR, Ranch Life, 290.

354 Sewall’s diary entry: Mattison, “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”

354 Seventy-five percent losses: Mattison.

354 TR’s losses: Hagedorn, RBL, Appendix, 482.

355 Stickney recollection: undated article by Stickney, Hagedorn BL notes (TRC); see also Hagedorn, RBL, 382-83; Putnam, 568-69.

356 Chase after the thieves: TR’s own account is in Ranch Life, 383-98; see also, Sewall, 58-83.

356 “To submit tamely”: TR, Ranch Life, 384-85.

356 TR to Corinne on Tolstoy: Apr. 12, 1886, Letters, I, 96.

357 “He impressed me”: undated article by Stickney, Hagedorn BL notes (TRC); also quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 383.

358 TR’s July 4 speech: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 407-10.

360 Packard predicts presidency: ibid., 411.

360 “We were glad to get back”: Sewall, 94-95.

360 “When he got back”: ibid., 41.

16. RETURN

page

361 “She has no looks”: quoted in Longworth, 19.

361 “hers was the best mind”: N. Roosevelt, Front Row Seat, 33.

362 “intensely on-the-ball”: Mrs. W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., to the author.

362 “Bamie’s telegram at 11:30”: quoted in Lash, 52.

362 “Always Auntie Bye meant more”: ARL, Hagedorn interview (TRB).

363 “She used to tell me stories”: Longworth, 20.

363 “She was the only one”: ARL, Hagedorn interview (TRB).

363 Eleanor on Bamie: E. Roosevelt, This Is My Story, 57-58.

363 Auntie Bye would have been President: ARL, Hagedorn interview (TRB).

363 “to stick the knife in”: W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., to the author.

363 “She was such a tremendous personality”: Mrs. J. Alsop, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.

364 Trip to Mexico with the James Roosevelts: B reminiscences.

364 “queer, little dumpy figure”: Mrs. J. Alsop, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.

364 “She grasped everything”: Helen Roosevelt quoted in N. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 32.

364 TR wants Bamie to organize a salon: TR to B, Apr. 22, 1886, Letters, I, 98.

365 “insisted that we did not live together”: B reminiscences.

365 “Theodore would not be happy”: quoted in Rixey, 56.

365 TR promises to forgo the pronoun “I”: TR to B, June 28, 1886, Letters, I, 104.

365 “Can you send me at once”: Nov. 3, 1884, Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 70.

366 Remarks on the “singularly attractive” Mrs. Selmes: Aug. 11,1886, ibid., 88-89.

366 TR laments he has no “constancy”: Putnam, 557 (Putnam heard the story from Mrs. Selmes’s daughter, the Arizona congresswoman Isabella Greenway).

367 TR’s letter to Bamie of Sept. 20, 1886: (TRB); also quoted in Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 90-91.

367 Bamie could keep Baby Lee: ibid.

368 “makes me quite blue”: C to B, Mar. 29, 1886.

368 “They didn’t want it”: ARL, Hagedorn interview (TRB).

368 Chance meeting in Bamie’s front hall: Fanny Smith (Parsons) to Putnam; see Putnam, 556-57.

368 TR and Edith: see Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 79-83.

368 “What day does Edith go abroad”: TR to C, Apr. 12,1886, Letters, 1,96.

369 “We haven’t had campaign headquarters”: undated N.Y. Times clipping, scrapbook (TRC).

369 “It almost broke my heart”: B reminiscences.

369 Bamie’s letter to Edith, Oct. 23, 1886: Sarah Alden Gannett collection (private).

370 Bamie’s letter to Nannie Lodge: quoted in Rixey, 62.

371 “At least I have a better party standing”: ibid.

371 Addressing the engagement announcements: B reminiscences.

AFTERWORD

page

373 “There was never a serious subject”: quoted in Rixey, 230.

373 “You felt such gallantry”: Mrs. Emory Gardiner, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.

375 TR’s response to Louisa Schuyler: N. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 100.

375 “My father, Theodore Roosevelt”: TR, Autobiography, 9.

375 “I have realized . . . all day”: quoted in Robinson, 206-07.

376 “peculiarly pleasant having you here”: TR to RBR, Mar. 6,1905, Letters, IV, 1131.

376 Recollection of Mittie in the N.Y. Sun: Oct. 21, 1900.

376 “I hate to think of her suffering”: quoted in Robinson, 240-41.

377 “wonderful balance”; “in many ways, as formidable”: Nicholas Roosevelt to Lilian Rixey, Jan. 15, 1964 (courtesy of P. James Roosevelt).

377 “To be with him was to have fun”: N. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 11.

377 “I love all these children”: TR to Emily Carow, Aug. 16,1903, Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children (Works, XIX), 441.

378 “Hereafter I shall never press Ted”: TR to B, Mar. 1898, Letters, II, 804.

378 “I am falling behind physically”: TR to Theodore, Jr., Oct. 24, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children (Works, XIX), 449.

379 The life of ex-President TR: see Gardner, Departing Glory.

379 Lines from Edith Wharton: quoted in Wagenknecht, 109.

379 Bamie at Austrian sanitarium with Elliott: B reminiscences.

379 “Poor Elliott”: Edith Roosevelt to B, July 19, 1893.

380 “He can’t be helped”: quoted in Lash, 89.

380 “the ugly duckling may turn out to be a swan”: Edith Roosevelt to B, Apr. 18, 1894.

380 “like some stricken, hunted creature”: TR to B, Aug. 18, 1894 (TRB); also quoted in Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 143–44.

380 “I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now”: quoted in Lash, 96.

381 “Talk as loudly”: N. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 34.

381 “Very early for a fox sparrow”: quoted in Robinson, 232.

Bibliography

I. MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

American Museum of Natural History, New York: early records and correspondence.

Cowles, W. Sheffield, Jr., Farmington, Connecticut: private collection of Roosevelt family papers, photographs, scrapbooks.

Derby, Ethel Roosevelt, Collection: Roosevelt family correspondence, privately held, Sarah Alden Gannett, Brattleboro, Vermont.

Hagedorn, Hermann, notes and interview transcripts: Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard.

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Papers: Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

Oral History Collection, Columbia University: transcripts of conversations and recollections of various Roosevelt family members and friends of Theodore Roosevelt.

Pringle, Henry F., notes for his Theodore Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard.

Roosevelt, Elliott, Papers: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park.

Roosevelt, Robert B., Papers (fragmentary): New York Historical Society, New York City.

State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck: correspondence, photographs, memorabilia, and taped interviews dealing with the early days of Medora.

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, New York City: a large collection of Roosevelt family memorabilia, photographs, some correspondence (unsorted), interview transcripts.

Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard: the great assembly of Theodore Roosevelt correspondence, family correspondence, diaries, journals, family scrapbooks, mementos, and photographs.

Theodore Roosevelt Papers: mainly the official correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential years, and mementos.

II. NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, AND JOURNALS

American Heritage

American Journal of the Medical Sciences

American Journal of Psychiatry

American Legion

The Bad Lands Cow Boy

Bismarck Weekly Tribune

Boston Advertiser

Boston Evening Transcript

Brooklyn Eagle

Chicago Times

Chicago Tribune

Cincinnati Daily Gazette

The Crimson (Harvard)

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

Harper’s Weekly

Harvard Advocate

Harvard Graduates’ Magazine

Harvard Lampoon

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

London Times

The Nation

New York Evening Post

New York Herald

New York Observer

New York Sun

The New York Times

New York Tribune

New York World

North Dakota History

The Outlook

Psychosomatic Medicine

Puck

St. Paul Pioneer Press

San Francisco Chronicle

Springfield Daily Republican

The Stethoscope

Time

Washington Post

Wide World

III. PUBLISHED WORKS ON THE BULLOCHS AND THE ROOSEVELTS

Bulloch, J. G. B., A History and Genealogy of the Families of Bulloch and Stobo and of Irvine of Cults. Washington, 1911.

Bulloch, Joseph Gaston, History and Genealogy of the Stewart, Elliott and Dunwody Families. Savannah, 1895.

Churchill, Allen, The Roosevelts: American Aristocrats. Harper & Row, New York, 1965.

Cobb, William T., The Strenuous Life: The “Oyster Bay” Roosevelts in Business and Finance. William E. Rudge’s Sons, New York, 1946.

Davis, Kenneth S., FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1971.

Hagedorn, Hermann, The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1954.

Kleeman, Rita Halle, Gracious Lady. D. Appleton-Century Co., New York, 1935.

Lash, Joseph P., Eleanor and Franklin. New American Library, New York, 1971.

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, Crowded Hours. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1933.

Miller, Nathan, The Roosevelt Chronicles. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1979.

Morris, Sylvia Jukes, Edith Kermit Roosevelt. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980.

Parsons, Frances Theodora (Smith), Perchance Some Day. Privately printed, 1951.

Rixey, Lilian, Bamie: Theodore Roosevelt’s Remarkable Sister. David McKay Co., New York, 1963.

Roosevelt, Eleanor, ed., Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1933.

Roosevelt, Eleanor, This Is My Story. Harper and Bros., New York, 1937.

Roosevelt, Nicholas, A Front Row Seat. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1953.

Roosevelt, Theodore, II, All in the Family. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1929.

Roosevelt, Mrs. Theodore, Jr., Day Before Yesterday. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1959.

Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting of the State Charities Aid Association, New York, 1878.

Theodore Roosevelt [Sr.]: A Tribute. The Proceedings at a Meeting of the Union League Club, New York City, February 14, 1878. New York, 1902.

IV. ON AND BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Abbott, Lawrence F., Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1919.

Beale, Howard K., Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power. Collier Books, New York, 1970.

Bishop, Joseph Bucklin, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time, Vol. I. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1920.

Blum, John Morton, The Republican Roosevelt. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1977.

Butt, Archie, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt. 2 vols. Doubleday, Doran & Co., Garden City, New York, 1930.

Chessman, G. Wallace, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1969.

Cutright, Paul Russell, Theodore Roosevelt the Naturalist. Harper and Bros., New York, 1956.

Douglas, George William, The Many-Sided Roosevelt. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1907.

Ferris, Joseph A., “When Roosevelt Came to Dakota.” Wide World, 1921.

Fraser, James Earle, “Sculpting T. R.” American Heritage, Apr. 1972.

Gardner, Joseph L., Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as ex-President. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1973.

Guild, Curtis, Jr., “Theodore Roosevelt at Harvard.” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, Dec. 1901.

Hagedorn, Hermann, The Boys’ Life of Theodore Roosevelt. Harper and Bros., New York, 1918.

———, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1921.

Harbaugh, William H., The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. Oxford University Press, New York, 1975.

Hart, Albert Bushnell, and Herbert Ronald Ferleger, eds., Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia. Roosevelt Memorial Association, New York, 1941.

Iglehart, Ferdinand C., Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him. Christian Herald, New York, 1919.

Lang, Lincoln A., Ranching with Roosevelt. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1926.

Leupp, Francis E., The Man Roosevelt. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1915.

Lorant, Stefan, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1959.

Mattison, Ray H., “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch, The Letters of William W. and Mary Sewall.” North Dakota History, Vol. 27, Nos. 3 and 4, Summer and Fall 1960.

———, “Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.” North Dakota History, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring 1960.

Morison, Elting E., ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. 8 vols. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1951-54.

Morris, Edmund, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1979.

Pringle, Henry F., Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1931.

Putnam, Carleton, Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1958.

Riis, Jacob A., Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen. Johnson, Wynne Co., Washington, D.C., 1904.

Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1921.

Roosevelt, Nicholas, Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1967.

Roosevelt, Theodore, An Autobiography. (Works, Vol. XX.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

———, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. (Works, Vol. I.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

———, Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 1870-1918. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York and London, 1924.

———, The Naval War of 1812. (Works, Vol. VI.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

———, Theodore Roosevelt’s Diaries of Boyhood and Youth. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1928.

———, Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. (Works, Vol. XIX.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

———, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Hermann Hagedorn. National Edition, 20 vols. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-1918, Vol. I. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1925.

Sewall, William Wingate, Bill Sewall’s Story of T.R. Harper and Bros., New York and London, 1919.

Thayer, William Roscoe, Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1919.

Wagenknecht, Edward, The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt. Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1958.

Welling, Richard, “My Classmate Theodore Roosevelt.” American Legion, Jan. 1929.

———, “Theodore Roosevelt at Harvard.” The Outlook, Oct. 27, 1920.

Wilhelm, Donald, Theodore Roosevelt as an Undergraduate. John W. Luce, Boston, 1910.

Wilson, R. L., Theodore Roosevelt, Outdoorsman. Winchester Press, New York, 1971.

Wister, Owen, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1930.

Wood, Frederick S., Roosevelt as We Knew Him: The Personal Recollections of One Hundred and Fifty of His Friends and Associates. John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia, 1927.

V. ON ASTHMA

Chapin, Joshua Bicknell, Asthma, Its Causes and Treatment. Thomas H. Webb and Co., Boston, 1843.

Cohen, Samuel I., “Psychological Factors,” in T. J. H. Clark and S. Godfrey, eds., Asthma. W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia, 1977.

Derbes, Vincent J., and Hugo Tristram Engelhardt, eds., The Treatment of Bronchial Asthma. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1946.

Kemp, Robert, Understanding Bronchitis and Asthma. Tavistock Publications, London, 1963.

Kendig, Edwin L., ed., Disorders of the Respiratory Tract in Children. W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia, 1967.

Kiell, Norman, “Effects of Asthma on the Character of Theodore Roosevelt,” in Henry Irving Schneer, ed., The Asthmatic Child. Harper & Row, New York, 1963.

Knapp, Peter H., “The Asthmatic Child and the Psychosomatic Problem of Asthma,” in Henry Irving Schneer, ed., The Asthmatic Child. Harper & Row, New York, 1963.

———, “The Asthmatic and His Environment.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 149, 1969.

Knapp, Peter H., Aleksander A. Mathé, and Louis Vachon, “Psychosomatic Aspects of Bronchial Asthma,” in E. B. Weiss and M. S. Segal, eds., Bronchial Asthma: Mechanisms and Therapeutics. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1976.

Liebman, Ronald, Salvador Minuchin, and Lester Baker, “The Use of Structural Family Therapy in the Treatment of Intractable Asthma.” American Journal of Psychiatry, May 1974.

Mackenzie, John Noland, “The Production of the So-called ’Rose Cold’ by Means of an Artificial Rose.” The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 1886.

McDermott, Neil T., and Stanley Cobb, “A Psychiatric Survey of Fifty Cases of Bronchial Asthma.” Psychosomatic Medicine, Apr. 1939.

Miller, Milton L., Nostalgia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Marcel Proust. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1956.

Purcell, Kenneth, “The Effect on Asthma in Children of Experimental Separation from the Family.” Psychosomatic Medicine, Vol. XXXI, 1969.

Salter, Henry Hyde, On Asthma. Philadelphia, 1864.

Thorowgood, John C., Notes on Asthma. Philadelphia, 1873.

Travis, Georgia, Chronic Illness in Children. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1976.

Weiss, Earle, Bronchial Asthma. CIBA Pharmaceutical Co., Summit, N.J., 1975.

Weiss, Earle B., and Maurice S. Segal, Bronchial Asthma: Mechanisms and Therapeutics. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1976.

VI. OTHER

Abbott, Lawrence F., ed., The Letters of Archie Butt. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1924.

Adams, Alexander B., John James Audubon. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1966.

Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams. Sentry Edition. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1961.

Amory, Cleveland, The Proper Bostonians. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1947.

Barrows, Chester L., William M. Evarts. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1941.

Bickmore, Albert S., An Autobiography. Unpublished, 1908.

Bigelow, Poultney, Seventy Summers, Vol. I. Edward Arnold & Co., London, 1925.

Boorstin, Daniel J., The Americans: The Democratic Experience. Random House, New York, 1973.

Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them. 1880.

Brown, Henry Collins, New York in the Elegant Eighties. New York, 1926.

Brown, Rollo Walter, Harvard Yard in the Golden Age. Current Books, New York, 1948.

Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, 2nd ed. 2 vols. Macmillan and Co., New York, 1891.

Bull, Deborah, and Donald Lorimer, Up the Nile. Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1979.

Bulloch, James D., The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe. 2 vols. London, 1883.

Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1965.

Burdick, Usher L., “Life and Exploits of John Goodall.” McKenzie County Farmer, Watford City, N.D., 1931.

“Cambridge on the Charles.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Jan. 1876.

Cary, Edward, George William Curtis. Houghton Mifflin Co., Cambridge, 1894.

Chidsey, Donald Barr, The Gentleman from New York: A Life of Roscoe Conkling. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1935.

Clark, Champ, The Badlands. Time-Life Books, New York, 1974.

Class of 1848. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1896.

Class of 1850. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1900.

Class of 1880, Secretary’s Report, Number 1, Commencement 1880. Cambridge.

Clay, John, My Life on the Range. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1962.

Coleman, Kenneth, ed., A History of Georgia. University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1977.

Croly, Herbert, Marcus Alonzo Hanna. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1912.

Curtis, George William, The Potiphar Papers. New York, 1853.

Dana, Richard Henry, To Cuba and Back. Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1859.

Day, Clarence, Life with Father. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1935.

Depew, Chauncey M., My Memories of Eighty Years. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1924.

Donald, David, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970.

Dresden, Donald, The Marquis de Mores, Emperor of the Bad Lands. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1970.

Edel, Leon, Henry James, 1843-1870, the Untried Years. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia and New York, 1953.

Eliot, Alexander, “Eliot of Harvard.” American Heritage, Aug. 1974.

Eliot, Charles W., Harvard Memories. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1923.

Fancher, Betsy, Savannah: A Renaissance of the Heart. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1976.

Fifth and Sixth Annual Reports of the American Museum of Natural History. New York, 1874.

Foraker, Joseph Benson, Notes of a Busy Life, Vol. 1. Stewart & Kidd Co., Cincinnati, 1917.

Forbes, John, The Physician’s Holiday, or a Month in Switzerland in the Summer of 1848. London, 1853.

Forbis, William H., The Cowboys. Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Va., 1973.

Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., Letters of Henry Adams. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1930.

Fuess, Claude Moore, Carl Schurz, Reformer. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1932.

Gamble, Thomas, Savannah, Duels and Duellists, 1733-1877. The Reprint Co., Spartanburg, S.C., 1974.

Garraty, John A., Henry Cabot Lodge. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1953.

———, The New Commonwealth. Harper & Row, New York, 1968.

George William Curtis, Proceedings at the Memorial Meeting of the Unitarian Club of New York. Nov. 14, 1892.

Goplen, Arnold O., “The Career of the Marquis de Mores in the Badlands of North Dakota.” North Dakota History, Vol. 13, Nos. 1 and 2, Jan. and Apr. 1946.

Grant, Robert, “Harvard College in the Seventies.” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1897.

Gressley, Gene M., Bankers and Cattlemen. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1966.

Harden, William, Recollections of a Long and Satisfactory Life. Negro Universities Press, New York, 1968.

Harriman, Mrs. J. Borden, From Pinafores to Politics. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1923.

Harrison, Mrs. Burton, Recollections Grave and Gay. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1911.

Harvard Class of 1880, Secretary’s Report. Cambridge, 1905.

Hawkins, Hugh, Between Harvard and America. Oxford University Press, New York, 1972.

Hellman, Geoffrey, Bankers, Bones and Beetles. National History Press, Garden City, New York, 1969.

Herrick, Francis Hobart, Audubon the Naturalist. 2 vols. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1917.

Historical Collections of the Joseph Habersham Collection, Daughters of the American Revolution, Vol. II. Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, 1968.

History of the Chemical Bank, 1823-1913. Privately published, 1913.

Howard, Leon, Herman Melville: A Biography. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1951.

Howe, George Frederick, Chester A. Arthur: A Quarter-Century of Machine Politics. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1934.

Hudson, William C., Random Recollections of an Old Political Reporter. Cupples & Leon Co., New York, 1911.

Huidekoper, A. C., My Experience and Investment in The Bad Lands of Dakota and Some of the Men I Met There. Wirth Bros., Baltimore, 1947.

James, Henry, The Bostonians. Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1966.

———, Charles W. Eliot. 2 vols. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1930.

Jordan, David M., Roscoe Conkling of New York. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1971.

Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons. Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1934.

Kaplan, Justin, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966.

Kell, John McIntosh, Recollections of a Naval Life. The Neal Co., Washington, D.C., 1900.

King, Moses, Harvard and Its Surroundings. Cambridge, 1882.

Labrie, Jean, The Amateur Taxidermist. Hart Publishing Co., New York, 1972.

Leckie, George G., ed., Georgia: A Guide to Its Towns and Countryside. American Guide Series. Tupper and Love, Atlanta, 1954.

Lefebure, Molly, The English Lake District. Hastings House, New York, 1964.

Lowitt, Richard, A Merchant Prince of the Nineteenth Century, William E. Dodge. Columbia University Press, New York, 1954.

Lynch, Denis Tilden, The Wild Seventies. 2 vols. (Reprint) Kennikat Press, Port Washington, N.Y., 1971.

“Many Years of Benevolence Lead to Outstanding Advances Against Various Kinds of Crippling.” The Stethoscope, Vol. II, No. 10, Dec. 1956.

Marcus, Robert D., Grand Old Party. Oxford University Press, New York, 1971.

Martin, Clarece, Roswell, Historic Homes and Landmarks. Roswell Historical Society, Roswell, Ga., 1974.

Martin, Edward Sanford, The Life of Joseph Hodges Choate, Vol. I. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1921.

———, “Undergraduate Life at Harvard.” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1897.

Mattison, Ray H., “Ranching in the Dakota Badlands.” North Dakota History, Vol. 19, Nos. 2 and 3, Apr. and July 1952.

McDougall, Walt, This Is the Life! Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1926.

Meriwether, Colyer, Raphael Semmes. George W. Jacobs & Co., Philadelphia, 1913.

Mitchell, Margaret, Gone With the Wind. Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1936.

Morgan, H. Wayne, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1969.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, Three Centuries of Harvard. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1946.

Muzzey, David Saville, James G. Blaine, a Political Idol of Other Days. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1934.

Myers, Gustavus, History of the Great American Fortunes. Modern Library, Random House, New York, 1937.

Myers, Robert Manson, ed., The Children of Pride. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1972.

Nevins, Allan, The Emergence of Modern America, 1865-1878. Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1971.

———, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1933.

Nevins, Allan, and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 4. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1952.

North Dakota, A Guide to the Northern Prairie State. Oxford University Press, New York, 1950.

Norton, Charles Eliot, ed., Letters of James Russell Lowell, Vol. II. Harper and Bros., New York, 1894.

———, Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, Vol. 1. Harper and Bros., New York, 1894.

Osborn, Henry Fairfield, The American Museum of Natural History. The Irving Press, New York, 1911.

Parkman, Francis, The Oregon Trail. New American Library, New York, 1950.

Platt, Thomas Collier, The Autobiography of Thomas Collier Platt. B. W. Dodge and Co., New York, 1910.

Proceedings of the Eighth Republican National Convention Held at Chicago, Illinois, June 3, 4, 5, and 6,1884.

Rasenel, Mrs. St. Julien, Charleston. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1925.

Reeves, Thomas C., Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1975.

Reid, Captain Mayne, The Boy Hunters; or Adventures in Search of a White Buffalo. (Reprint) Gregg Press, Ridgewood, N.J., 1968. (Originally published in New York in 1852.)

———, The Scalp Hunters. New York, 1863.

Rhodes, James Ford, History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1919.

Robinson, Elwyn B., History of North Dakota. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1966.

Rush, Richard, and Robert H. Woods, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion. Series I, Vol. I. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1894.

Rusk, Ralph L., The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1949.

Russell, Francis, The American Heritage History of the Confident Years. American Heritage Publishing Co., New York, 1969.

Santayana, George, “The Academic Environment at Harvard in the 80’s and 90’s.” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, undated, Theodore Roosevelt Collection.

Saum, Lewis O., “The Marquis de Mores: Instrument of American Progress.” North Dakota History, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring 1969.

Scott, James Brown, Robert Bacon. Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1923.

Shannon, David A., ed., Beatrice Webb’s American Diary. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1963.

Sherman, John, Recollections of Forty Years, Vol. II. Werner Co., Chicago, 1895.

Shores, Venila Lovina, “The Hayes-Conkling Controversy.” Smith College Studies in History, Vol. IV. Department of History of Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 1919.

Steele, Joan, Captain Mayne Reid. Thayne Publishers, Boston, 1978.

Stone, Candace, Dana and The Sun. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1938.

Stone, Melville E., Fifty Years a Journalist. Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1921.

Sullivan, Mark, Our Times, Vol. 2. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1927.

Taylor, Bayard, By-Ways of Europe. G. P. Putnam and Son, New York, 1869.

Temple, Sarah Blackwell Gover, The First Hundred Years. Walter W. Brown Publishing Co., Atlanta, 1935.

Thayer, William Roscoe, “Nathaniel Southgate Shaler.” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, Sept. 1906.

Third and Fourth Annual Reports of the American Museum of Natural History. New York, 1872.

Thomas, Harrison Cook, The Return of the Democratic Party to Power in 1884. Columbia University Press, New York, 1919.

Underwood, Rev. J. L., The Women of the Confederacy. Neale Publishing Co., New York, 1906.

Wagner, Charles A., Harvard, Four Centuries and Freedoms. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1950.

Wallace, David Duncan, South Carolina. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1951.

Weinstein, Gregory, The Ardent Eighties. International Press, New York, 1928.

Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1920.

———, A Backward Glance. D. Appleton-Century Co., New York, 1934.

White, Andrew D., Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White. Century Co., New York, 1905.

White, G. Edward, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1968.

White, Leonard D., The Republican Era, 1869-1901. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1958.

Whitehill, Walter Muir, Boston and the Civil War. Boston Athenaeum, Boston, 1963.

Wilkins, Robert P., and Wynona Huchette, North Dakota, a Bicentennial History. W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1977.

Williams, T. Harry, ed., Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881. David McKay Co., New York, 1964.

Winser, Henry J., The Great Northwest, A Guidebook and Itinerary for the Use of Tourists and Travellers over the Lines of the Northern Pacific Railroad. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1883.

Wise, John S., Recollections of Thirteen Presidents. (Reprint) 1968. (Originally published 1906.)

VII. REFERENCE

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1969.

The American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents of the United States. American Heritage Publishing Co., New York, 1968.

The Annals of America. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1968.

Baedeker, K., Switzerland, and the Adjacent Portions of Italy, Savoy, and the Tyrol, Handbook for Travellers. London, 1869.

Berkow, Robert, M.D., ed., The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories, Rahway, N.J., 1977.

The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, Vol. XV. Franklin-Turner Co., Atlanta, 1907.

Dictionary of American Biography. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936.

Dunglison, Robley, A Dictionary of Medical Science. Philadelphia, 1866.

1840 Census for the Cobb County, Georgia.

Kouwenhoven, John A., The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1953.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1974.

Seventh Census of U.S., 1850, Georgia Slave Schedule.

White, Norval, and Elliot Willensky, eds., AIA Guide to New York City. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1968.

Index

Adams, Brooks, 156

Adams, Charles Francis, 76–78, 156, 206

Adams, Henry, 126, 130, 157, 207, 374

Adams, William, 191

Adirondacks, 120–21

Advocate, 213, 216

Agassiz, Alexander, 327

Agassiz, Louis, 141, 204, 220

Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 71

Alabama (Confederate raider), 46, 67, 75–78

Allotment Commission, 61ff., 65, 159

Alsop, Mrs. Joseph, Jr., 252

Alvord, Thomas, 263, 271, 273

American Journal of the Medical Sciences, The, 102

American Museum of Natural History, 88, 116, 141, 175, 294

founding of, 32

new building, 136, 142, 179, 202

TR donates specimens to, 121

Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 356–57

anthracite coal strike, 374

Arnold, Matthew, 33

Arthur, Chester A., 280

and Chicago Republican convention (1884), 297–304

passim, 309, 310, 312–13, 321

at Cincinnati Republican convention (1876), 160, 162

and Customhouse, 158, 159, 175–80, 183–84, 196

Garfield’s running mate, 237

illness of, 292–93, 315

pledges support of Blaine, 315

as President, 245, 275, 299–300, 375

Associated Press, 269

asthma, 93–111

and causes of difficult breathing, 99

circumstances surrounding TR’s attacks of, 102–9

influence on TR of, 108–11

medical theories of, 94–95

nineteenth-century remedies for, 97

and psychological factors, 95–97, 101–3

see also under Roosevelt, Theodore Astor, Caroline Schermerhorn, 67, 240, 269

Astor, John Jacob III, 179, 269

Astor, Mrs. John Jacob III, 67, 143

Astor, William Waldorf, 260

Astor Library, 238–39

Atlanta Journal, 49

Atlantic Cable, 270

Audubon, John James, 120, 121, 123, 219

Autobiography (Roosevelt), 376, 377

Bacon, Martha Cowdin, 214, 221, 228, 230

Bacon, Robert, 209, 210, 214, 215, 327, 376

Bad Lands, 257, 296, 316, 318, 326–60

Bad Lands Cow Boy, The, 334–35, 360

Baird, Spencer Fullerton, 120, 219

Baker, Evelyn King, 49, 53

Ball, Willis, 45

Barnum, P. T., 29, 121

Beecher, Henry Ward, 144, 300, 317

“beef bonanza,” 327

Beef Bonanza, The, 331

Bell, Alexander Graham, 145

Bell, John G., 121

Belmont, Mrs. August, 67

Benson, Alfred, 331

Benton, Thomas Hart, 352

Berry-Boice Cattle Co. (“Three Sevens” brand), 331, 337, 347

Bess (Anna Bulloch’s slave), 47, 55

Bickmore, Albert S., 32, 33, 39

Bierstadt, Albert, 184

Bigelow, John, 327

Bigelow, Poultney, 251, 260, 261, 327, 374

Bishop, Joseph Bucklin, 321

Black Friday, 86

Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum, 266

Blaine, James G., 158, 260

and Chicago convention (1880), 299

and Chicago convention (1884), 280–81, 297–316

and Cincinnati convention (1876), 161, 162, 298

defections following nomination of, 316–24

election campaign, 346

and Mulligan letters, 161, 299, 323

Boston Daily Advertiser, 316

Boston Daily Globe, 316

Boston Herald, 323

Bostonians, The (James), 260

Boston Transcript, 314, 316, 318

Boy Hunters, The (Reid), 118

Brace, Charles Loring, 30, 31, 142, 280

Bright’s disease, 291, 292–93, 315

Bristow, Benjamin H., 160, 162, 317

Broadway Improvement Association, 29

Bronson, Theodore, 61, 64, 65, 85, 245

Brooklyn, N.Y., 282–83

Brooklyn Bridge, 113, 175, 239, 282

Brooklyn Eagle, 265, 274

Brooks, Erastus, 279

Brooks, Phillips, 206

Browning, Robert, 115–16

Bryant, William Cullen, 156

Bull Moose Party, 379

Bulloch, Anna, see Gracie, Anna Bulloch

Bulloch, Anne Irvine, 43

Bulloch, Archibald, 43

Bulloch, Ella, 249

Bulloch, Harriott Cross Foster 74

Bulloch, Hester Elliott, 43–44

Bulloch, Irvine, 44, 55

in Confederate Navy, 46, 57–58, 64, 67, 76–77

Mittie reunited with, 73–74

Bulloch, James I, 42–43

Bulloch, James II, 43

Bulloch, James Dunwody, 44, 48, 54–55, 114, 180

and Alabama, 46, 67, 75–78

blockade runner, 58, 64, 67

family reunion with, 73–75

and Mittie’s death, 295

TR and, 76, 78, 170, 245, 255, 375

Bulloch, James Stephens, 43–44

Bulloch, Jean Stobo, 42–43

Bulloch, Mary de Veaux, 43

Bulloch, Martha Stewart Elliot (Grandmamma Bulloch), 43–44, 46–47, 50, 54, 67, 68

and Civil War, 57–58, 60, 64, 66–67

death of, 66–67

in Roosevelt household, 35, 38, 39, 55, 56

Bulloch Hall, 45ff., 55, 67

Bunyan, John, 378

Bureau of Charities, N.Y.C., 141–42

Butler, Pierce, 44

Carow, Charles, 39, 147

Carow, Edith, 187

childhood friendship with the

Roosevelts, 39, 108, 126, 147, 169

on Elliott, 254, 380

engagement to TR, 366–68

girlhood relations with TR, 180, 195, 227

and TR’s first marriage, 230, 236, 245

Catalogue of North American Birds (Baird), 120

Catalogue of North American Mammals (Baird), 120

Century Association, 23, 156, 159

Century Magazine, 349, 353

Chapin, Harry, 204, 215, 222

Chapin, Joshua Bicknell, 95

Chemical Bank, 29, 144

Chicago, conventions at, 297–316, 317

Chicago Fire, 135, 138

Chicago Times, 320

Chicago Tribune, 302, 318, 320

Children’s Aid Society, 31, 117, 135, 142;

see also Newsboys’ Lodging House

Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital, 102

Choate, Joseph H., 32, 146, 175, 180, 261

Cigar Bill, 267–68, 279–80

Cigarmakers’ Union, 267

Cincinnati, Republican convention at, 155, 157–63, 298

civil service bill (New York State Assembly), 275–76, 279

Civil War, 23, 29, 56–66, 138

Clay, John, 331

Clayton, Powell, 303–4, 307

Cleopatra’s Needle, 180, 326

Cleveland, Grover, 274

and civil service reform, 275–76, 302 1884

presidential election, 315, 317, 346

Clews, Henry, 138

Clift family, 126, 129

Codman, Frank, 222

Columbia Law School, 237, 238–39, 287

Committee of Seventy, 154

Conkling, Roscoe, 260, 280

and Chicago convention (1880), 299, 309

and Cincinnati convention (1876), 157–63

and Customhouse controversies, 176, 178–84, 186, 196, 275, 301

resigns from Senate, 275

Conscription Act (1863), 59

Continental Land and Cattle Co., 331

Cook, James, 25

Cooke, Jay, 138

Cooper, James Fenimore, 123, 326, 378

Cooper, Peter, 156–57

Country Life in America, 289

Cowles, Anna Roosevelt, see Roosevelt, Anna (Bamie)

Cowles, William Sheffield, 373

Cowles, William Sheffield, Jr. (Bamie’s son), 128, 252, 373

Crimson, 207, 209

Cullom, Shelby, 310

Curtis, Assemblyman, 263

Curtis, George William, 190–91

and Customhouse controversy, 181, 182

and 1884 Republican convention, 299–306

passim, 309, 310, 314, 315

in Republican reform crusade (1876), 155–56, 158, 160, 162

TR praised by, 274, 319–20, 324

supports Cleveland against Blaine, 317

Custer, George Armstrong, 330

Customhouse controversies, 175–85, 196, 275, 301

Cutler, Arthur, 140, 167, 217, 293

Daddy Luke, 47, 55

Dakota Territory, 121, 235, 257, 326ff.; see also Bad Lands

Dana, Richard Henry, 75, 160, 221, 317

Daniell, Tom, 47–48, 53

Daniell, William Coffee, 48

Darwin, Charles, 207

Davis, Jefferson, 72, 76, 78

Day, Clarence, 325

Day Dream (yacht), 136

De Billier, Frederic, 327, 329

Deer and Antelope of America (Caton), 326

Deerhound (British yacht), 76

Delano, Sara, see Roosevelt, Sara Democratic Party Cleveland nomination, 317

and 1876 election, 225

New York mayoralty campaign (1884), 317

Tilden nomination, 159, 163 see also Tammany Hall

Depew, Chauncey, 261, 304

de Veaux, James, 43

Devonshire, Duke of, 82

Dimon, Assemblyman, 263

Dodge, Cleveland, 251

Dodge, William E., Jr., 61, 63, 65, 178, 191, 251

Dodge, William E., Sr., 178

Dodsworth, Mr., 169

Dow, Wilmot, 329, 337, 352, 354, 356, 357

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 118

Draft Riots, 60

Dunbar, Charles, 207, 213, 219, 220

Dreyfus Affair, 355

Drumont, Édouard, 355

Eaton, Howard, 331–32, 337, 347, 354

Edmunds, George Franklin, 181, 301, 309, 310, 312–13, 320

Eeghan, J. A. van, 331

Eliot, Charles, 284

and Blaine, 316

and Edmunds, 300

as Harvard president, 141, 201–8

passim, 211, 212–13, 220–21

at museum opening, 185, 202

Elkhorn Ranch, 337, 341, 352, 356–57

Elliot, Daniel Giraud, 88

Elliott, Corinne, 46

Elliott, Daniel Stuart, 44, 48, 53, 57, 64

Elliott, Georgia, 44

Elliott, John, Senator, 43, 46

Elliott, Johnny, 48, 130, 147

Elliott, Lucy Sorrel, 48, 130, 233

Elliott, Maud, 48, 130, 147, 180

Elliott, Susan, see West, Susan Elliott

Ellis, Lizzie, see Roosevelt, Elizabeth Ellis

Ellis, Ralph, 209

Emerson, Ellen, 128

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 128, 206

Enemy of the People, An (Ibsen), 284

Etruria, S. S., 369

Evarts, William, 246, 261

and Cigar Bill, 279, 288

and Customhouse controversy, 175–76, 178, 179

on Hayes dinners, 208

Family Circle Dancing Class, 240

Ferris, Joe, 332, 351

Ferris, Sylvane, 332, 337

Field, Cyrus, 270, 271, 273

Fifth Avenue Conference, 299

Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, 143–44, 191, 241, 250

First World War, 379

Fish, Hamilton, 135

Fish, Mrs. Hamilton, 67

Fisk, James, 63, 113

Five-Cent Bill, 277–79

Flandrau, Charles Eugene, 366

“Flight of the Duchess, The” (Browning), 115–16

Florida (Confederate raider), 76

Foraker, Joseph, 309–10, 313

Franco-Prussian War, 113, 114, 115, 138

Fraser, Hastings, 247

Free Trade Club, 238

Freud, Sigmund, 95

Furness, Frank, 130, 140

Furness Abbey, 78–80

Gallaxy (publication), 29

Garfield, James A., 237, 245, 275, 298–99, 307

George, Henry, 369, 371

Germanic, S. S., 233

Gideon, Assemblyman, 263

Godey, Harry, 126, 127, 128

Godkin, E. L., 156, 191, 299, 300, 310, 317

gold standard, 309

Goldthwait, Dr., 189

Gompers, Samuel, 267–68, 283

Gone With the Wind (Mitchell), 49

Goodall, John, 348

Gorringe, Henry Honeychurch, 326, 327

Gould, Jay, 113, 268–73, 275–77, 284, 299

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 257

Gracie, Anna Bulloch, 44, 82, 239, 249, 286, 362

and Civil War, 56–58, 60, 64–66

passim early life, 48, 52, 53

and Elliott, 245, 250, 257

and “Greatheart,” 34

in household of TR Sr., 38, 39, 55

Irvine’s secret meeting with, 74

marriage, 67

at Oyster Bay, 163, 233, 257

and TR’s first marriage, 229, 236

and TR Sr.’s death, 186–91

Gracie, Archibald, 151

Gracie, James K., 39, 188, 233, 236, 286

Grant, Ulysses S., 209, 300, 307

as President, 32, 142, 155, 156, 158, 160, 260

refuses to run again, 157

Grant and Ward, 300

Gray, Asa, 207

Great Northern Railroad, 295

Great Northwest, The (Putnam), 326–27

Greenwood Cemetery, 66, 191, 292, 296

Haase, Dr., 28

Hagedorn, Hermann, 221

Hale, Edward Everett, 202

Half-Breeds, 281

Hall, Anna, see Roosevelt, Anna Hall Hall, John, 144, 191, 292

Hall, Mary Ludlow, 380

Hamilton, Alexander, 142

Hand, Johnny, 307

Hand, Julia, 53

Hanks, C. S., 216–17

Hanna, Mark, 312, 321, 374

Harper’s Weekly, 155

Blaine renounced by, 317

on Edmunds, 300

on TR, 274, 302

on TR Sr., 182, 190–91, 300

Harrison, Benjamin, 300, 374

Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 67

Harrison, William Henry, 374

Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, 201

Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, 141, 204

Harvard University, 140–41, 165–74, 201–23

Hasty Pudding Club, 207, 211, 228, 229

Hay, John, 30, 33, 62, 68, 284, 376

Hayes, Lucy W, 179, 208

Hayes, Rutherford B., 162, 164, 173–75, 178–84

passim, 196

Hayes, Webb, 179

Hess, Jake, 261–62

Hewitt, Abram, 142, 154, 327, 369, 371

Higgins, Assemblyman, 263

Higginson, Henry L., 327

Hill, A. S., 220

Hippocrates, 95

Hoffman, Louis A. (”Baron”), 327, 333, 334

Hooper, Jennie, 227

Hopkins, Mark, 156

Howe, Julia Ward, 59

Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 378

Hudson, William, 265, 274

Huidekoper, A. C., 331, 347

Huidekoper, Frank, 331

Hunt, Isaac, 263–66 passim, 291, 294

on Elliott, 254

and Five-Cent Bill, 278

on Platt scandal, 275

on TR, 274, 278–79

and Westbrook Scandal, 270, 273

Hunter’s Feast (Reid), 118

Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (Roosevelt), 325–26, 344

Husted, James, 275

Hyde Park, N.Y., 232, 250, 253, 256

Ibsen, Henrik, 284

Independent Republicans, 315

Ingersoll, Robert G., 162, 298

Innocents Abroad, The (Twain), 72

Irvine, John, 43

Jackson, Henry, 211, 215

James, D. Willis, 143, 182

James, Henry, 72, 85, 203, 260

James, William (American philosopher), 141, 207, 221

James, William (English author), 270

Jay, Augustus, 126, 127

Jay, John, 175

Jay Commission, 175–79

Jerome, Jennie, 72

Jesup, Morris K., 261

J. K. Gracie Co., 286

Johnson, Samuel, 158

Jones, Charles C., 68

Jones, George, 300

Jung, Sir Salar, 247

Katahdin, Mount 217

Kearsage, 46, 76

Kelly, John, 273

Kelly, Peter, 263

Kennedy, John S., 294

King, Barrington, 44, 45, 58

King, Joseph Henry, 58

King, Roswell, 44

King, Tom, 48, 50, 51, 58

Kruse, Assemblyman, 263

Lady of the Lake, The (Scott), 80

Laënnec, René, 95

Laird, John, 77

Lamb and Rich, 289

Lampoon, 205

Lamson, John, 167, 170

Lamson family, 114, 167

Lane, Lulu, 227

Lang, Gregor, 331, 334, 336, 337, 338, 347

Lang, Lincoln, 331, 334, 336, 347, 352

Lebo, 342, 343

Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 120

Lee, Alice see Roosevelt, Alice Lee

Lee, Caroline, 225

Lee, Caroline Haskell, 225, 228, 291, 322

Lee, George, 225

Lee, George Cabot, 225, 228, 260, 292, 322, 323

and “beef bonanza,” 327

Lee, Harriett, 225

Lee, Henry, 225, 323

Lee, Isabella, 225

Lee, Rose, 214, 222, 225, 228, 229

Lee, Higginson and Co., 225, 323, 327

Leeholm, 289

Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 353

Lewis, George Washington, 211

Life with Father (Day), 325

Lincoln, Abraham, 36, 66, 307, 378

TR Sr. and, 61, 62, 65

Lincoln, Mary Todd, 62

Lincoln, Robert Todd, 300, 312

Lincoln, Willie, 62, 63, 65

Livingstone, David, 118

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 157, 157, 207, 329, 340

elected to Congress, 371

friendship with TR, 319–20, 322–23, 365

opposes Blaine at convention, 299, 303, 307, 309

stands by Blaine’s nomination, 317–18, 321, 323

Lodge, Nannie, 370

Loewenthal, Henry, 270

Logan, John A., 300, 310, 312–13, 315

London Daily News, 75

London Exhibition (1851), 27

Long, John D., 300, 310, 320

Long Branch, N.J., 60, 65–66, 101, 105

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 168, 206, 221

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, see Roosevelt, Alice (TR’s daughter)

Low, Seth, 259, 282–83, 292, 317, 322

Lowell, James Russell, 160–61, 161, 175, 317, 326

Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 322

Luffsey, Riley, 334, 336, 350

Lynch, John R., 304, 307

Mackenzie, John Noland, 102

Madison Square Presbyterian Church, 191

Maltese Cross Ranch, 332, 337, 341

Manhattan Elevated Railway Co., 269–71, 273, 275–77

Martin, John F., 55

Mary Ann (Roosevelts’ maid), 21–22, 71, 82, 117, 139, 187, 189, 237, 248

Mason, James M., 77

Massachusetts Reform Club, 317

McAllister, Ward, 68, 240

McDougall, Walt, 168

McKinley, William, 306, 309, 321, 374, 376

and Blaine, 303, 313, 314

McManus, Assemblyman, 263

Medora, Dakota Territory, 316, 332, 333–37, 340, 341, 351, 357–58

Melville, Herman, 177

Memorial Day, 315

Merriam, Francis, 126, 127, 129

Merrifield, Bill, 332, 337, 342–45, 348, 350

Merritt, Edwin A., 180, 183, 196

Metcalfe, John, 94, 96, 150, 152

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32

Miller, Warner, 280, 281

Minot, Henry, 173, 182, 187, 192, 193, 221, 228, 229, 230

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (Livingstone), 118

Missouri Pacific Railroad, 269

Mitchell, Margaret, 49

Mobile and Ohio Railroad, 286

Montcalm and Wolfe (Parkman), 206

Mores, Marquise de (nee Medora von Hoffman), 327, 332, 333, 334, 335–36, 353, 355

Mores, Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de, 327, 332–37, 347, 350–55

Morgan, Edwin D., 179

Morgan, J. Pierpont, 32, 261, 269, 317, 374

Morison, Sanford, 327

Mulligan letters, 161, 299, 323

Murphy, Michael C., 261, 263, 279

Murray, Annie, 169, 227

Murray, Joe, 261–62, 284

My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (Robinson), 381

Napoleon III, 86, 114

Nast, Thomas, 302

Nation, The, 156, 190, 300

National Mining and Exploring Co., 145

Naval History of the War of 1812, The (Roosevelt), 78, 213, 238, 241, 255, 257, 270

Newsboys’ Lodging House, 31, 33, 105, 142, 238, 254, 287

New York City Board of Aldermen, 275, 281–83

New York Court of Appeals, 279

New York Evening Mail, 190

New York Evening Post, 190, 302

and Blaine, 309, 315, 316, 323

and Five-Cent Bill, 278

and Reform Charter Bill, 290

and Westbrook Scandal, 273

New York Herald, 181, 290

New York Infant Asylum, 238

New York Observer, 279

New York Orthopedic Dispensary and

Hospital, 31, 36, 135, 143, 238, 254

New York Reform Club, 251

New York Sun, 179, 215, 264, 376

New York Telegram, 190

New York Times, The, 29, 129, 174, 190, 216, 265, 300, 308, 309

and Blaine, 303, 312, 314, 317

and Gould-Westbrook Scandal, 270, 271, 272

and Reform Charter Bill, 290

and TR’s engagement, 366–67

New York Tribune, 238, 316, 350, 364

and Five-Cent Bill, 278

and Hayes, 174

opposes public works, 155

on TR Sr., 182, 190

New York World, 41, 264–65

and Five-Cent Bill, 278

on TR’s support of Blaine, 316

and Westbrook Scandal, 270–71

New York Yacht Club, 269

Niagara Falls, 240

Nibelungenlied, 168

Nile River, 122–31

Nilsson, Christine, 300

Nobel Peace Prize, 375

North American Reptiles (Baird), 120

Northern Pacific Railroad, 326, 327, 330, 333

Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Co., 333

Northern Securities Co., 374

Norton, Charles Eliot, 207

Nugent, Laval, 331

O’Brien, John J. (”Johnny”), 280, 292, 300

Olmsted, Frederick Law, 136, 142, 156

On Asthma (Salter), 96

O’Neil, William (”Billy”), 263, 265, 275, 278, 284

On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 119

Oregon Trail, The (Parkman), 339

O’Shea, Minnie, 24, 376

Oyster Bay, N.Y., 112, 114, 378

TR plans home at, 248, 257, 286, 288–90; see also Sagamore Hill

TR Sr.’s home at, 145–48, 163–64, 167, 169, 233, 235

Packard, Arthur T., 335, 360

Pall Mall Gazette, The, 75

Palmer, George H., 213, 219

Panama Canal, 353, 355, 374

Panics 1837: 26

1869: 86, 113

1873: 138, 144

Paovitch, Noel, 78, 82

Parkman, Francis, 206, 221, 339

Parsons, Fanny Smith, see Smith, Fanny Parsons, James, 380–81

Patriarchs’ Ball, 240

Peck, Harry Thurston, 374

Pellew, George, 207, 215

Pender, Sir John, 331

Pendleton Act, 275, 300

Penrose, Boise, 259–60, 284

Phelps, Dodge and Co., 177–78

Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, 170, 174

Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 34

Pioneer Cattle Co., 327

Pius IX, Pope, 86

Plains of the Great West (Dodge), 326

Platt, Thomas C., 275, 297, 298, 303, 305, 306

Plunkitt, George Washington, 265

Plymouth Church, 66

Polk, Dr., 189, 190

Porcellian Club, 208, 211, 218, 221, 222, 228, 321

Potiphar Papers, The (Curtis), 156

Pott, Percivall, 35

Potter, Howard, 30, 32, 34, 159, 191

Pratt, Nathaniel, 45, 53

Prince, Le Baron Bradford, 180, 183–84

Progress and Poverty (George), 369

Progressive Party, 379

Proust, Marcel, 110

Puck, 299

Pulaski, S.S., 46

Putnam, George Haven, 286, 317, 326; see also G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Quincy, Josiah, 209, 316

Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (Roosevelt), 349

Rains, John, 263

Rand (classmate of TR), 209, 211

Red Cloud, Chief, 112

Reform Charter Bill, 281–83, 290, 293, 369

Reid, Elizabeth Mills, 364

Reid, Sir John Rae, 248

Reid, Mayne, 118–19, 123, 152, 341

Reid, Whitelaw, 364

Remington, Frederic, 325, 330, 346, 349

Republican Party 1876 convention and election, 155, 157–63, 260, 298

1880 convention and election, 237, 299

1884 convention and election, 297–324

1886 New York mayoralty campaign, 368–71

1894 convention, 280–81

1912 convention, 379

Republican Reform Club (New, York, 1876), 156–57, 160–61

Review of American Birds (Baird), 120

Richfield Springs, N.Y., 114, 256

Rüs, Jacob, 287

Riverdale, N.Y., 239

Roberts, Lloyd, 331

Robinson, Corinne Douglas, 363

Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt (Conie) and Alice Lee, 228, 230, 232, 240

appearance and personality, 37, 128, 233, 364

birth, 56

childhood, 21, 33–34, 37–40, 71–92

passim, 103, 107–8, 122–31

passim, 130, 140, 143, 145ff., 163, 167

children of, 257, 291, 363

courtship and engagement, 233, 238, 240–42, 245

death, 380

debut, 232

in Dresden, 130, 167

and Edith Carow, 126, 187, 366–68

and Elliott’s decline, 379–80

European tour, 71–92

passim and fathers death, 187–92

health, 36–37, 103, 108, 169

later life, 380–81

marriage, 250, 256–57, 380–81

and mothers death, 291–92

Nile journey, 122–31

TR, devotion to, 381

Robinson, Douglas, 288, 291

courtship and engagement, 233, 238, 240–42, 245

and Elliott, 251, 379–80

marriage, 250, 256–57, 380–81

and TR, 245, 369–71

Robinson, Edward Arlington, 376–77

Robinson, Theodore Douglas, 257, 291

Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad, 286

Roosevelt, Alfred, 261

Roosevelt, Alice (TRs daughter), 322, 346, 352

and Bamie, 295, 365, 367, 369

birth, 291

on Edith, 368

engagement, 221

Roosevelt, Alice Lee (TR’s first wife), 213–16 passim, 220

appearance, 226

and baby Alice’s birth, 291

courtship, engagement, wedding, 222–38

death, 291–96

honeymoons, 237, 245, 248

married life, 237–43, 248, 256, 257, 285–90

TR’s silence about, 376

Roosevelt, Anna (Bamie) appearance and character, 34, 37, 127, 361ff.

and baby Alice, 295, 322, 362–63, 365, 367, 369

back trouble, 32–34, 56, 103, 111, 363–64

birth, 54

childhood, 21, 26, 34–37, 39–40, 65–66, 70

and Civil War, 57, 58, 60

and Corinne’s engagement, 241, 242

and Cousin Sally, 232, 364

death, 373

debut, 127, 139, 140, 143

and Elliott, 166-67, 362, 379

European tour, 71–92 passim, 137–38

father, relations with, 33–35, 116–17, 127

and father’s death, 185–92

France, schooling in and flight from, 91–92, 113–14

passim ”Major Generaless,” 166–67

marriage, 373

mother, relations with, 127–28, 233

and mother’s death, 291–92, 295

Nile journey, 122–31

TR, devotion to, 364–66, 373

and TR’s asthma, 98–99, 103, 104

and TR’s engagement and marriage to Alice, 228, 230, 236, 241, 242, 257–58, 289

and TR’s engagement to Edith, 366–68

Roosevelt, Anna Hall, 256–58, 277, 286, 362, 379

Roosevelt, Archibald, 377

Roosevelt, Cornelius (TR’s cousin), 218

Roosevelt, Cornelius (TR’s uncle), 113, 120, 188, 189, 191

Roosevelt, Cornelius Van Schaack (CVS: TR’s grandfather), 21, 40, 42, 72, 113

business interests, 26, 29

death, 129, 130

N.Y.C. house of, 22, 41, 58, 66

Oyster Bay house of, 112, 114

and TR Sr.’s wedding, 22, 53

Roosevelt, Corinne (Conie), see Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Edith Carow, see Carow, Edith Roosevelt, Eleanor, 362, 363, 364, 373, 380

Roosevelt, Elizabeth (Mrs. James Alfred Roosevelt), 188, 189

Roosevelt, Elizabeth Ellis (Aunt Lizzie Ellis), 23, 55, 229, 376

Roosevelt, Elliott (Ellie), 244–58

alcoholism, 233, 250, 253, 254, 379

appearance and charm, 37, 128, 253–54

and Bamie, 167, 362, 379

birth, 56

in business, 251

childhood and education, 21, 32–33, 37–40, 67, 71–92

passim, 115, 122–31

passim, 140, 145ff., 152–53, 167

and Corinne’s marriage, 251

courtship of Anna Hall, 256–57, 277

decline and death, 379–80

in Dresden, 130, 167

Eleanor and, 380

European tour, 71–92

passim, 104, 106–7

and father’s death, 187–92

health, 147–53, 163, 172, 250, 257

in India, 233, 236, 237, 244–49, 253, 254

marriage, 256–57, 286, 362, 379

mother, relations with, 248, 251–53

and mother’s death, 291–92

Nile journey, 122–31

to Texas and return, 152–53, 163, 172, 180

TR dedicates book to, 326

and TR’s first marriage, 229, 230, 236

western trip with TR, 233, 234–36

writings of, 254, 255

Roosevelt, Elliott, Jr., 379

Roosevelt, Emlen, 195, 217, 245, 261, 281, 378

Roosevelt, Ethel, 377

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 250, 253, 373, 380

Roosevelt, Helen Astor, 240

Roosevelt, James, 232–33, 240, 253, 260, 364

Roosevelt, James Alfred, 42, 227, 238, 362

and family business, 28–30, 144–45

and Gould, 269

homes of, 130, 245

and politics, 113, 261

railroad interests, 286, 295

and TR’s finances, 211, 286

and TR Sr.’s death, 187–92, 196–97

Roosevelt, James Roosevelt (Rosy), 240

Roosevelt, Kermit, 377

Roosevelt, Laura, 120, 188, 189

Roosevelt, Margaret Barnhill (Mrs. CVS), 23, 26, 53, 55, 56

Roosevelt, Martha Bulloch (Mittie), 21, 25, 32, 40, 337

and Alice Lee, 228, 230–33, 236, 237, 241

appearance, 48–49, 144

background and early life, 41–48

Bamie, relations with, 127–28, 233

and children’s birth, 35, 54, 56, 103

and Civil War, 56–58, 60, 61, 65, 66–67, 103

courtship and marriage, 29, 48–54

and Cousin Sally, 232, 252–53

cultural interests, 70

death, 291–96

eccentricities, 69, 252–53

Elliott, relations with, 233, 251–53

European tour, 70, 71–92

passim, 103–8

passim, 137–38

expenditures, 67, 69, 138–39

and family gymnasium, 115

health, 54, 66, 69–70, 103

Irvine, secret meeting with, 74

Nile journey, 122–31

at Oyster Bay, 114, 145ff., 163–64, 289

and religion, 68

at Riverdale, 239

in society, 67–68

TR, influence on, 376

and TR’s asthma, 38, 93–94, 96–97, 99–105

passim, 108, 113–14, 137

and TR Sr.’s death, 187–92, 193

Roosevelt, Minnie O’Shea, 24, 376

Roosevelt, Nicholas (TR’s great-uncle), 42

Roosevelt, Nicholas (TR’s second cousin), 322

Roosevelt, Quentin, 377, 379

Roosevelt, Robert Barnwell, 22–27, 145, 244

and Brooklyn Bridge, 239, 282

political career, 113, 115, 154–55, 260

second marriage, 376

and TR’s law studies, 237, 239, 287

and TR’s political debut, 261, 263

Roosevelt, Sara Delano (Cousin Sally), 144, 232–33, 250, 252–53, 364, 373

Roosevelt, Theodore (Teedie, TR), 21, 36–40, 47, 67

in Adirondacks, 120–21

and Alice Lee: courtship and wedding, 222–38

and Alice Lee: honeymoons, 237, 245, 248, 255

and Alice Lee: married life, 237–43, 248, 256, 257, 285–90, 290

and Alice’s death, 291–96, 376

appearance, 37–38, 124, 165, 166, 167, 254, 264

in Assembly, 245, 249, 253, 257, 259–84, 290, 293–94, 322

assassination attempt on, 379

asthma attacks, 38, 46, 61, 65–66, 72, 81, 83–84, 92, 93–111, 113–16, 137, 194, 195, 218, 235, 256, 350, 378

Autobiography, 376, 377

Bamie’s devotion to, 364–66, 373

Benton biography by, 352

birth, 35, 56

birthplace, 19–20, 381

and Blaine, 299, 302–4, 308–10, 312–16, 318, 322–23, 346

body building, 115–16, 166, 172

children of, 377; see also Roosevelt, Alice (daughter) and Cigar Bill, 267–68, 279–80

and civil service reform, 275–76, 279, 281–83, 290, 369, 374

and Civil War, 56–57, 60, 70

and Cleveland, 274, 276, 302, 315

Corinne’s devotion to, 381

and Corinne’s engagement, 241–42

in Dakota Bad Lands, 257, 296, 316, 324, 325–60

death, 378–79

in Dresden, 130, 137, 167

Edith Carow, early friendship with, 108, 169, 180

Edith Carow, early romance with and subsequent relations, 195, 227, 230, 236, 245

Edith Carow, later engagement and marriage to, 366–69, 376–78

education, 38–39, 120, 123, 128, 130, 140–41, 163, 164, 167; see also at Harvard,

below Elliott, big brother to, 148–53

Elliott, western hunting trip with, 232, 234–36

European tours, 37, 71–92

passim, 103–8

passim, 137, 245, 248, 255

father, devotion to, 34, 217–18, 375

father, excursions with, 83–84, 104, 106–9, 114

and fathers death, 185–97

father’s final letter to, 184–85, 186, 196

and Five-Cent Bill, 277–79

and Gould, 268–73, 275–77, 284

at Harvard, 165–74, 182, 187

passim, 192, 194, 197, 201–32

passim, 235

his Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 325–26, 344

income and expenditures, 211–12, 286, 337

later life, 374–79

and law studies, 237, 239, 287–88

Lodge, friendship with, 301–2, 319–20, 322–23, 365

Maine trips, 195–96, 217, 218, 227, 235

mayoralty campaign of, 367–71, 377

and mothers death, 291–92

mother’s influence on, 376

nature studies and collecting, 38, 117–25, 131, 140, 141, 167–68, 214, 219–20

his Naval History, 78, 213, 238, 241, 255, 257, 270

new house with Alice, 286

Nile journey, 122–31, 193

Nobel Peace Prize, 375

and Oyster Bay, 114, 145–47, 167–69, 248, 257, 286, 288–90;

see also Sagamore Hill philanthropies, 238, 254, 287

as President, 373, 374–76

his Ranch Life, 349

at Republican 1884

convention, 297–99, 301–4, 306, 308–10, 312–15, 318–21

“Summer Birds of the Adirondacks,” 182

and Westbrook Scandal, 266, 268–74, 288

in Wyoming, 342–45

Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr. (Ted: TR’s son), 377, 378

Roosevelt, Theodore, Sr. (TR’s father), 21–40

abolitionist, 50

in Adirondacks, 120–21

appearance and character, 24–25, 32

and Bamie, 34–36, 116–17

and body building, 114–15

and business, 28–30, 144–45

in Civil War, 23, 57, 58–66, 103, 159

and Conkling, 157–59, 161–63, 183–84, 186, 196

and Corrine, 34

courtship and marriage, 29, 48, 50–54

and Customhouse controversy, 175–83

passim, 196, 300

death, 185–96

education, 26

and Ellie, 33, 148–53

European tours, 26–28, 70, 71–92, 104–7

passim, 137–38

and father’s death, 129, 131

“Greatheart,” 34

and the insane, 141, 180, 181

and Mittie’s health, 54, 69, 137

new 57th St. house of, 130, 136, 138–40

Nile journey, 122–31

at Oyster Bay, 145–47, 163–64, 165

and Panic (1873), 138, 141, 144

philanthropies, 30–32, 36, 105, 116, 135, 141–43

political reformer, 154–64

passim and religion, 24, 32, 42, 68, 91, 105, 125, 144

at Republican 1876

convention, 155, 157, 160–63

at Riverdale, 239

in society, 142–44

TR, birthday letter to, 170–71

TR, economy lecture to, 212

TR, final letter to, 184–85, 186, 196

and TR’s asthma, 38, 83–84, 94, 96–97, 101, 103–8

passim, 111, 113–14

at Vienna Exposition, 137, 176

Roosevelt, Weir, 26, 29, 50, 86, 90, 140

Roosevelt, West, 140, 229, 233, 322, 378

nature interest and trips, 38, 120–21, 195–96

Roosevelt and Son, 26, 29, 41, 135, 136

investment firm, 144–45, 261, 286

“Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” 38

Root, Elihu, 261, 300, 376

Rosenvelt, Claes Martenszen van, 42

Rosenvelt, Jannetje van, 42

Roswell, Ga., 44ff., 54–55, 67, 76

Rough Riders, 374

Rotch, Nana, 227

Russell, Archibald, 251

Russell, Lord John, 78

Russia, S.S., 84, 139

Russian Ball (1863), 66

Russo-Japanese War, 374

Rutherfurd, Mrs. Lewis, 67

Sabin, Senator, 307

Sagamore Hill, 365, 370, 375, 377, 378, 379, 380

Saga of King Olaf, The (Longfellow), 168, 221

Sage, Russell, 270, 273

St. Andrews Society, 238

St. John, Thomas B., 73, 91

St. Paul Pioneer Press, 316, 350

St. Paul’s School, 152, 205

Salter, Henry Hude, 96–97, 105, 109, 110

Saltonstall, Endicott, 225

Saltonstall, Harriett Rose, 225

Saltonstall, Leverett, 225, 228

Saltonstall, Mary (Mamie), 222, 225

Saltonstall, Nathaniel, 205

Saltonstall, Phillip, 225

Saltonstall, Richard Middlecott, 205, 209, 213, 215, 220

and TR’s courtship of Alice Lee, 222, 224, 229, 235

Saltonstall, Rose, 222, 225, 227, 228, 229, 235

Saratoga, N.Y., 66, 101, 105, 113, 180

Sargeant, Dudley A., 235

Sargent, John Singer, 72

Saturday Evening Post, The, 216

Savannah, S.S., 44

Scalp Hunters, The (Reid), 118

Schurz, Carl, 155, 157, 175, 274

and Customhouse investigation, 178–79

opposes Blaine, 161, 162, 299, 300, 302, 313–14, 317

and wife’s death, 294

Schuyler, Louisa, 117, 135, 141–43, 375

Schuyler, Philip John, 142

Scotia, S.S., 71–74

Scott, Samuel, 205

Scott, Sir Walter, 80, 237, 378

Scribner’s Magazine, 208

Sears, Mr. and Mrs., 74

Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, The (Bulloch), 78

Seligman, Mrs. Jesse, 71

Seligman, Mr. and Mrs. Leopold, 71

Selmes, Martha Flandrau, 366

Selmes, Tilden, 366

Semmes, Raphael, 78

Sewall, William, 196, 218, 265

in Bad Lands, 329, 331, 337, 338, 345–46, 350, 356, 357

quits, 354, 360

Seward, William, 280

Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 141, 206, 213, 220, 317

Shannon, Assemblyman, 263

Shaw, Harry, 222

Sheard, Titus, 281, 292, 298

Shenandoah (Confederate raider), 76

Shenango and Allegheny Railroad, 286

Sherman, John, 301, 309, 310, 312–13

Sherman, William Tecumseh, 67, 300

Smith, Fanny, 147, 148, 168, 169, 227, 253, 254, 256

marriage, 380

and TR’s first marriage, 230, 236

and West Roosevelt, 233

Smith, Paul, 120

Song of Roland, The, 168

Sorrell, Gilbert Moxley, 48

Souvestre, Marie, 91

Spanish-American War, 374, 378

Spectator, The, 75

Spinney, George, 265, 266

Sprague, Kate Chase, 159, 180

Stalwarts, 281

State Board of Charities, New York, 180, 181

State Charities Aid Association, 190

Statue of Liberty, 175

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 118

Steward, Daniel, 43, 46, 47

Stickney, Victor Hugo, 355, 357

Stiles, Henry, 48, 51, 58

Stiles, Mary Cooper, 53

Still Hunter (Van Dyke), 326

Stobo, Archibald, 42–43

Strauss, Johann, 86

Strew, W. W, 266

Sturgis, Russell, 130

Suez Canal, 137, 138

Sullivan, Mark, 284, 305, 374

“Summer Birds of the Adirondacks” (TR and Minot), 182

Sumner, Charles, 75

Sumner, William Graham, 156

Swan, Emily, 227–28

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 194

Taft, William Howard, 379

Tammany Hall, 23, 113, 154, 265, 273

tariff, 309

Taylor, Bayard, 72

Taylor, Charles Fayette, 36, 94, 96

Tebbets, Jack, 215, 222

Teschemacher, Hubert E., 327, 329

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 75

Thayer, Nathaniel, 126, 127, 128

Thayer, William Roscoe, 201, 202, 205, 210, 214, 323, 350

Thomas, Dr., 189

Thompson, Dr., 195

Thompson, Hubert O., 283, 284

Thoreau, Henry David, 155

Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 142, 300

Tilden, Samuel, 154, 159, 174–75

Tivoli, N.Y., 256, 257

To Cuba and Back (Dana), 75

Tolstoy, Leo, 356–57

Towers & Gudgell (”OX” brand), 331, 337, 347

Townsend, Martin, 310

Toy (Mittie’s slave), 47, 50

Tramp Abroad, A (Twain), 238

Trimble, Richard, 327, 329

Trollope, Anthony, 255

Twain, Mark, 72, 238, 300

Tweed, William Marcy, 113, 154, 280

Union Cattle Co., 327

Union League Club, 24, 59, 113, 135, 156, 159, 190

Union Theological Seminary, 191

Union Trust Co., 138, 286

Utica, N.Y., 300

Van Allen, Lucas, 293

Van Schaack, Elliese, 89

Vaux, Calvert, 136

Victoria, Queen, 74

Vienna Exposition (1873), 137, 176

Wallock, Lester, 71

Ward, John Elliott, 68

Washburn, Charles, 215

Watkins, Dora, 21, 35, 39, 139, 248

Weed, Thurlow, 179, 280

Weld, Minot, 209, 215, 222

Welling, Richard, 166, 215–16

West, Hilborne, 38, 39, 46, 50

in Adirondacks, 120

and TR’s asthma, 94, 96, 114

TR’s science mentor, 119

West, Susan Elliott, 38, 44, 46, 50, 56, 58, 64, 66, 67, 120

West, William H., 310–12

Westbrook, T. R., 268–74

Westbrook Scandal, 266, 268–74, 288

Western Union Telegraph Co., 269, 270

Wharton, Edith, 71, 72, 169

on New York society, 239, 340

on TR, 379

Whiskey Ring, 156, 160

White, Andrew D., 300, 306, 310, 320

White, Horace, 315

Whitney, Bessie, 227

Whitney, Ellerton, 226

Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 221

Winthrop, Egerton, 71

Wise, John S., 244

Wister, Owen, 202, 277

his anecdotes about TR, 216–17, 241

on Harvard, 209

on Lodge’s influence on TR, 323

and the West, 325, 327, 329, 346, 349

women’s suffrage, 309

Wood, J. G., 119

Wood, John, 115

Woodbury, John, 213, 214

Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, 156

Wyoming, 257, 327, 329, 342–45, 354

About the Author

DAVID MCCULLOUGH was born in Pittsburgh in 1933. An avid reader from an early age, he graduated from Yale with honors in English literature. After college he moved to New York and began work as a trainee at Sports Illustrated, a new magazine at the time. He spent five years working in New York, and at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an editor at the United States Information Agency. There he discovered that he enjoyed writing history, and began doing occasional pieces for American Heritage magazine.

After Kennedy was assassinated, McCullough moved back to New York to become an editor at American Heritage, where he worked for six years. During that time he wrote his first book, The Johnstown Flood, at nights and on weekends.

After the success of The Johnstown Flood, he made the difficult decision to quit his job at American Heritage, and support his family by writing books. Fortunately, his next work was The Great Bridge. He has been a full-time author ever since, publishing all his books with Simon & Schuster, including his new biography, John Adams. None of his books has ever gone out of print.

McCullough is twice winner of the National Book Award and twice winner of the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize. For his monumental Truman, he received the Pulitzer Prize. For his work overall he has been honored by the National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, the National Humanities Medal, the St. Louis Literary Award, and the New York Public Library’s Literary Lion Award.

In a crowded, productive career, McCullough has been an editor, essayist teacher, lecturer, and familiar presence on public television as host of The American Experience and narrator of numerous documentaries, including The Civil War and Napoleon.

He is past president of the Society of American Historians. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received thirty-one honorary degrees.

Still an avid reader, traveler, and landscape painter, McCullough now lives in Massachusetts, with his wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough. They have five children and fifteen grandchildren.

Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt.

Lincoln’s funeral procession approaches Union Square, April 1865. The Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt house is on the left, and the children watching from the second-story window are believed to be Theodore and Elliott.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Martha Bulloch Roosevelt (Mittie), considered one of the most beautiful women in New York.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. (Greatheart), large, powerful, the idolized father and humanitarian.

FOUR PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD)

Above left, Martha Stewart Elliott Bulloch (Grandmamma).

Above, Uncle Jimmie—Captain James Dunwody Bulloch.

Irvine Bulloch.

Two unidentified former slaves of the Bulloch family at Bulloch Hall, sometime after the Civil War.

Bulloch Hall, Roswell, Georgia, as it looks today.

COURTESY HISTORIC ROSWELL, INC.

Robert Barnwell Roosevelt.

Roosevelt & Son, 94 Maiden Lane, New York City.

ALL PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Early work by the student naturalist, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

“Teedie” at age ten.

Theodore, Sr., and his beloved Anna (Bamie).

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Teedie, Elliott, Cousin Maud Elliott, Corinne, and Cousin John Elliott, Dresden, 1873.

Opposite top, a letter from Teedie to Edith Carow, written in 1869, during the family’s first tour abroad.

Opposite bottom, Mittie, Dresden, 1873. (The necklace was a prized gift from Theodore, Sr., purchased in Egypt.)

Interior of a typical dahabieh of the type the Roosevelts used to “do” the Nile.

COURTESY DEBORAH BULL

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Senator Roscoe Conkling.

Chester A. Arthur.

ALL ILLUSTRATIONS: CULVER PICTURES

The New York Customhouse.

The American Museum of Natural History.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

“Tranquillity,” Oyster Bay, New York. Mittie and Theodore, Sr., are on the porch. Figures in the foreground are believed to be Corinne and Edith Carow. (The house no longer stands.)

Teedie, Elliott, Corinne, and Edith at Oyster Bay, probably the summer of 1876, before Teedie left for Harvard.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Theodore Roosevelt (now “Teddy”) at Harvard.

The room Bamie chose and furnished for Theodore off campus.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Theodore in rowing attire.

Opposite top, Theodore as yachtsman.

Opposite bottom, Theodore the hunter, in Maine with Bill Sewall (left) and Will Dow.

THREE PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

A page from Theodore’s diary, junior year.

FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Alice Lee.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

The young politician with some Albany allies. The “best friend,” Isaac Hunt, is seated at left, and behind stands Billy O’Neil. At center seated is George Spinney of The New York Times. At right is an assemblyman from Brooklyn, Walter Howe.

The gentleman reformer is paired with New York’s new reform governor, Grover Cleveland, in a cartoon by Nast in Harper’s Weekly.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

The Roosevelt brothers (Elliott with pipe) pose in a photographer’s studio in 1880, the summer of their hunting trip in the West.

Parlor of the Roosevelt mansion at 6 West 57th Street, with Elliott’s tiger as centerpiece.

SAGAMORE HILL, NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT LIBRARY

Anna Hall.

Elliott at the Meadowbrook Hunt.

COURTESY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

CULVER PICTURES

Henry Cabot Lodge.

Theodore in the Bad Lands in full cowboy regalia.

HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

TWO PHOTOS: STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF NORTH DAKOTA

Above, Madame de Mores, the former Medora von Hoffman.

Right, the Marquis de Mores in the Bad Lands.

Opposite top, Theodore’s Elkhorn Ranch, as sketched by Frederic Remington.

Opposite bottom, studio portrait of Theodore as “the plainsman,” made to help promote one of his books. (The buckskin suit cost $100—the equivalent of $1,000 or more today. Knife and scabbard were custom-made by Tiffany.)

COURTESY OF W. SHEFFIELD COWLES, JR.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Edith Carow.

Opposite top, Bamie with Baby Alice, about 1886.

Opposite bottom, Sagamore Hill, soon after completion.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Theodore Roosevelt, age 27, at the time he ran for mayor of New York.

Praise for Truman

“Perhaps the highest tribute one can pay a biographer is to say that through him one comes to know his subject almost as though in person. In fostering the reader’s acquaintance with Harry Truman, not once does McCullough get in the way. This is in every respect a splendid work.”

—Myron A. Marty, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Since I’ve been in national politics, whenever I’ve been asked who my favorite political leader of the century is, I have always said Harry Truman…. David McCullough has always been a favorite of mine. The Truman biography is outstanding.”

—Jimmy Carter, The Boston Phoenix

“Exemplary and riveting…. The book is like a comfortable Victorian three-decker novel. There are two plots, a hero and heroine, and a glittering cast of characters ranging from Dean Acheson, Churchill and General Marshall to the Pendergasts and General MacArthur, as well as a splendid collection of Shakespearean clowns…. McCullough’s book will stand for a long time as the outstanding analysis of an extremely important subject: the greatness of Truman, and its role as an exogenous ‘cause’ in the history of his time.”

—Eugene V. Rostow, Times Literary Supplement, London

“An impressive and valuable study of Truman, worthy of its subject.”

—C. Vann Woodward, The New York Review

“Truman is biography as good as it gets, as absorbing and readable as it is voluminous. McCullough writes like a novelist, digs like a zealous reporter and puts things in perspective like the superb historian he is.”

—Lorenzo Carcaterra, People magazine

“This is the biography of President Harry S. Truman against which not only all other Truman biographies but probably all other presidential biographies will be measured. It is comprehensive, well reasoned, insightful and yet elegantly simple. It is written with a love for the subject that is contagious.”

—Steve Weinberg, The Kansas City Star

“McCullough takes us on a beautifully guided tour of recent history—a journey that is as much a celebration of American experience as it is a captivating portrait of the ordinary ‘man from Missouri’ who became an extraordinary figure in the Cold War world. Keeping Truman himself always vividly in the foreground, Mr. McCullough has written a stirring, masterly, thoroughly absorbing book.”

—Jean Strouse, author of Alice James: A Biography

“We are always at Truman’s side, at poker and bourbon and at his high moments. Coverage is complete and fascinating…. Now we know Truman in all his candor, courage, straightforwardness, determination and his occasional blunder…. This long, penetrating book is biography at its best.”

—W. A. Swanberg, Chicago Sun-Times

“Sweeping and vivid…. As a comprehensive and highly readable account of one of the most American of Americans, this is a distinctive and distinguished volume.”

—Hoyt Purvis, The Dallas Morning News

“An enthralling and fluidly told surprise-success story…. A book that handles an enormous amount of material with deftness, taste, and an acute understanding of Truman’s world and the men who made it.”

—Rhoda Koenig, New York magazine

“Superbly researched and carried forward by McCullough’s narrative drive, Truman is endlessly readable. The Harry we were all wild about is re-created exactly as Harry was—feisty, preposterous, decisive, tireless, outrageous, but always honorable, always courageous, always guided by his inner gyroscope of conscience and character.”

—William Manchester, author of William Spencer Churchill: The Last Lion

“David McCullough brings Truman vividly to life in this masterpiece of American biography. It’s a superb political study and human history.”

—Steve Neal, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Splendid…an elegantly written, even moving work…deserves a wide audience—if nothing else to remind us of what we were and what we had.”

—Stanley I. Kutler, Chicago Tribune

“Surefooted, highly satisfying biography…. an impressive tribute to a man whose brisk cheerfulness and self-confidence were combined with a God-fearing humility.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Not only outstanding biography but a great American story as well—by a master of the art. It is about how modern America was made. It is also about character and leadership in a time that needed both.”

—Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize

“Harry Truman has found his biographer. David McCullough’s monumental Truman perfectly mirrors its subject—vivid, straightforward, fast moving, intensely human, never boring for a moment. Truman himself once asserted the right to be both a president and a human being; it is McCullough’s great achievement as a biographer that he has managed to pin both Trumans to paper.”

—Geoffrey C. Ward, author of The Civil War: An Illustrated History

“David McCullough has a rare gift for combining scholarship with storytelling. His Truman ranks with William Manchester’s American Caesar and Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt among the finest biographies of our time. To call Truman definitive is an understatement. For what Mr. McCullough has created is a vast panorama of American life and politics, from the stagecoach to the space capsule, all swirling around a seemingly ordinary protagonist whose extraordinary qualities make Truman’s life a stirring confirmation of democracy at its finest.”

—Richard Norton Smith, Director, Herbert Hoover Library

“A fresh, wonderful new biography…My only complaint about this marvelous book is how much it makes me miss the old guy with the snappy bow tie.”

—Daniel Schorr, USA Today

“Plain wonderful.”

—Justin Kaplan

“Masterful…. Everyone seems to be reading Truman. Those who are sixty years of age or more, and therefore old enough to have adult memories of the man himself, recognize the loving accuracy of McCullough’s account. Professional historians of any age will acknowledge that McCullough has done the hard work necessary for good history and has added zest and imagination—qualities often absent from academic writing.”

—Gaddis Smith, The Yale Review

Also by David McCullough

JOHN ADAMS

BRAVE COMPANIONS

MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK

THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS

THE GREAT BRIDGE

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1992 by David McCullough

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Eve Metz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCullough, David G.

Truman/David McCullough.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Truman, Harry S., 1884–1972.

2. Presidents—United States—Biography.

I. Title.

E814.M26 1992

973.918′092—dc20 [B]         92-5245 CIP

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6029-9

ISBN-10: 0-7432-6029-5

eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5815-6

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

FOR DORIE KANE MCCULLOUGH

Contents

Part One—Son of the Middle Border

1. Blue River Country

2. Model Boy

3. The Way of the Farmer

4. Soldier

Part Two—Politician

5. Try, Try Again

6. The Senator from Pendergast

7. Patriot

8. Numbered Days

Part Three—To the Best of My Ability

9. The Moon, the Stars, and All the Planets

10. Summer of Decision

Part Four—Mr. President

11. The Buck Stops Here

12. Turning Point

13. The Heat in the Kitchen

14. Fighting Chance

Part Five—Weight of the World

15. Iron Man

16. Commander in Chief

17. Final Days

Part Six—Back Home

18. Citizen Truman

Acknowledgments

Source Notes

Bibliography

We can never tell what is in store for us.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN

Part One

Son of the Middle Border

1

Blue River Country

As an agricultural region, Missouri is not surpassed by any state in the Union. It is indeed the farmer’s kingdom….

—The History of Jackson County, Missouri, 1881

I

In the spring of 1841, when John Tyler was President, a Kentucky farmer named Solomon Young and his red-haired wife, Harriet Louisa Young, packed their belongings and with two small children started for the Far West. They had decided to stake their future on new land in the unseen, unfamiliar reaches of westernmost Missouri, which was then the “extreme frontier” of the United States.

They were part of a large migration out of Kentucky that had begun nearly twenty years before, inspired by accounts of a “New Eden” in farthest Missouri—by reports sent back by Daniel Morgan Boone, the son of Daniel Boone—and by the fact that in 1821 Missouri had come into the Union as a slave state. The earliest settlers included families named Boggs, Dailey, and Adair, McCoy, McClelland, Chiles, Pitcher, and Gregg, and by 1827 they had founded a courthouse town called Independence, pleasantly situated on high ground in Jackson County, in what was often spoken of as the Blue River country. Those who came afterward, at the time of Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, were named Hickman, Holmes, and Ford, Davenport, McPherson, Mann, Noland, and Nolan, Freeman, Truman, Peacock, Shank, Wallace, and Whitset, and they numbered in the hundreds.

Nearly all were farmers, plain-mannered and plain-spoken, people with little formal education. Many of them were unlettered, even illiterate. They were not, however, poor or downtrodden, as sometimes pictured—only by the material standards of later times could they be considered wanting—and though none were wealthy, some, like red-haired Harriet Louisa, came from families of substantial means. She had said goodbye to a spacious Greek Revival house with wallpaper and milled woodwork, the Kentucky home of her elder brother and guardian, William Gregg, who owned numerous slaves and landholdings running to many hundreds of acres.

The great majority of these people were of Scotch-Irish descent. They were Baptists and they were Democrats, and like Thomas Jefferson they believed that those who labored in the earth were the chosen people of God. They saw themselves as the true Americans. Their idol was Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory of Tennessee, “One-man-with-courage-makes-a-majority” Jackson, the first President from west of the Alleghenies, who was of their own Scotch-Irish stock. It was for him that Jackson County had been named, and like him they could be tough, courageous, blunt, touchy, narrow-minded, intolerant, and quarrelsome. And obstinate. “Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest I am hard to turn,” was a line from an old Scotch-Irish prayer.

With their Bibles, farm tools, and rifles, their potent corn whiskey, their black slaves, they brought from Kentucky a hidebound loathing for taxes, Roman Catholics, and eastern ways. Their trust was in the Lord and common sense. That they and their forebears had survived at all in backwoods Kentucky—or earlier in upland Virginia and the Carolinas—was due primarily to “good, hard sense,” as they said, and no end of hard work.

They were workers and they were loners, fiercely independent, fiercely loyal to their kind. And they were proudly prolific. David Dailey, recorded as the first man to break the prairie sod in Jackson County, came west with a wife and twelve sons, while Christopher Mann, who outlived everybody of that generation, had already produced with his Betsie seventeen sons and daughters and with a second marriage fathered eight more. (Years afterward, at age eighty-seven, this memorable Jackson County pioneer could claim he had never lost a tooth from decay and could still hold his breath for a minute and a half.) They believed in big families, they came from big families. Children were wealth for a farmer, as for a nation. President Tyler himself had eight children, and in another few years, at age fifty-four, following the death of his first wife, he would remarry and have seven more children, making a total of fifteen, a presidential record.

Solomon Young, who was one of eleven children, and his wife Harriet Louisa, one of thirteen, were from Shelby County, Kentucky, east of Louisville. And so was Nancy Tyler Holmes, a widow with ten children, who made the journey west to Missouri three or four years later, about 1845, once her sons had established themselves in Jackson County. Carrying a sack of tea cakes and her late husband’s beaver hat in a large leather hatbox, she traveled in the company of several slaves and her two youngest daughters, one of whom, Mary Jane Holmes, was secretly pining for a young man back in Shelby County named Anderson Truman. He was one of twelve children.

If Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young were acquainted with any of the Holmes or Truman families by this time, there is no record of it.

Nearly everyone made the expedition the same way, traveling the wilderness not by wagon or horseback but by steamboat. The route was down the winding Ohio River from Louisville, past Henderson and Paducah, to the confluence of the Mississippi at Cairo, then up the Mississippi to St. Louis. Changing boats at St. Louis, they headed west on the Missouri, the “Big Muddy,” fighting the current for 457 miles, as far as the river’s sudden, dramatic bend. There they went ashore at either of two miserable, mudbound little river settlements, Wayne City or Westport, which put them within a few miles of Independence, still the only town of consequence on the frontier.

With the “terrible current” against them, the trip on the Missouri took a week. The shallow-draft boats were loaded so deep the water broke over the gunwales. Wagons and freight jammed the deck, cordwood for the engines, mules, horses, piles of saddles and harness, leaving passengers little room. (One side-wheel steamer of the era that sank in the river and was only recovered more than a century later, carried cargo that included everything from ax handles and rifles to school slates, doorknobs, whale oil lanterns, beeswax candles, 2,500 boots and shoes, and thousands of bright-colored beads and buttons intended for the Indian trade.) Day after day, the heavy, shadowed forest passed slowly by, broken only now and then by an open meadow or tiny settlement where a few lone figures stood waving from among the tree stumps. Some trees towering over the river banks measured six feet through. On summer mornings the early filtered light on the water could be magical.

These were the years of the great Missouri River paintings by George Caleb Bingham. The river Bingham portrayed was the settlers’ path. The distant steamer appearing through the sun-filled morning haze in his Boatmen on the Missouri, as an example, could be the Radnor, the Henry Bry or Winona, any of twenty-odd river packets that carried the Kentucky people.

The only notable sign of civilization west of St. Louis was the state capitol on a bluff at Jefferson City, a white limestone affair, “very substantial in execution,” within which was displayed a full-length portrait of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri’s own thundering voice of westward expansion. The painting was said to have cost the unheard-of sum of $1,000.

Besides those from Kentucky, the migration included families from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee, who, with the Kentuckians, made it a predominantly southern movement and so one of numerous slaveholders other than Nancy Tyler Holmes. Possibly, Solomon Young, too, brought slaves. In later years, it is known, he owned three or four—a cook, a nursemaid, one or two farmhands—which was about the usual number for those bound for Jackson County. They were farmers, not cotton planters, and for many, a slave was a mark of prosperity and social station. Still, the accumulative number of black men, women, and children traveling to the frontier was substantial. Incredibly, one Jabez Smith, a Virginia slave trader who set up business near Independence, is on record as having transported more than two hundred slaves.

White, black, young and old, they crowded the upbound steamers in the company of hellfire preachers and cardsharps, or an occasional pallid easterner traveling west for his health. Old journals speak, too, of uniformed soldiers on their way to Fort Leavenworth, blanketed Kaw (or Kansas) Indians, French fur traders and mountainmen with their long hair and conspicuous buckskins—a seemingly endless, infinitely colorful variety of humankind and costume. Nancy Tyler Holmes is said to have worn a white lace cap that concealed an ugly scar. As a child in Kentucky, during a Shawnee uprising, she allegedly saved herself by pretending to be dead, never moving or making a sound as she was being scalped. True or not, the story served long among her descendants as a measure of family grit.

The feeling in surviving accounts is of noisy good company and wild scenery and of “history” as an immediate and entirely human experience. Lieutenant John Charles Frémont, the celebrated Path Finder, came up the river in 1842, on his first exploring expedition to the Rockies. (One traveler described Frémont’s party as “healthy and full of fun and elasticity…by no means a choir of Psalm-singers, nor Quakers. They ate, drank, talked, sang, played cards and smoked cigars when they pleased and as much as they pleased.”) The following year, 1843, came John James Audubon. In the summer of 1846 a young historian from Boston, Francis Parkman, stood at the rail of the Radnor marveling at the immense brown sweep of the river, its treacherous snags and shifting sandbars. “The Missouri is constantly changing its course,” Parkman was to write in The California and Oregon Trail, his classic account of the journey, “wearing away its banks on one side, while it forms new ones on the other. Its channel is continually shifting. Islands are formed, and then washed away, and while the old forests on one side are undermined and swept off, a young growth springs up from the new soil upon the other.” It was “frightful,” he noted, “to see the dead and broken trees, thick-set as a military abattis, firmly imbedded in the sand, and all pointing downstream, ready to impale any unhappy steamboat that at high water should pass over them.” The landing near Independence was described approvingly as a “wild and enterprising region.”

It was also in that summer of 1846 that Anderson Truman came on from Kentucky, and, for some unexplained reason, on horseback, which was one of the few exceptional things ever recorded about Anderson Truman. Possibly he couldn’t afford boat passage.

Of this first Truman to reach Jackson County, there is not a great deal to be said. His full name was Anderson Shipp (or Shippe) Truman. His people were English and Scotch-Irish and farmers as far back as anyone knew. His father, William Truman, had come into Kentucky from Virginia about 1800 and reportedly served in the War of 1812. Andy, as he was called, grew up on the Truman farm near the tiny crossroads village of Christianburg, Kentucky. He was slight, gentle, soft-spoken, thirty years old, and without prospects. Nonetheless, Mary Jane Holmes, who was five years younger, had seen enough in him to defy her mother and marry him. On the pretext of visiting a married sister, she had returned to Kentucky earlier that summer and once there, announced her intentions.

Her mother, the redoubtable Nancy Tyler Holmes, was horrified, as she let Mary Jane know in a letter from Missouri dated July 24, 1846—a letter dictated to another of her daughters, which suggests that Nancy Tyler Holmes may have been illiterate. Since hearing the news she had been unable to sleep or eat. “Mary are you the first daughter I have that has refused to take my advice?” What made Anderson Truman so unacceptable is unclear. An explanation given later was that Mother Holmes thought Mary Jane was “marrying down,” since the Trumans had no slaves.

The wedding took place in Kentucky in mid-August at the home of the married sister, a handsome red-brick house with white trim that still stands. Then Mary Jane’s “Mr. Truman,” as she would always refer to him, set off by horse for “the wild country” of Missouri, intending to stay only long enough to secure the blessing of his new mother-in-law.

His first letter from Missouri reached Mary Jane a month later. To his amazement, he had been welcomed with open arms, her mother and sisters all hugging and kissing him, everybody laughing and crying at once. He was urged to stay and take up the frontier life. He could be happy anywhere, even in Missouri, he wrote to Mary Jane, if only she were with him. “As for myself I believed that I would be satisfied if you was out here…I believe I can live here if you are willing.”

She arrived by steamboat, and with her mother’s blessing and the wedding gift of a Holmes slave named Hannah and her child, the young couple settled on a rented farm belonging to a prominent local figure, Johnston Lykins, a Baptist missionary (preacher and physician) who had come to the frontier originally to bring salvation to the Indians, but had lately turned to land speculation. He and others were in the throes of founding a new town on the Missouri’s great bend, at the juncture of the Kansas River and the Missouri, this to be ambitiously named Kansas City. To such men the future was in towns and trade. They talked of geographic advantages plain to anyone who looked at a map. Here was the Missouri, the great “natural highway” downstream to St. Louis, and so to New Orleans, Louisville, or Pittsburgh. There, upstream, beyond the great bend, stretched all the Northwest and its immeasurable opportunities.

Here also, importantly, began the overland trails to Santa Fe, California, and Oregon. Jackson County was the threshold, the jumping-off point, to an entire second America of dry grasslands reaching clear to the Rockies. In a newly published guidebook to the Santa Fe Trail called Commerce of the Prairies (1844), the author, Josiah Gregg of Jackson County, portrayed Independence as the port of embarkation for the “grand prairie ocean.”

In fact, Independence, “Queen City of the Trails,” was the country’s first western boomtown, and to newly arrived settlers, after long days on the river, it seemed a metropolis of stores, blacksmith sheds, wagon shops, of crowded streets and unceasing commotion. The crack of bull-whips split the air like rifle fire as wagon trains made up for Oregon. Mexican caravans from Santa Fe rolled in with still more wagons, pack mules, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in Mexican gold to be spent on American trade goods. The spring Solomon Young and his family arrived, one Santa Fe caravan of twenty-two wagons is reported to have brought $200,000 in gold specie. Like a seaport town Independence had a customshouse.

“Mules, horses, and wagons at every corner,” observed Francis Parkman. “Groups of hardy-looking men about the stores, and Santa Fe emigrant wagons standing in the fields around…. Some of these ox-wagons contained large families of children, peeping under the covering.”

The permanent population of Independence by the 1840s was perhaps only seven hundred people, but on any spring day two or three thousand would be congregated in or about Jackson Square, at the center of which stood a trim red-brick courthouse with a fanlight over the door. Of the several public houses around the Square, the largest and best known, the two-story, brick Noland House, was acclaimed the westernmost hotel in America, offering accommodations for four hundred guests, provided no one minded sleeping two or three to a bed. The nearby wagon shops were the shipyards of the “prairie ocean” and no wagons supposedly were better suited for the rigors of a prairie crossing than those built by a free black man named Hiram Young, an enterprising manufacturer who, like nearly everyone involved with the feeding, housing, or outfitting of emigrants, was prospering handsomely.

But it was land that the Kentucky people came for, the high, rolling, fertile open country of Jackson County, with its clear springs and two “considerable” rivers, the Little Blue and the Blue, both flowing out of Kansas Territory. Every essential was at hand—limestone quarries, splendid blue-grass pastures very like those of Kentucky, and ample timber where the creeks and rivers ran. “To live in a region devoid of the familiar sight of timber seemed unendurable,” reads one old chronicle, “and the average Kentuckian could not entertain the idea of founding a home away from the familiar forest trees.” They counted hickory, ash, elm, sycamore, willow, poplar, cottonwood, and oak in three or four varieties. Walnut, the most prized, was the most abundant. Entire barns and houses were to be built of walnut.

It was land beautiful to see, rising and falling in broad swells and giving way to long horizons. Prairie grass was “high and green.” Wildflowers, wild herbs—meadow rose, turtlehead, snakeroot, wolfberry, thimbleweed—grew in fragrant profusion everywhere the prairie remained unbroken, and starting about ten miles south of Independence the country was nearly all still prairie.

To cut through the sod with a plow took six to eight yoke of oxen. Horses wouldn’t do. But beneath the crust, the dark prairie loam could be two to six feet deep. In places along the river bottoms, it was 20 feet deep. Josiah Gregg, the guidebook author, having seen all the country from the Missouri to the Rio Grande, declared that the “rich and beautiful uplands in the vicinity of Independence might well be denominated the ‘garden spot’ of the Far West.”

Much of the best land, it happens, was already under cultivation. Moreover, it had been violently contested when, a decade earlier, the “garden spot” had been the setting for what were politely referred to as the Mormon Difficulties. In 1831, only a few years after the founding of Independence, a small, advance party of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints arrived on the scene and were at first regarded by the local citizenry as little more than harmless fanatics. But more followed. They bought land, founded a settlement and a ferry crossing on Blue River, opened their own general store in Independence, and established the town’s first newspaper. Some began speaking out against slavery. In little time, seen as a threat, they were decried as “the very dregs” of the East, vicious, immoral, and in education “little above the condition of our blacks.” That they referred to the Indians across the border in Kansas Territory as their fellow tribes of Israel struck many hard-bitten old pioneers as close to insane.

More ominous was their announced intention to become proprietors of the entire region. Joseph Smith, their prophet and leader, proclaimed Jackson County holy land and commanded that Independence become their City of Zion. By the summer of 1833, with the Saints in the county numbering more than a thousand, or roughly a third of the population, it appeared they might control the fall elections. A mass meeting was called at the courthouse. Angry speeches were made and a proclamation issued declaring Mormons no longer welcome.

Violence quickly followed. A mob smashed the Mormon printing press, a Mormon bishop was tarred and feathered. On Halloween night armed riders, “without other warrant than their own judgment of the requirements of the situation,” attacked the Mormon settlement on Blue River, driving women and children from their homes. Crops and barns went up in flame, men were dragged into the fields and flogged. Jackson County was in a state of “dreadful fermentation.” In another clash three men were killed.

When, on the night of November 12, the skies ignited in a spectacular meteor shower like none ever seen on the Missouri frontier, many took it as a sign to rid the land of Mormons once and for all. More than a thousand people were forced from their homes and driven across the Missouri River into less settled territory to the north, where their persecutions only grew worse, but with the difference now that they fought back. The governor of Missouri, an Independence storekeeper named Lilburn W. Boggs, called out the militia and declared that for the public good all Mormons must leave the state or be “exterminated.” A religious war was under way, Missouri’s first civil war, and ended only when the Mormons departed for Illinois in 1839.

Such events were past history by the time Solomon Young and his small family arrived in 1841. Yet only a year later, in 1842, a lone assassin, a Mormon presumably, crept to a window in Independence and shot Lilburn W. Boggs, all but killing him. As favored by nature as the Blue River country may have been, it was no peaceable kingdom.

Nor was nature ever entirely benign in Missouri, as the new settlers learned soon enough. Winters could be severe, or marked by weeks of raw gloom when the whole country looked as grim and hard as iron. The cold cut to the bone. The diary of one farmer, though written years later, speaks for generations of Jackson County people:

Awful cold; I did not work today, too cold; Colder than it has been this year; I slept cold; Cloudy and wind blowing; I am chilly; Tremendous windy and cold; Cold, blue cold this morning…too cold to work; Awful cold, all of us housed up, nobody stirring; I got very cold….

It was a climate of great extremes, even in the span of a day. Temperatures could rise or drop 50 degrees in a matter of hours. Summers turned too dry or too wet and either way were nearly always broiling hot. The year 1844 brought the worst floods on record, followed by a tornado that tore up trees and fences and killed a number of people.

But then no one came to the frontier expecting things to go easily, least of all a farmer.

Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young made their start on a farm known as the Parrish place, not far from the Missouri River and well within the projected outlines of Kansas City. Then, shortly afterward, in 1844, possibly because of the flood, they made a first claim to public land on high ground back from the Blue River approximately sixteen miles south of Independence, near the settlement of Hickman’s Mills, on what was called Blue Ridge. It was high, fertile, well-drained ground, ideal grazing country, good for corn and wheat, as high and fine as any land in the county, with distant views miles into Kansas Territory.

This first Blue Ridge claim comprised just 80 acres, the minimum purchase required by the Land Act, and Solomon Young paid $1.25 an acre, the minimum price for public land. To gain title he was also obliged to occupy the land for a time, and consequently stories were passed down of how he and Harriet Louisa came there with “a gun and an axe and two babies and a blanket.” Grandchildren would listen to Harriet Louisa tell how Solomon rode off to file his claim at the land office at Clinton, seventy miles distant, and describe the nights she spent in a shelter of fence rails and brush, alone with the two children, Susan Mary and William, who, if not exactly babies any longer, were still quite small.

The family expanded and so did Solomon’s holdings. Six more children were born—Sarah Ann, Harrison, Elizabeth, Laura Jane, Martha Ellen, and Ada—as ever larger parcels of land were acquired. A house and barn went up. Blue Ridge became the homeplace. Solomon’s financial setbacks were frequent and might have crushed a less resilient spirit, but by reputation he was one of the best farmers and stockmen in the county and in the long run he prospered. He had an eye for horses, he knew mules, he knew land, and he bought and sold either at every opportunity. In time he established a trans-prairie freighting enterprise and amassed landholdings that, for Jackson County, amounted to a small empire. Indeed, by all accounts, Solomon Young was a remarkable man, and considerably more is known about him and Harriet Louisa than about Anderson or Mary Jane Truman.

He was born in Shelby County, Kentucky, near the town of Simpsonville, in 1815, the year of Andrew Jackson’s triumph at the Battle of New Orleans, which made him twenty-six when he came to Missouri. His father, Jacob Young, was a Revolutionary War veteran from North Carolina. His mother, Rachael Goodnight Young, died when he was twelve. When his father remarried and moved on, Solomon was left to fend for himself, earning his keep weighing hogs and trading livestock. Full grown he was tall, powerful, self-reliant, bounding with energy, and a world-beating talker. Talk was nourishment for Solomon, as it never was for Harriet Louisa.

Unlike so many who came out from Kentucky, he was neither Scotch-Irish nor a Baptist, but of German descent (the name had been spelled Jung in North Carolina) and only a nominal Methodist. Skeptical of preachers or anyone who made too much show of religion, he liked to say that whenever he heard a man praying loudly, his first instinct was to go home and lock the smokehouse. Politics interested him not at all.

Solomon had married Harriet Louisa Gregg in the second week of January 1838. She was Scotch-Irish, her people ardent members of Kentucky’s first and largest Baptist congregation, the Long Run Baptist Church at Simpsonville, which had been built on land once owned by Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather, Captain Abraham Lincoln. Her first child was born in 1839, her second two years following, the same spring she and Solomon started west, which means she must have been nursing the baby on the boat trip up the Missouri. Remembered for her imperturbable disposition, no less than her abundant red hair, Harriet Louisa was not known to have complained or lost heart then or at any time afterward, whatever happened. “She was a strong woman…and there wasn’t a thing in the world that ever scared her,” it would be said. Her last pregnancy was in 1856, but the baby did not survive. Nearly forty, she was well past middle age by the standards of the day, yet still short of midpoint in what was to be an extremely long, eventful life.

Exactly when Solomon went west on the first of his wagon-train expeditions, leaving Harriet Louisa in charge of everything, is not clear. It is known only that he went several times prior to the Civil War, beginning as early perhaps as 1846, the momentous year of the Mexican War and the trek of the Mormons out of Illinois to the Great Salt Lake (not to mention the year of Anderson Truman’s arrival in Independence). Such undertakings were epic in scale, in any event. The customary overland train was made up of forty to eighty giant canvas-covered freight wagons, each requiring six yoke of oxen or mules and two drivers. A single wagon and team stretched 90 to 100 feet. And since the practice under way was to keep the wagons about 100 feet apart, some trains would be strung across the prairie for as far as three miles. To keep his bearings, Solomon carried a brass telescope, like a sea captain.

The goods hauled could be worth a fortune, $30,000 or more, and the profits, if all went as planned, could be correspondingly large. Solomon, who at census time now listed himself as a freighter, appears to have done quite well. In 1850, his recorded wealth was $5,000. Ten years later, he was worth ten times that. At age thirty-five he could count himself a wealthy man, with land and property valued at nearly $50,000. He is said to have owned as much as 5,000 acres, fancy, blooded horses, and there was real silver on the table.

Because the Santa Fe Trail first headed south out of Independence, before swinging west across the Blue River, it passed within only a few miles of the Young farm. Solomon would depart in the spring. Large and full-bearded, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, he must have been something to see as he pushed off, as his family saw him and remembered him—a man “who could do pretty much anything he set his mind to.” Once, he started for California with a herd of fifteen hundred cattle. It took him a year and he lost five hundred cattle on the way, but he made it, through every kind of weather and hardship, across half the continent. At Sacramento he traded the surviving herd for a ranch of 40,000 acres. But this, as the story goes, he was forced to sell to cover the debts of a partner. A man made good on his debts, a man stood by his friends. And a world-beating talker had a tale to tell his children, and they theirs.

Another year, 1860, Solomon took forty wagons to Utah, with goods and salt pork for the Army, and his arrival at Salt Lake caused a stir:

The wagons were coupled together in pairs [noted the August 16, 1860, edition of the Deseret News], one behind the other, each pair having on board about sixty hundred pounds and drawn by six pairs of oxen….Mr. Young is of the opinion that the couple of two wagons together in that manner is the most economical way of freighting to this Territory…. Mr. Young’s cattle look remarkably well, and, as we are informed, he did not lose a single ox by accident or otherwise during the trip.

When the officer in charge at Salt Lake refused for some reason to receive the goods, Solomon met with Brigham Young, who, though no relation, was a fellow Mason and agreed to take the whole shipment if Solomon would extend him credit. The bargain worked out to the satisfaction of both.

Meantime, Solomon also did a thriving trade in outfitting and advising emigrants bound for Oregon or Santa Fe, who now, every year, numbered in the thousands. But by 1849 and 1850, the years of the California Gold Rush and the greatest traffic through Independence, the little town’s time in the sun was nearly over. For the same human tide brought virulent cholera. In the spring of 1849 ten people died at the Noland House within a single day. In 1851 cholera struck again. In 1854, with no rain from June to November, crops failed all over the county. Scarlet fever, pneumonia, and cholera were epidemic the next several years. In the spring of 1857 the Youngs themselves lost a child, nine-year-old Elizabeth, who died of causes unrecorded.

And all the while across the line in Kansas, the old issue of slavery was building to a terrible storm that was to affect the lives and outlook of nearly everyone in Jackson County for a very long time to come.

II

To many in western Missouri the Civil War commenced not in 1861 with the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, but in 1854, when Congress passed the fateful Kansas-Nebraska Act, leaving to the residents of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska the decision of whether to allow slavery. Missouri had come into the Union as a slave state following the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820–21, another congressional inspiration that admitted Maine, a free state, at the same time and prohibited slavery north of Missouri’s southern border, latitude 36°30′. Now the old Missouri Compromise line was gone. The new bill, designed to ease tension, had exactly the opposite effect.

What compounded the problem was the disproportionate size of the slave population along Missouri’s western border—where possibly fifty thousand slaves were held, which was nearly half the slaves in all Missouri. In Jackson County alone there were more than three thousand, and their owners, whatever their feeling for the Union, dreaded the prospect of free territory so close, to which a slave might escape, or from which could come armed bands of slave liberators. For the owner, his slave was very often his most valuable possession, in addition to being vital to his livelihood, and as the chances of war increased, the monetary value of every slave increased steadily, to the point where a male in good health was worth $3,000, as much as 500 acres of prime land.

Elsewhere in the nation Kansas was seen as the issue that would settle things. “Come on then, gentlemen of the Slave States,” said Senator William H. Seward of New York in a speech in Washington, “…We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” As if in answer, several thousand pro-slavery Missourians—“enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory,” as one of their leaders expressed it—stormed over the border with guns and whiskey to help Kansas elect a pro-slavery legislature.

In response, more Free-Soilers poured in from the East, a new kind of emigrant traffic from which struggling little Kansas City began to benefit. When armed pro-slavery ruffians, later to be known as “bushwhackers,” tried to close passage on the Missouri by terrorizing the riverboats, the Free-Soilers merely crossed overland through Iowa.

Time obviously was running out.

On May 22, 1856, hard-riding Missouri “Border Ruffians” shot up the town of Lawrence, Kansas, an abolitionist stronghold. Two days afterward, a strange, wild-looking old man named John Brown, a new Kansas settler, decided the moment had come to “regulate matters.” Armed with broadswords honed to razor sharpness, Brown and his sons descended after dark on three isolated cabins on little Pottawatomie Creek. There they took five pro-slavery Kansas men and boys, none of whom had anything to do with the raid on Lawrence, and chopped them to pieces—“as declared by Almighty God,” said John Brown.

No sooner had the Free-Soilers gained control in Kansas in the next round of elections than Kansas riders came charging over the line into Missouri to take their turn at murder and arson. For years before the Civil War began in the East, this terrible Border War—civil war in every dreadful sense of the term—raged all up and down the Missouri-Kansas line and continued until the surrender at Appomattox. It was like some horrible chapter out of the Middle Ages, with gangs of brigand horsemen roaming the land. They could appear out of nowhere any time, led often by men who were no better than young thugs, some possibly deranged, like the bantam-sized “Doc” Jennison, whose outlaw Kansans were called Jayhawkers or Red Legs (for their red leather leggings), or the Missouri guerrilla “Bloody Bill” Anderson, who liked to mutilate his victims. It was a war of plunder, ambush, and unceasing revenge. Nobody was safe. Defenseless towns were burned. Osceola, Missouri, and Shawneetown, Kansas, were all but wiped from the map.

Neither then nor later did the rest of the country realize the extent of the horrors. Nor was it ever generally understood that most Missourians remained loyal to the Union—including slaveholders like Solomon Young and Anderson Truman—or that most Missourians bore no resemblance to the infamous bushwhackers. The popular picture of all western Missourians as gun-slinging, whiskey-swilling riffraff was grossly inaccurate—as inaccurate as the idea that every Kansan was a transplanted, upright New England abolitionist. Atrocities were committed on both sides, and it was innocent civilians who suffered most. As one Kansan later said, “The Devil came to the border, liked it, and decided to stay awhile.”

Jackson County became “the burnt country.” Judge Henry Younger of Lee’s Summit saw his farm destroyed during Jayhawker “Doc” Jennison’s first sweep through the county, and Judge Younger was a Union man. Later, he was brutally murdered, which led his hot-blooded son Coleman, or Cole, to join up with the celebrated Missouri guerrilla chief, William Quantrill.

A Jackson County physician named Lee was gunned down in cold blood because his sons had joined the Confederate Army. John Hagan, a farmer, was stopped by Union cavalry while out for a Sunday drive with his family. Ordered to get down from the wagon, he was led into the woods and shot through the head for no known reason. Christopher Mann, the prolific old Kentucky pioneer who had the ability of holding his breath for a minute and a half, was made to stand by at gunpoint and watch his farm burned by Missouri guerrillas. “They asked me if I was not a black abolitionist, and when I told them, ‘I am a Union man, sir!’ one of the bushwackers struck me with his revolver and broke out two of my teeth.”

A first battle of Independence was fought before dawn the morning of August 11, 1862, when Quantrill and his ragtag band came screaming into the Square and a uniformed Confederate force overran a sleeping Union camp. In a second battle two years later, another Confederate victory, fierce block-to-block fighting raged back and forth across town for two days.

The worst atrocity, the unpardonable Lawrence Massacre, was committed by Quantrill, a brave, ingenious, wretched man who was continuously in and out of Jackson County, hiding in the heavy brush of the winding Blue River bottoms. To most slaveholders Quantrill was a hero and in memory, in after years in Jackson County, he would acquire a romantic glow, an aura like that of no other figure of the war, as if he had been the very soul of Old South gallantry in service of the Cause. In reality, he came from Ohio. Nor had he ever shown any southern sympathies or convictions, until the killing began.

At first light the morning of August 21, 1863, with a force of nearly 500 men riding under a black silk flag, Quantrill struck Lawrence, Kansas. Most of the town was still asleep. His orders were to kill every man big enough to carry a gun and to burn the town. When it was over, at least 150 men and boys had been murdered. The day was clear and still and smoke from the inferno, rising in tremendous black columns, could be seen from miles away.

Like many others in Jackson County, Solomon and Harriet Louisa had a personal tie to the bushwackers. Their third child, Sarah Ann, had married a man named James J. Chiles, a highly unsavory character known as Jim Crow Chiles. He was the dark side of frontier life, a future skeleton for the Young-Truman family closet.

Jim Crow, whose nickname was said to have been bestowed in boyhood for his exuberant performance of a popular dance called the “Jim Crow Set,” belonged to one of the original pioneer families in the county, and large landholders, which initially stood him well with the Youngs. But in 1857, Jim Crow had killed a man in the bar at the Noland House, a stranger who had done no more than remark on his table manners. (Another man who traveled with Jim Crow to Santa Fe shortly afterward remembered him as often good-natured, even jovial, “but subject to violent fits of anger, and when angry, a very dangerous man.”) Tried for murder at the Independence Courthouse in 1859, he got off, the standing of the Chiles family weighing heavily in the jury’s decision, and it was almost immediately afterward that he and Sarah Ann, or Sallie, were married. She was sixteen. Jim Crow, a “dashing fellow,” was notable for his dark eyes and “powerful, symmetrical build.”

At the onset of the war, Jim Crow took off with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, and quickly demonstrated that like them he enjoyed killing, “always exhibiting the traits of the most inhuman savage,” as a Kansas City paper would write at the time of his death. He was an active participant, for example, in the capture of Union Captain Daniel H. David on the Little Blue, when Captain David and his men were hacked to death John Brown style.

In this pitiless onrush of history, the Youngs, too, were caught in the middle no less than anyone along the border, and their stories of what happened, of all that was taken and destroyed, would be told repeatedly, some events merging in memory with others as time passed, some details being dropped or made a touch more vivid than the truth perhaps, depending on who was telling the story to whom and when. Whether, for example, the fanatical “Grim Chieftain of Kansas,” Jim Lane, struck the Young farm the summer of 1861, two years before the Lawrence Massacre, as Lane headed through Missouri to burn Osceola, or whether it was earlier, just after the war officially began in the spring of 1861, is a matter of some confusion. But there is no doubt that he came or that Solomon was somewhere far afield on one of his expeditions. (Solomon may have reasoned that since he was an avowed Union man his family would be safe.) Will Young, the oldest son, was also absent—Will had joined the Confederate Army—which left Harriet Louisa alone with the children.

In a theater of war characterized by strange, terrifying human apparitions, James Henry Lane may have been the strangest, most terrifying of all. Tall, gaunt, always wildly disheveled even in uniform, he had a sallow hatchet face, atrociously bad teeth, and a voice with a raspy, unearthly sound. He was also a brilliant orator and a rampant political opportunist. As an overnight, fire-eating Republican he had been elected as one of the first two senators from the new state of Kansas. Arriving in Washington on the eve of the war, he organized a Frontier Guard to protect Abraham Lincoln and for a few nights he and his men actually bivouacked in the East Room of the Executive Mansion. In Missouri he was known as a “freedom” soldier, meaning he would free you of anything he could lay his hands on—food, forage, money, silk dresses, the family silver, even a piano on occasion. Everybody knew about Jim Lane. He was as feared and reviled on the Missouri side of the line as was Quantrill in Kansas. For Harriet Louisa there could have been no mistaking who it was in Union blue riding up the road.

In the formal claim she filed in 1902, more than thirty-five years after the war, it is recorded that Union forces under five different officers came to the farm on five different occasions, beginning with General Lane in May 1861. All that they took or destroyed is itemized. If the record is accurate, then Lane was accountable only for fifteen mules and thirteen horses valued at $4,525. But by Harriet Louisa’s own recollection on numerous occasions before and after the report was filed, as well as the stories repeated by those of her children who were witness to the same events, this is what happened:

Lane and his Kansans proceeded to shoot four hundred Hampshire hogs, then cut out only the hams, leaving the rest to rot. Harriet Louisa was ordered to bake biscuits, which she did “until her hands blistered.” Some of the soldiers passed the time playing cards in the yard, sitting in the mud on her best hand-sewn quilt. Others, “out of sheer cussedness,” blasted away at her hens.

Whether Lane knew of the family’s connection to Jim Crow Chiles or the fact that Will Young had joined the Confederates is not known. But, to determine the whereabouts of Solomon Young, the Kansans took the “man of the place,” fifteen-year-old Harrison, looped a rope about his neck, threw the other end over a tree, and said they would hang him if he didn’t tell where his father was hiding. Harrison, according to the story, told the truth, saying Solomon had gone west with a wagon train. They tightened the rope, “stretching his neck,” and asked again. Harrison answered as before. Then, suddenly, bored with their game, the men let him go. Hay barns were set ablaze. Lane and the rest rode off, taking the hams, biscuits, feather beds, and the family silver.

According to Harriet Louisa’s formal claim, however, it was a Colonel Burris, not Lane, who made off with 1,200 pounds of bacon in October of 1862, as well as 65 tons of hay, 500 bushels of corn, 44 head of hogs, 2 horses (one with bridle and saddle), 1 “lot of beds and bedding,” 7 wagons, and 30,000 fence rails. A General Sturgis was also responsible for taking 150 head of cattle and a Captain Axaline for 13,000 fence rails, 1,000 bushels of corn, and 6,000 “rations.” The total value of everything confiscated came to $21,442, the equivalent in present-day money of a quarter of a million dollars.

Interestingly, no family silver is listed. Nor is there any reference to buildings destroyed. Yet the theft of the family silver by Old Jim Lane would be talked of repeatedly in after years, and Martha Ellen Young, who was nine at the time, would one day describe for a New York Times writer how she and her mother, their faces blackened with the soot and ash that rained down from the burning barns, stood in the yard watching the hated blue soldiers ride away.

Though possibly no silver ever was taken, certainly it might have been, and if no buildings were actually destroyed on the Young farm, the little girl may well have been witness to other farms going up in flames in “the burnt country.” The resulting hatred was the same in any event. The stories were what mattered as they were passed along, not the formal claim. From such times and memories, as was said, a family “got solid” in its feelings.

But nothing that happened in western Missouri during the course of the war left such a legacy of bitterness as the infamous Union measure known as General Order No. 11. Estimating that two thirds of the outlying Missouri populace were either “kin to the guerrillas” (like the Youngs) or “actively and heartily engaged in feeding, clothing, and sustaining them” (like the Slaughter family, near neighbors of the Youngs on Blue Ridge), the Union commander at Kansas City, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, decided to deny the guerrillas their base of supply by depopulating the entire area.

The order was issued August 25, 1863. All civilians in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties, except those living within a mile of Union posts at Kansas City, Independence, Hickman’s Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, were to “remove from their present places of residence” within fifteen days. If they could prove their loyalty to the Union to the satisfaction of the post commander, they could remain in those towns or cross over into Kansas. If not, they must leave Missouri. All grain and hay found in the district after the deadline was to be destroyed.

Twenty thousand people were driven from their homes. The country was depopulated in a matter of weeks, as Union cavalry helped themselves to whatever of value was left behind, then put a torch to buildings and crops. “It is heartsickening to see what I have seen,” wrote a Union officer to his wife. “…A desolated country and men and women and children, some of them almost naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God.” Another Union officer appalled by the suffering he witnessed firsthand was the artist George Caleb Bingham, whose outrage would take form after the war, when, settling in Independence, he painted Order No. 11, in which General Ewing himself would be seen driving a family from their home.

At the Young farm, the policy appears to have been carried out to the letter, despite the fact that Solomon had signed a loyalty oath more than a year before. The family was permitted to take away one wagonload of possessions. Little Martha Ellen would remember trudging northward on a hot, dusty road behind the swaying wagon, headed for “bitter exile” in Kansas City.

Anderson Truman, meantime, had fared far better. He too had signed a loyalty oath. He wanted only “the Union as it was,” like the rest of the Trumans back in Kentucky. (“I hope you have not turned against this glorious Union,” wrote his brother John Truman from Shelby County, where, as in Missouri, families and neighbors were sharply divided.) But earlier Anderson and his family had moved across the Missouri to Platte County, which, close as it was, the war hardly touched. An increasingly religious man, he wished no part in violence. He hated Catholics, but little else apparently, and he kept to his land and labors, living simply and almost without incident. Once, after dark, the slave Hannah heard screams and a commotion of horses at the adjoining farm. Everyone assumed the Red Legs had arrived and Grandmother Holmes, then in her eighties, fled with the youngest Truman children to hide in a cornfield. The Red Legs proved to be a detachment of Confederate cavalry who had come to press a neighbor’s sons into service. This was as close as the war ever came to the Trumans.

The children numbered five, three girls, Margaret, Emma, and Mary, and two boys, William and John, neither of whom was old enough to fight in the war.

When it was all over in April 1865, Anderson loaded his five slaves—Hannah, Marge, and their three daughters—into a big farm wagon with a month’s supply of food and drove them to Leavenworth, Kansas, the place they had chosen to begin their freedom. When he returned to Leavenworth some years later to learn what had become of them, nobody knew.

“They never bought one, they never sold one,” a keeper of the family annals would later conclude, speaking somewhat defensively of the Anderson Trumans and their slaves.

The wounds of nearly nine years of war in Missouri were a long time healing. While most veterans of the defeated Confederate Army took up life as best they could, married, and settled down, others found it impossible to return to anything like the old ways. Cole Younger turned desperado and with his brothers joined forces with two more who had fought with Quantrill, Frank and Jesse James. The gang held up its first bank on the main square of little Liberty, Missouri, about ten miles from Independence as the crow flies, in February 1866. Later they hit upon the novel idea of robbing trains.

Closer to home was the case of Jim Crow Chiles, who for years conducted his own one-man reign of terror, using a notorious gambling hall in Kansas City called Headquarters as a base of operations. Having made himself leader of the toughest element in that now wide-open town, he swaggered about armed with two heavy dragoon revolvers, two pocket Derringers, and a black snake whip that became his trademark. His home was in Independence, where he owned a livery stable and kept a pack of bloodhounds that bayed half the night, but that nobody ever dared complain about. He was “universally hated,” the kind of town bully who figured in children’s nightmares. To black people he was a living terror. On drinking sprees, he would mount a horse and hunt them down with his whip. It is recorded that he killed two black men in cold blood on two different occasions in Independence, shot them “to see them jump.” Reportedly, he had killed nine men altogether and was under indictment for three murders by the time a deputy marshal named James Peacock decided to stand up to him as no one ever had.

Both men were heavily armed and both accompanied by a young son, also armed, the morning of the confrontation on the west side of the courthouse square. September 21, 1873, was a Sunday and a number of people on hand witnessed everything.

Advancing on Peacock, Jim Crow challenged him to fight, then hit him in the face. Peacock struck back and at once they tore into each other with fists and pistols, pellmell in the dust of the street, the two boys plunging in. Jim Crow’s son, Elijah, had eyesight so poor he was nearly blind, yet he never hesitated. Shots were fired. Jim Crow was hit in the shoulder, Peacock in the back. Elijah, too, was hit. Then Peacock fired point blank into Jim Crow’s face, killing him instantly.

Jim Crow’s body was carried to the Noland House, to the same barroom where he had killed his first man. The boy Elijah died the next night. Peacock, however, survived, a bullet lodged in his spine, and as the sheriff who killed Jim Crow Chiles, he became a county legend and unbeatable at election time, the Chiles family, meanwhile, having publicly exonerated him from any blame.

For the Youngs, as for the Chileses, it was a tragedy of terrible proportions and one they refused to discuss, then or later, though it is said Solomon Young cursed his daughter Sallie and that Martha Ellen, her father’s pet, burned a portrait of Jim Crow. Sallie, a widow at thirty, was expecting another child. Her son Elijah had been all of thirteen.

III

For Martha Ellen Young—Matt or Mattie, as she was known—life had picked up again three years after the war, in 1868, the year she turned seventeen and the family resettled on Blue Ridge in a new, more spacious house. Harriet Louisa had chosen the spot. The new house faced west at the end of a straight quarter-mile drive lined with double rows of elm trees that Mattie helped her father plant. The house, wood frame and painted white with green shutters, had a wide front veranda and two large square front parlors off a central hall. Dining room and kitchen were in a wing to the rear, this enclosed by more porches. Beyond, to the rear, past the orchard, stood a huge red barn built entirely of heavy walnut planks and beams taken from the old, original mill at Hickman’s Mills.

The immediate farm comprised 600 acres, with fields bound by squarely built limestone walls—rock fences, as they were known. Whatever his losses from the war, Solomon appears to have taken hold again. Matt had her pick of several fine saddle horses and would spend some of the happiest days of her life riding sidesaddle over the high, open land. If she never learned to milk a cow, her father advised, she would never have to milk a cow. So she never learned.

She did learn to bake and sew and to use a rifle as well as a man. If she swept the veranda, she made the broom fly. “Lively” is the adjective that turns up in old correspondence to describe Mattie Young. Presently, she was sent away to the Lexington Baptist Female College, in sedate, tree-shaded Lexington, Missouri, where for two years she learned to sketch, play the piano, and acquired a lifelong love of books and the poetry of Alexander Pope.

Of above average height—about 5 foot 6—she was a slender young woman with dark hair, a round bright face, and a way of looking directly at people with her clear, gray-blue eyes. Like her father, whom she adored, she was inclined also to speak her mind.

Life on the farm, meantime, had returned to the old rhythms of seasons and crops and work. Talk at the dinner table was of hog prices and taxes; of the Mormons who had begun returning to the county from Utah, convinced still that Independence was their City of Zion; and of the new Hannibal Bridge at Kansas City, the first railroad bridge over the Missouri, which promised to change everything.

Kansas City was growing beyond anyone’s dreams. The bridge was finished in 1869, the year of the opening of the transcontinental railroad. By 1872, just three years later, there were seven railroad lines in and out of Kansas City. The days of steamboats and wagon trains were all but vanished. Missouri—“Muzoorah,” as one was supposed to pronounce it—was no longer the Far West, but the Great Center of the country.

In the summer of 1874 grasshoppers came in black clouds that shut out the sky. When they were gone, the land was as bare as if scorched by fire. The following year they came again, as if to mock the progress people talked about.

The social occasions Mattie Young loved best were the dances at home in the front parlors, or at neighboring farms. She was a spirited dancer, a “light-foot Baptist.” One winter, after a blizzard, there was a dance every night for a week. Neighbors would dance most of the night, then spend the following day riding in big box sleighs cross-country to the next house.

Possibly it was on such a night that she first met John Truman, who since the end of the war had returned with his family to Jackson County and taken up farming nearby. In any event, they seem to have known one another for some while before announcing their plans to marry in 1881, by which time Mattie was twenty-nine.

John Anderson Truman, who was a year older, had had no education beyond a rural school, and except for the night during the war when he fled with Grandmother Holmes into the cornfield, he had had no known adventures. Nor had he any special skills or money. None of the Trumans had ever had money. Still he was ambitious—he aspired to be a stock trader like Solomon Young—and he was a hard worker, cheerful, eager to please. He loved to sing while Mattie played the piano. He also had a violent temper, though thus far this had landed him in no trouble. Overall he made a good impression. In a thick new History of Jackson County, Missouri published the year he and Matt were married, it was said of John A. Truman that “he resides with his father and manages the farm; he is an industrious and energetic young man, and one that bids fair to make a success in life.”

His mother, Mary Jane Truman, had died two years before in 1879. The indomitable Nancy Tyler Holmes was also in her grave by this time, having lived to age ninety-four.

Appearances would always matter greatly to John Truman. For his wedding photograph taken in Kansas City, he wore a white string tie, kid gloves, and a black frock coat. His boots were gleaming, his thin reddish-brown hair clipped and plastered to perfection. He also chose to be seated for the picture, it is said, because he was sensitive about his height. At 5 foot 4, he was two inches shorter than Mattie. She stood beside him in brocaded satins and a wide lace collar, her hair parted in the middle and brushed smoothly back, in the current fashion, her left hand resting on his shoulder, her eyes, like his, directly on the camera.

As a wedding gift, Solomon gave her a three-drawer burl walnut dresser, with a marble top and a mirror with small, side shelves. She was never to own another piece of furniture quite so fine.

The ceremony took place at the homeplace three days after Christmas, December 28, 1881. The couple’s own first home was in Lamar, Missouri, a dusty, wind-blown market town and county seat (Barton County), ninety miles due south. For $685 John became the proud owner of a corner lot and a white frame house measuring all of 20 by 28 feet, which was hardly more than the dimensions of the Youngs’ kitchen. It had six tiny rooms, no basement, no running water, and no plumbing. But it was new, snug and sunny, with a casement window in the parlor on the southern side.

For another $200 John bought a barn diagonally across the street and there he opened for business, his announcement in the Lamar Democrat reading as follows:

Mules bought and sold. I will keep for sale at the White Barn on Kentucky Avenue a lot of good mules. Anyone wanting teams will do well to call on J. A. Truman.

A spinster sister, Mary Martha Truman, who, like John’s father, came for an extended stay, considered Lamar the end of the world. The place made her miserable, yet Mattie, she observed, remained “lively as ever.”

Mattie’s first child, a boy, was stillborn the couple’s first autumn in Lamar. A year and a half later a second child, a boy, was born in a bedroom off the parlor so small there was barely space for the bed. The attending physician, Dr. W. L. Griffin, received a fee of $15, and to celebrate the occasion the new father planted a seedling pine in the front yard. A story that John Truman also nailed a mule shoe over the front door for luck is apocryphal.

The date was May 8, 1884.

Two days later, a Baptist circuit rider took the baby out into the spring air, and holding him up in the sunshine, remarked what a sturdy boy he was.

Not for a month afterward, however, did Dr. Griffin bother to register the birth at the county clerk’s office up the street, and even then, the child was entered nameless. In a quandary over a middle name, Mattie and John were undecided whether to honor her father or his. In the end they compromised with the letter S. It could be taken to stand for Solomon or Shipp, but actually stood for nothing, a practice not unknown among the Scotch-Irish, even for first names. The baby’s first name was Harry, after his Uncle Harrison.

Harry S. Truman he would be.

The child would have no memory of Lamar or the house where he was born, for shortly afterward John Truman sold out and moved everybody north again, to a farm near Harrisonville, only seven miles from the Young place. The earliest written description of Harry Truman is in a letter from Harrisonville dated April 7, 1885, when he was still less than a year old. “Baby is real sick now,” wrote John’s sister Mary Martha, “he is so cross we can’t do anything.”

The mule business at Lamar had been disappointing. And so, apparently, was the Harrisonville farm, for the Trumans remained there even less time, only two years, during which a second son was born, John Vivian Truman—named for his father and a popular Confederate cavalry officer, John Vivian—who was to be known henceforth as Vivian.

Of these Harrisonville years little Harry would remember just two incidents. His earliest memory, interestingly, was of laughter. He was chasing a frog around the yard, laughing every time it jumped. To Grandmother Young, who had observed so many children, so splendid a sense of humor in a two-year-old was quite remarkable. The second memory was of his mother, for fun, dropping him from an upstairs window into the outstretched arms of his very large Uncle Harry, who was to be a particular favorite from then on.

Solomon Young, by now in his seventies and among the most respected men in the county, was still fit and active. It seemed nothing could touch him, not wars or epidemics or advancing years. But in 1887, the John Truman family moved back to the Young farm and John became Solomon’s partner. To what extent John’s two false starts influenced the decision, or how much say Mattie had, can only be imagined.

Thus it was to be the Young homeplace where small Harry S. Truman made most of his earliest observations of the world, beginning at age three. Grandfather Anderson Truman also moved in—he was given a room of his own upstairs—and a place was found for one of the fatherless Chiles grandchildren, Cousin Sol. Counting everybody—Harrison, who remained a bachelor, sister Ada, a hired girl, several hired hands, and nearly always a visiting relative or stray neighbor child—this made a household of seldom less than fourteen or fifteen people spanning three generations, all under one roof on the same Blue Ridge where Solomon and Harriet Louisa had made their claim so many years before.

2

Model Boy

Now Harry, you be good.

—MARTHA ELLEN TRUMAN

I

Harry Truman liked to say in later years that he had the happiest childhood imaginable. Grandpa Young took him riding over the countryside in a high-wheeled cart behind a strawberry roan trotting horse. Grandpa adored him, the boy knew. One summer, every day for a week, they drove six miles to the Belton Fair and sat together in the judges’ stand watching the races and eating striped candy. It was “the best time a kid ever had.” Grandpa was “quite a man, a great big man” with a flowing white beard and strong hands.

Until Mamma gave birth to a third child, the boy’s only competition for attention was little Vivian, who still wore his hair in curls. On a day nearly as memorable as those at the Belton Fair, Grandpa and he conspired to give Vivian a haircut, sitting him up in a highchair on the south porch. Mamma was furious when she discovered what they had done, but amazingly she said nothing, so unassailable was Grandpa’s authority.

The porch where the haircut took place overlooked a broad bluegrass pasture with a creek where the boys were allowed to explore on their own, accompanied by a black-and-tan dog of uncertain ancestry called Tandy and a cat named Bob. Harry would also remember a swing under an old elm close to the house and another swing indoors in the front hall for rainy days. The long porch on the north side of the house made a perfect race track for their red express wagon.

They went hunting for bird nests and gathered wild strawberries in prairie grass as tall as they. The farm was “a wonderful place.” These were “wonderful days and great adventures.” The Young land seemed to go on and on. A few miles beyond the immediate farm with its 600 acres was a second farm owned by Grandpa, this with nearly a 1,000 acres. There were herds of cattle, saddle horses, draft horses, mules, sheep, hogs, chickens, ducks, and geese. Harry’s father presented him with a black Shetland pony and a new saddle. With the pony on a lead, he let the boy ride beside him as he made his rounds. “I became familiar with every sort of animal on the farm,” Harry wrote long afterward, “and watched the wheat harvest, the threshing and the corn shucking, mowing and stacking hay, and every evening at suppertime heard my father tell a dozen farmhands what to do….”

It was a time of self-contained security and plenty, such as the Trumans were not to know again.

Most marvelous in memory for Harry was the abundance of food—dried apples, peaches, candy and nuts of all kinds, “wonderful cookies,” pies, corn pudding, roasting ears in summer. “There were peach butter, apple butter, grape butter, jellies and preserves,” he would write, all produced in a big crowded kitchen by Grandma Young and a German hired girl. Following the late autumn freeze and hog-killing time came homemade sausages, souse, pickled pigs’ feet, and lard rendered in a tremendous iron kettle said to have been too heavy for Old Jim Lane to carry away.

From his Aunt Ada, the boy learned to play euchre. Uncle Harry told amusing stories and taught him a card game called cooncan, a form of gin rummy then more popular than poker. Though Uncle Harry, the bachelor uncle, had forsaken farming for the “bedazzlements” of Kansas City, he returned often, bringing candy and toys. Like Grandpa Young, he was a big man, over six feet tall, “strong as a wrestler,” good-humored, handsome, and like Grandpa Young, he made Harry feel he was somebody particular, because he was named for him. “When he came it was just like Christmas.”

The child liked everybody, to judge by his later recollections. Cousin Sol Chiles, then in his teens and often surly and difficult, would be remembered as somebody who “really made life pleasant.” Sol’s mother, Aunt Sallie, was a “lovely person.” Aunt Laura, another frequent visitor from Kansas City, was “somebody we always enjoyed.”

Yet life had its troubles and woes. On the summer day when his Grandfather Truman died, three-year-old Harry had rushed to the bed to pull at the old man’s beard, trying desperately to wake him. Climbing on a chair sometime afterward, in an attempt to comb his hair in front of a mirror, he toppled over backward and broke his collarbone. Another time he would have choked to death on a peach stone had his mother not responded in a flash and decisively, pushing the stone down his throat with her finger, instead of trying to pull it out. Later, when Grandpa Young lay sick in bed and the little boy approached cautiously to inquire how he was feeling, the old pioneer, fixing him with a wintry stare, said, “How are you feeling? You’re the one I’m worried about.”

It was Mamma, Harry decided, who understood him best. She was brighter than anyone, he thought, and cared most about his well-being. Holding him in her lap while explaining the large print in the family Bible, she taught him to read before he was five. Then the summer of 1889, following his fifth birthday, Mamma surprised him with a baby sister, of whom nothing had been said in advance. From the sound of crying upstairs he and Vivian thought a new pet had arrived. The baby was named Mary Jane, after John Truman’s mother, the grandmother they had never known, and to Harry she was a miracle. He adored her.

It was Mamma also, a year later, who hustled him off to Kansas City for expensive eyeglasses. Though he had been badly handicapped by poor eyesight all along—“blind as a mole,” in his words—no one seems to have noticed until the night of a July Fourth fireworks when Matt saw him responding more to the sound of the skyrockets than to the spectacle overhead. The Kansas City optometrist diagnosed a rare malformation called “flat eyeballs” (hypermetropia, which means the boy was farsighted) and Matt agreed to a pair of double-strength, wire-rimmed spectacles at a cost of $10.

All at once the world was transformed for him, as if by magic. And as quickly he became a curiosity, small boys with eyeglasses being almost unknown in rural Missouri.

Her heart went out to him, Matt later said, but she was determined not to pamper. While Grandma Young gave every youngster free rein, Mamma taught that punishment followed transgression. She had a switch and she would use it. When Harry led Vivian and another child on an expedition to a water hole in the south pasture, to spend a glorious afternoon plastering each other with mud, she punished Harry severely, and Harry alone, for being the ringleader.

But more painful by far were Papa’s occasional outbursts, for though John Truman never spanked, never laid a hand in anger on any of his children, which seems remarkable for a man of such known temper, his scoldings were enough to “burn the hide off.” One incident was never forgotten. His father had been leading him on the pony when Harry fell off, only to be told that any boy who could not stay on a pony at a walk must walk himself. Harry cried all the way back to the house, where Mamma let it be known she thought he had been unjustly treated.

Still more change followed in the summer of 1890, the summer of the eyeglasses, when Mamma announced they were leaving the farm, moving to Independence, so that Harry could receive proper schooling. With money inherited from his father, John Truman acquired a house and several lots on South Crysler Avenue, close to the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks. At age forty, having attained nothing like the success forecast in the Jackson County History, John had decided to try again as a stock trader. He paid $1,000 down for house and land, and took out a mortgage for $3,000, certain he had driven a good bargain with the owner, Samuel Blitz, one of the few Jews in town.

For Harry, whose world, through the new eyeglasses, had only just come into focus, the next few years were to be a time of great adjustment.

In 1892, Solomon Young died at age seventy-seven. Less than a year later, a black servant girl trying to light a coal-oil lamp accidentally ignited a fire that burned the Young house to the ground. Practically nothing was saved, and though a small house, intended as a temporary replacement, was put up on the same spot for Grandma Young, and Uncle Harrison returned to help manage things, the old way of life at the homeplace was over. The one personal possession of Grandpa Young’s to survive the disaster was the brass telescope from his days on the plains, which he had given to Matt sometime before.

Nine-year-old Harry’s feelings at the time of his Grandfather Young’s death went unrecorded. But in later years he would talk often of the “big man” in his background who had made his own way in the world, on nerve and will, who had seen the Great West when it was still wild, who played a part in history, and who—of course—came home always to Missouri. With such a grandfather a boy could hardly imagine himself a nobody.

He appears to have liked school from the start. He liked his first-grade teacher, Miss Mira Ewin. He liked his second-grade teacher, Miss Minnie Ward. He liked all his teachers, by his later account—“I do not remember a bad teacher in all my experience,” he would reflect—and learned quickly how to make them like him. In this he felt he had quite a knack. He made a study of people, he remembered. “When I was growing up it occurred to me to watch the people around me to find out what they thought and what pleased them most…. I used to watch my father and mother closely to learn what I could do to please them, just as I did with my schoolteachers and playmates.” It was thus, by getting along with people, he discovered, that he could nearly always get what he wanted.

By all surviving evidence he was an exceptionally alert, good little boy of sunny disposition who, with the glasses that so greatly magnified his blue eyes, looked as bright and interested as could be. Mira Ewin, the first-grade teacher, remembered never having to reprimand him. “He just smiled his way along,” she said. A report card for second grade shows him consistently in the 90’s in spelling, reading, and deportment. His lowest grade for the first marking period was an 86 in writing—naturally left-handed, he was being taught to use his right hand—but by the third marking period he had brought that up to a 90, while for both language and arithmetic he received a perfect 100 percent.

The fourth marking period is missing because in midwinter, early in 1894, both he and Vivian came down with diphtheria, and though Vivian recovered quickly, Harry took a dramatic turn for the worse. He became paralyzed in his legs and arms and could only lie helplessly. For months Matt wheeled him about in a baby carriage, until abruptly, miraculously he recovered, and from that point on was seldom sick again.

When it was suggested to Vivian years later that his mother had to have been terribly frightened by the crisis, he said she “didn’t scare easy.”

Tutored through the summer, Harry made such progress that he was allowed to skip third grade and go directly into fourth. By now also he was reading “everything I could get my hands on—histories and encyclopedias and everything else.” For his tenth birthday, in the spring of 1894, his mother presented him with a set of large illustrated volumes grandly titled in gold leaf Great Men and Famous Women. He would later count the moment as one of life’s turning points.

There were four volumes: Soldiers and Sailors, Statesmen and Sages, Workmen and Heroes, and Artists and Authors. They were not books for children, but anthologies of essays from Harper’s and other leading American and English magazines. The subjects, numbering in the hundreds, ranged from Moses to Grover Cleveland. The authors included Edward Everett Hale on Goethe, Lord Macaulay on Samuel Johnson, H. Rider Haggard on Cortéz, and young Theodore Roosevelt on Winfield Scott. Harry would eventually plow his way through all of them, Soldiers and Sailors appealing especially. He dreamed of becoming a great general. He loved best the story of Hannibal, who had only one eye. “There is not in all history [he read] so wonderful an example of what a single man of genius may achieve against tremendous odds….” Of the American heroes, his favorites, not surprisingly, were Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee, who was his mother’s idol. It was to be worthy of her, he would one day confide to a friend, that he studied the careers of “great men.”

Included in the Lee biography was a letter from Lee to his son written in 1860. Though she could never have found the words, it was what Matt herself might have written to the boy as the new century approached:

You must be frank with the world; frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right…. Never do anything wrong to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so, is dearly purchased at a sacrifice. Deal kindly, but firmly with all your classmates; you will find it the policy which wears best. Above all do not appear to others what you are not.

Matt and John Truman both wanted books in the house. John kept loose change in a tray from an old steamer trunk, to save for a set of Shakespeare. Harry would never recall being bored, “not once,” he said, because “we had a houseful of books.” He read the Bible (twice through by the time he was twelve, he later claimed), “pored over” Plutarch’s Lives, a gift from his father, and in time to come, read all of the new set of Shakespeare. The reading was not something you talked about outside the house, he explained. “It was just something you did.”

Home now was a white clapboard, carpenter’s-planbook house not unlike a number of others in Independence, except for a cupola with a gilded rooster weathervane. Sloping away at the back was an unusually deep lot of several acres, where John Truman, an avid gardener, grew strawberries and vegetables, and kept cows, horses, and whatever livestock he happened to be trading at the moment, which could be a surprising number. For a time there were no fewer than five hundred goats quartered on the property. Trying to sink a well, he hit natural gas, with which he heated both his house and that of a neighbor. It was a rare piece of good luck for John Truman.

Beyond the back fence, about 150 yards or so distant, was the Missouri Pacific depot, while on the north side of the house the main tracks ran so close the trains would rattle the kitchen dishes. The soot and noise were something for Matt to contend with, not to say the smell of five hundred goats.

Harry was fascinated by trains, and daily a total of twenty-three went by. He would sit alone on the roof of the coal shed behind the house counting freight cars, or, on winter nights, awake in his bed, listen for the eastbound Kansas-Nebraska Limited, which made no stop at Independence and began shrieking its warning whistle miles beyond town.

“Harry, do you remember how much you loved the trains?” his cousin Ethel Noland would ask years afterward.

“I still do,” he said.

First and second grade were at the Noland School on South Liberty Street, which was a long walk, but when the new eight-room Columbian School opened on South River Boulevard, he had only to go three blocks. He kept to himself more than most boys his age and in later years he would speak feelingly of the isolation of childhood. “It’s a very lonely thing being a child.” He seldom played games. He was afraid of the rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard and because of his glasses, felt incapable of any sport that involved a moving ball. He much preferred being at home.

To help with the cooking and washing, the family now employed a woman named Caroline Simpson, who was “black as your hat,” and who, with her husband, “Letch,” and four children, lived with the Trumans. Caroline Simpson taught Harry to cook on the big wood stove and talked to him by the hour. He liked the warmth and chatter of the kitchen, liked to look after his little sister. He would sit with her in a rocking chair for hours at a time, braiding her hair or singing her to sleep. No one was ever so nice to her as her brother Harry, Mary Jane would say in later years. Outside in the yard he never took his eyes off her, afraid she might hurt herself, as he once had. The cellar door had slammed on his foot and cut off the end of his big toe. Mamma had rushed to the rescue, found the severed piece, and held it in place until the doctor arrived to secure it with a coating of crystalline iodoform and a bandage.

For a small boy he was also abnormally neat and clean. John Truman was the kind of father who wanted everything looking just so—grass clipped around fence posts, horses “slicked up,” and his children turned out in like fashion. But in a photograph of Harry made in Kansas City when he was thirteen and about to enter high school, he looks not just spotless, every detail in order, but like a boy who will stay that way.

He was never popular like other boys, never one of the fighters as he called them. Reminiscing long afterward, he spoke of the teasing he endured because of his glasses. “To tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy,” he would say, using the hated word. He ran from fights, he admitted. Yet his brother Vivian had no memory of Harry being teased about his glasses, and to judge by the recollections of several boyhood friends he wasn’t considered a sissy exactly, only different, “serious,” as one recalled:

They wanted to call him a sissy, but they just didn’t do it because they had a lot of respect for him. I remember one time we were playing…Jesse James or robbers and we were the Dalton brothers out in Kansas…and we were arguing about them…we got the history mixed up…but Harry came in and straightened it out, just who were the Dalton brothers and how many got killed. Things like that the boys had a lot of respect for. They didn’t call him sissy.

With girls of his own age he was so shy he could barely speak. His initial brush with other children in Independence was at Sunday School when the family first moved to town. Matt had sent him to the big, new red-brick First Presbyterian Church on Lexington Street, rather than to one of the Baptist churches, because the Presbyterian minister had been especially welcoming to her. At the Presbyterian Sunday School Harry met a blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl named Elizabeth Wallace and decided she was the most entrancing creature he had ever seen. But it was five years before he dared say a word to her. The only girls with whom he felt at ease were his cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland, the daughters of his father’s sister Ella and her husband, Joseph Noland.

His days passed largely in the company of women—Mamma, Caroline Simpson, his teachers, or Grandma Young, who came often to visit. He was surrounded by “women folk” and he got along with them splendidly, kidding and telling stories. His mother liked to say he was “intended for a girl” anyway, an observation he seems to have taken always in good spirit.

II

John Truman was getting on in the world. There was money now for servants, books, for studio photographs. As a surprise for the children he bought a pair of matched red goats, with custom-made harness, and a miniature farm wagon. The little rig became the talk of the neighborhood.

John was an early riser, an all-day striver, and thought to be “pretty ingenious” besides—because of his backyard gas well and various inventive ideas. He patented a staple puller for use on barbed-wire fences. For an automatic railroad switch that he devised, the Missouri Pacific reportedly offered an annual royalty of $2,000. When the Chicago & Alton topped that with an offer of $2,500, four times what most American families had to live on in a year, John asked for double the amount, with the result that both railroads turned him down and adopted another version of the same thing—pirated his idea apparently—and he wound up with nothing. It was a story told usually to show just how stubborn John Truman could be.

As a livestock trader, he stood well in the community. He had “a good eye.” He could determine the age of mules or horses at a glance, seldom needing to examine their teeth, and though a quiet man, he had perfected a nice “line of trade talk.” More important, John Truman’s word was good. “A mighty good trader, John Truman,” recalled a neighbor, “…very stubborn, but on the square.”

Because of Harry’s obvious affection for his mother, his eagerness to please her, and the enjoyment he took from her company as time went on, much would be said later of her influence, the extent to which he was “his mother’s son.” But as time would also tell, he and his father had much in common, more indeed than either of them realized through much of Harry’s boyhood, and the influence of the father on the son would never be discounted by those who knew John Truman, or by anyone in the family, including Harry himself.

Small and compact, like a jockey, John had a weathered, sunburned face and crow’s-feet that gave a hint of a smile around the eyes. The grin, when it came, was the kind people warmed to and remembered, as they remembered the temper. Touchy about his size, his honor, he would explode at the least affront, “fight like a buzz saw,” as Harry would say. Once, at the courthouse, when a lawyer accused him of lying, John took after the man with his fists, chasing him out the door and into the street. On election day John Truman was nearly always in a fight. One boyhood friend of Harry’s, Mize Peters, who was also the son of a horse trader, remembered a man coming into his father’s place, his head covered with blood, saying he had had an argument with John Truman, who hit him with a whip.

To the town, such ferocity seemed a remarkable thing in someone so unprepossessing physically and so good-natured ordinarily. “A fiery fellow,” it would be said. “But a man of John Truman’s integrity and industry…you excuse a whole lot of things.”

Like many men of the time, John had a strong, sentimental veneration of women. “No one could make remarks about my aunts or my mother in my father’s presence without getting into serious trouble,” Harry recalled. Of the three children, Mary Jane was John’s favorite. Papa, it seems, was as partial to Mary Jane as Mamma was to Harry. That Harry spent so much time watching over Mary Jane was in part because he knew how much it would please Papa.

Unlike his own father, John was considered a “liberal” in religion. He professed great faith in God, but faith also in what could be accomplished through courage and determination. “He had no use for a coward,” according to a niece named Grace Summer. “He raised his children to have faith in themselves and their potentialities….”

Assisted by the black hired man, Letch Simpson, John did a little farming still on rented land south of town, and occasionally he dabbled in real estate. Possibly, too, by this time he had begun speculating in grain futures in Kansas City. He was looking always for the main chance, wanting desperately to get rich. Meanwhile, as Harry said, he would trade nearly anything he owned.

In 1895, when the boy was eleven, John traded their house for another several blocks to the north, receiving some $5,400 in the bargain. Though the new house had less property than the one on Crysler Avenue, it stood on a corner lot at Waldo Street and River Boulevard, a more fashionable neighborhood and within easy walking distance of the courthouse square. Crysler Avenue had never been the wrong side of the tracks, but for an ambitious man, 909 Waldo was unquestionably progress in the right direction.

A down payment was made on a new piano for Matt, who would be remembered playing for her own “amusement and amazement.” When Harry showed signs of interest, she first tried teaching him herself, then arranged for regular lessons with a young woman next door, Florence Burrus.

A piano in the parlor had become part of the good life in America, a sign of prosperity and wholesome home entertainment, and the Trumans had an upright Kimball, the most popular piano of the day, priced at about $200. (“Music for the multitudes” was the Kimball company’s slogan.) Customarily, piano lessons were for the young women of a household, but Harry took to it wholeheartedly, pleased by his progress and by the approval of both parents.

For Harry, no less than for his father, life was picking up. The new neighborhood was filled with children of his own age. He was making friends as never before. The Waldo Street years would be remembered, like those on the farm, as nothing but “wonderful times.”

He had a “gang” now. “Our house became headquarters for all the boys and girls around…. There was a wonderful barn with stalls for horses and cows, a corn crib and a hayloft in which all the kids met and cooked up plans for all sorts of adventures….” Mamma remained “very patient,” whatever went on.

As he started high school, the friendships meant even more. Paul Bryant lived on the other side of Waldo at little Woodland College for Women, where his father was president. Across the back alley was Fielding Houchens, the Baptist minister’s son. Elmer Twyman was the son of the Truman family doctor who had seen Harry through the siege of diphtheria and restored the severed tip of his toe. There was Tasker Taylor, who could draw better than anyone, and tall, shy Charlie Ross, who never missed a day of school and who, like Harry, read everything in sight.

Yet, as much as he liked them all, Harry had no best pal among the boys. His only close friends remained his girl cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland, who were as good-natured and well read as he, interested in everything, not at all vain (or pretty), and, importantly, devoted to him. Harry once calculated that he had a grand total of thirty-nine cousins, but Ethel and Nellie were the favorites and they would remain so all of his life. Ethel in particular would understand him as almost no one else ever did.

Just six months older than Harry, Ethel was a year ahead in school. Nellie, who was four years older, was very like a big sister to him. As a threesome they spent hours together after school and in the evenings, usually at the Noland house on Maple Avenue. In summer the girls were regular visitors at the farm on Blue Ridge. Harry was always considerate, always companionable, Ethel remembered. “Harry was always fun.” They read Shakespeare aloud, taking parts. After doing Hamlet, Ethel began calling him Horatio, brave Horatio, the staunch friend.

The Noland sisters knew, too, how much he still secretly cared for Elizabeth Wallace, who had been in his class from the time he switched to the Columbian School in fourth grade, and who, year after year, because of the alphabetical seating arrangement, occupied the desk immediately behind him.

Bessie, as everyone called her, lived on North Delaware Street, two and a half blocks from the Trumans, in a tall frame house, number 608, with a bur oak shading the front lawn. “If I succeeded in carrying her books to school and back home for her I had a big day,” he would later say, appraising how far he had advanced in overcoming his shyness.

She was his “ideal.” She was popular. She stood out in class, always dressed in the latest thing. A natural all-round athlete, she played baseball as well as a boy (as third baseman she had no trouble with the long throw to first). She could run faster than her brothers and beat them in tennis. She was better at tennis than almost anyone her age, as Harry knew from watching her on the courts at Woodland College. In winter he would stand and watch her race off on skates across the college pond. She could skate, she could dance, she could do so much that he could not, that he had never learned. She could even whistle through her teeth, as almost no girl ever could.

Her street, North Delaware, with its ample houses and sidewalks of hexagonal flagstone, was considered the finest street in Independence, the houses lending an air of dignity to the whole neighborhood west of the Square. The tall gray residence of her wealthy grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, up the street on North Delaware, was one of the show-places of town. Grandmother Gates was English. At Christmas, Bessie gave gifts to her friends wrapped in fancy paper and wore silk dresses to formal parties and dances of the kind to which Harry was never invited.

Besides, Bessie was a Presbyterian, which socially put her at “the top of the pole.” (Since the war, the Baptists had slipped to perhaps third or fourth place, below the Campbellites and the Northern Methodists and Southern Methodists, but were still ahead of the Lutherans, the Catholics, and the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, those Mormons who had come back from Utah.) Asked long afterward whether she remembered Harry Truman hanging about the Wallace house in the years they were all growing up, Bessie’s close friend and next-door neighbor, Mary Paxton, responded emphatically, “No! No! Harry was a Baptist.”

III

It was, as people said, the kind of town where everybody knew everybody and everybody’s business. The population was six thousand and growing, but only slowly. Compared to Kansas City it was a sleepy backwater, churchgoing, conservative, rooted to the past, exactly as most residents preferred. Kansas City was a brassy Yankee town, “money-wise” and full of “new people.” Independence was southern in both spirit and pace—really more southern than midwestern—and very set in its ways.

There had been considerable building since the war. The coming of the railroads, the pellmell growth of Kansas City, the rise of several new local enterprises had had an effect. North Delaware Street, which ran north-south, four blocks west of the Square, was a perfect example of the changed look. The large Bullene house, the Sawyer house with its Tiffany glass windows, the big Gates place were all new since the war, like the money that built them. The Bullenes belonged to the family that founded Kansas City’s most popular dry goods firm, Emery, Bird, Thayer. Aaron Sawyer was head of the Bank of Independence, which had been organized since the war. George Porterfield Gates was partner in the Waggoner-Gates Milling Company of Independence, founded in 1866, which hit a bonanza with “Queen of the Pantry Flour,” a product known throughout the Midwest.

Gates himself was part of a postwar Yankee influx. He had come from Vermont by way of Illinois, joined William Waggoner in the milling business in 1883, and two years later greatly remodeled and expanded his relatively modest house at the corner of North Delaware and Blue Avenue, spending in all, according to the Independence Sentinel, a fabulous $8,000. Painted gray with black trim at the windows, the finished clapboard “mansion” had fourteen rooms, verandas front and rear, fancy fretwork, tinted (“flashed”) glass in the front bay windows, slate roof, gas illumination, and hot and cold running water.

Gates’s partner, William Waggoner, lived in even grander style, across from the mill on Pacific Street, in the house George Caleb Bingham once occupied, but that Waggoner had done over sparing no expense. It sat on a knoll, in a leafy, parklike setting of 20 acres.

The Swope place on South Pleasant Street had a ballroom on the top floor. (The Swope fortune came from land in Kansas City.) The Vaile house on North Liberty, the showiest house in Independence, was a towering stone-trimmed, red-brick Victorian wedding cake, with thirty-one rooms and Carrara marble fireplaces. The Vaile stable had mahogany-paneled stalls. There was a greenhouse and four full-time gardeners. If Harvey Vaile, who made his money in “pure water” and contract mail delivery, was not the richest man in town, he certainly lived as though he were.

Overall it was quite a handsome community. The primary streets were paved, clean, and shaded by large old elms and cottonwoods. People took pride in their gardens. On summer evenings, after dark, families sat visiting on front porches, their voices part of the night for anybody crossing the lawns between houses.

National holidays and politics provided what little excitement occurred from one year to another. Most memorable for young Harry Truman was the day of Grover Cleveland’s second victory, in 1892, when the family was still in the house on Crysler Avenue. John Truman had scrambled to the top of the roof to tie a flag to the gilded weathervane, and that night, looking extremely proud, he rode a gray horse in a torchlight parade. Bessie Wallace’s friend Mary Paxton, a latter-day chronicler of town life, remembered how the men with their blazing torches came swinging down North Delaware leaving a trail of light under the dark trees. She, Harry, all their generation would remember it as a night-of-nights, since twenty years went by before Democrats, with the election of Wilson, could celebrate another presidential victory.

In lots of ways it was a country town still. Roosters crowed at dawn. Dinner remained a midday meal in many households. The standard Sunday dinner after church was fried chicken, buttered peas, mashed potatoes, cream gravy, and beaten biscuits, which, being made of Queen of the Pantry Flour, a “soft wheat” flour, were understood to be the world’s best. Mud-spattered buggies and farm wagons clogged the Square on Saturday nights when the farmers came to town for haircuts and supplies. Town boys grew up with farmer’s chores as part of the daily routine. Harry and Vivian had cows to milk, horses to curry, water, and feed, wood to split for the kitchen stove.

On clear winter nights, with the trees bare and the soft glow of gas and oil lamps still the only light in the windows of town, stars in the black sky overhead blazed with a clarity that residents of a later, “electrified” era would never experience.

Local boosters insisted on calling it a city and bragged about the new electric plant under construction at a cost of $30,000, or the new high school, which had cost still more. Local merchants were described as unexcelled “in regard to integrity, uprightness and faithfulness in business affairs and cordiality and good nature in social life.”

Yet for all this there was an air of great understated gentility, even sophistication. There were those in town, among the old moneyed families, who talked of travels in Europe, or summers in Colorado Springs. “Study groups” met to discuss literature and poetry, and with a degree of appreciation and vitality that could take visitors by surprise.

The teaching in the schools Harry attended was superb. In addition to Woodland College for Women, there was Presbyterian College, also for women, and St. Mary’s Academy for girls. These, to be sure, were only tiny, struggling institutions—the usual graduating class at Woodland numbered just a dozen or so—but they were well regarded and cause for much local pride. Independence, remembered Ethel Noland years later, “stood for culture,” a claim easy for outsiders to scoff at, she knew, but that she and others like her took very much to heart.

“There was conversation,” she said. “I mean by that talk about what was going on in the world, talk about ideas.”

The town supported two bookstores and most of the leading families took the Kansas City papers, in addition to the Sentinel or the Jackson Examiner. Kansas City, furthermore, was only a ten-mile ride by trolley or on the new train known as the Airline. So there was little sense of being cut off from the wide world, if the wide world was what you wished.

And with so much history attached to the town, no one with a feeling for the past could find it uninteresting. “No town in the west is richer in historical interest than the beautiful city of Independence,” declared a new guide to Independence. At the point south of town where the wagon trains had crossed Blue River, crevices worn by their wheels were still plainly evident. George Caleb Bingham had painted his Order No. 11 in one of the old outbuildings at the Waggoner estate. The brick walls of the Chrisman-Sawyer Bank, on the northwest corner of the courthouse square, showed the scars still of Civil War battles, and on pleasant mornings in the years of Harry Truman’s boyhood, old Marshal Peacock could often be seen walking stiffly about town, a spare, erect figure with a white beard and cane, who, as everyone knew, still carried the bullet fired by Jim Crow Chiles lodged in his spine.

George Porterfield Gates, Bessie Wallace’s grandfather, liked to frighten and delight Bessie and her friends with his tale of a late-night drive home in a buggy from a long-ago country wedding. A mysterious rider had appeared out of the dark, put a gun to Gates’s neck, and held it there all the way into town. It was Jim Crow Chiles, who, Gates was sure, had only murder in his heart. But, as they turned down North Delaware Street, Jim Crow “laughed his fiendish laugh” and vanished in the night, as suddenly as he had appeared.

The atmosphere remained pervadingly southern—antebellum Old South, unreconstructed. Handkerchiefs were waved whenever the band played “Dixie.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy thrived, and such formal parties as attended by genteel young folk like Bessie Wallace and her friends were hardly different from those put on in Macon or Tuscaloosa, from the floral decorations entwining stair rails to the refreshments of chicken salad and charlotte russe. The biggest memorial in Woodland Cemetery was the Confederate monument. Portraits of Lee and Jackson were displayed prominently in many front parlors, and in summer Quantrill’s “boys”—grizzled, tobacco-chewing, Border War veterans dressed as if for church—gathered for daylong outdoor reunions, a portrait of Quantrill draped in crepe as their centerpiece. Often Jesse James’s brother Frank appeared for such occasions, causing great excitement.

At school, one of Harry’s favorite teachers, Ardelia Hardin, who taught Latin, would describe for the class how her father had been hit three times during Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and left for dead until discovered by Catholic sisters and taken to a Baltimore hospital, where, once recovered, he refused to swear allegiance to the United States and for this was imprisoned for the remainder of the war. “Harry always wanted to know about that,” Miss Hardin would remember half a century later, very pleased.

Virtually the entire town was American-born, though nearly every black resident past the age of forty had been born in slavery. Immigrant Irish, Italians, Croatians, and other foreign, impoverished people of the kind crowding into the vile West Bottoms of Kansas City were rarely ever seen in Independence.

Black residents lived in what was called “Nigger Neck,” a cluster of makeshift houses and shacks in a persimmon grove northwest of the Square. Blacks were unwelcome at most stores and were denied use of the town library. Black children went to a separate school—the Young School, named for the free-black wagonmaker of pioneer days, Hiram Young—and while white families like the Trumans might feel great, lifelong affection for their own black servants, words like “nigger” and “coon” were used as a matter of course in so-called “polite society.” And below the surface always lay a threat of violence, should any blacks forget their “place.” News of lynchings in the South were given lurid play by both local papers, invariably in the spirit that the victim only got what he had coming to him. The summer of 1901, the year Harry finished high school, the Jackson Examiner declared on its editorial page:

The community at large need not be especially surprised if there is a Negro lynching in Independence. The conditions are favorable at this time. There are a lot of worthless young Negro men in town who do nothing. They do not pretend to work and stand around on the streets and swear and make remarks about ladies and others who may pass by. They crowd into the electric cars and become offensive….

There were also in town, the editors were careful to add, many law-abiding Negroes “who are good citizens and who understand the truth of what we say as well as anyone.”

Certain precepts and bywords were articles of faith in such a place, in such times, and nearly everybody growing up there was imbued with them, in principle at least:

Honesty was the best policy. It saved time and worry, because if you always told the truth you never had to keep track of what you said.

Make yourself useful.

Anything worthwhile required effort.

If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. “Never, never give up,” Harry’s father would say.

Children were a reflection of their parents. “Now Harry, you be good,” his mother would tell him time after time as he went out the door.

He appears never to have questioned such dictates, any more than he questioned the established inequality of black people. “In those days,” he would remember, “right was right and wrong was wrong, and you didn’t have to talk about it.”

Many of the most familiar guidelines came directly from the Bible: “Honor thy father and mother.” “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.” “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.” “Be of good cheer.”

From Sunday School and his own reading of the Bible, Harry knew many passages by heart—particularly Matthew 5, 6, and 7, the Sermon on the Mount. “Ye are the salt of the earth…. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works….”

He memorized a prayer, one he would say through much of his life:

Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, Earth and the Universe:

Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with my fellowmen—help me to understand their motives and their shortcomings—even as Thou understandest mine!

Amen, Amen, Amen.

Say what you mean, mean what you say, he was taught at home. Keep your word. Never get too big for your britches. Never forget a friend.

They were more than words-to-the-wise, they were bedrock, as clearly established, as integral to the way of life, it seemed, as were the very landmarks of the community, its schools, church steeples, and courthouse. Not everyone lived up to them, of course, but to Harry it seemed everyone ought to try.

The Square was the center of the world if the town was the limit of your experience and at age fourteen, while still in high school, Harry went to work on the Square at J. H. Clinton’s drugstore. It was his first paying job.

Clinton’s drugstore stood at the northeast corner of the Square. Proprietor Clinton lived upstairs. Harry’s job was to come in each weekday morning at 6:30 to open up the place, sweep the sidewalk, mop the floor, wipe the counters, and do as much overall dusting and cleaning as possible before seven o’clock when Mr. Clinton came down and it was time for Harry to leave for school. More than half a century later, he could remember it all in detail:

There must have been a thousand bottles to dust and yards and yards of patent-medicine cases and shelves to clean. At least it seemed that way, because I never finished the bottles and shelves by schooltime and had to start the next morning where I’d left off the day before. By the time I got around them all, it was time to start over.

Two large glass vases in the front windows had to be cleaned and dusted, as well as a surrounding display of patent medicines. The windows were to be washed once a week, the prescription cases dusted “very, very carefully.” Saturdays and Sundays the boy worked from four in the afternoon until ten at night by the courthouse clock, when Mr. Clinton would lock up and Harry would head off in the dark, the lights in other shop windows along the Square going out one by one. Hurrying, he could make it home in twelve minutes.

J. H. Clinton advertised “Cigars, Smokers Supplies & Tobaccos, Perfumes, Toilet Articles, Soaps & Stationery, Prescriptions Carefully Compounded Day or Night.” But the store accommodated the town in yet another way, as Harry soon discovered, and it was this apparently that awakened him for the first time to the hypocrisies of certain prominent citizens known for their moral rectitude, the “high hats,” as he called them.

In a little closet under the prescription case, which faced the front and shut off the view of the back end of the store, was an assortment of whiskey bottles. Early in the morning, sometimes before Mr. Clinton arrived, the good church members and Anti-Saloon Leaguers would come in for their early morning drink behind the prescription case at ten cents an ounce. They would wipe their mouths, peep through the observation hole in front of the case, and depart. This procedure gave a fourteen-year-old boy quite a viewpoint on the public front of leading citizens and “amen-corner-praying” churchmen.

He would set the bottle on the counter and wait. “They’d put their dimes on the counter, and I’d leave all those dimes there until Mr. Clinton came in, and he’d put them in the cash register.” It was because these customers were such “counterfeits” that he hated having any part in the transaction. Far better, he thought, were the “tough old birds” around town who bought a proper drink in a real saloon whenever they wished, regardless of appearances.

The drugstore was one of several shops and stores fashioned out of what had once been the old Noland House, the frontier hotel and saloon where the body of Harry’s infamous uncle, Jim Crow Chiles, had been laid out after the shooting, a point of history Harry surely knew all about but never spoke of. The store was at the corner of Maple and Main, which with Lexington and Liberty, framed the Square. A jewelry store, a bookshop, two groceries, the Hotel Metropolitan, H. W. Rummel’s harness and saddle shop, a dry goods store, and the Courthouse Exchange Saloon were in the same block on Maple. Elsewhere around the Square, all facing the courthouse, were three more drugstores, two more saloons, A. J. Bundschu’s Department Store (“Once a patron, always a patron”), two barbershops, a tobacco shop, a shoe store, a theater, an opera house, a hardware store, a bakery, and an ice cream parlor. Three banks—the First National, the Bank of Independence, and the old, brick Chrisman-Sawyer—stood prominently at three different corners, while upstairs over several of the stores were various law and dental offices and Miss Dunlap’s dancing classes. A lumberyard, the Western Union offices, a barbershop for blacks, two livery stables, a feed store, the post office, the town jail, and the Airline railroad station were just off the Square, which meant that most of life’s necessities were all extremely handy, including the Ott-Mitchell Undertaking Parlor, which stood catty-cornered to J. H. Clinton’s drugstore.

But for size and impressiveness, nothing approached the courthouse, rising from its shaded lawn at the center of the Square. The simple, dignified little building of old with its fanlight over the door had long since disappeared, swallowed up by a great red-brick renovation in the high-Victorian mode with a mansard-roofed clocktower five stories tall. The courthouse was the focal point of Independence—the clocktower could be seen for miles jutting above the trees—and the courthouse, of course, was Democratic, for though Republicans were not unknown in Independence, the town remained solidly Democratic. People were born and raised Democrats as they were born and raised Baptists or Catholics. It was not something you questioned. As one said, “You were a Democrat come hell or high water. Or you were a Republican.”

In the warm months, on wooden benches in the dappled light of the courthouse lawn, the town loafers and “philosophers” congregated. Courthouse politicians, tradesmen, out-of-town salesmen, store clerks and bank presidents, mothers in long skirts shopping with their daughters—a good part of the town—passed up and down the sidewalks, stopping frequently to “visit.” The dark green Kansas City streetcar arrived and departed, making its cautious turn at Liberty and Lexington with bell clanging and a screech of wheels. In full summer, farm wagons laden with fresh produce lined the curbstones. Some summers, to keep the dust down, the town water wagon had to circle the Square several times daily.

To go up to the Square each morning to a regular job was for a boy to be very like a man. It was to be known, to be spoken to, and spoken well of if one were a brisk, cheerful, dependable boy like Harry Truman—and however disillusioned he may have been by some of the clientele at the drugstore, he was clearly enjoying himself and probably would have stayed on had his father not intervened. His first week’s wages of three silver dollars were, in memory, “the biggest thing that ever happened to me.” He bought a present for his mother and tried to give what money was left to his father, who said kindly that he should keep it for himself.

After three months, John Truman told the boy he had done enough. Better that he concentrate on his studies.

IV

He grew dutifully, conspicuously studious, spending long afternoons in the town library, watched over by a white plaster bust of Ben Franklin. Housed in two rooms adjacent to the high school, the library contained perhaps two thousand volumes. Harry and Charlie Ross vowed to read all of them, encyclopedias included, and both later claimed to have succeeded. Harry liked Mark Twain and Franklin’s Autobiography. He read Sir Walter Scott because Scott was Bessie Wallace’s favorite author. The fact that the town librarian, Carrie Wallace, was a cousin to Bessie may also have influenced the boy’s show of scholarly dedication.

“I don’t know anybody in the world that ever read as much or as constantly as he did,” remembered Ethel Noland. “He was what you call a ‘book worm.’ ”

History became a passion, as he worked his way through a shelf of standard works on ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. “He had a real feeling for history,” Ethel said, “that it wasn’t something in a book, that it was part of life—a section of life or a former time, that it was of interest because it had to do with people.” He himself later said it was “true facts” that he wanted. “Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure. It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt that I wanted and needed.” He decided, he said, that men make history, otherwise there would be no history. History did not make the man, he was quite certain.

His list of heroes advanced. To Andrew Jackson, Hannibal, and Robert E. Lee were added Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cyrus the Great, and Gustavus Adolphus, the seventeenth-century Swedish king. No Jeffersons or Lincolns or Leonardos were part of his pantheon as yet. Whatever it was that made other boys of turn-of-the-century America venerate Andrew Carnegie or Thomas Edison, he had none of it. The Great Men by his lights were still the great generals.

Few boys in town ever went to high school. The great majority went to work. High school, like piano lessons, was primarily for girls. In Harry’s class, largest yet at the new high school, there were thirty girls and just eleven boys.

Harry was good in Latin, “very good” in math, poor in spelling, and greatly influenced by his teachers who were all women except for “Professor” W. L. C. Palmer, the principal, who taught science, the one subject Harry didn’t care for. The women were spinsters, as required by the school system. (When his Latin teacher, Ardelia Hardin—she with the Pickett’s Charge grandfather—became the wife of Professor Palmer, she had to give up teaching.) Known by everybody, they comprised a kind of town institution unto themselves, as upholders of standards. They were “the salt of the earth,” Harry would say. “They gave us our high ideals, and they hardly ever received more than forty dollars a month.” They taught the old rooted values—loyalty, love of home, unquestioning patriotism—no less than Latin, history, or Shakespeare. She could never enter the classroom, said Miss Tillie Brown, without hearing the admonition to “put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the spot on which thou standest is holy ground.” And while some may have snickered at her manner, none doubted her sincerity.

The influence of his teachers on his life, Harry later said, was second only to that of his mother, and when crediting a Tillie Brown or a Margaret Phelps for all they had done for him, he did so with the assumption that everybody of his generation had a Tillie Brown or Margaret Phelps in their background and could therefore understand how he felt.

The panorama of history, as taught by Margaret Phelps, began with Adam and Eve. Tall, slender, her upswept hair always in place, she was an exacting person and somewhat frightening to most of her pupils until they got to know her. Harry liked her best of all his teachers and it was in history that he did best. There was no more important field of study, Margaret Phelps affirmed in a memorable statement of faith: “It cultivates every faculty of the mind, enlarges sympathies, liberalizes thought and feeling, furnishes and approves the highest standards of character.”

Tillie Brown, Matilda D. Brown, the English teacher, was hardly less impressive—“a genius at making us appreciate good literature”—and two of Harry’s composition books done under her guidance would survive, one from 1899, the other dated 1900-1901, his senior year. His focus was on people and moral ideals. He responded strongly to the stamp of patriotism on an author or a character. He abhorred sham. Courage counted above all, to judge by what he wrote. At times, when writing of the corrupting influences of money and of what he called “the passions,” the boy seemed wise beyond his years. How much of what he wrote was his own, how much the outlook of Tillie Brown is impossible to know, but as one who, by his own account, knew how to please a teacher, he may well have been giving her as much Brown as Truman in his value judgments.

Of James Fenimore Cooper he wrote in 1899:

The name Cooper suggests to me stories of Indians, the sea and the Revolution, in which we go through a great many adventures and narrow escapes. It also makes me think of a man who upheld his country and who would not step out of his way because it was hard or because he had to meet a quarrel. He was a man who would not let another “run over him.” He would support an argument to the last.

“Cooper’s books,” he also observed, “are interesting and famous but his sentences are too long.”

Under the heading “Courage,” he wrote in a strong, clear, straightaway hand, “The virtue I call courage is not in always facing the foe but in taking care of those at home…. A true heart, a strong mind and a great deal of courage and I think a man will get through the world.” In an essay on The Merchant of Venice, in the composition book from senior year, writing on Antonio, he said that though ideal men were few, his ideal man “should in the first place be brave; then he should fear his God…he must not be cold, haughty, or hypocritical; but he must have a warm heart and love someone (a woman is preferable).”

Shylock interested him primarily because Shylock was a strong man. Shylock’s failing was that he let his passions rule him. “When a man loses control of his passions he is gone,” wrote sixteen-year-old Harry Truman. Further along, he had this to say about Bassanio:

This world is made up of all sorts of conditions of men, from the best one could wish to the basest one could imagine. There are men who love money who will do anything for money, who will sell their souls for money. Then there are men who love money for the good that is in it, who like to use it to make others happy. There are men who love everything worldly, love wine women and a good time; then there are those who are so religious they have no time to think of anyone or anything. These men are extremists who run the thing into the ground. I like a man who has enough worldly wisdom to take care of himself; but I like him to have time to love both his God and those around him.

But it was the boy’s “steadfastness” that most impressed his teachers, said Ardelia Hardin. When called on to speak in class, he would stand clear of his desk and square his shoulders before saying a word.

What his grades were remains unknown, since the school’s records were later destroyed in a fire.

Measured by the time and effort expended, the most important activity in his life was the piano. Having progressed beyond the abilities of Miss Burrus, who taught by a numbers system, he began going twice weekly to Kansas City for lessons with Mrs. E. C. White, a gifted teacher who had studied under Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, one of the leading American pianists of the era, and with Theodore Leschetizky, who had been a teacher of Paderewski. Harry grew extremely fond of Grace White. (He was fond of most older people, as his cousin Ethel observed. “He was brought up to be fond of them.”) She opened a new world for him and his response was to work with exceptional determination, practicing two hours a day without fail, beginning at five o’clock every morning. As a grown man he would often speak lightly of “tickling the ivories,” as if it were only something he had happened to pick up along the way. But the slender, straight-backed youth with the round eyeglasses who sat at the keyboard in the half-light of dawn every morning was in dead earnest. He thought he had the makings of a concert pianist. And apparently so did Mrs. White.

He was willing not only to do the work, but to face whatever ridicule might come. His friend Charlie Ross would remember Harry going up the street with a music roll under his arm hurrying to catch the trolley for Kansas City. “Mothers held him up as a model, so he took a lot of kidding. It required a lot of courage for a kid to take music lessons in a town like Independence.” Another friend, Henry Bundschu, said Harry was the sort of boy who “seemed to do whatever his mother told him.”

He also loved music; he genuinely adored the great classical works Mrs. White guided him through and insisted he learn. On a big Steinway in her old-fashioned house on Brooklyn Street in Kansas City she drilled him in Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words,” pieces by Weber and Grieg. He learned the new “Woodland Sketches” by the contemporary American composer Edward MacDowell. For the rest of his life he could play Paderewski’s Minuet in G and several Chopin waltzes by heart. He was moved by “sad music,” Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique and Chopin’s Funeral March. Von Weber, he thought, wrote “beautiful things”—the Rondo Brillante, the Polka Brillante. But he liked still more the Chopin waltzes and polonaises. Mozart he loved most of all and with Mrs. White’s help eventually mastered the Ninth Sonata.

He was playing serious music with utmost seriousness and going to concerts at every opportunity. Many of the concert greats of the day came to Kansas City. Twice when Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler performed, first at the Lyceum, later at Pepper Hall, Harry was in the audience. He heard her play Scarlatti’s Pastorale and Capriccio, and Beethoven’s Sonata, Opus 111, which a reviewer in the Kansas City Journal called her “most profoundly developed offering.” This was in 1898, the year he worked in the drugstore, when he was fourteen. Later he heard Josef Lhévinne, who was “the best on the globe,” he thought. In 1900, when Paderewski came to Kansas City on tour, Mrs. White arranged a meeting backstage with “the great man,” who treated Harry to a private demonstration of how to play his Minuet in G.

As a boy brimming with such musical aspiration, his head filled with Shakespeare and noble Romans, as one who had taken teasing in a town where appearances were vital, and where every youngster bore the constant scrutiny of innumerable aunts, uncles, teachers, shopkeepers, and neighbors, he might well have burned to rebel. He might have longed for escape, as had Willa Cather growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, or to strike back somehow against the kind of small-town minds and souls that Sinclair Lewis would remember from boyhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. But nowhere in all that Harry Truman wrote and said about his youth, or in the lengthy recollections of him by friends and family, is there even a hint of anger or hurt or frustration over his surroundings. Clearly he liked Independence, Missouri, and its people. He liked being Harry Truman.

He had thinned out, stretched out, to perhaps, 5 foot 7, which was not as tall as he would be, but above average and already several inches taller than his father. Neat, clean, cheerful, he had still the gift for getting along with almost anyone. People knew who he was and people liked him, and partly because of the music roll and the eyeglasses. He had no enemies, he held no grudges. He had done no wrong, nor anything yet to be ashamed of, so far as is known. Importantly, his father approved of him, for all their seemingly different interests. Harry was “all right,” John Truman said. “He knew Harry had ability,” Vivian remembered. “He liked the way he never had an idle moment….”

Vivian, in contrast to his girlish-sounding name, was a sturdy, man’s kind of boy, who was good at games and wished no part of books or piano lessons. Already Vivian had shown such a knack for horse trading that John Truman gave him a checkbook and set him up as a “partner” at the age of twelve. Harry, try as he might, had no heart for trade. As he would later explain to Bessie Wallace, “When I buy a cow for $30 and then sell her to someone for $50 it always seems to me that I am really robbing that person of $20.”

Where Harry and his father found common ground was in the sociability and excitement of politics. Among the happiest of all Harry’s boyhood memories would be the big Democratic picnics every August at Lone Jack. John Truman would have everyone up early. He and the boys would hitch two of the best mules to a spring wagon, and with everything ready, the whole family would set out for the five-mile drive, the wagon filled with fried chicken, cakes, and pies. By noon at Lone Jack there would be thousands of people spreading food on tablecloths on the grass, and visiting back and forth. Then, about two, the speaking would begin. Harry liked particularly a candidate known as Colonel Crisp, “a colonel by agreement,” who ran for Congress time after time but never won and was famous for his annual picnic oration on the Battle of Lone Jack during the Civil War. Challenged once on his accuracy by a veteran who had been in the battle, Crisp responded, “Goddamn an eyewitness anyway. He always spoils a good story.” Another speaker, Congressman William S. Cowherd from Lee’s Summit, told a story that Harry would take pleasure in retelling the rest of his life. Speaking of certain provisions in a pending tariff bill that he found unpalatable, the congressman was reminded of a farmer on a visit to New York, having his first experience in a fancy hotel dining room. First he was served celery, which he ate, then a bowl of consommé, which he drank. But when the waiter placed a lobster before him, the farmer looked up indignantly and said, “I ate your bouquet. I drank your dishwater. But I’ll be darned if I’ll eat your bug.”

Now, in the summer of 1900, Harry went with his father to Kansas City to attend the Democratic National Convention that renominated the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, to run a second time against William McKinley. John Truman sat in a box seat, as the guest of one of Kansas City’s most up-and-coming citizens, William T. Kemper, a friend in “the grain business” and a national committeeman. Harry was consigned to the balcony or ran errands for Kemper, and hugely enjoyed himself. He remembered the immense sweep of the great hall and a crowd of seventeen thousand people, nearly three times the population of Independence, all under one roof. The nominating speech for Bryan touched off a demonstration that lasted half an hour.

Harry and his father declared themselves thorough “Bryan men,” and though Bryan and his running mate, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, went down to defeat in November to McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Bryan remained an idol for Harry, as the voice of the common man.

The Democrats made imperialism the issue in the election of 1900, but it was McKinley prosperity that carried the country, the Republicans campaigning on the theme of the “Full Dinner Pail.” How aware the boy may have been of his own family’s unprecedented prosperity at the moment is unknown. But by speculating in grain futures, through such contacts as he had established with “insiders” like William T. Kemper, John Truman was moving rapidly toward his dream of riches.

With his senior year under way that same fall, Harry found himself busier than ever. He, Charlie Ross, Tasker Taylor, and several others launched a first yearbook for the school. Charlie named it The Gleam, after Tennyson’s poem “Merlin and the Gleam.” Tasker did the illustrations. As part of their Latin studies, Harry and Charlie worked on translations of Cicero—Salus populi suprema, est lex, “The people’s good is the highest law.” Charlie, who was class president as well as editor of The Gleam, was also first in scholarship.

With Elmer Twyman, Harry spent weeks building a wooden model of Caesar’s bridge over the Rhine, as described in Caesar’s Commentaries, and met regularly with his cousin Nellie Noland, who was a “whiz” at Latin. The Noland family by this time had moved to 216 North Delaware, a small frame house opposite the Gates mansion. Best of all, Bessie Wallace was now part of the group there.

She was “over a good deal,” Cousin Ethel would remember. “I don’t know whether they got much Latin read or not because there was a lot of fun going on.” Harry had taken up fencing. “He had two foils, or rapiers, or whatever you call them; and so we would sometimes practice fencing, which we knew absolutely nothing about, but it was fun to try, and we had the porch…room here to play and have fun…which we did, with a little Latin intermingled.”

Progress and the new century were popular topics. “ ‘Progress’ is the cry on every hand,” wrote Elmer Twyman in The Gleam; “and invention, reform, and improvement is everywhere—in weapons, heat, light, food, medicine, building, transportation. Truly we are wizards performing miracles. We lack nothing but the airship and the philosopher’s stone, or, perhaps, the ‘fountain of youth.’ ” Harry copied down and saved the lines of a favorite poem by Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” describing all the wonders to come, including airships and air warfare and universal law:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle flags were furl’d

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

For the class picture taken outside the school’s main entrance, Harry stood by himself in back of the back row. Elmer Twyman, who stood nearby, proudly holding a man’s hat, had decided to become a doctor like his father. Charlie Ross, who sat on the ground at the near end of the front row, his long legs drawn up so that his socks were showing, was headed for the University of Missouri and a career in journalism. Harry had removed his glasses for the picture. He was not smiling, only paying attention to the photographer, his right hand resting on the shoulder of the slight, wistful-looking boy in front, Will Garrett, the class poet. Harry had decided to try for West Point. He and Fielding Houchens, who wanted to go to Annapolis, were preparing for the examinations by taking extra hours in history with Miss Phelps. Bookish Harry, who fenced with girls, who had never been in a fight in his life and was admittedly afraid of guns, thought he might make a general, if not a concert pianist.

Intentionally or not, his position in the picture put him about as distant as possible from Bessie Wallace, who sat smiling at the far end of the second row.

The night of graduation, it seemed half the town was packed into the high school auditorium. The girls were in white, the boys in dark suits and stiff collars. According to the Jackson Examiner, no finer-looking set had ever gathered on a single platform. Harry was not one of the student speakers, he received no awards or honors. The date was May 30, 1901, Memorial Day-Decoration Day as it was more commonly called—and so there had been band music and flags flying since morning. Harry was seventeen.

3

The Way of the Farmer

Experentia does it—as Papa used to say.

—CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield

I

Within a year of Harry’s graduation from Independence High School, calamity struck the Truman family, changing the course of their lives in ways none of them could have anticipated. For Harry it was as if a curtain suddenly descended, marking the end of boyhood and the small-town life he loved and that had seemed so secure and suited to him.

John Truman’s run of luck on Wheat futures had ended. He began losing heavily that same summer of 1901, and to recover his losses kept risking more and more until he had gambled away nearly everything he and Matt owned—as much as $40,000 in cash, stocks, and personal property, including 160 acres of prime land on Blue Ridge given to Matt by her father.

The situation could not have been much worse. At age fifty-one, John Truman was wiped out. The Waldo Avenue house had to be sold. For a while the family lived in another part of town, trying to keep up appearances, but eventually they had to pack and leave Independence altogether. They moved to a modest neighborhood in Kansas City, where John took a job for wages, something no Truman had done before. He went to work as a night watchman at a grain elevator. It was the best job he could find, at pay comparable to that of a farmhand. For a man of such fierce pride, and for those who loved him, it could only have been a painful time.

But there were no complaints. The Trumans were never a complaining people. It was not nice to tell your troubles, one must always be cheerful, Ethel Noland would remember. If asked how you were, you were always to respond, “I’m fine. And you?” Keep your troubles to yourself. She knew from experience, for her own father, having “plunged” in railroads, went “very flat indeed.”

Of his father’s catastrophe, Harry would only say in later years, “He got the notion he could get rich. Instead he lost everything at one fell swoop and went completely broke.”

Harry had tried a little gambling himself the summer after graduation, while traveling east by train to visit his favorite Aunt Ada, Matt’s younger sister, in southern Illinois. It was his first time away from home alone, and on the return trip, stopping in St. Louis to see still more of Matt’s people, a great-aunt named Hettie Powell and her family, he was taken to a horse race and urged by a cousin and three other young men to put in one of the five dollars they bet on a long shot called Claude. As Harry learned afterward, Claude was a well-known “mud horse”—the worse the track, the better he ran. Just as the race was to start, rain came in torrents. Not only did Claude finish first, he paid 25 to 1. Harry had never felt so rich in his life, but he was not to bet on a horse again for another forty years.

West Point had turned him down because of his eyes. Now, with his father’s financial troubles, college of any kind was out of the question. Back from St. Louis he signed up for an accounting course at little Spaulding’s Commercial College in downtown Kansas City, but even that had to be abandoned as too costly. To help the family, he went to work in the mailroom at the Kansas City Star. Then, in late summer, after the tragic death of a school friend, a better job came available. Tasker Taylor, the artist of the class, had been working as a construction timekeeper on the Santa Fe Railroad. On a hot evening in August, he was drowned while swimming in the Missouri River just upstream from the Independence pumping station. At John Truman’s urging, Harry took the job, which, for a boy who had seen so little of life, proved a rough initiation.

The Santa Fe was doubling its tracks into Kansas City. Harry worked ten-hour days, six days a week for $30 a month, plus board, which meant living with the labor gangs in their tent camps along the river, eating greasy food, and listening to their talk. On an hourly basis the pay was not much better than at Clinton’s drugstore. The talk included profanity and raw observations on life of a kind he had never imagined.

He kept tabs on everybody’s time—mule drivers, blacksmiths, and the common laborers who were mostly hoboes, four hundred men in total—and saw that they were paid off every two weeks, a transaction customarily performed on Saturday nights in a saloon, so the men would drink up their earnings and thereby guarantee a return to work Monday morning, a strategy that, Harry observed sadly, nearly always worked.

Much about the job he found highly enjoyable. He liked particularly traveling up and down the line from camp to camp, spinning along alone in a handcar. And the longer he was with them, the more he liked the men—“A very down-to-earth education,” he would call it—and they liked him. When the work was completed six months later, and the time came to say goodbye, a foreman, wishing him well, announced to all within earshot that Harry Truman was an “all right” fellow. “He’s all right from his asshole out in every direction.”

It was Harry’s first public commendation.

On Friday, April 24, 1903, looking scrubbed and spruce in a dark suit and high starched collar, every bit the perfect candidate for a bank clerk, he walked up Walnut Street in Kansas City and applied for a job at the stately National Bank of Commerce.

“Are you good at figures?” he was asked on a two-page employment application form. “Fair,” he wrote. Had he ever been fired? No. Did he smoke? Did he use intoxicating spirits? Had he any debts? No to all three, he answered, moving steadily down the page, using a swift dash line to indicate ditto. “Have you ever gambled or played cards for money?” No, again. “Have you ever ‘played the races’ or speculated in any way?”

To what extent the memory of Claude came rushing back can only be guessed, but here he hesitated, as is evident in the surviving document. He began to write something—there is the start of the down stroke of a letter—but thinking better of it apparently, he quickly repeated his ditto line. The answer was no once more, and it is the earliest known sign in his own hand that he was capable of telling less than the truth if the occasion warranted, capable of being quite human.

Asked if he had any extravagant tastes or habits, he answered that he didn’t think so. “In what forms of recreation or amusement do you find pleasure?” Theaters and reading, he wrote. “Where do you spend your evenings and Sundays?” At home. All true.

He had a letter from Dr. Twyman describing him as a “model young man.” Possibly, too, he had help from William T. Kemper, John Truman’s friend from better days, who was a director of the bank. In any event, he was hired as a clerk in the vault starting at $20 a month, which was about what his father was making at his night watchman’s job, and there he stayed for two years. In the view of his employers, his performance was outstanding. His immediate superior, a man named A. D. Flintom, could hardly say enough for him. “He is an exceptionally bright young man and is keeping the work up in the vault better than it has ever been kept,” Flintom wrote in a first report on young Harry Truman.

He is a willing worker, almost always here and tries hard to please everybody. We never had a boy in the vault like him before. He watches everything very closely and by his watchfulness, detects many errors which a careless boy would let slip through. His appearance is good and his habits and character are of the best.

In a later report, “Trueman,” as Flintom spelled it, was again praised for his “excellent character and good habits.” He was accurate. He was “always at his post of duty,” his work was “always up.” Further, he was “very ambitious.” “I do not know of a better young man in the bank than Trueman,” wrote Flintom to vice-president Charles H. Moore. Nor was Flintom one to lavish praise indiscriminately, as is clear from what he said of Vivian Truman, who had also come to work at the bank by this time. Vivian, though “nice appearing,” was “possessed of very little ability,” thought Flintom. “He is a very different boy from his brother….”

The vault where Harry spent his days—“the zoo,” as the clerks called it—was below street level, downstairs from the bank’s cavernous main lobby with its Corinthian columns and brass spittoons. He cleared checks drawn on country banks, sometimes handling as much as a million dollars a day, while keeping all notations in longhand. It was not work calling for much initiative or imagination or that he especially cared for; and Charles H. Moore, the vice-president, appears to have been the first person Harry actually disliked. Moore, said Harry Truman years later, was “never so happy as when he would call some poor inoffensive little clerk up before him in the grand lobby of the biggest bank west of the Mississippi and tell him how dumb and inefficient he was….” Harry continued to do his best, however, and his pay advanced steadily. In time he was earning $40 a month, which made him the family’s number one breadwinner.

His years at the National Bank of Commerce were 1903 to 1905. Two months after he went to work came the stunning news that Bessie Wallace’s father, David Wallace, one of the best-known men in Independence, had committed suicide. The story was in the papers. At first light the morning of June 17, while his family still slept, he had gotten up from bed, taking care not to disturb his wife, dressed fully, took a revolver from a dresser, and walked down the hall to the bathroom where, standing in the middle of the floor, he placed the muzzle of the gun behind his left ear and fired. He was forty-three years old and had, in the words of the Jackson Examiner, “an attractiveness about him that was natural and spontaneous.” In addition to his wife, Madge Gates Wallace, and Bessie, age eighteen, he was survived by three sons, ranging in age from sixteen to three. He left no note.

“Why should such a man take his own life?” asked the Examiner. “It is a question we who loved him are unable to answer….” Included also in the story was the gruesome detail that the bullet had passed through his head and landed in the bathtub.

Older friends and neighbors in Independence remembered the wedding of Madge Gates to David Wallace twenty years earlier as one of the most elegant occasions in the town’s history. It had been a brilliant moonlit night, the lawn at the Gates mansion ablaze with Chinese lanterns. Wedding presents in the parlor included oil paintings and an after-dinner coffee service in silver and china. David Wallace was the son of one of the old settlers from Kentucky, but until his marriage had had no wealth or social standing to speak of. He was a courthouse politician. Yet the importance of the Gates family more than compensated and David Wallace, many believed, was the hand-somest man in Independence. He was like the elegant small-town figure in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory,” who “fluttered pulses” with his good looks and who also “one calm summer night, /Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

What the Examiner did not mention, but that everyone knew, was that David Wallace had a drinking problem—often he had to be carried home by friends—and most efforts to fathom the tragedy came back to that. Or to gossip about money troubles, the view being he was badly in debt “and didn’t see any way out.”

If the Trumans had known shame during John’s financial downfall, it was little compared to what the family of a suicide would experience. The Trumans had moved away. Madge Gates, with Bessie and the younger children, left for Colorado Springs, not to return for a year. No one close to the family would ever discuss the subject except in strictest confidence. It was not something “decent people” wished to talk about. Sixty years had to go by before Bessie’s friend Mary Paxton described how her father had awakened her early that morning and told her to go next door at once to be with Bessie, because Mr. Wallace had killed himself. “[Bessie] was walking up and down back of the house with clenched fists, I remember. She wasn’t crying. There wasn’t anything I could say, but I just walked up and down with her….” Harry Truman is not known ever to have said a word on the subject outside the family.

He had seen nothing of Bessie in the time since the Trumans left town. Nor did he now. Even after she was back from Colorado Springs and began commuting to the Barstow School, Kansas City’s finishing school for wealthy young women, they kept to their separate lives. With her grief-stricken mother and her brothers, Bessie moved in permanently with Grandfather and Grandmother Gates at 219 North Delaware. So at a time when the Truman family’s “circumstances” were so greatly reduced, Bessie had become the “family princess” of the Gates mansion. What news Harry had of her came from the Noland sisters, who from their observation post across the street knew as much as anyone.

Since starting at the bank, Harry had been living at home, or what for the time being passed for home in Kansas City, spending little more than carfare and lunch money, which, according to the pocket account book he kept, came to about 50 cents a day. Once, throwing economies to the wind, he spent $11 for “Ties Collar Cuffs Pins, etc.” Later $10 went for “Music,” piano lessons with Mrs. White, which he soon had to drop. He would sometimes say later that he quit because playing the piano was “sissy.” The truth was the lessons had become more than he could afford.

His one indulgence was the theater, which he loved and for which he was willing to splurge, sometimes as much as two dollars. He went to vaudeville at the Orpheum and the Grand. For a while he worked as an usher on Saturday afternoons at the Orpheum, just to see the show for free. He saw the Four Cohans and Sarah Bernhardt. He went to concerts and the opera at Convention Hall. A note from “Horatio” dashed off on National Bank of Commerce stationery, telling his cousins Ethel and Nellie where to meet him for their theater date, ends: “I understand that Mr. Beresford is exceedingly good so don’t fail to come. I’ve already got the seats….” A performance by Richard Mansfield in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde left Harry so shaken he was afraid to go home alone.

With a population of 200,000, Kansas City was still a cow town and a grain town. St. Louis was by contrast old metropolitan and old money. St. Louis looked eastward, Kansas City faced west. They were two entirely different cities. But Kansas City was growing by leaps and bounds and prided itself in offering the latest and best of everything. There was hardly a city in America where an observant youth could have had a better day-to-day sense of the country’s robust energy and confidence at the start of the new century. To Harry it was a place of “things doing.” Once, with the other clerks, he rushed out of the bank and down 10th Street to see President Theodore Roosevelt speak from the back of a railroad car. It was his first chance to see a President, and though a Republican who spoke with a piping voice and who seemed surprisingly short, Roosevelt gave a good speech, Harry thought. The crowd was delighted. “They wanted to see him grin and show his teeth, which he did.”

In May of 1905, Harry signed up with a new National Guard unit. “I was twenty-one years old in May of that year,” he remembered, “and could do as I pleased.” It was a far cry from the dream of West Point, but Private Truman began drilling with Missouri’s Light Artillery, Battery B, First Brigade. (“They needed recruits,” he also said later, in explanation of how, with his poor eyesight, he passed the physical exam.) His first encampment that summer was at Cape Girardeau, in the far-off southeastern corner of Missouri. He went by train as far as St. Louis, then down the Mississippi by steamboat, “quite an experience.” He came home a corporal—“the biggest promotion I ever received”—and for a weekend visit to the Young farm put on his new dark blue dress uniform with its beautiful red piping on the sleeves, expecting to impress his grandmother. But as he stepped through the door, she could think only of Union soldiers. He was never to wear it again in her presence, she said.

Largely he was on his own by now. John Truman, fed up with city life, miserable in his job, had decided to try still another new start. He rented a small farm at Clinton, Missouri, about seventy miles southeast, on Grand River in prosperous farm country. Again Matt had to pack and move, and Harry began boarding out with John’s sister Emma, Mrs. Rochester Colgan, in Kansas City.

It was a wide-open town still, more than living up to its reputation. Sporting houses and saloons far outnumbered churches. “When a bachelor or stale old codger was in sore need of easing himself [with a woman], he looked for a sign in the window which said: Transient Rooms or Light Housekeeping,” remembered the writer Edward Dahlberg, whose mother was proprietor of the Star Lady Barbershop on 8th Street. To Dahlberg, in memory, nearly everything about the Kansas City of 1905, the city of his boyhood, was redolent of sex and temptation. To him it was a “wild, concupiscent city.” Another contemporary, Virgil Thomson, who was to become a foremost composer, wrote of whole blocks where there were nothing but saloons, this in happy contrast, he said, to dry, “moralistic” Kansas across the line. “And just as Memphis and St. Louis had their Blues, we had our Twelfth Street Rag proclaiming joyous low life.” But with such joyous low life Harry appears to have had little or no experience. Long afterward, joking with friends about his music lessons, he would reflect that had things gone differently he might have wound up playing the piano in a whorehouse, but there is no evidence he ever set foot in such a place, or that he “carried on” in Kansas City in any fashion.

After several months with Aunt Emma, he moved to an altogether respectable boardinghouse kept by a Mrs. Trow on Troost Avenue where, for room and board (breakfast and dinner), he paid five dollars a week. Another young boarder was a messenger at the Bank of Commerce named Arthur Eisenhower from Abilene, Kansas, (Arthur’s younger brother, Dwight David, was still at home in high school.) “Harry and I had only a dollar a week left over for riotous living,” Arthur would recall.

Refused another raise at the Bank of Commerce, Harry quit and went to work for the Union National Bank at 9th and Baltimore, in Kansas City’s famous ten-story New York Life Building, with its giant bronze eagle over the main entrance. The pay was better—$75 a month—and the Union National a pleasanter place to work. As an assistant teller, he was soon making $100 a month, truly, as he said, a magnificent salary.

With the new job, the big paycheck, his new friends, his drill sessions with the National Guard, Harry was as busy and happy as he had ever been. Had he gone to college four years earlier, he would only now be looking for his first job. He bought a Panama hat. He had his photograph taken. At the lavish new Willis Wood Hall, he saw Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in The Merchant of Venice.

But any thoughts he may have entertained about a career in banking were shortlived. Beset by more misfortune—his entire corn crop was lost to floods at Clinton—John Truman had agreed to move in with Grandma Young and run the Blue Ridge farm. Uncle Harrison, who had been in charge until now, had found the work more than he could handle and wanted to move to the city. The farm was large and good help ever harder to find.

The new arrangement appeared to suit everybody, and in October 1905 all the Trumans but Harry moved back to Blue Ridge. The problem was John also found the work too much, even with Vivian to help. So some four or five months later, Harry was told to quit his job and come home. The family came first. If Harry harbored any regrets or resentment, he never let on. His friends were sure he wouldn’t last as a farmer.

II

The change from his life in Kansas City was stunning. For five years, until he rediscovered Bessie Wallace, his preoccupations were to be almost exclusively those determined by crops, seasons, weeds, insects, rain and sunshine, livestock, farm machinery, bank loans, and the dictates of an energetic, opinionated father who was determined to succeed at last.

Everything now revolved about the farm. It was the focus of the whole family’s life, its livelihood, its constant responsibility, its sole source, of income. Everyone worked, “and woe to the loafer,” as Harry remembered.

“Well, if you don’t work, you don’t make it,” was the common philosophy as expressed by a neighbor. “You may do a lot of work and not make it, too, but you’ve got to do it or you won’t make it.”

‘“The simple life was not always so simple,” remembered another. “It was a hard life…a life which demanded perseverance…. It demanded first things first.”

The day began for Harry with his father’s call from the bottom of the stairs at five in the morning when it was still dark and cold outside. (That spring of 1906, Harry’s first on the farm, happened to be one of abnormal cold in Jackson County, of mud and heavy rains.) And it was his father who kept at him through the day, showing him what to do, working as hard as two men, and warning Harry time after time not to hurt himself, not to try to lift anything too heavy. A building up of both the farm and the owlish-looking bank clerk was apparently much on John Truman’s mind.

Harry learned to drive an Emerson gang plow, two plows on a three-wheeled frame pulled by four horses. The trick was to see that each horse pulled his part of the load. With an early start, he found, he could do five acres in a ten-hour day. Some mornings, to keep warm, he walked instead of riding. Some mornings, he remembered, not even a sweater, two coats, and an overcoat were enough to keep out the cold.

As spring moved on, he took instructions in driving the corn planter and wheat drill. John Truman would tolerate no crooked rows in the corn, no skipped places in the wheat, the money crop. If bare spots appeared in the corn or wheat, Harry would hear about it all summer. “My father told me to adjust the planter before starting, have the horses well in hand and under control, pick out an object on the other side of the field usually a quarter or a half mile away, point the tongue of the planter at that object and keep it there, letting the horses step out at a lively gait.” It was how Harry would conduct much of his life.

Some of the wheat fields were immense. One horse made such trouble that Harry found himself yelling at him in his sleep.

With its nearly 600 acres, the farm was among the largest in the county, more than four times the size of the average Missouri farm, and required the full-time efforts of John, Harry, Vivian, and several hired men. For John Truman, Harry observed, everything about the life seemed second nature. The small, weatherbeaten man could not understand why anybody would wish to sleep past 5:00 A.M. Nothing about the work daunted him. Harry disliked milking cows, particularly when they flipped their manure-soaked tails in his face. Raking hay was a “cussin’ job.” He hated the whole business of putting rings in hogs’ noses and thought husking corn, with the dirt and dust flying about, was work devised by Satan. Yet John Truman was happier than his children had seen him in years. He would never have left the farm in the first place, he told them, had it not been for their education. Mary Jane would remember knowing where he was almost any time of day because she could hear him singing at his work.

He knew how to make them all “step lively,” but was also quick to single out good work when he saw it. “Yes, and if you did a good job, he would compliment you,” said Gaylon Babcock, a neighbor who from boyhood helped at threshing time. “He made you want to do a good job.” Another man recalled seeing the Trumans planting a cornfield with three teams of horses working at once. A few days later he saw the same three teams cultivating the corn before it was up, to get a head start on the weeds.

Every day was work, never-ending work, and Harry did “everything there was to do”—hoeing corn and potatoes in the burning heat of summer, haying, doctoring horses, repairing equipment, sharpening hoes and scythes, mending fences. Some things he did better than others. Using an ax or saw left-handed, he took a lot of kidding for work that looked left-handed. He learned the song of the meadowlark (it said, “Pretty boy go to work,” according to local tradition) and that wind from the northwest meant rain. By paying attention to what his father had to teach, he became highly knowledgeable about livestock, as proficient nearly as Vivian. They raised registered short-horn cows and bulls, sheep, mules, thoroughbred horses, and Hampshire hogs. John won prizes for his horses. Harry’s “real love” was the hogs, which he gave such names as “Mud,” “Rats,” and “Carrie Nation.” Harry also kept the books, listing which crops were sold to whom and for how much:

Boundary lines for the farm were the same rock fences from Solomon Young’s time, and two of his big square limestone gateposts marked the main entrance from the rock road. The elm trees along the front drive had grown huge by now, so that the whole distance from the road to the house was in deep shade. Beyond the house still, through the orchard, was the old walnut barn, solid as ever and still painted red.

The only neighbors in view were the Slaughters, to the north, with whom the Trumans shared a common boundary of nearly a mile. A large family of eight children, the Slaughters were the most prosperous farmers in the vicinity. O. V. Slaughter and his wife Elizabeth had known Matt since childhood. Theirs were the only lights to be seen after dark. Everything else in view was cropland, trees, and sky.

The big change in community life in the years the Trumans had been away from Blue Ridge was the growth of Grandview, a mile to the south. The little town was the creation of two railroads that cut through corners of the farm, the Kansas City Southern and the St. Louis & San Francisco, or “Frisco,” both built shortly before Solomon Young’s death. Post office, bank, grocery, feed, and hardware stores and the two railroad depots were now only a ten-minute ride down the rock road. On Sunday mornings the bells of Grandview Baptist Church carried clearly.

The whole farm belonged still to Grandma Young. The small, frame farmhouse built for her after the fire was well kept but crowded now with the five Trumans. Painted plain white with dark green trim, it had seven rooms, all very small—kitchen, dining room, front parlor, sitting room, and two bedrooms at the top of the front stairs. Harry and Vivian slept under the eaves over the dining room, in a tiny room with two tiny windows down at floor level, reachable only by a narrow back stairway.

The house was without electricity. There was no running water or plumbing. Matt cooked on a coal stove. In winter, the hand pump often froze solid. In summer, Harry and Vivian’s room under the eaves became a furnace. Except for Matt’s walnut dresser, the furnishings were of the plainest kind. The single modern convenience was a telephone, which hung on the wall beside the front door.

Neighbors remembered the house being scrupulously neat and clean. No one took such pleasure in creating a disturbance with a broom as did his mother, Harry observed. “The coldest day in winter she’ll raise all the windows, get a broom and a dust rag, and just be perfectly blissful while the rest of us freeze,” he wrote. “Whenever the dog and cat see her coming they at once begin hunting means of exit.”

It was all rich land still, some of the most valuable in the state. Harry was satisfied it was the “finest land you’d find anywhere.” To his astonishment, he was taking great interest in “the creation of things that come out of the ground.” He read Cato’s De agri cultura with its advice on planting beans, sowing clover, making compost, curing hams, and the medicinal value of cabbage. He pored through Wallace’s Farmer and, for scientific ideas, reports from the agricultural colleges. In advance of most farmers in the area, the Trumans began rotating crops and some years the results were impressive—from yields of 13 bushels of wheat an acre to 19 bushels. To hold back erosion, Harry dumped bales of spoiled straw into gullies. Once soil had washed over the straw, he sowed timothy seed. It was an idea no one around Grandview had tried before.

Ed Young, the local veterinarian, described Harry as “always bustling around getting things done.” If John Truman was a stickler for doing jobs just so, Harry was, too, the more time passed. Brownie Huber, one of the hired men, recalled that Harry was the only man he ever worked for who had him take all the buckles off the harness before oiling so the oil would get under the buckles.

Harry also had two further attributes, according to Brownie Huber, who was with the Trumans for six years. Harry could “stir up as good a batch of biscuits as any woman” and he could admit a mistake. Thirty years later Huber recalled an incident that occurred one fall when he was plowing for winter wheat:

The ground was terribly hard so I was having to stop every round to let a three-year-old colt rest. Somebody in the family must have mentioned that I was stopping a lot because about the second day Harry came out and said, “Brownie, I’d keep them going pretty steady.” I was on my third round without stopping when the colt suddenly tumbled over. I called Harry and he came running out very much upset. We got the horse unhitched, into the shade and cooled out, after which Harry turned to me and said, “Brownie, from now on use your own judgment.” And those orders were never changed as long as I worked for Harry.

To more than a few people Harry seemed somehow different. One Grandview resident considered him so neat and polite he was sure Harry must be a preacher. Another, a young woman, remembered how easy he was to talk to. “He was so down-to-earth, yet he was something else, too, even then,” she said.

At threshing time, when neighboring farmers came to help the Trumans, as part of the season’s usual exchange of labor, Harry would work through the morning, but then, just before the big midday meal, while the other men were relaxing, he would clean up quickly and go to the kitchen to help his mother and sister. Stephen Slaughter, youngest of the Slaughter children, would remark that he never saw Harry wearing bib overalls like every other farmer, which seemed to distinguish him. “He always looked neat—not dressed up, but he looked neat. No, no, no, he never wore bib overalls.” Stephen’s first glimpse of Harry was on the morning of a threshing day at the Slaughter farm when Stephen was a small boy. Harry had come swinging into the yard driving one of the wagons, only Harry drove standing up and wore a Panama hat.

His circle was enlarging. After three years on the farm, he joined the Masons. Both grandfathers had been Masons and John Truman, though he never joined, said he always meant to. Harry was elected to receive degrees at the Belton Lodge on January 30, 1909. By March, having become “letter perfect” in the ritual, he passed to Master Mason. He greatly enjoyed the fellowship and took the ritual and spiritual teachings of Freemasonry with extreme seriousness. He felt uplifted by brotherhood in an order claiming great antiquity and to which both Mozart and Andrew Jackson had belonged, as had so many presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt and his recent successor, William Howard Taft. As every Mason knew, George Washington took the oath of office on a Masonic Bible and laid the cornerstone of the Capitol with a Masonic trowel.

In the autumn of 1909, Harry Truman was appointed a deacon. The following year he organized a new lodge at Grandview, in a room over a store on Main Street. By age twenty-six, he was already a figure of importance in the community. “Harry was a very good lodge man,” recalled Gaylon Babcock, a brother Mason, who happened not to be as impressed as were others by Harry’s abilities as a farmer, or by Harry’s personality. To Babcock, Harry seemed more of a “utility man” around the Truman place. Babcock, further, was bothered by the fact that Harry, a grown man, played the piano and still called his mother “Mamma.” Babcock much preferred Vivian or John Truman. Nonetheless, he thought Harry did “a good job in the lodge work—excellent.”

The man primarily responsible for Harry’s involvement in the Masons was Frank Blair, a clerk in the bank at Belton. “Frank Blair got Harry interested…and Harry was, as a bright fellow, ambitious,” Stephen Slaughter remembered. “And he [Harry] had ideas…I’m sure he had ideas…that he might even go into politics.” Stephen’s father, O. V. Slaughter, was president of the Jackson County Farm Bureau, which Harry also joined.

In December of 1909, shortly after her ninety-first birthday, Grandma Young died. Harry, who had been devoted to her, tried to imagine all she had seen in her life. She had been born in 1818. She had once told him of a time when Solomon was away and a band of Indians came to the door saying they wanted honey and hung about sharpening their knives on the grindstone until she turned a big dog loose and sent them flying. In recent years she liked to sit silently in the sunshine in a rocker smoking a corncob pipe. Her death was the first to touch Harry directly. That Christmas without her, he said, was the saddest he had ever known.

By the will of Harriet Louisa Young the farm went to Matt and Harrison, her five other children sharing none of it on the grounds that they had played no part in the work and should consider the money gifts they received over the years as fair compensation. Not surprisingly a storm broke over the will.

Meantime, Harry delighted in the increasingly frequent visits of Uncle Harrison, who came out from Kansas City full of funny stories and eager to beat Harry in a game of double dummy bridge. Uncle Harrison, as Harry came to appreciate, was a “character,” a huge, talkative, profane, generous-spirited man, a kind of Missouri Falstaff who had a splendid time doing—or talking about doing—most of the things one wasn’t supposed to. Certainly he was not like anyone in Grandview. Six feet tall and extremely stout—Harry estimated he weighed 240 pounds—he wore good three-piece suits, a gold watch chain, and always carried lots of cash. He prized the time he spent loafing, loved vaudeville, gambling, and Kansas City women, and thought it time Harry learned a new dance step called the “Pigeon Wing.” He also drank considerably, and asleep on the couch, he could, as Harry noted, set a record for snoring.

All Trumans, Harry decided, were worriers by nature, but Uncle Harrison said he let others do his worrying for him. Uncle Harry was part of Harry’s education, as they both appreciated.

He was filling out, becoming much stronger physically. The time with his father had also brought an important change. Working together in all seasons, they had grown closer than either ever supposed they might. Indeed, John Truman had come to depend on Harry and to respect his judgment. When a horse pulled a beam over on John in the barn, breaking his leg, Harry took charge and ran things for three months, until April of 1911. Then a calf knocked Harry down and broke his left leg below the knee. The attention and kindness showered on him by both parents through the next weeks took him by surprise. “Papa buys me candy and fruit as if I were a two-year-old,” he wrote, “and Mamma spends half her time making me comfortable and making my favorite pies. You really don’t know how much you’re thought of until you get knocked out. I shall try to keep my head though.”

Later in the year, when Vivian was married to Luella Campbell, the daughter of a nearby farmer, and moved off the homeplace, John made Harry a full partner, as once Solomon Young had done for him. If, in a good year, the farm cleared $4,000, then Harry might make as much as $2,000, or twice what he had earned at the bank. But by the same agreement Harry also assumed equal responsibility for John Truman’s debts, which were substantial.

They had new stationery printed for “J. A. Truman and Son, Farmers.” By the standards of the family’s time-honored way of life, not to say the viewpoint of the surrounding community, Harry Truman had arrived. “To be a good farmer in Missouri—that’s tops. That’s the finest thing you can say about a man,” Vivian would declare emphatically a lifetime later. Harry himself, writing in October 1911, summed up generations of bedrock faith in the old Jeffersonian dream of a nation of farmers:

You know as long as a country is one of that kind, people are more independent and make better citizens. When it is made up of factories and large cities it soon becomes depressed and makes classes among people. Every farmer thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little bit better.

This was in a letter, one of many, designed to inform and influence Bessie Wallace of Independence, who knew nothing of farms or farming. For by now Harry was head over heels in love.

III

“Well, I saw her,” he is said to have exclaimed with a grin to the Noland sisters one summer night in 1910.

Ethel and Nellie Noland, who had both become schoolteachers, were still living in the family house on North Delaware Street. According to Ethel, keeper of family history, Harry had stopped for a visit when someone mentioned a cake plate that should be returned to Mrs. Wallace and Harry volunteered “with something approaching the speed of light.” He crossed the street, went up the walk to the Gates house, up four steps and onto the porch, cranked the bell of the tall, double-leafed front door, then stood waiting. “And Bess came to the door,” remembered Ethel, who must have been watching from her own porch, “and of course nothing could have been a bigger occasion than that, to see her again and talk to her.” He didn’t return for two hours.

From the farm to North Delaware Street was only sixteen miles, but a long ride by horse and buggy—four hours or more round trip—even assuming John Truman would make the horse and buggy available when Harry wished. Nor was going by train much faster or easier. Harry had to walk into Grandview and catch the Frisco to Kansas City, then change to an Independence train. Relatively few trains stopped at Grandview, however, and connections were poor, with long delays even if everything went right. The one other possibility was to hitch a ride by buggy to a point called Dodson on Blue River, where he could take the interurban, the electric streetcar, into Kansas City, then transfer to another streetcar to Independence. Whichever way he chose seemed designed to make life difficult. Yet he made the trip at every opportunity, often spending the night on a couch at the Nolands’. Old friends and relatives in town were greatly impressed by such ardor. To people in Independence, Grandview was “the sticks.”

He was invited to Sunday dinner and sat politely with Bessie and her very formal mother, her brothers, and Grandmother and Grandfather Gates, as a black servant passed dishes. In the parlor afterward he played the piano for them. Bessie also accepted his invitations to concerts and the theater in Kansas City and went with him to meet his former piano teacher, Mrs. White. Harry was sure they would like one another. (“Isn’t she a caution?” he said later of Mrs. White.) Yet Bessie, as others noticed, did not go out to the farm to meet his family.

But it was in letter after letter—hundreds of letters as time passed—that he poured himself out to her, saying what he found he never could in her presence, writing more than he ever had in his life and discovering how much satisfaction there was in writing. He also longed desperately for her to write him, which, as he told her, was the main reason he wrote so often and at such length. Phone calls on a party line were out of the question, with the neighbors listening. He didn’t like the telephone under any circumstances. “I’m always rattled and can never say what I want to,” he explained to her.

What she wrote to him, what tone her correspondence took, can only be imagined, or deduced from what he said in response, since none of her letters from this period has survived.

It was a cheerful, often funny, consistently interesting, extremely alert, straightforward, and irrepressible young man that she came to know in this outpouring of mail from Grandview. And she possessed many of the same qualities. Her vitality and good humor, in particular, had made her quite popular in her own circles. Several young men had found her attractive well before she was rediscovered by Harry Truman. Chrisman Swope, son of one of the wealthiest families in Independence, had come calling frequently. There was a Mr. Young, a Mr. Harris, and a “romance” apparently with a young man named Julian Harvey from Kansas City. As Harry understood from the start, she was used to attention.

He could not spell very well, as he was aware. (“Say, it sure is a grand thing that I have a high school dictionary handy,” he wrote. “I had to look on the back to see how to spell the book itself.”) And clearly he delighted in talking about himself. He was his own favorite subject, yet nearly always with a sense of proportion and a sense of humor. She had never received letters anything like them—and very fortunately she saved them.

It is necessary to sit about half a mile or so from the horses when you drive an old binder [he explained in one] and it’s yell or stand still. My whip is just too short. If I make it longer it grinds up in the machinery and causes a disaster not only to the insides of the binder but to my record in the Book of Justice. It’s cheaper to cuss the team.

“This morning I was helping to dig a grave,” he reported in another letter, attempting to illustrate that farmers “get all kinds of experience in lots of things….”

It is not nearly such a sad proceeding as you’d think. There were six or seven of us, and we’d take turns digging. Those who weren’t digging would sit around and tell lies about the holes they’d dug and the hogs they’d raised. We spent a very pleasant forenoon and then went to the funeral.

They were hardly love letters, no “nonsense or bosh.” He told her about Uncle Harry, about the hired men, and while he bragged occasionally of how hard he worked, he in no way romanticized life on the farm for her benefit. If anything, he went to the other extreme. “I have been to the lot and put about a hundred rings in half as many hogs’ noses. You really haven’t any idea what a soul stirring job it is, especially on a day when the mud is knee deep….” He described being stuck in the eye by a blade of corn, and how his face had burned to the color of raw beef after hauling hay all day.

He had strong opinions and no small share of bigotry, though she never saw it that way, never found his use of expressions like “coon,” “nigger,” “bohunk,” “Dago,” or “Chink” objectionable, or she would have let him know and that would have been the end of it, since as he said, “I’m horribly anxious for you to suffer from an excessively good opinion of me!”

In his way he could also become quite philosophical, a word he didn’t like.

“You know when people can get excited over the ordinary things in life, they live,” he said at one point.

“You’ve no idea how experience teaches sympathy,” he observed in another letter, soon after breaking his leg.

Of his religious convictions, a matter he knew to be of great importance to her mother, he said that while he remembered well their Presbyterian Sunday School days together and though he had since joined the Baptist Church, he was only a reasonably good Baptist as the term was understood in Grandview. “I am by religion like everything else. I think there’s more in acting than in talking.” Bessie had invited him to attend an Episcopal service in Independence. (The Wallaces, too, had abandoned the Presbyterian Church.) It was his first time at an Episcopal service, he told her. He knew nothing of “Lent and such things.” Once, on a Sunday in Kansas City, he confessed, “I made a start for church and landed at the Shubert.”

They exchanged views on writers. Mark Twain was his patron saint in literature, Harry said. The year before, as he did not tell her, he had spent $25 of his own money for a twenty-five-volume set of Twain’s works. She urged him to read the longer novels of Dickens and in a letter written in May 1911, after his accident, he told her that to his surprise he was greatly enjoying David Copperfield:

I have been reading David Copperfield and have really found out that I couldn’t appreciate Dickens before. I have only read Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities. They didn’t make much of an impression on me and I never read anything else. A neighbor sent me Dombey & Son and David C., and I am glad for it has awakened a new interest. It is almost a reconciliation to having my leg broken to contemplate the amount of reading I am going to do this summer. I am getting better fast and I am afraid I’ll get well so soon I won’t get to read enough…. I do think Mr. Micawber is the killingest person I have run across in any book anywhere. He is exactly true to life. I know a half-dozen of him right here in Grandview. They are always waiting for something to turn up….

Then, out of the blue, that June, he proposed to her by mail, mixing affection with a little self-deprecation and caution, fearful she might laugh at him.

You know, were I an Italian or a poet I would commence and use all the luscious language of two continents. I am not either but only a kind of good-for-nothing American farmer. I’ve always had a sneakin’ notion that some day maybe I’d amount to something. I doubt it now though like everything. It is a family failing of ours to be poor financiers. I am blest that way. Still that doesn’t keep me from having always thought that you were all that a girl could be possibly and impossibly. You may not have guessed it but I’ve been crazy about you ever since we went to Sunday school together. But I never had the nerve to think you’d even look at me…. You said you were tired of these kind of stories in books so I am trying one from real life. I guess it sounds funny to you, but you must bear in mind that this is my first experience in this line and also it is very real to me.

Three weeks passed without a word from her. He waited, agonizing, then wrote to ask if he had said anything to offend her. She responded by turning him down, and apparently over the phone. That same day he wrote as follows:

Grandview, Mo.

July 12, 1911

Dear Bessie:

You know that you turned me down so easy that I am almost happy anyway. I never was fool enough to think that a girl like you could ever care for a fellow like me but I couldn’t help telling you how I felt. I have always wanted you to have some fine, rich-looking man, but I know that if ever I got the chance I’d tell you how I felt even if I didn’t even get to say another word to you. What makes me feel good is that you were good enough to answer me seriously and not make fun of me anyway. You know when a fellow tells a girl all his heart and she makes a joke of it I suppose it would be the awfullest feeling in the world. You see I never had any desire to say such things to anyone else. All my girlfriends think I am a cheerful idiot and a confirmed old bach. They really don’t know the reason nor ever will. I have been so afraid you were not even going to let me be your good friend. To be even in that class is something.

You may think I’ll get over it as all boys do. I guess I am something of a freak myself. I really never had any desire to make love to a girl just for the fun of it, and you have always been the reason. I have never met a girl in my life that you were not the first to be compared with her, to see wherein she was lacking and she always was.

Please don’t think I am talking nonsense or bosh, for if ever I told the truth I am telling it now and I’ll never tell such things to anyone else or bother you with them again. I have always been more idealist than practical anyway, so I really never expected any reward for loving you. I shall always hope though….

Then, promising to put on no hangdog airs when next he saw her, he changed the subject. Did she know of any way to make it rain?

They exchanged photographs and Harry had a standing invitation to Sunday dinner at the Gates house. Week after week, with no success, he tried to get her to come to Grandview. In August, he announced he was building a grass tennis court for her on a level place near the house. She could bring her friends, make a day of it. At Montgomery Ward in Kansas City he bought a heavy roller. Since neither he nor anyone else on the farm, or anyone in Grandview, played tennis or knew the requirements for a court, he had her send directions. He hoped to have everything ready by Labor Day. Mamma would cook a chicken dinner, he promised. “Not town dinner but midday meal, see? So be sure and come…. Now be sure and come out on Labor Day.”

In the flurry of excitement, seeing how intent on success he was, Matt decided to have several rooms papered. With only three days to go, Harry sent Bessie a map with directions. The Sunday before Labor Day he worked the day through on the court and by nightfall had everything ready, including a supply of watermelons.

But she didn’t come. She sent word it was raining in Independence. He wrote at once of his “disappointment” and asked if she could make it another time, adding that Mamma would still like her to come for dinner and that the weather in Grandview on Labor Day had been fine. When she did at last appear, for an impromptu visit some weeks later, the court was found to be insufficiently level for a proper game.

Yet, he would not be discouraged. He kept at courtship as he had kept to his piano lessons, with cheerful, willing determination. He told her of his progress in the Masons, he sent her books, commented on stories in his favorite magazines, Everybody’s, Life, and Adventure. “I was reading Plato’s Republic this morning,” he also informed her at one point, “and Socrates was discoursing on the ideal Republic…. You see, I sometimes read something besides Adventure.”

He knew he had a gift for conversation. He had found he could get most anything he wanted if he could only talk to people. The letters were his way to talk to her as he never could face to face.

That he particularly liked cake, pie, Mozart, Chopin, and Verdi became clear. She learned also how much there was he did not like: dentists, guns, snobs, hypocrisy in any form, prizefighters, divorce, the Kansas City Star (for its Republican bias), lawyers (now that his grandmother’s will was being contested), and Richard Wagner, who he thought must have been “in cahoots with Pluto.” He regretted much about his looks. He wrote of his “girl mouth” and the fact that he blushed like a girl. He confessed to such other ladylike traits as yelling when he had a tooth pulled and an “inordinate desire to look nice” when having his picture taken. Coming home alone in the dark, he could get “scared to an icicle,” he told her. He was afraid of getting knocked on the head by the hoboes who hung about at the point where he changed trains at Kansas City, fearful of both ghosts and hoboes as he made his way home on foot from the Grandview depot on nights when there was no moon.

Once approaching the house in the pitch dark, groping his way to the kitchen door, he walked headlong into the pump. The next day, he painted the pump white.

One man was as good as another, he thought, “so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” His Uncle Will Young, the Confederate veteran, had a theory that “the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.” Apparently Harry thought this would amuse her. “He does hate Chinks and Japs. So do I,” he continued. “It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”

But on an evening when Mary Jane was practicing a Mozart sonata at the piano, he wrote, “Did you ever sit and listen to an orchestra play a fine overture, and imagine that things were as they ought to be and not as they are? Music that I can understand always makes me feel that way.” Had Bessie been the girl in a stage musical of the kind he took her to see, she would have accepted him then and there.

The fact that he had no money and that he craved money came up repeatedly, more often and more obviously than probably he realized. In Grandview circles, financial wealth was something people seldom talked about or judged one another by. “We never rated a person by the amount of money he had,” remembered Stephen Slaughter. “Always, first and foremost, it was his character, his integrity.” No family, not even the Slaughters, had large bank accounts or costly possessions. Everybody, including the Slaughters, had debts. But Harry wanted more than what sufficed for Grandview; or, in any event, he clearly wanted Bessie Wallace to think he aimed higher.

He told her of his longing for an automobile. “Just imagine how often I’d burn the pike from here to Independence.” He saw a $75 overcoat in Kansas City that he wanted. If ever he were rich, he too would live in Independence. Writing one cold night before Christmas 1911, he told her also of the secret burden he carried with his father, the “hat-full of debts,” asking only that she keep this to herself since no one knew. Later, he said he had two reasons for wanting to be rich. The first was to pay his debts and build his mother a fine house. The second was to win her.

If only she cared a little, he would double his efforts “to amount to something.” Bessie replied saying that she and Mary Paxton had concluded that a woman should think seriously only of a man who could support her in style. Harry said he would take this as a sign of encouragement, whether she meant it that way or not.

He wanted so to live up to expectations, and his own most of all, but he didn’t know what to do with his life, what in the world to be. Like David Copperfield, he longed to know if he would turn out to be the hero of his own story.

He was pleased to learn that her mother admired his piano playing. (Mrs. Wallace herself was considered an accomplished pianist. In her youth she had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory.) “I really thought once I’d be an ivory tickler but I am glad my money ran out before I got too far,” Harry told Bess honestly. He had dropped out of the National Guard. Military life, too, had lost its pull: “I am like Mark Twain. He says that if fame is to be obtained only by marching to the cannon’s mouth, he’s perfectly willing to go there provided the cannon is empty….”

He had been offered a job running a small bank in the southern part of the county, but from what he had seen of bankers he had little heart for it. “You know a man has to be real stingy and save every one-cent stamp he can. Then sometimes he has to take advantage of adverse conditions and sell a good man out. That is one reason I like being a farmer. Even if you do have to work like a coon you know that you are not grinding the life out of someone else to live yourself.”

He admitted he was thinking about politics. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be like a Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday.” Mostly, he was restless.

With two other men from Grandview he went by train to South Dakota to take part in an Indian land lottery. At stations along the way people on the returning trains had shouted at them, “Sucker! Sucker!” Nothing came of the trip, or of another after it, to look at land in New Mexico, though he traveled some “mighty pretty country.” Approaching Santa Fe by train, up the valley of the Rio Grande, he saw a rainbow that held in the sky ahead for mile after mile. “I wanted to get off,” he wrote to her, “and chase the end of it down, thinking perhaps it really might be on a gold mine out here.”

She had lately told him Bessie was a name she no longer cared for. So his letters now began “Dear Bess,” though they closed as always, “Sincerely, Harry,” or sometimes, “Most sincerely, Harry.”

IV

The years Harry Truman spent on the farm were to be known as the golden age of American agriculture, with farm prices climbing steadily. If ever there was a time to have been a farmer, this was it. Wheat, corn, hay, everything was going higher—wheat was up to 90 cents a bushel in 1912—and for Harry and his father it meant continuously harder, longer days. Once in the summer of 1912 they spent twelve hours loading nearly three hundred bales of hay into a railroad car. It was the hottest work Harry had ever done. By sundown he was ready to collapse. But that night, seeing lightning on the horizon, his father insisted they go back out again and cover the hay that had still to be baled. They worked on in the dark, Harry handing 14-foot boards up to his father, who placed them on the top of the haystack—thirty-two 14-foot boards by Harry’s count.

John Truman bought more cows, more than doubling their herd, from thirty to eighty-two. “I have been working like Sam Hill this morning sowing wheat,” Harry informed Bess in a letter written in September 1913. “Papa has a fit every time I heave a one-hundred-pound sack of wheat…. Get to lay off the wheat this afternoon and pitch hay while they thresh.” That year they had enough hay for six hundred bales, and his father talked of a wheat crop for the next year of four hundred acres, enough, if all went well, to put them “out of the woods.” At night in the parlor, as Harry sat writing to Bess, his father would fall asleep in his chair.

It was a killing schedule Harry was keeping, with his work, his travels to Independence and Kansas City, his Lodge nights and letter writing. Though few sons were ever so dutiful, John accused him of losing interest in the farm and many mornings had trouble waking him. Once, when Harry missed his train and arrived home extremely late, he found his father still up and in a “terrible stew,” certain that something awful had happened to him. “He was sure I had been knocked on the head or fallen in the creek. When I told him I’d missed the car he had another fit….”

But Harry’s main concern was his father, who, he was sure, was working too hard. When he learned that John, through friends at the Independence Courthouse, was going after the job of road overseer for the southern half of Washington Township, which included Grandview, Harry had immediate misgivings. The upkeep and repair of country roads was a task performed by local men with their own teams of horses, either for hire or as a way to work off a six-dollar school tax. The work was never-ending and the job of overseer, an appointed political post, was one that paid two dollars a day and that almost nobody wanted. It was his father’s incurable love of politics that made him go after the job, Harry told Bess. “Politics is all he ever advises me to neglect the farm for.” If Harry could have his way, his father would have no part of it.

When John Truman got the job of overseer, others in Grandview took it as a sign that the Trumans were “strapped” and needed the money. John was considered a good man and a good neighbor. As Stephen Slaughter would recall, “I don’t think we would have traded him for anybody.” But by contrast to the Slaughters, the Trumans always seemed hardpressed financially. The Slaughter farm was not as large as the Truman farm, their land no better than the Truman land, yet the Slaughters prospered. O. V. Slaughter sent all eight of his children to college. “I never understood,” said Stephen years later. “They raised crops on that farm. We raised crops. They were always broke. We weren’t broke.”

Nonetheless, the improved quality of work on the roads under John Truman’s supervision was soon apparent. And with his father determined to keep the roads, no less than the farm, in prime condition, Harry thought he’d best help with the roads too. But should his father, on the strength of this job, decide to run for any other political office, Harry told Bess, then he, Harry, would go out and make speeches against him.

The truth was, Harry went on, warming to his subject, he was torn by his own yearnings. He wanted money, yet he knew it to be a less than satisfactory measure of success, let alone personal value. He saw the seductions and the pitfalls of politics. He knew it to be a dirty business and he scorned the kind of posturing it produced in some men. Yet the fascination remained. It was a remarkable letter:

Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man. Between hot air and graft he usually loses not only his head but his money and friends as well. Still, if I were real rich I’d just as soon spend my money buying votes and offices as yachts and autos. Success seems to me to be merely a point of view anyway. Some men have an idea that if they corner all the loose change they are self-made successful men. Makes no difference to them if they do eat beans off a knife or not know whether Napoleon was a man or a piece of silver.

Some others have a notion that if they can get high offices and hold up themselves as models of virtue to a gaping public in long-winded, high-sounding speeches that they have reached the highest pinnacle of success. It seems to me that the ability to hand out self-praise makes most men successes in their own minds anyway. Some of the world’s greatest failures are really greater than some of the other kind. To succeed financially a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egoist or a fool or a ward boss tool. To my notion, an ideal condition would be to have to work just enough so if you stopped you’d not go busted at once—but still you’d know if you didn’t work you couldn’t live. And then have your home and friends and pleasures regulated to your income, say a thousand a month. I am sure I’d be satisfied then to let vile ambition, political or monetary, starve at the gate.

When the newspaper in Belton called John Truman one of the “henchmen” of the Jackson County Court, John took off for Belton to “whip” the editor, but failed to find him, which Harry thought much for the best. “I told him that was a very mild remark and should be accepted as a compliment to a man who has a political job.” It was the first sign of John’s old temper in years and privately Harry appears to have been pleased.

He himself was known as the “mild-tempered” Truman. Through the furor over Grandma Young’s will, in the crossfire of charges and countercharges in court and out, Harry alone of the family seemed able to get along with everyone. He was the one person they could all talk to, the family peacemaker.

In September 1913 he made another try in an Indian land lottery, traveling this time farther from home than ever before, nearly to the Canadian border in northeastern Montana, in the company of a half-dozen other Grandview men, including his father. Harry loved these trips, but this one most of all. On a postcard to Ethel Noland mailed from Minneapolis, he said he was “feeling as good as an angel full of pie.”

Then, at long last, on a Sunday in November 1913, as Harry sat speechless, Bess said that if ever she married anyone it would be him. She wrote a letter to confirm the promise. They agreed they were secretly engaged. Harry was beside himself, “all puffed up and hilarious and happy.” She had made a confirmed optimist of him, he said. She called him an enigma. He said that sounded fine to him and especially coming from her, “for I always labored under the impression that it took smart people to be one.”

On a date in Kansas City, he took her to see Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian starring in a new show, The Girl from Utah, and held her hand as the handsome dark-haired leading man sang the show’s biggest hit, a song by Jerome Kern, “They’ll Never Believe Me.”

And when I tell them, and I’m certainly going to tell them,

That I’m the man whose wife one day you’ll be,

They’ll never believe me, they’ll never believe me,

That from this great big world you’ve chosen me.

There were no bounds now to his horizons. “How does it feel to be engaged to a clodhopper who has ambitions to be Governor of Montana and Chief Executive of the U.S.?” he inquired, the expansive aspirations intended as humor only. To his surprise, she wrote at once to say how much she cared for him. “I know your last letter word for word and then I read it some forty times a day,” he said. “Oh please send me another like it.” He thought perhaps he should put it in a safe deposit vault to keep from wearing it out.

You really didn’t know I had so much softness and sentimentality in me, did you? I’m full of it. But I’d die if I had to talk it. I can tell you on paper how much I love you and what one grand woman I think you, but to tell it to you I can’t. I’m always afraid I’d do it so clumsily you’d laugh…. I could die happy doing something for you. (Just imagine a guy with spectacles and a girl mouth doing the Sir Lancelot.) Since I can’t rescue you from any monster or carry you from a burning building or save you from a sinking ship—simply because I’d be afraid of the monsters, couldn’t carry you, and can’t swim—I’ll have to go to work and make money enough to pay my debts and then get you to take me for what I am: just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery, who’s anxious to be right. You’ll not have any trouble getting along with me for I’m awful good…. Do you suppose your mother’ll care for me well enough to have me in her family?

This last point was a large question indeed, for Madge Wallace remained, as would be said, a virtual “prisoner of shame” over her husband’s suicide and clung to Bess as a figure of strength greater than her own. She needed Bess quite as much as John Truman needed Harry. As the only daughter of an important family, Bess would have been a guarded “prize” even under normal circumstances. The prospects for a debt-ridden, farm-boy suitor would have been extremely remote, however persistent or well mannered he might be.

“Mrs. Wallace wasn’t a bit in favor of Harry,” remembered one of the Noland family, all of whom were strongly on Harry’s side. “And she says, ‘You don’t want to marry that farmer boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.’ And so she didn’t push it at all. She kind of tried to prevent it….”

Every call Harry made at 219 North Delaware Street could only have been a reminder of what distances remained between his world and hers. The etched glass in the front door, the plum-colored Brussels carpets, the good china and heavy lace curtains at the long parlor windows, the accepted use of silver dessert forks, the absence of any sign that survival meant hard physical labor day in, day out, the whole air of privacy, of unruffled comfort and stability, reflected a way of life totally apart from anything in his experience. (“We have moved around quite a bit and always the best people are hardest to know,” he once told Bess defensively.) Had he only to overcome the obvious differences in their station, he would have had an uphill haul, as he would have said. But the problem was greatly compounded by how Madge Wallace felt toward anyone or any cause that threatened to take Bess from her.

“Yes, it is true that Mrs. Wallace did not think Harry was good enough for Bess,” a member of the Wallace circle would comment with a smile sixty years afterward, her memory of it all quite clear. “But then, don’t you see, Mrs. Wallace didn’t think any man was good enough for Bess.”

In March 1914 his own mother suddenly took ill. The local doctor called in a specialist who decided that an operation for hernia must be performed and at once, there in the house. Harry had to stand beside her bed and hold a kerosene lamp while the doctor worked and “parts” were removed from his mother. It was, Harry said afterward, an experience he hoped he would never have to repeat.

Apologetically he told Bess he would be unable to leave home for several days. Mamma, as he had once written, was a person for whom there was no substitute. “I hope she lives to be a hundred and one.”

How direct a connection there was between his steadfast performance during the operation and afterward and the event that followed is not certain. But it was only a few weeks later when Mamma gave him the money to buy an automobile. And it was to be no farmer’s Model T Ford. If anyone had ever rewarded a son with one grand generous gesture, she had. Nothing could have pleased him more or made such an immediate difference in his life. He had never had anything of his own of such value or that drew such attention. He was to love automobiles all his life, but this was the automobile of his life.

It was a big, black, five-passenger 1911-model Stafford, hand-built in Kansas City by a man named Terry Stafford. Only three hundred of the cars were ever made. It had a four-cylinder engine, right-hand drive, a high brass-framed windshield, and Presto-Lite lamps nearly the size of the lamps on locomotives. On a good road, Harry soon demonstrated, it could do 60 miles an hour. It was a rich man’s car. New, it sold for $2,350. Harry paid $650. The house needed paint; payments on loans and the cost of the lawsuit over his grandmother’s will had stretched the family’s finances to the limit. From all practical viewpoints such an automobile was a huge extravagance—$650 would have been more than enough to pay for two hired men for a year—but to Harry $650 for such an automobile was a “bargain.” While not the first in Grandview, it was certainly the fanciest. In Independence, not even George Porterfield Gates had anything like it. With a little work on the engine, Harry found, he could go up Dodson Hill—considered the great test locally—so fast he had to shut off the power before reaching the crest.

He could come and go as he pleased now, and mostly it was go, on Blue Ridge Boulevard to Independence. Rolling through the shaded streets of Independence on a spring Sunday, wearing a sporty new cap, a fresh white shirt and proper Sunday necktie, the top down on the car, its brass all polished, he would never be taken for a hayseed. Bess and three or four others would pile into the “machine,” off with him for an afternoon of fishing on Blue River or a picnic at the waterworks beside the Missouri at Sugar Creek. Or Harry would treat them to “a spin” in the country.

He had a gang again, as he had not since boyhood. Besides Bess and the Noland sisters, there were Bess’s two brothers Frank and George and their best girls, Natalie Ott and May Southern. Harry and his car were the center of attention. They would all pose for pictures with the car, Harry at the wheel. Harry was always good company, said May Southern, who would soon marry Bess’s brother George. Harry, she said a lifetime later, never complained about anything unless there were onions in the potato salad. “Harry didn’t like onions.”

Uncle Harrison also enjoyed “a spin” with the top down, in any weather. One expedition for his benefit was to Monegaw Springs, an old Missouri spa about eighty miles from Grandview. Mamma, too, had insisted on going along for the ride in Lizzie, as Harry was calling the car by this time.

I started for Monegaw Springs on Sunday [he began a memorable account for Bess]. Mamma went along and we almost reached the springs without an accident. We got within a half mile of them and ran over a stump. I spilled Uncle Harry over the front seat and threw Mamma over my own head. Neither of them were hurt, except Uncle Harry renewed his profane vocabulary. I backed Lizzie off the stump and ran her into town with a badly bent axle. Mamma and I started for home at 6:00 A.M. on Monday. Got within seventy-five miles of it and it began to rain. Had the nicest slipping time you ever saw. What with a crooked axle and a bent steering wheel I could hardly stay in the road. Five miles south of Harrisonville Lizzie took a header for the ditch and got there, smashing a left front wheel into kindling. I phoned to Ferson and he sent me his front wheel. The accident happened within a half mile of a R.R. station, Lone Tree by name. Mamma and I sat there from 1:30 till 8:00 P.M. waiting for the wheel. It arrived all right and I couldn’t get it on. Then it began to rain in real earnest. I got soaked. A good farmer came and took us up to his house and we stayed all night. Next morning he hitched his team to Lizzie and pulled her out of the ditch. (I had tried to put the wheel on wrong end to, the night before.) He would not have a cent for keeping me nor pulling the car out. We started for Harrisonville and got about five miles north of there when we ran through a puddle and got the mag wet. Had to phone back to Harrisonville and get a man to come and tear it up—cost a five-dollar bill. Another good farmer took us to dinner free. Finally got to Grandview at 3:00 P.M.…

Mary Jane had spoken up, saying she wanted driving lessons—“I guess I’ll have to do it, though,” said Harry reluctantly, “since Mamma paid for the thing.” When Mary Jane crashed into the front gate, Harry was thankful it was only the gate she hit and not the stone post.

In three months he drove 5,000 miles. Not since his first pair of eyeglasses had anything so changed his life, and again it was Mamma who made it happen. Her decision was also, of course, a way of telling him she approved of his reason for wishing to be on the road. If Bess Wallace was what he wanted, she would do what she could to see nothing stood in the way.

In time, Papa, too, declared himself “well pleased” with the purchase and by midsummer would “raise a rumpus” for Harry to drive him out to survey the roads. “Imagine working the roads in a machine,” Harry wrote.

But by midsummer 1914, the summer the Great War began in Europe, it had become apparent that something was seriously the matter with John Truman. He had strained himself sometime earlier, exactly as he had so often warned Harry not to. Trying to move a boulder from one of the roads, the hard, stubborn little man had refused to give up and so had been done in by a stone in the path, like some figure in a parable.

Though the pain persisted, he refused to see the specialists, as Matt had, fearing an operation. By Labor Day an X-ray revealed that a severe hernia was causing an intestinal block. John was told he had to decide between surgery or the grave. He had already lost a great deal of weight and looked dreadful.

“If anyone asks him how he’s feeling,” wrote Harry, “he always says fine, even if he can’t raise up his head.” Fearing the worst, Harry urged the operation as the only choice left.

The automobile now became the means for getting his father to and from the doctor in Kansas City, who was a Chinese, the supposed family hatred of Orientals notwithstanding. Harry worried continually. He didn’t see how he could ever get by without his father, he confessed to Bess. “You know he is sixty-three and an operation at that age is nearly always fatal.”

Harry ran the farm, took over the road work, and drove John to the doctor as often as four times a week. He wondered if the fates were conspiring against him, he told Bess, but her “good letters” helped “put that backbone into me to accomplish what I’ve set out to do in spite of the devil and all his angels.” Some evenings his father could hardly talk and Mamma, as she had never done before, asked Harry to forgo the trips to Independence. Meantime, it was essential that Harry “make things hum” and get in 200 acres of wheat.

The operation on John Truman was performed at the Swedish Hospital in Kansas City in October. Bess sent flowers, which greatly pleased Harry and his father, who refused to let the nurse throw them away until they were entirely gone. John returned home, but Harry knew he could not last long. Word of his condition spread and neighbors began to call.

“I remember the Sunday afternoon Father and Mother drove over to the Truman home to visit him,” wrote Stephen Slaughter. “It was known at the time that Mr. Truman had only a short time to live. And I remember the sadness Father and Mother felt after the visit.” Full of despair, John had said he was a failure in life. “Father had given him what comfort he could,” Stephen remembered. John was told what a good neighbor he had been. He was reminded of the friends he had made, the useful work he had done, the fine family he had raised. Undoubtedly Harry was present as his father talked of his failure, for by this time Harry was rarely away from his father’s side.

John Truman died the morning of Monday, November 2, 1914.

“I was with him,” Harry said years later. “I had been sitting with him and watching a long time. I nodded off. When I woke up he was dead.”

Brownie Huber, the hired man, who was also at the house, recalled: “Harry and I often got up real early and very quietly so as not to awaken his mother and sister. He would make biscuits, cook oatmeal and fry eggs. That is the way it was the morning his father died. I was eating breakfast while Harry went in to stay with the old gentleman, when he appeared at the door and said, ‘Dad just passed away.’ ”

The day of the funeral, schools were closed in Grandview. Friends came to the service at the house from everywhere in the county. Their buggies and horses and Model T’s were drawn up all along the drive beneath the bare trees. A headline in the Independence Examiner reported the loss of “An Upright Citizen Whose Death Will Be a Blow to His Community.” Burial was at the old Forest Hill Cemetery in Kansas City, at the brow of a slope beside the graves of Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young.

To Bess, Harry wrote: “I have quite a job on my hands now…. You know, I’ve been in the habit of running the farm for some time, but Papa always made it go.”

V

If it was sure-enough war, wheat would go higher still, farmers had been saying all summer. And then it had come, in the first week of August, when sixty thousand German troops crossed into Belgium at Liège. The papers were filled with war news and as Willa Gather would write, even to “quiet wheat-growing people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of unforeseeable natural disaster….” By September the German armies had swept through Belgium and into France as far as the Marne River, where the French were making a heroic stand.

To Harry, with his sense of history, his fascination with military heroes, his previous part in the National Guard, all this, presumably, should have been of greatest interest. But the letters he wrote said nothing of the war. Even after his worries and grief over his father had passed, the subject of the world at large received no mention. To judge by what he was writing to Bess Wallace, little beyond his own immediate life ever drew his attention or thoughts from the time he first began corresponding with her in 1910. The only exception was the presidential contest of 1912 that elected Woodrow Wilson, the first Democrat to win the presidency since Grover Cleveland, and to Harry, a great man. If he was at all concerned about what was happening in France, or perceived any connection between the war headlines in the papers and his own fate, he gave no sign of it except once, two years later, when he told Bess he had had a dream. He had fallen from a plane over France and wound up in a hospital crying because he couldn’t see her.

As it was, he had plenty to think about. He felt the responsibility of the farm keenly and “gave it everything he had,” as his sister later said. “I almost got done planting corn this evening…. I was in the field at six o’clock and quit at seven. Nearly a day’s work,” he informed Bess in April 1915. “…I’ve simply got to make things come across this year if I have to work night and day.” He worried about the weather. He worried about his debts. He worried that the men would never work for him as they had for his father.

He kept on as road overseer for another six months, until a rival faction took over at the Independence Courthouse and he was out. From February to August he also served as postmaster in Grandview, though in name only, since he left the work to an assistant, a widow, who he thought needed the money more than he did.

He was up with the sun every morning, still, even with Papa gone. Early morning was the best time for “solid thinking,” he liked to say. He was thirty years old. He had been on the farm eight years, or more than a quarter of his life. He had lost none of his devotion to the family, or his determination to win Bess Wallace, or his good humor. (She must send him another picture of herself soon, he said, so he could have one downstairs as well as up. “It’s right unhandy to chase upstairs every day to see how you look.”) Yet his restlessness was greater than ever. He hated his “slow progress” at home, even with the rise in farm prices. He had reached a point, in fact, where he might have gone off in any of several directions with his life, given the opportunity.

With Uncle Harry in tow, he traveled to Texas hoping to entice him into some land speculation. The trip, like his earlier ones, came to nothing. Involved next in a zinc mine in Oklahoma, he told Bess, “There’s no one wants to win half so badly as I do.” He pictured the two of them in an ideal country house and the thought made the delays nearly unbearable. “Then I wake up and see our old house going to wreck for want of paint and repairs because I must pay interest on a debt I had no hand in making and my dream has to keep waiting.”

When the suit over his grandmother’s will was settled at last, after six years, his mother wound up no better off than before. She won the case and kept the farm, but what money came of it was consumed in lawyers’ fees. Even before John Truman’s death she had been forced to put another mortgage on the land. To pay off doctors’ bills and funeral expenses, Harry had to sell some Black Angus cattle he had only recently acquired. Now, along with Uncle Harry, his mother was advancing him money for his zinc-mine venture, which infuriated Vivian, who thought Harry had already been given quite enough and would be better off paying attention to the farm.

Vivian proved correct. The zinc mine was Harry’s first big experience with failure of his own doing.

The mine was located at a point called Commerce in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, just over the Missouri line, and 192 miles from Grandview. If the weather was right, the roads passable, and provided he had no blowouts and succeeded in fording four river bottoms, he could make it in the Stafford, he claimed, in seven hours. More often he took the train.

“This place down here is certainly one beyond the limit,” he wrote from Commerce early in 1916. “When it rains there is water six inches deep over everything. When it’s dry the dust is as deep over everything.” He was homesick, lonesome, yet expecting to be “on velvet” before long. Someday, he vowed, he would have a Pierce Arrow.

“I don’t suppose I’d ever have been real pleased if I hadn’t tried just once to get rich quickly,” he would tell Bess before it was over.

He had put up several thousand dollars to go into partnership with two brother Masons, Thomas Hughes, a Grandview farmer, and a Kansas City promoter named Jerry Culbertson, neither of whom knew any more about mining than he did. They called themselves the T-H-C Mining Company and bought what was known as the Eureka Mine at Commerce, hoping to cover their start-up expenses with the waste ore that had been left lying about above ground by the previous owner. Their troubles began almost immediately. The superintendent they hired turned out to be a crook. A rival group shut off the water needed for processing the ore. Equipment failed. Meantime, Harry kept shunting back and forth to Grandview, often twice a week, trying to hold things together at both ends.

Jerry Culbertson had no interest in the day-to-day operations of the mine, and when lightning struck Tom Hughes’s barn at Grandview, burning it to the ground, Hughes refused to give any more of his time, leaving the job to Harry, whose outlook swung from “blue-sky” confidence to abject gloom and back again. It was proving a liberal and expensive education, he observed during one of his high points. Of necessity he became a mechanic, mine superintendent, night watchman, and, above all, “official straightener” of mix-ups. He had never worked so hard or worried so much. And he refused to give up. “I can’t possibly lose forever,” he wrote plaintively to Bess. He had put Mary Jane in charge at home, but the hired men resented taking orders from a woman. When two of them quit, Harry had to catch the next train.

He saw his money vanishing. On May 19, 1916, feeling unusually sorry for himself after a trying day at Grandview, he wrote Bess a letter of a kind she had not seen before. He had begun to think his knack for failure was hereditary:

The mine has gone by the board. I have lost out on it entirely. If Uncle Harry had not been sick I should have gone down there Tuesday evening. It is a setback from which I don’t suppose I shall very soon recover. If I don’t lose all the livestock I have, it will only be because I shall turn it over to Mamma. I shall join the class who can’t sign checks of their own I suppose. It is a hard nut to crack but it had to be done. There was never one of our name who had sense enough to make money. I am no exception.

I shall endeavor to make the farm go as usual but I’ll have to stay on it. My finances are completely exhausted…. You would do better perhaps if you pitch me into the ash heap and pick someone with more sense and ability and not such a soft head.

Then, after a good night’s sleep, his first in a long while, he assured her he was as hopeful as ever. He could “continue business as Harry Truman yet.” Frank Blair at the Belton Bank had come to the rescue with a loan, after telling Harry what a mistake he had made ever getting involved with Culbertson. How would Bess like coming in as a partner and help run the mine, Harry wanted to know.

“It’s about 110 degrees in the shade all the time down here,” he wrote from Commerce in July. “We also have a very active brand of mosquitoes. They work all night every night. The flies work in daytime.” It was the summer of the battles of Verdun and the Somme.

“Wish heavy for me to win,” he told her. “Keep wishing me luck because it means everything to me,” he urged again in August.

He wanted to buy an engagement ring but felt he must hold off because buying it with borrowed money would be bad luck. His luck, their luck, the will of the Fates, were all uppermost in his mind. He talked of opening a Ford agency in Commerce, certain now that that was the path to fortune.

The zinc mine closed that September of 1916. By November Harry was in the business of buying and selling oil leases, out of an office in Kansas City. Again he had gone in with Jerry Culbertson, despite Frank Blair’s warning, despite what he must have known himself from the experience at Commerce. But he was after the main chance now, as much as ever John Truman had been. The third partner in this new venture, David Morgan, later said it was actually the gamble of the business—the “hazard”—that appealed to Harry. Morgan, an Oklahoma lawyer and oil man, also knew what he was doing, as Harry appreciated.

Harry put in $5,000—five notes for $1,000 due in ten months, these, according to the contract, to be “signed also by Martha E. Truman, the mother of said Harry S. Truman.” She urged him to keep her father in mind, rather than his father. Grandpa Young, she said, had been wiped out three times that she knew of, but he “came up every time with something else.” Grandpa Young, the family success, the strong, self-made man who had never given up trying, was the example to take heart from.

Morgan was the president of what became the Morgan Oil & Refining Company. Culbertson handled sales and promotion. Harry was treasurer and so listed on the firm’s new stationery. However, a bookkeeper named Brelsford later said Harry’s real specialty was seeing people. “Truman was surrounded by people, people, people. Salesmen, lease men, lease owners, scouts, and what-have-you. Morgan had his duties, but he shoved quite a burden of seeing people over to Mr. Truman.”

Though he appears to have made no sales himself, Harry had become a boomer. “If this venture blows, I’ll know I’m hoodooed,” he told Bess, who was among those who bought stock.

If Harry had no premonitions about American involvement in the European war, Culbertson was banking on it. “In the event this country is unfortunately brought to war,” said a newspaper advertisement written by Culbertson, “the absolute necessity of gasoline and other byproducts of crude petroleum are bound to come to such urgent demand that the price will soar beyond all expectations….”

Morgan was convinced that fortunes were waiting beneath the farmlands of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The company leased thousands of acres in all three states and in Louisiana as well. But then in April 1917 Woodrow Wilson was calling on Congress for a declaration of war and the war, rather than bringing a bonanza to Morgan Oil & Refining, eventually finished it off. There was no manpower to pursue oil, investors disappeared, the company went out of business. Only later was it discovered that one of their leases in southeastern Kansas was part of the famous Teeter Pool, a supply of oil that would have made millions for the company and its officers had they just drilled deeper.

Bess, like other investors in the venture, lost all she had put in, while Harry seems to have come out even. How much he lost altogether in the zinc mine is unclear. He said $11,000 at the time, but later gave a figure of $7,500. Either way it was a lot of money and all of it borrowed money. If his part in his father’s debts was $12,000—the figure he once confided to Bess—then possibly his total indebtedness by this time was $23,000. Perhaps not coincidentally, Matt put another mortgage of $25,000 on the farm in 1917.

Yet as bad as Harry felt about all this—and he could get extremely blue—the farm, mortgages and all, meant security as almost nothing else could have. Good years brought a clear income of maybe $4,000, at a time when the average working family earned less than $1,000. Exceptional years might mean $7,000, and apparently the Trumans had a few such years.

Further, the farm now belonged solely to the Trumans. The previous summer of 1916, Uncle Harrison had died, leaving all of his part to Matt and her children. In plain monetary terms they were sitting on a fortune. The price of wheat in 1916 hit a new high of $1.65 a bushel. Good land in Jackson County by 1917 was selling for $200 an acre. At the least the farm was worth $100,000, but it might have sold for twice that. Matt had no intention of selling any of it. Still, there it was if troubles came, and it was in prime shape still, since, as their neighbors so often said, the Trumans were good farmers.

Ethel Noland, who understood Harry as well as anyone, said she knew all along he was never meant for a farmer. And clearly he knew it, too. Yet he had held on for ten years, doing his share and more. He had also discovered in Commerce, Oklahoma, that between farming and zinc mining, he would take farming.

Much later he would remember the years on the farm as invaluable experience. He would talk of the drudgery, and he would call it the best time he ever had in his life. A farm gave a person time alone to himself, which he liked and needed, for all his enjoyment and need of people. “Riding one of these plows all day, day after day, gives one time to think,” he would say, reminiscing long afterward. “I’ve settled all the ills of mankind in one way or other while riding along….”

As would be said later in newspaper articles, he never lost the farm habits of early rising and hard work. His mother would say the farm was where Harry got his common sense. “It takes pride to run a farm same as anything else,” he would tell her, sounding very like his father.

4

Soldier

It is the great adventure, and I am in it.

—CAPTAIN HARRY TRUMAN, AEF

I

The war in Europe that changed the world in such drastic fashion need hardly have concerned Harry Truman of Grandview, Missouri, much beyond what he might have read in the Kansas City papers or some of his favorite magazines. Had he chosen, he could have played no part in it, and nobody would have expected him to have done otherwise. He turned thirty-three the spring of 1917, which was two years beyond the age limit set by the new Selective Service Act. He had been out of the National Guard for nearly six years. His eyes were far below the standard requirements for any of the armed services. And he was the sole supporter of his mother and sister. As a farmer, furthermore, he was supposed to remain on the farm, as a patriotic duty. Upon the farmers of the country, said President Woodrow Wilson, rested the fate of the war and thus the fate of the nation and the world.

So Harry might have stayed where he was for any of several reasons. That he chose to go, almost from the moment of Wilson’s call to Congress for a declaration of war in April 1917, was his own doing entirely and the turning point in his life. He left the responsibility for the farm and care of his mother to his sister Mary Jane, who, later, would say simply and dutifully, “We got through,” but whose own life as a consequence was not to be the same.

She had grown into an attractive young woman with a bright smile and even disposition. Some people thought her the best looking and, overall, the most appealing of the Trumans. In a studio photograph made for Harry to take with him to war, she posed in a big picture hat with an expression that seemed to combine both strength and gentleness. She was twenty-eight the summer he left for Camp Doniphan. She was still unmarried and without serious prospects for marriage, but popular. From that point on, she was to have little life of her own or any society much beyond Grandview. The worries and responsibilities that had weighed so heavily on Harry since their father’s death were all now hers, and she would be more alone than ever he had been, a point he seems to have felt deeply after a time. “It was quite a blow to my mother and sister,” he conceded years afterward. His idealism and “overzealous conduct” got him “into things” before he had a chance to realize what the consequences might be to others. Mary Jane, who adored him, also thought he had grown a bit self-preoccupied and conceited.

Bess Wallace’s response to his decision was to say they should be married at once. Harry, almost unimaginably, said no. She must not tie herself to a man who could come home a cripple or not at all, he said. They would wait until he came home whole.

In an effort to explain why he went, he offered most of the reasons given by hundreds of thousands of American men in that emotionally charged time. He still disliked guns, he had never been in a fight of any kind or risked his life over anything. But it was “a job somebody had to do.” It would make a man of him. He would not be a “slacker” no matter what, however old, blind, or untried he might be, and no one who understood him or cared for him should expect otherwise. Besides, he would say, there wasn’t a German bullet made for him and the war would soon be over, once Americans were in the fight. He would remember feeling “we owed France something for Lafayette,” and being “stirred heart and soul” by the war messages of Woodrow Wilson. Greatest of all was the sense of joining in a noble crusade across the sea, “over there” in old Europe.

Over there. Over there.

Send the word, send the word over there,

That the Yanks are coming…

He played it now on the piano, along with the other rousing and sentimental songs—“Good-bye Broadway, Hello France,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” Trying long afterward to describe the emotions of the time, he would stress that most Americans responded as he did, “stirred by the same flame that stirred me in those great days.”

The hard truth was that human beings had never been slaughtered in such numbers or so rapidly as in this hideous war. Nor with less to show for it. The machine gun, automatic rifles, massed artillery, poison gas, flamethrowers, the airplane, and the tank made a mockery of old-style textbook stratagems and old-style battlefield heroics. In the previous year, 1916, there had been 2 million casualties on the Western Front, the line of battle that reached all the way from the North Sea to the Swiss border, 350 miles in length, and despite such appalling butchery the line had hardly moved either way. In just four months at the Battle of the Somme, between July and October 1916, the Germans alone lost more men than were killed in all four years of the American Civil War. That spring of 1917, as Harry Truman, feeling “all patriotic,” helped organize a new Missouri artillery battery, a frontal assault by the British at Ypres gained 7,000 yards at a cost of 160,000 dead and wounded in five days.

Initially, the common view had been that the fighting wouldn’t last long. It was a war that would be quickly over. But from the summer of 1914 the slaughter had continued year after year, consuming a whole generation of English, Scots, French, and Germans. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,” Woodrow Wilson had said, stating the harsh reality, in his famous war message. Yet it was a war like the Civil War, the imagined pageantry of bright legions and banners flying, and such ringing words as Pétain’s at Verdun, “They shall not pass,” that stirred the souls of the young Americans signing up to “make the world safe for democracy,” the noble phrase of Wilson’s that people remembered above all.

Harry Truman felt, he later said, as if he were “Galahad after the Grail, and I’ll never forget how my love cried on my shoulder when I told her I was going. That was worth a lifetime on this earth.”

His convictions made him an effective recruiter. He painted the Stafford automobile bright red and went dashing about Kansas City in it wearing his new uniform. He lived in uniform. Nothing even remotely so exciting had ever happened to him before. Every day had focus now.

He had little trouble rejoining the National Guard and went immediately to work organizing a new artillery battery, Battery F, expecting to be made a sergeant. Instead, he was elected a first lieutenant, officers in the Guard then still being chosen by the men as in Civil War days. It was one of life’s great moments. He had never been elected anything until now.

Drilling began in May in the streets of Kansas City across from Union Station and inside Convention Hall. When the 2nd Missouri Field Artillery, as they were known, became the 129th Field Artillery of the 60th Brigade attached to the 35th Division, Harry had to face a regular Army physical for the first time. He was stripped, weighed, measured, examined for hernia, gonorrhea, piles, fallen arches, and defects of vision. He managed to pass the eye examination, according to his brother Vivian, by memorizing the chart. (Harry, Vivian liked to say, couldn’t see over the fence without his glasses.) The actual record of the examination shows that Harry had uncorrected vision of 20/50 in the right eye, 20/400 in the left eye, which theoretically meant he was blind in the left eye.

According to the same record he also stood 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 151 pounds, which made him 10 pounds heavier and an inch taller than the average recruit. His chest measured 33 inches “at expiration,” 37 inches “at inspiration.” All else was categorized “normal.”

The first units of the American Expeditionary Forces were by now in France, under the command of General John J. Pershing, who as every true son of Missouri knew was Missouri born and raised. On July 4, 1917, when Harry turned up at Bess Wallace’s house in full uniform, sporting silver spurs and a riding crop, American infantry of the 1st Division were parading through Paris to a tumultuous welcome.

In September Harry was on his way to Doniphan, a huge new tent encampment on a windswept plain adjacent to Fort Sill, at Lawton, Oklahoma, within the old Comanche Indian Reservation. There was not a tree, and Lawton, a prairie tank town, was twenty miles away. Except for some barren hills to the west, the hard country was as flat as a tabletop. Approaching trains could be seen for miles. The camp had been named for Alexander Doniphan, a Mexican War hero who had led a band of eight hundred Missouri volunteers on one of the longest marches in military history, more than 3,000 miles from Santa Fe to El Paso to Chihuahua to Buena Vista, while defeating several larger Mexican forces en route.

Reveille was at 5:45, breakfast at 6:30 A.M. Drill began at 7:30. Nights were surprisingly cold and the wind that blew almost constantly day or night was described in one formal account as “misery-producing.” “It was sure enough cold and still is,” Harry recorded early in October. Soon the dust storms struck. “A tent fifty yards away is invisible. Dust in my teeth, eyes, hair, nose, and down my neck.” The men were saying they would give Oklahoma to the Germans and call it even. On the rare days when the wind didn’t blow, Harry reported, “we are all very happy.”

The truth was he was happy under nearly any conditions. Bess was not to worry for a minute. He was too busy to be down in spirits or getting into any “meanness,” he told her, by which he seems to have meant troubles with women of the kind soldiers were known to be susceptible to. (In one letter he said she need not worry about him thinking of anyone but her, since there were only Indians in Lawton and “ugly ones at that,” but then, thinking better of what he had written, he quickly added that it wouldn’t matter if “all the Lillian Russells and Pauline Fredericks in this Republic were down here for I don’t like but one style of beauty and that’s yours.”)

His duties with the men included instruction in the handling of horses—about which he knew more than most new officers—trench-digging exercises, and artillery training with 3-inch guns which were few in number. He tried to accustom himself to thinking and figuring in the metric system. Most artillery terms were already familiar from his earlier days in the Guard: Defilade, “Protection from view by an object in front, such as a hill, a wood or building….” Enfilade, “To rake a line lengthwise from the side, by rifle or shell fire….” Field of fire, “The area which is within range of a gun or battery and not protected by intervening obstructions or defilade.” He stood inspection, played his part on the drill field. “I have been squads east and squads sideways, arms up and hands down until I can’t open my mouth without telling someone to straighten up and get in step.” He could march perfectly at the prescribed cadence of 120 steps a minute, 32 inches per stride. He was also acquiring an ability to curse like Captain Kidd, he said, and wondered if he might sometime have to face a high reckoning for it.

Each evening officers assembled for “school” on artillery fire and field service regulations, or to hear someone report on operations in France. “I learned how to say Verdun, Vosges, and Belgium, also camouflage,” he wrote after a lecture from a French officer. Another night, having listened to an English colonel who had been on the Western Front, he wrote to Bess, “He made us feel we were fighting for you and mother earth and I am of the same belief. I wouldn’t be left out of the greatest history-making epoch the world has ever seen for all there is to live for….”

In a twenty-four-hour exercise under “actual battlefield conditions,” he spent a night in the trenches and observed for the first time the famous rapid-firing French 75 in action. At special instructions on gas protection, he learned to put on a mask, then sat in a so-called “gas house” for ten minutes. When a rainstorm in January 1918 turned to snow to sleet to the worst blizzard he had ever seen, it made him think of Grandpa Young and all he had endured on the plains. For weeks the temperature stayed at zero or below. The bread froze and had to be cut with a saw. He was still living in a tent, heated by a Sibley stove of the kind used by the Army in the time of the Plains Indian wars.

After a day on horseback in February he decided he must be getting pretty tough, since he wasn’t the least tired. To find he could also make men “toe the line” seems to have come as an even greater revelation.

In addition to his regular duties, he had been assigned to run the regimental canteen—a dispensary for candy, sodas, cigarettes, tobacco, shoelaces, writing paper—and it was this that soon made him known to nearly everyone in camp. (Virgil Thomson, the future composer, who had also enlisted in the 129th and was at Doniphan at the same time, would remember Lieutenant Truman years later as “one of our most effective officers.”) To help make the operation a financial success (as most Army canteens were not) Harry took on a partner, Sergeant Edward Jacobson, a former clerk in a Kansas City clothing store. “I have a Jew in charge of the canteen by the name of Jacobson and he is a crackerjack,” he told Bess, as if that were all the reason anyone would need to expect a profitable outcome. And it was indeed Jacobson who ran things, as Harry was always first to acknowledge.

They became fast friends. “Each day Harry would write a letter to his girl, Bess Wallace,” Jacobson remembered, “and I would write one to my sweetheart Bluma Rosenbaum…and when I went into town [to replenish supplies], I would mail them.” Harry had brought the Stafford to camp and had it stripped down to serve as a truck. The bright red car, with Truman at the wheel, Jacobson beside him, became a familiar sight rolling through camp, trailing a column of dust.

To finance the canteen every man in the regiment was assessed $2, which produced an instant capitalization of $2,200. In no time Truman and Jacobson had a “grand, rushing” business, taking in $500 to $900 a day. A barbershop and a tailor shop were added. After six months business was so successful overall that the canteen paid dividends of $10,000, which made Truman and Jacobson extremely popular and led them to conclude they were an unbeatable business combination. Some of the other officers began kidding Harry, calling him a “lucky Jew” and “Trumanheimer.” “I guess I should be very proud of my Jewish ability,” he said.

His one private worry was that he might somehow fail to measure up as an officer and be disqualified and disgraced. Rumors of an imminent departure for France had by now become commonplace. Faced with another physical exam and a doctor who twice refused to pass him because of his eyes, Harry simply kept talking until the doctor relented. He supposed he could put on a “real good conversation when circumstances demand it,” he told Bess. But it had been a close call.

He missed her terribly. “Jacobson says he’d go into the guardhouse thirty days for one night on Twelfth Street. I’d go for forty days if I could see you thirty minutes.” After a flying visit to Independence during which he was able to see her for little more than an hour, he wrote, “I didn’t know how crazy I was about you until I went to leave.” His letters, however, carried none of the old anguish over what he might make of himself in life. There was no more self-doubt, or self-pity over his supposedly bad Truman luck. Except for an attack of what he discreetly described as “indigestion,” he remained in perfect health, and even the indigestion ended quickly when a young Catholic chaplain, Father L. Curds Tiernan, came to the rescue with a bottle of whiskey.

Sergeant Jacobson and Father Tiernan were among the half dozen or so he counted now as his real pals. The others were fellow officers, including three from Independence, Edgar Hinde, Spencer Salisbury, and Roger Sermon. Another, James M. Pendergast, was the nephew of the Kansas City politician T.J. Pendergast. When Lieutenant Pendergast was called before a board of inquiry after the death of three of his men in the explosion of a live shell they had found on the reservation, it was Lieutenant Truman, as a member of the board, who did the most to defend him and to see that he was exonerated.

It was also at Harry’s urging that two of his superior officers, Colonel Karl D. Klemm and Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Danford, joined the Masons and this, too, he felt, helped greatly to expand his influence. Both Klemm and Danford were West Point graduates, Class of 1905, which would have been Harry’s class had he been admitted to the Academy. Klemm, a Kansas City man, was efficient, humorless, and, like Harry, had been elected to his position. Considered a strict, “Prussian type” officer, he would, as time went on, cause Harry and others considerable grief. “We elected Klemm and then were sorry we had,” Harry later admitted.

Danford, by striking contrast, had all the qualities in a leader that Harry most admired and hoped to cultivate in himself. Danford knew what he was talking about (he had helped write the artillery manual), and while an exacting disciplinarian, he knew also to treat those under him with kindness and understanding. Though Harry would serve under Danford but briefly, and only in training, he was never to forget him and the example he set. “He taught me more about handling men and the fundamentals of artillery fire in six weeks than I’d learned in the six months I’d been going over to the school of fire and attending the regimental schools.” While other instructors seemed determined to make a dark mystery of the mathematics involved, Danford, who had taught military science at Yale, emphasized that the point was to make the projectile hit the target. That Danford was among the few officers who also wore, eyeglasses must have provided still further reason to admire him.

The closest friend, however, was First Lieutenant Ted Marks, who was nothing like the rest of the Missouri men, but an Englishman with what seemed a natural military bearing, a pleasant, open face, and protruding ears. Two years older than Harry, Marks was a Kansas City tailor in civilian life whose beautiful custom-made suits sold for as much as $75. He had been born in Liverpool, ran away from home at age sixteen, and served three years in the Grenadier Guards before coming to America. He and Harry had first met more than ten years earlier, in 1906, when Marks walked into the National Guard offices to join up and found a bespectacled young corporal named Truman officiating behind the desk. As Marks would always remember, Harry had asked him how long he had been in the country. Marks said six months and Harry responded, “You speak pretty good English for the time you’ve been here,” which led Marks to wonder what sort of a country he had come to after all.

On one of the bitterest of Camp Doniphan’s bitter cold days, Marks, Truman, and another lieutenant, Newell Paterson, went for examination for promotion before General Lucian D. Berry, a hard-bitten old Army martinet who, with his big mustache, looked like a figure out of a Frederic Remington painting, and had a reputation for chewing up National Guard officers. By his lights, they were no better than “political officers,” unworthy of rank or respect. Once, when Truman’s captain, also a Guard officer, submitted an efficiency report full of praise for Harry Truman and recommending promotion, General Berry sent it back with the comment, “No man can be that good.”

The three lieutenants stood in the numbing cold outside Berry’s office waiting their turns. The temperature was near zero. When Lieutenant Paterson was called first, Marks and Truman remained standing for another hour and a half. When Harry’s turn came, the general and three colonels took him “over the jumps” for more than an hour, Berry becoming so loud and rough that Harry had trouble remembering anything. If he had the right answer, it only made Berry more angry. If he was unable to answer at all, Berry would stalk up and down the room pulling on his mustache and shouting, “Ah, you don’t know, do you?” or, “It would be a disaster to the country to let you command men!”

Harry came out flushed and angry and fearing the worst. Then, because it was nearly the lunch hour, Marks was kept only thirty minutes. As it turned out, all three lieutenants were passed, though Harry was not to learn of his promotion for another several months. He was told only that he and Paterson would be going overseas in advance of the others, as part of a select group of ten officers and one hundred men to be given further training in France, which he knew to be a high commendation.

“I suppose you will have to spend the rest of your life taking the conceit out of me,” he wrote Bess. “Mary is fully convinced that I am overloaded with it, although I never thought so.”

On the eve of departure, not knowing what else to do about his automobile, he sold it for $200.

The night of March 19, 1918, he was “moving out at last,” by troop train, the ride so rough he could hardly complete his letter to Bess. “I’d give anything in the world to see you and Mamma and Mary before I go across,” he wrote. “…You can write me Detachment 35th Division, 129th F.A., Camp Merritt, New Jersey, and I’ll probably get it.” When the train stopped briefly in the Kansas City yards, he was out of the car in an instant, running down the tracks in the dark looking for a telephone. A switchman in a shed told him to help himself. “The phone’s yours,” Harry would long remember the man saying. “But if she doesn’t break the engagement at four o’clock in the morning, she really loves you.”

On leave in New York before sailing, he and four other officers put up at the McAlpin Hotel on Broadway, and “did the town” as best they could in the little time available. They saw a vaudeville show at the Winter Garden, rode the subway, walked up Broadway after dark, up Fifth Avenue the next morning. By high-speed elevator they went to the top of the fifty-eight-story Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest skyscraper. They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, ate in a Chinese restaurant. Harry, who had expected to be overwhelmed with admiration for New York, found it all very much overrated. The show at the Winter Garden was a flat disappointment. The celebrated lights on Broadway looked no different to him than those on 12th Street in Kansas City. The McAlpin was no better than Kansas City’s Muehlebach (which he spelled Muleback). And besides there were too many Jews. He called it a “Kike town” in a letter to Bess, and to the Nolands explained that in addition to the millions of “Israelitist extraction,” there were millions of “wops” as well. As for pretty girls, Kansas City had twice as many.

Only the Woolworth Building lived up to expectations. The view from the top was well worth the 50-cent admission.

Shopping on Madison Avenue, he was touched by the patriotic feelings of an optometrist who charged him just $17.50 for two pairs of aluminum-framed glasses, much less than he would have had to pay at home. To be on the safe side Harry was going to France with six pairs of glasses, all pince-nez.

“I imagine his vision with glasses is 20–20, but without the glasses he couldn’t recognize his brother twenty feet away,” another officer named Harry Vaughan would later explain. They had become friends at Doniphan. “So, he always has had several pair on hand in case…he would be so helpless without them, and he was advised that he could not wear the ordinary glasses with the side pieces over the ears in action, because it would interfere with wearing your gas mask, you see. It would leave a hole on either side that you would be able to get gas through. So he brought…I believe he said, four or five of his lens prescriptions in pince-nez.”

The George Washington, a confiscated German luxury liner with seven thousand troops aboard, sailed the night of March 29, 1918, Good Friday, nearly a year to the day since the President’s declaration of war. “There we were watching New York’s skyline diminish and wondering if we’d be heroes or corpses,” Harry remembered. He and Lieutenant Paterson stood at the rail for some time talking about German submarines and “a lot of things ahead.” Then they went below and, as Harry recalled, passed the rest of the night playing poker.

The weather was clear the whole way across, perfect submarine weather. The ship was part of a convoy, sailing a zigzag course once it reached the submarine zone. There were endless lifeboat drills and calisthenics on deck. Life preservers were worn at all times. At night, the ship was dark, smoking on deck forbidden. No one had much space. Officers were sleeping six to a cabin. As the time passed, Harry, who did not know how to swim and had never seen an ocean, wondered why anyone would ever want to be a sailor. He ached for home. The water was either blue or lead-colored, he noted, depending on whether the sun was out or in. The only variety in the panorama came at sunrise or sunset, and the sunsets weren’t half as good as back home.

II

The George Washington steamed into the crowded harbor of Brest the morning of April 13. The day was warm and sunny, and First Lieutenant Truman thought the town looked “quite wonderful.” It wasn’t Paris, but if Paris was as much livelier as it was bigger, then Paris had to be “some town.” Bands were playing, welcoming crowds lined the shore, thousands of people cheering and waving flags.

The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France by this time numbered nearly a million men, a figure that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. Only the summer before, on July 4, when the first American infantry unit marched through Paris, there had been just fourteen thousand American troops in all of France. Now, the seven thousand “doughboys” who came down the gangways from the George Washington were but a fraction of the monthly total. That April, 120,000 arrived. Soon there would be 250,000 landing every month until eventually there were 2 million American troops in France.

Four hundred miles away from the docks at Brest, to the northeast at the Belgian border, one of the most savage battles in history was raging. Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff had launched a massive frontal assault on the Allied lines along the River Lys, near Armentiéres. With Russia out of the war since December, after the fall of the czarist regime, the Germans were free to concentrate on one front, as they had wanted from the beginning, and this was intended to be their deciding offensive. The losses were appalling. Only the day before, April 12, the British commander, General Sir Douglas Haig, issued his famous order: “With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.” The Battle of the Lys lasted three weeks until the Ludendorff offensive was stopped. Winston Churchill would consider it the critical struggle on the Western Front and, thus, of the war. Yet to Lieutenant Truman and the thousands arriving with him, none of this was apparent. What they saw their first days ashore and for weeks, even months to come, was the France that was not the war. As Harry wrote to the Noland sisters, he felt like Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad, as much a tourist as a soldier.

Being an officer in the AEF, he found, meant accommodations such as he had never known or expected. At the hotel in Brest he had a room to himself larger than any in the Gates mansion. There were double lace curtains at the window and a white marble mantelpiece with a seventeenth century Dutch clock under a glass case, a beautiful affair even if it didn’t run. Chairs were upholstered in red plush, floors polished smooth as glass. He admired a crystal water decanter and a mahogany wardrobe with a full-length mirror in which he could also admire himself in his new overseas cap and Sam Browne belt.

For nearly two weeks he did little more than enjoy himself. If he had been disappointed by New York and the Atlantic Ocean, France more than made up for it. He enjoyed the food (the bread especially) and the wine. He admired gardens so well cultivated and cared for that there was hardly a weed to be seen. The whole surrounding countryside with its irregular patchwork of fields and hedgerows made him wish he were a painter, he told Bess. “The people generally treat us fine and seem very glad to accommodate us in any way they can.” Later he wrote, “I’m for the French more and more. They are the bravest of the brave.” They also knew how to build roads as smooth and solid as a billiard table “and every twenty meters there are trees on each side.” Nor could he get over the way audiences at the movies clapped and cheered during the love scenes. “They are the most sentimental people I ever saw,” he noted approvingly. If ever he had to give up being a Missourian, he decided, he would be a citizen of France, though so far he hardly dared try the language other than to say, “Je ne comprends pas.”

Good food, wine, and cognac were all plentiful and an American soldier’s pay went far. Harry calculated that his came to 1,100 francs a month, enough nearly “to retire on over here.” A fine meal cost about 10 francs. Wine and cognac were a comparable bargain. Most of the 35th Division, having been too long in Oklahoma, seemed determined to drink France dry. But they were certain to fail, he also noted, the supply being “inexhaustible.”

As he did not report to Bess, women, too, were plentiful. Temptation beckoned in Brest, as it would later in every interior city he went to in France. One American lieutenant wrote in his diary, “Wandering through dark streets. Ever-present women. So mysterious and seductive in the darkness…. A fellow’s got to hang on to himself here. Not many do.” But apparently Harry did.

“Personally, I think Harry is one of the cleanest fellows…the cleanest fellows morally that I ever saw, or know,” First Lieutenant Edgar Hinde of Independence would remember. “I never saw him do anything out of the way that would be questionable in the way of a moral situation. He was clean all the way through. I always admired him for that quality and you know when a man’s in the Army, why his morals get a pretty good test.”

“Wish I could step in and see you this evening,” Harry wrote to Bess the night of April 17, after five days in France. “Have only seen one good-looking French woman and she was married to some French general or admiral or something, anyway he had seven or eight yards of gold braid on him.”

At the end of April he was assigned to an elite artillery school 500 miles to the east, near the hilltop town of Chaumont, in Lorraine where Pershing had his headquarters. The first-class coach Harry traveled in was upholstered like a Pierce Arrow limousine, he reported happily to Ethel Noland. No wealthy civilian on tour ever had things better.

His new quarters were even more splendid than anything he had yet seen, a seventeenth-century gray stone chateau set in a lovely, walled park in the middle of a picture-book village called Montigny-sur-Aube, this in turn set in a gently sloping valley. There was a magnificent garden, a moat, stone walls six feet thick, tile floors, marble stairs, hand-carved woodwork, “everything you like to read about,” he told Ethel. “You’d never think that a war was raging in this same land, it is so peaceable and quiet and pretty.” Spring had arrived in full glory, with soft, fragrant air and trees along the brows of near fields all a delicate green. His one problem was the bells that kept him awake the first few nights. The church clock would strike eleven, “and then the clock on the Hotel de Ville would strike eleven five minutes later and then five minutes later some clock that I haven’t been able to locate yet would strike eleven. By that time the church clock had started on eleven fifteen and it was one continual round of pleasure all night long.”

Forbidden to give his location, he was able to say only that he was “somewhere in France.”

The first week at the artillery school was the most difficult ordeal he had ever experienced. After that, the work got harder. He felt he was in over his head, having never been to college, and worried constantly that he would fail. The mathematics was all at the college level. He studied surveying and astronomy. There was no time for anything but work, from seven in the morning until ten at night. There was hardly time to get from one class to the next. He had no idea what was happening in the war and of the outside world, he said, he was as ignorant as if he were in Arkansas.

Training in the classroom and on the firing range centered on the French 75-millimeter gun, a small, rapid-fire, rifled cannon known for its mobility and phenomenal accuracy. It had been developed twenty years before, its technology guarded by the French as a military secret. The slim, 6-foot barrel was of nickel steel and other alloys that were kept classified. The breechblock, gun carriage, and hydropneumatic recoil system were all of special design. Because the gun recoiled on its carriage, it stayed in place with each shot, and thus no time was lost correcting its aim between shots, which was the secret of its rapid fire. It could get off twenty to thirty shots a minute and had an effective range of five miles. Being light in weight compared to most cannon, a little over a ton and a half, and maneuverable with its high-spoked wooden wheels, it was considered ideal for trench warfare. The fire from a battery of four was murderous.

It was called the marvel weapon. The French would later say it won the war for them. No American or British-made fieldpiece could compare and American units relied on it almost exclusively. (Virtually no American fieldpieces-or American airplanes or tanks-were used in the war, for all the troops supplied by the United States.) To the Germans, it was the “Devil Gun.”

I’ve studied more and worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever did before in my life [Harry wrote to Bess at the end of May]…right out of one class into another and then examinations and thunder if you don’t pass.

We had a maneuver yesterday and General Pershing himself was there. I was in command of a battalion of artillery and he did not even come around to see if I could fire that many guns…. My part was mostly play-like except the figures. I was supposed to have three batteries, which were represented by three second lieutenants. Had a second lieutenant for adjutant and a major for regimental commander. We had a good time and walked about six miles besides. There were Major Generals, Brigadiers, Colonels, Majors and more limousines than a January funeral. It was a very great pleasure to see a Major General click his heels together and nearly break his arm coming to a salute when The General came along. You don’t often see Major Generals do that.

On Sundays he attended services at the Catholic church, where the air was chill and he was unable to understand a word. France was a grand place for Frenchmen, he had decided, and he didn’t blame them for fighting for it; “and I’m for helping them, but give me America, Missouri and Jackson County for mine with the finest girl in the world at the county seat,” he wrote on May 5, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday.

One of his examinations given on a Saturday in May would have driven the president of Yale University to distraction, he reported. The Sunday after, with little to do, he discovered volumes of music-Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann-and a “dandy” piano in a YMCA that had once been the home of a wealthy local family. He played at length while the other officers listened. “It sure was a rest after the week’s work.”

After five weeks, his ordeal over and feeling extremely lucky to have “slipped through,” he was ordered to rejoin his old regiment, which by now had arrived in France and was stationed at Angers. Heading west again by train, he seldom took his eyes off the passing scenery. Like so many American soldiers, he was astonished not only at how beautiful the country was but how very old. A young officer traveling with him, Arthur Wilson, remembered being amazed at Harry’s knowledge of French history. “He had maps and he knew where we were going. It didn’t mean anything to me….” During a wait at Orleans, Harry insisted they get out and see the city’s famous cathedral and the equestrian bronze of Joan of Arc in the main square.

At Angers, to his total surprise, he learned he had been made a captain months earlier. No one had bothered to tell him. He only found out when he saw it reported in The New York Times.

As adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, he was assigned to teach the other officers what he had learned. “I just barely slipped through at the school, and now they’ve got me teaching trig and logarithms and surveying and engineering,” he told Bess. Didn’t she think it amusing that an “old rube” from Missouri was handing out such knowledge to the Harvard and Yale boys? In another letter, he said he had never known how valuable a university education was until now.

She wrote to him faithfully, as did Mamma, Mary Jane, and Ethel Noland. Their letters took a month or more to reach him and arrived usually in batches of six or seven. “Please keep writing,” he told them. Knowing how they worried, he said nothing upsetting, never a word of discouragement or serious complaint. “No I haven’t seen any girls that I’d care to look at twice….” He was eating well, walking as much as fifteen miles a day. He never felt better, nor looked so good with his new captain’s bars. “I look like Siam’s King on a drunk when I get that little cockeyed cap stuck over one ear, a riding crop in my left hand, a whipcord suit and a strut that knocks ’em dead.” (“That was one of the things about this war,” Willa Cather would write, “it took a little fellow from a little town, gave him an air and a swagger….”) He had Arthur Wilson take his picture sitting on a horse. Like every good American soldier, Captain Harry Truman conceded, he had an “insane desire” to let the home folks know how he looked.

In the chest pockets of his tunic he carried three photographs. In the right pocket were Mamma and Mary Jane in her picture hat. In the left, over his heart, was a wistful portrait of Bess that he adored more than any ever taken of her. She had written on the back for him: “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”

The first week of July the 129th Regiment moved from Angers to what had once been Napoleon’s artillery base, Camp Coëtquidan, near Rennes, for final training before going into action. Again to his enormous surprise, Captain Truman learned he was to be a battery commander. He was summoned before Colonel Karl D. Klemm and told to begin at once. It was his highest ambition come true and he was scared to death. He would have command of 4 guns and 194 men.

Thursday morning, July 11, 1918, shoulders back, head up, he walked out onto the parade field to face for the first time Battery D of the 2nd Battalion, 129th Field Artillery, “Dizzy D,” by reputation, most of them Irish Catholics from Kansas City. “They were a pretty wild bunch of Irish, I’ll tell you that,” remembered Lieutenant Hinde. “They had [had] one captain named Charlie Allen and they had two or three others there, none of them could handle them, and finally they assigned Truman to command the battery. He was a third degree Mason in a Catholic battery and we thought he was going to have a pretty rough go of it….”

He was not at all what the men expected. One of them, recalling the scene, said he looked like “a sitting duck.” Another remembered “a stirring among the fellows…. Although they were standing at attention, you could feel the Irish blood boiling—as much as to say, if this guy thinks he’s going to take us over, he’s mistaken.” A private named Vere Leigh would recall “a rather short fellow, compact, serious face, wearing glasses. And we’d had all kinds of officers and this was just another one you know.” To others Harry looked, with the pince-nez spectacles, like a store clerk or a professor and totally out of his element. “Yes,” said Private Edward McKim, “you could see that he was scared to death.”

Harry, who would remember the moment more vividly than anyone, said he had never been so terrified. He could feel all their eyes on him, feel them sizing him up. “I could just see my hide on the fence…. Never on the front or anywhere else have I been so nervous.”

According to Private Albert Ridge, who later became a judge in Kansas City, the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them. As he was to confess long afterward, writing about himself in the third person, “He was so badly scared he couldn’t say a word….”

At last he called, “Dismissed!” As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer. (“And then we gave Captain Truman the Bronx cheer, that’s a fact,” said Vere Leigh.) As the day wore on, they staged a sham stampede of their horses. After taps, a fight broke out in the barracks and several men wound up in the infirmary.

In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the noncommissioned officers who were “busted” in rank. “He didn’t hesitate at all,” remembered Private Leigh. “The very next morning this was on the board. He must have sat up all night…. I think the First Sergeant was at the head of the list.”

Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. “I didn’t come over here to get along with you,” he said. “You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now and I’ll bust you right back now.” There was no mistaking his tone. No one doubted he meant exactly what he said. After that, as Harry remembered, “We got along.” But a private named Floyd Ricketts also remembered the food improving noticeably and that Captain Truman took a personal interest in the men and would talk to them in a way most officers wouldn’t.

He proved a model officer and extremely popular with “wild Irish” Battery D. “Well, I would say that his major characteristic was great friendliness, that he had such warmth and a liking for people,” recalled Arthur Wilson. “He was not in any way the arrogant, bossy type, or Prussian type of officer. A lot of us youngsters, you know, when they put gold bars on our shoulders, why we thought that we sort of ruled the world. And he had, as an older man, a very quiet sort of a way of serving as a leader…. And he was a disciplinarian but he was very fair. I don’t know, I can’t describe what the personal magnetism was except that he had it.”

“You soldier for me, and I’ll soldier for you,” Harry told the men. “Soldier, soldier all the time,” his favorite colonel, Robert Danford, had said at Camp Doniphan.

For one month he drilled the men on the firing line, trying to teach them everything he knew about the French 75. They thought the weapon a wonder and, with practice, claimed, in Missouri style, that they could pick off a sparrow on a wire at 9,000 yards.

Working them hard, insisting on strict behavior, making them “walk the chalk,” and driving himself no less, he found his satisfaction in the task, his pride in the men, as well as his own newfound sense of power, were like nothing he had ever known. “Talk about your infantryman,” he boasted, “why he can only shoot one little old bullet at a time at the Hun. I can give one command to my battery and send 862 on the way at one round and as many every three seconds until I say stop.” Whatever dislike or fear of guns he had known before appears to have vanished. He knew how much was riding on his judgment now. “You’ve no idea what an immense responsibility it is to take 194 men to the front,” he told Bess. Were he to get them killed, he would never be able to look anyone in the face again.

How brave he might be once the high-explosive shells began flying weighed heavily on him. He kept thinking of a man Uncle Harrison once described who had the bravest kind of head but whose legs “wouldn’t stand.”

Enthusiasm in the camp was fueled now by daily dispatches of Americans in action at last. Through most of that spring, while Captain Truman was at Montigny-sur-Aube, the numerical superiority of the Germans on the Western Front had become clear. The great question was whether American forces would arrive in time and in sufficient strength to make the difference. By June the Germans were back again on the banks of the Marne, within cannon shot of Paris. The situation was grim. The leaders of France, Italy, and Great Britain warned Woodrow Wilson of the “great danger of the war being lost” unless American forces became available as rapidly as possible. Pershing had been bound and determined to commit his troops only as a separate American command, but because of the emergency more than 250,000 Americans were rushed to the front to support the French under the command of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The Americans fought bravely at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Then, on July 15, the Germans unleashed another huge offensive aimed at Paris, the Second Battle of the Marne, sending fifty-two divisions against thirty-four Allied divisions, nine of which were American. In three days, from July 15 to July 18, the tide of battle turned. To Ludendorff, American forces had been the “decisive” factor, and the German chancellor later confessed that “at the beginning of July 1918, I was convinced…that before the first of September our adversaries would send us peace proposals…. That was on the 15th. On the 18th even the most optimistic among us knew that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days.”

But for the Americans, the worst was still ahead.

In the time allotted, Captain Truman had transformed what had been generally considered the worst battery in the regiment to what was clearly one of the best, as was demonstrated in conspicuous fashion the day of their departure for the front, on August 17. The 129th Field Artillery began moving out from a nearby railyard, one battery at a time. To a very large degree the war was fought with railroads. The movement of troops and equipment by rail was ever critical, hence great store was set on how well officers and men managed things when the time came to go. For artillerymen especially, “moving out” was a terrific undertaking. The trains for each of the batteries were comprised of some seventeen flat-cars, thirty “dinky” French boxcars (these marked “40 Hommes, 8 Chevaux”), and a single passenger coach for officers. Everything needed had to go aboard—troops, guns, caissons, field kitchens, horses, harness, hay, feed, battery records, extra supplies of every sort—in the quickest time, with the least wasted motions possible.

As it was, each battery managed to get on board and under way in about an hour. The time for Battery D was 48 minutes, a record.

They were rolling by eight in the morning and the trip lasted two days, their train passing close enough to Paris that they could see the top of the Eiffel Tower. Beyond Paris, except for the scars of war, the rolling countryside might have been Missouri or eastern Kansas. Then they were beside the Marne, traveling past Château-Thierry, scene of a great American victory, then along a narrowing valley, past Epernay, in the heart of the champagne country. They turned southeast. For mile after mile, in a landscape of broken wooded hills, one small village after another looked much alike with their orange tile roofs and single church steeples.

They were heading for the beautiful Vosges Mountains, in Alsace, nearly to the Swiss border, which was the extreme eastern end of the front. Long the sleepiest sector of the war, it was, the American high command had decided, the ideal place for green troops to get some experience holding the lines, as a preliminary to an all-out American offensive. The first American battle casualties had been suffered in the Vosges, the autumn before, and in the time since one division after another had been moved in and out.

The end of the line, hours later in the dark, was the town of Saulxures, by a swift little river in a mountain valley. In mid-August, on the night Battery D arrived, the air outside the train was sweet with the smell of giant firs and patches of purple thyme along the river banks. Harry would remember, too, how good the local beer tasted.

The following morning, August 20, puffs of white smoke could be seen in the sky five or six miles to the east, and, in the middle, a moving speck. It was anti-aircraft shrapnel being fired at an enemy observation plane, and the first real sign of war. But by then Harry was already on his way into the mountains.

III

“It was just a quiet sector to give the boys a little indoctrination in trench warfare,” recalled Sergeant Frederick Bowman, one of the small detachment that went with Captain Truman to locate a gun position. They traveled by truck at first, over twisting roads to a tiny, picturesque village called Kruth. Then, with horses and accompanied by a French officer who spoke no English, they began a hard, steady climb into the fir-clad mountains, up logging roads as steep as a roof. It was terrain such as the Missouri men had never seen, with rushing streams, beds of green moss inches deep, great granite boulders heaped on all sides, and everything heavily shadowed beneath the huge, shaggy trees. The enemy’s batteries were on an opposite mountainside. As Sergeant Bowman said, the topography was “kind of a V-shaped affair,” and so wild and rugged, it appeared, that either side might fire away endlessly and do no harm.

The sky was clear, the day warm and sunny, visibility excellent—not ordinary conditions in the Vosges—but the men and horses were well concealed under the trees. At one point only, when they came to an open ridge in plain view of the Germans, did the French officer have them go at intervals, one man at a time.

They found the spot they wanted at the edge of the trees at an elevation, Harry reckoned, of more than 2,000 feet above the valley. The men would remember making a meal of cold beans and beef, hardtack and a mess kit full of wild red raspberries picked en route, these topped off with champagne provided by the French officer.

Camping in the woods, they spent several days getting set up. Then the rest of the battery began the long, hard climb from below, hauling the guns. “It was surely some steep hill,” Harry wrote. Once, a can of lard broke loose from a wagon and bounced the whole way to the bottom. Clouds had moved in on the mountain, meantime, shrouding the trees in mist. The chance of being seen was no longer a worry, but in the damp air now even the least sound carried. To muffle the wheels of the guns Harry had them wrapped in burlap, which struck some of the men as silly. And indeed, the whole struggle of hauling everything into place seemed doubly absurd when, after days of doing nothing in the clouds, then days of rain, the battery was told to pack and move on again.

Harry had been ordered to take up a position about a mile closer to the German lines and prepare to fire a gas barrage. So his first action would be to shell the enemy with poison gas.

The battery moved after nightfall, horses, guns, and men laboring up and down roads now slick with mud and rain. And it was raining still the next afternoon when they took their new position, everyone exhausted from no sleep but also extremely excited and eager to commence firing for real at last. The targets were some German batteries four miles distant. The barrage was to begin after dark and to be what in artillery parlance was called “fire for neutralization,” to “suppress the activities of the enemy” without necessarily destroying his position.

When the command was given at precisely 8:00 P.M., August 29, four batteries of the 129th opened up. The piercing crash of the 75s went on for half an hour. Battery D fired five hundred rounds. “We were firing away and having a hell of a good time doing it,” remembered Private Leigh, “until…[we] woke somebody up over there.”

The barrage over, the night was suddenly still. There was only the sound of the rain. At this point the battery was supposed to move out with all speed, to take a new position before the Germans had time to return the fire. Horses were to be brought up at once from the rear, the guns hauled away. But the first sergeant in charge of the horses was nowhere to be found. The job of first sergeant was assigned on a rotating basis and the first sergeant that night was Glen Wooldridge, who didn’t appear with the horses for nearly half an hour. Then, with everybody charging about in the dark rushing to make up for lost time, things became miserably scrambled. Fearing the Germans would retaliate with a gas barrage of their own, the men had their masks on. Some were struggling frantically to get masks on the horses.

When the first German shells came screaming over, Harry was up on a horse trying to see what was going on. A shell burst with a shattering roar not 15 feet from him. His horse was hit—or slipped—and went over into a shell hole and rolled on top of him, pinning him down helplessly. By the time he was pulled free by a big, heavy-shouldered lieutenant named Vic Housholder, his breath was nearly gone—Housholder remembered him “gasping like a catfish out of water.” Meantime, half the horses and two of the guns had charged off in the dark, over a hill in the wrong direction to become hopelessly mired in the mud. Then all at once, the same unfortunate Sergeant Wooldridge, in panic, began yelling at the top of his voice for everyone to run, saying the Germans had a “bracket” on them.

Wooldridge himself took off. Others ran after him, though how many is uncertain. No one could see much of anything in the black night and pouring rain, and with such wild confusion all around. With their masks on, telling who was who was nearly impossible, even at close range. Private Walter Menefee said later there was only Captain Truman and maybe three or four others who didn’t run. “I led the parade!” Menefee admitted. Vere Leigh thought hardly anyone took off except Wooldridge.

In any event, Captain Truman stood his ground, and once having recovered his breath, let fly with a blast of profanity that had stunning effect chiefly because it came from the officer who, heretofore, had seemed so proper and reserved. “I got up and called them everything I knew,” was how Harry himself remembered the moment. He was livid and terrified.

For years afterward at reunions in Kansas City, with whiskey flowing, there would be much lighthearted banter and kidding over this first encounter with the enemy, Battery D’s so-called “Battle of Who Run.” But there was nothing the least comical about the situation at the time.

With his blistering verbal barrage and the vivid example of his own fierce courage under fire, Captain Truman succeeded finally in getting things in control. Two horses were dead, two others had to be shot. The guns, in mud to their axles, were impossible to move with manpower only. They could be rescued later, he decided, and marched the men back to base position through the dark and the continuing downpour.

At about four in the morning, after a hot meal, he went to his tent, collapsed, and slept for twelve hours.

He was worried sick, sure he was disgraced. But his superior, Major Marvin Gates, told him reassuringly that green troops often behaved badly their first time and to forget about it. Gates recommended only that Sergeant Wooldridge be court-martialed at once. Unable to bring himself to do that, Harry had Wooldridge broken to private and transferred to another battery, where, as it turned out, he later performed well and bravely.

In a letter to Bess, Harry said it had not been until the day after that terrible night that he figured out what had happened. “The men think I am not much afraid of shells but they don’t know I was too scared to run and that is pretty scared.”

Because no one had been killed in the melee, the men decided that Captain Truman—Captain Harry—besides being cool under fire, was good luck. When time came to go back for the abandoned guns, a potentially perilous mission, every man in the battery volunteered. Harry, deeply touched, did the job with only the necessary men and horses.

At first light, September 3, the regiment was on the move again and in full battle dress—helmets, gas masks at the ready, blanket rolls, and full packs that weighed as much as 70 pounds, or more than half the weight of some of the men. A sign on Grand Avenue, Kansas City, had said: “Join the Artillery and Ride.” Now, to save the horses on the steep roads, everybody was on foot, officers included.

Harry was struck by the beauty of the mountain valleys. Hay and grain were being harvested, but by old people and children, the old women all in black. “It was literally true that the manhood of France was in the army,” wrote a lieutenant named Jay Lee. “Only the very old and the crippled were exempt from the army, but not from the work.”

At the village of Vagny two days later, the regiment boarded another train, this bound north. The next night, at Bayon on the Moselle River, a curious incident occurred that frightened Harry more than he let on. At the station a young lieutenant colonel from a Missouri infantry division told him to get his men off the train and find cover fast, before daylight. The whole area, he said, was under bombardment from German planes. In the dark Harry could make out the carcasses of two dead horses beside the platform. The colonel introduced himself. He was Bennett Clark, the son of Speaker of the House of Representatives Champ Clark of Missouri, who had been one of John Truman’s favorite Democrats. Colonel Clark said he would hate to see Harry and his men suffer the same fate as the horses. “Well, I was scared green,” Harry later wrote. “I was in command of the train and there was absolutely no one to pass the buck to. I simply had to unload that battery and find a place for it before daylight.” Guns, horses, ammunition were off the train and into the pine woods in the least time possible, everybody moving with breakneck urgency. But as the morning passed and no German planes came, Harry walked back to the station, where he found Clark grinning. The joke was on Harry, Clark said. There had never been any German planes. When Harry asked about the dead horses, Clark said they had been shot by a veterinarian.

Harry appears to have taken this in good spirits, partly because his men had enjoyed a much-needed rest and a chance to bathe in the river. He and Bennett Clark were to have a great deal to do with one another in time to come, but for now neither had any reason to expect to see the other ever again.

By dusk the regiment was on its way on foot. They marched most of the night and the following day. In a pocket diary Harry marked their progress: “September 10. Leave Coyviller at dark. Rain…September 11. Leave Bosserville at 7:30 P.M. Rain Rain Rain Went through Nancy dark as hell.”

“Who can ever forget the impression of those night marches!” Lieutenant Jay Lee would write after the war, in a privately published history of the 129th Regiment.

We sometimes went as far as 30 or 35 kilometers [18 to 20 miles] in a night, which wasn’t so bad except when, as so often happened, obstruction or congestion in the road caused…fretful stops and starts. The wonderous fact of all these men over there made a vivid and solemn impression…the long line of horses, limbers, guns, caissons and men stringing out interminably before and behind…thousands of men, all alike in outward appearance of round helmets and army raincoats; all with common purpose and determination, but each occupied with his own thoughts….

They were part of the first big American push, half a million men on their way to Saint-Mihiel, south of Verdun.

So slow was our progress that after six hours we had only advanced three or four miles [continued Lieutenant Lee, describing the night march through Nancy] when…the whole front to our north broke out in flame, and a tremendous, continuous and awe-inspiring roar of artillery began; while huge searchlights, interspersed with many-starred signal rockets, shot their shafts like the Northern Lights constantly across the sky. We had heard or seen nothing in our experience like it….

“American drive begins,” Harry scrawled in his diary on Thursday, September 12. “Heard first roar of American artillery.”

They were held in reserve short of Saint-Mihiel for several days, horses harnessed, everything ready to move at a moment’s notice. It was now that Harry felt himself in “the great adventure” at last. In long lines, thousands of bedraggled German prisoners marched past. “We are doing our best to finish the job and get home,” he wrote to Bess, “but we can’t leave until it’s done. In fact, we don’t want to leave until it’s done.”

Among those in his command he had come to depend on were Sergeant Edward Meisburger, who in the midst of the chaos at “Who Run” never flinched, and Sergeant Ralph Thacker, who, though only nineteen, had the judgment and staying quality of a much older man. Lee Heillman, the cook, Frank Spina, the barber, were the best in the Army. Harry Kelley, the instrument sergeant, was “very, very bright,” an “excellent soldier,” who could figure the firing data quite as well as Harry could.

The night of September 16, in bright moonlight, they began the forced march that none of them would forget. Orders had changed. Saint-Mihiel had been a sudden, resounding American victory. The Germans were overrun in two days. So the 129th was en route to the Argonne Forest.

“It was march all night and part of the day, grab a few hours sleep and march some more,” Harry wrote.

The Supreme Command had decided on a colossal, all-out offensive to end the war. The attack, infinitely greater than any that had gone before, would extend along the entire Western Front from Verdun to the sea. The sector allotted to the American Army ran from the Meuse River, north of Verdun, to the Argonne Forest, a distance of twenty-four miles. The American objective was to cut the German rail lines at Sedan.

This great Meuse-Argonne offensive, as it would be known, was the largest action in American military history until then. No larger American army had ever been seen than the one now on the roads. Fifteen divisions were moving up—600,000 men, nearly 3,000 artillery pieces, trucks, tanks, supply wagons, more than 90,000 horses—a logistical problem of staggering proportions that had been worked out by an exceptionally able officer on Pershing’s staff, Colonel George C. Marshall. Infantry and ammunition were carried by big, lumbering, chain-drive trucks, but because the horse-drawn artillery moved so much more slowly, the order of march was mixed, to keep solid columns. Discipline on the road was poor, congestion often a nightmare. Everything was moving up by just three roads and much of the time the traffic was two-way, with the French troops that were being relieved coming back from the front. Furthermore, to keep the Germans from knowing what was happening, nothing could go forward or back except under the cover of darkness. Officers in charge of the roads had often to brandish revolvers to keep traffic moving. And after the first moonlit night, a fine rain fell nearly all the while, turning the roads to rivers of mud. Many horses were in such poor shape by this time that they began dropping in their traces and had to be destroyed.

To lessen the burden on the horses, the artillerymen carried all they could. “And there was an order out,” Private Floyd Ricketts remembered, “that we cannoneers who were walking and following the guns were not to hold onto any part of the gun or caissons so as not to put any more burden on the horses. But walking along almost dead on your feet, you could hardly resist grabbing a hold of the caisson to help you along.”

Colonel Klemm, in a state such as the men had never seen, kept riding up and down the line shouting orders “like a crazy man” and at one point senselessly ordered an advance at double-time up a long hill. Had he not been wearing a yellow rain slicker, some of the men later speculated, he might have been shot in the back. But because Father Tiernan had on the same color coat no one would have risked making a mistake in the dark.

Harry took the men off the road to rest. Klemm found out and demanded to know what he was doing. “Carrying out orders, sir,” Harry answered, after which, it is said, the men adored him as never before.

Later, Harry let a man with a twisted ankle, Sergeant Jim Doherty, ride his horse, which was against orders. Klemm, seeing Doherty, flew into a rage and ordered him down. Harry told Klemm that as long as he, Harry, was in command of the battery, Doherty would ride. Klemm, furious, turned and rode off, but not, apparently, before telling Harry what he thought of him.

“The Colonel insults me shamefully,” Harry wrote in his diary. “No gentleman would say what he said. Damn him.”

(Reminiscing about the march long afterward, some of the men would speculate that Klemm really had gone crazy for the moment, or was drunk. Klemm would remain a troubling memory for years. In 1925 in his Kansas City business office, he shot and killed himself.)

The march went on for a week. “The weather was bad, rainy, and we would sleep in the daytime in thickets or in woods and then take off at dusk and march all night,” said Private Ricketts. They passed places called Ourches, Loisy, and Rembercourt, which were nothing but ruins. Sometimes Harry and Father Tiernan walked together at the head of the battery, talking about “the history of the world and I don’t know what all,” Harry remembered. If all priests were like him, he told Tiernan, there wouldn’t be any Protestants.

The morning of September 22, they pulled off to sleep in a rain-soaked forest opposite Rarécourt, close to their final position. From here on they would travel light, free of their supply train, and as rapidly as possible, everybody riding.

Harry’s diary entry for Monday, September 22, says only, “Wild ride to position tonight.” Later, for Bess, he wrote this vivid account:

I stripped the battery for action. I knew I was in for it this time because I only took the firing battery and just enough men to run the guns and they for the first time were allowed to ride. I got stuck getting out of the woods. One caisson got pigheaded and I couldn’t budge the cussed thing with either prayers or cuss words. I tried both. Finally hooked all the men onto it with ropes and got it out and then and there began the wildest ride I ever hope to have. It seemed as though every truck and battery in France was trying to get to the same front by the same road that I was going. I had twelve carriages in my column, four guns, six caissons and two fourgon wagons, one of them full of instruments and one full of grub. I don’t know which I’d rather have lost…. Well I finally got my battery out on the main highway and headed for the front. The real front this time west of Verdun and just alongside the Argonne Forest. Those devilish trucks kept trying to cut me in two. It was necessary to keep the battery moving at a trot and a gallop nearly all the way and I had to ride the line to see that they stayed closed up. Every time I’d get a chance I’d cut in ahead of a row of trucks and sew ’em up until I got the whole battery by and every time a truck would get a chance he’d cut through the battery. They didn’t get very many chances because when we got the right of the road I made it a point never to let ’em through…. I don’t know if I told you but it was raining as usual and the road was as slick as glass.

It had been a forced march of nearly 100 miles and they arrived on time. Indeed, the whole massive move to the front had been a total success. Incredibly, not a single unit failed to reach its appointed place on schedule. The 129th Regiment’s designated position was Hill 290, a gradual slope half a mile from a crossroads village called Neuvilly, which consisted mainly of a ruined stone church that would serve as a field hospital and where a much-published photograph would be taken of the wounded in stretchers crowded beneath a huge painting of the Ascension that had miraculously survived and still hung on the shattered wall above the altar.

Captain Truman and Battery D were assigned to a clump of saplings near a fair-sized wood across a field of mud. They arrived in pitch dark at 3:00 A.M., the rain still coming down, men and horses exhausted. Only by hitching twelve horses to each gun and having every man push were they able to get all four guns in place by daylight. In the distance, across an open No-Man’s-Land, was the German strongpoint of Boureuilles.

The next three days were spent in preparation for “H-Hour.” Trenches were dug, ammunition stacked, trees cleared for a field-of-fire. From time to time, German shells came screaming over. The second night several hit the exact spot where Harry had slept the first morning and would have made small pieces of him, as he said, had he not shifted locations. The evening of Wednesday, September 25, in Colonel Klemm’s dugout, the battery commanders received their orders. The offensive was to begin in the morning, “H-Hour,” at 5:30 A.M. Each battery was to fire 1,000 rounds an hour. This meant six rounds per gun per minute, since each gun would need ten minutes every hour for cooling off. The first hour, before the infantry moved out, would be “preparation” fire, to destroy barbed-wire entanglements. Afterward, at “H-Hour,” would come a two-hour “rolling” barrage during which the range of fire would have to advance steadily, 100 meters every four minutes, over the heads of the advancing infantry. Thus even a small mistake by battery commanders or gun crews could bring down disaster on their own troops.

“Everything was now in readiness, with the quiet which precedes the storm,” wrote Lieutenant Jay Lee in his formal history. “Late in the afternoon Captain Roger T. Sermon, Regimental Personnel Officer, paid the men, according to routine, a ceremony that never failed to arouse general interest, even on so eventful an occasion as this.”

Harry, Lieutenant Housholder, and Sergeant Kelley were up all night going over their final computations.

At a different point along the line, a swashbuckling American tank commander, Lieutenant Colonel George Patton, impatient for morning, wrote to his wife, “Just a word to you before I leave to play a part in what promises to be the biggest battle of the war or world so far.”

The bombardment began long before daylight when the air was chill, at 4:20 A.M., the morning of Thursday, September 26, 1918. Two thousand seven hundred guns opened fire all along the front with a roar such as had never been heard before. In three hours more ammunition was expended than during the entire Civil War—and at an estimated cost of a million dollars per minute. The American air ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who took off in his plane before daybreak, said, “Through the darkness the whole western horizon was illumined with one mass of jagged flashes.” From Hill 290 it looked as though the sky was on fire—“as though every gun in France was turned loose,” said Harry.

At 5:30, “H-Hour,” exactly on schedule, the rolling barrage opened up. “That gun squad worked just like clockwork,” remembered Corporal Harry Murphy. “It was—it was a sight, they just were perfect. They just got those rounds off so fast that—unbelievable.”

“My guns were so hot,” wrote Harry, “that they would boil [the] wet gunnysacks we put on them to keep them cool.”

When the barrage ended all was still except for distant machine-gun fire that sounded oddly, Harry thought, like a typewriter.

The infantry had pushed off into a charred, cratered landscape with no visible landmarks, then disappeared into a thick white fog. The first phase of the fighting, as George Marshall would write, was “confusing in the extreme.” The Germans, though greatly outnumbered, were solidly dug in on high ground, ideal ground defensively, and a nightmare for those on the attack. Up the center ran a huge hogback, heavily wooded, with high points where the Germans had all the advantage, after four years of work on their defenses. Most of the American divisions being hurled at them had never had contact with an enemy before. Some troops had never handled a rifle until now.

The 129th Field Artillery was ordered forward, to follow the infantry. Captain Truman and Major Gates went out ahead trying to spot enemy gun emplacements and for a while were pinned down on a road by machine-gun fire. From where they had started to the sheltering woods on the other side of No-Man’s-Land was only about a mile and a half, but hauling the guns through the shell-blasted muck, craters, and twisted barbed wire was a long day in hell. The crossing took twelve hours, the struggle lasting into the night. Men and horses pushed and hauled under nearly constant fire. The German shells came over with a sound like the scream of air brakes, then hit with a terrific explosion, throwing up dirt and pieces of iron in all directions. Yet so exhausted were the men as night wore on that some of them were falling asleep on their feet.

The next day, after some confusion in orders, they started forward again. They saw the dead now, scattered here and there, and nearly all were Americans, since the retreating Germans carried their dead and wounded back with them. At a crossroads near Cheppy, heaped in a pile, were seventeen American dead, infantrymen, while down the road a dozen more were lying “head to heel,” all “shot in the back after they’d gone by,” Harry surmised. He would remember how quiet his men became at the sight and the sergeant who spoke up, “Now you sons-of-bitches, you’ll believe you’re in a war.”

West of Cheppy the battery moved into a peach orchard. Harry and one of his lieutenants, Leslie Zemer, Sergeant Kelley and Corporal William O’Hare went out ahead to establish an observation post, stringing a telephone line and advancing, unknowingly, several hundred yards beyond the infantry. About dusk, from the crest of a hill, Harry saw an American plane drop a flare off to the west, then turning his field glasses on the spot, saw a German battery pulling into position on the left flank, across a small river in front of the 28th Division, which was beyond his own assigned sector. Standing orders were to fire only at enemy batteries facing the 35th Division. Harry decided to disregard that.

“Truman didn’t panic,” remembered Private Leigh, “he let them [the Germans] take their horses away from the guns, which was exactly what he should have done. If it had been me I would have hollered for D Battery to start firing as soon as I saw them. He didn’t do that, he let them get into position, get all set to fire, with their horses by this time a couple of miles away. Then he had his firing data exact. It’s no good to have a man up there if he don’t know what the hell he’s doing….”

“Truman sent back the data,” Private McKim recalled. “We went into action and he said, ‘Fire at will, fire as fast as you can,’ and we just poured them in there.”

The decision undoubtedly saved lives in the 28th Division, and though an outraged Colonel Klemm was on the phone almost at once, threatening Captain Truman with court-martial for violating orders, nothing came of it.

A German plane, meantime, had spotted the battery in the peach orchard—the pilot had actually flown in at about 300 feet and lobbed down a few German “potato-masher” hand grenades—so Harry, back with his battery, ordered everyone to pull out at once. German artillery fire, a “lot of heavy stuff,” came soon after. “You know,” said Vere Leigh, “when you’re in the artillery they don’t shoot at you with machine guns. You’re back from the line, and they shoot at you with that heavy stuff. They wiped that peach orchard out.”

This was on September 27. Later that same night, as the battery moved on, Harry was on horseback when he was hit in the face by a low-hanging branch and suddenly found himself without his glasses and unable to see. The horse kept moving with the column. Harry turned frantically in the saddle to look behind, only to find the glasses sitting nicely on the horse’s back.

In his diary he had time for the barest record:

September 28: Moved to position on Cheppy-Varennes road Fire on Boche O.P. [Observation Post]…on Boche Bty moving out.

September 29: Fired barrages

September 30: Same as yesterday

One soldier wrote, “The artillery fire has been something awful for the past two days. Shells are screaming over our heads constantly. The Germans shell us quite often, and we are continually hugging the earth, making ourselves as thin as possible. I feel like a man of fifty….”

On the afternoon of the 29th, reports came that the infantry was losing ground. American stragglers began streaming past. The Germans were about to counterattack. Harry’s immediate superior was Major John Miles and as every man knew there were just two possible orders to give for a position about to be overrun. One was “direct fire”—point-blank fire into the advancing enemy—and then stand by the guns to die or be captured. The other was to abandon the guns and fall back. “Well, men,” Miles said. “Get ready and we’ll give them direct fire.”

The German attack never came. Still, as Lieutenant Lee would write, “The coolness, the steady courage, the readiness to stand fast to the last, evidenced by Major Miles and his men on that anxious afternoon, were none the less inspiring that they were not pressed to the final sacrifice.”

Casualties among the infantry were heavy—as high as 50 percent in the 35th Division. Litter cases at the dressing station at Cheppy numbered in the hundreds. Fourteen ambulances loaded with wounded had been sent to the rear from that one station in a single day. On September 30 thousands of men were being fed there, most of whom had been wounded or gassed. Father Tiernan was busy burying the dead under fire all afternoon. One ambulance company alone suffered more than fifty casualties.

The Meuse-Argonne offensive was to have been another swift, smashing American victory, like Saint-Mihiel, but it was not. Sedan was ultimately taken, but at appalling cost. The Meuse-Argonne was the battle that produced the so-called “Lost Battalion,” an infantry unit that was trapped for five days and suffered casualties of nearly 70 percent, and also the most appealing American hero of the war, infantryman Alvin York from the hills of Tennessee, who single-handedly captured 132 Germans in one day. In all, in 47 days of fury, there were 117,000 American casualties. In the military cemetery on the Romagne Heights, at the center of the battlefield, 14,246 dead would be buried, making it the largest American military graveyard in Europe.

“It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it’s bad enough,” Harry wrote Bess in the first week of October. The heroes, he added, are all in the infantry.

The regiment was pulled back for rest. His own men looked like scarecrows and their respect for him had never been greater. “He was the Captain, he was the head man,” Vere Leigh said later, “and he was treated as such, we respected him, and he earned it. That’s why we respected him, because he earned it…. He’s not a dramatic type or anything like it. He’s no Patton, you know. He might have been a better soldier than Patton, but he was not a showoff.”

Harry had lost 20 pounds. He could hardly believe what he had been through. Terrible as it had been, it was also “the most terrific experience of my life.” He couldn’t help feeling proud. His men were alive and in one piece.

In mid-October, with the weather still cheerless and colder than before, the regiment took up new positions on the bleak heights east of Verdun, above the Meuse River Valley, in preparation for what was to be the final drive. Days were spent laying telephone wires, digging new dugouts, and camouflaging. His battery was soon so perfectly concealed that Harry himself had trouble finding it after dark. His dugout, down the road, was a “palace,” with stove, table and chair, a telephone beside his cot—“all the comforts of home except that I’ll have such a habit of sleeping underground that I’ll have to go to the cellar to sleep when I get home.”

Lieutenant Harry Vaughan, who was in a different regiment and who had been out of touch with Harry since Camp Doniphan, was seeing more of him now and puzzled how, after weeks in the trenches, any man could look so consistently clean and dapper.

Before Battery D, in the distance, rising on the grim horizon like the hump of an evil subterranean monster, was the famous bastion of Douaumont, once the showpiece of French defenses, the greatest fortress in the world. Harry thought it and the surrounding landscape comprised the most dreary prospect he had ever looked upon. Shattered dead trees stood like ghosts. The ground everywhere was a mass of shell craters. In Verdun itself not a building remained undamaged. The ancient city had caught the full force of the war. The civilian population had long since fled. Harry tried to imagine the same panorama before the war, with everything as cultivated and beautiful as the rest of France he had seen.

To stem the German tide in 1916, France had sent an unending column of men and artillery to Verdun. The fury and horror had been like nothing in history. The French, Harry was told, had put their 75s “hub-to-hub” for direct fire at the advancing enemy. The battle lasted ten months, the longest ever. Casualties on both sides came to 900,000 men. The ground everywhere was still a rubbish heap of weapons, shells, shreds of clothing, and no one knew how many dead. In a letter to the Noland sisters, he described a field a short distance to the west of his position “where every time a shell lights it blows up a piece of someone.” In none of his letters did he complain. In none did he even begin to describe the truth of the horrors he had seen. Like nearly every man writing home, he tried to put a good face on things. Only now did he seem to waver somewhat. He couldn’t shake the presence of the dead from his mind. “When the moon rises…,” he told Bess, “you can imagine that the ghosts of the half-million Frenchmen who were slaughtered here are holding a sorrowful parade over the ruins.” He did not, however, mention the smell or the rats everywhere.

To Ethel Noland he sent a poppy he found among the rocks near his new observation post, close to the German lines, at the end of a four-mile, zigzag hike through the trenches. He had brought back two flowers, the other for Bess.

The men were kept busy working on their positions, gas-proofing dugouts, moving ammunition, standing guard. The shelling continued. Guns boomed somewhere, near or far, almost continuously.

The weather turned colder. There was more rain. A day with sunshine was an event worth noting in his diary. “Fine day,” Harry wrote October 28. “Very fine day,” reads the entry for October 29. Before dawn on November 1 came another “show” like the one at the Argonne, as every battery opened up on the German lines for five straight hours.

For weeks there had been rumors of peace. A German pilot shot down just behind Battery D said the war would be over in ten days. On November 7 a United Press correspondent, Roy Howard, sent a cable from Paris saying hostilities had ceased at two o’clock that afternoon. The news was false.

On November 9 the infantry went forward once more, after an hour-long barrage. Harry’s friend Captain Ted Marks, and Battery C, were ordered forward in support of the infantry. The next day the drive and its artillery support continued. The morning of November 11, Battery D was firing again when, at about 8:30, Captain Truman was notified by headquarters that in exactly two and a half hours, at 11:00 A.M.—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—the Germans would sign an armistice agreement.

Sergeant Meisburger was called to Captain Truman’s dugout, where he found the captain stretched on the ground eating a blueberry pie, a wide grin on his face. “He handed me a piece of flimsy and said between bites, ‘Sergeant, you will take this back and read it to the members of the battery.’ ” What puzzled Meisburger was where Captain Truman had obtained the blueberry pie.

“My battery fired the assigned barrages at the times specified,” Harry wrote. “The last one was toward a little village called Hermeville…. My last shot was fired at 10:45.”

When the firing ceased all along the front line [he continued] it…was so quiet it made me feel as if I’d been suddenly deprived of my ability to hear.

The men at the guns, the Captain, the Lieutenants, the sergeants and corporals looked at each other for some time and then a great cheer arose all along the line. We could hear the men in the infantry a thousand meters in front raising holy hell. The French battery behind our position were dancing, shouting and waving bottles of wine…. Celebration at the front went on the rest of the day and far into the night. Very pistols, rockets and whatever else was handy were fired.

I went to bed about ten P.M. but the members of the French Battery insisted on marching around my cot and shaking hands. They’d shout “Vive le Capitaine Américain, vive le Président Wilson,” take another swig from their wine bottles and do it over. It was 2 A.M. before I could sleep at all.

A lieutenant named Broaddus of Battery F had been up in a balloon directing artillery when the cease-fire came. Below him, he remembered, “people went so wild celebrating that they forgot to pull me down…and I sat there for two hours.”

“You’ve no idea how happy we all were to have the war end,” wrote Harry to Ethel Noland. “You know that the continual and promiscuous dropping of shells around you will eventually get on your nerves considerably and mine were pretty tightly strung by 11 o’clock November 11. It was the most agreeable sigh of relief I ever have [had] when word came to cease firing.”

The Great War was over and to the victors it seemed a triumph for civilization. It was left now to the statesmen to make a lasting peace. In less than a month President Wilson was on his way to France on the George Washington, the ship that had brought Harry and so many thousands.

For the 129th Field Artillery the war had been the Meuse-Argonne offensive and it had cost the regiment 129 battlefield casualties. Battery D suffered only three men wounded, one of whom later died, but they had been on a special detail with an ammunition train at the time, not under Captain Truman’s command. “We were just—well, part of it was luck and part of it was good leadership,” said Private Vere Leigh. “Some of the other batteries didn’t have that kind of leadership.”

IV

Two weeks and two days after the Armistice, Captain Harry Truman was on leave in Paris dining at Maxim’s. At a nearby table he saw the prettiest woman he had laid eyes on since coming to France and to his delight found she was an American with the Red Cross. After dinner he and several other officers went to the Folies-Bergère, where the “little ladies” clustered about them during the intermission. (Years later he would call the show “disgusting,” but at the time he told Ethel Noland it was about “what you’d expect at the Gaiety only more so.”) He saw Notre Dame and Napoleon’s Tomb. At the Arc de Triomphe, his trench coat belted tight against the November air, he posed for a snapshot beside a captured German cannon. He rode a taxi the length of the Champs-Elysees, up the Rue Royale, down the Madeleine, back up the Rue de Rivoli, over the Seine by the ornate Alexander III Bridge. He visited the Luxembourg Palace, the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre, strolled the Boulevard de l’Opéra, “and a lot of side streets besides.” All in twenty-four hours.

From Paris they took the train to Nice. Paris, said Harry, was “as wild as any place I saw.” Nice was “ideal,” with the Mediterranean on one side, the foothills of the Alps on the other. His hotel, “a dandy place,” overlooked the sea. “The view from my window is simply magnificent…. There is no blue like the Mediterranean blue,” he told Bess, “and when it is backed by hills and a promontory with a lighthouse on it and a few little sailing ships it makes you think of Von Weber’s ‘Polacca Brillante,’ which I am told was composed here.” She was all that was needed to make the place heaven.

He saw his first palm trees, walked in the sunshine, ate like a king, and in the first days of December drove to Monte Carlo, where he was startled to see a real-life princess drinking beer. He and Major Gates hired a car and drove to the Italian border, returning to Nice by way of the Grande Corniche, “the most beautiful drive I ever had.”

In Paris again, his leave about over, he and Major Gates went to the opera, to a performance of Thaïs by the French composer Massenet, which was then immensely popular in France. The Place de l’Opéra was ablaze with lights, as it had not been since 1914. After his days on the Riviera, with his longing for the woman he loved, the sensuous music stirred him deeply. It was “beautifully sung and the scenery [more palm trees] was everything that scenery can possibly be.” This, he emphasized in his letters, was the “real” opera. He would have paid the admission if only to see the gilded glory of the building.

He returned to a division encampment near Verdun notable only, he said, for its copious mud. The wait to go home became endless. “To keep from going crazy we had an almost continuous poker game,” remembered his friend from Independence, Captain Roger Sermon of Battery C. When news of the influenza epidemic at home reached camp, Harry became so alarmed he hardly knew how to contain himself. Bess and her brother Frank had both been down with the “Spanish flu,” he learned, Mary Jane and Ethel Noland as well, all through the weeks he had been on leave, and though all four were on the mend he kept worrying. “Every day nearly someone of my outfit will hear that his mother, sister or sweetheart is dead,” he wrote. “It is heartbreaking almost to think that we are so safe and so well over here and that the ones we’d like to protect more than all the world have been more exposed to death than we.” By the time the epidemic ran its course, vanishing mysteriously early in 1919, the number of deaths in the United States reached 500,000, including 25,000 soldiers, or nearly half the number of American battlefield deaths in the war. At Camp Doniphan alone fifty-one had died.

When in late January Harry learned that his favorite battery clerk, Sergeant Keenan, had died in the base hospital of appendicitis, he wrote in his diary, “Would as leave lost a son.”

General Pershing and the Prince of Wales came for a division review. Pershing shook Captain Truman’s hand and told him he had a fine-looking bunch of men and to take them home as “clean morally and physically as they were when they came over….” Harry took the order quite to heart.

It’s some trick to keep 190 men out of devilment now [he wrote later to Ethel Noland]. I have to think up all sorts of tortures for delinquents. It’s very, very lucky that we are far from wine, women and song or we’d have one h--- of a time. Sometimes I have to sock a man with extra duty that I sure hate to punish. You know justice is an awful tyrant and if I give one man a nice muddy wagon to wash on Sunday, because he went to Verdun without asking me if he could, why I’ve got to give another one the same duty if he does the same thing even if he has the most plausible excuse. I’m crazy about every one of ’em and I wouldn’t trade my messiest buck private for anybody’s top sergeant. It very nearly breaks my heart sometimes to have to be mean as the dickens to some nice boy who has been a model soldier on the front and whose mail I’ve probably censored and I know he’s plum crazy about some nice girl at home but that makes no difference. I have to make ’em walk the chalk. You’d never recognize me when I’m acting Bty Commander.

He was thinking constantly of home and what was ahead for him. He wrote in his letters of returning to the farm, but he mentioned also the possibility of running for political office on his war record—for eastern judge in Jackson County, possibly even for Congress. After what he had seen of peacetime Army life, he said, he would give anything to be on the House Military Affairs Committee. Like a great many of his fellow reserve officers, he had acquired a decided bias against West Pointers. He thought most of them pompous, lazy, and overrated, and couldn’t imagine himself living under such a system. “I can’t see what on earth any man with initiative and a mind of his own wants to be in the army in peacetimes for,” he wrote. “You’ve always got some fossil above you whose slightest whim is law and who generally hasn’t a grain of horse sense.” As a boy, he told Bess, he had “thirsted for a West Point education…only so you could be the leading lady of the palace or empire or whatever it was I wanted to build.” All he knew now for certain was that he longed to get “back to God’s country again,” to “the green pastures of Grand Old Missouri”; that, in fact, he had no place to go but home; that he was broke, and in love—“I love you as madly as a man can”—and eager to be both out of the Army and married just as soon as possible. He dreamed of walking down North Delaware Street. He dreamed of owning a Ford and touring the country with her. “Maybe have a little politics and some nice little dinner parties occasionally just for good measure. How does it sound to you?”

“We’ll be married anywhere you say at any time you mention,” he wrote in another letter, “and if you want only one person or the whole town I don’t care as long as you can make it quickly after my arrival.”

“You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to,” she wrote in response, in the earliest of her letters to have survived. “I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine.” Her mother, she said, hoped they would move in with her at 219 North Delaware. “Just get yourself home and we won’t worry about anything.”

He hated the waiting. He wished “Woodie” (Woodrow Wilson) would quit his “gallivanting” in France and depart, so every American soldier could, too. Saving the world was of no concern any longer. “As far as we’re concerned,” he told Ethel Noland, “most of us don’t give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether Russia has a Red Government or no Government and if the King of the Lollypops wants to slaughter his subjects or his Prime Minister it’s all the same to us.”

In March, the regiment moved south to Courcemont, near Le Mans, where the officers were again quartered in luxury at the Château la Chenay, once the home of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the great canal builder. Harry had one more chance at a flying visit to Paris, during which he saw Woodrow Wilson ride by and, in a shop on the Rue de la Paix, he bought a wedding ring. Then on April 9, 1919, with the 52 other officers and 1,274 men of the 129th Field Artillery, he sailed for New York on the former German liner Zeppelin.

On this homeward voyage, the last act of his great adventure, the returning hero was violently seasick nearly the whole way. For a time he wished he were back at the Argonne where he might die honorably. Yet he could bear any agony, he knew, given the direction they were heading.

Part Two

Politician

5

Try, Try Again

I’ve had a few setbacks in my life, but I never gave up.

—HARRY TRUMAN

I

As his observant cousin Ethel Noland once remarked, Harry Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man. He had been born when Chester A. Arthur was President and among the more pressing issues was whether the nation should continue building a wooden Navy. He was a grown man, thirty-three years old, middle-aged nearly, by the time of the Great War, the event which, more than any turn of the calendar, marked the end of the old century and the beginning of something altogether new. His outlook, tastes, his habits of thought had been shaped by a different world from the one that followed after 1918. As time would show, the Great War was among history’s clearest dividing lines, and much that came later never appealed to Harry Truman, for all his native-born optimism and large faith in progress.

He had been more at home in the older era. He never learned to like the telephone, or daylight saving time, an innovation adopted during the war. He tried using a typewriter for a while, but gave it up. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens remained his favorite authors. Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee were to be his lifelong heroes. Until he met George C. Marshall, he wondered if the “modern” times were capable of producing a great man.

The kind of art that had burst upon the public with New York’s Armory Show of 1913—the first big American exhibition of modern paintings, which included Marcel Duchamp’s sensational Nude Descending a Staircase— had no appeal or meaning for Harry Truman. “Ham and eggs art,” he called it. He liked the old masters. His taste in American art, not surprisingly, ran to the paintings of Missouri riverboatmen and Missouri politics by George Caleb Bingham, or the western scenes of Frederic Remington, who had once owned a saloon in Kansas City.

If Harry Truman had even a little interest in the theories of Einstein or Freud, he never said so. Words like “libido” or “id,” so much in vogue after the war, were never part of his vocabulary. Indeed, he despaired over a great deal that became fashionable in manners and mores. He disliked cigarettes, gin, fad diets. He strongly disapproved of women smoking or drinking, even of men taking a drink if women were present. When after much debate Bess decided it was time she bobbed her hair, he consented only reluctantly. (“I want you to be happy regardless of what I think about it,” he told her.) He disliked the very sound of the Jazz Age, including what became known as Kansas City jazz. Life in the Roaring Twenties as depicted in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald or John O’Hara was entirely foreign to his experience, as it was for so much of the country. He never learned to dance. He never learned to play golf or tennis, never belonged to a country club. Poker was his game, not bridge or mah-jongg. “It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all,” insisted F. Scott Fitzgerald, but Harry Truman, in those years, discovered politics to be his life work.

As the war was a watershed time for the world, so it was in his life. “I have always wondered,” he later wrote, “how things would have turned out in my life if the war had not come along just when it did.” What it most obviously did was to take him from the farm, and he would not go back again, except as a visitor. That much was settled for him, as it was for tens of thousands of others who came home. (“How you gonna’ keep ’em down on the farm/After they’ve seen Paree?” went the hit song of 1919.) More important, he was not the same man who left for France only the year before. The change was astounding. He had new confidence in himself. He had discovered he could lead men and that he liked that better than anything he had ever done before. He found he had courage—that he was no longer the boy who ran from fights—and, furthermore, that he could inspire courage in others.

He had come home with a following, his biggest, best “gang” ever, his battery “boys,” who looked up to him as they would an older brother. He was the captain who brought so many sons of Jackson County home safe and sound. Alone in the dim light of his tent or dugout in France, late at night, he had spent hours answering letters from the mothers and fathers of men in his command, a consideration not commonplace among officers of the AEF, and one that would not soon be forgotten in Kansas City.

He had been a big success as a soldier. The war had made him a somebody in the eyes of all kinds of people, including, most importantly, Bess Wallace, who had only decided to marry him once she heard he was enlisting. By nice coincidence, the signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles and their wedding took place on the same day.

Also because of the war he had met and befriended Eddie Jacobson and Jim Pendergast, who, with Bess, were to have so much to do with the new and different life that began the morning the 129th Field Artillery had its triumphal return.

“Well, I remember when he came back, what a day it was,” said Ethel Noland. “We all went into the city and saw them parading through the streets…. Then we went to the Convention Hall and had a great reception.”

The 129th marched uptown from Union Station in dazzling morning sunshine, under full packs, wearing their “tin derbies,” as they had marched in France. Harry and the other officers were on horseback. Flags brightened buildings and lampposts. The crowds along both sides of Grand Avenue were fifty deep. At 11th Street stood a huge Welcome Arch. People were cheering, weeping, holding up children to see. One young woman, carrying a baby, walked parallel to her husband from the station all the way to the Convention Hall in high heels.

Three days later, May 6, at Camp Funston, Kansas, the men were given their final discharges, and seven weeks and four days after that Bess and Harry were married. But not before two important events took place.

On May 8, Harry’s birthday and his second day home, he and Bess had their first and apparently their last heated argument. Possibly it was over the wedding plans, or possibly over her mother’s insistence that they live with her. Whatever the cause, Harry would remember the day and its misery for the rest of his life. In a letter to Bess written thirty years later, he would refer to it as their “final” argument.

Then, a month in advance of the wedding, he and Eddie Jacobson took a lease on a store in downtown Kansas City. Though Jacobson had served with another battery in France, they had seen each other occasionally and Jacobson, too, had come home on the Zeppelin. They had decided to join forces again and open a men’s furnishing store, a haberdashery, convinced their partnership at Camp Doniphan had been only a prelude to great merchandising success. It was a decision made quickly, even impulsively, and, on Harry’s part, it would seem, one designed to impress Bess and her mother.

The wedding, on Saturday, June 28, 1919, took place at four in the afternoon in tiny Trinity Episcopal Church on North Liberty Street in Independence, and the day was the kind Missouri summers are famous for. The church, full of family and friends, became so stifling hot that all the flowers began to wilt.

The bride wore a simple dress of white georgette crepe, a white picture hat, and carried a bouquet of roses. Her attendants, cousins Helen Wallace and Louise Wells, were dressed in organdy and they too carried roses. The groom had on a fine-checked, gray, three-piece business suit made especially for the occasion, on credit, by his best man, Ted Marks, who had returned to his old trade of gentleman’s tailor. The groom also wore a pair of his Army pince-nez spectacles and appeared, as he stood at the front of the church, to have arrived directly from the barbershop.

Frank Wallace, the tall, prematurely balding brother of the bride, escorted her to the altar, where the Reverend J. P. Plunkett read the service.

Present at the reception afterward, on the lawn at the Gates house, were Mrs. Wallace and her mother, Mrs. Gates, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wallace, Mr. and Mrs. George Wallace, and young Fred Wallace, while the “out-of-town” guests, as recorded in the papers, included Mrs. J. A. Truman, her daughter Miss Mary Jane Truman, and Mr. and Mrs. J. Vivian Truman. All the Nolands attended, of course, as did several of Harry’s former brothers in arms. One who was unable to be there wrote to him, “I hope you have the same success in this new war as you had in the old.”

Punch and ice cream were served. The wedding party posed for pictures, Harry looking extremely serious, Bess a bit bemused. Presently, bride and groom departed for the train in Kansas City, driven by Frank Wallace, with more cars following.

At the station, waiting on the platform, Ted Marks remarked to Harry’s mother, “Well, Mrs. Truman, you’ve lost Harry.”

“Indeed, I haven’t,” she replied.

Recalling the day years later, Mary Jane spoke more of what she had been through before she and Mamma ever reached the church. They had been harvesting wheat at the farm. Mary Jane had cooked noon dinner for twelve farmhands—meat, potatoes, fresh bread, homemade pies, “the usual,” she said.

Ethel Noland remembered Harry’s expression as he stood watching Bess come down the aisle. “You’ve just never seen such a radiant, happy look on a man’s face.”

It had been nine years since the night Harry returned the pie plate. He was now thirty-five; Bess was thirty-four.

The honeymoon couple stopped at Chicago, Detroit, and Port Huron, Michigan. In Chicago, they stayed at the Blackstone. At Port Huron, they were at the beaches of Lake Huron, where the weather was as perfect as their time together. So sublime were these days and nights beside the ice-cold lake that for Harry the very words “Port Huron” would forever mean the ultimate in happiness.

It was all too brief. Worried over her mother’s health—Madge Wallace suffered from sciatica, among other real and imagined complaints—Bess felt they must return to Independence sooner than planned. As her mother wished, they moved into 219 North Delaware, taking Bess’s room at the top of the stairs on the south side. The immediate household now consisted of Bess, Harry, Madge, Fred, who was a college student and his mother’s pet, and the elderly Mrs. Gates, who had a room on the first floor off the front parlor. In back of the house, beyond the driveway, in what was formerly the garden, two small, one-story bungalows had been built, facing Van Home Boulevard, one each for brothers Frank and George and their wives. Thus the whole family was together still in a “kind of complex,” under the watchful eye of Mother Madge Wallace, a neat, straight little woman with a rather sweet expression, her hair done up in a knot, who still wore an old-fashioned velvet choker. Among the neighbors she was perceived as possibly the most perfect lady in town and “a very, very difficult person.”

Bess considered the arrangement temporary. She and Harry would stay only long enough for her mother to become accustomed to the idea that she was married. Harry moved in with his clothes, a few books, and a trunk full of his Army things, which was nearly all he owned.

II

Truman & Jacobson was located at 104 West 12th Street, Kansas City, on the ground floor of the Glennon Hotel, catty-cornered from the larger Muehlebach Hotel, which made it a choice location. By agreement Harry was to keep the books; Eddie would do the buying. Between them they would take turns with the customers.

Jacobson, short, cheerful, and conscientious, was twenty-eight years old, but with his glasses and rapidly thinning hair looked perhaps thirty-five, and unlike Harry, he had had twelve years’ experience in the retail clothing business. One of six children and known by everyone as “Eddie,” never “Edward,” he was the son of impoverished immigrant Jews from Lithuania who had settled first on New York’s Lower East Side, where he was born, and later in Kansas City, where he went to work at age fourteen as a stock boy in a dry goods store. Eddie, too, was soon to be married—to Bluma Rosenbaum at B’nai Jehudah, Kansas City’s oldest Reform temple, in December of that year—and so, like Harry, he had every reason to wish to succeed.

It was to be a “first-class operation,” specializing in famous brands. They would sell no suits or coats, but a full line of “gents furnishings”—shirts, socks, ties, belts, underwear, hats. To get started, they combined their money and borrowed from the bank. The store was remodeled inside and out. The cost of their initial inventory came to $35,000.

Harry put in $15,000, most of which he obtained by selling off livestock and machinery from the Grandview farm. He had hoped the farm might continue as before and tried to persuade Mary Jane to keep it running, but she refused if he was unwilling to be there and do his part. Two years had been enough, she said. That fall they auctioned off horses, hogs, plows, seed drill, nearly everything, the proceeds going to Harry for the store, an arrangement that was hardly fair to Mary Jane, given all she had done, and that pleased no one in the family except Harry. The land would now be rented for someone else to farm.

The store opened for business in late November 1919, and would be remembered by friends and patrons as “right up to snuff,” “a sharp place.”

The name “Truman & Jacobson” was set in colored tiles at the street entrance, between two large plate-glass show windows filled with shirts in striped pastels, fifteen to twenty hats, and a hundred or more stiff, detachable collars, suspended by wire in vertical columns. The shirts and collars were all Ide brand, as proclaimed in formal lettering across the top of the storefront, above the plate-glass windows. Inside, long showcases were filled with shirts, leather gloves, belts, underwear, socks, collar pins, cufflinks, while behind, on open shelves, were boxes of more shirts, more detachable collars—“Marwyn” collars by Ide, which, like those in the windows, featured “the smart roll-front.” But what immediately caught the eye was a display of silk neckties, hundreds of ties in every color and pattern, strung from an overhead wire on the left that reached the length of the store.

It all looked fresh and clean. The tiled floor was kept shined. Glass countertops gleamed. There were big electric fans overhead, a glistening new cash register, and close by on one showcase, the store’s proud conversation piece, a huge silver loving cup, four feet high, a gift to “Captain Harry” from the boys of Battery D. Above the hat shelves at the back of the store, arranged like a bouquet, were the five flags of the Allied nations.

With the loving cup and flags, the atmosphere was not unlike that of a college shop, the college in this instance having been the war. For anyone who liked clothes as Harry did, who had liked always to “look nice,” the effect must have been very pleasing.

Yet it is hard to imagine the adjustment from battery commander to storekeeper as anything but difficult, hard to imagine him not finding it a painful comedown from such career aspirations as he had confided to Bess, or from parading with a victorious army up Grand Avenue. Nor does there appear to be an explanation, unless it was that he—and Bess also—wanted money quite as much as in the years before the war and saw the partnership as the opportunity, while at the same time keeping contact with his “boys,” the city, and people of a kind who might do him good should politics ever become his “line.” His only explanation later was, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

He and Eddie opened their door regularly at eight every morning and remained open until nine at night. Times were prosperous. “Sporty” 12th Street—the 12th Street of Twelfth Street Rag—was “jumping.” Conventioneers poured in and out of the Muehlebach. In the Dixon Hotel, across the street, were two gambling houses. Prostitutes worked the neighborhood. Day or night, salesmen, secretaries, shoppers from outlying towns, nearly everybody seemed to have money to spend. “Twelfth Street was in its heyday and our war buddies and the Twelfth Street boys and girls were our customers,” Eddie Jacobson would recall with pleasure. “Silk underwear for men, and silk shirts, were the rage. We sold shirts at sixteen dollars. Our business was all cash. No credit.” Shirts, the main stock in trade, were Eddie’s specialty. Harry, who called it “the shirt store,” would stand poised for business between two of the showcases, an elbow on one countertop, a hand on the other, his shoes shined, tie straight, the overhead lights glinting in his thick glasses. Like the store, he always looked fresh and clean.

As hoped, it became a rendezvous for their Army pals, a number of whom now looked to Harry as financial adviser, legal adviser, “and everything else,” as Eddie said. “We’d all drop in there sometime during the day—it was the hangout,” remembered Eddie McKim. Some evenings there was barely room for the real customers. “But Harry seemed glad to have us,” said former Sergeant Meisburger. Even the policeman on the corner, Walter “Cushionfoot” Teasley, had been a first lieutenant with the battery at Camp Doniphan.

Harry returned the favor of their patronage as best he could. He bought his suits from Ted Marks, had his hair cut at Frank Spina’s barbershop. They were just like his family, he would say. Bess objected to the haircuts. But Frank Spina was one of his boys, Harry would explain. “You can’t quit them.”

Others living elsewhere around the country wrote to wish Harry well. “I see no reason,” said one man, “why you, with your engaging personality and honest morals, should not be very successful in that business.”

“Well, sir, don’t forget me,” wrote another, Eugene Donnelly, in a letter from a remote Texas oil field, “and when you see a keen young lady come out of the Muehlebach, just say to yourself gee I’d hate to be old Donnelly, living seven miles from a railroad, enjoying the company of two hundred men.” Once, in France, after the Armistice, when Donnelly and several others from Battery D were due to go to Paris on furlough but had no money, Harry had found out about it and loaned them what they needed. “We’d have done anything for him then,” Donnelly would say in an interview years afterward, “and nobody that I know has changed his mind.”

Eddie’s wife Bluma said later that her husband never worked as hard as he did that first year in the 12th Street store, nor Harry either, she supposed. There were no signed agreements between them, there was never a need for it. “They just felt that close to one another that they could trust each other, which they did all through their lives.”

By the year’s end they had sold $70,000 worth of goods, which meant a high return on their investment.

In his campaign for President in 1920, the handsome Republican candidate, Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio—who had been picked in a famous “smoke-filled room” at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, just a year after Mr. and Mrs. Harry Truman stopped there—called for a return to “normalcy.” The American people, Harding said, had had enough of heroism, and he and his running mate, former Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, defeated the Democratic ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt with a bigger majority than in any previous election. Normalcy seemed indeed to be what the country wanted, and in this respect Truman and Jacobson, restocking their shelves in Kansas City, waiting on customers, seemed in perfect step with the times. Harry joined the Kansas City Club, the Triangle Club (a businessmen’s lunch group much like Rotary), and the Kansas City Athletic Club, where, with relentless determination, he taught himself to swim, using a strange, choppy, self-styled sidestroke, his head above water, so he could keep his glasses dry. With Ted Marks or Jim Pendergast, he ate regularly at the Savoy Grill, in the old Savoy Hotel on 9th Street, his favorite place for lunch. He dreamed also of a new car, to replace the second-hand, four-cylinder Dodge roadster he was driving to and from the city.

The one looming worry was that the farmers were hurting and the reasons were plain enough at the same Kansas City grain exchange where John Truman had lost his money twenty years earlier. Prices were tumbling. Wheat that had sold for a record $2.15 a bushel in 1919 had dropped to $1.44 a bushel by the fall of 1920. Farm prices overall fell 40 percent and the farmers’ plight began to spread. The Middle West was especially hard hit. By 1921 the silk shirt that had been such a symbol of the postwar boom became the shirt Truman & Jacobson could no longer sell. By mid-year their “flourishing business” had evaporated. With the country in a full-scale depression, Harry and Eddie Jacobson were in trouble. To keep their stock up to date, they were forced to borrow more money.

The same old friends kept dropping in, but no one was buying as before. Several now found the store a convenient place to borrow an extra five or ten dollars. It became a combination club and unemployment agency, and, because of Harry’s generosity, small loan office. If they came in asking for “Captain Harry,” Eddie Jacobson recalled, he knew it was for a touch. If they asked for “Captain Truman,” he knew he had a sale.

It was Harry also who paid for the damages after a Battery D reunion on St. Patrick’s Day, 1921, a dinner at the Kansas City Elks Club that turned into a brawl, with the “boys” hilariously “airlining” soup and dinner rolls at one another. There had been no shortage of whiskey for the evening, Prohibition notwithstanding, and things were finally so out of hand that the police had to be called. But then one of the police turned out to be a former Battery D sergeant, George Brice, who, to the delight of the other police, was unceremoniously relieved of his revolver and most of his clothes.

As the depression grew worse and the partners had less and less to do, Harry became increasingly restless. “He would get out and go to lunches and mix with people…and Eddie Jacobson would stay around and take care of business,” said Ted Marks, who had not encouraged Harry to go into the retail line. Now they talked about anything and everything but Harry’s troubles. “We all were having a hard time those days…. Rents were high and starting anew—it was pretty rough,” Marks remembered.

Harry and Eddie had an ink blotter printed up as a flyer to hand out at the counter:

Dr. A. Gloom Chaser Says:

“It Takes 65 Muscles of the Face to Make a Frown and 13 to Make a Smile—Why Work Overtime?”

Buy Your Men’s Furnishings from Us at New Prices. YOU Will Smile at the Great Reductions. WE will Smile at the Increased Business. Then NONE of US Will be Overworked.

In the fall of 1921, when plans were announced for an American Legion convention in Kansas City, as part of ceremonies to dedicate the site for a colossal new war memorial, Harry at once volunteered his services. As chairman of the decorations committee, he raised money, ordered flags and bunting, and launched a campaign to have every downtown business, trade association, club, every household “show the flag” in what he promised would be the most patriotic gathering ever in the country and one certain to make Kansas City “the most talked about town in the world.” He was brisk, enthusiastic, and effective. The big day was November 1. France sent Marshal Ferdinand Foch; Great Britain sent Admiral Earl David Beatty; Italy, General Armando Diaz; and Belgium, General Baron Jacques, a strapping figure with a pink face and huge cavalryman’s mustache. General Pershing came to town—a thrill for Harry—and Eddie Rickenbacker and Vice President Coolidge, who, reportedly, looked and acted so effacingly vice-presidential that he had trouble gaining admittance to several gatherings. Eighty-five bands marched and sixty thousand men of the American Legion, including former Captain Harry Truman, who was chosen for the honor of presenting flags to the Allied commanders. Foch, whose presence on the reviewing stand electrified the crowds, said he had never seen such a display of feeling, such patient, “almost sacred,” attention from so many people. More than a hundred thousand had turned out.

Later activities, however, were considerably different in spirit. “That,” remembered Harry’s friend and fellow legionnaire, Harry Vaughan, “was when we took the Hotel Baltimore to pieces.” Somebody drove a Texas steer into the hotel lobby. A crap game in the street outside stopped traffic. Eddie McKim could not recall Harry taking part in any of the “high jinks…except he probably looked out of his haberdashery store door and would see some of the ladies’ negligées floating down from the windows of the Muehlebach Hotel. They used to lodge in the trolley wires….”

The goodwill and mutual respect between Harry and Eddie Jacobson, meantime, seemed not to suffer from the strain they were under, though it remained at heart a business friendship. Eddie’s wife sensed a certain distance between the Trumans and the Jacobsons that she took to be a sign of anti-Semitism among Harry’s in-laws. The Wallaces, she said, were considered aristocracy, and under the circumstances the Trumans could not afford to have Jews in their house. But then Harry seldom if ever brought any of his friends home to North Delaware Street. The privacy of Madge Wallace’s world was one thing, the world without was another, and so it would remain.

Truman & Jacobson failed in 1922. After much discussion, the partners decided not to file for bankruptcy—and thereby wipe out their debts—but to try to pay off their creditors as best they could, little by little as time went on. The business was approximately $35,000 in the red. Eddie, who went on the road as a shirt salesman, did all he could to meet his part of the debt, but in three years, unable to keep up, was forced to declare himself bankrupt. Some time later, when the two friends met for lunch downtown, Harry, seeing Eddie’s frayed suit, gave him some money and told him to buy some new clothes. Fifteen years after the store went under, Harry would still be paying off on the haberdashery, and as a consequence would be strapped for money for twenty years. But like his father, he never ever neglected appearances.

The store had been a dismal failure. Yet few thought it Harry’s fault. He was the victim of circumstances, the times were against him. “It was a nice store, and he was just a victim of circumstances like all the rest of us,” remembered former First Lieutenant Edgar Hinde, who was trying to sell Willys-Overland automobiles in Independence. “It was rough, I’ll tell you, it was rough!” The price of wheat in 1922 was 88 cents a bushel.

An exception to this view was Harry’s former Grandview neighbor and Lodge brother Gaylon Babcock, who remembered Harry’s downfall coming as no surprise. To Babcock, whose father had put money in the store, it was just another case of “There goes Harry again.”

Harry blamed the Republicans in Washington. The fault was neither in himself nor in his stars, but in the tight money policy of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, he insisted. But it could also be said that the trouble began in 1920 when the Wilson administration suddenly cut government spending and raised taxes.

III

To his wife Bess, who regarded most of his Army friends as roughnecks, Harry once described Jimmy Pendergast as “a nice boy and as smart as the old man he’s named for.”

The old man in question, the original James Pendergast, was the legendary Alderman Jim, the first Pendergast in Kansas City politics and founding father of what became a famous, or infamous, depending on one’s point of view, Kansas City dynasty. His was a familiar American story. The son of Irish Catholic immigrants who had settled and raised a numerous family in St. Joseph, upstream on the Missouri River, Alderman Jim had come to Kansas City in the centennial year of 1876, a young man with neither money nor connections and in desperate need of a job. He found work first in a slaughterhouse, then in an iron foundry, in the West Bottoms, a roaring industrial section that stretched across the muddy lowlands between the river’s great bend and the bluffs of the city. Jim Pendergast was brawny and gregarious and with his sunny disposition made friends rapidly. He also saved his money and in 1881, after betting on a winning horse called Climax, he purchased a combination hotel and saloon which, in tribute to his lucky horse, he called the Climax. Other saloons were acquired as years passed, these, too, proving popular and profitable, especially with the added attraction of back-room gambling. In addition, Jim Pendergast moved into the wholesale liquor business.

His real love, however, was politics. He was of course a Democrat and a natural vote-getter. In time, with the hardworking, hard-drinking, steadily expanding populace of the West Bottoms, the First Ward, as his base of power, he built Kansas City’s first political organization and made himself boss, a term he disliked. “I’ve got friends,” he would say cheerfully. “And, by the way, that’s all there is to this boss business—friends.” In 1889, Jim brought three younger brothers, Michael, John, and Thomas, on from St. Joseph to help manage things. Three years later, in 1892, he ran for alderman from the First Ward. “There is no kinder hearted or more sympathetic man in Kansas City than Jim Pendergast,” said one devoted Democrat introducing the candidate. It was a reputation not lightly earned.

No deserving man, woman or child that appealed to Jim Pendergast went away empty-handed [remembered a contemporary], and this is saying a great deal, as he was continually giving aid and help to the poor and unfortunate…. There was never a winter in the last twenty years that he did not circulate among the poor of the West Bottoms, ascertaining their needs, and after his visit there were no empty larders. Grocers, butchers, bakers, and coal men had unlimited orders to see that there was no suffering among the poor of the West Bottoms, and to send the bills to Jim Pendergast.

He remained on the city council for eighteen years, never losing an election. He was “Big Jim,” “King of the First,” conspicuously, proudly Irish and Catholic, with a physical resemblance to the great Irish-American hero of the day, prizefighter John L. Sullivan, which did him no harm as a public personality. With his love of good food he had grown to well over 200 pounds. He had a thick, black handlebar mustache, wore small black bow ties and a heavy gold watch chain, and worked steadily for public improvements—parks, boulevards, buildings, all projects that meant work for his people. He fought for higher pay for firemen. He fought the anti-Catholic American Protective Association. He fought the reformers, kept the saloons open and purchased another on Main Street, a block from City Hall, which he made his headquarters. He had courage and a much-loved sense of humor. When a bill was put before the state legislature in Jefferson City that would have prohibited anyone who owned a saloon from holding elective office and reporters asked what he thought of it, Alderman Jim said probably the bill was intended as a way of improving the reputation of saloonkeepers.

With the city growing by leaps and bounds, he reached out more and more to constituencies other than the Irish—to blacks, Poles, Slavs, Croatian slaughterhouse workers, to every immigrant group, and particularly the largest, the Italians, whose stronghold lay beyond the First Ward in the teeming, crime-ridden North End. The peak of his power came after the turn of the century, at the time when the bankrupt Truman family had moved to Kansas City. By then he had picked his own mayor, James A. (“Fighting Jim”) Reed, in addition to nearly every other key office at City Hall. Charges of vote fraud in the First Ward led to investigations that produced no evidence of wrongdoing. “I never needed a crooked vote,” Jim enjoyed telling reporters. “All I want is a chance for my friends to get to the polls.”

Following his death in 1911, a ten-foot bronze statue was erected in Mulkey Square, on the heights overlooking the West Bottoms, a commanding seated figure of Alderman Jim paid for by public subscription and inscribed “to the rugged character and splendid achievements of a man whose private and public life was the embodiment of truth and courage.” Even the Kansas City Star, arch-opponent of machine politics, lamented his passing. His word had been his bond, said the paper. “His support of any man or measure never had a price in cash.”

It was the Pendergast “organization,” however, that stood as Big Jim’s great legacy, and it was to his brother Tom, sixteen years his junior—young enough nearly to have been his son—that he passed the mantle of leadership. “Brother Tom will make a fine alderman, and he’ll be good to the boys—just as I have been,” an ailing Jim had reassured a gathering of patrons at his Main Street saloon. As bookkeeper for the saloons and precinct captain, young Tom had learned the business and politics from the ground up, rising to superintendent of streets, a job second only to mayor in the patronage it offered. At Jim’s retirement, Tom was elected to Jim’s old seat on the city council. But unlike Jim, Tom cared little for public office and retired from the council in 1915, not to run for anything ever again.

Tom—Thomas Joseph Pendergast, or T.J.—was no one to quarrel with. Though only 5 feet 9, he was a blond, ruddy-faced bull of a man, with a head so massive it looked oversized even on so large and powerful a body. His neck seemed part of his heavy shoulders, almost as though he had no neck, and it was well known that he could knock a man senseless with a single blow. Yet for all this, he had a kind of jauntiness, an appealing ease of manner. People spoke of the warmth, not menace, in his large, oddly protruding, pale blue eyes. It was the eyes, in combination with his “hugeness,” according to a close observer named William Reddig, that made Tom look both formidable and engaging. To Reddig, a veteran reporter for the Star, Tom was one of the most arresting figures ever seen in Kansas City, and once seen, never forgotten.

Like his brother, Tom was a saloonkeeper who abhorred drunkenness and drank only an occasional glass of beer. He dutifully attended early mass every morning. He liked to say he had never spent a night away from his wife. Further, as Big Jim had long appreciated, Tom was acutely intelligent.

Though the Pendergast operations had never suffered from lack of money, and money, as often said, was nowhere more useful than in politics, Tom, the bookkeeper, perceived politics as a business opportunity to a degree Jim never had. He acquired more saloons. He expanded the wholesale liquor business. Brother Mike Pendergast, meantime, was made the liquor license inspector for all Jackson County, which gave him the power to say yes or no to the operations of more than six hundred saloons, this naturally depending in no small part on how willingly the proprietors did business with the Pendergasts.

Even more important, as time would tell, was the Ready-Mixed Concrete Company established by Tom, one of the first companies anywhere to mix concrete in a plant, then deliver it by truck to the construction site. With his love of public improvements, Jim had been known as a builder—all the Pendergasts were builders—but Tom, with the city growing as never before, saw no reason why others should profit from the work if the organization could. In addition to the Ready-Mixed Company, he eventually founded or had substantial interest in the W. A. Ross Construction Company, the Midwest Paving Company, the Midwest Precoat Company, the Kansas City Concrete Pipe Company, the Centropolis Crusher Company, a cigar company, an oil company, and something called the Public Service Pulverizing Company. To charges that he used his political power to control contracts and furnish material for public use, Tom would reply, “Yes. Why not? Aren’t my products as good as any?” And, by and large, they were, often better.

Hundreds of people from all walks of life, every level of society, would later testify to the kindness, generosity, and fundamental decency of Tom Pendergast, not to say his impressiveness as a political leader. “He was a master! He had an analytical mind,” said one loyal foot soldier in the organization, a street repair inspector. “He ran the organization for people. His first concern was always people…. He was a man of immense heart and imagination…. He was always courteous. He would always listen you out.” To a young lawyer with no connection to the organization, a single face-to-face meeting with Tom was enough to convince him that “that fellow could probably talk anyone into anything.”

“He did so much for poor people,” it would be said again and again. “Oh, he was a wonderful man. To me he was a Robin Hood,” said a woman for whom he had found a job in a hospital laundry, one of the thousands of jobs he had provided over the years. “No, I never had a sense of evil when I was with him,” remembered a Catholic priest. “The man never exuded a sense of evil.” Even the judge who later sent Pendergast to prison would concede afterward that had he known him, he, too, very likely would have been one of his friends.

Reticent by nature, Tom kept himself to himself, as would be said, and this supposedly was his “edge.” But those associated with him in his long career, including Harry Truman, were to hear certain observations repeated many times:

The amateur failed in politics because politics was concerned with “things as they are.” “Most people don’t think for themselves. They lean on newspapers.” “You can’t make a man good by passing a law that he must be good. It’s against human nature.” Politics, as his brother Jim had so often professed, was primarily a business of friends. “We have the theory that if we do a man a favor he will do us one. That’s human nature.” Few people were ingrates. Ingratitude was a cardinal sin. “Let the river take its course.”

To reporters, with whom he was invariably courteous, he would describe himself only as a realist and claim to know more about how the people felt than anyone in town, or any newspaper. “It’s my business to know.”

As his admirers also liked to point out, Tom Pendergast was not the kind to flaunt his power. He was never seen parading about the courthouse or City Hall. He preferred to run things quietly, keeping tabs on the precincts where the organization was in business 365 days a year.

“Politics is a business, an all-the-year-round competitive business. To the victor belong the spoils. I might as well be honest about it. It may be cynical but that’s the fact. It’s the same locally and nationally. Nobody gets a job on an appointment because he’s a nice fellow. He must deserve it politically. It’s the same as in any other business.”

The pattern of the organization followed the pattern established by law for election purposes. There was a ward leader, a precinct captain for each precinct, and a block leader for every square block within the precinct. The precinct captain was the first person who called on newcomers to the neighborhood, who saw that their water was connected, gas and electricity turned on. Coal in winter, food, clothing, and medical attention were all provided by the organization to whoever was in need at no charge, and as those benefiting from such help would remember fondly, the system involved no paperwork, few delays, no stigma of the dole. “When a man’s in need,” T.J. would lecture, “we don’t ask whether he’s a Republican or Democrat…. We function as nearly as we can 100 percent by making people feel kindly toward us.”

Politics was personal contact. When winter storms hit the city, trucks from the various Pendergast enterprises would arrive in the West Bottoms loaded with overcoats and other warm clothing to be handed out to the homeless, the drunken derelicts, to any and all who were suffering. At Christmas, Tom gave out three thousand free dinners. Many people would remember for the rest of their lives how at the height of the deadly influenza epidemic in 1918-19 and at great personal risk Tom Pendergast had made a personal survey, house to house, to see who needed help.

All that was expected in return was gratitude expressed at the polls on election day. And to most of his people this seemed little enough to ask and perfectly proper. Many, too, were happy to be “repeaters,” those who voted “early and often” on election day. The woman who worked in the hospital laundry, as an example, started as a repeater at age eighteen, three years shy of the voting age, and enjoyed every moment. She and several others would dress up in different costumes for each new identity, as they were driven from polling place to polling place in a fine, big car. It was like play-acting, she remembered years later. She would vote at least four or five times before the day ended. “Oh, I knew it was illegal, but I certainly never thought it was wrong.”

But for all his sway and subsequent notoriety as the machine overlord of Kansas City, Tom Pendergast was not without rivals. His power was as yet limited, even as late as the 1920s. In opposition was another Democratic faction led by another exceedingly adroit, popular Irish-Catholic politician named Joseph B. Shannon. In the parlance of Jackson County, Pendergast Democrats were the “Goats,” whereas Shannon’s people were the “Rabbits,” and both sides proudly so. The names began, supposedly, because the poverty-stricken families aligned with Alderman Jim had kept goats on the bluffs above the West Bottoms, while the Shannon people occupied a territory overrun by rabbits. It was also said that once on a march to a political convention Alderman Jim had roared, “When we come over the hill like goats, they’ll run like rabbits.” In any event, Joe Shannon was nothing like a rabbit in temperament. He was smooth, well dressed, and handsome in much the way Warren G. Harding was handsome. He was also quite as fearless as any Pendergast and had both the pluck and personality to inspire a following. And since the Republicans rarely had support enough to carry a general election in the county, the real knockdown contests were always in the primaries, among Democrats, where the lines were sharply drawn. Every Democrat counted himself either a Goat or a Rabbit, whether in town or out in the country. John Truman in his time had been a Goat and it was his Goat friends at the Independence Courthouse who made him a road overseer. So in that sense John Truman had been a Pendergast man, as was Harry briefly when he replaced his father as overseer.

The difference in the two factions was mainly a matter of style. The Goats liked to win with strength, with big turnouts on election day. The Rabbits were known for their cleverness. But both sides could play rough—with money or by calling out the saloon bullies. Strong-arm tactics at the polls, ballot-stuffing, ballot-box theft, the buying of votes with whiskey or cash, bloody, headlong street brawls, all the odious stratagems that had made big-city machine politics notorious since the time of New York’s Boss Tweed, had been brought to bear to determine which side within the party gained the upper hand. “Stealing elections had become a high art,” wrote one man, “refined and streamlined by the constant factional battles….” And the prize at stake always was power—jobs, influence, money, “business,” as Tom Pendergast would say. It was “the game” played by “the boys” with zest, and never over such issues of reform as inspired periodic Republican or independent citizens’ crusades. That the Republicans so rarely ever triumphed was taken by Democrats, whether Rabbit or Goat, as proof that Republican bosses just weren’t as smart as a Joe Shannon or a Tom Pendergast.

Years before, in the time of Alderman Jim, a landmark bargain had been struck, largely because Alderman Jim had at last concluded that the Rabbits were there to stay. He and Shannon reached what became known as the Fifty-Fifty Agreement, whereby the prize of patronage after every election was to be divided evenly, no matter which faction won, thereby guaranteeing that neither side could ever lose. But Goat and Rabbit loyalties remained strong all the same, the battles continued. Politics, after all, in the words of one Casimir Welch, a tough ward boss of “Rabbit persuasion,” was “a game for fighters.”

To every Goat Tom Pendergast was the Big Boss, while his brother Mike was the “enforcer of loyalty.” Mike was hard and combative, yet a charmer when he wished, or at least an easier man to talk to than Tom. Mike, who ran the “Bloody Tenth” Ward, liked to get out and see people, in contrast to Tom, who preferred to stay in his cubbyhole office off the lobby of the somewhat disreputable Jefferson Hotel, another Pendergast enterprise. They were different in appearance as well. Mike stood six feet tall. He was broad-shouldered and slim, his hips so narrow that to keep his trousers in place he felt obliged to wear both belt and suspenders. Mike had a resolute, chiseled look, strong chin, and eyes of an even paler blue than Tom’s. He was really quite a handsome man. His great flaw, as everyone knew, was his temper. He was a “tenacious fighting type of the old school,” a hothead who hated double talk and compromise, which was why Alderman Jim had passed him over and put Tom at the head of the organization. There was never any halfway ground with Mike. As was said, you were either with him or against him. He detested all Rabbits and was credited with claiming their extinction as among his foremost ambitions. One Saturday he had walked alone into a saloon famous for being a Rabbit stronghold, and after inviting a half-dozen men to join him for a drink at the bar, for a toast to the spirit of Fifty-Fifty, he hurled his glass in their faces, only to be jumped and severely beaten. But it had all been worth it, Mike said afterward.

Because of his closeness to Tom, who called him “Michael,” Mike’s views were invariably taken as Tom’s own, and this gave him a standing second to none except Tom. Also, besides the Tenth Ward, Mike had responsibility for what was called the country vote, the whole outlying eastern section of the county that included such towns as Grandview, Lee’s Summit, and Independence. (For some reason, as Harry Truman would recall, Tom Pendergast had no interest in the country vote.) In addition, most importantly, Mike had produced the heir apparent. Tom had three children, but two were girls and his only son was still, in the early 1920s, a small child. Mike, however, had a daughter and six sons, the oldest of whom was being groomed to take over. He was Harry’s friend Jim Pendergast, and it was pleasant-mannered, pleasant-looking Jim who one day brought his father around to the haberdashery on 12th Street to meet Harry Truman.

The time of the meeting was probably the late fall or early winter of 1921, which was still several months before the final collapse of Truman & Jacobson but well past the point when Harry knew the business was doomed.

They wanted to know if Harry would like to run for eastern judge of Jackson County, a courthouse job in Independence, which under the Missouri system was not a judicial post but administrative, the equivalent of a county commissioner, and a prime spot politically, which Harry already understood. With three judges on the court—an eastern judge (for the outlying country), a western judge (for Kansas City), and a presiding judge—having one vote of the three was worth a great deal, if only for trading purposes. The judges had control of the county purse strings. They hired and controlled the road overseers, as well as road gangs, county clerks, and other employees numbering in the hundreds. They could also determine who was awarded county contracts, and for the county road system, such as it was, there seemed a never-ending need for maintenance and repairs.

According to Pendergast family tradition, the idea of running Harry was Jim’s alone, and, interestingly, his father gave his consent even before meeting Harry because, in part, of what he knew of John Truman. If Captain Truman was all Jim said, and he was John Truman’s son, then, providing he had no link to the Ku Klux Klan or any such anti-Catholic faction, Captain Truman was all right with Mike.

Harry accepted their offer at once, with no hesitation. To a friend he wrote, “They are trying to run me for Eastern Judge, out in Independence, and I guess they’ll do it before they are through.” This was in a letter dated February 4, 1922, suggesting the anonymous “they” already had things so well in hand there could be no turning back. At a meeting at Mike’s Tenth Ward Democratic Club, Harry sat quietly as Mike, who disliked making speeches, got up and said, “Now, I’m going to tell you who you are going to be for, for county judge. It’s Harry Truman. He’s got a fine war record. He comes from a fine family. He’ll make a fine judge.”

Had he wished, Mike could also have stressed that Harry Truman was a Baptist and a Mason who could talk farming with farmers as no big-city Irish politician ever could, that Harry was of old pioneer stock, the son of an honest farmer and an honest road overseer, that Harry was a fresh face in county politics, and, not incidentally, known himself to be an honest and honorable man—strong attributes under any circumstances, but ideal for what the organization needed to win the country vote. Indeed, for the Pendergasts’ purposes, Harry Truman was just about ideal, a dream candidate, which is what led some to observe then, as later, that he offered more to the Pendergasts than they to him.

“Old Tom Pendergast wanted to have some window-dressing,” Harry’s friend Harry Vaughan would later explain, “and Truman was really window-dressing for him because he could say, ‘Well, there’s my boy Truman. Nobody can ever say anything about Truman. Everybody thinks he’s okay.’ ”

For Harry, the timing could not have been better. He badly needed rescuing. To some latter-day admirers and students of his career, the suggestion that he turned to politics in desperation, because of his business failure, would be unacceptable, a fiction devised to cast him in the worst possible light. It would be stressed that his interest in politics was longstanding, that the Pendergasts had come to him, not he to them, and that in any event their power then was by no means absolute, hardly enough to dictate a political destiny. And all this was true. Yet to Harry himself there was never much question about the actual state of his affairs or to whom he owed the greatest debt of gratitude.

“Went into business all enthusiastic. Lost all I had and all I could borrow,” he would write in a private memoir. “Mike Pendergast picked me up and put me into politics and I’ve been lucky.” Mike was nothing less than his “political mentor,” continued Harry. “I loved him as I did my own daddy.”

He remembered he had been standing behind the counter “feeling fairly blue” the day Mike and Jim came into the store. What he wished to make especially clear was not that the Pendergasts had played no part of consequence, or that he had little indebtedness to them, but that it was Mike, not Tom, the Big Boss, whose interest made the difference. Harry was not even to meet Tom Pendergast for some time to come.

The job of eastern judge paid $3,465 a year. If elected, Harry would serve two years.

His Army friends were nearly unanimous for the idea. Only a few tried to dissuade him. Eddie McKim, his former sergeant, told him he was crazy. When Harry sat down with Edgar Hinde, in Hinde’s Willys-Overland garage in Independence, to explain what he was about to do—grinning, as Hinde recalled—Hinde told him he wasn’t the political type, to which Harry responded, “Well, I’ve got to eat.”

To sample opinion among those of the older generation who had influence in Independence, Harry called on Colonel William Southern, editor of the Examiner. Colonel Southern, whose rank was strictly honorary, was the father of May Southern Wallace, Bess’s brother George’s wife, which, in a manner of speaking, made him one of the family, as well as someone whose goodwill and backing could matter significantly. A short, pink-faced, cigar-chewing man with a goatee, who customarily wore his hat at his desk, the colonel listened patiently to Harry, then told him what a fool he would be to “mess up” his life with politics. “I told him all the bad effect a life of chronic campaigning could have on a man,” he would later recount. “I told him how poor were its rewards…how undermining the constant need for popular approval could be to a man’s character.” Harry, smiling, only shook his head and said he had made up his mind.

What opinions Bess had, what her mother was saying privately, or Mamma Truman thought, are not recorded. Ethel Noland, it is known, strongly approved and would later explain Harry’s willingness to take up with the Pendergasts as succinctly as anyone would: “They always like to pick winners, and they endorsed him. And, indeed, if he hadn’t been endorsed by the machine he couldn’t have run. He was very grateful to them….”

IV

Candidate Truman opened his campaign two months short of his thirty-eighth birthday, March 8, 1922, at a rousing, foot-stamping rally of war veterans in an auditorium at Lee’s Summit. About three hundred people turned out for speeches, free cigars, and music, and to see Harry Truman launched, ostensibly, as the American Legion candidate, an idea acclaimed as admirably new and progressive. (“If they [the veterans] want to mix in politics it is their right and when they take such matters into their hands they will settle affairs of state as they settled the Kaiser’s in France,” said the Lee’s Summit Journal.) The Battery D “Irish bunch” were there in force, along with a “sprinkling” of Pendergast people. Harry, when introduced by former Colonel E. M. Stayton, another veteran of the Argonne, said he was willing to run and was only just able to say that, so “thoroughly rattled” was he by stage fright. “That first meeting was a flop for me,” he would recall long years afterward. “I was scared worse than I was when I first came under fire in 1918.” But his speech was all the crowd wanted. The highlight of the evening came when Ethel Lee Buxton of Kansas City, who had been a Red Cross entertainer in France, sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” then closed with “Mother Machree.”

Another evening Harry spoke at Grandview, another from a rough wooden platform in front of the Hickman’s Mills church, and on neither occasion was he able to say much more than that he was in the race and welcomed the support of his friends. At Hickman’s Mills the introduction was made by his old neighbor O. V. Slaughter, who had headed the Jackson County Red Cross during the war and was now president of the Grandview Bank, the kind of man who knew senators and governors, yet remained “strictly and primarily” a farmer. Gray-bearded, he looked like an old-style patriarch, and though seldom known to speak in public, he was considered highly persuasive when he did. One line only would be remembered from his remarks. “I knew Harry Truman before he was born,” he said, and to others who had known John and Matt Truman, or who, like Slaughter, remembered Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, no stronger endorsement could have been spoken. Reportedly there were only three votes in the precinct against Harry.

Four other Democrats were in the race—a farmer and road overseer named Thomas Parent; an Independence businessman, James V. Compton; another Independence man, George W. Shaw, who was a road contractor; and Emmett Montgomery, a banker from Blue Springs—and all were thought formidable opponents. Parent had the support of a former judge, a flashy politician named Miles Bulger, who was neither Rabbit nor Goat but a spoiler. Compton had served previously on the court and could stress the value of experience. Shaw was known to be honest, which, as Harry said, was considered unique in a contractor. But the man to beat was Emmett Montgomery, the Rabbit candidate.

Harry Truman stood for better roads and a return to sound management of county business. The most that could be said for his early speeches was that they were brief. One, at a night rally at Sugar Creek, an oil refinery town in the lowlands by the river just north of Independence, was remembered by Edgar Hinde as “the poorest effort of a speech I ever heard in my life. I suffered for him.” But as the weeks wore on, and with the oncoming summer and the increased demands of a “hot race,” the speeches improved somewhat. “If you’re going to be in politics,” Harry later reflected, “you have to learn to explain to people what you stand for, and to learn to stand up in front of a crowd and talk was just something I had to do, so I went ahead and did it.”

Edgar Hinde, Eddie McKim, Tom Murphy, and Ted Marks worked steadily, knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, showing up wherever and whenever needed. “We’d do whatever was necessary to help Harry,” remembered Tom Murphy, who had been a sergeant in Battery D. As the campaign went on, Murphy, McKim, and the others put out a flyer proclaiming Harry Truman “the best liked and the most beloved Captain, officer in France or elsewhere.”

Frank and George Wallace lent a hand. Harry’s former Latin teacher, Ardelia Hardin Palmer, organized a door-to-door canvass in Independence to bring out the women’s vote, a new element in the political picture.

Harry spoke at White Oak, Raytown, Lone Jack, Englewood, and Blue Springs. He covered every township and precinct, driving himself in the old four-cylinder Dodge over roads so rough he had to put sacks of cement in the trunk for ballast, to keep the car from slamming him through the windshield.

The main event of the political summer took place in July, a picnic at Oak Grove attended by four thousand people, twice the number expected. Every Democratic candidate was scheduled to speak. As a way of giving Harry added attention, Eddie McKim arranged for him to arrive by airplane. Harry and the pilot, another war veteran named Clarence England, sailed over the crowd in the open cockpits of a two-seat Jenny of the kind flown in France. After circling several times, dropping leaflets, they landed in a pasture beside the picnic ground, stopping with difficulty just short of a barbed-wire fence. As the crowd rushed forward, the candidate climbed out, leaned over the fence, and became violently ill. Apparently it had been his first ride in a plane. He then proceeded to the rostrum.

It was by far the largest crowd he had ever faced and an opportunity, he knew, such as he had not been given before. He was the last to speak. “I am now going to tell you what I stand for and why you should vote for me,” he began in a flat, rapid voice. “The time has arrived for some definite policy to be pursued in regard to our highways and our finances. They are so closely connected with our tax problem that if they are properly cared for the tax problem will care for itself….”

Eddie McKim, remembering earlier appearances in the campaign, thought Harry had come a long way. A style was evolving. Having stated the problem, he proceeded to a solution joined to a fundamental philosophy plainly expressed.

“I want men for road overseers who know roads and who want work—men who will do a day’s work for a day’s pay, who will work for the county as they would for themselves. I would rather have 40 road men for overseers who are willing to work than to have 60 politicians who care nothing about work. I believe that honest work for the county is the best politics anyway.”

Running the county into debt was bad business and bad politics, he said. He wanted it stopped.

Thus far in the campaign only one charge had been brought against him—that in an election in 1920 he had voted for a Republican, Major John Miles, who had been his superior officer at the Argonne. It was the worst his opponents had been able to come up with, and given the spirit of Jackson County politics, it was a serious charge. He chose the moment now to explain himself.

“You have heard it said that I voted for John Miles as County Marshal. I’ll plead guilty…along with 5,000 other ex-soldiers. I was closer to John Miles than a brother. I have seen him in places that would make hell look like a playground.” His tone was flat no longer.

I have seen him stick to his guns when Frenchmen were falling back. I have seen him hold the American line when only John Miles and his three batteries were between the Germans and a successful counterattack. He was of the right stuff and a man who didn’t vote for his comrade under circumstances such as these would be untrue to himself and to his country. My record has been searched and this is all my opponents can say about me and you knowing the facts can appreciate my position. I know that every soldier understands it. I have no apology to make for it. John Miles and my comrades in arms are closer than brothers to me. There is no way to describe the feeling. But my friend John is the only Republican I ever voted for and I don’t think that counts against me.

At that moment, for many who were listening, the primary election for eastern judge was over, and Harry Truman had won.

No county election in years had aroused such interest, a phenomenon attributed by some to the novelty of the women’s vote. Harry, however, was dwelling more and more on what the influence might be of the Ku Klux Klan, the growing strength of which was another sign of the times. Crosses had been burned near Lee’s Summit. Klan membership was growing in Independence and two of his opponents, Parent and Shaw, had Klan support. Edgar Hinde urged Harry to sign up with the Klan, to join immediately, convinced it was “good politics.” Hinde himself had already joined, “to see what was going on, you know,” as he later explained. A Klan organizer named “Jones” told him to bring Harry in any time, saying it was all Harry had to do to guarantee Klan backing.

Harry refused at first, but then gave Hinde $10 for membership. “Jones” insisted on meeting Harry privately at the Baltimore Hotel and Harry agreed. But when at the meeting “Jones” told him he would get no support unless he promised never to hire Catholics if elected, Harry ended the discussion. He had commanded a mostly Catholic battery in France, he said, and he would give jobs to whomever he saw fit. Apparently the $10 was returned.

It had been a grievous mistake ever to have said he would join in the first place. It was an act either of amazing naivete, or one revealing a side he had not shown before, a willingness under pressure to sacrifice principle for ambition. Either way the whole incident was shabby and out of character, and hardly good politics. How he thought Klan support might offset the devastating effect such an alliance would have on the Pendergasts—not to say the effect on his own beloved “Irish bunch”—is difficult to imagine.

In his defense later, it would be said that the Klan in 1922 seemed still a fairly harmless organization to which a good God-fearing patriot might naturally be attracted, that it offered a way for those who felt at odds with the changes sweeping the country to make known their views. Yet only the year before Harry had lent his support to a Masonic effort to suppress the Klan in St. Louis. He had to have known what the Klan was about. William Reddig of the Star would remember Jackson County Klansmen of the time as anything but good fellows. “They didn’t just hate Catholics, Jews, and Negroes,” Reddig wrote. “They hated everybody.”

A rumor was now circulated by the Klan that Harry’s grandfather, Solomon Young, was a Jew. At a Klan meeting in Independence just before the primary on August 1, a guest speaker from Atlanta said Harry Truman was less than 100 percent American—that is, not sufficiently opposed to Catholics and Jews. Edgar Hinde stood up and protested. There were shouts to throw him out. A friend of Harry’s from Grandview named Toliver rose to say they could throw him out, too, which, as Hinde remembered, had a “cooling influence.” But the Klan’s previous indifference to the Truman candidacy had ended.

He said later it was the soldier vote plus “kinfolks in nearly every precinct” that put him over. He would talk of being “accidentally” elected and suggest that his failure with the haberdashery also had an important influence. “Most people were broke and they sympathized with a man in politics who admitted his financial condition.” Others close to the campaign said the deciding factor was Harry Truman. People liked him—and largely because he so obviously liked them and being among them.

Privately, Harry was disappointed in the efforts of the Pendergast people in his behalf. He had expected more.

The campaign ended with a big Saturday night rally at the courthouse. On election day cars covered with placards were busy back and forth across town bringing people to the polls. “The smell of old ’alky, hooch, and ‘good’ whiskey is on the breath of many a man,” wrote Colonel Southern, a teetotaler.

As the day wore on, the rough play began. At a polling place at Fairmont Junction, close to the Kansas City line, an armed gang of Shannon henchmen tried to make off with the ballot box before the Pendergast people could get to it, only to be confronted by two deputy marshals who had rushed to the scene on orders from Harry’s Republican friend, Marshal John Miles. Guns were drawn, when suddenly Shannon himself materialized out of the shadows and with the barrel of Deputy John W. Gibson’s 45-caliber automatic pressing on his ample stomach, announced it would be best if everybody quieted down and went home. Had Shannon’s men succeeded in their mission, Harry would most likely have lost the election. As it was he defeated the Rabbit candidate, Emmett Montgomery, by a bare 279 votes out of a total (for all five in the race) of more than 11,000.

It was “the damn Republicans” who were to blame, Joe Shannon complained bitterly. If they had only kept out of things, Harry Truman would never have won. Probably that was so. Deputy Gibson, the man with the 45, was, like John Miles, a veteran of the 129th Field Artillery.

V

The fall electi on was a formality only—every Democrat won—and on New Year’s Day, 1923, in a ceremony at the courthouse, the new county court was seated. The other two judges were Elihu Hayes and Henry McElroy. Hayes was the presiding judge, and though a Rabbit, “a fine old gentleman” in Harry’s estimate. McElroy, the new western judge, was a through-and-through Goat and close associate of Tom Pendergast, a spare, bucktoothed, ambitious businessman commonly praised for his efficiency. The huge basket of red roses in the courtroom was the gift of McElroy admirers from Little Italy.

To be called “Judge” pleased Harry immensely. He enjoyed the prestige of the job and the way people greeted him as he walked briskly to and from the courthouse. He had rank again.

As presiding judge, Elihu Hayes should have been the dominant figure and leader of the court, and by the Fifty-Fifty Agreement his Rabbit friends looked forward to an equal share in county jobs and every other form of largess under the court’s control. Things did not work out that way, however. It was Henry McElroy who took charge from the start and McElroy showed no desire to give anything to the Rabbits. With Judge Truman voting with him, there was not much to keep McElroy from having his way. (“He ran the court with my vote,” Harry later said.) The roster of road overseers was filled with Goats only. Goats were named to county jobs large and small. Rabbits already on the payroll were always the first to be fired.

The old adage of Andrew Jackson, that to the victors belong the spoils, was gospel again in Jackson County, Missouri. The decision had come down from the Pendergasts. Fifty-Fifty was finished. And though in hindsight Harry would see the peril in this, at the time he did not. He was preoccupied with being businesslike, concentrating on cost cuts, improvements in services, determined to perform as promised.

He also knew what pleasure the plight of the Rabbits was bringing to his mentor, Mike Pendergast.

“We ran the county, but we ran it carefully and on an economic basis,” Harry claimed later, and in truth the new court stood in striking contrast with what had gone on before under the renegade Miles Bulger. Under McElroy and Truman a county debt of more than a million dollars was cut in half. The county’s credit rating improved. So did county services and, most notably, the quality of work on the roads. Harry Truman, as he later boasted, made himself “completely familiar with every road and bridge…visited every state institution in which the county had patients.” Years of mismanagement and crooked contracts had produced roads so poorly constructed that they caved in like pie crusts. Bridges were inadequate or in sad repair. The improvements made now were impossible to ignore. Even the Kansas City Star had praise for what was happening under the crisp, efficient new county administration. And if Harry was taking McElroy’s cue on matters political, McElroy appeared no less dependent on Harry on practical questions. “When a road project or a bridge application is brought before the county court, here is what happens,” wrote one Republican. “Judge McElroy turns to Judge Truman and asks him what about it. Nine times out of ten Judge Truman already has been on the ground and knows all about the proposition. He explains it to the court. Judge McElroy then says, ‘All right, if you say so I move the work be done,’ and it is ordered.”

At a Triangle Club lunch at the Muehlebach Hotel, Judges Hayes, McElroy, and Truman were given a standing ovation. It seemed a new era had dawned.

But the job, Harry discovered, wasn’t enough to satisfy. To his surprise, he felt restless for more to do. He wanted other ways to make himself known, other associations beyond “the courthouse crowd.” He grew increasingly active in the Masons and the Army reserve. He became Deputy Grand Master of the 59th Masonic District of Jackson County. The summer of 1923 he spent two weeks on active duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, his first long separation from Bess since their wedding day. In September he enrolled in night courses at the Kansas City School of Law, where he studied hard (Blackstone, contracts, criminal law), keeping pages of notes. Only someone of extraordinary energy could have maintained the pace.

Meantime, life at home at 219 North Delaware—the Gates house, as Harry would always refer to it—went on quietly and privately. Bess had taken no part in his political campaign because, as known only within the family, she had suffered a second miscarriage. The first had occurred the spring of 1920, when prospects were still bright at the store, and nothing had been said then either. With friends Harry left no doubt that he and Bess wanted children but implied that if there was a problem it was with him. When a cousin, Ralph Truman, wrote from Springfield to say he had a new child, Harry responded, “I wish you would send me a pair of your old breeches to hang on the bed, maybe I can have some luck.”

His devotion to Bess was unstinting as ever and because of their separation the summer of 1923, when he was at Fort Leavenworth and they were again corresponding, it is known how much she, too, cared for her “Old Sweetness.”

“It is now 10:20 and I am in bed. There was a black bug on my bed when I turned the sheet down and I had to kill it myself—but that wasn’t the first time I had wished for you,” she wrote. “Lots and lots of good night kisses.”

She would wait for hours by the front window watching for the postman. A night toward the end of the two weeks was “the worst night yet.”

“You be a good girl and I’ll be a good boy,” he wrote. A week later he was saying he hoped he would never have to be away so long again. He was feeling “marvelous,” he told her, ready to come home and “lick all the Rabbits.”

As they both knew, she was already two months pregnant.

The arrival of the baby, in the midst of a snowstorm, Sunday, February 17, 1924, was, with the exception of his wedding day, the biggest event of Harry Truman’s life thus far, and the one bright moment in what otherwise was to be a bad year for him.

He had urged Bess to go to a hospital. She and her mother insisted the baby be born at home. Out of superstition that too much advance fuss could again bring disappointment, there was not even a crib or cradle at hand. The baby would spend the first days of life on pillows in a bureau drawer.

About noon, Harry was told to call the doctor, Charles E. Krimminger, a big red-faced man remembered for his huge hands—“hands as big as a frying pan”—who came in covered with snow and went directly upstairs. A practical nurse, Edna Kinnaman, arrived soon after and would remember Mrs. Wallace and Harry waiting patiently through the afternoon in the upstairs hall, the very proper Mrs. Wallace seated on a cedar chest, Harry in a chair looking amazingly composed.

Bess, according to Nurse Kinnaman, “got along beautifully.” It was a normal birth. The baby, a girl, weighed 7½ pounds. “We didn’t have to announce it [when the baby arrived]…because they heard her cry and the grandmother and daddy came into the room.” It was five o’clock. Harry called his mother and sister and told them the name would be Mary Margaret, after Mary Jane and Mrs. Wallace. The wife of a friend who saw him soon afterward said “his face just beamed.”

There had not been a baby in the old house since Madge Wallace’s own childhood. Now, for several months, until the death of Mrs. Gates that spring, there were four generations in residence. Little Margaret, as everybody was calling her, was more than just Bess and Harry’s firstborn, she was the delight and center of attention for great-grandmother, grandmother, four Wallace aunts and uncles in the adjoining houses to the rear who remained childless, Uncle Fred, who was still part of the household, and the two Noland sisters across the street. Her arrival changed the entire atmosphere of the family. For Harry, on the verge of forty, life had new meaning. Nurse Kinnaman remembered his devotion to the child was both remarkable and instantaneous.

For Democrats everywhere it was a dismal time. At the national convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden the delegates took a record 103 ballots to pick an unknown, unlikely Wall Street lawyer as their candidate for President, John W. Davis, who seemed destined to lose. A drive to nominate the colorful Catholic governor of New York, Al Smith, had failed, along with a resolution to denounce the Ku Klux Klan. When William Jennings Bryan tried to speak, he was rudely shouted down. To the Jackson County delegation it was a pathetic show. The single ray of hope was Franklin Roosevelt, who, though crippled with polio, made the nominating speech for Smith. Tom Pendergast was “carried away” by it and said Roosevelt would have been the choice of the convention had he been physically able to withstand the campaign. “He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met,” Pendergast later declared.

The Republicans, to the surprise of no one, nominated Calvin Coolidge, who had assumed the presidency the year before, after the sudden death of Warren G. Harding. And though the Harding administration had left a trail of scandal, giving the Democrats a promising campaign issue, Coolidge, who sat out the campaign in the White House, was to win in November by a popular margin of nearly two to one.

If Judge Truman saw actual defeat in store when he began to campaign for reelection that spring, he never let on. As friends were to observe so many times in his life, Harry refused ever to look discouraged. The remedy of “Dr. A. Gloom Chaser” was not forgotten. “He kept his feelings to himself,” remembered a young Pendergast worker named Tom Evans, “and he was always very, very cheerful….”

The Shannon forces, bitter over how they had been treated, burning for revenge, lined up with the Ku Klux Klan to try to beat both McElroy and Truman in the primary—the fact that Joe Shannon was a Catholic, the fact that Shannon personally spoke out against the Klan at the national convention, all notwithstanding. When McElroy and Truman won in the primary, Shannon quietly decided to bolt the ticket in the fall and throw his support, with that of the Klan, to the Republicans.

That Harry Truman survived the primary, winning by more than 1,000 votes, was impressive under the circumstances, and due in good measure to all-out support from the Kansas City Star. Putting aside its distaste for Pendergast for the moment, the paper had declared candidates McElroy and Truman superior public servants. It seemed inconceivable, said the Star, that the Democrats could care more about “factional advantage” than efficiency in public office. “The record of the county court of Jackson County is refreshing…. Expenditures of the court last year were more than $640,000 less than those of the previous year. To date the deficit has been reduced nearly one half, and there is now a cash balance of more than a quarter of a million dollars.” Harry Truman, said the Independence Sentinel, was the very model of a public man. “To even talk about throwing him out of office after two years of faithful service would be to destroy the incentive for a public official to make good,” declared the paper, and the Star agreed, saying everyone who believed in good government should vote for Judge Harry Truman.

In the same issue of the Star the local head Klansman, Todd George, announced that his organization was “unalterably opposed” to Harry Truman. Later, Harry said the Klan had threatened to kill him. When the Klan staged a big outdoor, daylight rally at Lee’s Summit, Harry decided to drive out and confront them. Perhaps a thousand people were gathered, many of whom he knew. “I poured it into them,” he remembered. “Then I came down from the platform and walked through them to my car.” On the way home, he met another car headed for the rally filled with “my gang” armed with shotguns and baseball bats. Had they come earlier, he knew, things might have become very unpleasant.

The Republican nominee for eastern judge was Henry Rummel, the Independence harnessmaker who, years before, had made the special equipage for the team of red goats to pull the Truman children in a miniature farm wagon. Harry, who liked “old man” Rummel and respected him, said nothing against him in the campaign.

Rummel won. Harry was out of a job again, and McElroy also. Harry showed no sign of bitterness. The morning after the election, on a corner near the square, seeing a friend, Henry Chiles, who had worked hard with the Rabbits for Rummel, he crossed the street to shake hands and say there should be no hard feelings. When Chiles expressed regret over the part he had played in defeating Harry, saying he felt ashamed of himself, Harry told him to put it out of his mind. “You did what your gang told you and I did what my gang told me.” That was the way it was in politics.

Cousin Ralph Truman, in a letter of encouragement, said that were Harry to run again in two years he would win by a landslide, a conclusion Harry had already reached on his own.

In the intervening time, he became something of a man of affairs in Kansas City. From an office in the Board of Trade Building, he began selling memberships in the Kansas City Automobile Club, working on commission, which, after expenses, came to approximately five dollars for every new member he recruited. In a year he had sold more than a thousand memberships and cleared $5,000, which, with a family to support and debts to pay, he greatly needed. Roads, highways, the new age of the automobile had become his specialty. He was named president of the National Old Trails Association, a nonprofit group dedicated to building highways along the country’s historic trails and to spreading the concept of history as a tourist attraction. (Writing from Kansas during one of many trips in behalf of the group, he told Bess, “This is almost like campaigning for President, except that the people are making promises to me instead of the other way around.”) He kept up contacts with old friends, stayed active in the Masons and the Army reserve. Only his interest in law school seemed to suffer. After nearly two years of work there, he dropped out.

In times past, during the early days of the Morgan Oil Company, he had been described as constantly surrounded by people—“people, people, people.” It was the same again now. Ted Marks would remember him everlastingly on the move. “If one thing did not work—he’d get into something else right away. He was never idle, always operating.”

One thing he got into was another of his mistakes. With Colonel Stayton, Spencer Salisbury, and several others he took over a tottering little bank called the Citizens Security, in Englewood, adjacent to Independence. He and his partners soon discovered they had been lied to about its assets. Reporting the situation at once, they got out as quickly as possible, selling their interest to new management. No one made money in the transaction. There is no evidence of wrongdoing. But the bank failed soon afterward and its new president, B. M. Houchens, a brother of Harry’s high school classmate Fielding Houchens, killed himself in his garage. To many people the whole episode seemed shadowy and left bad memories.

A further venture involved selling stock in the new Community Savings and Loan Association of Independence, and in this, too, Spencer Salisbury was in league—a sign, many were to say later, that Harry was not always the best judge of character when it came to his friends. Another of the Argonne brotherhood, Salisbury belonged to an old, well-to-do Independence family and was a lifelong operator, lively, talkative, and “smart,” by reputation, though “a little slick.” Tall and spare, he was known to those who knew him best as “Snake-eye” Salisbury. Even his own sister would remember him as “kind of a cold bird.” Asked long afterward why Harry ever associated himself with the man, Edgar Hinde replied, “Anybody who’s ever been a friend of his…they’ve got to hit him right in the face before he’ll drop them. And I think that’s one of Harry’s big faults.”

Salisbury was cheating him in the business, Harry concluded after a while, and so withdrew, saying nothing publicly. Only in private did he vent his anger, writing some years later that Salisbury “used me for his own ends, robbed me, got me into a position where I couldn’t shoot him without hurting a lot of innocent bystanders, and laughed at me. It nearly makes me a pessimist.” He had never had an enemy before.

Seeing Harry Truman go on to bigger and better things in later years, Salisbury would refer to him as “a no-good bastard.” But Truman by then had used his influence in Washington to put federal investigators on to Salisbury’s subsequent business activities in Independence, with the result that Salisbury spent fifteen months in Leavenworth prison. In turn, a few years after that, it was Salisbury, an avowed member of the Klan, who told reporters that Harry Truman had definitely joined the Klan, which was a lie and potent enough to carry far.

Between times, in the years 1925 and ’26, Harry kept in close touch with Jim and Mike Pendergast. On pleasant evenings he would drive into town to sit and talk for hours on Mike’s big front porch on Park Avenue. Mike thought Harry should run next time for county collector, an appealing prospect since the job offered an inordinately high salary of $10,000 plus allotted fees that could mean that much again. But then Mike took Harry to meet Tom, who said he had already promised the job to someone who had been with the organization longer than Harry. Tom thought that Harry, with his experience on the court, would be better suited for presiding judge, which had a salary of $6,000. Mike advised Harry to fight for the collector’s job, if that was what he wanted, but Harry thought it better to do as Tom wished.

For Harry, this apparently was the first face-to-face encounter with the Big Boss. It took place early in 1926, in Tom’s office at 1908 Main Street, the new headquarters for the Jackson Democratic Club, a nondescript two-story building of pale yellow brick that Tom had had put up beside the small Monroe Hotel, which he also owned. The neighborhood was one of drab little stores, cheap restaurants, and machine shops, anything but a center of power by appearances. The big banks, office towers, and department stores, all that visitors took as emblematic of Kansas City wealth and vitality, were six or seven blocks to the north. The club’s meeting room and Tom’s office were on the second floor, over a wholesale linen supply store. The aura of the narrow stairway, a flight of twenty wooden steps, was about that of the approach to a dance studio or tailor shop.

So it was settled. Harry would run for presiding judge, and since the Pendergasts and Joe Shannon had by now patched up their differences, there was never much doubt about the outcome. Harry ran in the primary unopposed. In November, he and the entire Democratic slate swept into office. Henry McElroy became the new city manager of Kansas City. As presiding judge, Harry Truman himself had real authority at last.

VI

The term of office was four years, rather than two, and he served two consecutive terms, eight years, from January 1927 to January 1935. His performance was outstanding, as judged by nearly everyone—civic leaders, business people (Republicans included), fellow politicians, the press, students of government (then and later) and, emphatically, by the electorate. In the 1926 election he won by 16,000 votes. When he ran again for presiding judge in 1930, his margin of victory was 58,000.

Something unusual had happened, said the Independence Examiner halfway through his first term: “No criticism or scandals of any importance have been brought with the county court as a center and no political charges of graft and corruption have been made against it.” The Star praised him for his “enthusiastic devotion to county affairs.” Harry Truman was efficient, known to be always informed. “Here was a man you could talk to that knew what was going on, and knew what ought to be done about it,” said a representative of the Kansas City Civic Research Institute. At a conference on better state and local government sponsored by the University of Missouri at Columbia, an editor of the St. Louis Star-Times noted that Judge Truman was the only Missouri official present who could discuss administrative problems on an equal basis with visiting experts.

Every subject of debate tended sooner or later to center in the views of a quiet-spoken man who sat across the table from me [wrote the editor]. It was with surprise amounting almost to incredulity that I observed this trend of affairs, for the quiet man whose opinions had so much respect in a gathering of reformers was the presiding judge of…Jackson County…home bailiwick of the notorious Pendergast machine.

More important and equally unexpected was the way in which he proved himself a leader. His first day in office he Spoke to the point:

We intend to operate the county government for the benefit of the taxpayers. While we were elected as Democrats, we were also elected as public servants. We will appoint all Democrats to jobs appointable, but we are going to see that every man does a full day’s work for his pay. In other words we are going to conduct the county’s affairs as efficiently and economically as possible.

The other new members of the court, Howard Vrooman and Robert Barr, were expected to follow his lead. Vrooman, the western judge, was an affable Kansas City real estate executive and a Rabbit. Barr, a gentleman farmer and graduate of West Point, had been Harry’s own choice to fill his former position as eastern judge. For all intents and purposes, therefore, Presiding Judge Truman was the chief executive officer. Later in his political career it would be charged that he had had no executive experience. But in fact he was responsible now for an annual operating budget of $7 million, more than the budget of some states, and for seven hundred employees—county treasurer, sheriff, county councilor, road overseers, surveyors, highway engineer, health officials, parole officers, purchasing agents, a coroner, a collector (the job he had wanted), a recorder of deeds, superintendent of schools, liquor license inspector, election commissioners, and nine justices of the peace. He had overall responsibility for the county home for the aged, the county hospital, the McCune Home for (white) Boys, the Parental Home for (white) Girls, the Home for Negro Boys and Girls, and more than a thousand miles of county roads. He also had charge of two courthouses (with jails), since Kansas City, too, had a courthouse. He had the most say in apportioning the budget, and keeping the books was ultimately his responsibility. It was, theoretically, within his power now to award contracts, adjust tax rates, float bond issues, or determine what sums for the county would be borrowed from which banks and when. As the county’s topmost official he was also expected to be its chief spokesman, to appear at business lunches, take part in conferences, spread the word of Jackson County progress and opportunities.

In theory, he had only the electorate to report to, and his constituency was no longer just the country vote, as before when he was eastern judge. It was the whole county now, including all Kansas City, which had a population of nearly 500,000. Theory apart, there was also Tom Pendergast, with whom he had had almost no prior contact. Mike Pendergast could be counted on to stand by him. Mike came calling frequently at the court, still the mentor, arriving in a dark green Peerless sedan with Jim driving and accompanied sometimes by Mike’s youngest son Robert, a small boy who liked to take a turn spinning about in Judge Truman’s swivel chair. But Mike was not Tom. Mike, furthermore, had suffered something like a nervous breakdown from the strain of political battles, and at the urging of his doctors and family, he had eventually to relinquish his place in the organization.

Instead of borrowing county funds from Kansas City banks at 6 percent interest, as had been the practice for years, Judge Truman went to Chicago and St. Louis and negotiated loans at 4 percent, then 2½ percent. Told by outraged Kansas City bankers that he was inflicting unjust punishment on their stockholders, he said he thought the taxpayers of the county had some rights in the matter, too.

When the Republican National Committee announced Kansas City as the choice for their national convention in 1928, then appeared to be reconsidering because of costs, Harry helped raise money locally for the Republicans, on the sensible ground that the Kansas City economy could only benefit. (It was in Kansas City’s Convention Hall, on June 12, that the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover.)

He hired Democrats only, as promised, both Goats and Rabbits, and apparently on an even basis. He also put his brother Vivian on the payroll, as purchasing agent for the county homes, and hired Fred Wallace, his youngest brother-in-law, as county architect, primarily to appease Bess and her mother. Fred, like his father, was a drinker and a worry, and still the apple of his mother’s eye.

Roads, however, were the priority. Within days after taking office, Judge Truman named a bipartisan board of two civil engineers, Colonel (later General) E. M. Stayton and a Republican named N. T. Veatch, Jr., to appraise the roads of the entire county and draw up a plan, something that had never been done before. He also accompanied them on much of their survey, covering hundreds of miles in all. The report, issued three months later, described 350 miles of “ ‘pie crust’ roads clearly inadequate to stand the demands of modern traffic,” and stressed that the cost just to maintain them would exceed what might be raised by taxes. The plan was to build 224 miles of new concrete roads, in a system so designed that no farmer would be more than two miles from at least one of them. The cost was to be $6.5 million, this raised by a bond issue, which, again, was something that until now had not been done for roads in Jackson County. Bond issues of any kind had seldom fared well in years past. Harry, however, was convinced the people would support the program if guaranteed honest contracts and first-rate construction.

Great skepticism was expressed by the Kansas City Star and by Tom Pendergast, when Harry went for his approval. “You can’t do it. They’ll say I’m going to steal it,” Harry would remember “the Big Boss” insisting. If he told the people what he meant to do, they would vote the bonds, Harry said. He could tell the voters anything he liked, Pendergast replied, which Harry took to mean he had an agreement.

It was as though all he had absorbed in his readings in the history of the Romans, the memory of the model of Caesar’s bridge, the experience of countless misadventures by automobile since the days of the old Stafford, the memory of the roads he had seen in France, not to say his own experience with the farm roads in and about Grandview and the father who had literally died as a result of his determination to maintain them properly, converged now in one grand constructive vision. He would build the best roads in the state, if not the country, he vowed, and see they were built honestly.

He set off on another speaking tour, town to town. “I told the voters we would let the contracts to low bidders and build under the supervision of bipartisan engineers.” It was early spring, the mud season, so no one needed reminding of the condition the roads were in. Every voter received a map showing where the improvements would come.

The bond issue was enlarged to include a new courthouse and jail for Kansas City, a new county hospital, and a home for retarded children. The courthouse, jail, and children’s home were voted down. The roads and hospital carried, the vote taking place on Harry’s forty-fourth birthday, May 8, 1928. It was a stunning victory—the vote in favor of the bond issue was three to one. Good as his word, he let a first contract of $400,000 to a construction firm from South Dakota. Other work soon went to other firms not usually chosen for public projects in Jackson County.

The roads were built, and extremely well. Five years later, in 1933, the Examiner could report:

It is now generally recognized that every promise made at that time [1928] by the County Court…and by General E. M. Stayton and N. T. Veatch, Jr., the bipartisan board of engineers, selected to supervise the construction of the system of roads…has been carefully fulfilled. Every road proposed in the plans submitted has been built exactly as promised, and all well within the money voted and the estimates of the engineers.

Trees were planted along the sides, as Harry remembered from France, seven thousand seedling elms and poplars in all, though to his sorrow, Jackson County seemed as yet unready for the look of the Loire Valley. The farmers mowed them down.

He repeatedly stressed the practical in much of what he said, but he attempted the trees and, with the roads completed, he published a handsomely designed booklet, Results of County Planning, showing in more than a hundred pages of photographs what beauty there was in the landscape of the county to be enhanced, not destroyed, by progress, and for the benefit of everyone. “Here were hundreds of square miles…hundreds of thousands of people…each dependent on the other…and only a plan and a determined spirit needed to develop these opportunities and make each available to an understanding of the other!” In time, the report continued, would come “parks and recreation grounds at points easily available to all the county population—the healthful places of diversion that every large and growing population needs for its own pleasure and for the sake of coming generations.” The pictures were of schools, farms, industry, main streets and the mushrooming Kansas City skyline, bridges over the Missouri, the Blue and Little Blue, and mile after mile of roads through rolling countryside, where so much pioneer history had taken place. The interest in history, felt so strongly by the presiding judge, was all through the book. A caption under a photograph of Raytown’s main street read: “Raytown, once a favorite place for assembling teams for Santa Fe caravans, also had the distinction of a home nearby which was framed and cut in Kentucky and shipped here by water—the Jesse Barnes home, 2½ miles southwest of Raytown. A part of the house is still standing.” Another photograph showed the path worn by the wagons where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Big Blue. Under another, of a frame house set among old elms, the caption read: “Since 1867, Mrs. Martha E. Truman has lived on this farm on Blue Ridge Boulevard. She was born in Jackson County in 1852. She is the mother of Judge Harry S. Truman, presiding judge of the County Court.”

“Oh! If I were only John D. Rockefeller or Mellon…I’d make this section (six counties) the world’s real paradise,” he wrote privately. As it was, the road system was completed on schedule and, almost unimaginably, for less than the original estimate.

Another bond issue was voted, for more roads, for the Kansas City Courthouse, and for a total remodeling of the Independence Courthouse. The new Kansas City Courthouse, to replace a Victorian firetrap with creaking elevator and oiled wood floors, would be the county’s part in an extensive Ten-Year Plan that would include a new City Hall and civic auditorium. It was among the most ambitious city projects in the country and one championed vigorously by both the Star and, Tom Pendergast, which meant it was certain to go forward.

Brisk about his business as always, seemingly tireless, Harry insisted that everything be done just so and concerned himself with details of a kind others would never have bothered with. Raised on the idea that appearances mattered, as an expression of self-respect, raised on the old premise that any job worth doing was worth doing well, ambitious for his community and for himself, he was determined to give the county a courthouse in Kansas City second to none.

Unsure of exactly what he wanted in the new building, he decided he wouldn’t know until he had educated himself. Thus he set off by automobile—in his own car, at his own expense—on an amazing cross-country tour to look at public buildings of all kinds and to talk to their architects. He traveled thousands of miles—as far west as Denver and Houston, east all the way to Brooklyn, south as far as Baton Rouge—and took with him, for company and to help with the driving, a man named Fred Canfil, whose companionship he apparently enjoyed, but who to a great many people seemed to personify nearly everything odious about Kansas City politics. By appearance, manner, by reputation, Canfil was the typical Pendergast roughneck, “a loudmouthed, profane, vulgar, and uncouth person…a low ward heeler of the worst type,” in the words of testimony that would be taken some years later by agents of the FBI. He was considered a bully, a braggart, “a big bag of wind,” overbearing and crude. Six feet tall and built like a heavyweight wrestler, he had a dark, glowering expression nearly all of the time. He wore the brim of his hat low over his eyes and stood with his legs apart, feet firmly planted, as if braced to block a doorway. He was called peculiar and secretive, “a mystery man,” and as time went on, because of his booming voice, “Whispering Fred.” And it was whispered of “Whispering Fred” that he had a criminal record.

People who had worked with him for years had no idea where he lived or where he came from, whether even he was married. Earlier, before going to work for Judge Truman, Canfil had kept an office in the Board of Trade Building, but there had been no name on the door or telephone listed. He drove a good car, his suits were custom-tailored. Yet no one knew what he did for a living. One prominent Kansas City Democrat who was considering Canfil for a job tried in vain to find out more and finally asked him face to face, “What the hell do you do for a living?” Canfil only laughed and said lots of people would like to know. Refusing to give up, the man asked the police commissioner, as a favor, to put a tail on Canfil. But after several days the police could report only that Canfil had lunch regularly in a booth at the Savoy Grill with Harry Truman and Ted Marks. (Probably this was in 1925, when Harry was selling memberships for the Kansas City Automobile Club and had his own office in the Board of Trade Building, as did Ted Marks, who no doubt made the good suits Canfil wore.)

The facts about Canfil, as Harry Truman knew, were these:

He was Harry’s own age and had grown up on a farm in Kansas. Unmarried, he lived with a sister in a small house on East 77 Terrace, Kansas City. Until the war, he had worked briefly as treasurer for a circus and for several years ran the service department of a Cadillac agency in Shreveport, Louisiana, his mother’s hometown. At the time he had the office in the Board of Trade Building, Canfil was working as a rent collector for a Kansas City landlord. Contrary to rumor, he had no criminal record.

How long he had been involved with the Pendergast organization is not known, but, according to later testimony, it was his association with Judge Truman that had kept him in good graces with the organization and not the other way around.

Harry had met Canfil first in the Army. After being elected to the court, he hired Canfil as a tax investigator. Harry liked him, liked how he went about his work. “Fred’s a little rough, but Fred’s all right; he’s as loyal as a bulldog,” he would explain long afterward, recalling the years Canfil had been at his side. The loud mouth and crude language were largely a front. As a soldier Canfil had been superb, rising from sergeant to lieutenant by dint of his own merit, a point that counted greatly with Harry, and one that later investigators would find amply documented in Canfil’s service record. “Character excellent right along and recommended as an unusually efficient officer,” read one entry in the file at the War Department. “He generally worked twelve to fifteen hours a day,” read another. “But I never saw him worn out or tired. He was ever full of enthusiasm and eager for the next task….”

It was in Shreveport, Canfil’s old place of business, that Harry saw a building that he admired more than any others on the tour, the massive new Caddo Parish Courthouse, and decided to hire its architect, Edward F. Neild, as a consultant. The building was in what would later be known as the Art Deco style. Though disdainful of the “modern” in painting, Harry was very definite in his admiration of Art Deco.

As he would have trees for his roads, so he determined now to have an equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson for the front of the courthouse. In Charlottesville, Virginia, he saw one of Stonewall Jackson that he thought exceptional and at once commissioned its sculptor, Charles L. Keck of New York. Concerned about historical accuracy—and out of long affection for “Old Andy”—he drove to the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Tennessee, to make measurements of Jackson’s clothing. He would have his hero’s statue no larger or smaller than life. “I wanted a real man on a real horse.”

The Kansas City Times declared the new road system “a distinct achievement that would be creditable to any county in the United States,” which it was. The Star lauded the “extraordinary record” of Presiding Judge Truman. He was elected the president of the Greater Kansas City Plan Association, made the director of the National Conference of City Planning.

With his reputation fast growing he seemed to everyone who knew him still the cheery, optimistic “same old Harry,” for whom work was a tonic. But it was not that way entirely. He had become so tense, so keyed up, as he wrote Bess from one of his journeys, “that I either had to run away or go on a big drunk.” He loathed the sound of the telephone and at home or his office the telephone rang incessantly—“and every person I’ve ever had any association with since birth has wanted me to take pity on him and furnish him some county money without much return.” He suffered from headaches, dizziness, and insomnia. As time went on and the stress of the job increased, the headaches grew more severe. The telephone and headaches were among the chief reasons he went away so often, on his cross-country surveys of public buildings or to Masonic meetings or to summer Army camp, where, interestingly, the Army doctors found him exceptionally fit. One said he was as physically sound as a twenty-four-year-old.

“I haven’t had a headache since I came,” he wrote to Bess three days after arriving at Camp Riley, Kansas, the summer of 1927. “This day has been successful. I have a letter from you, have been horseback riding, watched the Battery fire nine problems, had an hour swim, a good meal and am tired as I can be without any headache,” he told her another day. Some of the other officers in the reserve, like Harry Vaughan, wondered at times why they bothered keeping up with it. “We didn’t have any equipment,” Vaughan would remember. “We didn’t have any enlisted personnel, we had no materiel…we just didn’t have anything.” But for Harry the chance to be outdoors, the exercise, the companionship without the pressures of politics, were a godsend.

He had become a terrible worrier. He was anxious about little Margaret, who was too thin and pale, too often ill. He began taking medicine for his nerves. He worried about money. He worried about possible entrapment with women, an old device for destroying politicians. Once, responding to a call for a meeting in a room at the Baltimore Hotel, he asked Edgar Hinde to go along, just in case. When they knocked at the room, Hinde remembered, a blond woman in a negligée opened the door. Harry spun on his heels and ran back down the hall, disappearing around the corner. Hinde thought it was a fear verging on the abnormal.

I’ve been around Legion conventions with him. He’d have his room there, [and] naturally, everybody would kind of gravitate to his room. If some fellow brought a woman in there, or his wife even, I’ve seen him pick up his hat and coat and take off out of there and that would be the last you’d see of him until those women left. He just didn’t want any women around his room in a hotel…. He had a phobia on it.

“Three things ruin a man,” Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. “Power, money, and women.

“I never wanted power,” he said. “I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”

On April 30, 1929, after Harry had assigned something over $6 million in road contracts, a judgment by default for $8,944.78 was brought against him for his old haberdashery debts. His mother, meantime, had been forced to take another mortgage on the farm. Yet when one of his new roads cut 11 acres from her property, he felt he must deny her the usual reimbursement from the county, as a matter of principle, given his position. Had he not been the presiding judge, her payment would have been $1,000 an acre or $11,000.

He was scrupulous over money almost to a fault, but also over the range of small favors and shortcuts, the expedient little “arrangements” by which politicians traditionally benefited—so much so that stories about him would be told for years.

A young man from Independence named Yancey Wasson, who worked for his cousin at Guy Wasson’s Fabric Company on Magee Trafficway in Kansas City, would remember Judge Truman coming in to buy seat covers for his car. The bill came to $32, but on instructions from his cousin, young Wasson said Judge Truman could forget the bill if he just arranged for the company to get some business on county cars and trucks. Harry gave him a look. “Son, I don’t do business that way,” he said, and paid the bill.

Sometime later, when Tom Pendergast ordered seat covers for his car that were to cost $65 and Yancey Wasson, calling at Pendergast’s office, made a similar offer, Pendergast, leaning back in his chair, said, “I think we can do that.”

“About two hours later,” Wasson recalled, “I walked out of the police garage with an order for 200 quick-change seat covers for 100 cars on the police register and an order for 20 front rubber mats.”

On September 2, 1929, seven weeks before the stock market crash, Mike Pendergast, whom Harry had “loved like a daddy,” died of heart failure. With the onset of the Depression, the pressures on Judge Truman, as the county’s chief executive, intensified dramatically, for the harder work was to find, the more farms and businesses failed, the more his county contracts and county employment mattered. Even the most insignificant jobs that he had to give out became plums. Friends and family were after him continually and at the very time he had to start cutting back on the payroll, since the county, too, was in trouble, as increasing numbers of people fell delinquent on taxes. At the end of the day when he had at last to fire two hundred county employees, he went home and became sick to his stomach.

With Nurse Kinnaman accompanying her, Bess had taken Margaret to Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf, in the hope that a change of climate for a few weeks might restore the child’s health. To find a little peace and quiet for himself, and a night’s rest, Harry would drive to Grandview and sleep in his old bed over the kitchen, or arrange with the manager of a downtown hotel to give him a room without registering, “so no job holder who wants to stay on can see or phone me.”

The afternoon of Monday, November 3, 1930, on the eve of election day, an attempt was made to kidnap six-year-old Margaret from her first-grade classroom at the Bryant School on River Boulevard, just four blocks from home.

According to her teacher, Madeline Etzenhouser, an unknown middle-aged man who kept his hat on appeared at the door of the room shortly before the afternoon recess, saying he had come to pick up Judge Truman’s child, Mary Margaret. “I was a little curious about that,” Miss Etzenhouser later said, “since we always called her Margaret, never Mary Margaret. I also was puzzled because either Mrs. Truman or one of Margaret’s uncles always picked her up after school.” Telling the man to wait, she hurried to the principal’s office. When she returned, the man was gone. “In a few minutes Mrs. Truman came into the room. She was panicky. I believe she thought Margaret was not there, and she was extremely relieved to find her all right.” Judge Truman and several deputy sheriffs arrived soon after. “It was quite a stir….”

The following day, election day, while Harry was out in the county visiting the precinct polls, Margaret and her mother, accompanied by the deputy sheriffs, were taken to a hotel in town to spend the day under close security. To what extent the incident was connected with politics, Bess and Harry could only wonder. Nothing further was learned. But Margaret was to be closely watched thereafter and the tragedy of the Lindbergh kidnapping two years later was deeply felt by the Trumans.

As he never let on at the time, Harry was in terrible turmoil over what he had found politics to be in reality. He was suffering from disillusionment and pangs of conscience such as he had never before known, all of which may have had a great deal to do with his headaches.

“While it looks good from the sidelines to have control and get your name in both papers every day and pictures every other day, it’s not a pleasant position,” he confided to Bess. “Politics should make a thief, a roué, and a pessimist of anyone,” he said in another letter, “but I don’t believe I am any of them….” But could he withstand the pressures?

Later would come a vivid, if fragmented, picture of what he was going through behind the scenes, described in occasional reminiscences, and in one long, extraordinary, private, undated memoir written on two or three different nights when he hid away alone in the Pickwick Hotel in downtown Kansas City, pouring himself out on paper, writing page after page for no one but himself.

VII

Trouble had come immediately after the road bond issue passed, as soon as Tom Pendergast discovered that Harry meant to keep his promise to the voters and refuse favoritism on contracts.

“The Boss wanted me to give a lot of crooked contractors the inside and I couldn’t,” he wrote. Pendergast became furious when Harry held his ground. The code of honor that meant so much to Harry, said T.J., was worth nothing in the real world. He dismissed the road plan as needless fuss that would serve only to give the engineers big reputations. Bids need merely be doctored so that the right people got the contracts, Pendergast told him. Harry held firm, arguing that his way was the best for the public and for the party, and it seems Pendergast realized for the first time the sort of man his brother Michael had brought into the organization. Possibly T.J. had been testing Harry. In any event, his anger appeared to pass. A meeting was called at his office, a confrontation that may have been arranged in part for T.J.’s own amusement, and one that Harry would enjoy recounting in later years.

The office at 1908 Main was so small, all of 12 by 14 feet, that it seemed overcrowded when T.J. sat there alone. Two windows with Venetian blinds overlooked the street. Furnishings were sparse—a rolltop desk against the wall, a few chairs and spittoons, a faded green rug, and over the desk, in a frame, the original drawing of an old cartoon from the Star showing an expansive Alderman Jim with a box of First Ward votes in his grip. The spittoons were an accommodation for guests, since T.J. smoked cigarettes only, using an elegant cigarette holder. Customarily he also kept his hat on while at his desk and sat well forward in his wooden swivel chair, as though about to leave on other business, a technique, he found, that helped keep conversations short. Stationed just outside the office was his massive, veteran secretary, or gatekeeper, Elijah Matheus, a former riverboat captain called “Cap,” who was as large as T.J. himself.

Five were present for the meeting—Pendergast, Harry, and three road contractors who were old friends of the organization and all extremely upset over Harry’s attitude, according to Harry’s later account, which is the only one available. One man, Mike Ross, was not only head of Ross Construction, in which T.J. had part interest, but ward boss in Little Italy, which made him extremely important. Privately Harry considered Ross “a plain thief.”

“These boys tell me that you won’t give them contracts,” Pendergast began.

“They can get them if they are low bidders,” Harry answered, “but they won’t get paid for them unless they come up to specifications.”

“Didn’t I tell you boys,” said Pendergast. “He’s the contrariest cuss in Missouri.”

When the meeting ended and the three contractors left, Pendergast told Harry to go ahead and run things as he thought best, adding only that of course he, Pendergast, always had the two other judges to call on if he needed to vote Harry down.

From that point forward apparently Pendergast was as good as his word, never asking Harry to do anything dishonest. “And that’s the God’s truth. I did my job the way I thought it should be done,” Harry said in an interview years afterward. “And he never interfered….”

They were not close—there was never to be the kind of relationship Harry had with Mike—but they grew to respect one another. Pendergast recognized Harry’s integrity as an asset. Harry, in the Pickwick Hotel memoir, written close to events, portrayed the Big Boss as a man of parts whose code, though very different from his own, he could not help but admire. Pendergast was no hypocrite, no “trimmer,” however rough and sordid his background. “He, in times past, owned a bawdy house, a saloon and gambling establishment, was raised in that environment, but he’s all man.” He wondered, Harry wrote, who was worth more in the sight of the Lord, Tom Pendergast or the “sniveling church members who weep on Sunday, play with whores on Monday, drink on Tuesday, sell out to the Boss on Wednesday, repent about Friday and start over on Sunday?”

He felt he understood Tom Pendergast. At least he knew where he stood with him. It was Vrooman and Barr, the other two on the court, who dismayed and infuriated him. Any man who was dissolute with women, Truman believed, was not a man to be trusted entirely. He had discovered that Vrooman and Barr both “loved the ladies” and kept “telephone girls” on the payroll. (“I’ll say this for the Big Boss,” he wrote as an aside, “he has no feminine connections.”) Vrooman, the western judge, though a “good fellow,” seemed determined to make any profit possible from county transactions. Barr, the eastern judge and Harry’s own choice for the job, was a total disappointment, and, to Harry, beyond understanding:

Since childhood at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics and right living as its own reward. I find a very small minority who agree with me on that premise. For instance, I picked a West Pointer, son of an honorable father, a man who should have had Washington, Lee, Jackson, Gustavus Adolphus for his ideals, to associate with me in carrying out a program and I got—a dud, a weakling, no ideals, no nothing. He’d use his office for his own enrichment, he’s not true to his wife (and a man not honorable in his marital relations is not usually honorable in any other). He’d sell me or anyone else he’s associated with out for his own gain….

Worse than Barr’s immorality, more troubling than anything for Harry, was a situation, only vaguely described in his account, in which he had found it necessary to do wrong himself in order to prevent a greater wrong. Barr, it appears, had been in on the theft of some $10,000, and Harry, who found out, felt he must let Barr get away with it to protect his bond issue and to keep Barr from stealing even more.

This sweet associate of mine, my friend, who was supposed to back me, had already made a deal with a former crooked contractor, a friend of the Boss’s…I had to compromise in order to get the voted road system carried out…I had to let a former saloonkeeper and murderer, a friend of the Boss’s, steal about $10,000 from the general revenues of the county to satisfy my ideal associate and keep the crooks from getting a million or more out of the bond issue. Was I right or did I compound a felony? I don’t know…. Anyway I’ve got the $6,500,000 worth of roads on the ground and at a figure that makes the crooks tear their hair. The hospital is up at less cost than any similar institution in spite of my drunken brother-in-law [Fred Wallace], whom I’d had to employ on the job to keep peace in the family. I’ve had to run the hospital job myself and pay him for it…. Am I an administrator or not? Or am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You judge it, I can’t.

This and more came pouring out of him in the hotel room. He went on for pages. He described how Vrooman and Barr would shoot crap while court was in session, crouching down behind the judge’s bench as Harry tried to transact business. (He had actually found it easier to get things accomplished if they were so occupied.) He had always thought most men had a sense of honor. Now he wasn’t at all sure. Pendergast, as if lecturing a slow student, had told him that very few men stayed honest if given opportunity to cheat and get away with it. What chance was there for a clean honest government, he wondered, when a bunch of vultures sat on the sidelines? “If we only had Tom to deal with, the public might have a chance, but Tom can’t operate without Joe [Shannon] and Cass [Welch]. Cass is a thug and a crook of the worst water, he should have been in the pen twenty years ago. Joe hasn’t got an honest appointee on the payroll….”

The more Harry wrote, the angrier he grew:

I wonder if I did the right thing to put a lot of no account sons of bitches on the payroll and pay other sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth in order to satisfy the political powers and save $3,500,000. I believe I did do right. Anyway I’m not a partner of any of them and I’ll go out poorer in every way than I came into office.

He reckoned he could already have pocketed $1.5 million, had he chosen, which, as future disclosures would make plain, was altogether realistic. As it was, “I haven’t $150.” He wondered if he might be better off if he quit and ran a filling station.

“All this,” he added, “gives me headaches….”

To little Sue Ogden, the big house where her playmate Margaret Truman lived was a magnificent sanctuary secure from the troubles of Depression times. Margaret’s Grandmother Wallace was an elegant lady who wore her old-fashioned clothes with style. Margaret had a beautiful new bicycle. Margaret had a new swing set. Whenever Margaret’s father came home from a trip, he brought her a present. “She had everything she wanted,” Sue remembered. Judge Truman always looked dressed up and there was a black servant, Vietta Garr, who did the cooking and waited on the table.

Independence was hard hit by the Depression. In 1931, three banks closed within three weeks. Hundreds of families were suffering. According to the records, in the fiscal year 1931–32 more than 900 families in town, some 2,800 people, were receiving relief—food and clothing—from a half-dozen organizations, including the Community Welfare League, the Red Cross, the Kiwanis Club, and the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army had set up a soup kitchen on the Square. The Welfare League had taken over the old county jail as a distribution center and the lines there grew steadily longer. In 1932–33, families “comprising 4,347 individuals” received help, more than half again the number of the year before. Sue Ogden’s father, a machinist, had trouble finding work of any kind and kept leaving town to look elsewhere. She would remember being hungry during the times her father took the family away with him to other towns. Margaret, she knew, was never hungry. To Sue and her family, Margaret Truman was a child of wealth and privilege.

Margaret would remember that because of the Depression her allowance had been cut from 50 cents a week to 25 cents. “And this was a disaster!”

Sue Ogden and her older sister Betty lived next door, across a narrow alley on the south side. Mrs. Truman encouraged Margaret to play with the two Ogden girls, who were tomboys, as Mrs. Truman had been once, and because they lived so close by. They were playmates “without risk,” as Sue remembered, and since the kidnapping scare, the Trumans were “terribly fearful” about Margaret. “We kind of had to teach her how to play.”

Judge Truman seemed always relaxed and friendly, “just a father.” He “wasn’t upset to be caught in his pajamas. He was just very calm about having us around the house. We played on his rowing machine in the bathroom and he didn’t mind.”

The two Ogdens were in and out of the house as if it were their own, or playing out back on the driveway, where Mrs. Truman or Vietta Garr could keep watch. The house was a “wonderful place” to play. A basement called “the dungeon” was big enough to ride Margaret’s bicycle in. A “fine attic” was filled with old-fashioned clothes for dressing up. It was a household that seemed to run smoothly year after year, with never a sign of friction. “If there was ever any bad feeling, even an undercurrent of bad feeling, they certainly hid it well,” Sue recalled. Vietta Garr, who had first come to work in 1927, said later, “I never heard a squabble the entire time I was with them. I have never seen Mr. Truman angry….” Her father had been groomsman for Grandfather Gates. “The whole family had good dispositions and were easy to work for,” she remembered. “They liked things nice, and that is the way I liked them, so we got along fine.”

For Bess, life was ordered, private, sociable within bounds. She belonged to a bridge club and served as secretary of the Needlework Guild, a group of women who collected clothing for the needy—such activities as appeared among the society items dutifully reported by young Sue Gentry in the Independence Examiner. And for Bess that was quite enough. Her family was her life. She had no wish for more, no desire whatever for public attention or acclaim.

Margaret would remember her own life being nearly perfect. “I was an only child and I had lots of aunts and uncles with no children. And everything went to Margaret. It was lovely.” The only disciplinarian in the household was her mother, whose eyes could turn steely and who on occasion spanked her, as her father never did. Her mother, Margaret recalled, was far more likely than her father to be hard on people who deserved it. “I could twist him around my little finger.”

At dinner, Grandmother Wallace sat at the head of the table, Father at the other end. Margaret sat with her mother on one side, with Uncle Fred opposite. Dinner was served at 6:30. There was a white linen tablecloth, linen napkins, and good silver. Father did the carving, and “beautifully,” according to Vietta Garr. The atmosphere was calm and proper, always. Grandmother Wallace did her hair a little differently for dinner and put on a fresh dress. “My manners were expected to be perfect,” Margaret remembered. If her father and uncle discussed politics, her mother occasionally joined in, but never her grandmother, who did not care for politicians, or politics. “Her presence was very much felt. Even though she didn’t talk a great deal.”

The food, ordered each morning by Madge Wallace by telephone, was straightforward and ample—baked Virginia ham, standing rib roast, warm bread and old-fashioned biscuits, baked sweet potatoes, fresh vegetables in season, cakes, pies, peach cobbler. Harry particularly liked corn bread and Missouri sorghum. His favorite dessert was angel food cake, according to Vietta Garr, who, in all, would spend thirty-six years with the Truman family. “Yes, I spoiled him,” she would say, “but he was always such a nice man.”

On Sundays, Harry, Bess, and Margaret would drive to Grandview for a big, midday fried chicken dinner at the farm, where, as Margaret remembered, the atmosphere was “entirely different.” It was not just that her father looked forward to these visits, but her mother as well. “She liked Mamma Truman immensely.” Mamma was “full of spice,” with opinions on nearly everything, including politics. The difference between this spry little “country grandmother” and the one in Independence was extreme. With Mamma Truman one felt in touch with pioneer times, with a native vigor and mettle that seemed ageless. Mamma still went rabbit hunting with Margaret’s boy cousins, Vivian’s sons. Once when she offered food to a tramp at the back porch and the tramp complained the coffee wasn’t hot enough, she took the cup, went inside, and promptly returned with a shotgun. He could be on his way, she said, or she would warm more than his coffee for him.

It pleased Margaret to see the enjoyment her father took in Mamma’s company. “Now Harry, you be good,” she would say as they were leaving. But Mamma could also observe that “Being too good is apt to be uninteresting,” a line they all loved.

With the Ogden sisters and a half-dozen other neighborhood girls, Margaret put on plays in the backyard at 219 North Delaware. For one called The Capture of the Clever One, with Margaret in the title role, the Examiner sent a photographer to make a portrait of the cast. Performances were after dark. A Ping-Pong table tipped on its side served as a backdrop, lights were strung, kitchen chairs set out for the audience. Harry attended dutifully. “I want her to do everything and have everything and still learn that most people have to work to live, and I don’t want her to be a high hat,” he had written to Bess.

He was habitually dutiful and responsible about all kinds of family matters, the sort of father who checked to see that the tires had good tread and 35 pounds of pressure, who had the oil changed every 1,000 miles without fail. “The car was washed every few days,” Margaret would remember. “And the upholstery was vacuumed and cleaned and people did not throw gum wrappers around—they were put in the ashtray—and he did not like people to smoke because he had never smoked and because the smoke would get into the upholstery…. He was very particular about his cars.” And about himself—his suits, ties, his shoes. He never went out the door without his hat, as few gentlemen of the day ever would, and his hat was always worn straight on his head. “Straight, absolutely straight,” she remembered.

He was interested in the weather, like most farmers. “He read all the weather maps in the papers and he always had a barometer where he could see it.”

He was a string saver. He could get two weeks’ use out of a straight razor by stropping the blade on the palm of his hand before each shave. Interestingly, for all his years on the farm, for all he knew about tools and odd jobs, he did no repairs around the house, never cut the lawn or put up screens. Undoubtedly, his mother-in-law had some say in this. Such work was for the yard man.

“It never seemed like the Truman house,” Sue Ogden remembered. “It was so clearly Mrs. Wallace’s house. And she was clearly in charge of everything about it.”

Another of Margaret’s childhood friends, Mary Shaw, would remember hearing her parents say, “How does Harry put up with that?”

“It was very hard on my father,” Margaret would concede long afterward, while showing a visitor through the house. “You know, my father was a very quiet, nontemperamental man at home. He got along. I mean, he made it his business to get along…because he loved my mother and this was where she wanted to live.”

Up early every morning, well before dawn, and always before anyone else, he had the house to himself, to read the papers, including the comic strips which he loved, and especially Andy Gump. (Told that as county judge he could have any license plate number he wished, he had picked Number 369, because it was Andy Gump’s number, a point he delighted in explaining to anyone who asked.)

In the evenings he would turn to his books and become wholly immersed. “You could talk to him if he were reading and you wouldn’t get an answer.” Indeed, Margaret could not recall her father sitting down quietly at home without a book in his hand.

He became a great joiner. In addition to the Masons, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he belonged to the Elks, the Eagles, the International Acquaintance League. Monday nights he went uptown to the Square to play poker in a back room over the Farmer & Merchants Bank. It was a regular game among the same old friends, several of them Army pals like Edgar Hinde and Roger Sermon, a grocer who had become the town’s mayor. They named themselves the Independence Harmonicon Society, or Harpie Club, because one of their number had once distinguished himself playing the harmonica, or French harp, extremely poorly but with exuberance in a contest at the local movie house. The game had a 10-cent limit. A little beer or bourbon was consumed, Prohibition notwithstanding, and the conversation usually turned to politics. Such was the social life of Judge Harry Truman in the early 1930s, the worst of the Depression, years when Adolf Hitler was rising to power and Japan invaded Manchuria.

As much as he enjoyed going out to the farm to see his mother and sister, he had no desire ever again to live in the country. He loved the town. “He liked his walk up to the courthouse square,” said Margaret. “He liked people…he genuinely liked people and he liked to talk to them….”

In many ways it was still the town he had grown up in. Farmers crowded the Square on Saturday nights, but the rest of the week, nights were quiet, broken only by the sound of passing trains and the striking of the courthouse clock. Margaret Phelps and Tillie Brown still taught history and English at the high school. The town directory listed most of the old names of the original settlers—Boggs, Dailey, Adair, McClelland, Chiles, Hickman, Holmes, Ford, Davenport, McPherson, Mann, Peacock, Shank, not to say Truman, Wallace, and Noland. Harry knew nearly all the family histories—it was good politics to know, of course, but he also loved the town.

His devotion to Bess appears to have been total, no less than ever. On his travels, at summer Army camp, he wrote to her nearly every day. How had he ever gotten along without her before they were married was a mystery he pondered in a letter from Fort Riley, Kansas, the summer of 1930. “Just think of all those wasted years….”

“Have you practiced your music?” he wrote to Margaret from. Camp Ripley, Minnesota, another summer. He had splurged and for Christmas bought her a baby grand piano, a Steinway, a surprise she did not appreciate. She had dreamed of an electric train. “I’m hoping you can play all those exercises without hesitation. If you can I’ll teach you to read bass notes when I get back.”

As early as 1931 there was talk of Harry Truman for governor, a prospect that delighted him. “You may yet be the first lady of Missouri,” he told Bess. Whatever inner turmoil he suffered, however many mornings of dark despair he knew, the truth was he loved politics. He was as proud of the roads he had built and of the new Kansas City Courthouse as of anything he had ever accomplished, or hoped to. Work was progressing on the new Independence Courthouse, his courthouse, as he saw it, and everyone approved. “From the time of the establishment of Jackson County until now,” wrote Colonel Southern in the Examiner, “men with the same indomitable courage of the county’s namesake, Andrew Jackson, have dwelt in this ‘garden spot of Missouri’—with eyes always fixed on the future greatness of this great domain and with the thought uppermost to build, build, build a county that the rest of the state would be proud of.”

But the greater satisfaction for Harry was in what he had been able to do for ordinary people, without fanfare or much to show for it in the record books—things he could only have done as a politician. Years afterward, over lunch in New York with the journalist Eric Sevareid, he would describe how as a county judge in Missouri he had discovered that through a loophole in the law, hundreds of old men and women were being committed to mental institutions by relatives who could not, or would not, cope with their care or financial support, and how by investigating the situation he had restored these people to their rights and freedom. This, he said, had given him more satisfaction than anything.

“He loved politics,” remembered Ted Marks, “and he strived for something and never let loose until he got there. I think no matter what job he held he put all he had into it. He enjoyed it and did the best he knew how….”

He had not found his real work until late in life, not until he was nearly forty. But then, observed Ethel Noland, hadn’t he been a late bloomer all along? “He didn’t marry until he was thirty-five…. He didn’t do anything early.” Politics came naturally. “There,” she said, “he struck his gait.”

Harriet Louisa Gregg Young and Solomon Young.

Mary Jane Holmes Truman and Anderson Shipp Truman.

Martha Ellen Young Truman and John Anderson Truman at the time of their marriage, December 1881.

Harry S. Truman at about age ten.

In a graduation portrait of the Class of 1901, seventeen-year-old Harry Truman stands fourth from the left at the back. Bess Wallace is on the far right, second row, and Charlie Ross sits on the far left in the front row. The Latin inscription over the door says: “Youth the Hope of the World.”

The center of Independence, Jackson Square, at the turn of the century. The courthouse is on the right.

Truman at about the time he was employed as a clerk at the National Bank of Commerce, Kansas City. “His appearance is good and his habits and character are of the best,” wrote a supervisor.

Cousins Nellie and Ethel Noland, to whom he was the adored “Horatio.”

The junior partner of J. A. Truman & Son, Farmers, stands with his mother and grandmother Young by the front porch of the house at Grandview.

The work day began with his father’s call from the foot of the stairs at 5:30 A.M. Here, Truman rides the cultivator across a field of young corn.

Truman at the wheel of the second-hand, right-hand drive, 1911 Stafford touring car that transformed his life. With him are Bess Wallace (in front), sister Mary Jane Truman, and cousin Nellie Noland.

A summer outing on the Little Blue River with Harry at the oars, Bess with the fishing pole. “Harry was always fun,” remembered Ethel Noland.

The portrait of Bess that Harry carried to war in 1918. “Dear Harry,” she wrote on the back, “May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”

His AEF identity card shows a newly commissioned Captain Harry S. Truman with no glasses and a regulation haircut.

With Harry “over there,” Mary Jane was left to run the farm. “It was quite a blow to my mother and sister,” he later conceded.

Truman (third from right) poses with some of his fellow artillery officers “somewhere in France.”

Wounded soldiers from the Argonne are tended beneath an undamaged painting of the Ascension in a ruined church in Neuilly, September 1918.

The war over, Captain Truman (on the right) relaxes in the sunshine at Monte Carlo.

Harry and Bess Truman pose for their wedding portrait with bridesmaids Louise Wells (left) and Helen Wallace, Bess’s brother Frank (center rear), who gave her away, and best man Ted Marks, who made the groom’s suit on special order. The day, Saturday, June 28, 1919, was extremely hot and humid—standard for summer in Missouri.

The Gates-Wallace house, 219 North Delaware Street, Independence, as it looked at the time the Trumans moved in “temporarily” with Bess’s mother, following their honeymoon.

Truman & Jacobson, “the shirt store,” as Truman called it, opened for business on 12th Street, Kansas City, in November 1919. Above, on the left, haberdasher Harry S. Truman strikes a characteristic pose at the sales counter.

Thomas J. Pendergast, the “Big Boss” of Kansas City, beams for photographers at his daughter’s wedding.

All but lost in floral tributes, Truman is sworn in for a second term as Presiding Judge of the Jackson County Court, January 1931.

Michael Pendergast, whom Truman “loved as I did my own daddy.”

James Pendergast, Michael’s son and Truman’s devoted friend.

Judge Truman speaks at the dedication of the new Independence Courthouse on September 17, 1933, one of the proudest days of his life.

Ten-year-old Margaret with her parents, the summer of Truman’s first campaign for the Senate, 1934.

Throughout the campaign Truman stressed his farm background. At right, for a publicity photograph, he sits on the porch swing at Grandview with the two other most important women in his life, his mother and sister Mary Jane.

Crisscrossing the state, the candidate spoke at one county seat after another, his platform usually the courthouse steps. Town loafers and boys on summer vacation often represented a good part of his “crowd.” He was not a captivating or impressive speaker, but people also had no difficulty understanding what he meant and seemed to feel better for having listened to him. The punishing heat and time on the road bothered him not at all.

At first “under a cloud” in the Senate because of his Pendergast connection, Truman nonetheless kept a portrait of “T.J.” prominently displayed in his office.

A rare photograph of Truman and Tom Pendergast together was taken at the 1936 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. With them are Kansas City attorney James Aylward (center), FDR’s political adviser, James A. Farley (the tall figure at rear), and David E. Fitzgerald, Sr., Democratic National Committeeman from Connecticut (right foreground).

John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers (seated near left), makes a dramatic appearance before the Truman Committee, as Chairman Truman (far right) listens impassively.

Truman, who loved the Senate “club,” became one of its most popular members. Here, in his office, he is surrounded by fellow Truman Committee members (from left to right) Homer Ferguson, Harold H. Burton, Tom Connally, and Owen Brewster.

In the midst of the 1944 Democratic National Convention at Chicago, Truman signals his feeling about the drive to make him FDR’s running mate.

Bess and Margaret at the moment Truman is named the nominee for Vice President. Margaret would be remembered cheering as if at a football game. Bess, however, rarely smiled for photographers.

Truman and Roosevelt smile for photographers at lunch in the Rose Garden at the White House, August 18, 1944. Shocked by the President’s appearance, Truman later told an aide, “His hands were shaking…physically he’s just going to pieces.” This was one of the few occasions when Truman and Roosevelt were seen together.

6

The Senator from Pendergast

Friends don’t count in fair weather. It is when troubles come that friends count.

—HARRY TRUMAN

I

Francis M. Wilson, known to rural voters as the Red-Headed Peckerwood of the Platte, was a freckled, old-fashioned Missouri stump speaker who excelled at charming country crowds with his poetic tributes to the natural splendors of their beloved state. A convivial man, he had also attained, by age sixty-four, something of the air of a statesman, and in 1932, as the Pendergast choice for governor—and with Franklin Roosevelt heading the national ticket—he could look forward to certain election.

Though Wilson maintained a voting address in rural Platte County, his home was a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on East Linwood Boulevard, Kansas City, and it was there before sunup one morning in October 1932, just three weeks before the election, that he complained to his wife Ida of not feeling well. As only she and a few close friends knew, he had been suffering with bleeding ulcers. She immediately telephoned his brother, R. P. Wilson, a physician, who, with his wife and son, arrived as it was getting light.

At six o’clock Francis M. Wilson died. When someone mentioned calling the mortician, Ida Wilson said no. Once the mortician knew, the news would be out. She said to phone Tom Pendergast.

Dr. Wilson made the call, telling Pendergast only that he should come at once. At seven o’clock T.J. arrived, breathing heavily from the climb up the stairs. The Wilson boy answered the door. “Mr. Pendergast didn’t ask why or what or when,” he later recounted. “He said, ‘Have you called the mortician?’ ” Told they had not, T.J. asked what their wishes were about a replacement for Wilson in the election. The family said they thought it should be Guy B. Park, a Platte County circuit judge and neighbor, to which T.J. responded, “Who the hell is Guy Park?” After some discussion, Pendergast, who kept standing the whole time, told them he had to leave and that they should speak to no one until he called back.

They waited for nearly four hours, the body of Francis Wilson on the bed in the adjoining room. At eleven o’clock Pendergast called and said only three words, “Call the mortician.”

Thus it was that white-haired, sober-looking Guy B. Park went to the governor’s mansion, and Harry Truman did not.

Harry Truman had wanted more than anything to be the nominee for governor, and well before T.J. ever picked Francis Wilson. Encouraged by friends and complimentary comments in several papers suggesting he would make a good chief executive for the state, he had been hugely disappointed when Pendergast refused him the nod. Then came the stunning news of Wilson’s death the afternoon of October 12, the same afternoon, it happened, that Harry and thirty-five thousand others were celebrating the completion of the road program at reputedly the biggest country barbecue ever put on in Jackson County. “It was my big day,” he remembered bitterly.

Apparently he lost no time in getting to Tom Pendergast, only to be told once again he was not the choice, that Guy Park had been decided on. That night Harry drove to the little resort town of Excelsior Springs north of the river and checked into a hotel to remain in seclusion for several days.

His anguish over his future was deep-seated and painful. Having served two consecutive terms in the court, he was ineligible to run again for county judge, and unlike so many others in public life, he had no law practice or insurance business to fall back on, nor any private income. He questioned seriously whether he had made the right choice in life. In a letter of advice to a nephew, he wrote, “It will be much better for you to go to work for a bank or some mercantile institution and get real experience than to get a political job where you learn nothing and lose out when the administration changes.” With the end of his term in 1934, Harry Truman would be fifty years old, and without the blessing of Tom Pendergast there was really not a lot more he could do in politics, whatever his aspirations. As he himself said, everything would be all right only as “long as the Big Boss believes in me….”

The previous June he had traveled to Chicago with T.J. as part of the Missouri delegation to the Democratic National Convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt. Pendergast had announced himself for former United States Senator James Reed of Missouri, who had begun his career as mayor of Kansas City in the era of Alderman Jim. The brilliant, egotistical Reed had been one of the “nine willful men” in the Senate who killed the League of Nations, and Harry consequently had no use for him. Pendergast’s enthusiasm was mostly a pose to please Reed. In reality he was playing a somewhat complicated game of a kind new to Harry. Pendergast, Harry was later to say, “understood political situations and how to handle them better than any man I have ever known.”

T.J. had already made a special trip to confer with Roosevelt at Albany before the convention. James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s highly influential political adviser, had also been warmly received by the Kansas City organization at a lunch at the Muehlebach. If anything, T.J. was more enthusiastic about Roosevelt this time than in 1924. Still, he put on a show for Reed under the lights at Chicago Stadium, and Harry, swallowing his distaste for Reed, went through the motions, the dutiful soldier, until the Big Boss began letting votes go to Roosevelt, a little at a time, exactly as Jim Farley wanted, to keep the Roosevelt tally steadily building with each ballot. At the end, Pendergast, Harry, the whole Jackson County delegation had come home extremely pleased with the outcome.

By the following spring of 1933 Harry felt he was more in favor than ever before. “I had a fine talk with T.J. yesterday,” he reported to Bess in high spirits, “and I am still on top. He told me to do as I pleased with the county payroll…he’d put the organization in line behind me. He also told me I could be Congressman or collector. Think of that a while.”

The power of Tom Pendergast had become as great as or possibly greater than that of any political boss in the country. Major changes had taken place, promising larger roles for nearly everyone of ability in the organization.

In 1930, the year Harry was reelected presiding judge, T.J. had at last resolved the old, nettling problem of the Rabbits by simply convincing Joe Shannon that he belonged in Congress. The silver-haired, silver-tongued Shannon was put nicely out of the way in Washington, where he served six terms in the House, distinguishing himself as an apostle of the old-time faith of Thomas Jefferson. Only those who had been through the Goat-Rabbit struggles of past decades could appreciate what a singular victory this was for the Big Boss, and all so smoothly done.

The year after, in 1931, Kansas City achieved “home rule,” which meant control of its own police, who until then had been under state authority. Thus for all practical purposes, the organization now ran the police department.

In 1932, the Missouri legislature failed to establish new congressional districts as required by Congress, with the result that every candidate for the House had to be elected at large, instead of by districts. The possibilities in this for increased Pendergast power were almost too great to imagine, since the big Jackson County vote—the Pendergast vote—now bore directly on all congressional elections everywhere in the state. T.J. could not only name his own governor, but thirteen men for Congress as well. And that fall he had but one disappointment when Bennett Champ Clark of eastern Missouri made a vigorous campaign for the Senate and won, in open opposition to the Kansas City organization. (This was the same Bennett Clark, the son of Missouri’s famous Champ Clark, who at the railroad station in France had fooled Harry Truman into believing an enemy air attack was imminent.) So by the start of 1933, with Park in office as governor, Pendergast was riding higher than ever. The Capitol in Jefferson City was spoken of now as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” With Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal taking over in Washington, the prospects for the future looked boundless. In the small office at 1908 Main Street, a portrait of FDR now held the place of honor over T.J.’s rolltop desk.

Even in the depths of the Depression’s worst years, Kansas City was enjoying a building boom. A new thirty-four-story Power & Light Building, the tallest skyscraper in Missouri, stood over the city like a shining statement of faith. Swinging his car out of the driveway each morning, heading to town on Van Horne Road, Judge Truman would see it rising proudly against the horizon, the very picture of progress.

A new Nelson Art Gallery was under construction at a cost of $3 million. As part of Kansas City’s Ten-Year Plan, work began on a magnificent municipal auditorium that would fill an entire block, include an arena seating twelve thousand and an elegant music hall. A new police building was also part of the plan, along with a new waterworks system and a new public market. A few blocks from Judge Truman’s skyscraper courthouse, a still larger City Hall was going up.

Compared to other cities, the Kansas City outlook was confident and expansive. There were jobs, and local government—the organization—was providing most of them. Under the direction of City Manager Henry McElroy, thousands were put to work with picks and shovels, while heavy machinery was left standing by unused, so that more men could be employed. (McElroy would later claim it was the Kansas City make-work program that inspired the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the WPA.) One seemingly endless project involved paving mile after mile of Brush Creek with a thick bed of Pendergast’s Ready-Mixed concrete.

If Judge Truman felt besieged by job applicants in these early Depression years, his was a small burden compared to what T.J. faced. The lines outside the yellow-brick building on Main Street began gathering before dawn most weekdays and by mid-morning stretched two or three blocks. He saw as many people as possible, on a first-come-first-served basis, no matter who they were, keeping the interviews to a few minutes at most, beginning about nine and ending promptly at noon when he stopped for lunch. Rarely was anyone sent away feeling empty-handed. Invariably courteous, Pendergast would listen attentively, ask a few questions, then scrawl a note on a slip of paper requesting somebody somewhere in one or another city or county organization, or in one of his own enterprises, to consider the needs of the bearer “and oblige,” these final two words seeming to carry the full weight of his command. Actually, it depended on which color pencil he used. If the note was written in red, his “and oblige” meant the applicant should be given a job or granted a favor without delay. If, however, the Big Boss wrote in blue, then this was only someone to keep in mind should anything turn up. If the note was written with an ordinary lead pencil, the bearer was nobody to bother with.

When a reporter questioned Pendergast whether jobholders were ever asked to donate to the organization at election time, he said, “Why shouldn’t they be? That’s how they got their jobs.”

Harry loved to tell the story of the day when there was a particularly large crowd waiting to see Pendergast, and his gatekeeper, “Cap” Matheus, went out to say that if there was anyone in line who had anything to give Tom, he should come directly in. But no one moved.

The old Pendergast policy that politics was chiefly a business of making friends placed no limits because of ethnic background, religion, or race. To be a Democrat was to be a Democrat. Tolerance was good politics. And while less was done to alleviate suffering in the desperate Negro wards, the attitude of the Pendergast organization was seen by black people as progress. As one of them remembered, “The machine did small favors mainly, but small favors were better than no favors at all.”

Business people had few quibbles about the organization or the man who ruled it. Taxes were low. With a phone call or two, a talk with T.J. or young Jim, red tape wondrously dissolved, projects went forward. People in business found they could get quick, reliable answers to important questions, that problems with the city could be resolved with amazing dispatch. The comment most often heard about Tom Pendergast was that “he got things done.”

Even the editors of the Star at this point were impressed by the executive ability of City Manager McElroy, a judgment they lived to regret. Kansas City probably had “the most efficient city government in its history,” said the Star in 1930. Presiding Judge Truman was frequently cited as an exemplary public official.

But others, too, commanded respect and deservedly. Harry Truman was not, as sometimes implied later, the sole exception-to-the-rule in a wholly nefarious crowd. Jim Pendergast was able and honest and had, as remembered his priest, Monsignor Arthur Tighe, a remarkable “kind of gentleness about him for being a politician.” Attorney James P. Aylward, T.J.’s friend and adviser, and chairman of the Democratic County Committee, was astute, hardworking, and well regarded within Kansas City professional circles.

Even Pendergast himself had lately acquired some of the trappings of respectability, a degree of polish unimaginable in earlier times. He dressed now in conservative, well-tailored suits. He and his wife had been to Paris. T.J. would expound on his love of Paris, without apology. He had developed a great fondness for French cooking, his friends knew. His new home on Ward Parkway, in the Country Club district, Kansas City’s loveliest residential section, was an exact copy of a house he had seen in France, a red-brick mansion in the Regency style, perfect in every detail.

Life had never been better. And by the close of the year, with Prohibition ended in December 1933, the Pendergasts would be back in the legal liquor business again. Best of their line was “Old 1889 Brand,” named for the year Tom first arrived in Kansas City. It was seven-and-a-half-year-old Kentucky bourbon, one hundred proof.

That gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, the sale of narcotics, and racketeering were a roaring business in Kansas City was all too obvious. Nor did anyone for a moment doubt that the ruling spirit behind it all remained Tom Pendergast. It was the Pendergast heyday. Never, not even in the gaudy era following the Civil War, had the city known such “wide-open” times. Forty dance halls and more than a hundred nightclubs were in operation, offering floor shows, dancers, comedians, and some of the best blues and jazz to be heard anywhere in America—the Bennie Moten Orchestra at the Reno, and later at the Reno, Count Basie and his Kansas City Seven doing “The One O’clock Jump,” trumpeter Hot Lips Page at the Subway, blues singer Julia Lee at the Yellow Front Saloon. Musicians from all over the country, most of them black and all hard hit by the Depression, came to Kansas City, knowing there was work. “Every joint had music,” one of them remembered, “every joint.”

This, too, was heartland America, no less than the old-fashioned, country-town peace and quiet of nearby Independence.

“Dance All Night Long!” said an advertisement in the Star for the Musicians Ball at the Labor Temple, in the spring of 1932, at which Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, Walter Page and his Blue Devils, the Nighthawks—in all, eight orchestras—played until sunup.

There were no closing hours. At the Subway, in a basement at 18th and Vine, thirty to forty musicians would “crowd in” to play. “Everybody played that wanted to play…and every night you could find music there…. It never really did open until after 1:00 [in the morning].” “A cracker town, but a happy town,” Count Basie remembered.

The red-light district ran for blocks, on 13th and 14th Streets. One high-priced place called the Chesterfield Club offered a businessman’s lunch served by waitresses clad only in high heels and cellophane aprons.

A lifetime resident of Kansas City named John Doohan, trying years later to describe the rollicking city it had been, would suddenly stop in mid-sentence, realizing how much he missed it. “See…there just wasn’t any law,” said Doohan, whose job in the research library at the Star required keeping watch on the unfolding history of the city.

The clubs stayed open all night. Liquor flowed. There was a band in every place…and gambling, even around the Star [at Grand and 17th]…. On the northeast corner there was a bookmaker and gambling. On the southeast corner there was a bookmaker and gambling. Two doors north of the Star, there were two bookie joints. And then as you went on Main, there were gambling places at 31st…at 31st and Prospect, 34th and Main….

Gambling places…Prostitution—wide open. Knocking on windows. Two bits, quarter and fifty-cent places.

Whenever questioned about this, Tom Pendergast customarily replied, “Well, the rich men have their clubs, where they can gamble and have a good time. Would you deny the poor man an equal right?”

“Ours is a fine, clean, and well-ordered town,” Pendergast would insist repeatedly, and John Doohan, too, would remember there being little fear of violent crime.

I will say the town was safe. You never got mugged. You could walk around downtown any time of the day or night. You could walk through the colored district, and there weren’t any problems. I mean things were…you know, there wasn’t much crime. But there were the rackets.

Others, including respected, proper citizens, conceded privately that “wide open” was good business, particularly in hard times.

The head of the rackets, one of T.J.’s acknowledged “chief lieutenants,” was a small, dapper Italian-American with a master-of-ceremonies personality named Johnny Lazia, who had earlier served a prison sentence for armed robbery. Lazia was the King of Little Italy, where, in 1926, he had seized power from T.J.’s old Ninth Ward leader, Mike Ross. T.J. had accepted Lazia as part of the organization largely because he had no choice and apparently with the understanding that Lazia would keep Al Capone and other out-of-town gangsters clear of the city. “Our Johnny,” it seems, relied on his charm as well as his power, and he and Boss Tom soon were “fast friends.” Also, importantly, T.J. had by this time become a heavy gambler on horse races and so was in continuous need of such “fast friends.” At the office at 1908 Main, he had installed his own direct wire to tracks in the East, even set up betting cages at the rear of the clubroom. Across the Missouri River in Platte County he had established his own race track, the Riverside Park Jockey Club, where he also kept his own stable of horses.

In return for his support in the Ninth Ward, Lazia was to have control over liquor and gambling in the city, as well as a say in hiring policies at the police department. Allegedly, Lazia even had his own office at the police department. A federal agent sent to investigate Lazia’s activities reported to Washington that when he called Kansas City police headquarters, Lazia answered the phone.

Lazia, too, knew how to be a friend in need. When former Senator James Reed’s companion (later wife) Nell Donnelly was kidnapped in 1931, it was to Lazia that Reed went immediately for help, and Lazia who brought her safely home. Two years later, in 1933, when City Manager McElroy’s stylish twenty-five-year-old daughter Mary was kidnapped, it was again “Our Johnny” who came to the rescue, this time producing the ransom money, $30,000 in cash, which he collected with astonishing speed from friends among the gamblers.

Through all this, only one brave voice was raised in protest, Samuel S. Mayerberg, the rabbi of Temple B’nai Jehudah, who in the spring of 1932 decided to speak out before a government study club, a meeting of perhaps forty people, most of whom were women. It was then that a reform movement began, though few, and clearly no one in the organization, seemed particularly concerned, nor was there a rush of good citizens to join his ranks. “One of my hardest jobs was not fighting the underworld,” Mayerberg later said, “but in using my energy and time to convince thoroughly nice people, honorable men…that as respectable citizens, they ought to be in it [the fight] also.”

When federal investigators started proceedings against Lazia for income tax evasion in 1933, T.J. wrote at once to Jim Farley, the new Postmaster General in Washington and part of FDR’s inner circle, to stress how extremely important Lazia was to him. “Now Jim,” he wrote, “Lazia is one of my chief lieutenants and I am more sincerely interested in his welfare than anything you might be able to do for me now or in the future….”

But then, only weeks later, came the stunning news of Kansas City’s “Union Station Massacre,” one of the most sensational atrocities of the whole gangster era. On Saturday, June 17, 1933, three notorious bankrobbers and killers, Verne Miller, Adam Richetti, and “Pretty Boy” Floyd, armed with submachine guns, attempted to rescue another “public enemy,” Frank (“Jelly”) Nash, as Nash, in handcuffs, was being escorted by law officers from a train to a waiting car at Union Station, to make the short drive to the federal prison at Leavenworth. The three killers, who were waiting in the parking lot outside the station, made their move as Nash was being put in the car. One officer turned and fired with a pistol. The three then opened up with machine guns, killing five men—two Kansas City policemen, an agent of the FBI, a police chief from Oklahoma, and Nash—after which the killers vanished. And though none of the three had any known ties to Kansas City, a local racketeer named Michael James (“Jimmy Needles”) LaCapra would later testify that it was Johnny Lazia who arranged to get them safely out of town. True or not, Lazia became the most talked-about man in Kansas City, drawing more popular attention even than Tom Pendergast.

In what was to be a long, often trying, and continuously eventful public life, some days for Harry Truman would stand out always as moments of great personal satisfaction. One was Tuesday, September 5, 1933, in the middle of what otherwise was a particularly difficult and uncertain time for him.

On Tuesday, September 5, the completed new $200,000 county courthouse at Independence—the fifth so-called “remodeling” of the building since 1836—was dedicated with ceremonies and festivities that began early in the morning and stretched on into the night. There were horseshoe-pitching contests, an old fiddlers’ contest, a Negro dancing contest, music from seven marching bands and seven drum corps, a bathing beauty contest, a horse show, a street dance, a parade of floats by local merchants, and a historic pageant. The formal dedication itself took place in the afternoon, beginning at two by the old four-faced courthouse clock (it, too, newly refurbished and set now in a colonial cupola), and included speeches by Governor Park and Judge Harry S. Truman.

The day was warm and sunny, the large crowd in good spirits, everybody enjoying the occasion. The homely Victorian scruffiness of the old courthouse had been transformed into something larger, more spacious, and in a style vaguely like that of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, though the architect, Harry’s brother-in-law Fred Wallace, was quoted in the day’s special edition of the Examiner saying that his inspiration for the north and south porticos had been the Greek “Temple of the Winds.”

The new building had little of the character of what had stood there before, but was neat and trim, it seemed, with its pink brick and columned porticos, its cupola and refurbished clock and marble lobby—a clear improvement to nearly everyone and to those especially who would work there, numbers of whom were looking down from the open windows upstairs as Judge Truman, in a white suit, delivered his brief, unexceptional remarks from the speaker’s platform. The Examiner called the building “dignified, spacious, symmetrical” and praised the leadership of the man who, more than any other, had made it possible.

“During the six and one half years of his administration as presiding judge, Harry S. Truman, with the hearty cooperation of his associates on the county bench, has done a number of remarkably big things that will occupy a large place in the history of the county,” said the paper, which then went on to list “a few”: a $10 million road and bridge system built by two bond issues, a modern hospital at the Jackson County Home for the Aged and Infirm, a Girls’ Home for Negroes on the County Farm, a new Kansas City Courthouse estimated to cost $4 million, and now the $200,000 Independence Courthouse. It was a record unmatched in the history of the county.

During these years of strenuous service to Jackson County [the Examiner also wrote of Judge Truman] he has found time to serve as president of the National Old Trails Association, an office he still holds. He has become widely known throughout Missouri, and many of his friends have expressed the opinion that he will fill the office of governor someday….

But to Judge Truman himself, his future remained a large mystery and a worry.

Later in the fall of 1933, outraged that the Roosevelt administration had appointed a Republican as director of the federal reemployment service in Missouri, Tom Pendergast complained to Washington, with the immediate result that the Republican was fired and the job given to Judge Truman. Having no wish to relinquish his place on the county court any sooner than necessary, Harry agreed to serve in this new federal post without pay. He waived the $300-a-month salary and began driving to and from the federal office in Jefferson City, halfway across the state, twice a week. The task was to channel unemployed laborers into jobs with contractors on federal public works, and, with his experience in county projects, he was ideally suited. The long drives also provided time to think about the future.

For Pendergast it was another giant step. In a few months The Missouri Democrat (a paper controlled by the organization) could report that 100,000 men and nearly 10,000 women were employed in the state under the new federal (Democratic) program.

Harry found himself reporting to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s public works official, and traveling to Washington on government business, something he had never done before.

At long last Harry made up his mind. He would run for Congress, he decided, against the wishes of his wife, who had liked the sound of the collector’s job, with its high pay and security, and who greatly preferred staying in Independence. In Congress, Harry told her, he would have the chance for some “power in the nation.”

But when he went to see T.J., he was told the choice was no longer his. Pendergast had picked another man, a circuit court judge named Jasper Bell (who would win handily in the primary, and again in November, and go on to serve six terms in Congress). Crestfallen, Harry found himself out in the cold again, “maneuvered out,” as he said.

Weeks went by. Nothing more was mentioned, no further offer made. His spirits fell to a new low.

Then, in early May 1934, without warning, everything changed. Stopping at Warsaw, Missouri, on a speaking tour, he received a call from Jim Pendergast asking him to meet as soon as possible at the Bothwell Hotel in Sedalia. It was a matter of importance.

The drive to Sedalia took about half an hour. Pendergast had Jim Aylward with him and the three of them drew up chairs in a corner of the hotel lobby. Harry had no idea what was coming.

There had been a meeting, he was told. T.J. wanted him to run for the United States Senate. Harry was incredulous, almost speechless.

“The Boss is 95 percent for you,” Aylward assured him.

“What’s wrong with the other five percent?” Truman asked.

“Oh you know what I mean,” Aylward said. “The Boss is for you.”

He needed time to think, Truman said. They told him he had to do it for the good of the party, and this apparently settled the issue. He agreed to run but said he was broke. In another day or so, Aylward and Jim Pendergast each gave him $500 to get started.

As Harry learned soon enough, he was anything but T.J.’s first choice for the Senate. T.J. had asked at least three others to run, only to be turned down by all three. Jim Reed had been asked first, largely as a courtesy. (The New York Times had predicted Reed would be the choice.) When Reed said no, T.J. turned to Joe Shannon, who professed feeling too out of sympathy with the New Deal and said that at his age he preferred to remain in the House. The third and most serious choice was Aylward, who, everyone agreed, would have made a strong candidate and a first-rate senator if elected. His name had been mentioned repeatedly in the papers as a prime possibility. But Aylward had no longing for the life in Washington, he told T.J., no wish to give up time with his family or leave his law practice.

Other names came up. When Jim Pendergast suggested Harry Truman, whose name to this moment had never been on anyone’s list, Aylward enthusiastically agreed. T.J. was skeptical. “Do you mean to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be elected to the United States Senate,” Aylward would remember Pendergast exclaiming. But Aylward and Jim persisted until T.J. agreed.

Joe Shannon, when consulted, said he thought T.J.’s initial reaction had been the right one. Truman was “too light,” Shannon thought. “A very pleasant sort of fellow,” Shannon would later explain to a reporter. “And he’s clean…. On the other hand…I don’t think he’s heavy enough for the Senate. I can’t imagine him there….” But, added Shannon, “Tom hasn’t got a field of world-beaters to pick from.”

The Truman candidacy was announced on May 14, 1934. Before dawn that morning, alone in a room at the Pickwick Hotel, he had written:

Tomorrow, today, rather, it is 4 A.M., I have to make the most momentous announcement of my life. I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age and I thought two weeks ago that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me.

II

The state of Missouri comprises nearly 70,000 square miles, an area larger than all New England. The population in 1934 was 3.7 million, with more than 1 million people, roughly a third, concentrated in the two largest cities, St. Louis and Kansas City, some 260 miles apart at opposite ends of the state.

The landscape varied enormously, from the low alluvial cottonlands of the southeastern “Boot Heel,” along the Mississippi, to the rugged Ozark Hills in the south-central section, to the prairie farmlands along the Kansas border. A dozen railroads crisscrossed the state and a half-dozen airlines flew in and out of St. Louis and Kansas City, while charter plane service was available for such smaller cities as St. Joseph, Springfield, and Joplin. But it was by automobile that Missouri Democrats waged their primary battles for Congress that summer of 1934, with candidates and campaign workers, hundreds of soldiers in the ranks, fanning out over the state, traveling many thousands of miles. And though the two major highways between Kansas City and St. Louis—Route 40 through Columbia, and Route 50 by way of Jefferson City—were the fastest, main-traveled roads, there was hardly a road anywhere, hardtop or dirt, that went untraveled, as each faction tried to win the courthouse towns in a state where there were a total of 114 county seats. And it was a task made no easier by the fact that the summer of 1934 in Missouri was the hottest on record.

The heat came up from the highways in shimmering waves, like a mirage on the desert. “It was 104 yesterday and 102 today,” Kathleen Pendergast, the wife of Jim Pendergast, read in a letter from her husband, who had been on the road, “busy running hither and thither,” as he said, ever since Harry Truman made his announcement. Jim Pendergast and Jim Aylward had driven first to Jefferson City, to be sure Guy B. Park was “in line,” and to call on those state employees—a very great number indeed—who, like Governor Park, owed their jobs to the Kansas City organization. At the same time, some fifty others from Kansas City were traveling the state, dispatched to whichever county or small town they had originally come from, to drum up support for Judge Truman. Jim’s assignment for the moment was to call on local newspapers. Distressed by the weather, he longed for a storm to clear the air. But in all the temperature would register 100 degrees or above for twenty-one days in July. Only Harry Truman appeared untroubled by the heat, a peculiarity that would be noticed often in times ahead.

It was Aylward, now chairman of the state committee, who ran the campaign, and the opening Truman rally at Columbia was a model operation, as “Kansas City took over Columbia.” An estimated four thousand people filled the lawn in front of the Boone County Courthouse, close by the University of Missouri campus. Besides the busloads of people from Kansas City, a big Jefferson City turnout had been orchestrated—state employees from every department reportedly—and a “newfangled loud speaking truck” stood by to carry Judge Truman’s speech, a sure sign, said the papers, of politics brought up to date. With the noise and color of the gathering crowds and an American Legion band pumping away, the mood seemed more like that of a homecoming game.

Harry had two opponents in the race, Jacob L. (“Tuck”) Milligan from Richmond, and John J. (“Jack”) Cochran from St. Louis, both of whom were Missouri congressmen experienced in the ways of Washington and far better known than Harry. Cochran, a big, friendly, humorous, and honest man, was favored to win. He was “a congressman’s congressman,” someone known to understand the “wheels-within-wheels” intricacy of government, and who, importantly, also had the support of the St. Louis counterpart of the Pendergast machine, the so-called “Igoe-Dickmann organization.” Tuck Milligan, in his favor, was backed by Senator Bennett Clark—Milligan was seen as Clark’s way of again challenging Tom Pendergast and gaining a second seat for himself in the Senate—and like his father before him, Clark was a colorful, two-fisted stump speaker.

Opening their campaigns weeks earlier, Milligan and Cochran had both focused on Harry Truman’s one clear advantage in the race, the Pendergast power behind him, as his greatest liability, portraying him as a mere machine stooge. Their attacks, furthermore, came just as the excesses of the organization had again become lurid news, as violence in Kansas City’s municipal elections left dozens of people injured and four dead. So Harry was an easy mark.

Now, at Columbia, in a speech carried statewide by radio, he lashed back. “It will be remembered that Mr. Milligan and Mr. Cochran journeyed to Kansas City two years ago and sought and received the endorsement of the Kansas City organization for their races for the nomination as congressman at large for Missouri.” As for Bennett Clark, he only wanted more power, to make himself boss.

In days following, in Saline County and at Boonville, Harry tried to change the tone and subject. The Depression was the issue, he insisted, declaring his all-out faith in the New Deal. (“A New Deal for Missouri” said a placard in the window of the “newfangled loud speaking truck.”) He talked of the capitalist domination of government in bygone Republican times, praised the determination of FDR to end the “rule of the rich” and give the average American a chance. Ninety percent of the wealth of the country was in the hands of 4 percent of the population, he said at Springfield. Roosevelt was “the man of the hour” to chase the moneychangers from the temple, “so that the common people of the country could have a chance at the good things of life.” The party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was the party “for the everyday man just like you and me.” He called for shorter working hours, higher pay, old-age pensions, payment of the soldiers’ bonus. He also called his opponents in the primary his friends and said any remarks he might make about them would be of a purely political nature.

But the Pendergast issue would not go away. And since Milligan and Cochran were both stressing their own all-out support for Roosevelt, Pendergast was in practicality the only issue.

Then, on Tuesday, July 10, with Harry’s campaign not yet a week old, the quiet of night in Kansas City exploded with machine-gun fire. It happened at 3:00 A.M. The victim this time was Johnny Lazia, cut down as he was about to open a car door for his wife in front of the Park Central Hotel. Two unknown assailants had been waiting in the dark. Lazia was hit eight times. “Why to me, to Johnny Lazia, who has been a friend to everybody?” he moaned to a doctor at the hospital. According to the account spread across the front page of the early morning edition of the Kansas City Journal-Post, he then delivered what were very nearly his last words: “If anything happens, notify Mr. Pendergast…my best friend, and tell him I love him.”

Tom Pendergast and City Manager McElroy were prominent among the mourners at Holy Rosary Catholic Church for Lazia’s funeral, the biggest ever seen in Kansas City, despite a temperature of 106 degrees. “There were at least ten thousand people down around the church who couldn’t get in,” Jim Pendergast recorded. “Of course a lot of them were simply curiosity seekers, but Johnny did have a world of friends.”

The next night, across the state near St. Louis, at Washington, Missouri, Senator Bennett Clark, in support of Tuck Milligan, pulled off his tie, loosened his collar, and tore into Harry Truman as no one ever had until then. It was Missouri politics “with the bark off,” the style Missouri loved.

It seems my old friend Judge Harry S. Truman finds it easier to abuse me than to set forth his own qualifications [the senator began slowly]. His opening speech at Columbia, which was attended almost exclusively by a mob from Kansas City—in fact I am informed the natives looked over the crowd to see if Dillinger was there—by a lot of state employees ordered out by their superiors as a condition to holding their jobs and herded over in buses like trucks carrying cattle to market, was largely an attack on me.

Harry fears that someone from the eastern part of Missouri may undertake to set up as boss. Harry Truman fears a boss in Missouri—God save the mark! Harry places the intelligence of the Democrats of Missouri so low and estimates their credulity so high that he actually went into great length in promising people that if elected to the Senate he would not set up as a boss or undertake to dictate to anybody. Why, bless Harry’s good kind heart—no one has ever accused him of being a boss or wanting to be a boss and nobody will ever suspect him of trying to dictate to anybody in his own right as long as a certain eminent citizen of Jackson County remains alive and in possession of his health and faculties…. In view of the judge’s record of subserviency in Jackson County it would seem that his assurances against any assumption of boss-ship are a trifle gratuitous to say the least.

When all three candidates, plus Bennett Clark and Governor Guy B. Park, appeared at a huge picnic in Clay County, north of Kansas City, an annual affair sponsored by St. Munchins Catholic Church, Harry was clearly outclassed. Bennett Clark held the crowd spellbound, though it was Milligan who got the biggest applause. Ten thousand people sat resolutely through four hours of political oratory, as the sun beat down. “Deeply interested in the array of political lights that paraded across the rough board rostrum,” wrote a reporter, “the perspiring crowd held its ground throughout.”

The president of the Missouri Farmers’ Association, William Hirth, joined the Cochran campaign and began referring to Truman as “Tom Pendergast’s bellhop.” “For this bellhop of Pendergast’s to aspire to make a jump from the obscure bench of a county judge to the United States Senate is without precedent. When one contemplates the giants of the past who have represented Missouri this spectacle is not only grotesque, it is sheer buffoonery.”

Striking back, Harry charged Milligan with padding the government payroll with relatives, but saved his harshest invective for Bennett Clark. The senator, said Harry, ran for office on his father’s reputation, but his record proved there was nothing in heredity.

Many who thought they knew Judge Truman were astonished by the different man he became now, under attack. “Judge Truman is unobtrusive in his work,” wrote a correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “His decisions are made in low tones; there is no braggadocio about him. He sees his job and does it quietly. But in a fight, this quiet man can and does hurl devastating fire….”

Truman, said Bennett Clark, was conducting a campaign of “mendacity and imbecility” unmatched in Missouri history. “What Harry is really trying to do is to secure a good county job for himself on his retirement from the county court of Jackson County next January…. Harry himself told me of his hopes.” Perhaps the heat was affecting Harry Truman, Clark surmised, because ordinarily he was neither vicious nor inventive enough to tell such lies. Further, Clark charged that seven or eight thousand state employees were out campaigning for Truman, all at the taxpayers’ expense—but then such, alas, was the Pendergast way.

T.J., demonstrating that he still knew a few things about bringing politicians down to size, invited a reporter into his office and in the course of an affable, soft-spoken conversation remarked, “Why, Senator Clark is a friend of mine. He was in here just the other day.”

Jack Cochran, to his credit, tried to keep the debate on a serious level. Mud slinging, Cochran said, was a luxury for prosperous times and had no place when conditions were so desperate and so many were suffering. In a speech in front of the Capitol at Jefferson City, Harry Truman, too, talked of his sadness over so much that he had seen traveling the countryside.

Farm prices, in steady decline since the Coolidge years, had gone from bad to worse. Eggs that normally sold for 25 cents a dozen were bringing 5 cents. Since 1930, more than eighteen thousand Missouri farms had been foreclosed. Abandoned houses, their windows boarded, fences falling, dotted the landscape. Sharecroppers were living in two-room, dirt-floor shacks, walls insulated with old newspapers. The look of the land, and in the faces of farm families in this summer of 1934, was as bleak as in anyone’s memory. Certainly, Harry Truman had never seen anything comparable. It was both the worst of the Depression and the year dust storms on the western plains began making headlines. With no rain and the fierce heat continuing, crops were burning up all over Missouri. An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch assumed a biblical cadence in its description of the tragedy: “Under merciless summer suns the fields ached, and the corn withered, and the cattle perished, and the rivers became as scars of dust, as the drought droned its hymn of hate.”

Conditions, said Truman in one speech, were “such as to make any human with a heart anxious to alleviate them.”

He presented himself as a common-sense country boy. He was the good Baptist farmer from Grandview, repeatedly poking fun at his rivals as “city farmers.” And he looked the part, deeply tanned from days in the sun, lean, fit, “hard as nails” by one account. He was fifty now and there was considerably more gray in his hair, yet he seemed much younger. He smiled constantly—a big politician’s grin, his even, white teeth looking whiter than usual because of the tan, his eyes flashing behind the steel-rimmed glasses. Joe Shannon, among others, thought he smiled entirely too much.

One blistering day, on a road near Mexico, Missouri, seeing a farmer in a field having trouble with his binder, Harry stopped the car, climbed the fence, introduced himself, took off his coat, “and proceeded to set up the binder under a hot sun for his new found friend,” as reported in the local paper in a story that did him no harm with the local farmers.

Truman and Cochran were both battling for the farm vote, knowing it could decide the election. Neither of them had a chance without the support of their respective big-city machines, but if the votes for Cochran in St. Louis and those for Truman in Kansas City proved equal, then it would be the farmers who named the winner. Jim Pendergast worried that the farmers were more concerned about the prospects for rain than about politics.

In six weeks candidate Truman covered the greater part of Missouri by automobile, by main highways and winding back roads, until he had appeared before, shaken hands, and “visited” with courthouse crowds in more than half of the 114 county seats. It was hot, exhausting, throat-parching day-and-night work and he greatly enjoyed nearly every moment. He had always liked being on the road. “Fact is, I like roads,” he would say. “I like to move….” He felt as good as if he were on vacation, he told reporters, and he looked it.

Again, as on the earlier cross-country courthouse survey, he was accompanied by Fred Canfil, whose hulking, blustery presence left some people wondering. If a man could be judged by the company he kept, why on earth would Judge Truman choose such a companion? But Canfil was as hardworking, as willing to put in ten to fifteen hours a day as ever. Besides, Harry found him amusing, good company, if eccentric and at times exasperating. Arriving at a hotel, Canfil would immediately check Harry’s quarters to see that all was satisfactory—bathroom, sink, toilet, bathtub—and oblivious to the fact that he was scattering his cigarette ashes everywhere he went. Canfil and Truman were to be together for years, as things turned out, Truman refusing to abandon Canfil or to make apologies for him.

Some days that summer, they covered several hundred miles, stopping for food and gas and speeches at a dozen or more places. Some towns were good-sized, like Hannibal on the Mississippi, Mark Twain’s town, which had grown to twenty thousand people, or Poplar Bluff, seat of Butler County, on the bright, clear, misnamed Black River, in the southeastern corner of the state. Poplar Bluff had a population of ten thousand. More often the candidate spoke in places like Laddadonia, Elmo, Liberty, or Benton, towns of six hundred people or less. At Benton, seat of Scott County, population four hundred and known for its chicken-calling contest on Neighbor Day each October, bobcats were still a sufficient menace in the 1930s to require an organized “drive” on them. At Liberty, just north of the Missouri River from Independence in Clay County, the little, two-story bank building on the northeast corner of the courthouse square looked no different from the day in 1866 when it was held up by Jesse James.

The crowds that turned out to hear Judge Truman were seldom large, no more usually than a cluster of a few hundred people standing quietly, attentively in the shade of a courthouse lawn, while in his rapid-fire fashion he spoke from the courthouse steps. A good part of his usual audience was composed of courthouse loafers, old-timers with nothing better to do, and, invariably, small boys free from school for the summer. The atmosphere was old-fashioned and neighborly, and though the response to him was rarely demonstrative, he seemed always to leave his crowds feeling better.

For a scrapbook of the campaign, Fred Canfil kept clipping the local papers along the way. One item dated August 3, from an unidentified paper, acknowledged that Judge Truman was no orator, but then this was an argument in his favor since there was already too much oratory in the United States Senate.

At a banquet in his honor at the Baltimore Hotel in Kansas City the week before the primary, Tuck Milligan brought seven hundred people to their feet cheering when, without mentioning Tom Pendergast by name, he said that anyone who perpetrated vote fraud in America ought to be treated as a common criminal. As for his opponent Harry Truman, who was still campaigning at the other end of the state, Milligan joked, “Why, if Harry ever goes to the Senate, he will grow calluses on his ears, listening on the long-distance telephone to the orders of his boss.”

Milligan by now was clearly falling behind, while Cochran and Truman appeared to be neck and neck.

On the day of the primary, August 7, once the smoke blew away, as Harry said, he had won by 40,000 votes. The final tally was Truman, 276,850; Cochran, 236,105. Milligan, who ran a poor third, received 147,614.

Harry had done well with the farmers, but so had Cochran, carrying as many counties as Truman. The big margin of victory after all was in Jackson County, where a grand total of 137,000 votes had been rolled up for Truman, nearly half of all he received. Two years before, with Pendergast support in his race for Congress, Cochran had carried Jackson County by an overwhelming 95,000 votes. This time, with the organization against them, Cochran and Milligan together received all of 11,000 votes. In some Kansas City precincts Cochran failed to get a single vote.

Cochran felt his big mistake in the race had been to predict he would get 125,000 votes in St. Louis. This, he thought, had only made the Pendergast people work harder. As it was, Cochran’s margin in St. Louis (and St. Louis County) was 112,000–25,000 votes less than what had been achieved by the machine at the other end of the state.

The Kansas City Star called it a Pendergast triumph pure and simple. The one consolation was that western Missouri would now have representation in the Senate. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch expressed the view that the winning of the Democratic nomination for United States Senator by Judge Harry S. Truman of Independence was “without significance.”

No one seemed to think that Truman himself had had a thing to do with his victory, and he himself was quoted saying only how much he appreciated all that his friends had done for him.

As expected, the general election in the fall was a “pushover.” Harry’s Republican opponent was the incumbent who proudly carried the name of an infamous New York Republican of the Grant era, Roscoe Conkling. He was Roscoe Conkling Patterson. Harry’s expenses in the primary had come to $12,286. In the general election they were $785.

Afterward, he and Jim Aylward made a flying visit to Washington to call on Bennett Clark, who had been the biggest loser in the primary fight and who now, looking to his own reelection a few years hence, preferred to forget all he had ever said against his “good friend” Harry Truman and the Kansas City organization.

In a talk before the Kansas City Elks Club, Harry said he hoped to keep his feet on the ground in Washington.

By December, the final touches were being added to the handsome new, twenty-one-story courthouse in Kansas City. On the day of its dedication, after Christmas, as her father beamed with pleasure, ten-year-old Margaret Truman helped pull the string to unveil Charles Keck’s equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson. Margaret had grown tall for her age, “skinny and all one color—faded blonde,” a friend would remember, and clearly she enjoyed being her father’s daughter.

As a reward for faithful service, Fred Canfil was made Building Director of Jackson County, a kind of glorified custodian or janitor for the new courthouse, and would, according to later testimony, prove “very energetic” and “very noisy and loudmouthed,” and run things better than any other previous custodian.

They were exciting days for the Trumans. The week after, on January 3, 1935, Bess and Margaret, with Jim Pendergast, watched from the visitors’ gallery in the United States Senate as Harry, “barely recognizable” in morning coat and striped pants, walked with Senator Clark down the blue-carpeted aisle to the dais, to take the oath of office from Vice President John Nance Garner.

On the day Harry bid goodbye to Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, Pendergast had told him, “Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and answer your mail.”

III

Harry Truman had an unusually retentive mind. He remembered people—names, personal interests, family connections. He remembered things he had read or learned in school long before, often bringing them into conversation in a way that amazed others. He remembered every kindness he had ever been shown, the help given in hard times, and particularly would he remember those who treated him well when he first arrived in Washington, at age fifty, knowing almost no one and entirely without experience as a legislator. He would fondly recall Harry Hopkins, for example, because Hopkins had shown him kindness in this most difficult of times in his life. Another was William Helm, Washington correspondent for the Kansas City Journal-Post, to whom the new senator had gone for help at the start, confessing he was “green as grass” and in need of someone to show him around. At first, Helm took this as a joke. Here, he thought, was the eighth natural wonder of the world, a politician who didn’t take himself too seriously, a friendly, likable, warmhearted fellow with a lot of common sense hidden under an overpowering inferiority complex.

Two other new Democratic senators, Carl Hatch of New Mexico and Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington, went out of their way to be friendly. Hatch was self-effacing and bookish, Schwellenbach “a real guy” and “a wheel horse.” Among the older, veteran senators, Harry could count a half dozen from both sides of the aisle who gave encouragement, and like Hatch and Schwellenbach, they were all from the West, or were at least western in outlook.

Extremely important to Harry, as events proved, was Burton K. Wheeler, a lanky, independent-minded Montana Democrat, something of a rogue, who smoked big cigars and ran the powerful Interstate Commerce Committee.

Carl Hayden of Arizona, another Democrat, had come to Congress in 1911, as a territorial representative. “He took the trouble to explain some of the technicalities and customs of the Senate which appear pretty confusing to a newcomer,” Harry would write. Republicans Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and old William E. Borah, “the Lion of Idaho,” never treated him as anything but an equal. And most memorable was seventy-two-year-old J. Hamilton (“Ham”) Lewis of Illinois, the majority whip, who wore pince-nez, wing collars, spats, and a wavy pink toupee to match his pink Vandyke whiskers and sweeping mustache, and who one day came and sat down in an empty seat beside Senator Truman.

“Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” Lewis said kindly. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”

He was liked also by the red-faced, hard-drinking Vice President, “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas, who still dressed in a swallow-tailed coat and striped pants, and who, echoing T.J.’s parting words, told Truman to study hard and keep quiet until he knew what he was talking about. It was advice Garner always gave beginners, but that not all heeded. He, too, was a man of little formal education and obscure background. Now and then as time passed, he would ask Truman to take the Vice President’s chair and preside over the Senate. On a day when Will Rogers came to Capitol Hill for lunch, Garner invited Harry to come along, a favor and an occasion Harry would never forget.

Such gestures were the exception, however. “I was under a cloud,” he would say later. The Kansas City reputation had followed him to Washington. Bennett Clark was spoken of as the Senator from Missouri. Harry Truman was the Senator from Pendergast.

Bronson Cutting of New Mexico had a way of looking through Truman as though he didn’t exist. Pat McCarran of Nevada later recalled, “I never considered him a Senator.” George W. Norris of Nebraska, the great voice of reform in the Senate, thought he was “poison,” and refused to speak to him.

When a congressional aide named Victor Messall, a native Missourian and an experienced hand on the Hill, was offered a job on Senator Truman’s staff, he refused, fearing what the association might do to his career. “Here was a guy…sent up [to Washington] by gangsters,” he remembered. “I’d lose my reputation if I worked for him.”

Messall only changed his mind after volunteering to help the senator hunt for an apartment, which they found on Connecticut Avenue—four rooms in the Tilden Gardens apartments for $150 a month. Later, they stopped at a piano store, where Truman sat down and played several before choosing one to rent for five dollars a month. From there they went to a bank. While Messall waited, the senator took out a loan for furniture.

This, Messall decided, was an altogether different kind of man from what he imagined and one he now wanted very much to work for. A slim, snappy dresser, his hair slicked back Fred Astaire style, Messall became number one of a staff of five in Truman’s office. The reporter William Helm would describe him watching over the senator thereafter with “doglike devotion.”

Making his first call at the White House in February, a nervous Senator Truman found Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and one or two others high up in the administration sitting about the waiting room, busily talking and paying no notice of him. Though scheduled for fifteen minutes with the President, his time was cut to seven, during which he remained tongue-tied before Roosevelt. “It was quite an event for a country boy to go calling on the President of the United States,” he remembered. His telephone calls to the White House in the months to follow often went unanswered.

“He came to the Senate, I believe, with a definite inferiority complex,” wrote his boyhood friend Charlie Ross, who had become a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He was a better man than he knew.”

His diligence was noteworthy. Most mornings, he turned up at his office so early—about seven—and so in advance of everyone else in the building that it was decided he should have his own passkey, reportedly the first ever issued to a senator. Indeed, he would rise and be on his way so early in the morning that by mid-afternoon he would look in need of another shave. He carried himself straighter than a tall man would, walked considerably faster than customary in Washington. On good days he walked the several miles to the Capitol, moving-along at a steady military clip of 120 paces a minute and stopping usually at Childs restaurant for breakfast. When he didn’t walk, he took the trolley that ran down Connecticut Avenue, then swung east on Pennsylvania, past the White House, and on up to the Capitol.

“By the time his colleagues get down to work,” wrote William Helm, “Senator Truman has been through the morning mail, dictated several hundred letters, fixed up as many deserving Democrats with jobs as possible and is rarin’ to go.”

That his ties to Tom Pendergast continued, he left no doubt. To one Kansas City job applicant who asked his support, he wrote, “If you will send us the endorsements from the Kansas City Democratic Organization, I shall be glad to do what I can for you.” This, in his view, was how the game had always been played, not by Tom Pendergast only, but in American politics overall, from the beginning, and he was never to view it differently. To the victors went the spoils.

He saw to the appointment of hundreds of people to hundreds of different jobs in Missouri, including old friends and family. His brother Vivian would go to work for the Federal Housing Agency in Kansas City. Ted Marks was set up in a job with the Labor Department, in the Veterans Employment Service in Kansas City. Edgar Hinde became postmaster in Independence, a job he held for twenty-five years.

In the reception area of his office, over the marble mantelpiece where no one could possibly miss it, Senator Truman put a framed portrait of T.J. Pendergast.

His office was Number 248, on the second floor of the immense Senate Office Building (later named the Russell Building) northeast of the Capitol, his windows looking onto an interior courtyard. In the Senate Chamber he was assigned seat 94, one of seven newly installed behind the back row on the Democratic side to accommodate the disproportionate Democratic majority. To his right sat Sherman Minton of Indiana. The seat on the left remained empty until June when the newly elected Senator from West Virginia, Rush Holt, would turn thirty and thus be old enough, according to the Constitution, to take his place.

Of the ninety-six senators in this the 74th Congress, there were, including Senator Holt, sixty-nine Democrats and twenty-seven Republicans. Bennett Clark sat almost directly ahead, two rows down. Beyond Clark, about midway in the second row, was Tom Connally of Texas, who still wore the black bow tie and old-fashioned stand-up collar of the classic southern statesman. Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Hugo Black of Alabama, two senators of great importance to the administration, were also in the second row, and Ellison DuRant (“Cotton Ed”) Smith of South Carolina, who was known for his orations on King Cotton and Southern Womanhood and his near-perfect aim with tobacco juice. In the majority leader’s front-row seat on the aisle sat Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, while over near the other end of the first row, to Harry’s left, in seat 17, was the storm center of the chamber, the place of Huey Long of Louisiana, whose rampant outbursts against the administration lately included the charge that Franklin Roosevelt was personally trying to destroy him.

The year before, Long had proclaimed his “National Share Our Wealth Program,” promising to make “Every man a king, every girl a queen,” and through Harry Truman’s first months in the Senate, Long dominated, upstaging everyone. In early February he opened an assault on Jim Farley, charging that Parley’s operations were steeped in corruption. Then, on February 20, calling Farley a “political monster,” Long inserted in the Congressional Record an article from the Post-Dispatch describing how T.J. Pendergast had arranged with Farley to call off Internal Revenue investigations of Johnny Lazia. Long afterward told Harry it was only a little politics to please the home folks.

On the day of another Long tirade, when Harry was presiding in the Vice President’s chair, most of the Senate got up and walked out. Later, when he and Long found themselves crossing the street together, heading for the Senate Office Building, Long asked how Harry had liked the speech. He had stayed, Harry said, only because he was in the chair and had no choice. Thereafter Long refused to speak to him. In September in Louisiana, Long would be shot and killed by an assassin.

But if repelled by someone like Huey Long, Harry cared little more for other celebrated “speechifiers” in the Senate. Admittedly fearful of making a speech himself, he seemed to resent particularly those who could and who made their reputations that way. They were the “egotistical boys” whose specialty was talk.

Watching Senator Truman from the press gallery, William Helm wrote, “He sits in the back row of the top-heavy Democratic side of the Senate at every session, listening, absorbing, learning…. His is the conventional way. He ruffles no oldster’s feathers, treads on no toes.”

Four months passed before he dared introduce his first bill. It concerned a subject he knew about from experience–“A Bill to provide insurance by the Farm Credit Administration of mortgages on farm property”—and was sent by Vice President Garner to the Committee on Banking and Currency, where it promptly died.

As customary for freshman senators, he was assigned to two major and several lesser committees. In former days, the Committee on Appropriations would have been a position of dignity, little work, and little significance, but in the New Deal Washington of 1935 it was the largest committee of all, its power unprecedented. The appropriation that January of $4.8 billion for work relief represented approximately half what the government spent. Interstate Commerce, the committee of which Burton K. Wheeler was chairman, seemed a natural place for Harry, with his background in roads and highways, his lifelong fascination with railroads. The smaller assignments included the Public Buildings and Grounds Committee, and the Printing Committee, headed by Carl Hayden and responsible primarily for the Congressional Record. (Mamma Truman had asked Harry to put her on the list for the Record and became a steadfast reader.) The one assignment he did not care for was the District of Columbia Committee, which eventually he quit. He thought the District ought to have self-government.

He worked exceedingly hard at his assignments. Indeed, his first years in the Senate were devoted almost exclusively to committee work. Seldom did he miss a meeting of the two major committees, where, it was also noted, “He speaks rarely, listens much.” He was getting acquainted with the way things were done, which most veteran senators and staff people knew to be an art in itself. He was acutely aware of his limited formal education, and in a determined effort to compensate for it, he never let up. Assigned by Senator Wheeler to a new Interstate Commerce subcommittee investigating railroad finances, he searched the Library of Congress for books on railroad management, railroad history, until more than fifty volumes were piled in his office. “I’m going to be better informed on the transportation problem than anyone here,” he vowed privately. What surprised and disappointed him was to find how few others from Congress ever used the Library.

He had come into national public life at the start of “the Second Hundred Days,” the high tide of the New Deal. The crusade now was not just recovery from the Depression, but for reform, and he voted with the Democratic majority time after time, helping to pass some of the most far-reaching legislation in the history of Congress. He never once spoke for a measure, never took part in debate. He just voted—for the Wagner Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing the right of workers to join unions and to bargain collectively; for establishment of the Works Progress Administration; for the Social Security Act; and for rural electrification, which may have changed the way people lived more than any other single measure of the Roosevelt years. In his own state in 1935, nine out often farms had no electricity.

As a member of the Interstate Commerce Committee, he worked intensively on what became the Public Utility Holding Company Act, designed as a blow against public power cartels, and in the process had his first brush with big-time lobbying and high-powered witnesses. The lobby set up headquarters in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel.

He resolved to deny no one a hearing. “I’ll take all the dinners he has to put out,” he would later write of a lobbyist for a midwestern railroad, “and then do what I think is right.” A true son of Missouri, he wanted all the facts. “I can see no harm in talking to anyone—no matter what his background. In fact I think everyone has a right to be heard if you expect to get all the facts.”

At the hearings, witnesses for the public utilities included such prominent Wall Street figures as Wendell Willkie, president of the Commonwealth & Southern, and John W. Davis, the former Democratic presidential candidate. The “propaganda barrage,” as Truman attested, was such as no county judge in Missouri had ever experienced. Constituents with utility stocks sent thirty thousand letters and telegrams. (He burned them all, Harry claimed years later, though Mildred Dryden, his secretary, would remember no such conflagration.) The lobby also sent people to Kansas City to see Tom Pendergast, who apparently took their side. But that too failed, according to Harry. In June, the bill passed the Senate by a wide margin as expected, with Senator Truman paired in favor. Detained “on important business,” he had arranged to vote for the bill if the outcome looked close. (The important business was driving Bess and Margaret back to Independence for the summer. After five months, they had had enough of Washington.)

“I was a New Dealer from the start,” he would say firmly and proudly later, and the record showed that few in the Senate could match his record of support for Franklin Roosevelt. Senator Robert Wagner of New York, author of so much New Deal legislation, was to praise Senator Truman as extremely useful. Yet in manner, background, language, age, choice of companions, he bore no resemblance to the ardent young New Dealers portrayed by one historian as “trained in the law, economics, public administration, or new technical fields, brilliant and dedicated…nurtured on progressive ideals, schooled in the improved universities of the 1920’s.” Like so many things about Washington, liberals were a new experience for him, and generally speaking, he didn’t care for them, unless they were of the Burton Wheeler variety, western in style and a bit rough about the edges. The rest seemed lacking in common sense, for all their education. He was heart and soul an Andrew Jackson—William Jennings Bryan—T. J. Pendergast kind of Democrat. He loved politics in large part exactly because it meant time spent with men like Cactus Jack Garner (who would be remembered for observing that the vice presidency was not worth a pitcher of warm piss). Privately he enjoyed poking fun at “the boys with the ‘Hah-vud’ accents,” though never, as far as is known, at the Harvard man in the White House.

He voted with the President repeatedly because he genuinely wanted to do what was best for the common people at a time when so many were in desperate need of help. He considered himself one of them. He knew what they were suffering. But he knew also, of course, the value of voting with the President—the leader, “the Boss”—both as an article of faith and as a way ahead. Alben Barkley of Kentucky, assistant to the majority leader, would describe later how he had liked Harry Truman almost at once, instinctively. “As the old political saying goes, he ‘Voted right’.”

To many liberals in the Senate he was “go-along, get-along Harry,” a decent, sincere man whose company they often enjoyed—“I liked Harry Truman,” Claude Pepper of Florida remembered—but he was not someone to take seriously.

The President had told Congress it could not go home without passing his entire program. So Congress labored through the sweltering summer of 1935, the worst summer of the Dust Bowl, the summer when, for the benefit of the newsreel cameras, on a day the temperature hit 110 degrees, one Texas congressman fried an egg on the Capitol steps. Harry called it “a hot wave,” in a letter to Bess and Margaret, but he never complained about the heat or the work, only about their being so far from him.

He gave up the apartment, moved to a hotel to save money, and wrote to them constantly, from his room or the office, or at his desk in the Senate and particularly if someone like Huey Long were “spouting.” Long had begun calling the President a “faker” and predicting revolution if things didn’t soon change. Once he held the floor for fifteen and one-half hours, sometimes reading from the Bible or offering recipes for Roquefort salad dressing.

Harry’s spelling was not much improved from years past, for all he had advanced in station. He had trouble with words like “occasion,” which he wrote “occation.” He couldn’t spell “Hawaii” and wrote of Senator Byrnes as “Senator Burns.” He failed even with the spelling of his own home address, addressing envelopes repeatedly to Mrs. Harry S. Truman at 219 North “Deleware” Street.

In the month of July alone, he wrote thirty-four letters to her. To pass the evenings, he read Volume One of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. Or he would work his way through The New York Times. Always an ardent reader of newspapers, like most politicians, he was now taking the Washington Star, the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun, in addition to several Missouri papers, but he saved, The New York Times for the quiet of evening. It was the summer Will Rogers was killed in a plane crash in Alaska, news that left Harry feeling devastated. Rogers had been a second Mark Twain, he told Bess. “No one has done more to give us common sense.”

One evening, with a dozen others from the Senate, he crossed the Potomac to attend a party given by the chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, Joseph P. Kennedy, at Kennedy’s rented estate, Marwood, a thirty-three-room Renaissance château in the cool of the woods above the river. In a letter to Bess, Harry described it as “a grand big house a half mile from the road in virgin forest with a Brussels carpet lawn of five acres all around it, a swimming pool in the yard, and all the other trimmings.” He had never been in such a house. He was told it had cost $600,000 to build. He felt complimented to be included in such a party, but of his host he had nothing to relate.

He was trying to find an apartment they could afford for the year ahead:

Found a rather nice place at 1921 Kalorama Road. It was a northwest corner, fifth-floor apartment—two bedrooms, two baths, living room, small dining room, large hall, $125 per month. No garage. Then I looked at a house at 2218 Cathedral, a block north of Connecticut…. They were painting and papering it from cellar to attic. It had a two-car garage…. They wanted $90 per month. I then went down to the Highlands at California and Connecticut. They had a nice two-bedroom apartment on the southeast corner, fourth floor, at $125—better I think than 1921 Kalorama Road. Then I looked at the Westmoreland right behind the Highlands on California. They wanted $100 for a two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor, and $79.50 for one on the fourth floor that had four rooms. It is an old place but the location and rooms were very nice…. I am going back to look at 2400 Sixteenth Street and the Jefferson tomorrow and a couple of houses. I bet I find something that’ll suit before I quit.

Not only was he the Senator from Pendergast, he was one of the poorest of senators, a point he felt acutely. He never ceased worrying about money and whether he could make ends meet in Washington on a salary of $10,000. In his letters to Bess he reported the amount of his bus fare (20 cents), the charge for six months of the Washington Post ($7.50), an old grocery bill ($9.53). Thinking he might go over to the Maryland seashore for the Fourth of July weekend, he was “extravagant” and bought a bathing suit, but then went to a public health dentist to have two teeth filled. He had always wanted to be able to buy house furnishings of his own choosing. He dreamed extravagant dreams, he told her—of paintings by Holbein and Frans Hals, of Bokhara carpets, Hepplewhite dining table and chairs, and mahogany beds (“big enough for two”). But she must have faith in him:

I am hoping to make a reputation as a Senator…if I live long enough that’ll make the money success look like cheese. But you’ll have to put up with a lot if I do it because I won’t sell influence and I’m perfectly willing to be cussed if I’m right.

On three occasions in midsummer he traveled to New York to see Tom Pendergast, who was living like a potentate in a twenty-ninth-floor suite at the Waldorf-Astoria at a daily rate that would have covered Harry’s rent for a month. To his surprise and delight, T.J.’s welcome was the warmest ever. “Pendergast was as pleased to see me as if I’d been young Jim,” Harry reported to Bess after the first meeting. “We talked for three hours about everything under the sun.” On the second visit, two weeks later, T.J. was “as pleased to see me as a ten-year-old kid to see his lost pal.”

Hints of a huge insurance scandal were in the wind, involving a Pendergast man in the state government, R. Emmett O’Malley, Missouri’s Superintendent of Insurance. Marquis Childs of the Post-Dispatch had been to the Waldorf to interview T.J. earlier in the spring, before T.J. sailed for France on the new Normandie, and in the course of the questioning, T.J. had said, “Yes, I told O’Malley to approve the insurance deal,” adding angrily, “And what’re you going to do about it?” which had been a mistake. (When Childs went to the ship later, to see T.J. off, he found him in a better mood. “Pendergast and the very blond Mrs. Pendergast were ensconced in the living room of their suite which was almost literally filled with flowers, orchids and lilies of the valley, expensive flowers. This was Pendergast, the Maharajah of Missouri, in all his glory.”) But apparently Harry’s conversations at the Waldorf included none of the truth of what was going on behind the scenes with O’Malley, even if to Harry it appeared as though he and T.J. had covered “everything under the sun.”

One topic they did take up was a replacement for Governor Park, who by Missouri law could serve only a single term. Harry thought perhaps it should be a wealthy Pike County apple grower named Lloyd C. Stark. Harry and Stark had met through the American Legion—Stark, too, had served as an artillery officer in France—and had compared notes as time went on, Stark confiding his own political ambitions. Harry had been a guest at Stark’s estate in Pike County, in northeastern Missouri, home of the Stark nursery, largest in the United States and famous for the Stark “Delicious” apple. At Stark’s urging, Harry had provided him with a list of key people throughout the state and put in a word for him at 1908 Main Street. “Confidentially, I had a fine visit with our mutual friend in Kansas City last Friday,” Stark had written Harry that spring of 1935, delighted by how things were shaping up.

But T.J. didn’t like Stark and had already crossed him off as a possible governor at the time of Francis Wilson’s death. (At Wilson’s funeral, a news photographer happened to catch the massive Big Boss and the trim, elegantly tailored apple grower, each with cigarette in hand, deep in conversation among the parked cars.) Neither T.J. nor Jim Aylward thought Stark could be trusted and told Harry so.

“He won’t do,” said T.J. “I don’t like the son-of-a-bitch. He’s no good.”

Long afterward, Harry would remark to a friend, “The old man had better judgment than I did.”

However, as was said, the apple grower was also an accomplished apple polisher, and when Harry took both Stark and Bennett Clark with him on a third trip to the Waldorf that summer, T.J. at last consented. Stark was to have the organization’s full support—which meant Stark could count on being the next governor—and, of course, with the implicit understanding that the organization could in turn count on Stark.

On the train back to Washington, Stark, “the most grateful man alive,” promised to do anything to help Harry any time. He had only to say the word.

Relations with Bennett Clark, meanwhile, were also improving. Few in the Senate had been quite so contemptuous of Truman as Clark during Harry’s first several months, and Clark still did little to make Harry’s job any easier. Clark also seemed to go out of his way to annoy or embarrass the administration, and yet invariably it was Clark that Roosevelt worked with on federal appointments in Missouri, not Senator Truman, who voted consistently with the administration. It was Roosevelt’s way of trying to win Clark over, and Clark’s way of getting more than his share of patronage, all of which left Harry far out in the cold, trying to swallow his pride and resentment. Further, Clark had little time for what Harry called “the ordinary customers” from back home who had favors to ask or troubles to settle.

But Clark, as Harry recognized, was a man with an extraordinary mind, who knew the Constitution and parliamentary law as well as anyone in the Senate. He was hugely entertaining, a good host, a good cook—country ham with red-eye gravy and turnip greens his specialty—and like Cactus Jack Garner he enjoyed a sociable “libation” over lunch, or in mid-afternoon, or day’s end, or most any time. Harry adored the banter and storytelling that went with this side of senatorial life. It was closer to the comradeship of Army life than anything else he had known. He enjoyed Clark’s humor as they “took a little something to settle the nerves.” At a lunch for the health faddist Bernarr Macfadden, they regarded each other with long faces across the table. “Kind of hard on Bennett and me to attend a dry lunch in this town,” Harry noted.

In his office, for special guests like Clark, Harry kept a supply of T.J.’s best bourbon. (“And while I heard criticism aplenty of Pendergast himself,” recorded William Helm, “I have yet to hear a noble senator raise his voice against the quality of Pendergast liquor.”) Other “supplies for the thirsty” were kept by the Secretary of the Senate, Colonel Edwin Halsey (and later by his successor, Les Biffle), in an office only a short stroll across the hall from the chamber. Unlike Clark, Harry kept to a rule of one stroll, one drink only.

Though younger than Harry by six years, Clark was heavyset and jowly, and with his thinning hair looked both older and more senatorial. Clark’s biography in the Congressional Directory, written by Clark himself, took up nearly three-quarters of a page of fine print. Senator Truman’s, also self-penned, consisted of three lines.

A year later, in the summer of 1936, as the Democrats convened in Philadelphia to renominate Franklin Roosevelt for a second term, Harry was with T.J. again, and more conspicuously now than at any time in years past. Just back from still another European vacation—he had returned this time on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary—T.J. came down to Philadelphia by train from New York, planning to commute back and forth every day from his suite at the Waldorf. He arrived Tuesday, June 23, the morning the convention opened. Jim Farley, chairman of the national committee, Jim Aylward, and Senator Truman clustered about him to pose for pictures on the convention floor, T.J. beaming as the flash cameras exploded.

All the big bosses of the Democratic Party were gathered in Philadelphia—Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite, the urbane, affable, extremely powerful Edward J. Flynn of the Bronx; tall, natty Frank Hague of Jersey City, who would be remembered by history for his comment, “I am the law” Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago; E. H. (“Boss Ed”) Crump of Memphis, former farm boy and noted bird lover; and T. J. Pendergast, a white carnation in his lapel, who the day before had celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday. At one time or other, Roosevelt had courted and worked with them all, depending on their help, and he would again. He called them all his friends. And all appreciated perfectly what wonders the Roosevelt magic had worked for them in four years. As Marquis Childs observed, “The vast expenditures of the New Deal had put into their hands power they had hitherto scarcely dreamed of.” Though no one could know it at the time, the day was to mark T.J.’s last big public appearance. So, as a gathering of the era’s big-city Democratic bosses, all figuratively on stage together, it was a final, historic moment.

Harry, who had driven up from Washington, had no real part to play. He had been named to no committees of importance. He was only a delegate-at-large. He was there really to be with Pendergast, and indeed the group photograph taken on the convention floor is the only known picture of him at the Boss’s side.

Returning by train to New York that night, Pendergast was suddenly taken ill. The doctors diagnosed coronary thrombosis. Harry, who had stayed on in Philadelphia but did not bother to remain for Roosevelt’s speech the final night, apparently was not told for some time how serious the situation had become. In August, still confined to his hotel room, T.J. suffered another relapse and was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital for surgery. He had intestinal cancer and the operation required the closing of his rectum. For T.J. it meant the use of a tube in his side for the rest of his life.

Had T.J. only died that summer, Harry Truman would later reflect, his reputation would have been secure as the greatest political boss of the time. But it was not to be.

Not until September was Pendergast able to return to Kansas City, traveling by train in a special car and with great secrecy. By then the primaries were over, the organization having performed at peak efficiency: Lloyd C. Stark was the Democratic nominee for governor and as certain of election in November as was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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.”

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.

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.

V

It was the toughest campaign of Harry Truman’s career. “If Governor Stark runs against me,” he had told the papers, “I’ll beat the hell out of him.” But this was mostly bluff; he knew what the odds were.

Franklin Roosevelt, who could have made all the difference, only toyed with him awhile, leading Truman to think he was on his side. Truman had gone to the White House about some pending legislation and the President insisted instead on talking Missouri politics. He spoke of Stark as “funny,” meaning phony, as Harry explained to Bess. “I do not think your governor is a real liberal,” Roosevelt said. “He has no sense of humor…. He has a large ego.” Later Harry had run into Bennett Clark, who, though “cockeyed,” also promised his support. It was all too much for one day, Harry decided.

But Roosevelt gave no endorsement or even encouragement, no help at all except to let the senator know in roundabout fashion that he would be glad to appoint him to a well-paid job on the Interstate Commerce Commission. “Tell them to go to hell,” Harry responded. If he couldn’t come back as a senator, he didn’t want to come back at all.

Clearly he would be on his own this time. Tom Pendergast was in prison, the organization in shambles. At best Roosevelt could be counted on to remain neutral, but then not even that was certain. For all his loyal service to the New Deal, Senator Truman was not someone Roosevelt was willing to stand by or utter a word for. In Washington, as columnist Drew Pearson observed, “the wise boys” wrote Truman off.

In Missouri every major paper was against him but one, the Kansas City Journal-Post. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch summed up Truman’s chances as “nil.” He was without money, while Lloyd Stark, riding a wave of publicity, had all the marks of a winner, including plenty of money and the apparent endorsement of Franklin Roosevelt. If ever anyone had a reason to detest Franklin Roosevelt, it was Harry Truman as 1940 approached.

Privately, he was in despair over Roosevelt, Pendergast, and the “terrible” state of the world. In late August 1939, Hitler and the Russians had signed a nonaggression pact. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany. Margaret had never known her father to be in such low spirits. He went to the Washington premiere of the new Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, hoping it would cheer him up, but came away, as he wrote to Bess, greatly discouraged by its blanket portrayal of senators as crooks and fools. Doubtless he was distressed too by the fact that the chief figure of corruption in the story was a fat, heavy-handed machine boss who acted much like Tom Pendergast and ruled a city called Jackson.

Public opinion of the New Deal seemed to be at a low ebb. Roosevelt was getting nowhere with Congress. New Deal cures for hard times had been insufficient, the Depression persisted. Eight million people were still unemployed.

Harry worried over money owed on his mother’s farm. To meet notes coming due, Vivian had exchanged a mortgage on the farm for $35,000 from the Jackson County School Fund, this according to a law that allowed the loan of school money not currently needed. Harry’s secret hope was to sell the farm and clear all the debt on it—he wished now it had been sold when he came home from France—but he knew how much the place meant to his mother. Giving it up at her age might be more than she could take.

For the record, he had kept out of the loan arrangement and later said he had known nothing about it, which was undoubtedly less than the truth, since, along with Vivian, Fred Canfil, too, had signed the papers.

The continued ranting of Adolf Hitler on the radio left him increasingly gloomy. He met for lunch in Washington with Robert Danford, his old superior officer at Camp Doniphan, now a general, and talking of events in Europe and Germany’s apparent military superiority, they both became “mighty blue.” Harry feared a Nazi world. He dug out some of his old Army maps of France and tacked them to his office wall to follow the fighting. In open opposition to such strident isolationists in the Senate as Wheeler, Borah, and his fellow Missourian, Bennett Clark, he spoke out still more and strongly for “preparedness,” called on the President to summon a special session of Congress to revise the Neutrality Act of 1936, which he himself had voted for but now realized was a mistake. In a speech in Missouri in October, he said the three dictators, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, had reverted to the code of “cave-man savagery.” American neutrality was obsolete in the face of such reality, he said. The arms embargo must be lifted. “I am of the opinion that we should not help the thugs among nations by refusing to sell arms to our friends.” With Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina, he urged larger appropriations for defense, an immediate buildup of the Army, and a Navy “second to none.” He was outraged by the arguments of the America First movement and the speeches being made by Charles Lindbergh. On November 11, Armistice Day, he wrote to Bess: “You know it makes some of us who went on that first Crusade…wonder sometimes just what fate really holds for civilization.”

But as so often in his life, he went ahead uncomplaining, determined to defeat the “double-crossing” Stark and return to the Senate, where, he knew, history was going to be made as never before. His back was up. He would find out who his real friends were.

Meantime, with five other senators, he flew off to Mexico and Central America on a so-called “fact-finding” trip—“a pleasure trip,” he was frank to admit. There was “too much poverty” in San Salvador, he thought, but Costa Rica from the air looked like a painting by one of the old masters: “Smoking volcanoes, blue lakes and the Pacific Ocean all in view at the same time from 134 miles in the air,” he wrote to Bess. In Panama, he toured the length of the Canal by plane, inspected the giant 16-inch defense guns, watched a ship pass through the Miraflores Locks, and found himself “treated royally” by everyone. One artillery officer whom he had known from summer camp at Fort Riley “treated me as if I were the President of the U.S.A.”

In Nicaragua on the return route, President Somoza impressed him as “a regular fellow.” In Mexico City, he tried to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. But it was arriving at San Francisco and stopping at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill that he enjoyed most. He loved San Francisco. “This, you know, is one of the world’s great cities and it is San Francisco—not Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma retired farmers as the city in southern California is,” he wrote, referring to Los Angeles, a city he disliked. When others in the party went out on the town, on a “slumming expedition” in search of female companionship, he bowed out. “I guess I’m not built right,” he told Bess. “I don’t enjoy ’em—never did, even in Paris, and I was twenty years younger then.”

At a first campaign strategy meeting in St. Louis, at the Hotel Statler in January 1940, fewer than half of those invited appeared and some only to explain sheepishly why they would be unable to take an active part. The few with serious interest included his old friend Mayor Roger Sermon of Independence, Harry Vaughan, John Snyder, and James K. Vardaman, who, like Snyder, was a St. Louis banker. They would support Harry no matter what, they said, though Roger Sermon, who was known as “a plodder” and “all business,” thought Harry should understand the outlook was extremely bleak. “Harry, I don’t think you can win and that’s not merely my personal opinion but after inquiring around.” Having heard several more comparably discouraging forecasts, Harry said only that he would appreciate a little talk about electing Senator Truman.

Jim Pendergast, who was unable to attend, had asked Vic Messall earlier to tell the senator that “if he gets only two votes in the primary one will be mine and the other will be my wife’s.” Jim Aylward decided to sit the campaign out. Congressman Joe Shannon wanted time to make up his mind. But Jim Pendergast, as surviving head of what was left of the organization, would work as few men ever did for Harry and produce considerably more than two votes.

On February 3, 1940, Truman announced formally that he was filing his declaration of candidacy for reelection to the United States Senate, and said further that he was both opposed to President Roosevelt’s seeking a third term and that his own choice for President was Bennett Clark.

Seldom had he appeared more the politician, in the least complimentary understanding of the term. That he, Harry Truman, could honestly propose conservative, isolationist, alcoholic Bennett Clark for the presidency at any time, let alone now, with the world as it was, seemed so blatantly hypocritical and expedient as to be laughable. Nor did his promise, “as a faithful Democrat,” to support Roosevelt, should he become the nominee, take any of the edge off the announcement. Clearly, it was Clark’s support in eastern Missouri that he was after, that and a little satisfaction perhaps in letting Roosevelt know how he felt and that he too could play the game.

His opposition to a third term, however, was entirely sincere. The idea went against his fundamental political faith. “There is no indispensable man in a democracy,” he wrote privately. “When a republic comes to a point where a man is indispensable, then we have a Caesar. I do not believe that the fate of the nation should depend upon the life or health or welfare of any one man.”

To no one’s surprise, the Bennett Clark presidential boom came to nothing.

Vaughan and Snyder raised what little money there was to begin with and set up headquarters in a “borrowed” room in the Ambassador Building in St. Louis. “We borrowed clerks, we borrowed furniture, we borrowed everything we could,” Snyder recalled. Almost no one seemed willing to give money. Mildred Dryden, who had left the Washington office to help with the campaign, remembered having trouble finding money enough to buy stamps. One mailing of eight hundred letters asking for donations of a dollar produced about $200, hardly worth the effort. According to Rufus Burrus, an Independence lawyer and another of Harry’s Army reserve friends, funds were so low at one point that there was not money enough for a hotel room, so the candidate slept in his car. “A United States Senator…sleeping in his car!”

The first of Harry’s Senate friends to lend a hand was Lewis Schwellenbach, who arrived in time for the official opening of the campaign at Sedalia, in the heart of the state, the night of Saturday, June 15, 1940, one day after German troops occupied Paris. A crowd of several thousand turned out, which was fewer than expected, but having Schwellenbach there counted heavily with the candidate. Mary Jane and Mamma Truman were in front-row seats on the lawn. Bess and Margaret were seated on the platform. “At sixteen,” Margaret later wrote, “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.” Mamma Truman, who was nearly eighty-eight, shook hands among the crowd, a campaign aide at her side to help with names. Probably, as one of her generation, she never thought of the people as “out there.”

“Is he our friend?” she would ask about those she met.

More fellow Democrats from the Senate arrived in Missouri to lend a hand, an unusual gesture in a primary campaign and a very real measure of their regard and affection for Harry Truman. Carl Hatch, Sherman Minton, and Lewis Schwellenbach, three old friends, came to give vocal support. However pointedly Roosevelt ignored him, Truman was running hard on his New Deal record. “While the President is unreliable,” he confided to Bess, “the things he’s stood for are, in my opinion, best for the country….” Senator Jimmy Byrnes, hearing of Truman’s financial troubles, talked the New York financier Bernard Baruch into contributing a desperately needed $4,000 to the campaign. And at the last, Alben Barkley, too, would appear for speeches in St. Louis and Kansas City. But Bennett Clark appeared determined to do nothing. What had Harry Truman ever done for him, Clark is said to have remarked in Washington.

In full-page newspaper ads, the president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, A. F. Whitney, called for help for “our good friend” Harry Truman, and in another few weeks the railroad unions provided the only big money behind the senator, some $17,000. Harry, as always in his political life, refused to handle any money, leaving that to the others. Eventually, however, to meet expenses he had to borrow $3,000 on his life insurance policy.

Four years of investigations into railroad finances had resulted in the Truman-Wheeler Bill, still to be passed, providing protection for the railroads as a mainstay of the nation’s transportation system. He had supported the Farm Tenancy Act of 1937, and after passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, giving farmers price supports, he had said on the floor of the Senate that until the farmer got his fair share of the national income there could be no real agricultural progress. In 1939 he had voted for expanding the low-cost housing program, for increased funds for public works, increased federal contributions to old-age pensions. Particularly was he proud of his part in the Civil Aeronautics Act (1938), to bring uniform rules to the burgeoning new aviation industry.

On the issues of national defense and how the country should meet the crises in Europe, he was adamant. America “ought to sell all the planes and materials possible to the British Empire,” he said in a radio address on June 30.

It was the record he ran on, and tirelessly. Through July he crisscrossed the state in his own car, a ’38 Dodge, again with Fred Canfil along to share the driving, or Vic Messall or his old Kansas City friend Tom Evans. When Harry drove, he drove fast—too fast, the others thought.

Between times he was traveling back and forth to Washington, where, because of the war in Europe, Congress was still in session. Yet he seemed to thrive on it all, just as in the last campaign. Tom Evans, who was twelve years younger, had to give up and go home, no longer able to keep the pace.

Truman’s speeches were without charm. He made no attempt at eloquence or the kind of slowly building, tall-tale exaggeration and pleasure in words for their own sake that Missouri audiences traditionally adored. His voice was both flat and high-pitched—and the larger the crowd, the higher the pitch. In normal conversation he spoke in rather low, pleasing tones, but something happened as soon as he stepped to a podium. Trying to emphasize a point, he would chop the air rapidly, up and down, with both hands, palms inward, while at the same time, and in the same rhythm, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet, a style some of his detractors loved to imitate.

He had little skill for making politics a good show. It was a talent he greatly admired in others, but that he did not have now any more than before. The Senate had taught him little in that respect. Compared to someone like Bennett Clark, who after half an hour on the stump was only warming up, he was a flat failure. Yet in his own face-to-face way of campaigning he could be very effective. Once, in the course of the campaign, he told a friend how to do it: “Cut your speech to twenty-five minutes, shake hands with as many people as you can for a little while. Afterward, even if you have time left, leave. If you have no place to go, you can always pull off the road and take a nap.”

Moving among country crowds, pumping hands, he would say, “I just wanted to come down and show you that I don’t have horns and a tail just because I’m from Jackson County.”

He also took a stand on civil rights, and while by later standards what he said would seem hardly daring or sufficient, for Missouri in 1940 it was radical. He stated his position at the very start, in Sedalia, to a nearly all-white audience:

I believe in the brotherhood of man; not merely the brotherhood of white men, but the brotherhood of all men before the law…. If any class or race can be permanently set apart from, or pushed down below the rest in political and civil rights, so may any other class or race when it shall incur the displeasure of its more powerful associates, and we may say farewell to the principles on which we count our safety….

Negroes have been preyed upon by all types of exploiters, from the installment salesman of clothing, pianos, and furniture to the vendors of vice. The majority of our Negro people find but cold comfort in shanties and tenements. Surely, as freemen, they are entitled to something better than this.

Privately, like the country people whose votes he was courting, he still used the word “nigger” and enjoyed the kind of racial jokes commonly exchanged over drinks in Senate hideaways. He did not favor social equality for blacks and he said so. But he wanted fairness, equality before the law. He had been outraged by reports of black troops being discriminated against at Fort Leavenworth and used his office to put a stop to it.

At the National Colored Democratic Association Convention in Chicago that summer, he told a black audience that raising educational opportunities for Negro Americans could only benefit all Americans. “When we are honest enough to recognize each other’s rights and are good enough to respect them, we will come to a more Christian settlement of our difficulties.” Legal equality was the Negro’s right, Truman said, “because he is a human being and a natural born American.”

In one respect it was like 1934 all over again. There were three in the running and again one was named Milligan, for District Attorney Maurice Milligan had decided that he, not Lloyd Stark, was the one who had brought down Tom Pendergast and so deserved to be the next Senator from Missouri. Later speculation that Milligan was, in fact, cleverly maneuvered into the race by some of the Truman people—in order to divide the Stark vote—would never be substantiated, but that was what happened (just as Tuck Milligan had divided the vote for Cochran in 1934), and for Truman his entry into the contest could not have been more welcome.

In the first weeks the odds were heavily in favor of Stark, with Milligan second, Truman a very distant third. (A cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick in the Post-Dispatch showed two heavy trucks marked “Stark” and “Milligan” in head-on collision high above a tiny toy truck marked “Truman.” “No place for a Kiddie car,” said the caption.) The Milligan candidacy rapidly faded, however. It soon became a race between Stark and Truman, and one of Truman’s chief advantages proved to be Stark himself, as Harry Truman seems to have known intuitively from the beginning. Over dinner at the Willard Hotel one evening in Washington, well before the campaign began, he had told friends he was sure Stark would attack him personally and that if he, Harry, were not even to mention Stark, then Stark would begin making mistakes—“enough errors to give me a definite opportunity.”

As predicted, Stark tore into Truman at first chance, calling him a Pendergast lackey, a rubber-stamp senator, and a fraud. “The decent, honest, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens of Missouri,” said Stark in a speech at Joplin, “know him for what he is—a fraudulent United States Senator, elected by ghost votes, whose entire record in public office has been devoted to one purpose alone, and that is to the service of the corrupt master who put him into power….”

In Truman’s files still was the letter from Stark thanking him for the introduction to Tom Pendergast. Learning of this, several on the campaign staff urged Harry to release it, certain it could settle the outcome of the election in one blow. But Harry refused, saying he would let Stark destroy himself.

Little things about Stark began to draw attention. It was noted, for example, that his chauffeur was required to give him a military salute. Then, with only weeks to go, Stark went to the national convention in Chicago as an announced candidate for the vice-presidential nomination, as well as for the Senate, and Bennett Clark, who had at last concluded that Harry Truman deserved his help, rose to the occasion in grand style. To a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Clark observed:

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…. I understand, too, that he is receiving favorable mention as Akhund of Swat and Emir of Afghanistan.

Stark was one of seventeen in a vice-presidential race that included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead, William O. Douglas, Jimmy Byrnes, Henry A. Wallace, and Congressman Sam Rayburn. At Chicago, Stark passed out bushels of apples and wound up with 200 votes on the first ballot. The final decision, however, was made in Washington by Roosevelt, who had by then accepted the draft of the convention for a third term. He chose Henry A. Wallace, the Secretary of Agriculture, a former Republican from Iowa, a former editor of Wallace’s Farmer, which had been founded by his grandfather, and an ardent liberal.

Truman had come to Chicago with the Missouri delegation and held a seat on the resolutions committee, an important role. The convention opened on July 15. But in Kansas City the following day, an event took place that rocked him as very little ever had. The Republicans who controlled the county court had decided to foreclose the court-held mortgage on the homeplace at Grandview, and on Tuesday, July 16, 195 acres of the farm were sold at auction on the courthouse steps in Kansas City. The Star carried a front-page picture of the auction crowd and a caption explaining that the farm belonged to Martha E. Truman, mother of the Missouri senator. How much warning Harry had is unknown, but clearly he was helpless to find the money to save his mother from eviction. He was also certain it had been done for political reasons only, to humiliate him in the middle of the campaign, which seems to have been exactly the case.

Two days later at the convention, in the middle of the fight over the vice-presidential nomination, Harry felt suddenly so tired and weak he thought he was having a heart attack. Reaching out desperately, he clutched at a railing and hung on for ten or fifteen minutes, totally unable to move, until someone, seeing what was happening, helped him to a chair.

The homeplace on Blue Ridge was gone—though it would be recovered later. His mother and sister moved into a small, rented house in Grandview, where, not long afterward, Mamma Truman slipped on the unfamiliar steps and broke her hip. As broken hips were then often fatal, Harry thought it meant the end for her. But it was not, nor did she complain about the new quarters.

In a letter home, he asked Bess to try to imagine the shame she would feel if her mother were evicted from 219 North Delaware.

Election day for the primary would be August 6; from Washington in late July, he wrote, “I’m thinking August 6 all the time.” Theodore Roosevelt had once written that “black care rarely sits behind the rider whose pace is fast enough.” It seemed to be his own cure, too.

Will call you from Sedalia tomorrow night. Taking train to arrive there at 9:30 P.M. Will start out at Salisbury at 10:00 A.M. Thursday, Keytesville at 2:00 P.M., Brunswick 4:00, and Carrollton at 8:00 P.M., Hardin at 9:00 P.M. Next day Cuba and Cape Girardeau. Saturday, Sikeston, Maiden, and Poplar Bluff. Rest Sunday and start at Lamar, Nevada, Rich Hill, and Butler Monday. Harrisonville, Belton, and K.C. Tuesday. Will stay at home Tuesday night…and go to St. Louis, thirty-first. Barkley is coming to K.C. and St. Louis on thirtieth and thirty-first. Will stay in St. Louis until Saturday and then come home.

The night of the big speech with Barkley in St. Louis was a fiasco. In a hall big enough to seat more than three thousand people, a grand total of three hundred showed up.

And yet it was in St. Louis in the final week that events turned suddenly and unexpectedly in Harry’s favor. When the campaign was over and the results final, he would comment to Bess, “Anyway we found out who are our friends….”

As valuable as any, surprisingly, ironically, was Bennett Clark. From a hotel room in St. Louis, Clark began calling people all over the state. “He finally ended up in a hospital and we continued to push him even there,” remembered a Truman campaign worker, “and he kept his telephone busy.”

Still more important was Clark’s influence on a hale, broad-shouldered young Irish-American named Robert E. Hannegan about whom until now Truman knew nothing. A St. Louis police chief’s son, Hannegan had been a star athlete at St. Louis University and for a while, after law school, played semi-professional baseball. Since 1933, he had been extremely active in Democratic politics, in the rough school of the Dickmann organization, eventually becoming city chairman. But up to now, Hannegan had been working for Stark. Whatever it was that Bennett Clark said or promised to make him switch must have been extremely convincing, for with just two days to go before the primary, Hannegan suddenly deserted Stark and went to work feverishly for Truman. In hindsight, Harry would see it as the biggest break of the campaign, and thereafter the tall, good-looking young man in the loud neckties could do no wrong in Harry’s estimation, though had anyone ever walked out on him as Hannegan had on Stark, it would have been seen as rank betrayal.

On election night Truman was heard to remark, “Well…I guess this is one time I’m beaten,” to which his friend Edgar Hinde replied that it was a long time until morning.

Margaret, however, would remember her father going to bed after calmly announcing he would win. They had been listening to the returns on the radio in the living room. By eleven o’clock Stark had an 11,000 vote lead. For her mother, Margaret would write, it was one of the worst nights of her life. They were both in tears. When the phone rang in the middle of the night, after everyone was in bed, it was Bess who answered. A campaign worker in St. Louis, David Berenstein, wished to congratulate the wife of the Senator from Missouri. Bess took it as a bad joke and slammed down the receiver. But Berenstein called back. Truman was carrying St. Louis.

It was an extremely close shave, as Truman said. He won by not quite 8,000 votes out of 665,000 cast. And 8,411 votes were also his margin over Stark in St. Louis, where, thanks to Bennett Clark, Hannegan had done his last-minute work. But the black vote, too, had gone to Truman, and he did better with the farmers this time than he had in 1934. Most importantly, he carried Jackson County by 20,000 votes, which was only a fifth of his margin in 1934, but still 20,000 votes in the place where supposedly anyone ever associated with the Pendergasts was done for. His own standing with the people, the work of Jim Pendergast and what remained of the organization, had counted more than all the sensation of the scandals, the charges of his opponents, and the relentless opposition of the Star. It was truly an extraordinary victory.

Maurice Milligan sent his congratulations and promised Truman his support in the fall election. Governor Stark said nothing publicly, but in private correspondence with Roosevelt blamed his defeat on “the machine vote, backed by Bennett Clark with every force at his command,” plus “virtually all the Federal appointees, including Postmasters and WPA workers,” who had made the difference for Truman. Besides, said Stark, “our rural vote, which is strong for me,” had failed to materialize, “due primarily to the severe drought.”

In order to run in the primary Milligan had been required to quit as district attorney. When Milligan applied for reappointment, Truman wrote Roosevelt a letter saying that in fairness Milligan should have his job back. However, when Stark’s term as governor expired and word reached Truman that Stark was being considered by Roosevelt for a position on the Labor Mediation Board, Truman saw that he did not get it. Stark, who had seemed so destined for glory, was to withdraw from politics in disgust, never again to hold public office.

Three days after the primary election, when Harry Truman walked into the Senate Chamber, both floor leaders and all the Democrats present “made a grand rush” to greet him. Les Biffle, Secretary to the Majority, told him that no political contest in memory had ever generated such interest in the Senate as had his race in Missouri. Biffle had arranged a surprise lunch in his honor. “I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes were going to kiss me,” Harry later wrote Bess, his joy in the day still overflowing. “Barkley and Pat Harrison were almost as effusive. Schwellenbach, Hatch, Lister Hill, and Tom Stewart, and Harry Schwartz almost beat me to death. Dennis Chavez hadn’t taken a drink since the Chicago convention but he said he’d get off the wagon on such an auspicious occasion, and he did with a bang. Minton hugged me…. Well, as you can see it was a grand party.”

Though in the general election in the fall Truman failed to do as well as Franklin Roosevelt in his race with Wendell Willkie, he nonetheless won resoundingly, defeating his Republican opponent, Manvel Davis, by 44,000 votes.

His one last worry, before returning to Washington, was over delay of the papers certifying his reelection—papers that, by law, required the signature of Governor Lloyd C. Stark. “Has my certification of election been officially received by you?” he anxiously cabled the Secretary of the Senate, Colonel Edwin A. Halsey, on December 13. By return telegram Halsey assured him that all was in order.

In a brand-new pearl gray, two-door 1941 Chrysler Royal, a car that was to be in steady service for the next fifteen years, he and Bess set off again for Washington.

7

Patriot

War has many faces; or, rather, in war men and nations wear many faces.

—ERIC SEVAREID

I

In “Locksley Hall,” the poem by Tennyson that young Harry Truman had copied down in his last year in high school, and that he carried still, neatly folded in his wallet, were lines describing an aerial war of the future, lines written well before the invention of the airplane:

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue…

In July of 1940 began the first great air battle in history, the Battle of Britain, as day after day Hitler’s Luftwaffe crossed the Channel to bomb British ports, airfields, and London, and the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the Royal Air Force went up to “grapple” in defense. It was all Tennyson had foreseen and worse. In a raid on London, September 7, there were 375 German bombers, an unprecedented force. Then the night raids began, and devastation from incendiary bombs that Americans read about in dispatches by correspondents Robert Bunnelle and Helen Kirkpatrick, or heard described firsthand by the dramatic radio voice of Edward R. Murrow. “As I watched those white fires flame up and die down, watched the yellow blazes grow dull and disappear,” said Murrow in his broadcast of October 10 at five in the morning, London time, “I thought, what a puny effort is this to burn a great city.” Hitler boasted that his air Blitz would break the will of the English people. On Sunday, December 29, London was subjected to the most savage bombing yet. More than a thousand fires raged across the city.

In Washington that same night, Franklin Roosevelt was wheeled into the oval-shaped Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the White House to deliver by radio the “fireside chat” to be known as his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech. The Nazis, he said, were determined to enslave the world and he warned that stroking a tiger would never make it a kitten. He saw American civilization in graver peril than at any time since Plymouth and Jamestown. It was not war he wanted, but all-out, massive production for war to supply those nations under Nazi attack. “We must become the great arsenal of democracy. For this is an emergency as serious as war itself….”

On January 6, 1941, at a joint session of the new Congress, Senator Harry Truman listened as Roosevelt delivered a second ringing summons to action, in support of those nations fighting in defense of what he called the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear. To Truman, it was the President at his best. A few days later came Roosevelt’s plan for Lend-Lease, to send Britain arms on credit, and in both houses of Congress the fight was on. Isolationists in the Senate—Wheeler, Vandenberg, Bennett Clark, Gerald P. Nye, Taft of Ohio—objected bitterly, calling the bill the road to war. Wheeler, Truman’s old mentor, was the most scathing of all, saying it would “plow under every fourth American boy,” which Roosevelt called “the rottenest thing” that had been said in public life in his generation. Wheeler, Clark, and the others could not have been more wrong or shortsighted, Truman felt. Bennett Clark had made himself a favorite of the America First movement, praised Lindbergh, and claimed, “We have everything to lose and nothing to gain in a war.” Clark opposed aid to Britain, opposed further involvement of any kind by the United States. If Hitler conquered Europe, he said, “we’re better off defending the United States than frittering away our supplies in Europe.”

Clark was destroying himself politically, Truman was certain, and plainly Clark was having increasing difficulty staying sober. Repeatedly, Truman voted against amendments designed to restrict Roosevelt’s execution of the bill.

Truman was by now a member of both the Military Affairs Committee and the Military Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. In September he had voted for the first peacetime draft. By December, more than $10 billion had been awarded in defense contracts in a country that was officially still at peace. Testifying on the Hill, the Army’s Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, had called for a force of 2 million men, and another $1 billion to cover expenses, and said the money was only a start. Questioned whether he was not asking for more than necessary to meet the emergency, he replied, “My relief of mind would be tremendous if we just had too much of something besides patriotism and spirit.”

Senator Truman, who was by now a colonel in the reserves, and who knew how critical was the shortage of qualified officers, went to Marshall’s office in the rabbit warren of the old Munitions Building and tried to enlist. Pulling his reading glasses down on his nose, Marshall told him he was too old and could better serve his country in the Senate.

Events were moving rapidly. An older, simpler way of life in Washington was passing. It was becoming a different city overnight. All through the Depression years, even with the changes imposed by the New Deal since 1933, it had remained a small town in most ways, southern at heart and unhurried. Now there were new people everywhere, swarms of new federal employees, more automobiles, more rush and confusion. The year before, it appeared the old “temporaries” on the Mall, acres of unsightly structures like the Munitions Building put up during the First World War (as it was now being called), might at last be torn down and taken away. Instead, the demand was to increase their number. A hodgepodge of new war agencies was sprouting with names and initials difficult to keep straight—the NDMB, National Defense Mediation Board, the OPM, Office of Production Management, and later the OEM, Office of Emergency Management. There was the SPAB, Supplies Priorities and Allocations Board, and the DPC, Defense Plants Corporation.

Every month was adding five thousand people to the city’s population. Already, the shortage of housing was more acute than in 1918. The Trumans were extremely lucky to find a new apartment, five small rooms at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, on the street side of the building, second floor, for $120 a month. And this time they would hold on to it, Bess—the Madam or the Boss, as the senator referred to her—having decided she and Margaret would stay through the year.

There were lines at movie theaters, constant crowds at Union Station. Hotel bars and the best restaurants were a hubbub of manufacturers’ agents in search of defense contracts and influence peddlers claiming to have an inside track. The talk was different, more urgent and full of new expressions like “stockpile,” “tooling up,” and “mobilize.” The New Deal was passé now, the Depression a bygone era. The hero of the hour, so different from the kind who had flocked to Washington in the early Roosevelt years, was the “dollar-a-year man,” a high-powered, high-priced corporation executive who had taken a government post but kept his old corporate salary, an innovation that some, like Senator Truman, looked on with great skepticism.

Yet as fast as the pace was picking up, it was hardly enough, given the urgency of the crisis. To those like General Marshall who knew the truth of the country’s military strength and were trying desperately to do something about it, the overriding worry was how slowly change was taking place.

In the beginning Truman had little idea what he was getting into.

Concerned about complaints from constituents of gross extravagance and profiteering in the construction of Fort Leonard Wood, a new camp for draftees in south-central Missouri, concerned also that his home state was not getting its share of defense contracts, he decided on “a little investigation” of his own. Setting off from Washington in the old Dodge, he drove south as far as Florida, then on into the Midwest, eventually swinging north to Michigan, stopping at Army installations and defense plants all along the way. It was another of his automobile odysseys, like the courthouse survey of earlier years, and he later claimed to have rolled up 30,000 miles, or 5,000 miles more than the distance around the world, which was preposterous. Still, he probably covered 10,000 miles, and the experience was an eye-opener, as he said. Hard times were plainly in retreat in the biggest boom in the history of the country. But great haste in the buildup for war was making unconscionably great waste. It was the same everywhere, he found. Millions of dollars were being squandered. Had there been such mismanagement of federal help for the poor and unemployed a few years earlier, he thought, the outcry would have been overwhelming. As it was, no one seemed to care or to be saying anything. If national defense was the issue, the sky was the limit.

At Fort Leonard Wood he found costly equipment and material lying about in the snow and rain “getting ruined, things that could never be used, would never be used….” The contractor had had no previous construction experience. “And there were men, hundreds of men, just standing around collecting their pay, doing nothing.” Truman walked about this and other sites taking notes on what he saw and whatever people were willing to tell him. Unless asked, he seldom said who he was.

Much camp construction, he discovered, was being done on a cost-plus basis—the contractor was paid for all costs plus a fixed percentage profit—which could be virtually an open ticket for piling up excessive profits. He was disturbed, too, by the obvious fact that the vast part of defense work was going to a small number of large corporations and these mainly in the East. He feared that many of the safeguards usually observed in government transactions were being thrown aside. He felt the President should be informed at once.

Returning to Washington, he called the White House for an appointment and from the moment he was ushered into the Oval Office, his reception could not have been more cordial, or more gratifying personally. Roosevelt was in grand form. He gave the senator a hearty welcome from his chair, flinging one arm in the air in characteristic gesture. He called him “Harry,” repeatedly, as for half an hour they talked across the clutter of papers and knickknacks covering the big mahogany desk. Yet, when the session ended, Truman came away wondering if he had made any impression at all. As he wrote to a friend, Roosevelt was so courteous and cordial it was hard to know just what he thought or where one stood with him. “Anyway,” he concluded, “I’m going to lay it before the Senate.”

He spent weeks preparing a speech, consulting other senators, asking for suggestions from friends and staff. He told William Helm he was outraged over the greed of big business at such a time, and of some of the labor unions. “There’s too much that is wrong here!” he insisted.

On Monday, February 10, 1941, Truman stepped into the well of the Senate to describe the problem as he saw it and to propose the establishment of a special committee to look into the awarding of defense contracts. It was his own idea, his own moment. His obscurity in national life, and in the course of the war, was about to end—and it was of his own doing.

Reaction in the Senate was immediately favorable. (Besides sounding an alarm on the scandalous state of military spending, he struck a responsive chord everywhere on the Hill by calling it grossly unfair for the War Department to ignore the suggestions of members of Congress concerning defense contracts. “It is a considerable sin,” he said, “for a United States Senator from a State to make a recommendation for contractors, although he may be more familiar with the efficiency and ability of our contractors than is anybody in the War Department.”) Referred first to the Committee on Military Affairs, Resolution 71 was reported out unanimously in a matter of days. But then back it went to the Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses of the Senate. There it might have languished indefinitely, for the committee’s chairman was Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina, who was close to the administration, and the administration had no wish to see its method of handling things scrutinized or stalled by any congressional committee. Roosevelt’s continuing admonition to everyone involved with defense production was, “Speed, speed, speed.”

To bring some semblance of order to operations Roosevelt had established a National Defense Advisory Commission, then an Office of Production Management, but there was really no clearcut administrative system, or any one person in charge. In effect, the sprawling defense effort was being handled by the White House, where the last thing anyone wanted was a pack of congressional investigators to contend with. There was alarm, too, at the War Department. A single nettlesome senator could mean unending problems and bad publicity, let alone an ambitious chairman of an investigating committee whose main, underlying intent, more than likely, would be to advance his political fortunes. Constant congressional probing could well delay or deter the whole program.

Only one voice cautioned against a “resentful attitude”—Chief of Staff Marshall, who said it “must be assumed that members of Congress are just as patriotic as we.”

Truman understood the potential peril in what he was proposing. From his reading of Civil War history he knew what damage could be done to a President by congressional harassment in a time of emergency, and the lives it could cost by prolonging the war. Abraham Lincoln had been subjected to unrelenting scrutiny by the powerful Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which caused continuing trouble and delays. Its Radical Republican leadership had insisted even on a say in the choice of field commanders and battle strategy, and as often as not it was the Confederates who benefited. Robert E. Lee once remarked that the committee was worth two divisions to him, an observation Truman would often cite. He had gone to the Library of Congress for the Civil War records to verify for himself what mistakes the committee had made.

Like others, Truman had little use for investigations after-the-fact such as those conducted by Senator Gerald P. Nye and his committee, who in examining the causes of the First World War had raised a conspiratorial theory of the role played by the munitions makers. The Nye Committee, Truman felt, had been a major cause of isolationist sentiment in the Congress and contributed more than anything else to the nation’s woeful unpreparedness. It did no good, Truman said, to go digging up dead horses once a war was over. “The thing to do is to dig this stuff up now and correct it.”

But what saved his proposal was another one put forward in the House by a belligerent Georgia Democrat, Eugene Cox, who openly despised Roosevelt and wanted the establishment of a joint congressional committee to investigate “all activities” involving national defense. At a White House meeting, Jimmy Byrnes stressed to the President how much better off he would be “in friendly hands”—with a Truman committee—and Roosevelt agreed. Byrnes also wanted Truman to be given an absurdly modest funding of $10,000, a shoestring, to keep watch on expenditures that in 1941 alone would exceed $13 billion; though Truman objected vigorously, he managed only to get the appropriation raised to $15,000.

Resolution 71 was reported out on a Saturday afternoon in March, when a total of sixteen senators were on the floor, none of whom objected as Byrnes asked for immediate adoption. The vote was unanimous. A week later in a late-night session, after beating back isolationist amendments, the Senate passed the Lend-Lease Bill, which called for the spending of another $7 billion.

Its formal title was the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but from the start it was spoken of almost exclusively as the Truman Committee. There were seven members, five Democrats, two Republicans. Except for Tom Connally of Texas, all, like the chairman, were junior senators and, in the words of one observer, distinguished only by their “unspectacular competence.” The Democrats included Connally, Carl Hatch of New Mexico, Monrad C. Wallgren of Washington, and James Mead of New York. The Republicans were Joseph H. Ball of Minnesota and Owen Brewster of Maine.

“Looks like I’ll get something done,” Harry wrote to Bess. The summer before, in the midst of the primary, he had told her, “The political situation is going to be something to write history about next year, and if I do win watch out.” He felt himself a participant in history again, as he had not since France. This second term in the Senate would be nothing like the first, he knew. Washington and the world were no longer the same. He was no longer the same. His proposal, as even his critics acknowledged, was a masterstroke. He had set himself a task fraught with risk—since inevitably it would lead to conflict with some of the most powerful, willful people in the capital, including the President—but again as in France, as so often in his life, the great thing was to prove equal to the task.

From his railway investigations he had learned the importance of a committee staff. Now, on the advice of Attorney General Robert Jackson, he hired a young Justice Department lawyer named Hugh Fulton, who had just convicted a federal judge for fraud. Fulton was only thirty-five years old and memorable, a big, apple-cheeked figure, over six feet tall and rotund, who wore a black derby and spoke with a piping voice. He told the senator he wanted a salary of $9,000, or more than half the whole appropriation. Truman hired him, confident that if they produced results, money would be no problem.

Like Truman, Fulton was an early riser and a steady worker. He was bright, tenacious, and, as time proved, a superb choice. For several months he would be all the committee could afford in a paid staff, though the problem was temporarily circumvented with the old senatorial device of “borrowing help” from some of the “downtown” (executive) agencies. The first investigator hired was young Matthew J. Connelly from Boston, who had worked for a Senate committee investigating campaign expenses. Others included George Meader, who would later become a member of Congress; Harold Robinson, a former FBI agent; Agnes Strauss Wolf, the one woman in the group; Morris Lasker, a recent graduate of the Yale Law School; William Boyle, a young man from Kansas City who had worked his way up in the Pendergast organization from precinct captain to acting director of the Kansas City police; and the ever faithful Fred Canfil, who operated out of Truman’s office in the Federal Building in Kansas City.

The only major change on Truman’s senatorial staff was the departure of Vic Messall under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Apparently, for all his devotion to the senator, Messall had been dipping into campaign funds for his own purposes—or Truman thought so—and he was told to find work elsewhere.

As a replacement for Messall, Truman brought his jovial friend Harry Vaughan to Washington and made him both his secretary, as the position of administrative assistant was still called, and a liaison for the committee with the military services, Vaughan being a lieutenant colonel in the reserves. (Later, Vaughan would leave to go on active duty with the Army Air Corps.)

There was to be no whitewash or witch-hunt, Truman told his committee staff, no grandstanding for headlines or any attempt ever to forestall the defense effort. But neither were they to be cowed by rank or political pressure. The primary task was to get the facts. “There is no substitute for facts,” he would say. They must know what they were about. “Give the work all you’ve got,” he urged, warning them never to tell those under investigation they were doing a good job. “If you do and it is later found they haven’t done a good job, then they can say our committee agreed with what they did.”

Their time was to be spent only where there were clear and present problems. They were not to go looking for trouble where none was known—and this applied to staff investigators and committee members alike. Once, in a closed, or executive, session, a senator not on the committee, Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, who was sitting in, asked out of curiosity, “What are you fishing for this morning?” It seemed a fair question, he thought, in an executive session.

Truman was offended. “This committee does not go on fishing expeditions,” he answered.

“I think the distinguished chairman resented my question,” Wiley observed.

“I do not like it,” said Truman. “I resent it. We are not on a fishing expedition.”

All findings were to be reported as the work of the full committee, not of any one senator or of the chairman. The committee would have no say on military strategy, military personnel, or the size or disposal of the defense effort.

What Truman came to appreciate most in Hugh Fulton was his “honesty of purpose,” and Fulton’s contribution overall was to be of such obvious value that some observers would later speak of him as the driving force of the committee. But this was not the case. The driving force was Senator Truman.

The long process began on April 15, 1941, with the appearance before the committee of a dozen highest-ranking officials, military and civilian, including the elderly Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and Chief of Staff Marshall. When the problem of seniority in the Army was discussed, Marshall insisted on the need for selective promotion. “You give a good leader very little and he will succeed,” he said, looking at the chairman; “you give a mediocrity a great deal and he will fail.” Years later, Truman would say that his respect for George Marshall had its beginning at this first session of the committee hearings.

On April 23, the committee went to nearby Camp Meade in Maryland, the first of nine camps on a cross-country inspection tour. One camp, at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, was found to have cost more than ten times the original estimate. Another, Camp Wallace in Texas, which was supposed to have been built for $480,000, wound up costing $2,539,000. In several instances the Army had shown “fantastically poor judgment” in selecting camp sites (Fort Meade was a prime example), and an estimated $13 million had been wasted just by renting trucks and other construction equipment instead of buying it all outright at the start.

The Army had made a special study of camp construction following the last war, when rampant waste and inefficiency had also prevailed, but as the committee discovered, this special study had been lost, news that left the chairman “utterly astounded.” If plans for the country’s military campaigns were comparable to those for construction, Truman reported to the Senate, the situation was truly deplorable.

The central problem was the system of cost-plus contracts. “There was no attempt to ask contractors what they had been in the habit of making in peacetime or even what they were willing to take,” Truman would write. “Huge fixed fees were offered by the government in much the same way that Santa Claus passes out gifts at a church Christmas party.” Some contractors were making in a few months three to four times what they normally cleared in a year, and at no risk. One architect-engineer was found to have increased his income through an Army contract by 1,000 percent.

Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, the hot-tempered Chief of Services of Supply, who was known for his efficiency, complained loudly about the committee as a creature “formed in iniquity for political purposes.” It was “axiomatic,” he said, that time and money could not be saved at the same time.

“General Somervell was a very brilliant general,” remembered Matt Connelly, the chief investigator, “but he was also a martinet, and he resented any intrusion or stepping on his toes. But that did not impress Senator Truman. He went ahead anyway.”

Later Somervell would concede that in fact the Truman Committee’s investigations of Army camp building alone had saved the government $250 million. Further, as the committee had strongly recommended, the responsibility for camp construction was taken away from the Quartermaster Corps and given to the Corps of Engineers, as it should have been in the first place.

The senators on the committee worked extremely hard, almost without exception, and the chairman hardest of all. A few nights before the first interviews with Stimson and Marshall in April, Truman had what was diagnosed as a gallbladder attack. He had been wrenched from his sleep by such excruciating pains that Bess thought he must be having a heart attack. But there was no easing up on his schedule, and by June he was again badly exhausted.

“My standing in the Senate and down the street [at the White House] gets better and better,” he wrote on June 19, 1941, in a letter to Bess, who was back in Missouri once more. “Hope I make no mistakes.” If he weren’t working so hard, from daylight until dark, he didn’t know what he would do without her, he said, adding plaintively, “Hope I won’t be long here alone.”

On June 22 came the stunning news that Hitler had turned and attacked Russia along an 1,800-mile front. Asked what he thought of this colossal turn of events, Truman spoke his mind in a way no one could fail to understand and that would not be soon forgotten. “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia,” he said, “and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” It was hardly an appropriate observation at this juncture, but like many Americans, and many in Congress, Truman saw little difference between the totalitarianism of Fascist Germany and Communist Russia, and particularly since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and Russia’s invasion of tiny Finland. Nor was he willing to close his eyes to the realities of the Soviet regime just because suddenly it was Russia under Nazi assault. Stalin was only getting what he had coming to him was the feeling, and one shared by a very large segment of the American people.

Worried about the world, worried about himself, he went to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for a checkup, only to be told there was nothing the matter with him beyond fatigue. He was suffering from severe headaches and nausea, he told the examining physician, who recorded in the senator’s medical record:

Last year he ran for reelection and had a particularly fatiguing campaign…in which a great deal of vilification was hurled at him…. The attack on him affected him and caused him much mental anguish. His symptoms increased more than ever from this time on. In the last few months there has been an increased amount of activity in the Senate…he felt that he would be unable to continue his present pace.

But back to work he went, the pressures on him only growing, his pace easing not at all, as increasingly the investigations seemed to cast a shadow on the White House. He refused to equivocate and people began taking notice as they had not before. In August, while speaking in the Senate, he was pressed by Senator Vandenberg to admit that the President was culpable. “In other words,” said Vandenberg, a leading Republican, “the Senator is now saying that the chief bottleneck which the defense program confronts is the lack of adequate organization and coordination in the administration of defense…. Who is responsible for that situation?”

“There is only one place where the responsibility can be put,” Truman answered.

“Where is that—the White House?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thank the Senator.”

With others on the committee, senators and staff investigators, he traveled the length of the country—mostly by plane. They would put down at a city or military base, go through their routine for a day or so, and then be off again, like a roadshow, everybody by now knowing just what to do. War plants were inspected, hearings held in local hotels. In some places they found nothing out of line. They were in Memphis and Dallas in late August, then on to San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Spokane. Bess was kept posted nearly every day, by letter or phone call, often by both, no matter how grueling his schedule. Some letters spoke candidly of what they were finding:

Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif.

Thursday, August 21, 1941

Dear Bess:

Well I spent yesterday at San Diego. The navy sent a big transport plane for us. We left the airport at 9:00 A.M., arrived at San Diego at 10:00, and Admiral Blakely took us in charge for the usual show around. Looked at marine barracks under construction and had lunch with the recruits. A Missouri boy from St. Louis waited on me, one from New York took care of Mead, and one from Washington, Wallgren.

Looked over the new marine base camp and then got another walk around a plane plant, the Consolidated—said to be the biggest of ’em all. The managers are all such liars you can’t tell anything about the facts. Each one says he’s having no trouble and everything is rosy but that the other fellow is in one awful fix. By questioning five or six of them separately I’ve got an inkling of the picture, and it’s rather discouraging in some particulars but good in others. We are turning out a very large number of planes and could turn out more if the navy and army boys could make up their minds just what they want.

Labor is a problem. The same brand of racketeer is getting his hand in as did in the camp construction program. Some of ’em should be in jail. Hold some hearings today and tomorrow, spend Saturday and Sunday in San Francisco, and open in Seattle Monday….

Kiss Margie, love to you,

Harry

Flying in and out of Washington’s new National Airport, he looked down on the tremendous gouge in the mud flats along the Virginia side of the Potomac, downstream from Arlington Cemetery. It was the site of a gigantic new five-sided headquarters for the military, the Pentagon, a larger office building than any in the world and a clear sign of the direction the country was taking.

From modest beginnings and in only a few months, the committee proved its value, producing both results and attention. By fall its appropriation was increased from $15,000 to $50,000, its membership enlarged by one more Democrat, Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, and two Republicans, Harold Burton of Ohio, who was to become one of the most dedicated members, and Homer Ferguson of Michigan, a former judge, who, like Brewster of Maine, was to be a particularly tenacious interrogator at hearings. The staff, too, was expanded. Eventually there would be fifteen investigators and as many clerks and stenographers.

Hearings were held in the committee’s headquarters on the fourth floor of the Senate Office Building, Room 449, or, in special cases, in the great marble Caucus Room on the third floor. Frequently business was also transacted in what was called the Dog House, a small room behind Truman’s office with a few worn leather chairs, refrigerator, whiskey, and walls covered with Civil War scenes and photographs and cartoons telling the chairman’s political life story.

At Truman’s insistence any member of the Senate was welcome to sit in and take part in the hearings. When presiding, he seemed invariably well prepared and in charge, yet he seldom dominated. Instead, he would go out of his way to let other senators hold the stage. No one could remember congressional hearings being handled with such straightforwardness and intelligence. As in his earlier railroad investigations, witnesses were shown every courtesy, given more than ample time to present their case. There was no browbeating of witnesses, no unseemly outbursts tolerated on the part of anybody. One reporter wrote of a “studious avoidance of dramatics, no hurling of insults or threats of personal violence that characterize so many other congressional hearings.” Yet Truman could be tough, persistent, in a way that took many observers by surprise. It was a side of the man that they had not known. Columnist Drew Pearson wrote that one of the most remarkable developments of the committee was its chairman. “Slightly built, bespectacled, a lover of Chopin and a shunner of the limelight, Truman is one of the last men in Congress who would be considered a hard-boiled prober. In manner and appearance he is anything but a crusader.”

Above all the chairman was eminently fair. Once, during testimony from one of the dominant figures in the American labor movement, the flamboyant, pugnacious head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, Senator Ball questioned whether the witness was to be taken at his word when he said workers were going hungry:

“Mr. Lewis, you are not seriously trying to tell the committee that any large number of workers in the United States don’t get enough to eat? That is demagoguery, pure and simple, and you know it.”

Lewis, sitting forward on the edge of his chair, a dark scowl across his massive face, responded angrily in a deep stentorian voice that filled the room:

“If you ask the question, I will answer it. But when you call me a demagogue before you give me a chance to reply, I hurl it back in your face, sir.”

Truman broke in. “Now, Mr. Lewis, we don’t stand for any sassy remarks marks to the members of this committee,” he said, “and your rights will be protected here just the same as those of everybody else. I don’t like that remark to a member of the committee.”

“Senator, did you object when the Senator called me a demagogue?” replied Lewis, a man of fierce pride.

“Yes,” Truman said, “it works both ways. I don’t think the Senator should have called you a demagogue.”

The documenting of waste and mismanagement in the construction of Army camps had been comparatively easy work, a way to give the committee credence in about the least time possible, which was why Truman had started with the camps. The larger work—more difficult, more time-consuming, more important, and much more risky politically—was the investigation of defense production, the gathering of facts, figures, specific detail, and no end of opinion on the building of ships and warplanes, on ordnance plants, automobile plants, labor unions, government contracts, the roles played by the giant corporations and small business, the stockpiling of vital materials. And what the committee turned up was extremely alarming: bad planning, sloppy administration, sloppy workmanship, cheating by labor and management, critical shortages everywhere.

There was too little aluminum, so vital for warplanes, too little copper, zinc, and rubber. Even after drastic cutbacks in production for civilian use, the annual output of aluminum was only about half the demand for building planes. One producer, Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America, had a near monopoly on the manufacture of the lightweight metal and kept claiming it could supply both domestic and defense needs, yet could not come even close. Production of magnesium was even more woefully behind, and the reason, when revealed, would cause a sensation. An arrangement had been made through an interlocking cartel, between Alcoa and the giant German firm of I. G. Farben. To safeguard its American market for aluminum, Alcoa had agreed to hold back on producing magnesium, also to sell what magnesium it owned to the Germans at a cut price, with the result that Germany had far more magnesium than the United States.

Standard Oil of New Jersey, through its agreements with I. G. Farben, had intentionally delayed the development of synthetic-rubber plants. “Standard Oil,” reported Truman,

had agreed with the German I. G. Farben Company that in return for Farben giving Standard Oil a monopoly in the oil industry, Standard Oil would give the Farben Company complete control of patents in the chemical field, including rubber. Thus when certain American rubber manufacturers made overtures to Standard Oil Company for licenses to produce synthetic rubber, they were either refused or offered licenses on very unfavorable terms…. Needless to say, I. G. Farben’s position was dictated by the German government.

There was no “unpatriotic motive” involved here, concluded the committee in its report. It was only “big business playing the game according to the rules,” with a heavy price “to be borne by the entire nation.”

The American government, too—specifically the Office of Production Management—had been negligent in seeing the need for a greatly increased output of copper, lead, and zinc. For his part, Truman worried that shortages of steel were the most serious of all.

Automobile manufacturers had been allowed to do as they wished, which was to keep turning out cars as usual in 1941, on the grounds, they said, that only 10 percent of their equipment could be used for war production anyway. Automobile production for the first eight months of 1941 actually exceeded production during the same months in 1940, and consumed quantities of strategic materials—some 18 percent of the nation’s available steel, 80 percent of available rubber. The aircraft program was dawdling because the Army and the Navy had left it largely to the manufacturers to decide what planes to build. “There is no planned or coordinated program for the production of aircraft,” Truman would report. The committee uncovered “negligence and willful misconduct” in the Navy Bureau of Ships. (When Admiral S. M. Robinson, Chief of the Bureau of Ships, said he believed the efficiency of private and Navy shipyards to be about the same, but told the committee that comparisons were difficult because of different bookkeeping systems, the committee declared that in a matter of such importance the Navy should take steps to ascertain the actual facts.) With private shipbuilders the Navy was found to be “extremely liberal.” A representative of the Todd Shipyards Corporation in testimony about one contract with the Navy said that if it weren’t for taxes the company could not have handled its profits with a steam shovel.

By late October the German Army had advanced to within seventy miles of Moscow and Roosevelt offered Stalin a billion dollars worth of supplies.

The root of most troubles and delays, the committee concluded, was the Office of Production Management, the President’s own ungainly creation, where there were two heads instead of one, William S. Knudsen, formerly of General Motors, and labor leader Sidney Hillman, founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Roosevelt wanted the power divided. He had no wish to create a so-called “production czar,” which, the committee decided, was exactly what was needed most, a strong man with clear authority. This was the conclusion of the committee’s first annual report being prepared in the final months of 1941. Truman in particular had been outraged to discover Hillman withholding a construction contract from a low bidder because of his fear of trouble from “irresponsible” elements in the American Federation of Labor. “First of all,” Truman told the Senate on October 29, “the United States does not fear trouble from any source…. If Mr. Hillman cannot, or will not, protect the interests of the United States, I am in favor of replacing him with someone who can and will.”

The record of the OPM, said the report, was not impressive. Its leadership was inept. “Its mistakes of commission have been legion; and its mistakes of omission have been even greater. It has all too often done nothing when it should have realized that problems cannot be avoided by refusing to admit that they exist.”

The committee had also decided it would be best for the country and for the defense effort to dispense as soon as possible with all dollar-a-year men, of whom there were more than 250 in the Office of Production Management. Such corporate executives in high official roles were too inclined to make decisions for the benefit of their corporations. “They have their own business at heart,” Truman remarked. The report called them lobbyists “in a very real sense,” because their presence inevitably meant favoritism, “human nature being what it is.” They should be paid government salaries in keeping with other government positions of comparable responsibility, concluded the committee, and required to disassociate themselves from any other employment or any payment from companies with defense contracts. Divided loyalties, like the divided command at the top of the Office of Production Management, were a bad idea.

On October 30, the American destroyer Reuben James was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Iceland, with a loss of 115 men. Talk of war had become commonplace in Washington, though no one seemed to be doing anything very specific about it. Writing in his diary on December 2, during a stop in the city, David Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, said it looked as if a war with Japan, not Germany, was only days off. Yet people seemed unconcerned. He wondered if the democratic system was capable of coping with the world as it was. On December 4, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox declared, “No matter what happens the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.”

Having no wish to embarrass the administration—and thereby harm the defense effort—Truman saw that the President received an advance copy of the committee’s findings, and in an eleventh-hour decision, before the report was released, Roosevelt disbanded the OPM and announced the establishment of an all-new War Production Board under a single head, Donald M. Nelson of Sears, Roebuck. Others had been pressing Roosevelt to make the change, including Secretary of War Stimson, but for the Truman Committee it was a signal victory. “We have fought to get you this job,” Truman would tell Nelson later. “We are going to fight to support you now in carrying it out.”

But by then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and it was Nelson’s task to mobilize for all-out war. By then even the likes of Burton K. Wheeler were saying that the only thing left to do was beat the hell out of them.

Truman had been in Missouri the first week in December, busy with political chores. The night of December 6, he checked into a hotel in Columbia, hoping to catch up on some greatly needed sleep. How he heard the news the next day and managed to get back to Washington in time for Roosevelt’s momentous address to Congress on December 8, he recounted a week later in a letter to Ethel Noland, probably because he had always seen her as the one in the family with the greatest feeling for history.

Dec. 14, 1941

Dear Ethel:

Well at last I am sitting at my desk, the office is empty for the first time since I returned. One reason is the doors are locked and it’s Sunday, I came down to clean off my desk and find out just how many important letters were covered up on it. Do you remember that picture with W. C. Fields as the efficiency filing expert. Well my desk is just like his was. Whenever the girls can’t find a letter in the files they are morally certain it’s lost on my desk and the pitiful part about it is sometimes it’s true.

Well there’s been a lot of happenings since I was calling on you on my daddy’s birthday [December 5]. I have been afraid it would come but not just the way it did. We’re always surprised of course even when the expected happens—if it’s war anyway. I left Saturday for Columbia to get a good night’s sleep over the weekend before Monday at Jeff City. In fact I was hoping for two. Went to bed at the Pennant Hotel outside of town about seven o’clock Saturday night and had breakfast Sunday at 8. Called the madam and went back to bed. The boy who drove me down left about noon and at three o’clock called me from Cross Timbers (I bet you never heard of it) and told me that the Japs had bombed Honolulu. The boy was a Deputy U.S. Marshal and he was on his way to Springfield. Well I phoned the St. Louis office of T.W.A. and told ’em I had to be in Washington the next morning and about that time Bess called and said the Sec. of the Senate had called to say there’d be a joint session Monday and that I should be there. Well I had no car and no driver so I called the little airport at Columbia right across the road from the hotel and the manager said he had a plane and would take me to St. Louis. We left at 4:50 and I was on the ground and in the station of the St. Louis Airport at 5:35. It took us just 40 minutes to fly 130 miles. Then my trouble began. I tried to go to Chicago and then tried Memphis and finally I think T.W.A. dumped somebody off and I got on the 11 P.M. plane for Pittsburgh. Sat up all night and listened to the radio, got to Pittsburgh at 3:30 where I met Senator Chavez of N. Mex who came from Chicago, Sen. Davis of Pa. who lives there and Curley Brooks, the great Republican Isolationist from Chicago. He’s a new Senator from Ill, Legionnaire, fat, curly haired, has a small synthetic blonde wife and is a most important Chicago Tribune Senator. He looked as if he’d swallowed a hot stove and that’s the way all those anti-preparedness boys looked the next day. It wasn’t because they’d been up all night getting there either.

I went home (we got here at 5:30 A.M.), found Bess up getting breakfast. My new secretary, Harry Vaughan, was at the airport with my car and I was at home by 6 o’clock. Went to bed and slept until ten and then came to the Senate. It was quite an occasion. Guess you heard it on the radio. Then on the 11th we had to accept another invitation from Germany and Italy. Goodness knows where it will end. I wish I was 30 and in command of a Battery. It would be a lot easier….

II

“Harry Truman was one of the liveliest, most vital Senators in my time,” wrote a veteran Senate employee, the liaison for the press, Richard Riedel, who had first come to work as a Senate page at the age of ten in 1918. Riedel had observed them all, from the days of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., and doubted that any had ever enjoyed public life as much as Truman, or took it so in stride. “An easygoing joviality emanated from him…[he had] an interest in everything and everyone….” But often at the hearings of his committee, Truman seemed to present a different face to the world. “When he got down to business, the twinkle in his eyes would be replaced by a look of concentration. At such times, at close range the thick lenses of his glasses gave his eyes a fearsome, eerie stare so stern that it gave the weird illusion that one was confronting an entirely different person.” At such times, said Riedel, he was grateful Senator Truman was his friend.

In the frenzied, confusing weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Under Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, had urged the President to do away with the committee, saying it would “impair our activity if we have to take time out to supply the Truman Committee all the information it desires.” But Roosevelt had no such wish, and as the work of the committee continued, the energy and effectiveness of its chairman drew increasing attention. The first annual report was presented to the Senate on January 15, 1942. In time would come 50 additional reports, as a consequence of extensive, careful research, and more than 400 hearings at which 1,798 witnesses appeared. Amazingly, all reports of the committee were to be unanimous. Asked how this could happen, Republican Owen Brewster said it was not hard to get men to agree when the facts were known.

Early 1942 was a dark time. Singapore fell to the Japanese, then Bataan, with the surrender of General Wainwright and some 75,000 American and Filipino troops, the largest surrender of an American fighting force since Appomattox. Leningrad was still under siege, after more than six months, and along the eastern seaboard of the United States, off shores long thought safe from Europe’s wars, German U-boats were sinking oil tankers almost at will—and “so close,” wrote Eric Sevareid, “that a chorus girl in a Miami penthouse could see men die in flaming oil.” Washington made ready for air raids. Bess Truman had blackout curtains on order for the Connecticut Avenue apartment. The senator took his World War I helmet to the office and at night would lie awake tossing and turning, “fighting the war.” In April, driving through North Carolina on committee business, he tried to think only of spring returning, “the return of Ceres from Pluto’s palace.” The dogwood and apple orchards were in bloom along the winding road, and at the hotel at Chapel Hill all was quiet and restful. Still he couldn’t sleep, fretting over the course of the war.

In a speech on the Senate floor that summer of 1942, he called for a second front in Europe to relieve the Russians—as a matter of clear military necessity. In a speech at home in Jackson County he said the war was only a tragic continuation of “the one we fought in 1917 and 1918.” The victors in that war, he argued, “had the opportunity to compel a peace that would protect us from war for many generations. But they missed the opportunity.” A “spirit of isolationism” had brought the worse calamity of the present conflict. It must never happen again.

Disclosures produced by his committee were shocking. Curtiss-Wright was discovered manufacturing faulty airplane engines for delivery to combat forces. One inspector for Curtiss-Wright, a man with two nephews in the Army Air Corps, broke down and wept as he told a committee investigator what was going on. “If I were the executive in charge of a plant of that sort, I would know what was going on,” Truman told an Air Corps officer who testified, “and I think it is plain negligence, and maybe worse than that…that they didn’t know. They should have known.” The officer agreed. “No doubt about it,” said Truman. The Air Corps had denied that there were problems. Curtiss-Wright launched an advertising campaign stressing the company’s contribution to winning the war. But the faulty engines were a reality, and as Truman surmised, more than negligence was involved. As an aftermath of the committee’s investigation one Air Corps general involved was sent to prison.

Questioning the cause of troubles with the B-26 bomber built by the Glenn Martin Company, the committee was informed by Martin himself that the wings were not wide enough. Truman asked why the wings weren’t fixed. Martin said plans were too far along and that besides he already had the contract. Truman said that if that was how Martin felt, then the committee would see the contract was ended. Martin said he would correct the size of the wings.

They saw a lot of the seamy side of the war effort, Truman once remarked, speaking for the committee. Yet for Truman the disclosures appeared to confirm many of his worst suspicions about big business in America. He was truly a Jeffersonian in spirit; William Jennings Bryan remained a political hero. The things Truman had said in the Senate in earlier years about the evils of big banks, big insurance companies, big corporations had been said in earnest. He had never really known any industrialists or heads of giant corporations, most of whom were Republicans. He had never counted such people among his personal or political friends.

Nor, at this stage, does he appear ever to have accepted the view that a certain amount of corporate stupidity and corruption was inevitable in an undertaking so massive and involving so many interests as the war effort. In fact, the American industrial powerhouse, America’s phenomenal productivity was what would turn the tide against Germany and Japan. It would prove the decisive factor in the war, and Truman was to give too little credit to the vast majority of patriotic business people and industrialists who were making this happen. At times, in what he wrote and said, he made it seem as though the committee and its investigators were the only ones doing their duty. He didn’t believe that, of course. Also, from what he and his investigators were finding, it is easy to understand why he might have felt as he did.

A classic case and one of the most memorable days of testimony concerned the United States Steel Corporation and its subsidiary, Carnegie-Illinois Steel. At issue was the quality of steel plate being produced for ships.

As frequently happened, the committee’s first hint of trouble came in letters from employees who felt it their patriotic duty to report what was going on. At first little was done. The volume of similar complaints and warnings from around the country had become too great to handle. Much of it was obviously crank mail and to follow every lead would have been impossible. But when a newly launched ship, a tanker called Schenectady built by Henry J. Kaiser, broke in two at Portland, Oregon, in January 1943, the question of steel plate became one of vital importance.

At the Irvin Works, the Carnegie-Illinois rolling mill at West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, investigators for the Truman Committee found that at least 5 percent of the plant’s production, or about 3,000 tons of steel per month, failed to meet Navy specifications, yet was being labeled and delivered as up to standard. The results of quality tests—chemical analysis conducted in the mill to determine the quantity of carbon and other elements in the steel—were simply altered (as were other tests for tensile strength) “to conform to what the customer expected to receive,” in the words of the chief specifications examiner, a man named Murray Stewart. If the chemical analysis of a “heat” of steel wasn’t known, he said, then they would just make one up for the record book.

Stewart was among the first to appear on the day of the hearing, March 23, 1943, and he provided some of the most damaging of all testimony, as well as a touch of unintended humor, when Hugh Fulton encouraged him to explain how exactly the system worked:

FULTON: In other words…you would make up a chemical analysis which you thought would fit what the steel should have been.

STEWART: That is right.

FULTON: And how would you deal with that in that particular record book?

STEWART: In order to keep our records so that we would know when it was an incorrect heat number, we would enter it in this book in pencil.

FULTON: How were the other entries made?

STEWART: They were made in ink.

FULTON: And did you, in addition to making them in pencil, put any prefix letter in front of them?

STEWART: It was a common practice to put an “F.”

FULTON: What did “F” mean?

STEWART: Fake.

FULTON: You told our investigator originally that it meant phone.

STEWART: That is right.

FULTON: But now under oath you desire to state it meant fake?

STEWART: That is correct. The investigator was a stranger to me and I was sort of pressed for something to say at the moment.

An assistant metallurgist, David B. Ireland, Jr., testified—apparently hoping to put operations at the Irvin mill in a better light—that he learned how to fake the tests at the Edgar Thomson Works, another giant Carnegie-Illinois mill near Pittsburgh. Indeed, he had become so proficient, said Ireland, that he could readily fool a Navy inspector, whenever one was on hand. To date only one tester had been caught cheating by a Navy inspector, Ireland continued, but there was an explanation for that: “He cheated more than he was supposed to cheat.”

Was the man fired, asked Senator Homer Ferguson. No, said Ireland, he was demoted. Was he demoted because he went too far, Chairman Truman asked a higher-ranking employee, chief metallurgist W. F. McGarrity.

“Yes, sir,” said McGarrity.

“Going a little too far, he was demoted,” repeated Truman. “He wasn’t fired, he was just demoted.”

“And through satisfactory work elsewhere he was brought back to a better paying job,” added McGarrity.

Three investigators from the committee had gone to the Irvin Works earlier in March, or roughly two months after the Schenectady incident. They had called first at the Carnegie-Illinois headquarters in Pittsburgh, where they were told by the president of the corporation, J. Lester Perry, that they could speak to no employee unless a company attorney were present. Nor would they be permitted inside the mill until he, Perry, put through a call to Senator Truman to see what this was all about, a move that infuriated Senator Truman and made him immediately suspicious that Perry was trying to hide something. When the investigators arrived at Irwin about noon they were kept waiting for half an hour, then invited to lunch at the company cafeteria. They did not want lunch, they said, they wanted to see the record book from the mill at once. But they were kept waiting another hour, and when the book was at last made available at two in the afternoon, they learned it had been taken apart the night before and distributed among several people who were “doing work” for the company attorney. Two hours had been required to put it back together again. How much had been removed or altered they had no way of knowing, wrote one of the investigators in his report to Chairman Truman.

“I don’t think that was exactly strong cooperation, Mr. Perry,” Truman said when Perry took his place at the witness table, after Stewart, Ireland, and McGarrity had all completed their testimony. “And I was also rather surprised…that you didn’t take immediate action to clean the plant and find why this procedure was followed. I want you to explain to the committee fully why that was.”

“Senator Truman, it is not my intention to explain this and to be controversial,” Perry answered smoothly.

“You can be as controversial as you like,” said Truman. “It is your privilege.”

He had never had any desire except to cooperate, Perry insisted. Perhaps he had not appreciated the full importance of the investigators’ visit, perhaps he should have done more. He had demonstrated goodwill, he thought. As he recalled, it was only late in the day when the seriousness of the situation became clear to him. “That afternoon, late, it appeared definitely that they wanted to make an investigation,” he said.

“We don’t send investigators to plants just for fun,” Truman snapped.

“I understand that now,” replied Perry.

Truman pressed him again on what action had been taken to straighten things out in the mill. Had anybody been fired? What corrections had been made? Trying first to evade the questions, Perry admitted that as yet nothing had been done. He needed time to get all the facts, “the fullest implications.” Truman found that unacceptable. If he had been president of the company, he said, he would have gotten to the bottom of the situation at once. “You had all this information as soon as our investigators had it.”

It was Perry’s position, as expressed in a prepared statement and in the course of testimony, that while management deplored such devious practices as had been disclosed by the committee’s investigators—practices that higher management had no part in—even the substandard plates supplied by the mill were “entirely suitable for their intended use.” If the Navy was not getting what it ordered exactly, what it was getting was good enough for the purpose. “The only explanation which can be given for the failure to carry out prescribed testing procedures is that a few individuals…grew lax under the pressure of heavy production….” He found the word “cheat” as used in other testimony unacceptable. He preferred “misrepresentation.”

Most important, concerning the Schenectady, he said that failure of steel plate in the ship had not been the cause of its breakup and even if that were the problem, the plate at the point where the break began was not a product of the Irvin Works.

Of the senators present, it was Ferguson and Brewster, the two Republicans, who bore down hardest on Perry, while Fulton or Truman would move in with a question or comment from time to time. Ferguson picked up quickly on the question of where the Schenectady plate had been made. It was not made at Irvin, Perry affirmed again. Then where, asked Ferguson. Homestead, admitted Perry.

“Didn’t you hear the witness testify here that he was taught how to cheat down at the Homestead Works?” Ferguson asked.

“Senator, this word ‘cheat’…”

“Have you a better one?”

Senator Brewster then read aloud from the report of an investigation conducted by the Bureau of Ships, stating quite plainly that “a very poor quality of steel” had been “most directly responsible” for the failure of the Schenectady. The plate was “of definitely inferior quality,” Brewster read on. It was so brittle it was more like cast iron than steel.

Had Perry read the report? He had read parts of it, he replied. Brewster, his anger becoming more apparent, wondered how Perry might feel if he had a son going overseas in a ship made of such steel.

Perry answered, “Why, Senator, I don’t for a moment condone poor steel, defective steel in ships or anywhere else that has to do with the war effort. Don’t worry about how I feel about the sons going over there.”

Truman interposed to explain that Senator Brewster had a son overseas in the war.

“If a customer asks you for a strength of 60,000 pounds, the breaking point on a test,” Ferguson said, “and you give him a product of 57,000 pounds, but you represent to him in figures that you have tested it and it did test 60,000 pounds, is that a misrepresentation of a material fact?”

PERRY: Yes, sir.

FERGUSON: You understand that was done up to five percent of the material furnished?

PERRY: That is the evidence here this morning.

FERGUSON: Do you say that that was not selling a product to the United States Government under false representations?

PERRY: If that was done, to that extent it would be.

FERGUSON: You heard the testimony. Is there any doubt in your mind that it was done?

PERRY: There is a doubt in my mind as to whether it was done in regard to material that was furnished to Government specification and testing where the Government made the inspection or supervised the inspection.

FERGUSON: Do you mean to say—do I understand you now to say that you don’t believe the testimony of your own men here under oath?

PERRY: Did they actually testify to that point that where inspection was made by the Navy…?

FULTON: And also to the Navy where they said it was possible to cheat with the Navy inspector standing right there.

PERRY: I have stated that where that was done it was a misrepresentation.

FERGUSON: Do I understand that you still insist that no inferior material was sold to the Government?

PERRY: I still insist that it was not inferior for the end use to which it was put….

FERGUSON: In other words, you are the man who is stating what you think the Government should buy, is that right?

PERRY: No, sir.

FERGUSON: Then, why don’t you live up to the Government specifications?

PERRY: We should.

FERGUSON: Why didn’t you?

PERRY: We will.

TRUMAN: I’ll say you will….

The hearing lasted five hours. When the company’s attorney, testifying after Perry, talked of his need to master the technicalities of the steel business before “justifying this situation,” Truman broke in to ask what knowledge of technicalities had to do with removing cheaters from jobs of critical responsibility. “I don’t know anything about the steel business,” Truman said, “and don’t expect to know about it, but I can tell you when the books have been tampered with and when there is a bunch of crookedness going on. That is plain enough for me to see.”

But the question of who ultimately had been responsible for what went on—of how high up the blame should go—was never really answered. No one above the chief metallurgist, McGarrity, would admit to any knowledge of rigging tests or falsifying records. Nor did the hearing disclose a substantial motive for passing off the inferior steel. Those in the mill involved in the deception had nothing to gain by their actions and everything to lose if found out. The one plausible explanation offered was that it was all in an effort to set an impressive production record.

In any event management promised to set everything straight, and in the final hour the president of U.S. Steel, Benjamin F. Fairless, promised Truman that whoever was responsible would “walk the plank.”

“You realize, Mr. Fairless,” said Senator Brewster, “how incredible it seems that subordinates in the company would risk their entire future without hope of reward of any character. That, of course, is what impresses the committee and makes it so amazing.”

Senator Ferguson was curious whether Mr. Fairless thought, from what he had heard during the day, that the operation of Carnegie-Illinois Steel was an example of good management. “I certainly do not,” said Fairless. “I consider it was very, very poor management.”

At the close of the hearing, asked by a reporter for his personal comment on what had been divulged during the day, Truman said he did not think that could be printed.

On the issue of the dollar-a-year men on the War Production Board, Truman stood fast, stressing with great feeling the essential injustice of the system, but giving in at last, much against his better judgment, because the production czar he had helped create, Donald Nelson, argued otherwise. Nelson wanted no change in the system, insisting it was the way to get maximum results from industry. He had to have people who understood how industry worked, he told the committee. Asked why such men should be allowed to retain their corporate ties and benefits, he said people with big salaries had big expenses—mortgages, insurance, and the like—and could not make the change to government pay without suffering hardship.

“I don’t think there should be any special class,” Truman responded. Only that morning he had received a letter from a man who had been earning $25,000 a year, a reserve officer who had been called up for duty. “He is going to get $140 a month, and he can’t draw his $25,000 while he is gone,” Truman said. “He is satisfied to do that because he wants to win the war, just as you do and just as I do, by every means possible, no matter what it costs him, because if he doesn’t win it his $25,000 a year won’t be worth a cent. I am laboring, and have been, under the delusion, maybe, that if the government had the power to take these young men away from their jobs and their outlook on life for the purpose of this emergency, the dollar-a-year men could face the same situation and face it adequately, and would be glad to do it.”

He was not opposed to the dollar-a-year men because they were businessmen—he wanted more businessmen in government, especially in the war effort—but he knew how “human” it was for a steel executive on loan to the war administration to hesitate in ordering any action that might injure the standing of his company or industry once the war was over. He had learned that certain high-ranking dollar-a-year men had initially delayed the construction of new furnaces when they were needed because of concern over what increased ingot capacity might do to their postwar profits.

But reluctantly he backed off, saying that if Nelson felt the system was what it took to win the war, then the committee should not stand in the way. In a letter to Nelson a few days later, he was more specific. The committee did not like having procurement matters entrusted to those who were such obvious hostages to fortune, he wrote.

However, the committee believes that the best interests of the procurement program require that it be administered by a single head who will be able to do things in his way and who will be judged by his accomplishments as a whole…. The committee will, therefore, support you even on matters in which it disagrees with you….

By pushing harder on the issue, he felt, the committee could run the risk of overreaching its power, to the point of dictating policy, like the intrusive Civil War committee.

In backing Nelson he was also standing by a fundamental conviction that control of the war effort must be kept in civilian hands. In just the first six months of 1942 military contracts added to the economy totaled $400 billion. He saw ambitious generals and admirals on all sides gaining influence over industry and agriculture and he worried what this could mean for the future. In the fall of 1942, on a broadcast for “The March of Time,” he called the issue of civilian control the foremost of the day and warned it could shape the whole political and economic structure of the country after the war. “The function of generals and admirals is to fight battles,” he said, “and to tell us what they need to fight battles with.”

General Brehon Somervell, wearing three stars now, was again called before the committee to explain an incredible project, called Canol, after “Canadian oil.” The scheme was to build a four-inch oil pipeline across 1,200 miles from Canada to Alaska, and it had been launched “on the nod” from Somervell, secretly, with little thought to the realities of terrain, climate, available materials, available manpower, or the views of oil experts, the Corps of Engineers, and the War Production Board. An item was added to the War Department budget of $25 million with no description except that it was for the construction of military facilities in Canada and Alaska.

The shroud of secrecy had been primarily to avoid interference from other civilian sides of government, and in particular the notoriously irascible Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior and head of the Petroleum Administration. Employees of the contractor, Stephen Bechtel, began calling Canol “the greatest project since the Panama Canal.” But then Ickes found out about it and went before the Truman Committee to say the whole project “grew entirely out of a one-page memorandum from General Somervell, who was anxious to conserve paper….” Ickes called the pipeline useless and the committee came to much the same conclusion, having heard more from Somervell’s chief adviser for the project, James H. Graham, a dollar-a-year man who, Ickes said, was “worth every penny of it.” Graham, the committee found, had no idea how long the pipeline was to be. He had made no estimate of the cost, nor did he believe anybody else had. “I don’t regard cost in time of war,” he told the committee more than once.

“The committee damns it up and down while the War Department is as usual scrambling desperately to save face instead of having the guts to admit a mistake frankly and go on from there,” wrote a new observer on the scene, a young reporter for the United Press named Allen Drury, on the day of Somervell’s appearance. “All the desperate assertions of an embarrassed incompetence have been hurried forth to justify the thing, but the committee is unimpressed.”

Somervell had paraded into the hearings flanked by four brigadier generals and several majors. At one point, as Drury happily recorded in his journal, Somervell asked for some water, handing his glass to a brigadier who handed it to a major who, finding no one of lesser rank available, filled the glass himself and returned it to the brigadier who returned it to the general.

The committee hammered away at Somervell for four and a half hours, with Hugh Fulton and Senator Harley Kilgore doing most of the questioning. The chairman listened quietly. But in winding up the day Truman read Somervell a letter he had received from the Navy Department—a letter, he explained, written in answer to his own question whether the Navy had ever been asked for its opinion on Canol, or requested to participate. According to the letter, a search of Navy files had turned up no communication indicating such an inquiry. No officers or officials of the Navy Department had ever been questioned orally about Canol.

Somervell said he never implied that he had asked the Navy. “It is not a Navy situation. Not any more than a bakery we might build….”

Truman suggested that very possibly it could have to do with the Navy, since ships burn a good deal of oil.

“Yes, sir,” replied Somervell, who now said the Chief of Naval Operations and others had “expressed themselves in favor of the project.”

“The Secretary of the Navy, however, has the other opinion,” said Truman. “The committee will stand adjourned.”

Worn down at day’s end, he would complain to Bess that the pressures on him had begun to tell again. She knew of his headaches and exhaustion and worried he might push himself to the point of collapse. Witnesses at the hearings got on his nerves far more than he let on, he told her. He talked of just going away somewhere and reading Shakespeare and Plutarch “over and over and over.”

Yet nothing about his public manner revealed any of this. He was brisk and cheerful as always. He radiated good health and youthful energy. In contrast to so many among the congressional brotherhood, the gray, double-chinned, food-stained veterans of Capitol Hill, he appeared abnormally fit and his good clothes, his one indulgence, were spotless. Though not a fancy dresser—he remained too much the midwesterner for that—he looked always, as Margaret said, as if he had just stepped from a bandbox. His suits were perfectly cleaned and pressed, his shirts immaculate. (He had had a time his first few years in Washington finding a dry cleaner who could do his clothes to his satisfaction.) He had dozens of suits—some old favorites custom-made by Ted Marks, others from Eddie Jacobson’s new store in Kansas City or from Garfinckel’s in Washington, mostly double-breasted, grays and blues, and cut to accentuate how trim he was. (He could still get into his old Army uniform, he liked to tell people.) Lately, too, he had begun wearing bow ties—a departure viewed by his wife and daughter with considerable disfavor—and there was always a fresh, perfectly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket showing five points, always the World War I service pin in his lapel. He looked crisp. He moved with a bounce, even in the heat of summer, his two-tone summer shoes clicking down the marble halls more rapidly than any. Richard Riedel, the young press liaison who prided himself in being able to get about the Capitol in double-quick time, remembered Truman’s good-natured approval of the pace he set. “One day in a typical kidding mood he [Truman] started in behind me and walked lock-step through the Lobby to the amusement of all who saw him.”

His vitality seemed greater than ever, in keeping with his new confidence. He had “arrived” in the Senate, as everybody knew, and it agreed with him. He was having a splendid time being Senator Harry Truman of the Truman Committee.

Yet he acquired no airs, for all this. He was as unpresuming, as accessible as always, despite the extraordinary new power he had and the urgent, wartime atmosphere of Washington. Self-importance was on display in the city in many quarters to a greater degree than ever in memory, but Truman seemed somehow unaffected. A reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described later how he had been sent by his editor to see the senator, who was reportedly back in town briefly after one of his committee forays and staying at the Jefferson Hotel on 16th Street:

I went up to the front desk and asked the room clerk for the number of Senator Truman’s room. He gave it to me. I went to a house phone and called the Senator’s room. The phone was answered not by a security guard, not by an aide, not even by a secretary. It was answered by Harry Truman. I identified myself, and he said sure, come on up. I knocked on his door, and the door was opened by Senator Truman. He was alone, in his shirt sleeves, with a book held closed on a finger. He put the book aside, offered me a chair, poured us each a bourbon highball, and sat back with a friendly smile. We talked, without interruption, for almost an hour. What we talked about, what I later wrote, I have no real recollection of. All I remember is that the book he was reading was Volume III of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. That the bourbon we drank was Old Crow. That he was completely relaxed and responsive. And that there was no one else around.

Nearly everything being said about him in the papers was complimentary, and the committee and its work now had the respect of the administration. “I am more surprised every day at the respect with which the special committee is regarded by people in high places,” he wrote to Bess, very pleased. “If I can just keep from making any real errors, we are on the way to really help win the war and to make the job more efficient and quicker. That means fewer of our young men killed and a chance for a more honorable settlement. So you must pray for me to go the right way.”

In the Senate, where he was always well liked, he had achieved a new stature, even among liberals who, until now, had regarded him as pleasant enough and conscientious, but bland. “The man from Missouri,” remembered Claude Pepper, “had dared to say ‘show me’ to the powerful military-industrial complex and he had caught many people in the act.”

He was notable too for so much that he was not. He was not florid or promiscuous. He made no pretense at being superior in any regard. He did not seem to need the limelight, flattery, or a following. He did not want to be the President.

To his pleasure, he was recognized now in restaurants and hotel lobbies, as he had never been before except in Missouri, and not always there. “Now you’ve got to help me more than ever so I won’t be a damn fool or stuffed shirt,” he told Bess.

Margaret, now in her late teens, had begun singing lessons and was doing splendidly, he thought. She was talking already of a singing career. Neither he nor Bess was a singer. Margaret never heard him even try to sing, which seemed odd for someone with such love for music. But he did nothing to discourage her, said only that she must first finish college.

He called her “Margie” or “Miss Skinny.” Alert and energetic, with a sunny disposition, she was one of the great satisfactions of his life.

They so clearly enjoyed one another’s company that it gave pleasure to others. “One time, one Christmas,” remembered a niece of Ethel Noland’s, who lived in the Noland house on North Delaware, “Margaret was with him and they came across for a little visit Christmas morning. And I don’t think I ever laughed any harder…. They just gave it back and forth…. They were as fun as can be. Repartee! He was so crazy about Margaret, just enjoyed being with her and talking with her and we sat there just entranced….”

With friends in Washington he could talk about her by the hour, as she knew.

You have a good mind, a beautiful physique and a possible successful future outlook—but that now is up to you [he wrote when she turned eighteen]. You are the mistress of your future. All your mother and dad can do is to look on, advise when asked and hope and wish you a happy one. There’ll be troubles and sorrow a plenty but there’ll also be happy days and hard work.

From a financial standpoint your father has not been a shining success but he has tried to leave you something that (as Mr. Shakespeare says) cannot be stolen—an honorable reputation and a good name. You must continue that heritage and see that it is not spoiled. You’re all we have and we both count on you.

Later, to Bess he would write, “Tell my baby she has a most beautiful voice-to keep it natural without any gimcracks, pronounce her words clearly and in English so they can be understood—and she’ll be a great singer.” She too must never become a damn fool or a stuffed shirt.

They remained an extremely close-knit family, their social schedule modest, their way of life private and quiet. At home in the small, simply furnished apartment on Connecticut, Truman’s corner of the living room included a chintz-covered armchair, a reading lamp, his phonograph, and his record collection. In a small, free-standing bookcase within arm’s reach was a leatherbound set of Plutarch’s Lives, a two-volume Andrew Jackson by Marquis James, all four volumes of Freeman’s Lee, the Bible, Stories of the Great Operas, a biography of John Nance Garner, and Don Quixote.

Bess, now in her fifties, looked plumper and more matronly by the year, and was enjoying Washington as she never had. The stepped-up pace of wartime agreed with her. He had put her on the office payroll, a not uncommon practice, but one he had criticized others for, most notably Tuck Milligan during his first Senate race. Her salary was $2,400. Truman worried about damaging publicity if ever this were known, but the extra income made a difference. How much real work she did would remain a matter of opinion among the staff, none of whom were as well paid. At one point he advised her privately to “only just drop in and do some signing” of letters. “It helps all concerned.” She was working also at the USO one day a week, and reportedly “reveled” in the excitement he was causing on the Hill.

In a letter from Independence during a visit in June of 1942, she told him how much better he was sounding on the radio. A speech explaining the rubber shortage had been broadcast nationwide. She thought it his best yet, and Ethel Noland agreed. His consonants had all been pronounced just right, Ethel said.

The day before their twenty-third wedding anniversary, he sent Bess twenty-three roses, then telephoned her that night and wrote a letter the next morning:

Washington, D.C.

June 28, 1942

Dear Bess:

Well this is the day. Lots of water has gone over the dam. There’ve been some terrible days and many more nice ones. When my store went flooey and cost my friends and Frank [Wallace] money, when Margie came, don’t think I ever spent such a day, although the pains were yours. And to name one more, when we thought Stark had won and when I lost actually for eastern judge. But the wins have far outweighed ’em. June 28, 1919, was the happiest day of my life, for I had looked forward to it for a lifetime nearly or so it seemed. When a man gets the right kind of wife, his career is made—and I got just that.

The greatest thing we have is a real young lady who hasn’t an equal anywhere. That’s all the excuse we need for living and not much else matters.

It was grand to say hello last night. I was so tired I could hardly sit up. Went to bed right away after playing Margie’s song record and the Minuet (in G) and Chopin waltzes. It’s pretty lonesome around here without you….

Kiss Margie, lots and lots of love and happy returns,

Harry

In November 1942, after the American landing in North Africa, he was praised in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a way that would have been inconceivable a few years before. Harry Truman, wrote Marquis Childs, had become “one of the most useful and at the same time one of the most forthright and fearless of the ninety-six” in the Senate. In a book published that same fall, a brilliant portrait of Washington going to war called I Write from Washington, Childs also contrasted the appalling revelations of the Truman Committee to the kind of false picture presented by the Office of Facts and Figures, a new propaganda agency.

Truman and his committee were now known nationwide, observed the Washington Star. So great was their reputation, said BusinessWeek, that “often a threat to ‘take everything to the Truman Committee’ is sufficient to force a cure of abuses.” The whole country was greatly indebted to Senator Truman and his colleagues, wrote The Nation.

Arthur Krock of The New York Times so admired the senator’s “objectivity at the total expense of partisanship” in his running of the committee that he invited a select few of his fellow journalists to lunch with Senator Truman at the renowned Metropolitan Club and wrote later of the “excellent impression” he made.

By 1943 the committee had produced twenty-one reports covering a wide range of subjects—gasoline rationing, lumber, farm machinery, the loss of American shipping to U-boats. The week of March 8, 1943, “Investigator Truman” was on the cover of Time. In many ways, said Time, the Truman Committee was among the outstanding successes of the entire war effort. It was the “watchdog, spotlight, conscience and spark plug to the economic war-behind-the-lines,” and a heartening sign that even in wartime a democracy could keep an eye on itself. Hardly less remarkable, said the magazine, was the transformation of Harry Truman, from Pendergast errand boy to able, energetic committee chairman just when he was needed:

For a Congressional committee to be considered the first line of defense—especially in a nation which does not tend to admire its representatives, in Congress assembled—is encouraging to believers in democracy. So is the sudden emergence of Harry Truman, whose presence in the Senate is a queer accident of democracy….

Truman himself, wrote Time, was “scrupulously honest…. His only vices are small-stakes poker, an occasional drink of bourbon.” (“WHAT DO THEY MEAN AN OCCASIONAL DRINK OF BOURBON?” Lewis Schwellenbach cabled from Spokane.)

In a poll of Washington correspondents conducted by Look magazine, Senator Truman would be named one of the ten men in Washington whose services had been the most important to the war effort. Further, he was the only one on the list from either branch of Congress.

On April 14, 1943, putting aside his committee work, Truman flew to Chicago to champion a cause that had little to do with the war effort and that seemed a bit surprising for a midwestern senator, a Baptist, a Mason, and proud member of the American Legion to involve himself with. He spoke at a huge rally called to urge help for the doomed Jews of Europe. Chicago Stadium was packed, the crowd estimated at twenty-five thousand. The chairman was a prominent Roman Catholic, Federal Judge William J. Campbell. The keynote speaker was Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York, head of the American Jewish Congress.

The war in which he and his comrades fought twenty-three years earlier, said Senator Truman in his speech, had been waged “not only that nations might be free but also that the people who make up those nations might be free.” Now that freedom had been trampled to dust under the “iron heel of the barbarian.” The Jews of Europe, through the edict of “a mad Hitler,” were being “herded like animals” into concentration camps. It was time something was done about it.

In private, Truman was a man who still, out of old habits of the mouth, could use a word like “kike,” or, in a letter to his wife, dismiss Miami as nothing but “hotels, filling stations, Hebrews, and cabins.” But he spoke now from the heart, and with passing reference to Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” made an implied criticism of the President for doing too little to help the Jews. Truman was not among those who refused to believe the Germans capable of such atrocities as were being reported from Europe.

Merely talking about the Four Freedoms is not enough. This is the time for action. No one can any longer doubt the horrible intentions of the Nazi beasts. We know that they plan the systematic slaughter throughout all of Europe, not only of the Jews but of vast numbers of other innocent peoples.

Now was the time for fighting, he continued, but no less important was planning for the day when the war would end. “Today—not tomorrow—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and a place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers.” Free lands must be opened to them, he said.

Their present oppressors must know that they will be held directly accountable for their bloody deeds. To do all this, we must draw deeply on our traditions of aid to the oppressed, and on our great national generosity. This is not a Jewish problem, it is an American problem—and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably.

It was a remarkable speech, one of the strongest he ever made. How very important it was that he felt as he did, neither he nor any of his audience could possibly yet know.

With other senators on the committee—Hatch, Ball, Harold Burton—Truman was giving more and more thought to problems of the postwar world. And though he played no direct part in the drafting of a Senate resolution for the establishment of a postwar international organization, a United Nations—a resolution sponsored by Senators Ball, Burton, Hatch, and Lister Hill, and hence known as B^2H^2—Truman was the acknowledged guiding spirit. The United States could, “not possibly avoid the assumption of world leadership after this war,” he was quoted in The New York Times. And with Republican Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, who had also fought in World War I, Truman set out on a Midwest speaking tour in the summer of 1943 to spread the internationalist word under the sponsorship of the United Nations Association. He kept hammering at the same themes over and over across Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. “History has bestowed on us a solemn responsibility…. We failed before to give a genuine peace—we dare not fail this time…. We must not repeat the blunders of the past.”

Not all the Truman Committee’s efforts were successful. The Canol Project went on and wound up costing $134 million, all money that need never have been spent, and more serious even than the financial waste was the misuse of vitally needed manpower and materials. (At one point 4,000 troops and 12,000 civilians were involved.) Corporations and government agencies found to be bungling things or committing outright fraud, like Carnegie-Illinois Steel, were frequently let off the hook to keep production rolling. “We want aluminum, not excuses,” Truman said after the committee’s tangle with Alcoa.

Yet overall the committee’s performance was outstanding. It would be called the most successful congressional investigative effort in American history. Later estimates were that the Truman Committee saved the country as much as $15 billion. This was almost certainly an exaggeration—no exact figure is possible—but the sum was enormous and unprecedented, and whatever the amount, it was only part of the service rendered. The most important “power” of the committee was its deterrent effect. Fear of investigation or public exposure by the committee was enough in itself to cause countless people in industry, government, and the military to do their jobs right, thereby, in the long run, saving thousands of lives.

It was not just that the production of defective airplane engines or low-grade steel had been exposed; the committee also made positive contributions to the production of improved military equipment. The most notable—and one that saved many lives—was the famous, hinge-prowed Higgins landing craft used for amphibious assault, which was built and ordered by the Navy’s Bureau of Ships only after heavy prodding from the committee. With the new Higgins craft troops could be landed on a variety of shallow beaches, rather than just established harbors. It increased mobility for the offense, made obsolete much of the old coastal defenses. Yet until the committee looked at the subject with a fresh eye, Navy bureaucrats had been trying to force the adoption of a plainly inferior design.

The committee was also a continuing source of information about the war effort for the whole country. In its report on the loss to U-boats, for example, the committee said 12 million tons of American shipping were destroyed in 1942, an alarming figure. This was 1 million tons more than all the nation’s shipyards were then producing. The Navy immediately denied the validity of the report. But when Secretary of the Navy Knox appeared before the committee in executive session, he admitted the committee was telling the truth.

Unquestionably, the relentless “watchdog” role, the attention to detail during the hearings, the quality as well as the quantity of the reports issued, all greatly increased public confidence in how the war was being run. Further, anyone called before the committee could count on a fair hearing. The chairman would have it no other way.

From what he had observed of Chairman Truman during the day of General Somervell’s testimony, Allen Drury of United Press recorded: “He seems to be a generally good man, probably deserving of his reputation.” But after watching several more sessions, including one in which Truman went out of his way to keep some of the other senators from browbeating a witness, Drury could hardly say enough for the head of the committee:

April 12, 1945: Harry S. Truman takes the oath of office from Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone in the Cabinet Room at the White House.

Expressions of grief, as well as confidence in Harry Truman, fill the front page of the Independence Examiner.

James F. Byrnes (left) and Henry A. Wallace, ardent candidates for the vice-presidential nomination only the summer before, wait with Truman for Roosevelt’s funeral train at Washington’s Union Station. Below: The new President of the United States at his desk.

July 1945: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Truman, and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin, “The Big Three,” meet at Potsdam, Germany.

Conference table, Cecilienhof Palace.

Truman in Berlin with Generals Eisenhower and Patton. Eisenhower was high on the new President’s list of favorite generals; not so Patton.

Above: Truman’s headquarters during the Potsdam Conference was No. 2 Kaiserstrasse, the “nightmare” house where the decision on the atomic bomb was made. Below: Truman’s desk in the second-floor study.

Above: Truman’s order, handwritten in pencil to Secretary of War Stimson, to use the atomic bomb on Japan. Below: At his desk in the Oval Office, 7:00 P.M., August 14, 1945, Truman announces the surrender of Japan.

May 25, 1946: As he calls on Congress for the power to draft striking rail workers into the Army and thus break a nationwide shutdown, Truman is handed a note saying the strike has ended. Left: He and the First Lady had hosted a reception for wounded veterans the day before, just as worries over the rail strike were at their worst. The postwar burdens of his office bore heavily on Truman (opposite). But he had discovered a retreat away from Washington, the naval base at Key West, Florida, and aide Clark Clifford (shown below with Truman at Key West) had emerged as a bright new star on the White House staff.

Two who helped turn the tide in 1947: Left: Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg shaking hands on March 12, as Truman is about to ask Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey—the speech that introduced the Truman Doctrine; and (opposite) Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the “great one,” as Truman called him, who in a commencement speech at Harvard on June 5 proposed what came to be known as the Marshall Plan.

Eddie Jacobson, a behind-the-scenes key figure in the decision to recognize Israel, talks with his old friend and former business partner.

Chaim Weitzmann, the new president of Israel, presents Truman with the Torah scrolls during a first official call at the White House.

Opposite: In the first address ever made by a President to the NAACP, Truman speaks from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of ten thousand, June 29, 1947.

America’s best-known walker steps out in a 35th Division Reunion parade in Kansas City.

Past 2:00 A.M., July 15, 1948, his hands chopping the air, Truman tells cheering convention delegates at Philadelphia, “Senator Barkley and I will win this election…arid don’t you forget that!” His odyssey began in September. Below: From the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan at Richmond, Indiana, Truman makes one of hundreds of “whistle-stop” speeches.

After Stalin clamped a blockade on Berlin on June 24 (the day Dewey was nominated), Truman launched the Berlin Airlift. Tensions over Berlin continued for months.

Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey and his wife. According to the press, only a miracle or a series of unimaginable Republican blunders could save Truman from defeat.

In one of the most memorable photographs in the history of American politics, the “sure loser” holds aloft a premature Chicago Tribune headline. Heading east after the election, Truman’s train had stopped at St. Louis where he was handed a copy of the paper. Below: Part of the throng that welcomed Truman back to Washington. Some 750,000 people filled the streets in the largest outpouring for a President that the capital had ever seen.

There are a number of times, when it is quite easy to find oneself thanking whatever powers there be that the country has Harry Truman in the Senate. He is an excellent man, a fine Senator and sound American. The debt the public owes him is great indeed. And Boss Pendergast put him in. Politics is funny business….

III

For quite some time staff investigators had been picking up puzzling hints of a secret enterprise larger even than the Canol Project, odd bits and pieces of information indicating huge, unexplained expenditures for something identified only as the Manhattan Project. On June 17, 1943, Truman telephoned Secretary of War Stimson. Their conversation was brief:

STIMSON: Now that’s a matter which I know all about personally, and I am the only one of the group of two or three men in the whole world who know about it.

TRUMAN: I see.

STIMSON: It’s part of a very important secret development.

TRUMAN: Well, all right then—

STIMSON: And I—

TRUMAN: I herewith see the situation, Mr. Secretary, and you won’t have to say another word to me. Whenever you say that to me that’s all I want to hear.

STIMSON: All right…

TRUMAN: You assure that this is for a specific purpose and you think it’s all right. That’s all I need to know.

STIMSON: Not only for a specific purpose, but a unique purpose.

TRUMAN: All right, then.

STIMSON: Thank you very much,

Apparently, however, more information kept coming to Truman in one way or other, and by July he had been told enough to know the essential nature of the “very important secret development.” Incredibly, he even put it in a letter to Lewis Schwellenbach, who had since left the Senate to become a federal district judge in Spokane. Schwellenbach had been concerned over sudden, enormous land condemnations for the DuPont Company along the Columbia River near a desolate railroad town called Hanford. Nearly half a million acres were involved and he had written to Truman to inquire about it. On July 15, 1943, Truman wrote to say he shouldn’t worry.

“I know something about that tremendous real estate deal,” he said, “and I have been informed that it is for the construction of a plant to make a terrific explosion for a secret weapon that will be a wonder.” He added, “I hope it works.”

This was a terrible breach of security on Truman’s part, an astonishing lapse of simple good judgment—to have passed on such information in so offhand a fashion in an ordinary letter sent through the mail. It was exactly the sort of “insider” talk, one member of the senatorial “club” to another, that gave generals and admirals nightmares and little desire ever to tell politicians anything more than necessary. Truman had not bothered even to write in private, but dictated the letter to Mildred Dryden, which means that as of then she too was aware of the making of “a terrific explosion.”

But apparently no one ever found out about the letter. Neither Schwellenbach nor Dryden said a word more on the subject, as far as is known.

Curiosity and concern over the DuPont operations at Hanford did not end there. Senator Elbert Thomas of Oklahoma wanted the situation investigated. He, too, apparently had been hearing stories. A staff man on the Truman Committee informed the chairman confidentially that complaints of waste and inefficiency at Hanford had become “chronic,” and added, “In my humble opinion, I believe that this is another ‘Canol,’ wherein the guise of secrecy is being resorted to by the War Department to cover what may be another shocking example when the lid is finally taken off.”

Truman felt pressured to know more, his agreement with Stimson notwithstanding.

On November 30, 1943, he informed Senator Thomas, “I have sent an investigator to look into it, and I hope we can find out what is wrong.”

A few weeks afterward, Fred Canfil walked into a Western Union office in Walla Walla, Washington, and sent the following telegram, collect to Senator Truman. It must have made interesting reading to whoever put it on the wire:

COLONEL MATHIAS, COMMANDING OFFICER DUPONT PLANT, TOLD ME THAT YOU AND THE SECRETARY OF WAR HAD AN UNDERSTANDING THAT NONE OF YOUR COMMITTEE WOULD COME INTO THE PLANT. THROUGH ANOTHER AGENCY I FOUND THAT WITHIN THE LAST 10 DAYS A CONFIDENTIAL LETTER WAS RECEIVED FROM THE WAR DEPARTMENT…TO ARMY OFFICERS AND TO HIGH CIVILIAN ENGINEERS…. TO THE EFFECT THAT THESE PEOPLE WERE TO SEE THAT NO SENATOR OR ANYONE CONNECTED WITH THE SENATE WAS TO BE GIVEN ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROJECT.

Canfil, who may not have known as much as Truman about the purpose of the plant, was only doing his duty. Truman thought him overly efficient. “Whenever he finds out that I want something,” he once said of Canfil, “he never stops until it is done….”

But after the wire from Walla Walla, committee interest in the Manhattan Project cooled. The understanding with Stimson was honored again. Nor is there anything in the record to suggest that Truman ever heard of separating plutonium from U-238 (the work going on at Hanford) or had any idea how “the terrific explosion” was to be made.

Only a few months later, Stimson, General Marshall, and Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, drove to the Capitol for a private meeting in Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office. Present besides Rayburn were the House majority and minority leaders, John McCormack and Joe Martin. It was then, in February 1944, that Stimson and Marshall revealed “the greatest secret of the war” for the first and only time on the Hill. As Joe Martin wrote years later:

The United States was engaged in a crash program to develop the atomic bomb before the Germans perfected one. Marshall described the design of the bomb in some technical detail. Stimson said that if the Germans got this weapon first, they might win the war overnight. They told us that they would need an additional $1,600,000,000 to manufacture the bomb. Because of an overriding necessity for secrecy, they made the unique request that the money be provided without a trace of evidence to show how it was spent.

The three legislators agreed to do what was necessary. Senator Truman was told nothing.

Yet according to Stimson’s diary, the chairman of the investigating committee was soon after him once more. Truman was now asking that a member of the committee staff, General Frank Lowe, be taken into Stimson’s confidence about the Hanford Works. Stimson by now was extremely annoyed with Senator Truman. Stimson thought he had an agreement. He told Truman no, a response Truman did not take lightly. “He threatened me with dire consequences. I told him I had to do just what I did,” said Stimson in his diary, adding, “Truman is a nuisance and a pretty untrustworthy man. He talks smoothly but he acts meanly.” Under no circumstances was Senator Truman to be told anything more.

8

Numbered Days

I hardly know Truman.

—FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, JULY 1944

I

It was in early summer of 1943, one year in advance of the Democratic National Convention, that Senator Truman recorded on paper for the first time that in some circles he was being talked of as a candidate for Vice President, assuming the President were to run for a fourth term. He had been invited to Sunday lunch at the Washington home of Senator Joe Guffey, a staunch New Dealer who took him out into the garden to ask “very confidentially” what he thought of Vice President Henry Wallace. Truman had smiled and said Wallace was the best Secretary of Agriculture the country ever had. Guffey, laughing, said that was what he thought, too. “Then he wanted to know if I would help out the ticket if it became necessary by accepting the nomination for Vice President,” Truman recorded. “I told him in words of one syllable that I would not….”

And though the idea was talked about with increasing frequency thereafter, Truman, when asked his opinion, always gave the same answer. He wanted to stay in the Senate.

Moreover, he believed in being realistic. Franklin Roosevelt had shown no sign of dissatisfaction with the Vice President, nor any inclination to abandon him. And even if Roosevelt were to change his mind, there were a number of others—Jimmy Byrnes and Alben Barkley, to name the two most obvious possibilities—who were better known, more experienced, and who would leap to the opportunity. Jimmy Byrnes, a small, tidy, vivid man whom Truman greatly admired, was a southerner, a lapsed Catholic, and sixty-four years old, all of which could count against him. But he had done virtually everything there was to do in government, his experience ranging across all three branches, beginning with seven terms in the House before going to the Senate. Named to the Supreme Court in 1941, Byrnes had resigned after only one term to become Roosevelt’s War Mobilization Director, with an office in the East Wing of the White House. Popularly referred to as “Assistant President,” he was the consummate “insider” whose political judgment, whose ability to funnel money where needed in the party (such as to Senator Truman in 1940) were thought second to none. Roosevelt relied heavily on him and liked him. By contrast to such a man as Byrnes, Truman was small potatoes, as he well knew, and no closer to Roosevelt now than he had ever been.

In fact, lately, a distinct chill had been felt at the White House concerning Truman, ever since publication in American Magazine of a ghost-written article about the findings of the committee that Truman had allowed to be published under his name without bothering to read it very carefully. Too late had he discovered how critical it was of the administration’s handling of the war effort. (“Leadership is what we Americans are crying for,” the article said. “We are fighting mad, and ready to tackle any job and to make any sacrifice…. All we ask is that we be intelligently and resolutely led.”) He was certain that the President didn’t like him, Truman told friends in the Senate.

Still the vice-presidential speculation continued, and with Truman’s name spoken often, for the reason that certain influential figures in the Democratic Party had joined in a pact to keep Henry Wallace off the ticket.

They were only a handful, only a half dozen or so to begin with, but they were among the most powerful men in the party, and they had taken it upon themselves to talk down Wallace at every opportunity and begin organizing wider opposition to him. They included the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Frank Walker, who had replaced Jim Farley as Postmaster General; Ed Pauley, a wealthy California oilman who was treasurer of the national committee; George E. Allen, a jovial man-about-Washington, lobbyist, and secretary of the national committee; and Robert E. Hannegan, Truman’s last-minute savior in the 1940 campaign, who had since advanced to Commissioner of Internal Revenue and was now not only a great favorite of the President’s but in line to replace Walker as national chairman. General Edwin “Pa” Watson, appointments secretary at the White House, had also agreed to clear the way whenever possible for anti-Wallace Democrats to see the President. Watson, it was hoped, could serve as counterbalance to Mrs. Roosevelt, a known champion of the Vice President.

But the key man in the “conspiracy” was Edward Joseph Flynn of the Bronx, who, since the downfall of Tom Pendergast, was considered the most powerful political boss in the country and who in looks and manner bore little resemblance to the usual picture of a successful Irish politician. At fifty-two, Flynn was tall and handsome, with thinning gray hair and gray eyes, beautifully dressed, well educated, an ardent gardener, a student of history. Most importantly, he was a devoted friend of Franklin Roosevelt and his influence on Roosevelt on political matters exceeded that of anyone inside or out of the administration. It was Ed Flynn who ran the President’s successful bid for a third term in 1940, and it was Ed Flynn now, more than any of the others, who saw defeat in November unless something was done about the Vice President. For Henry Wallace was not their idea of a politician.

Henry Wallace was one of the most serious-minded, fascinating figures in national public life, a plant geneticist by profession who had done important work in the development of hybrid corn and whose Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company was a multimillion-dollar enterprise. He was an author, lecturer, social thinker, a firm advocate for civil rights and thorough New Dealer with a large, devoted following. With the exception of Franklin Roosevelt, he was the most popular Democrat in the country. Those who loved him saw him as one of the rare men of ideas in politics and the prophet of a truly democratic America. But he was also an easy man to make fun of and to these tough party professionals, Wallace seemed to have his head in the clouds. They had never wanted him for Vice President. He had been forced upon them in 1940, when Roosevelt threatened not to run again unless he could have Wallace as his running mate. Wallace was too intellectual, a mystic who spoke Russian and played with a boomerang and reputedly consulted with the spirit of a dead Sioux Indian chief. As Vice President he seemed pathetically out of place and painfully lacking in political talent, or even a serious interest in politics. When not presiding over the Senate he would often shut himself in his office and study Spanish. He was too remote, too controversial, too liberal—much too liberal, which was the main charge against him.

Of the group only Ed Flynn appears to have personally admired Wallace and his ideas, but as the political writer Richard Rovere observed of Flynn, he considered candidates only as good as their chances of winning.

None of this would have mattered greatly had the President said Wallace was again his choice. But Roosevelt preferred to let things slide. His mind was on the war. He was also just as happy to keep everyone guessing as long as possible.

The first meeting with Roosevelt to discuss the “advisability” of ditching Wallace took place at the White House in January 1944, six months in advance of the national convention, and Truman’s name figured prominently in a discussion of alternative choices that included Byrnes, Barkley, Sam Rayburn, Ambassador John G. Winant, Senator Sherman Minton, and Justice William O. Douglas, who had replaced the late Louis D. Brandeis on the Supreme Court. It was Hannegan who had the most to say about Truman, but Hannegan appeared equally enthusiastic about Byrnes, and as a whole the group was more against Wallace than for any one possible replacement.

Roosevelt declined to give a clear sign of what he wanted. As the historian James MacGregor Burns, then a member of the White House staff, later wrote, Roosevelt never pursued a more Byzantine course than in his handling of this question.

Truman, who was party to none of the discussions, thought Sam Rayburn would be the best nominee and said so publicly.

By spring Jimmy Byrnes looked like the clear favorite at the White House, though Wallace was leading in the polls. Harry Hopkins, the only one closer to Roosevelt than Byrnes, made a point of telling Byrnes that Roosevelt very much hoped he would be on the ticket. (Flying home from the Teheran Conference, looking out at the stars, Hopkins had asked the President who he thought would be the best man to take over his duties if something happened to the plane and it went down. “Jimmy Byrnes,” Roosevelt said without hesitation.) When Byrnes appeared reluctant to try for the job, others began putting pressure on him.

For by then there was concern over more than just losing votes in November. The President’s declining health could no longer be ignored, though in wartime nothing on the matter could be said publicly. After a bout of so-called “walking pneumonia” in April, Roosevelt, with much wartime secrecy, went to Bernard Baruch’s estate in South Carolina for what was supposed to have been a two-week rest but that stretched to a month. Seeing the President after his return to the White House, Ed Flynn was so alarmed by his appearance that he urged Mrs. Roosevelt to use her influence to keep him from running again. “I felt,” Flynn later said, “that he would never survive his term.” Ed Pauley would say that his own determination to unseat Wallace came strictly from the conviction that Wallace was “not a fit man to be President…and by my belief, on the basis of continuing observation, that President Roosevelt would not live much longer.” George Allen, remembering these critical months just before the 1944 convention, wrote that every one of their group “realized that the man nominated to run with Roosevelt would in all probability be the next President….”

The worry aroused by the President’s appearance was more than justified. His condition was worse than all but very few were aware of. Secretly, he was under the constant supervision of a cardiologist, who after a thorough examination in March reported that given proper care he might live a year.

In May, Roosevelt sent Henry Wallace on a mission to China, which many took as a sign that Wallace was finished. Then in early June, just after news of the Allied landings at Normandy, and with only a month to go before the convention, Hannegan dropped in on Byrnes at the White House, where, for several hours, he tried to convince Byrnes to become a candidate for Vice President. The President himself, Hannegan said, had told him Byrnes was the man he had really wanted as his running mate in 1940 and that he would rather have Byrnes on the ticket this time than anybody. Later, Pa Watson telephoned Byrnes to confirm everything Hannegan had said.

On June 27, Hannegan took things a step further. He told Roosevelt that Wallace had to come off the ticket. All he had to do, Hannegan said to the President, was to agree to Jimmy Byrnes and they could “sail through” the convention and the election.

“That suits me fine,” Roosevelt responded. “He was my candidate for Vice-President four years ago [at the 1940 convention], but religion got messed up in it.”

“That won’t matter a damn bit,” Hannegan answered. “I am a Catholic and I can talk on that subject….”

While Truman had been a great backer of Hannegan, ever since the 1940 Senate race, it was Byrnes, with his influence with Roosevelt, who had had the most say in making Hannegan Commissioner of Internal Revenue and now the new chairman of the Democratic Party.

Roosevelt asked Byrnes to go with him to Shangri-la, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, to talk campaign strategy for a few days, after which, wrote Byrnes, “I did conclude that he was sincere in wanting me for his running mate….”

Yet at the time, at the end of a long day, Byrnes also remarked to one of his aides, “Now, partner, let’s not get too excited on this vice-president business. I know that man [FDR] more than anybody else.”

Asked by two or three of his staff who were gathered about his desk what he thought of Harry Truman, Roosevelt said he didn’t know much about him. But Henry J. Kaiser, the famous shipbuilder, he said, was somebody else “we have got up our sleeve.”

Having completed a cross-country survey at Roosevelt’s request, Ed Flynn told him that opposition to Wallace was greater even than anyone supposed. Both Flynn and Roosevelt knew the election in the fall would be close, that Roosevelt was by no means a certain winner. Wallace on the ticket, Flynn warned, could mean the loss of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California, which was undoubtedly an exaggeration. The problem was to find someone who would hurt Roosevelt’s chances least. So together, according to Flynn’s subsequent account, the two of them ran down the list, weighing the negative sides of all the other candidates.

Byrnes was the strongest choice, Flynn agreed, but Byrnes, who had been raised a Catholic, had left the Church when he married, to become an Episcopalian, and in Flynn’s view the Catholics “wouldn’t stand for that.” Organized labor had no enthusiasm for Byrnes since he had opposed sit-down strikes in wartime. But far more serious to Flynn was Byrnes’s southern background and recorded positions on racial issues. This was the crucial flaw. In 1938, Byrnes had been in the forefront of those southern senators fighting against a proposed federal anti-lynching law, and in a speech on the Senate floor he had turned much of his fire on Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “The Negro has not only come into the Democratic Party,” Byrnes had said, “but the Negro has come into control of the Democratic Party.” Then, pointing to the gallery where White was sitting, Byrnes exclaimed, “If Walter White…should consent to have this bill laid aside, its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard.”

When asked who he thought should run with Roosevelt, Byrnes usually mentioned Truman, Rayburn, and Henry J. Kaiser.

Sam Rayburn was a good man, Flynn and Roosevelt agreed, but Rayburn was from Texas, another southerner, and so “couldn’t be considered.” When they went through the list of the entire Senate, only one fitted the picture, Harry Truman. As Flynn wrote:

His record as head of the Senate Committee…was excellent, his labor votes in the Senate were good; on the other hand he seemed to represent to some degree the conservatives in the party, he came from a border state, and he had never made any “racial” remarks. He just dropped into the slot.

Flynn left the White House convinced he had an agreement, that Roosevelt saw Truman as the one who would do the ticket the least harm. This was not exactly a rousing endorsement for the Senator from Missouri, but it was what Flynn had wanted to hear, which is probably the main reason Roosevelt, given his manner of operation, sent him on his way with that impression.

About this same time, Roosevelt asked a favor of Mrs. Anna Rosenberg, a member of the War Mobilization Advisory Board, whose office, like that of Byrnes, was in the East Wing. Mrs. Rosenberg had become a favorite of the President’s. A highly attractive woman, she dressed smartly, wore expensive perfume, and lent an air of femininity to the White House that he greatly welcomed. In contrast to Mrs. Roosevelt, she also appreciated good food and would on occasion smuggle in jars of caviar to the President, sometimes also baskets of paprika chicken cooked by her Hungarian mother, which she and Roosevelt would happily devour together in his office in secret, “like naughty children,” she would remember. Roosevelt told her now that Byrnes was the best man, but asked her to go tell Byrnes he was not to be the vice-presidential choice, because of the Negro vote. Mrs. Rosenberg, who admired Byrnes greatly and wanted him on the ticket, said she couldn’t do that. If the President wanted Byrnes to know he had no chance, then the President would have to tell him himself, she said. But Roosevelt never did, never could, as she knew.

Truman was trying to clear up his work and get away for a few days in Missouri before the convention opened in Chicago on July 19. With so little time remaining, gossip over the vice-presidential question had become intense. To any and all who asked if he was interested in the nomination, Truman said no—“no, no, no.” The whole matter was getting on his nerves. He had not seen the President. It had been more than a year since he had seen the President. Nor would he make any effort to do so now.

“I don’t want to be Vice President,” he told William Helm as they were rushing along a hall in the Senate Office Building, and, as Helm wrote later, anyone who saw the look on his face would have known he meant it.

The number of other Democrats in the Senate reputedly in the running had grown to such a list, reporters were joking, that it was easier to tally those who were not candidates. On July 6, to judge by corridor gossip, Wallace had the nomination sewed up. On July 7, the word from “informed sources” was that the President wanted Wallace but he also wanted three or four “acceptable” names held in reserve, should the convention refuse to “swallow Henry.” In that case Barkley was first choice. On July 9, it was noted that Senator Truman, by continuing to do battle with the War Production Board and the armed services, was killing whatever chance he might have had.

“The Vice President simply presides over the Senate and sits around hoping for a funeral,” Truman explained to a friend. “It is a very high office which consists entirely of honor and I don’t have any ambition to hold an office like that.”

Max Lowenthal and Les Biffle were after him to run for Vice President. “The Madam doesn’t want me to do it,” he told Lowenthal. To Margaret he wrote, “It is funny how some people would give a fortune to be as close as I am to it and I don’t want it.” Then, making it unmistakable that his thoughts, too, were on the obvious mortality of Franklin Roosevelt, not to say his own advancing years, he added, “1600 Pennsylvania is a nice address but I’d rather not move in through the back door—or any other door at sixty.”

The letter was written on July 9, just as he started the long drive home alone to Missouri.

On Monday, July 10, after an all-night flight from Seattle, an exhausted Vice President of the United States arrived in Washington at the end of a 51-day, 27,000-mile mission to China, and at 4:30 that afternoon he met with the President to report on what he had seen. Roosevelt was cordial as always. For a long while they talked about China and Wallace’s venture to Outer Mongolia, where no American had set foot in seventeen years. (Wallace had brought Roosevelt some Mongolian stamps for his collection.) As Wallace recorded in his diary, it was Roosevelt who at last “opened up on politics saying that when I went out I should say that no politics were discussed.”

Roosevelt assured Wallace that he was his choice as running mate and that he intended the fourth term to be “really progressive.” He talked of the professional politicians who thought Wallace might mean a loss of 2 or 3 million votes (figures Ed Flynn had supplied). “Mr. President,” Wallace interjected, “if you can find anyone who will add more strength to the ticket than I, by all means take him.” Roosevelt warned Wallace of the ordeal he might face at Chicago trying to get the vice-presidential nomination and expressed concern about the pain this could mean for Wallace’s family. “Think of the catcalls and jeers and the definiteness of rejection,” Roosevelt remarked. Wallace said he was not worried about his family.

The next day, Tuesday, July 11, the President announced formally that he was running for another term. (Young Allen Drury wrote that he would never forget the look on the faces of Democratic senators when the news reached the Hill. “It was as though the sun had burst from the clouds and glory surrounded the world. Relief, and I mean relief, was written on every face. The meal ticket was still the meal ticket and all was well with the party.”) At lunch that day, July 11, Hopkins again asked Roosevelt who he thought would make the best President, Byrnes or William O. Douglas. “Jimmy Byrnes,” Roosevelt said, “because he knows more about government than anybody around.” Hopkins asked who the President thought would win the nomination if the convention were left free to decide. “Byrnes,” Roosevelt said again.

Then that night, following dinner, in the President’s blue Oval Study on the second floor of the White House, the full anti-Wallace coalition—Flynn, Hannegan, Walker, Allen, Pauley, plus one more exceptionally influential “practical” politician, Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago—gathered with the President for what they were to regard as the decisive meeting.

Because of the muggy heat, everyone was in shirtsleeves. Drinks were passed, and again the full list of vice-presidential possibilities was taken up one by one. Again Byrnes and Rayburn were rejected. Now, for the first time, Barkley, too, was ruled out, and by Roosevelt, because Barkley was too old. Like Byrnes, Barkley was sixty-six, which made him Roosevelt’s senior by only four years, but the Republicans at their convention in Chicago had just nominated for President Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, who was all of forty-two, the age Roosevelt’s Republican cousin Theodore had been when he took office, and so age could very likely be an issue in the campaign.

Roosevelt thought a young man was needed on the Democratic ticket, and to the surprise of the others, he proposed William O. Douglas, an idea none of them had ever seriously entertained. Douglas, he said, was youthful (he was forty-six), dynamic, a good liberal, and he had a kind of Boy Scout quality that would appeal to voters. Besides, Roosevelt thought, Douglas played an interesting game of poker.

But the idea fell flat. No one wanted Douglas any more than Wallace.

Again the talk turned to Harry Truman, Roosevelt contributing little to the conversation except to observe that he had set Truman up in his committee (which was not so) and thought he was doing a commendable job. Truman was able and loyal to the administration, Roosevelt agreed, and “wise to the way of politics.” Reportedly, the question of Truman’s association with the Pendergast machine was “thoroughly discussed” and dismissed as irrelevant.

One point only troubled the President-Truman’s age. He was not sure, Roosevelt said, but he thought Truman was nearly sixty. Hannegan, who knew Truman was already sixty, tried to change the subject, but Roosevelt sent for a Congressional Directory and the conversation continued. When the Directory arrived, Ed Pauley quietly took it and said no more.

As to which candidate might be best suited and prepared for the burdens and responsibilities of the presidency, there appears to have been little or no discussion. Apparently, only Roosevelt touched on the subject, saying again that, all in all, Jimmy Byrnes was the best-qualified man.

It would also be remembered how tired and listless the President was all through the stifling, hot evening. Frank Walker commented later that he had never known Roosevelt to stand so willingly on the sidelines “and let others carry the ball.”

Exhausted he was, and preoccupied by the war. Since the Allied landings at Normandy on June 6, the Germans had launched their first V-1 “buzz bombs,” Hitler’s terrifying Vergeltungswaffe, the vengeance weapon, against London. In the Pacific, the American assault on the island of Saipan had been met with Japanese resistance as fierce as any since the fighting began. Just the week before, on the night of July 6, three thousand Japanese had hurled themselves against the 27th Division in one mass banzai charge, all to be killed. No one, and least of all Roosevelt, expected the final stages of the war to become anything but more and more costly.

At last, turning to Hannegan, Roosevelt said, “Bob, I think you and everyone else here want Truman.”

Roosevelt had not said yet whether he himself wanted Truman, but at this point, Ed Pauley, still holding the Congressional Directory, rose and suggested they break up, then hurried everybody out of the room before Roosevelt had a chance to say anything more. Downstairs, as they were about to leave, Hannegan decided to go back up and get something in writing. By several accounts he returned with a note that Roosevelt had scrawled on an envelope: “Bob, I think Truman is the right man, FDR.” But an offhand, personal note was hardly conclusive, and as George Allen observed in understatement, “Roosevelt was still free to change his mind….”

A day or so later, writing in his diary, Harold Ickes, the Secretary of Interior, recorded that in a conversation with the President about the vice-presidential issue, little had been said about Senator Truman. “I gathered that he felt, as I do,” wrote Ickes, “that Truman might do but that he might raise a political-boss issue that would be especially welcomed by Dewey whose rise to political prominence has been due to fighting political bosses.”

It was a pattern. No matter how many talked to Roosevelt on the subject, each and all came away feeling he thought just as they did. For the moment anyway.

At first chance the morning of Wednesday, July 12, Hannegan went to see Henry Wallace at his apartment at the Wardman Park—a mission undertaken, according to Hannegan’s later account, at the request of the President. He told Wallace he would be a detriment to the ticket and must therefore withdraw. Wallace said they might as well understand one another. He was not withdrawing as long as the President preferred him.

On Thursday, the 13th, Wallace met for lunch with Roosevelt, who reported the meeting of the night of the 11th in some detail, explaining the preference of the professional politicians for Truman as “the only one who had no enemies and might add a little independent strength to the ticket.” Wallace showed him a new Gallup Poll reporting 65 percent of Democratic voters in favor of Wallace, while Byrnes had but 3 percent, Truman 2 percent. The only other potential candidate with even a modest showing was Alben Barkley, with 17 percent.

It was his intention, Roosevelt said, to send a letter to the chairman of the convention, Senator Samuel Jackson, saying that if he were a delegate he would vote for Wallace. Would he offer any alternative name, Wallace asked. No, Roosevelt assured him, he would not.

The Vice President stood to leave. At fifty-five, he was slim and fit, a man who was regularly out of bed at 5:30 in the morning to play tennis. Yet he had an untidy look, which with his underlying shyness and the shock of reddish-gray hair that hung over the right side of his forehead, made him seem almost rustic, and so entirely different from the seated President.

“Well, I am looking ahead with pleasure to the results of next week no matter what the outcome,” Wallace said.

Roosevelt, his head up, beaming, drew Wallace close and with a vigorous handclasp said, “While I cannot put it just that way in public, I hope it will be the same old team.”

In another exchange earlier that same morning, Roosevelt had told Jimmy Byrnes he was certain Wallace could not win at Chicago, but that he would endorse no candidate other than Wallace. Byrnes pointed out that he had not allowed himself to become seriously interested until Bob Hannegan had told him, in effect, that he was the President’s first choice. On the question of his standing with black voters, Byrnes said only that he didn’t think that would matter, when all was said and done. He showed the President a photograph he had just received from Aiken, South Carolina, in which Mrs. Roosevelt was seen addressing a group of blacks. “Look at the expressions on their faces,” Byrnes said. “That is idolatry. You can’t tell me that because you have a Southerner on the ticket that those people are going to turn against Mrs. Roosevelt and the President who have done more for them than anybody….” Roosevelt said he thought Byrnes was right.

“Mr. President, all I have heard around this White House for the last week is Negro. I wonder if anybody ever thinks about the white people. Did you ever stop to think who would do the most for the Negro. This is a serious problem, but it will have to be solved by the white people of the South….”

He wanted an open convention, Roosevelt said, which Byrnes, understandably, took to mean that he himself had every chance for the nomination. “You are the best qualified man in the whole outfit and you must not get out of the race,” Roosevelt told him. “If you stay in you are sure to win.”

Meeting with Hannegan and Frank Walker for lunch the next day, Byrnes repeated what Roosevelt had said. Hannegan was incredulous. “I don’t understand it,” he said. Neither did Byrnes, who, determined to settle the matter, returned to his White House office and put through a call to Roosevelt, who by this time was at his home in Hyde Park, New York. Byrnes, who had once been a court stenographer, took down their conversation in shorthand.

Roosevelt said again he was not favoring anybody. “I told them so. No, I am not favoring anybody.”

BYRNES: Bob Hannegan and Frank Walker stated today that if at the convention they were asked about your views, they would be obliged to say to their friends that from your statements they concluded you did not prefer Wallace but did prefer Truman first and Douglas second, and that either would be preferable to me because they would cost the ticket fewer votes than I would.

ROOSEVELT: Jimmy, that is all wrong. That is not what I told them. It is what they told me. When we all went over the list I did not say I preferred anybody or that anybody would cost me votes, but they all agreed that Truman would cost fewer votes than anybody and probably Douglas second. This was the agreement they reached and I had nothing to do with it….

Byrnes pressed him. If Hannegan and his friends were to release any kind of statement saying the President preferred Truman and Douglas, that could make things very difficult for his own cause.

“We have to be damn careful about language,” Roosevelt answered. “They asked if I would object to Truman and Douglas and I said no. That is different from using the word ‘prefer.’ That is not expressing a preference because you know I told you I would have no preference.”

Roosevelt asked Byrnes whether he would try for the nomination. Byrnes said he was considering it, but he needed to know the President’s views. Roosevelt replied, “After all, Jimmy, you are close to me personally and Henry is close to me. I hardly know Truman. Douglas is a poker partner. He is good in a poker game and tells good stories.”

Finishing the call, Byrnes went directly down the corridor to Hopkins’s office and repeated what the President had said. If anyone knew Roosevelt’s mind supposedly it was Hopkins, who now told Byrnes the President was sure that if Byrnes entered the race he would win, he would be nominated.

According to Byrnes, it was then that he phoned Harry Truman in Missouri, though Truman would remember the call coming early in the morning, as he was about to leave for Chicago. Whether this was Friday morning or Saturday morning is not clear, nor important. But presumably Byrnes would not have called Truman until after he had talked with the President, so most likely it was Saturday morning.

Truman was staying at the President Hotel in Kansas City. Bess, Margaret, and Madge Wallace were visiting Fred Wallace at his new home in Denver.

Byrnes asked if Truman was serious when he told the newspapers he did not want the vice-presidential nomination. Yes, Truman replied, absolutely. He was not a candidate. Byrnes said he had been given the “go sign” from Roosevelt and would like nothing better than to have Truman make the nominating speech for him at Chicago. Truman accepted at once, saying he would be delighted and would do all he could to line up the Missouri delegation. Clearly he, too, was convinced by this time that Byrnes was both the President’s choice and the best one, and his source for such confidence must have been Bob Hannegan. Otherwise, he would never have responded so affirmatively and without hesitation.

Again by Truman’s recollection, he had no sooner put down the phone than it rang a second time. Alben Barkley now wanted him to make his nominating speech at Chicago. He was sorry, Truman replied, but he had just said yes to Jimmy Byrnes.

II

The turmoil at the Chicago convention was entirely over the vice presidency and at no time did the outcome appear inevitable. Ambitions were too large, the opportunities for deceit and maneuver and the play of emotion too plentiful, the dictates of Franklin Roosevelt too capricious and uncertain for there to have been even a momentary sense of events moving as if on a track. Things could have gone differently at any of several points, and with the most far-reaching consequences. As Alben Barkley would write, the denouement in Chicago of all the plotting that had gone on in Washington was a fascinating political drama. It was politics for the highest stakes, politics at its slipperiest, and the only real drama of either national convention that summer.

A few weeks before, when the Republicans filled the same hotels and picked their nominees in the same steaming hall, there had been no contest and no surprises. Thomas E. Dewey was smoothly nominated on the first ballot and his only near rival, Senator John W. Bricker, was the choice for running mate. Now the assembling Democrats were to be denied the chance even to see their standardbearer, their hero, whose overwhelming endorsement for yet another term was a foregone conclusion. Roosevelt had declined to appear before the convention because of his duties as Commander in Chief, he said, just as he had agreed to run again because he saw it as his duty as a “good soldier” in time of war. His acceptance speech was to be delivered by radio hookup from some undisclosed location on the West Coast.

But as so many of the Democrats who converged on Chicago understood, the task of choosing a Vice President had unique importance this time. The common, realistic, and not unspoken view was that they were there to pick not one, but two presidents, and if the identity of the first was clear, that of the second was not.

Had there been a poll of the delegates as they checked in at the hotels, the choice of the majority would have been Henry Wallace. I. F. Stone, writing in The Nation, said that on the basis of his inside sources he could report for certain it would be Wallace. Yet the eminent radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn virtually announced the nomination of Alben Barkley, while Arthur Krock of The New York Times said the prime contenders, after Wallace, were Byrnes, Barkley, and Douglas, in that order, and made no mention of Harry Truman. Speaking for the Democratic National Committee, George Allen thought it would be Truman but he couldn’t be sure. Hannegan and Mayor Kelly, meantime, two of the most powerful figures on the committee, had concluded it would be Byrnes.

But, of course, nobody really knew, since so much depended on Franklin Roosevelt, and as George Allen also aptly observed, “Roosevelt could, of course, have named anybody.”

Privately, and as he would tell no one until much later, Truman thought it would be Wallace.

Looking back on what happened, Alben Barkley would conclude that he had been sadly naive about the whole business. He had been in politics nearly forty years, this was his eleventh national convention, but he had never seen anything like what went on.

Truman drove to Chicago from Kansas City on Saturday, July 15, four days before the convention was officially to open, and the same day the President’s westbound train made an unscheduled stop at Chicago.

As later disclosed, Roosevelt was en route to San Diego, where a cruiser would take him to Hawaii for meetings with General Douglas MacArthur. But at three that afternoon his train was shunted onto a siding so that Bob Hannegan could come aboard for a private talk in the President’s new armor-plated private railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, another innovation resulting from the war. They were together approximately half an hour. “The train stood in the Chicago yards during this conference and none of us showed ourselves outside,” wrote the President’s secretary, Grace Tully. Though nearly everything said between Roosevelt and Hannegan was kept secret, one request by Roosevelt would become the best-known line of the convention. Whatever was decided, said the President, Hannegan must first “Clear it with Sidney,” meaning that Sidney Hillman was to have the final say—Hillman, who now ran the CIO’s well-heeled Political Action Committee, or PAC, which was something new in American politics.

Hannegan also came off the train with a letter on White House stationery, which, in lieu of a briefcase, he carried inside a copy of the National Geographic Magazine. The letter was postdated July 19:

Dear Bob:

You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas. I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one of them would bring real strength to the ticket.

Always sincerely,

Franklin Roosevelt

Whether it had been written earlier in Washington or was produced to order that day is not certain. Grace Tully, however, said Hannegan had come out of the President’s sitting room with a letter in his hand naming two acceptable running mates, William O. Douglas first, Harry Truman second, and that Hannegan told her the President wanted it retyped with the order of the names reversed. To her, the reason for the switch seemed obvious. “By naming Truman first it plainly implied…that he was the preferred choice of the President.” Hannegan would later deny making any such switch, and since the first copy of the letter was thrown away by another secretary who did the actual typing, there was no way to confirm or disprove the story. Ed Pauley, who claimed to have been with Hannegan when he went to see Roosevelt, said later that Hannegan was back at his hotel before he discovered to his horror that Douglas was even mentioned. Also a note dated July 19 in Roosevelt’s hand, as well as a typewritten duplicate on White House stationery, have survived with Truman’s name listed first. But Grace Tully was not known for fabricating stories, nor was there any reason why she should have done so in this instance.

In any event, the handsome, gregarious Hannegan—Mr. Busyman Bob, as he would be remembered—was playing an extremely deceitful game at this his first national convention, possibly at Roosevelt’s direction, and possibly not. For his next move was to call Jimmy Byrnes in Washington, a second call to Byrnes that day. The first, made by Mayor Ed Kelly in the morning, had been to tell Byrnes that he, Kelly, and Hannegan were no longer worried about losing the Negro vote if Byrnes were on the ticket, and that this was the message Hannegan would take to Roosevelt when the presidential train came in. Now, in the second call, Hannegan told Byrnes that the vice presidency was all set. Byrnes was the one. “The President has given us the green light to support you and he wants you in Chicago.”

Byrnes left Washington for Chicago at once and, seeing Tom Connally on the train, confided triumphantly that the nomination was his. Roosevelt himself had passed the word. “Harry Truman will nominate me,” Byrnes said.

Arriving in Chicago the morning of Sunday the 16th, Byrnes found a bright red fire chief’s car and driver waiting at the station for him, courtesy of Mayor Kelly. He was taken directly to the mayor’s apartment on Lake Shore Drive for a breakfast meeting with Kelly and Hannegan, who assured him he was the chosen man. “Well, you know Jimmy has been my choice from the very first. Go ahead and nominate him,” they quoted Roosevelt as having instructed. A little afterward, Alben Barkley, too, was told by Kelly that “it was in the bag for Jimmy.”

Hannegan and company spent most of the day with Byrnes mapping out strategy. Hannegan even ordered “Roosevelt and Byrnes” placards printed. By late afternoon, the word had spread among the delegates and reporters milling about in the hotel lobbies.

The Roosevelt letter to Hannegan was kept secret. Hannegan was showing it to no one, because of its mention of Douglas, he later said. And no one apparently had said anything about it as yet to Senator Truman, who by now had his nominating speech for Byrnes all prepared.

Sitting beside an open window in his hotel room that evening, the flat, gray-blue panorama of Lake Michigan in the distance, Truman talked at length to a St. Louis reporter, with the understanding that most of what he said was off the record. Although Bess and Margaret, due to arrive from Denver on Tuesday, would be staying at the Morrison Hotel, the senator had taken a suite in the Stevens, across the street from the venerable Blackstone, so that his “politicking” would not disturb their sleep. Jimmy Byrnes, his candidate, was also in the Stevens, six flights up on the twenty-third floor, in the hotel’s plush Royal Skyway, the same rooms occupied a few weeks earlier by Thomas E. Dewey.

He was determined to stay out of the running, Truman said. He knew his Pendergast background would be dragged out again and he wished none of that. He had worked too hard to build a good name in the Senate. The reporter remarked that as Vice President he might “succeed to the throne.” Truman shook his head. “Hell, I don’t want to be president.” He then described the failures and scorn experienced by every Vice President who had succeeded to the highest office, beginning with John Tyler and overlooking the most obvious example to the contrary, Theodore Roosevelt.

To another reporter that same evening Truman repeated much the same thing. Those who had succeeded dead presidents were ridiculed in office, had their hearts broken, and lost any vestige of respect they had before. “I don’t want that to happen to me.”

Nobody, it would seem, was avoiding the central issue of Roosevelt’s health and what the vice-presidential nomination really meant. Truman’s Kansas City friend Tom Evans later said Truman knew perfectly well that Roosevelt’s days were numbered and this was precisely why he had no desire to be on the ticket. “I’m satisfied with where I am,” Evans remembered him saying. “Just a heartbeat, this little,” said Truman, making a tiny space between forefinger and thumb, “separates the Vice President and the President.”

Since arriving in Chicago, he had hardly been able to sleep at night. He hated the thought of intrusions on his family’s privacy, and what so much notoriety might do to Margaret at such an important stage in her life. He was worried about skeletons in the closet, he told Evans—about Bess being on the office payroll in Washington and what the papers would make of that. Writing years later, Margaret would say that most of all he feared what a disclosure and retelling of David Wallace’s suicide would do to Bess and her mother.

Evans, an old Pendergast loyalist who had grown rich with a chain of drugstores that also sold quantities of Pendergast beer and whiskey, had come to Chicago at Truman’s request for the supposed purpose of helping him fend off the nomination, as had Eddie McKim and John Snyder. Scowling, heavy-handed Fred Canfil, too, was on hand in his role as general factotum and looking, noted one reporter, “as if he could throw a bull in two falls out of three.” (Canfil would later complain of missing much of the drama on the convention floor because “somebody else wanted some booze and I had to help him.”) Yet they all seem to have spent most of their time talking Truman up as the ideal choice—McKim liked to say it was a question of destiny—and trying to persuade Truman to change his mind.

Roy Roberts, the fat, hard-drinking, opinionated editor of the Kansas City Star, who was a Republican and a man Truman loathed, also came and went, perspiring heavily and acting like a kingmaker, which aggravated Truman greatly.

None of them lost sight of the point that it was really the presidency at stake. As McKim remembered, they “got Truman in a room and…explained the situation to him.” After much talk, McKim told him, “I think, Senator, that you’re going to do it.” What gave him that idea, Truman snapped. “Because,” said McKim, “there’s a little, old ninety-year-old mother down in Grandview, Missouri, that would like to see her son President of the United States.” Truman, in tears, stomped out of the room.

Bess, Margaret, Mildred Dryden, his little band of Missouri friends, as well as his brother Vivian, who was in Chicago to see his first national convention, were all sure he did not want the nomination and would all later stress how extremely stubborn he grew as pressures on him increased. Only Vic Messall, who was still out of favor but on hand as a spectator, thought differently. Truman was always politically ambitious, Messall said. “I’m sure he wanted to be Vice President. But he had to pretend he didn’t.”

Reflecting on Truman’s frame of mind years later, John Snyder would say that it wasn’t so much that Truman didn’t want to be President but that he didn’t want to succeed Franklin Roosevelt, which was different.

For Truman, in memory, the convention would always be “that miserable time” in Chicago, the most exasperating experience of his life. Marquis Childs, a practiced Truman observer, described him as plainly “scared to death.”

The sensation of Monday, July 17, was the release by convention chairman Samuel Jackson of Roosevelt’s letter about Wallace. A hundred reporters or more fought for the mimeographed copies. It had been written at Hyde Park on Friday, the same day as Roosevelt’s reassuring telephone conversation with Jimmy Byrnes:

I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as Vice President [read the key paragraph of the instantly famous document], for eight years earlier while he was Secretary of Agriculture, and well before that. I like him and I respect him and he is my personal friend. For these reasons I personally would vote for his nomination if I were a delegate to the convention.

To many it seemed a kiss of death for Wallace—“the coolest and cruelest brushoff in all the long Roosevelt career,” in the words of one account. Unquestionably, it threw the choice of a running mate wide open. He did not “wish to appear to be in any way dictating to the convention,” Roosevelt had also written. If anybody benefited, said several papers, it was Jimmy Byrnes. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the letter a spur to the “already soaring campaign stock of energetic little Jimmy Byrnes.” But the Wallace forces, including Sidney Hillman and Phil Murray of the CIO, took the announcement as a sign of hope, since theirs was the only candidate who now had something in writing from the President. “It was generally regarded as a Roosevelt endorsement,” remembered Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, a Wallace floor leader, who, from his conversations with Roosevelt in Washington, was certain Roosevelt wanted Wallace.

It was only now, in response, that Hannegan began saying he, too, had a letter from the President, which named Truman. But no one was allowed to see it.

Hannegan’s corner suite on the seventh floor of the Blackstone, Rooms 708–709, had become the convention nerve center, since Hannegan alone claimed direct telephone contact with the President. In the red-carpeted hall outside, reporters and photographers set up a round-the-clock vigil to see who came and went. At first Hannegan tried to discourage them, insisting that nothing was happening there. Mayor Kelly, who was in and out “continually,” kept mentioning the Roosevelt letter. “Do you want to see it?” he asked a skeptical representative of the United Auto Workers. Indeed yes, said the man. “I haven’t got it with me,” Kelly replied, “but I’ll show it to you tomorrow.”

At a dinner that night arranged by Kelly in a private apartment on Chicago’s North Side, a location kept secret from the press, Byrnes was man of the hour. It was only when everybody was about to leave that Hannegan mentioned one further detail, the need, as required by the President, to “Clear it with Sidney,” a point Hannegan seemed to regard as only a formality.

On Tuesday morning Senator Truman and Sidney Hillman had orange juice, eggs, and bacon sent up by room service to Hillman’s suite at the Ambassador East, “the fancy hotel,” as Truman called it. Born in Lithuania, educated to be a rabbi, Hillman had been an eight-dollar-a-week apprentice pants cutter in the garment district of New York when Truman was still riding a plow on the farm. He had led his first strike at twenty-three and founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America by the time he was thirty. He had also joined the Socialist Party and still spoke with a slight accent, which would have been more than enough in places like Grandview, Missouri, to have made him seem a dangerous radical. To party chiefs like Hannegan and Kelly, he was an amateur and therefore not wholly trustworthy, whatever the power of his PAC or his allegiance to the President. Hillman wasn’t even a registered Democrat. In addition, as co-director of the former Office of Production Management in Washington, he had come under heavy fire from the Truman Committee, which had been mainly responsible for his removal. And so Truman had no reason to expect much from him in the way of cooperation or favors.

Truman asked for Hillman’s support for Byrnes. Hillman declined and refused to be budged. He was working hard for Henry Wallace, Hillman said. If it could not be Wallace, then he wanted either William O. Douglas or Harry Truman.

Truman said he was going to nominate Byrnes. Hillman said that would be a mistake.

Truman reported directly to Byrnes all that Hillman had said, but Byrnes seemed not to care, and with reason. By reliable reports he had already lined up more than 400 of the 589 votes needed to nominate.

When Ed Flynn arrived in Chicago later that morning, Tuesday the 18th, Hannegan rushed him into a corner to say it was all over. “It’s Byrnes!” Flynn said it was no such thing and demanded a meeting of the select committee, the same group as the night before, which convened again in the same secret North Side apartment, except that this time Sidney Hillman was included and Jimmy Byrnes was not.

There was only one man to nominate, Flynn insisted, and that was Harry Truman, because Harry Truman was what they had agreed to with the President.

Flynn was extremely angry. “I browbeat the committee, I talked, I argued, I swore,” he later wrote. Hillman declared Byrnes unacceptable to organized labor. Flynn said Byrnes would cost no less than 200,000 Negro votes in New York alone. Byrnes was a “political liability.” Roosevelt could lose the election. Everyone agreed—Hannegan, the party’s chairman, Pauley, Walker, Allen, Hillman for labor, Kelly the big-city boss. Reporters were to call them “the Harmony Boys.”

Flynn put through a call to Roosevelt in San Diego and one by one each man got on the line. In the end Roosevelt agreed it should be Truman.

Though accounts differ somewhat, this appears to be what happened next: Within a short time that evening Byrnes and Truman were individually told what the President had said. Truman heard it from Hannegan, who came to his room at the Stevens, and also showed him a longhand note from the President saying, as Truman remembered, “Bob, it’s Truman, F.D.R.,” a different wording from what Roosevelt had supposedly scrawled for Hannegan the night of the 11th at the White House. Also, by Truman’s recollection, the note he was now shown was written on scratch paper, not an envelope. Truman doubted Roosevelt had written it. “I still could not be sure this was Roosevelt’s intent,” he would recall.

An hour or so later Truman went alone to the Royal Skyway to square things with Byrnes. He asked to be released from his promise of support. Byrnes said he understood perfectly, given the circumstances. Whether he would stay in the race, Byrnes said, was a question he would have to sleep on. When Byrnes tried to get through to Roosevelt by phone, he was told the President was unavailable.

Word of the sudden turn in events spread fast. Ed Flynn had been in town less than a day and everything had changed. In a long account by Turner Catledge in The New York Times the next morning, Wednesday, July 19, opening day for the convention, was a revealing paragraph:

Reports that Senator Truman was to be the choice of the anti-Wallace forces were heard in the New York state delegation…. Edward J. Flynn, New York national committeeman, in a conference with leaders, informed them that the decision of the Wallace opponents was to back Senator Truman, and that the New York delegation might be voting for him at least after the first ballot. The group agreed to accede to this decision.

Byrnes dropped out of the race and the talk everywhere was that the bosses killed his candidacy. In a release to the press, Byrnes said he was withdrawing “in deference to the wishes of the President.” He then left for home in a fury, feeling he had been betrayed by Roosevelt. In a parting conversation with Alben Barkley, who was scheduled to nominate the President, Byrnes remarked sourly, “If I were you I wouldn’t say anything too complimentary about him.”

Barkley was as upset as Byrnes, furious over Roosevelt and his games at their expense. He was sick and tired of trying to determine which shell the pea was under, Barkley told a reporter, and threatened to tear up his nominating speech and be done with the whole affair.

For Truman, events were out of hand. These were three or four of the most critical days of his life and they were beyond his control, his destiny being decided for him by others once again. Speculation now centered on him. But as his stock rose, so did objections to him, because of the Pendergast connection. Jim Pendergast was prominent in the Missouri delegation, which was the first to name Truman its choice for Vice President, quite against his wishes. Running into his old high school classmate Charlie Ross, now a contributing editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Truman said, “Feel sorry for me. I’m in a terrible fix.”

How much faith he had in Hannegan at this point, he never said, but to many it looked as though the young party head was out of line in taking such an overtly partisan role. He appeared to be constantly improvising, seldom sure of his ground. To prove he really did have something in writing from Roosevelt about Truman, he at last released the much-talked-of letter. But this only produced more grumbling and controversy. Why hadn’t he said it mentioned Truman and Douglas? His claim of an endorsement for Truman was only half true and wasn’t a half-truth as good as a lie? And how much credence should be given to a letter released on July 18 that was supposedly written on July 19?

Among those most surprised by the letter when he later saw accounts of it in the papers was William O. Douglas, who at the time of the convention was in Oregon hiking in the mountains. No one had told him he was being considered.

Meantime, Henry Wallace had arrived in Chicago, and at a packed press conference at the Sherman Hotel, sitting on a table with his long legs swinging, Wallace said he was there to fight to the finish. His supporters were claiming 400 votes on the first ballot. In a secret caucus of the political action committee at the Sherman, CIO president Phil Murray shook his fist and said in his deep Scottish burr, “Wallace…Wallace…Wallace. That’s it. Just keep pounding.”

A sluggish, entirely routine first session of the convention opened just before noon inside Chicago Stadium, the same giant arena where Roosevelt had been nominated in 1932 and again in 1940. From steel girders overhead hung a huge Roosevelt portrait used in 1940, only retouched a little to make him look a bit less pale. There was a prayer. There were speeches. The real business continued at the hotels.

III

Only narrow Balbo Street separated the Stevens from the Blackstone, and it was to the Blackstone, to Hannegan’s seventh-floor suite, that Truman was “summoned” that afternoon, Wednesday, July 19. Hannegan, collar open, his shirt damp with perspiration, had assembled the inner core—Pauley, Walker, Kelly, Flynn—plus, for the first time, Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City, who had never cared particularly for Senator Truman and who until now had been telling delegates that he didn’t want Truman because his nomination would only stir up the whole boss issue.

It was clearly a gathering arranged for effect, for Truman’s benefit. (Barkley would later refer to Hannegan as “the stage manager” at Chicago.) The time had come for a decision from the senator. They were placing a call to San Diego.

Truman sat on one twin bed. Hannegan, phone in hand, sat on the other. “Whenever Roosevelt used the telephone,” Truman remembered, “he always talked in such a strong voice that it was necessary for the listener to hold the receiver away from his ear to avoid being deafened, so I found it possible to hear both ends of the conversation.”

“Bob,” Roosevelt’s voice boomed, “have you got that fellow lined up yet?”

“No,” said Hannegan. “He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.”

“Well, you tell the Senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility.” With that Roosevelt banged down the phone.

Truman said later that he was completely stunned. “I was floored, I was sunk.” Reportedly his first words were “Oh, shit!” He himself recalled saying, “Well, if that’s the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”

That evening Henry Wallace made a surprise appearance on the floor of the convention, and the roar of approval from the galleries astonished everyone, including, noticeably, Henry Wallace.

“Ye gods!” wrote Margaret Truman in her diary. “The Missouri delegation has decided to nominate Dad for V-P. Vice President Wallace is very strong so I doubt if we win, although the South doesn’t want Wallace at all.”

To judge by her use of the word “we,” Bess, too, had resigned herself to the decision.

On Thursday, July 20, an immense crowd filling the hall, the convention became a thundering, old-fashioned political circus. Alben Barkley, bathed in spotlights on the podium, his broad face streaming with perspiration, his anger at Roosevelt forgotten for the moment, delivered a fulsome tribute to the great leader that set off a demonstration lasting forty minutes. In seconding the nomination, Henry Wallace gave one of the strongest speeches of his career, an impassioned, straight-from-the-shoulder declaration of liberal principles that brought the huge, roaring audience to its feet time after time. The only chance for the Democratic Party, he said, was to keep on its liberal course.

In a political, educational and economic sense, there must be no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Educational opportunities must come. The future must bring equal wages for equal work regardless of sex or race….

By evening, as time for the President’s address approached, the crowd had grown far beyond what the arena was built to hold. It was packed to the roof with perhaps forty thousand people. Reportedly fifteen thousand counterfeit tickets had been printed and distributed with the blessing of Mayor Kelly, who for all his apparent Truman fervor was secretly hoping for a Truman-Wallace deadlock, so the prize would go to his own candidate, Illinois’s favorite son, Senator Scott Lucas. But the ticket ploy resulted in thousands of additional Wallace supporters, many supplied by the CIO, who jammed the galleries and worked their way onto the convention floor, while thousands more milled about in the corridors. The Wallace people were determined to see the nomination decided there in the hall and not by the “big boys” in a smoke-filled room. The idea was to stampede the convention.

Nominations for the vice presidency were scheduled for the next day, but as the evening wore on, with more speeches and fanfare for Roosevelt, the surge for Wallace kept growing. The heat inside the hall was nearly unbearable.

At the Blackstone, Hannegan told Truman he might have to be nominated that night, depending whether they had the votes. They would have to be ready to move fast. Bennett Clark was supposed to nominate Truman, but no one knew where he was. Clark, whose wife had died the year before, had been drinking more than usual. Truman went to look for him. Hannegan started for the convention hall.

When the speeches and roll call ended, and the President was swiftly renominated, the delegates settled down to hear his speech. The familiar voice came booming from a cluster of amplifiers, as the huge crowd sat watching the empty podium. Absolute silence hung over the darkened hall, even during the President’s pauses. With no one on stage, the effect was eerie. Roosevelt was speaking from his railroad car in San Diego.

“What is the job before us in 1944?” the great, disembodied voice asked. “First, to win the war—to win the war fast, to win it overpoweringly. Second, to form worldwide international organizations, and to arrange to use the armed forces of the sovereign nations of the world to make another war impossible…. "

No sooner was the speech over than a Wallace demonstration erupted. From every corner of the stadium came a chant of “We want Wallace!” The organist, catching the spirit, began pumping away at the Wallace theme song, “Iowa, Iowa, That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows,” over and over. Ed Pauley, livid with rage, threatened to chop the wires to the amplifiers unless the tune was changed.

Bob Hannegan was seen hurriedly conferring with Mayor Kelly in the Illinois delegation. Then they were both up on the podium, heads together with Chairman Jackson. To several of the Wallace floor leaders it looked suddenly as if the time to nominate their man was then, that night, and the quicker the better.

“I sat there and watched the demonstration and I saw it growing in volume,” remembered Claude Pepper, who, as head of the Florida delegation, was positioned on the aisle. “I stood up on my seat, and I could see the whole convention hall then. And I said [to myself], ‘You know, that’s a real demonstration….’ So after it got into full speed and steam, I said, ‘If we could bring this nomination up right now, we could nominate Henry Wallace.’ ”

At the rear of the hall now, Hannegan had started throwing open the outer doors to let more people in, while, at the same time, Ed Kelly kept shouting about fire rules.

Desperate to get the chairman’s eye, Pepper tried hopping up and down on his chair, waving the Florida banner, but to no avail. His floor microphone had been turned off.

He jumped down and started up the aisle, fighting his way through the crowd. Reporters, hundreds of delegates, and spectators saw him and knew at once what he was trying to do. If he could get to the podium, he would make the nominating speech himself with no more delay.

And then when I got to the little gate [remembered Pepper], the little fence around the podium where the Chairman presided…well, fortunately, there was a railroad labor man that was minding the gate. He was a friend of mine, so he opened the gate and let me in…I got up to about the second step from the top going just as hard as I could to get up that stairway, and I saw the Chairman look over there. He had seen me coming up the aisle. And so, immediately—by this time I got about nearly to the first step—the Chairman said, “Motion made. The convention adjourned. All in favor of the motion, let me know by saying ‘Aye, aye.’ ” And, “That’s it.” And, “The convention’s adjourned.” And I by that time was just about to the top step. And they started roaring, “No, no, no, no.”

Jackson later told Pepper he had hated to do what he did, but that he had promised the newspaper and radio people to hold the vice-presidential decision until the next day when they would be better prepared. Jackson admitted he had seen Pepper trying to get his attention, that he had an eye on him the whole time he was heading for the podium, and knew perfectly well why he was coming. What he did not tell Pepper was that he and Bob Hannegan had already made an agreement to shut things down that night before the Wallace people could start the nominations. The public explanation was that the decision was a matter of necessity, because of fire laws.

Harry Truman had witnessed none of this. He had spent the night in search of Bennett Clark, finding him finally in a room where he was not supposed to be, at the Sherman, and too drunk to say much more than hello. By then it was past midnight. “So I called Bob [Hannegan],” Truman remembered, “and said, ‘I found your boy. He’s cockeyed. I don’t know whether I can get him ready or not, and I hope to Christ I can’t.’ ”

Of all those in Missouri who had kept track of Harry Truman’s activities and accomplishments in the Senate over the past nine years, none had been so attentive, appraising his every move, as his mother Martha Ellen Truman, who remained a close reader of the Congressional Record and a more partisan Democrat than almost anyone he knew. Once, introducing her to a political friend, Truman told her the man had grown up in Mississippi and had never seen a Republican until he was twelve. “He didn’t miss much,” she replied.

For days now, in her small parlor at Grandview, she had been sitting close to the radio, following the convention. Interviewed by reporters, she said she did not want her son to become Vice President. He should stay in the Senate, she said emphatically.

“I listened to all the Republican Convention, too. They keep predicting that Roosevelt will die in office if he’s elected. The Republicans hope he will. They keep saying that I’ll die, too, and I’m almost 92.1 hope Roosevelt fools ’em.”

The final session inside the stadium, Friday, July 21, lasted nine hours and would be described as the strangest, most bitter conclusion to a national convention in a very long time.

Senator Bennett Clark, after a great deal of black coffee, a shower, and some food, had, with Hannegan’s help, pulled himself together sufficiently to appear on the podium. But his speech for Truman was short and had none of his usual flair. He moved the audience not at all. (In another few weeks, as Truman had anticipated, Bennett Clark went down to defeat in the Democratic primary in Missouri, thereby ending a career in the Senate that many, including Truman, had once thought could lead to the White House.)

Nor were the seconding speakers much of an improvement. A labor leader from Pennsylvania said that while he did not know the senator personally, he thought Truman would make the strongest possible running mate for the reason that he was a Democrat and an American.

By contrast, a vigorous speech for Henry Wallace, delivered by an Iowa judge named Richard Mitchell, touched off another noisy demonstration, and Claude Pepper, given a turn at the podium at last, made a moving plea to the Democratic Party not to repudiate the man who more than any other symbolized the democracy of Franklin Roosevelt. Wallace’s delegate strength for the first ballot appeared to be gaining.

But Hannegan, Flynn, Kelly, and the others had been working through the night, talking to delegates and applying “a good deal of pressure” to help them see the sense in selecting Harry Truman. No one knows how many deals were cut, how many ambassadorships or postmaster jobs were promised, but reportedly, by the time morning came, Postmaster General Frank Walker had telephoned every chairman of every delegation.

The strategy of the Truman forces was to organize as many favorite-son nominations as possible and thereby keep Wallace from winning on the first ballot. The result was a total of sixteen nominations for Vice President, and as the speeches continued through the long afternoon, delegates in groups of twos and threes were seen going to and from a private air-conditioned room beneath the platform, Room H, at the end of a narrow, dark hall, where, for hours, Senator Truman stood shaking hands. Only later did he emerge to join Bess and Margaret in a box just behind the podium. Henry Wallace was waiting out the session in his hotel room, in keeping with custom, but Truman sat in full view munching on a hot dog and enjoying the spectacle.

The nominating session had drawn some interesting visitors, including film stars Gloria Swanson, who occupied a box close by, and Spencer Tracy, who was besieged by autograph hunters. Among the delegates were seventeen of Truman’s fellow Democrats from the Senate. Ed Flynn and Frank Hague could be seen conferring on the platform, a tableau that caused some veteran observers among the press to recall earlier times when the “big boys” were more discreet about their conniving. But the crowds in the galleries were nothing like the night before. Mayor Kelly’s police had been checking tickets, with the result that thousands of Wallace supporters had been kept out.

The first ballot began at 4:30 P.M. and Wallace stayed in the lead the whole way, rolling up 429 votes to Truman’s 319, with the remainder divided among Alben Barkley and the favorite sons. By the time the tally became official, it was past six. The convention had been in session for nearly seven hours without pause and the crowd expected to recess for dinner, before the night session. But then Chairman Jackson stepped to the microphones to announce that a second ballot would be taken at once. The convention was still in its afternoon session, which meant no tickets for the night meeting would be honored—and therefore no more Wallace crowds admitted. It was a daring stroke by Hannegan.

On the second ballot the excitement began to build almost at once. Wallace was ahead until suddenly, just as had been forecast for the second ballot, Ed Flynn delivered to Truman 74 votes from the New York delegation, which had been divided the first time around. Now Truman moved out in front.

For a moment, the count narrowed again, Wallace pulling to within 5 votes of Truman. Then the break came. Alabama’s favorite son, Senator John Bankhead, withdrew his name and cast 22 Alabama votes for Truman, which gave Truman nearly 500. Delegates rose from their chairs. South Carolina switched 18 votes from Bankhead to Truman and the stampede was on. Indiana, Wyoming, and Maine went over to Truman, while from the galleries came an insistent roar of “We want Wallace!” Photographers were clustering about the Truman box. The senator was smiling broadly. Even Bess, who had looked intermittently grumpy and skeptical through the first ballot, was seen beaming now and turning, as requested, to pose with her husband. Margaret was jumping up and down, cheering as if at a college football game. Over in the Illinois delegation Mayor Kelly shouted to Senator Lucas, “Christ Almighty, let’s get in this thing.” The whole crowd was on its feet.

Truman only needed one big state. Ohio announced for Truman, which would have been enough but a delegate challenged the count and Ohio passed. Then Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts declared that Massachusetts changed its vote to 34 for Truman, and that did it.Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, “unofficially but conclusively,” was the party’s nominee for Vice President.

Illinois, a little late, piled on another 55 votes for Truman and more states followed. Bennett Clark started a Truman procession down the aisles, as a phalanx of police escorted the nominee to the platform. The official tally was running late, but at 8:14, Chairman Jackson formally announced the Truman victory. The final count was Truman 1,031, Wallace 105. William O. Douglas had 4 votes.

The acceptance speech, one of the shortest in American political history, lasted less than a minute. The nomination was an honor for Missouri, Truman said, and an honor that he accepted “with all humility.” More than the speech, it was the shy, almost embarrassed way he stepped up to the bank of microphones, and the way he stood waiting for the crowd to settle down, that many people would remember. He looked out at the huge hall in tumult, his glasses glinting in the spotlight. Then he stepped back slightly.

“Now, give me a chance,” he said.

He was called “the Missouri Compromise” and “the Common Denominator” of the convention. To many it had all been a sad spectacle. “I don’t object to Truman,” wrote Harold Ickes to Bernard Baruch, “but I react strongly against the method of his nomination and the seeming dominating position that the corrupt city bosses now have in the Democratic National organization.” The senator’s Pendergast roots figured in editorials across the country. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called him one of the weakest candidates ever nominated. Time magazine, which only the summer before had lauded his work on the Truman Committee, portrayed him now as a drab mediocrity, “the mousy little man from Missouri.”

“Poor Harry Truman. And poor people of the United States,” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic:

Truman and the people are the ones who will suffer from that convention deal between Roosevelt and the bosses. Truman is a nice man, an honest man, a good Senator, a man of great humility and a man of courage. He will make a passable Vice President. But Truman as President of the United States in times like these?

Yet, on balance, the reaction was favorable, if not enthusiastic. For all his machine background, said the Kansas City Star, Harry Truman had “unusual capacity for development.”The New York Times praised his personal qualities and said he had the advantage of having been through the political mill.

He has known the dust and heat of a political campaign, and has learned the art, not to be despised, of seeking that middle course which will appeal to a majority of the voters. He fought with distinction in the First World War; he has been a farmer; he has known firsthand the difficulties of a small businessman. He has had the kind of experience, in short, likely to make a realist sympathetic to the problems of the varied groups rather than to produce the doctrinaire or the zealot.

Astonishingly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called him an excellent choice. Even Richard Strout in his otherwise gloomy New Republic essay took heart from the idea that Truman, while not brilliant, had character.

Reflecting on the nomination in the privacy of his diary, reporter Allen Drury wrote:

On the credit side, the Senator is a fine man: no one would do a better job of it in the White House if he had to. On the other side the Pendergast background made him entirely too vulnerable to Republican attack, and no one who knows him likes to see him subjected to that kind of smearing…. I think Senator Truman is one of the finest men I know.

Again at Chicago, as so consistently through the Truman career, it had been the system of politics, the boss system, that counted in deciding his fate. There had been no popular boom for him for Vice President. Nor had personal ambition figured. As Richard Rovere wrote, no one ever contrived less at his own elevation than Harry Truman at Chicago. And as time would tell, everything considered, the system, bosses and all, had produced an excellent choice.

In Independence a few days later, three thousand people streamed across the back lawn at 219 North Delaware to shake hands with the senator, who, in a white seersucker suit, stood beneath a blooming rose arbor beside his wife and daughter. Bess was performing the expected public role, though far from happily. At Chicago after the nomination, as they fought their way out through the crowds to a waiting limousine, with police pushing and shoving, she had turned and glared at her husband, demanding, “Are we going to have to go through this for the rest of our lives?” On the drive home through the smothering July heat of southern Illinois, the atmosphere inside their own car was, as Margaret recalled, “close to arctic.” “Dad tried to be cheerful and philosophical simultaneously. Mother said little.”

No sooner had they arrived in Independence than Margaret’s Aunt Natalie Wallace, Uncle Frank’s wife, took it upon herself to tell Margaret that her Grandfather Wallace had shot himself. Margaret ought to know, she said, since the story was bound to come out any time now. Shattered, disbelieving, Margaret rushed to the kitchen to ask Vietta Garr if this were true. Vietta nodded. Unable to face her mother, Margaret waited until evening to tell her father what she had heard, and for the first and only time in her life he turned his fury on her.

“He seized my arm in a grip that he must have learned when he was wrestling calves and hogs around the farmyard,” she remembered. “ ‘Don’t you ever mention that to your mother,’ he said.” Then Truman “rocketed” out the door to find Aunt Natalie.

I wish I could tell you that years later I asked Mother if her anxiety about her father’s death was the hidden reason for her opposition to Dad’s nomination [Margaret would write years later]. But to the end of her life, I never felt free to violate the absolute prohibition Dad issued on that summer night in 1944.

Out-of-town reporters, looking over the old gray Victorian house for the first time, saw that it needed paint.

The defeated Henry Wallace immediately declared his all-out support for the ticket, exhibiting no bitterness, and in turn he was praised for his courage and forthrightness. Contrary to predictions, he had had real delegate strength after all and had nearly carried the convention despite all the forces aligned against him. Roosevelt would have had no trouble whatever getting him nominated, had he so decided. But then no one seemed nearer to understanding Roosevelt after the convention than before.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote sympathetically to Wallace, “I had hoped by some miracle you could win out, but it looks to me as though the bosses had functioned pretty smoothly. I am told that Senator Truman is a good man, and I hope so for the sake of the country.”

What was not perceived as yet, because so little was known of what went on behind the scenes at Chicago (as well as in Washington before the convention), was the critical part played by Ed Flynn—the fact that it was Flynn, more than anyone, who had convinced Roosevelt that Wallace was a liability and urged Harry Truman on him as the safest alternative; that it was Flynn, the day he arrived in Chicago, who refused to accept Jimmy Byrnes as a fait accompli, as Kelly and Hannegan had; that it was Flynn, with perfect timing on the second ballot, who delivered the important New York vote.

Southern opposition to Wallace because of his views on racial equality was clear, as was the refusal of northern liberals to accept the southerner Byrnes for his opposing views on the same subject. What was not so clear still was the degree to which Flynn worried over the black vote in New York, the point he had stressed at the secret White House meetings in the spring. It was vital that Truman had no opposition from organized labor, as Byrnes did. It was important that Truman was seen by the conservative side of the party—the southerners’ side—as the kind of politician they could work with, who would “go along” in the old phrase, as Wallace never could. It was also very important that Truman had no enemies, that nearly everybody liked Harry Truman, and especially in the Senate, where there would be much work to do when the war was over and the Senate once again, as after the first war, would take part in establishing the peace. But given Ed Flynn’s concern about the black vote, it was, after all, Truman’s record on civil rights—his stand in the Senate against the poll tax, his Sedalia speech in 1940, his talk to black delegates at the 1940 convention—that made him the right man, a somewhat ironic turn for the son of unreconstructed Missouri lineage who would soon be accused of having once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Roosevelt declared himself well pleased with the outcome and wired Truman his congratulations. Harry Hopkins, somewhat in contradiction to what he had told Jimmy Byrnes, said later that the President had had an eye on Truman all along. “People seemed to think that Truman was just suddenly pulled out of a hat—but that wasn’t true,” said Hopkins. Bernard Baruch said that while everyone professed a willingness to do what the Boss—Roosevelt—wanted, the Boss did what Ed Flynn wanted.

Roosevelt’s son Jimmy, a Marine officer who had been with him in San Diego at the time of the nomination, later wrote of his father’s “irritability over what was happening in Chicago” and of his “apparent indifference as to whom the convention selected” as a running mate. “Although Father did not commit himself, I came away with the distinct impression that he really preferred Justice William O. Douglas as the vice-presidential nominee. But he professed not ‘to give a damn’ whether the delegates came up with Justice Douglas, Jimmy Byrnes, or Harry Truman.”

On the very day of his renomination at Chicago, Roosevelt had had a seizure, as only his son Jimmy knew. He had suddenly turned deathly pale, with a look of agony in his face, “Jimmy, I don’t know if I can make it—I have horrible pains,” Roosevelt said, barely able to get the words out. Jimmy helped him lie down on the floor of the railroad car and watched over him for about ten minutes, terrified, until his father asked to be helped to his feet again. Soon afterward the Commander in Chief was driven to a hilltop above the Pacific where—chin up, smiling, intent—he watched ten thousand Marines storm ashore from Higgins boats in a dress rehearsal for an amphibious landing.

IV

On Tuesday, August 18, 1944, in the shade of a magnolia tree said to have been planted by Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had lunch on the South Lawn of the White House. Because of the heat, Roosevelt suggested they take off their jackets. So it was in their shirtsleeves, seated at a small round table set with crystal and silver from the Coolidge years, that the two men posed together for photographers for the first time.

In background, interests, personality, in everything from the sounds of their voices to the kind of company they enjoyed to the patterns of their careers, they could not have been much more dissimilar. Roosevelt was now in his twelfth year in office. He had been President for so long and through such trying, stirring times that it seemed to many Americans, including the junior Senator from Missouri, that he was virtually the presidency itself. His wealth, education, the social position he had known since boyhood were everything Harry Truman never had. Life and customs at the Roosevelt family estate on the upper Hudson River were as far removed from Jackson County, Missouri, as some foreign land. Roosevelt fancied himself a farmer. To Truman, Roosevelt was the kind of farmer who had never pulled a weed, never known debt, or crop failure, or a father’s call to roll out of bed at 5:30 on a bitter cold morning.

Truman, with his Monday night poker games, his Masonic ring and snappy bow ties, the Main Street pals, the dry Missouri voice, was entirely, undeniably middle American. He had only to open his mouth and his origins were plain. It wasn’t just that he came from a particular part of the country, geographically, but from a specific part of the American experience, an authentic pioneer background, and a specific place in the American imagination. His Missouri, as he loved to emphasize, was the Missouri of Mark Twain and Jesse James. In manner and appearance, he might have stepped from a novel by Sinclair Lewis, an author Truman is not known to have read. To anyone taking him at face value, this might have been George F. Babbitt having lunch with the President under the Jackson magnolia.

Roosevelt, on the other hand, was from the world of Edith Wharton stories and drawings by Charles Dana Gibson. He was the authentic American patrician come to power, no matter that he loved politics or a night of poker with “the boys” quite as much as the Senator from Missouri, or that he, too, was a Mason and chose a bow tie as many mornings as not, including this one. Roosevelt had been given things all of his life—houses, furniture, servants, travels abroad. Truman had been given almost nothing. He had never had a house to call his own. He had been taught from childhood, and by rough experience, that what he became would depend almost entirely on what he did. Roosevelt had always known the possibilities open to him—indeed, how much was expected of him—because of who he was.

Both were men of exceptional determination, with great reserves of personal courage and cheerfulness. They were alike too in their enjoyment of people. (The human race, Truman once told a reporter, was an “excellent outfit.”) Each had an active sense of humor and was inclined to be dubious of those who did not. But Roosevelt, who loved stories, loved also to laugh at his own, while Truman was more of a listener and laughed best when somebody else told “a good one.” Roosevelt enjoyed flattery, Truman was made uneasy by it. Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations. He was a master of the circuitous solution to problems, of the pleasing if ambiguous answer to difficult questions. He was sensitive to nuances in a way Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly, too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions. His answers to questions, even complicated questions, were nearly always direct and assured, plainly said, and followed often by a conclusive “And that’s all there is to it,” an old Missouri expression, when in truth there may have been a great deal more “to it.”

Each of them had been tested by his own painful struggle, Roosevelt with crippling polio, Truman with debt, failure, obscurity, and the heavy stigma of the Pendergasts. Roosevelt liked to quote the admonition of his old headmaster at Groton, Dr. Endicott Peabody: “Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization is forever upward….” Assuredly Truman would have subscribed to the same vision. They were two optimists at heart, each in his way faithful to the old creed of human progress. But there had been nothing in Roosevelt’s experience like the night young Harry held the lantern as his mother underwent surgery, nothing like the Argonne, or Truman’s desperate fight for political survival in 1940.

Roosevelt, as would be said, was a kind of master conjurer. He had imagination, he was theatrical. If, as his cousins saw him, Harry Truman was Horatio, then Franklin Roosevelt was Prospero.

Truman was often called a simple man, which he was not. “I wonder why we are made so that what we really think and feel we cover up,” he had once confided to Bess, and some who knew him well would, in retrospect, feel he had withheld too much of himself from public view, and that this was among his greatest limitations. But in contrast to Franklin Roosevelt—and it was Truman’s destiny from this point forward to be forever contrasted to Roosevelt—he was truly uncomplicated, open, and genuine. In private correspondence Truman could be extremely revealing, whereas Roosevelt never dropped the mask, never poured his heart out on paper as did Truman in hundreds of letters and notes to himself, even after it was clear that he was to be a figure in history.

To many Americans, Truman would always be the “little man from Missouri.” Roosevelt was larger than life, even in a wheelchair. He had that force of personality that Truman so admired in a leader and to a degree rarely equaled in the ranks of the presidency. This, too, was something Truman knew he did not have himself, as he knew he had no exceptional intellectual prowess, as had, say, Henry Wallace. “I am not a deep thinker as you are,” he had told Wallace only a day earlier when asking Wallace for his help in the campaign ahead. Yet Truman, as Republican Congressman Joe Martin would write, was “smarter by far than most people realized.”

In some ways Truman would have felt more in common, more at ease, with the earlier Roosevelt, Theodore, had he been host for the lunch. They were much more alike in temperament. They could have talked books, Army life, or the boyhood handicap of having to meet the world wearing thick spectacles. Or possibly the old fear of being thought a sissy. Like Theodore Roosevelt, and unlike Franklin, Truman had never known what it was to be glamorous.

The contrast in appearance between the President and his new running mate was striking. Truman looked robust, younger than his age. The President, though only two years older, seemed a haggard old man. He had returned only the day before from his long mission to the Pacific, and from the sag of his shoulders, the ashen circles under his eyes, it was clear the trip had taken its toll. Truman, who had not seen the President in more than a year, was stunned by how he looked. Even the famous voice seemed to have no energy or resonance.

The lunch was sardines on toast. The conversation dealt mainly with the campaign ahead and was not very private or revealing, since the President’s daughter, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, joined them. Truman would later repeat only one remark of Roosevelt’s. The President told him not to travel by airplane, because it was important that one of them stay alive.

To his dismay, Truman noticed that Roosevelt’s hand shook so badly he was unable to pour cream in his coffee.

“The President looked fine and ate a bigger lunch than I did,” Truman told reporters afterward, already becoming party to the fiction of a steady hand at the helm. To Bess and Margaret, who were still in Independence, he described how Roosevelt had given him two roses, one for each of them. “You should have seen your Pa walking down Connecticut Avenue…with his hat blown up by the wind (so he looked like a college boy—gray hair and all) and two rosebuds in hand,” he wrote, as if he hadn’t a worry in the world. But arriving at his Senate office, he appeared noticeably upset. He was greatly concerned about the President, he told Harry Vaughan, and described how Roosevelt’s hand had trembled so pouring his cream in his coffee that he put more in the saucer than in the cup. “His hands were shaking and he talks with considerable difficulty…. It doesn’t seem to be any mental lapse of any kind,” Truman said, “but physically he’s just going to pieces.”

In September, Truman took Eddie McKim to a White House reception, where McKim was so shocked by the President’s appearance he wondered if Roosevelt would live long enough to be inaugurated, if Henry Wallace might become President after all. On the way out, as they were walking through the gate, McKim told Truman to turn and look back, because that was where he would be living before long. “I’m afraid you’re right, Eddie,” Truman said. “And it scares the hell out of me.”

To his cousin Laura Delano, Roosevelt would later remark that he liked Harry Truman. “Harry is a fine man, intelligent, able, and has integrity. He doesn’t know much about foreign affairs, but he’s learning fast…”

How Truman honestly felt about Roosevelt can be deduced only from odd remarks to friends or in his private notes and correspondence, and the picture that emerges, though incomplete, is not complimentary. He called him Santa Claus. He called him a prima donna and a fakir. Writing about Bernard Baruch, whom he disliked, Truman would say, “There never was a greater egotist unless it was Franklin D.” Another time, describing Roosevelt to Bess, he wrote, “He’s so damn afraid that he won’t have all the power and glory that he won’t let his friends help as it should be done.”

There was little subtle about Truman. He was never remote, rarely ever evasive. He had been raised on straight answers by people who nearly always meant what they said. Roosevelt wasn’t that way. “You know how it is when you see the President,” Truman once told Allen Drury. “He does all the talking, and he talks about what he wants to talk about, and he never talks about anything you want to talk about, so there isn’t much you can do.”

To Republican Owen Brewster, Truman said he had but one objection to the President and that was “he lies.”

Such feelings, however, would never be publicly expressed, not by Senator Harry Truman of his President, his Commander in Chief and leader of the Democratic Party. That would be unthinkably disloyal, not to say politically unwise and unprofessional. On occasion Truman could also rise to Roosevelt’s defense and in a manner not unlike that of his father. At a meeting in Boston in a room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel that fall, halfway through the campaign, Joe Kennedy began vilifying Roosevelt. “Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son-of-a-bitch that killed my son Joe?” Kennedy said, referring to his oldest son, who had died in the war. Kennedy went on, saying Roosevelt had caused the war. Truman, by his later account, stood all he could, then told Kennedy to keep quiet or he would throw him out the window. Bob Hannegan had to step in and take Truman aside to remind him of how important Kennedy’s money was to the Democratic Party.

His first official speech of the campaign was delivered on a steamy, full-moon night in front of the old red-brick courthouse in Lamar, just up the street from the house where he was born. He spoke for half an hour, never once referring to himself. Experience was what the country needed in such critical times. Franklin Roosevelt was what the country needed. “You can’t afford to take a chance. You should endorse tried and experienced leadership,” Truman said, as if his own comparative inexperience were in no way part of the equation.

And this was the theme that he carried cross-country, traveling by rail in an old combination sleeper and dining car called the Henry Stanley. Hugh Fulton, Matt Connelly, Eddie McKim, and Fred Canfil were along to assist.

The youthful, handsome Connelly, whose own experience thus far had been only as an investigator for the Truman Committee, would remember how the senator recruited him as a political right-hand man:

Truman came back from Chicago after the convention and the office was a madhouse…photographers, press, so at 5 I locked the door and said, “I think you’ve had enough for today.”

He said, “Yes, it was quite a day. Let’s go back to the ‘doghouse,’ I want to talk to you.” There he said, “How about a drink? You like that damn Scotch, don’t you?”

I said, “I’ll mix them.”

He said, “No, I’m up to something. I’ll mix them.” So he made a drink and sat down. He said, “You know, I’ve got to make a campaign trip.”

I said, “I assumed you would.”

He said, “I want you to go along with me.”

“You want me to go along with you! What do I know about politics?”

He said, “Never mind that. You’ve got a pretty good teacher.”

The route was from New Orleans through Texas and New Mexico, then up the Pacific coast to Portland and Seattle, then east all the way to Boston, with a dozen stops en route. From Boston Truman went to New York, then Washington, where finally he turned homeward again, by way of Wheeling, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis.

At Uvalde, Texas, the morning the train stopped, old John Nance Garner was waiting on the station platform dressed in khaki work pants and a battered ten-gallon hat, his hands stained from picking pecans. “I’m glad to see you, Harry. Bless your old soul,” said the former Vice President, who after falling out with Roosevelt had left Washington vowing never again to cross the Potomac River as long as he lived, a vow he kept. Somewhere in the world it must be twelve o’clock and time for a drink, Garner speculated. Truman told him to come right aboard.

In Seattle he addressed a crowd of ten thousand. At little Avery, Idaho, beside the Shoshone National Forest, only three women, schoolteachers, were waiting when the train stopped, but he spoke for fifteen minutes just the same. It wasn’t their fault they were the only ones there, Truman would explain. “He’s just like the rest of us,” said Montana Congressman Mike Mansfield, introducing Truman at a lunch in Butte. On a drive through Pittsburgh he had a twenty-six-man motorcycle escort and huge crowds stretching for miles.

He was not an exciting speaker. It was not a colorful campaign. He just kept pounding away at the need for Roosevelt’s leadership to win the war and establish the peace. There could be no return to the isolationism of the Republicans once the war was over, no Congress in the control of Republicans like Nye and Taft. To one reporter on the train, it was “the farmer-neighborliness,” the “genuineness” of the candidate that made him appealing and believable, far more than anything he said.

Once, on the train, he was wrenched from his sleep by a vivid nightmare. He had dreamt Roosevelt was dead and he, Harry Truman, was President.

The Republicans tried hard to make him an issue. “Clear it with Sidney” became a Republican war cry. But all efforts by Republicans and reporters to turn up something unsavory from his Pendergast years came to nothing.

Bess’s Senate salary was reported and deplored, just as he had feared. He was portrayed repeatedly as small-time, backwater Harry, the failed haberdasher. (“He couldn’t even make good selling shirts.”) A rumor spread that he was part Jewish, again, as in years past, on the basis that he had a grandfather named Solomon. He was not Jewish, Truman responded, but if he were he would never be ashamed of it.

The charge that he had been a member of the Klan, which he categorically denied, appeared first in the Hearst papers. The story broke shortly before he reached Boston, where, with the Irish-Catholic vote at stake, it might have done irreparable harm. To Truman and his entourage there was no question that the story had been Seen purposefully planted to hit Boston just in time for his arrival and that the day was only saved by the celebrated former Governor of Massachusetts James Michael Curley, then a member of Congress, who spoke from the same platform with Truman.

“Jim Curley got up to make his little speech,” remembered Matt Connelly, for whom it was one of the memorable moments of the campaign, “and [he] said, ‘We have a very unusual candidate for Vice President. He goes to California, the word comes back to us he’s a Jew; he arrives in the Midwest, the word comes back to us that he’s a member of the Klan.’ And he turned, ‘Mr. Vice President, I invite you to join my lodge, The Ancient Order of Hibernians. We’d be glad to have you as one of our members, and I assure you, we will get out the vote.’

“I said to Mr. Truman, ‘That takes care of the Klan.’ ”

But it was the old Pendergast association that dogged him most, and especially when coupled with the question of Roosevelt’s health. Attacks by the Chicago Tribune were sharpest of all:

If they confess that there is the slightest chance that Mr. Roosevelt may die or become incapacitated in the next four years, they are faced with the grinning skeleton of Truman the bankrupt, Truman the pliant tool of Boss Pendergast in looting Kansas City’s county government, Truman the yes-man and apologist in the Senate for political gangsters.

To the immense relief of the Trumans, nothing was said of the death of Bess’s father, and Truman’s anger erupted only over remarks by Republican Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous wife of publisher Henry Luce, who, poking fun at the idea of Bess working on his Senate staff, began calling her “Payroll Bess.” If, as Truman had said, his mother didn’t bring him up to be a statesman, then she would not be disappointed, Mrs. Luce also declared.

In the normal rough-and-tumble of a campaign, Truman could take nearly anything said about him, but at any mention of his family, even an implied slight, he got “hotter than a depot stove.” He would have nothing but contempt for Clare Boothe Luce from that point on, commenting privately that she spelled her name L-O-O-S-E.

Between Truman and the White House there was little or no communication. The real battle, after all, was the one Roosevelt was waging against Dewey, and to the delight of those close to the President, the battle revived him wonderfully. Though he made few public appearances, one before the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington was considered the best campaign speech of his entire career. He seemed his old self, spontaneously adding a little extra to the prepared text, delivering it with great, feigned gravity and savoring the moment as only a seasoned performer could:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks—on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but [pause] Fala does resent them….

As Robert Sherwood, his speechwriter, later observed, the Fala story put the needed excitement into the campaign. “The champ” was back. Ed Flynn, after all his anguish and exertions over the choice of a Vice President, would later tell friends that Roosevelt was in such fine form in the campaign that he could have won had he put Fala on the ticket.

The night the President spoke in Chicago, more than a hundred thousand people packed Soldier Field. He “improved visibly in strength and resilience,” recalled Sherwood. In New York, in the face of a cold driving rain, he rode for hours in an open car, bare-headed, so millions of people could see him with their own eyes and know he was all right. It was an ordeal that could have put a younger, stronger man in the hospital, but at the end Roosevelt seemed exhilarated, glad for the chance to show what he could take.

Dewey had raised the specter of Communist infiltration in Washington. “Now…with the aid of Sidney Hillman…the Communists are seizing control of the New Deal…to control the Government of the United States,” Dewey warned. Roosevelt had grown to detest Dewey as he never had a political opponent, and like the driving rain, this too seemed to brace him up.

The Trumans waited out the returns in Kansas City, in a suite at the Muehlebach, a throng of old political and Battery D friends on hand to help celebrate, and before the long night ended a large number of them were extremely drunk. “I was shocked,” remembered Margaret.

One old political friend from southwest Missouri, Harry Easley, stayed on with Truman after everyone had left. Stretched out on a bed, Truman talked of how lonely he had felt through the campaign. He had seen the look of death in Roosevelt’s face, Truman said. “And he knew…that he would be President before the term was out,” Easley remembered. “He said he was going to have to depend on his friends…people like me, he said…he knew that he was going to be the President of the United States, and I think it just scared the very devil out of him…even the thought of it.’

It was nearly four in the morning before Dewey conceded, and the victory was narrow, the closest presidential election since 1916. The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won by 3 million votes, carrying thirty-six of the forty-eight states. Yet a shift of just 300,000 votes in the right states would have elected Dewey and Bricker. Dewey asked all Americans to join him in the hope that “in the difficult years ahead Divine Providence will guide and protect the President of the United States.”

Roosevelt, before turning in at Hyde Park, said, “I still think he is a son-of-a-bitch.”

In deference to the tragedy of war and the President’s limited strength, the inauguration at noon, January 20, 1945, was a somber affair lasting less than fifteen minutes. It was the first wartime inauguration since Lincoln and the first ever held at the White House, the ceremony conducted on the South Portico before a crowd that included numbers of disabled soldiers. A thin crust of snow covered the lawn. The day was grim. There were no parades. The red jackets of the Marine Band were the one note of cheer in the whole chill, muted scene.

Truman, wrapped in a heavy dark blue overcoat, his shoulders braced as if at attention, took the oath of office from Henry Wallace, a serious look on his face. Then the President was helped to his feet by his Marine son Jimmy and a Secret Service agent. Roosevelt wore only a thin summer-weight suit and moved slowly, stiff-legged from his braces, until he could reach out and grip the edge of the lectern. Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, standing close by, was suddenly reminded of how her husband had looked when he went into his decline.

V

Truman was Vice President for eighty-two days and as busy as he had ever been, doing what was customarily expected of a Vice President—presiding over the Senate, attending parties and receptions, shaking endless numbers of hands. Roosevelt was out of the country until the end of February. He had slipped away from Washington in strictest secrecy just two days after the inauguration, traveling by rail to Norfolk, where the cruiser Quincy carried him to the Mediterranean Sea, to the island of Malta. From Malta he went by plane to the old Black Sea health resort of Yalta, for his second Big Three conference with Churchill and Stalin. Jimmy Byrnes had gone, too, as a special adviser, and so had Ed Flynn, as a kind of official stowaway. Vice President Truman had been told only that if it was “absolutely urgent,” he could make contact with the President through the White House. Since taking office, Truman had seen nothing of Roosevelt nor had he been told anything at all about the conference. Truman had not even met the new Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius.

To his surprise, however, he was enjoying himself. The round of social engagements not only didn’t bother him, he delighted in it. “The amiable Missourian with the touch of country in his voice and manner,” reported Time, “had conquered a schedule that had Mrs. Truman and Capitol society writers breathless.”

Perle Mesta, heir to Oklahoma oil money and the widow of a wealthy Pittsburgh toolmaker, gave a party in the Vice President’s honor that was described as “one of the most glittering in Washington’s long history of glittery parties.” Mrs. Mesta had come to Washington initially as a Republican, but “jumped the fence” to become a Democrat only the summer before, because the Republicans had refused to renominate Wendell Willkie. Now she had “taken up” Harry Truman.

[The party] had all the charm of an English court tea, the sparkle of a Viennese ball, and the razzle-dazzle of a Hollywood premiere. The best names in officialdom and society attended. Shirt fronts gleamed with star-ruby studs. Evening gowns fairly dripped with diamonds and pearls. Champagne, at $20 a bottle, flowed in cascades….

“He circulated around in as comfortable, unpretentious, and agreeable manner as could be,” wrote the author John Gunther, after seeing Truman at a dinner party given by the foreign affairs editor of the Washington Post. Truman had been the first to arrive, Gunther noted.

He was lively and animated…a guest among other guests.

I had the impression of what you might call bright grayness. Both the clothes and hair were neat and gray. The gray-framed spectacles magnified the gray-hazel eyes, but there was no grayness in the mind…. His conversational manner is alert and poised. He talks very swiftly, yet with concision. You have to listen hard to get it all.

Later, during an interview on the Hill, when Gunther asked him what he liked most, Truman answered, “People.”

Old friends on the Hill found him wholly unaffected by his new role, “homespun as ever.” He kept his same quarters in the Senate Office Building, Room 240, using the Vice President’s office in the Capitol mainly as a place to greet visitors, under the dazzle of a seven-tiered crystal chandelier.

For senators of both parties it became, as Charlie Ross wrote, “the most natural thing in the world” to drop in on Truman for a chat, or perhaps a nip of bourbon. “Many of them observed on these occasions that they had never been in the Vice President’s office when Henry Wallace was there. Wallace to them was otherworldly. He didn’t speak their language; Truman does.”

He, Bess, and Margaret were still living in the same five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue at the same $120-a-month rent. The only difference was that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Wallace, had also moved in.

“Harry looks better than he has for ages—is really putting on weight,” Bess wrote to Ethel Noland. “Marg has gone to a picture show and Harry to a poker party,” she told Ethel in another letter. “Mother is practically asleep in her chair—so it’s very peaceful.”

The one new personal convenience with the job was an official car, a black Mercury limousine, and a driver, Tom Harty, who picked the Vice President up each morning and returned him home again at day’s end. En route to the Capitol, they would drop Margaret off at George Washington University, where she was in her junior year. Also, in the front seat rode a young man whom Truman at first assumed was a friend of Harty’s who needed a lift. He was George Drescher, the first Secret Service man to be assigned to a Vice President. The idea had been suggested by Harry Vaughan, who had returned from active duty with the Air Corps to become Truman’s military aide, another first for a Vice President. Appalled to find that no security arrangements had been made for Truman, Vaughan went to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and told him it seemed a bit incongruous to have seventy or a hundred people guarding the President and no one at all guarding the Vice President.

“I used to get down here to the office at 7 o’clock,” Truman wrote his mother and sister from his office.

But now I have to take Margaret to school every morning and I don’t get here until 8:30. Reathel Odum [who had replaced Mildred Dryden as his stenographer] is always here at that time and we wade through a stack of mail a foot high. By that time I have to see people—one at a time just as fast as they can go through the office without seeming to hurry them. Then I go over to the Capitol gold-plated office and see Senators and curiosity seekers for an hour and then the Senate meets and it’s my job to get ’em prayed for—and goodness knows they need it, and then get the business going by staying in the chair for an hour and then see more Senators and curiosity people who want to see what a V.P. looks like and if he walks and talks and has teeth.

What inner fear or concern Truman still felt over the President’s health, he seems to have kept to himself. Nor did he appear to be making any effort to prepare himself for Roosevelt’s death. It was as if all the dire speculation of the summer before, the nightmare he had had on the campaign train, were forgotten, locked away, now that the unthinkable was so much nearer at hand. The closest he came to open speculation on the future and its problems was an off-the-record conversation with a correspondent for Time, Frank McNaughton, who later wrote to his editor in New York:

Truman says simply that he hopes to be of value to the administration through his contacts in the Senate, and he conceives the VP’s job to be a sort of liaison between the executive and legislative branches. Truman is fervent in his declared hope that he can do this right up to the hilt.

“There is a difficult situation after every war, and disagreements and misunderstandings spring up between the executive and legislative,” Truman, an expert on history, says. “Madison encountered it, Andrew Jackson experienced it in an aggravated degree, and Woodrow Wilson had to struggle with it. There is always a tremendous reaction after every such emergency. I don’t think the human kind has changed so much, in that regard, but I have hopes that this will be a period in history when all will rise to the seriousness of the occasion and cooperate for the good of this country and the people.”

We can’t attribute it to Truman, but he is tremendously afraid that there will be a postwar struggle between executive and legislative, and between the Allied powers, that will wreck the peace once and for all. He believes it is going to take the greatest sagacity and diplomacy to prevent postwar national and international struggles for power and prestige, and he conceives it to be his job to effect, to the best of his ability, a smooth cooperation and liaison between the Senate and the President….

His more immediate task was to help get Henry Wallace approved by the Senate as the new Secretary of Commerce. However, it was his part in two other events, both occurring in Roosevelt’s absence, that drew the greatest attention.

In Kansas City, on January 26, less than a week after the inauguration, Tom Pendergast died at the age of seventy-two. Since his return from prison nearly five years before, Pendergast had been living in the big red brick house on Ward Parkway, where, in steadily declining health, he was seen by few outside his immediate family. His name rarely appeared in the papers any longer. His political influence was entirely gone. By court ruling, he was even restricted from setting foot ever again at 1908 Main Street. Truman is not known to have called on him from the time Pendergast left prison, but then to have done so would have been extremely difficult.

But on hearing of T.J.’s death, Truman decided at once that he would attend the funeral. He took off for Kansas City in an Army bomber and was among the several thousand mourners who filed past the bier at Visitation Catholic Church. He was photographed coming and going and paying his respects to the family, all of which struck large numbers of people everywhere as outrageous behavior for a Vice President—to be seen honoring the memory of a convicted criminal. Yet many, possibly a larger number, saw something admirable and courageous in a man risen so high who still knew who he was and refused to forget a friend.

Two weeks later he was back in the news, with more pictures, and again, to some, as a figure of ridicule. He had agreed to take part in a stage show for servicemen held at the Washington Press Club’s canteen. He was playing an upright piano, to an audience of about eight hundred men in uniform, when actress Lauren Bacall, also part of the entertainment, was boosted on top of the piano to strike a leggy pose as the delighted crowd cheered and flashbulbs popped. “I was just a kid,” she would remember. “My press agent made me do it.” “Anything can happen in this country,” a soldier was quoted at the time. The photographs of the Vice President serenading the glamorous Hollywood star were an instant sensation. What disturbed many people was that Truman appeared to be having such a good time, which he was. Bess was furious. She told him he should play the piano in public no more.

On March 1, in the House Chamber, at a solemn joint session of Congress, with Majority Leader John McCormack beside him, Vice President Truman sat on the dais behind the President as in slow, often rambling fashion Franklin Roosevelt reported on some of what had happened at Yalta. He read the speech sitting down, explaining it was easier not to carry 10 pounds of steel on his legs, which was the first time he had made public mention of his physical disability.

He appeared more pale and drawn than ever. His left hand trembled noticeably as he turned the pages. “It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree it has been so far, a fruitful one.” At times, losing his place, he ad-libbed. “Of course there were a few other little matters, but I won’t go into them here.” At times, his voice seemed to give out and his hand shook again as he reached for a glass of water. “Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive again.”

Here and there in the chamber, listening to him speak, were more than a few who knew enough to have sensed what meaning could lie in these last words—John McCormack, Minority Leader Martin, Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, Henry Wallace, Jimmy Byrnes, Sam Rosenman, who had written much of the speech, Steve Early, the President’s press secretary, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who was watching from the gallery, perhaps a dozen in total who knew the great secret about which the Vice President had been told nothing.

“I saw the President immediately after his speech had been concluded,” Truman wrote. “Plainly, he was a very weary man.” Roosevelt, as he told Truman, was leaving as soon as possible for Warm Springs, Georgia and a rest.

In the stack of mail on his desk to be answered the morning of Thursday, April 12, was a letter from Jim Pendergast, who needed his old friend Harry’s help. “For about a year,” Jim wrote, “the Pendergast Wholesale Liquor Company has been trying to get bottles and cartons in order to carry on their business. They have made three applications and these applications have all been approved by the local office of the War Production Board but when they get to Washington they have all been rejected.” The company, Jim explained, had over eleven thousand barrels of straight bourbon whiskey stored in Kentucky but no bottles or cartons. The situation was serious.

“We will see what we can do right away,” Truman dictated to Miss Odum.

He had dressed for the day with customary care, in a double-breasted gray suit with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket neatly folded so that three corners were showing, a white shirt, and a dark blue polka-dot bow tie. He looked scrubbed and well barbered, the picture of health and self-possession. In the Senate Chamber later in the day, reporters in the press gallery would comment on his obvious enjoyment of people as he moved among different groups of senators on the floor. “It’s wonderful, this Senate,” he had said in a press conference only the day before. “It’s the greatest place on earth…. The grandest bunch of fellows you could ever find anywhere.”

The rest of the mail took longer than usual, so that he was late getting over to the Senate Chamber, where the day’s work had already begun, Alben Barkley substituting for him on the dais. The time of Truman’s arrival was approximately 11:30 A.M.

Senator Willis of Indiana was just relinquishing the floor. Truman and Barkley shook hands and Truman, taking his seat, handed a few official communications to the reading clerk, who announced them to the Senate. One concerned plans being made by the town of Patton, Pennsylvania, for a welcome-home celebration in honor of General George S. Patton. Another was a request from the legislature of Alaska to increase the reindeer herds in Alaska’s national parks by declaring open season on wolves and coyotes.

Many of those in the chamber were people Truman had known since he first came to the Senate ten years earlier. And for all that the world had changed, all the tumult and tragedy of the war, the old room itself looked much the same, except for a mass of ugly steel girders overhead, supports put up in 1940 to hold an old ceiling that had been on the verge of collapse. They had been installed as a temporary expedient only, but then, because of the war, the restoration work had to be postponed, and so there they remained, “barn rafters,” beneath which the business of the Senate continued.

Senator Hawkes of New Jersey asked for printing in the Congressional Record of a petition from the Order of the Sons of Italy to invite Italy to the forthcoming San Francisco Conference to organize the United Nations. Senator Reed of Kansas asked that nineteen letters and telegrams be printed in the Record, all describing the critical shortage of boxcars for grain shipments. The boxcar situation, said the senator, was the worst he had ever seen; wheat was spoiling on the ground.

The main business before the Senate was the ratification of a water treaty with Mexico, affecting use of the Colorado and Rio Grande. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Connally spoke first, followed by Ernest McFarland of Arizona. Both urged ratification. Truman had a page deliver a note to Republican Senator Saltonstall of Massachusetts, asking Saltonstall to come up and take his place. “I have a Missouri soldier boy in my office,” explained Truman, who promised to be back in no more than an hour. Noticing an apple on the dais, Saltonstall asked what would happen if he ate it.

“You will take the consequences,” Truman said.

Truman had always been a man of his word, Saltonstall would remember, telling the story years later. “He was back in an hour.”

At another point, the Vice President was seen in a friendly huddle with Republicans Wiley of Wisconsin and Wherry of Nebraska. Allen Drury, watching from the press gallery, remarked to Tony Vaccaro of the United Press that Roosevelt was fortunate to have so good a man as Truman to deal with the Senate. Vaccaro, frowning, said Roosevelt would make no use of him. Vaccaro, who had lately been spending time with the Vice President, said, “Truman doesn’t know what’s going on. Roosevelt won’t tell him anything.”

As the record would show, Truman had met with the President exactly twice, except for Cabinet meetings, since becoming Vice President—once on March 8 and again on March 19, ten days before Roosevelt left for Warm Springs—and neither time was anything of consequence discussed.

About midway through the afternoon Senator Alexander Wiley, Republican of Wisconsin, commenced his remarks on the Mexican water issue, speaking not always to the point and in numbing detail when he did:

It may be noted that the report of the Bureau of Reclamation of the problems of the Imperial Valley and vicinity considered that 800,000 acres ultimately would be irrigated in Mexico, and that some storage would be required for this purpose. Under the present duty of water in the Mexico area, the 800,000 acres of land would require a diversion from the river of 4,800,000 acre-feet of water. The aggregate acreage under the two items to which the footnote in the above table applies is…

Truman decided to make other use of his time by writing a letter to his mother and sister, even though he had little news to report:

Dear Mamma and Mary—I am trying to write you a letter today from the desk of the President of the Senate while a windy Senator from Wisconsin is making a speech on a subject with which he is in no way familiar….

Hope you are having a nice spell of weather. We’ve had a week of beautiful weather but it is raining and misting today. I don’t think it’s going to last long. Hope not, for I must fly to Providence, R.I., Sunday morning.

Turn on your radio tomorrow night at 9:30 your time and you’ll hear Harry make a Jefferson Day address to the nation. I think I’ll be on all the networks so it ought not to be hard to get me. It will be followed by the President, whom I’ll introduce.

Hope you are both well and stay that way.

Love to you both.

Write when you can.

Harry

At the conclusion of Wiley’s speech, Barkley moved for a recess. It was four minutes to five by the clock over the main lobby entrance.

Truman came down from the dais, went out through the swinging doors on his left, crossed the Senators’ Private Lobby, and stepped into the Vice President’s office to tell Harry Vaughan that he would be with Sam Rayburn should anybody want him.

Then, eluding his Secret Service guard, the Vice President walked the length of the Capitol, cutting through the Senate Reception Room, out past the eight-foot white marble statue of Benjamin Franklin, down the long, tiled corridor, around “Mark Twain’s Cuspidor” (the columned well of the Senate Rotunda, so named by Twain because of the tobacco leaves on its columns), on through the main rotunda under the dome, through Statuary Hall (the old House Chamber), and briefly along another corridor to a stairway; down the stairs to the ground floor, left down one hall, right down another to Room 9, Sam Rayburn’s private hideaway, known unofficially as “the Board of Education.”

Rayburn, who referred to it simply as “downstairs,” met there for a “libation” every afternoon, once the formal business of “upstairs” was concluded. It was an important part of his day, and to be invited to join him, even once or twice in a term, was considered the sign that one had arrived. Truman was among the regulars.

Moving along at his usual brisk pace, he would have covered the distance from the Vice President’s office in less than three minutes. So it must have been just after five o’clock when he came in.

Though pictured often as small and plain, the room was about 20 feet in length, its ornate ceiling busy with painted birds and animals. The furnishings, too, were large, comfortable and utilitarian—big, worn black leather chairs, a long couch, a sink, and a large refrigerator that was camouflaged with veneer to more or less match the big desk, where Rayburn kept the whiskey.

Two others were already with the Speaker when Truman arrived, Lewis Deschler, the House Parliamentarian, and James M. Barnes, a staff man at the White House assigned to congressional liaison. The gray afternoon outside was fading, the room growing dim. No one had bothered yet to turn on the lights.

Apparently it was Deschler who reminded Rayburn that Truman had had a call from the White House.

“Steve Early wants you to call him right away,” Rayburn said. Truman mixed himself a drink, then dialed the number, National 1414.

“This is the V.P.,” he said.

Steve Early’s voice sounded tense and strange. Truman was to come to the White House as “quickly and as quietly” as he could, and to enter by the main entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue.

As Lewis Deschler later recounted, Truman lost all his color. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” he said, putting down the phone.

He was wanted at the White House right away, he told the others. They must say nothing.

He went out the door alone. Then he began to run, taking a different route. He kept to the ground floor this time, racing down a hall between a double line of bronze and marble Civil War generals and forgotten state governors, his shoes pounding on the marble floor. He ran through the echoing old Crypt, past the Senate barbershop, then up a flight of stairs with brass banisters to his office—to get his hat.

He told Harry Vaughan he was on his way to the White House and to keep that to himself. In minutes he was in the big Mercury with Tom Harty driving, but still no Secret Service guard, moving with all possible speed through the evening traffic. By now it was approximately 5:15 P.M.

What thoughts were rushing through his mind, he never fully revealed. “I thought I was going down there to meet the President,” he later said.

“I didn’t allow myself to think anything else.” To his mother he would write it occurred to him that perhaps Roosevelt had returned from Warm Springs because the retired Episcopal bishop of Arizona, an old friend of the President’s, had been buried that day. “I thought that maybe he wanted me to do some special piece of liaison work with the Congress and had sent for me to see him after the funeral.”

But if this was so, why had he run back to his office? “I ran all the way,” he told her. What did he imagine he was running toward? Or leaving behind?

At the White House, the long black car turned off Pennsylvania, through the northwest gate, and swept up the drive, stopping under the North Portico. The time was 5:25.

Two ushers were waiting at the door. They took his hat and escorted him to a small, oak-paneled elevator, more like an ornate cage, that had been installed in the Theodore Roosevelt era and that ascended now very slowly to the second floor.

In the private quarters, across the center hall, in her sitting room, Mrs. Roosevelt was waiting. With her were Steve Early and her daughter and son-in-law, Anna and John Boettiger. Mrs. Roosevelt stepped forward and gently put her arm on Truman’s shoulder.

“Harry, the President is dead.”

Truman was unable to speak.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said at last.

“Is there anything we can do for you,” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

Part Three

To the Best of My Ability

9

The Moon, the Stars, and All the Planets

So ended an era and so began another.

—ALLEN DRURY

I

The news broke at 5:47 P.M., Eastern War Time, April 12, 1945.

International News Service was first on the wire, followed seconds later by the Associated Press, United Press, the four radio networks, and the Armed Forces Radio Service. In New York CBS interrupted a children’s serial about Daniel Boone called “Wilderness Road.” NBC broke into “Front-Page Farrell,” ABC interrupted “Captain Midnight,” and Mutual, “Tom Mix.”

In minutes the bulletin had reached every part of the country and much of the world. The time in London was near midnight. In Berlin, where it was already another day, Friday the 13th, an ecstatic Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, telephoned Hitler personally to proclaim it a turning point written in the stars. In Moscow, the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, was hosting an embassy party when a duty officer called to report what he had heard on a late broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service. At the Armed Forces Radio Station in Panama, Sergeant James Weathers, assigned to answer incoming calls, began picking up the phone and answering, “Yes, it’s true,” “Yes, it’s true,” over and over again.

Franklin Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia, at 4:45 in the afternoon (3:45, Warm Springs time). Two hours earlier, sitting at a card table signing papers, he had complained of a terrific headache, then suddenly collapsed, not to regain consciousness. As many accounts stated, his death at age sixty-three came in an hour of high triumph. “The armies and fleets under his direction as Commander-in-Chief were at the gates of Berlin and the shores of Japan’s home islands…and the cause he represented and led was nearing the conclusive phase of success.”

From the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt sent cables to her four sons in the service, saying their father had done his job to the end, as he would want them to do, a point Steve Early included in the initial White House announcement. To Early and Harry Truman she had also expressed a wish to fly to Warm Springs, but questioned whether it would be proper now for her to use a government plane. Truman, unhesitatingly, said she should. This and the arrival of Secretary of State Stettinius were among the few things he would remember from the scene in her study. Stettinius had appeared in the doorway with tears streaming down his face.

They agreed the Cabinet should be assembled at once and the Chief Justice summoned to administer the oath of office. Truman started downstairs for the West Wing. From the President’s office he telephoned Les Biffle. He wanted the congressional leadership to come at once, and a car sent for Mrs. Truman and Margaret. He then called the apartment and told Bess what had happened. She had not had the radio on. It was the first she had heard.

The West Wing throbbed with activity and tension. Reporters, photographers, White House staff people, the Secret Service, and a few of Truman’s own staff converged from several directions, crowding corridors and offices. Voices were hushed and tense. Telephones kept ringing. In the twilight outside, across Pennsylvania Avenue, in Lafayette Square, thousands of people gathered in silence.

By seven o’clock nearly everyone who was supposed to be there had assembled in the Cabinet Room: Stettinius and Chief Justice Harlan Stone, Sam Rayburn, John McCormack, Joe Martin, Henry Stimson, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Attorney General Francis Biddle, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Julius Krug, War Production Board Administrator, Fred M. Vinson, Director of the Office of War Mobilization, Admiral William Leahy, who was Roosevelt’s personal chief of staff, Bob Hannegan, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the only woman present until the arrival of Bess and Margaret. Missing were Postmaster General Frank Walker, who was ill, and Alben Barkley, who had decided to stay with Mrs. Roosevelt. Uniformed White House guards were at the doors.

Truman sat by himself in a brown leather chair, looking dreadful, “absolutely dazed.” When Bess came in, he crossed the room and took her hand. Little was said by anyone. Then, for what seemed an extremely long time, they all stood waiting while several of the staff went in search of a Bible. “It was a very somber group,” Stimson would record.

Bess, who had been crying almost from the moment she heard the news, dabbed repeatedly at her eyes with a handkerchief. Margaret would remember feeling as if she were going under anesthesia. None of it seemed quite real.

The only Bible to be found was an inexpensive Gideon edition with garish red edging to the pages. It had been in the desk drawer of the fastidious head usher, Howell Crim, a short, stooped, bald-headed man who now made sure it was properly dusted before placing it on the table. Truman would later tell his mother he could have brought Grandpa Truman’s Bible from his office bookcase had he only known.

He and Justice Stone took their places by the marble mantelpiece at the end of the room, beneath a portrait of Woodrow Wilson. Bess, Margaret, and the others filed in around them. A few reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen were told to come in. One of the staff recalled much milling about and confusion. The time on the clock on the mantel was 7:09, 2 hours and 24 minutes since Roosevelt’s death.

Truman glanced at the clock. “It said nine past seven when I started to swear the oath—I remember,” he later said. “I looked at it. And I remember the faces all around me….”

He picked up the Bible and held it in his left hand. He raised his right hand.

“I, Harry Shipp Truman,” Justice Stone began.

“I, Harry S. Truman,” Truman corrected him.

“…do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“So help you God,” added the Chief Justice.

“So help me God.”

His “sharp features taut,” as a reporter noted, Truman looked straight ahead through his thick, round glasses. The sudden, fervent way he kissed the Bible at the end of the ceremony impressed everyone present. It had all taken not more than a minute.

Afterward he asked the Cabinet to remain.

They were assembled about the table when Steve Early came in to say the press wanted to know if the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would open as planned in twelve days, on April 25. As several in the room knew, Roosevelt had often sat alone at the same table looking at the Wilson portrait, pondering the tragedy of Wilson’s failure to create the League of Nations. The answer was emphatically yes, Truman said, making his first decision as President.

In his brief remarks to the Cabinet he said he intended to carry on with Roosevelt’s program and hoped they would all stay on the job. He welcomed their advice. He did not doubt that they would differ with him if they felt it necessary, but final decisions would be his and he expected their support once decisions were made.

Stimson, the senior member, said it was time to close ranks. When the meeting ended, Stimson remained behind. There was a matter of utmost urgency to be discussed, he told Truman. It concerned a new explosive of unbelievable power. But he gave no further details, which left Truman no better informed than before.

In his diary later that night, Stimson wrote that the new President had conducted himself admirably, considering the shock he had been through and how little he knew.

Truman, before leaving for home, remembered that Eddie McKim was in town and that they had a date to play poker that night at McKim’s room at the Statler. “I guess the party’s off,” Truman said, once the White House operator had McKim on the line.

By 9:30 he was back at 4701 Connecticut Avenue. Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace, he found, had gone to the apartment of neighbors next door, a general named Davis and his wife, where they were lingering over the remains of a turkey and cake. Margaret remembered her father saying little except that he had had nothing to eat since noon. Mrs. Davis fixed him a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk. Shortly, he excused himself, went to the apartment, and called his mother to tell her he was all right and not to worry. He then went to bed and, he later said, immediately to sleep.

Automobile traffic and streetcars passed beneath his open window as though nothing were different. People walking by took no more interest in the building than on other nights. Other residents, coming or going, some with dogs on leashes, were surprised to find reporters in the lobby and Secret Service men standing about.

The reporters had taken over two couches beside a stone fireplace. In a corner was the telephone switchboard for the building and a bank of mailboxes. Box 209 carried a printed card, “Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Truman,” with “Margaret Truman” handwritten in ink below. The switchboard operator said she regretted very much that the Trumans would be leaving. “Such lovely people,” she said.

A widely repeated story in Washington that the switchboard at 4701 Connecticut Avenue was the busiest in town that night—because news of Roosevelt’s death and Truman’s swearing in meant there would soon be an apartment available in the building—is apparently apocryphal.

To the country, the Congress, the Washington bureaucracy, to hundreds of veteran New Dealers besides those who had gathered in the Cabinet Room, to much of the military high command, to millions of American men and women overseas, the news of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, followed by the realization that Harry Truman was President, struck like massive earth tremors in quick succession, the thought of Truman in the White House coming with the force of a shock wave. To many it was not just that the greatest of men had fallen, but that the least of men—or at any rate the least likely of men—had assumed his place.

“Good God, Truman will be President,” it was being said everywhere. “If Harry Truman can be President, so could my next-door neighbor.” People were fearful about the future of the country, fearful the war would drag on longer now. “What a great, great tragedy. God help us all,” wrote David Lilienthal, head of TVA. The thought of Truman made him feel physically ill. “The country and the world don’t deserve to be left this way….”

The fact that Roosevelt had died like Lincoln in the last stages of a great war, and like Lincoln in April, almost to the day, were cited as measures both of Roosevelt’s greatness and the magnitude of the tragedy. But implicit also was the thought that Lincoln, too, had been succeeded by a lackluster, so-called “common man,” the ill-fated Andrew Johnson.

Stettinius, who as Secretary of State was next in line now to succeed to the presidency, wondered privately if the parallel was not closer to what followed Woodrow Wilson, after the last war, if the country was in for another Harding administration, with cheap courthouse politicians taking over.

Senators, according to the conventional wisdom, didn’t make strong presidents. Harding had been the only other President drawn from the Senate thus far in the century and the feeling was he had been taken from the bottom of the barrel. Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, even Coolidge had all been governors. And governors, from experience, knew something about running things.

In a house at Marburg, Germany, three American generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, sat up much of the night talking about Roosevelt and speculating on the sort of man Truman might be. All three were greatly depressed. “From a distance Truman did not appear at all qualified to fill Roosevelt’s large shoes,” Bradley wrote. Patton was bitter and more emphatic. “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord to be Presidents.”

It had been an unusually difficult day for the three commanders, even before the news about Roosevelt. They had seen their first Nazi death camp, Ohrdruf-Nord, near Gotha. As they bid good night to one another, an aide recalled Eisenhower looking deeply shaken.

For thousands of men in the ranks, as for many at home, the question was not so much was Truman qualified, as who was he.

In the chill of dawn in Germany, a private named Lester Atwell remembered, his battalion had been lined up for breakfast beside a country road:

“Men”—an officer came quickly along the line…“I have an announcement to make: President Roosevelt died last night.”

“What?” You heard it from all sides. “What? President Roosevelt? Roosevelt’s dead?” We were astounded.

The officer’s voice continued. “We don’t know any particulars, except that he’s dead. I think it was very sudden. Probably a stroke. Truman, the Vice-President, will take over.”

“Who? Who’d he say?”

“Truman, ya dumb bastard. Who the hell you think?”

There were some, however, who, facing the prospect of a Truman presidency, felt confident the country was in good hands. They knew the man, they said. They understood his origins. They had seen how he handled responsibility and knew the inner resources he could draw on. As before and later in his life, confidence in Harry Truman was greatest among those who knew him best.

“Truman is honest and patriotic and has a head full of good horse sense. Besides, he has guts,” wrote John Nance Garner to Sam Rayburn, who was himself assuring reporters that Truman would make a good, sound President “by God,” because, “He’s got the stuff in him.” To arch-Republican Arthur Vandenberg, writing the night of April 12, Truman was “a grand person with every good intention and high honesty of purpose.” Could Truman “swing the job?” Vandenberg speculated in his diary. “I think he can.”

Asked years later what his feelings were when he realized Truman was President, John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, said, “Oh, I felt good. Because I knew him. I knew the kind of man he was.”

Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote to his son in the Navy that as a consequence of a long, recent meeting with Truman he had a definite impression:

He was straightforward, decisive, simple, entirely honest. He, of course, has the limitations upon his judgment and wisdom that the limitations of his experience produce, but I think that he will learn fast and will inspire confidence. It seems to me a blessing that he is the President and not Henry Wallace.

Even I. F. Stone of The Nation, long an outspoken Wallace supporter, would write: “I hate to confess it, but I think Mr. Roosevelt was astute and farsighted in picking Mr. Truman rather than Mr. Wallace as his successor. At this particular moment in our history, Mr. Truman can do a better job.”

At home in Independence, editor William Southern wrote in the Examiner that the country was “in the hands of an honorable man, not just a politician.”

Among such old faithfuls as Eddie McKim, Ted Marks, John Snyder, Jim Pendergast, and Eddie Jacobson, there was never a doubt. “GET IN THERE AND PITCH. YOU CAN HANDLE IT,” Jim Pendergast cabled immediately from Kansas City. “I wish people knew him as I do,” Eddie Jacobson told a reporter.

At Grandview a day or so later, questioned by reporters, the mother of the new President offered as fair and memorable a comment as any: “I can’t really be glad he’s President because I am sorry President Roosevelt is dead. If he had been voted in, I would be out waving a flag, but it doesn’t seem right to be very happy or wave any flags now. Harry will get along all right.”

Truman was immensely pleased and proud of her. Her statement was “a jewel,” he wrote in his diary. “If it had been prepared by [the] best public relations [advisers] it could not have been better.”

Only gradually would he reveal his own feelings, making plain that if anyone was stunned by the turn of fate, or worried over the future, or distressed by the inadequacies of the man stepping into the place of Franklin Roosevelt, it was Harry Truman.

At the White House the difference was felt at once. Arriving at 9:00 the next morning at the West Wing, where a cluster of reporters were waiting, Truman stepped from the big White House Cadillac followed by Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press. Vaccaro had gone early to the Connecticut Avenue apartment. He had been standing alone on the curb outside the building hoping to catch a glimpse of the new President as he started off for his first day. Truman told him to hop in if he wanted a ride.

“There have been few men in all history the equal of the man into whose shoes I am stepping,” Truman had said as they headed downtown. “I pray God I can measure up to the task."

It was Friday, April 13, 1945, twenty-seven years to the day since he landed at Brest as a First Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force.

In the President’s office everything was as Roosevelt left it, the arrangement of furniture, his ship models, his naval prints on the apple green walls. Only the desk had been touched, cleared of its pictures and knick-knacks by Jonathan Daniels of the Roosevelt staff, who stood by waiting now as Truman came in. He felt the presence of Roosevelt acutely, Truman later wrote, and so did Daniels, whose personal ties to Roosevelt went back to World War I, when his father, Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy, had been Roosevelt’s boss. “It seemed still Roosevelt’s desk and Roosevelt’s room,” Daniels remembered. “It seemed to me, indeed, almost Roosevelt’s sun which came in the wide south windows and touched Truman’s thick glasses.” He watched as Truman sat in the President’s high-backed leather chair, rolled back and forth, turned, leaned back, as if testing it, and he thought how pathetically undersized Truman looked.

The first visitor was Eddie McKim. “Eddie, I’m sorry as hell about last night,” Truman greeted him, getting up from the desk. McKim, who was extremely nervous and straining at formality, felt he must remain standing as Truman sat down again. He didn’t know what to do in front of a President, McKim blurted. Truman told him to come over and have a chair. When McKim remarked that he would be heading home that afternoon, Truman asked him to stay on, saying, “I need you.”

He saw Secretary Stettinius twice, for forty-five minutes that morning and again at the end of the day. (At the conclusion of the morning meeting Truman asked Stettinius for a written report summarizing diplomatic problems in Europe and said he wanted it by the close of business.) Stimson, Marshall, Leahy, Forrestal, and Admiral Ernest J. King came in about an hour before noon to sketch in general terms the status of the war. And beginning about three o’clock he talked about “everything from Teheran to Yalta…everything under the sun,” with Jimmy Byrnes, who had flown in from Spartanburg, South Carolina, the night before, as soon as he heard the news.

The White House was in a state of chaos meanwhile. Several of the Roosevelt staff had been up all night making arrangements for the funeral. Reporters jammed the press room and lobby. The President was granting no interviews, they were told, yet apparently the President was taking almost any out-of-town call from friends. Once Byrnes departed, the door was opened to Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star, who squeezed his immense bulk into one of the maple armchairs beside the President’s desk to carry on a half hour conversation that resulted in a widely syndicated article in which Roberts made much of the fact that Truman was the typical, average American. “What a test of democracy if it works!” he wrote.

But the big surprise of the day came at noon, when suddenly, defying tradition, Truman left the White House and drove to the Hill, saying he wanted to be with his friends. A lunch had been arranged in Les Biffle’s office for a select seventeen from both parties and both houses, but mostly from the Senate. Truman arrived at the Capitol with full presidential entourage—cars, police, Secret Service—and walked surrounded by armed men down halls where only the day before he had walked free and alone. The lunch was private, reporters excluded. Pale and tense-looking, Truman took a drink and insisted on informality. The meal was salmon, cornbread, peas, and potatoes, and soon most of the group were calling him “Harry” again. He wanted to tell them in person, he said, that he needed their help in a “terrible job.” He felt overwhelmed and he didn’t mind saying so. What did they think of an address to a joint session on Monday, after the funeral? There was some discussion and indecision. He told them he would be coming and to prepare for it.

When, the lunch over, he came out into the hall still looking tense, a crowd of reporters stood waiting. “Isn’t this nice,” Truman said, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. “This is really nice.” In his years in the Senate he had made no enemies among the working press. Reporters liked him, he was relaxed, easy with them, liked them individually, considered several real friends.

“Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

“For just a moment he had taken us into his confidence,” wrote Allen Drury, “and shown us frankly the frightening thing that had happened to him—shown us, who represented something, a free and easy camaraderie and naturalness to which he knew he could never, for the rest of his life, quite return.” Also, for a new, untried President to have come to the Hill in such fashion seemed an auspicious first move. “Characteristically he came to them. He did not, this first time, ask them to come to him,” wrote Drury.

To Republican Arthur Vandenberg, Truman’s surprise appearance on the Hill marked an end to years of “executive contempt for Congress” under Roosevelt. But among Roosevelt’s people, the reaction was altogether different, as Jonathan Daniels recorded. They took it as a sign of regression, from a strong, independent presidency to a lonely, perhaps subservient one. Daniels himself felt crushed and resentful, anything but admiring of Truman.

Signing his first official document late the afternoon of his first day, a proclamation announcing Roosevelt’s death, he felt strange writing his name, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States. Had he come into the office in normal fashion, there would have been two months grace after election day, time in which to get used to the idea and prepare himself. As it was, he had no time. He was President now and would be all the rest of the day, and all night, and all tomorrow and the next day and the next. He had been through the morning papers before breakfast. The war news ran on for pages. Ninth Army tanks had pushed beyond the Elbe River, nearly to the suburbs of Berlin. At some points, American and Russian forces were only seventy-five miles apart. The terrible Battle of Berlin was nearing its climax. In the Pacific, American infantry had landed on Bohol, last of the central Philippines still in enemy control. In one huge daylight raid more than four hundred B-29 Superfortresses had bombed Tokyo for two hours.

As the morning papers reported, the war thus far had cost 196,999 American lives, which, as Truman knew, was more than three times American losses in his own earlier war. The new total for American casualties in all categories—killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners—was 899,390, an increase in just one week of 6,481, or an average of more than 900 casualties a day. In the Pacific the cost of victory was rising steadily.

And he, not Roosevelt, was responsible now. He was the Commander in Chief—of armed forces exceeding 16 million men and women, of the largest naval armada in history, of 10 battleships, 27 aircraft carriers, 45 cruisers, of more planes, tanks, guns, money, and technology than ever marshaled by any one nation in all history, and in the critical last act of the most terrible war of all time. In their report that morning, the Chiefs of Staff had said fighting in Europe could last six months longer; in the Pacific, possibly another year and a half.

And what would follow? What might peace bring? Relations with Russia were deteriorating rapidly. The State Department report provided by Stettinius was hardly encouraging: “Since the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Government has taken a firm and uncompromising position on nearly every major question….” In Poland, now occupied by Soviet forces, the situation was “highly unsatisfactory,” with Soviet authorities failing repeatedly to keep agreements made at Yalta. The Russians were trying to “complicate the problem” by supporting their own Warsaw Provisional Polish Government to speak for Poland. There was no exchange of liberated prisoners. Direct appeals to Stalin had had little effect.

Until that afternoon the Soviets had been refusing to send their foreign minister, V. M. Molotov, to the San Francisco Conference. Now, suddenly, Stalin had changed his mind, as a gesture in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, a gesture that had been urged on him by the American ambassador in Moscow, Harriman. He would send Molotov, Stalin said, if the new President would request it—which Truman did at once, achieving thereby what appeared to be a first diplomatic breakthrough. But as Harriman himself wrote, the gesture resolved none of the basic difficulties. Churchill and the British government were more apprehensive than ever about Russia.

Truman had had no experience in relations with Britain or Russia, no firsthand knowledge of Churchill or Stalin. He didn’t know the right people. He didn’t know Harriman. He didn’t know his own Secretary of State, more than to say hello. He had no background in foreign policy, no expert or experienced advisers of his own to call upon for help. Most obviously, he was not Franklin Roosevelt. How many times would that be said, thought, written?

Roosevelt had done nothing to keep him informed or provide background on decisions and plans at the highest levels. Roosevelt, Truman would tell Margaret privately, “never did talk to me confidentially about the war, or about foreign affairs or what he had in mind for peace after the war.” He was unprepared, bewildered. And frightened.

“It is needless to say that President Truman comes into this gigantic assignment under a handicap,” said the solemn editorial in that morning’s Washington Post.

He must pick up the work of a world-renowned statesman who had had more than 12 years of experience in the White House…[and] we should be less than candid at this grave moment…if we did not recognize the great disparity between Mr. Truman’s experience and the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him.

He was the seventh man to have succeeded to the office after the death of a President, the first having been John Tyler of Virginia, to whom Truman mistakenly believed he was related through his great-grand-mother, Nancy Tyler Holmes. John Tyler had replaced William Henry Harrison in 1841, the year Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young migrated to Missouri, and Tyler had set an important precedent, by deciding to be President in name and in fact and not the Vice President acting as President, which many at the time thought proper, the Constitution being somewhat ambiguous on the subject. Truman was born during the White House years of Chester A. Arthur, who succeeded to the presidency after the assassination of Garfield, and in Truman’s lifetime two more vice presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, had become President following the deaths of McKinley and Harding. But with the exception of Andrew Johnson, no Vice President had ever succeeded so towering a figure as Franklin Roosevelt, and though Lincoln loomed larger than any President in history, Lincoln had not been a world leader, nor the Civil War a titanic, global conflict.

Truman felt great division within himself. Like John Tyler, he must be President, act presidential, but could he ever feel he was? “I’m still Harry Truman,” he had said several times to different people since 7:09 the evening before.

A Pentagon information officer who had been sent to the White House that morning with a statement to the overseas troops for the President to sign, was asked to wait in the Fish Room and would remember always the moment when a “small, gray man” walked in, put out his hand, and said, “I’m President Truman,” with the accent on the “I,” as though there might be some other President Truman.

On the one hand he was determined to establish that he was in fact in charge. On the other, he felt the constant, nearly overbearing presence of Roosevelt. He would have a portrait of Roosevelt—Roosevelt in his Navy cape turned as if facing a storm—hung to the right of the desk and, pointing to it, would tell visitors, “I’m trying to do what he would like.” Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s secretary, complained to friends, “I still can’t call that man [Truman] President.” But then Truman himself still thought of Roosevelt as President. “He’s the only one I ever think of as President,” he would write to Mrs. Roosevelt months later.

His own favorite President of the century, Woodrow Wilson, had had a brilliant academic career. Herbert Hoover had been a world-famous engineer. Franklin Roosevelt, heir to a great name, had been the popular governor of New York, the nation’s richest, most populous state. And who was he, Harry Truman? What qualifications had he beside such men, or so many others in public life who wanted the job?

Alben Barkley told Truman he must stop deprecating his ability to carry on. “Have confidence in yourself,” Barkley said. “If you do not, the people will lose confidence in you.”

Sam Rayburn came to deliver stern advice of another kind. “I have come down here to talk to you about you,” Rayburn began.

You have got many great hazards, and one of them is in this White House. I have been watching this thing a long time. I have seen people in the White House try to build a fence around the White House and keep the very people away from the President that he should see. That is one of your hazards. The special interests and the sycophants will stand in the rain a week to see you and will treat you like a king. They’ll come sliding in and tell you you’re the greatest man alive—but you know and I know you ain’t.

On Saturday morning, April 14, his second day in office, having decided to make John Snyder a federal loan official, Truman called Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to tell him that “the President” had made the appointment. Jones, understandably, asked if the President had made the decision before he died. “No,” snapped Truman. “He just made it now.”

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau arrived, intending to ask Truman a number of questions, as a way of assessing him. Truman said he did not wish to take up Morgenthau’s time. He asked for a comprehensive report on the nation’s financial standing and, as with Stettinius, he said he wanted it quickly, demonstrating that he, Harry Truman, was not on trial, Morgenthau was.

To Morgenthau, who had not known him, Truman seemed courteous as well as decisive. “But after all, he is a politician,” added Morgenthau in his diary, “and what is going on in his head only time will tell.”

When the train bearing Roosevelt’s body came into Union Station from Warm Springs later the morning of Saturday the 14th, Truman was waiting on the platform beside the Roosevelt family and flanked by the two men who had the most reason to see themselves in his place, Henry Wallace and Jimmy Byrnes. Truman had asked them to accompany him to the station, knowing the photographers would record the moment. It was a generous, respectful gesture on his part, but seen also as a mark of confidence. Like the lunch at the Capitol, it seemed exactly the right thing for him to have done.

The day was extremely warm and muggy, the sun burning through a haze. To the steady beat of muffled drums, the three men in their dark suits rode together in the long, slow funeral procession to the White House. Tremendous crowds stretched the length of Constitution Avenue, waiting to see the caisson and casket roll past pulled by six white horses. Never would he forget, Truman wrote, the sight of so many people in grief.

At midday the weather changed dramatically, with heavy clouds rushing in and the wind whipping the flags that stood at half-mast everywhere in the city. Then rain came in torrents. At the four o’clock service in the East Room, where several hundred had gathered—the Cabinet, Supreme Court, foreign diplomats, the Chiefs of Staff in uniform, Thomas E. Dewey, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson—not one person thought to stand when Truman entered, nor did he appear to notice. With Bess and Margaret beside him, he sat motionless through the service, staring straight ahead at the flag-draped casket.

His schedule had been crowded all day. With the capital and nation in mourning, with the Roosevelt family still in residence, he had wanted no more attention than necessary drawn to activities in the West Wing—no further official pronouncements, nothing until Roosevelt was decently buried. Still, in the time between the return from the station and the East Room service, there had been a steady procession in and out of his office—Harry Hopkins, Ed Flynn, Admiral Leahy, Jimmy Byrnes. The longest session was with Hopkins, who had left a sickbed in Minnesota to attend the funeral and looked like death itself. Truman asked him how he felt. “Terrible,” Hopkins answered. “I knew what he meant,” Truman wrote. For nearly two hours they reviewed the history of the Roosevelt years, talked about Stalin and Churchill, as the rain beat against the tall windows. Lunch was brought in and Hopkins pulled his chair up to the desk.

There were no eulogies in the East Room service, at Mrs. Roosevelt’s request. Two hymns were sung, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” and “Faith of Our Fathers.” After the final prayer, Bishop Angus Dun, again as Mrs. Roosevelt wished, read the famous line from the 1933 inaugural address, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself….”

On Sunday morning, April 15, after a night trip by presidential train, many of the same group were gathered at the graveside in the rose garden of Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate. The weather, mercifully, had turned fair and cool. It was a perfect spring day, the Hudson Valley glorious with spring green, the river sparkling. Truman stood with Bess and Margaret, hat in hand, his head bowed as Taps were sounded.

II

The first test was his address to Congress the afternoon of Monday, April 16, and he passed with flying colors. Indeed, for days, for weeks, he seemed to do nearly everything right. Congress, the press, the public liked what they saw and heard—even a little mix-up at the start of the speech, when Truman began before he was supposed to.

He came down the aisle to a standing ovation, went directly to the rostrum, opened a large black looseleaf notebook, and started in, addressing not just the packed chamber but an enormous radio audience. Speaker Rayburn leaned forward. “Just a minute, Harry, let me introduce you,” he interrupted, his voice coming over clearly on the battery of microphones. In a phone call only that morning, Rayburn had told him, “Mr. President, you are not ‘Harry’ to me any more.” But in his own excitement Rayburn had forgotten and the moment—amusing, poignant—would be recalled for years.

The speech lasted just fifteen minutes. Speaking slowly and carefully, Truman was interrupted by applause again and again, seventeen times before he finished.

“With great humility,” he said, “I call upon all Americans to help me keep our nation united in defense of those ideals which have been so eloquently proclaimed by Franklin Roosevelt.

“I want in turn to assure my fellow Americans and all those who love peace and liberty throughout the world that I will support and defend those ideals with all my strength and all my heart. That is my duty and I shall not shirk it.”

People everywhere felt relief, even hope, as they listened. He seemed a good man, so straightforward, so determined to do his job. The voice and accent would take some getting used to—he pronounced “United States” as “U-nited States,” said “nation” almost as though it rhymed with “session,” at times “I” came close to “Ah”—but he sounded as though he meant every word.

He would prosecute the war without letup, Truman said, work for a lasting peace, work to improve the lot of the common people.

All of us are praying for a speedy victory. Every day peace is delayed costs a terrible toll. The armies of liberation are bringing to an end Hitler’s ghastly threat to dominate the world. Tokyo rocks under the weight of our bombs…. I want the entire world to know that this direction must and will remain—unchanged and unhampered!

“Our demand has been, and it remains—Unconditional Surrender,” he declared, his voice rising suddenly in pitch on the last two words, which brought a storm of applause.

He spoke of the necessity for a “strong and lasting” United Nations organization. Isolationism was a thing of the past. There could be no more safety behind geographical barriers, not ever again.

“The responsibility of a great state is to serve and not to dominate the world.”

The conservative columnist David Lawrence, watching from the press gallery, wrote that between the man on the rostrum and the audience before him there was a “bond of friendship” such as few presidents had ever experienced.

Much of the speech had been written on the train returning from Hyde Park. Jimmy Byrnes and Sam Rosenman, author of innumerable Roosevelt speeches, had played a large part. But the conclusion, delivered to a hushed chamber, was entirely Truman’s own. His face lifted, his hands raised, in a voice of solemn petition, he said:

At this moment I have in my heart a prayer. As I have assumed my duties, I humbly pray Almighty God, in the words of King Solomon: “Give therefore Thy servant an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this Thy so great a people?” I ask only to be a good and faithful servant of my Lord and my people.

The old struggle to determine good from evil—it had been with him for so very long. “[I am] just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery, who’s anxious to be right,” he had once told Bess Wallace in a love letter from the farm.

The applause, sudden and spontaneous, was such as few had ever heard in the chamber. Senators, members of Congress, old friends wanted him to succeed in a way they had not felt before. And because he wasn’t Roosevelt, he would need all the help he could get. Because he wasn’t Roosevelt, it was easier to feel a common bond. The morning after he became President, Republicans in the Senate had filed into their big conference room No. 335 and after passing a resolution of regret over Roosevelt’s death, talked of Harry Truman’s strengths and shortcomings, and decided it was no time to rock the boat. “He’s one of us,” reporters were told afterward. “He’s a grand fellow, he knows us, thinks like us.” Even those inclined to fight him felt obliged to help him get his feet on the ground. “We know how we’d feel thrust into such a job, and we know Harry Truman would be one of the first to help us.”

Messages of approval poured into the White House. “I was tired of Eastern accents,” wrote a woman from Indiana. Midwestern native good sense meant good things for the future, said a letter from Illinois. (“His diction comes out of the wide open spaces and will find an echo out of these same wide-open spaces,” the Washington Post had said.) “Your modesty, your humility, your earnestness, have captivated the hearts of your American people,” a woman in Georgia assured him. “Friend Harry,” another letter began. There was heartfelt sympathy for his “tremendous burden,” his “terrible responsibility.” He was urged to trust in God, keep his health, get enough sleep, eat right. Labor unions, groups of company employees, veterans organizations, local chapters of the Communist Party, fraternal orders, and church groups pledged their cooperation. One correspondent from Port Jervis, New York, said that while he had “never known a man named Harry who really amounted to a damn,” he would lend his support anyway.

From the Time and Life Building in New York, publisher Henry Luce informed Truman that at a meeting of his business friends he had found unanimous confidence in “your ability to discharge successfully the great duties of your office in your own way.” In Topeka, a doctor who was delivering a baby during the broadcast of the speech stopped to shake hands with the newborn citizen—to congratulate him for making his entrance at so auspicious a moment in history. “May I say,” wrote the doctor to Truman, “that in our locality I have never seen such unity of purpose as is manifest toward you and toward the administration you are beginning.” And he was a Republican, the doctor said.

Every new President had his “honeymoon” with Congress and the country, of course, but this, the feeling that Truman was “one of us,” was something more. The day of the speech the Trumans moved from their apartment to Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to stay temporarily until Mrs. Roosevelt moved out. For several days, his Secret Service convoy keeping step, Truman walked briskly across the street to work at about eight o’clock every morning. Once a taxi slowed, the driver put his head out the window and called, “Good luck, Harry,” as if speaking for the whole country.

“Well, I have had the most momentous, and the most trying time anyone could possibly have,” his mother and sister in Grandview read in a letter written from Blair House the night of April 16.

This afternoon we moved to this house, diagonally across the street (Penn. Ave.) from the White House, until the Roosevelts have had time to move out of the White House. We tried staying at the apartment, but it wouldn’t work. I can’t move without at least ten Secret Service men and twenty policemen. People who lived in our apartment couldn’t get in and out without a pass. So—we moved out with suitcases. Our furniture is still there and will be for some time…. But I’ve paid the rent for this month and will pay for another month if they don’t get the old White House redecorated by that time.

My greatest trial was today when I addressed the Congress. It seemed to go over all right, from the ovation I received. Things have gone so well I’m almost as scared as I was when Mrs. R. told me what had happened. Maybe it will come out all right.

That same day the Russians had begun their final drive on Berlin, Marshal Georgi Zhukov concentrating twenty thousand guns to clear a path.

The first press conference, the next morning, April 17, was the largest that had ever been held in the White House, with more than three hundred reporters packed shoulder to shoulder in the President’s office, those in front pressed against his desk. “The new President made an excellent impression. He stood behind his desk and greeted the correspondents smilingly. He answered their questions directly and avoided none of the queries put to him,” recorded another of the Roosevelt staff, a press aide named Eben Ayers.

Truman began with a reading of the same wartime ground rules as established by Roosevelt. All off-the-record comments were to be kept in confidence. Background material must remain that only and not be attributed to the President, who was to be quoted directly only when he gave his express permission. With so much to do, Truman said, he expected to be able to hold only one press conference a week.

Would he go personally to the San Francisco Conference? No. Had he taken any steps to meet with Churchill and Stalin? Not as yet. What about David Lilienthal, whose term as head of TVA was about to expire? He was not ready to discuss appointments. How did he stand on race relations? His record in the Senate spoke for itself.

“Do you expect to see Mr. Molotov before he goes to San Francisco?”

“Yes. He is going to stop and pay his respects to the President of the United States. He should.”

Admiral Leahy, who had witnessed so many Roosevelt press conferences, was delighted with the President’s “direct” performance. Truman had already asked Leahy to stay on as Chief of Staff, with the understanding that he, Leahy, would always speak his mind. The old sailor, now past seventy, was also known for his “direct” performance.

The applause at the end of the session was unprecedented. To reporters long accustomed to Roosevelt, who had made every press conference a kind of circuitous game and charm show, the change was startling and to most, extremely welcome. Privately, Truman felt he had lived five lifetimes in five days.

Three days later, when he called them in again to say his old boyhood friend Charlie Ross was to be the new press secretary, replacing Steve Early, who had retired after twelve years in the White House, the announcement received unqualified approval. Ross had first come to the capital as a young reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1918, and in 1931 won a Pulitzer Prize for a study on the effects of the Depression. He was widely liked and respected. Steve Early had been hard-boiled. Many reporters were afraid of him. Ross was more professorial and patient, gentle-mannered, soft-spoken. “There is no more beloved or more highly regarded newspaperman in this city than Charlie Ross,” said the Washington Post.

Hiring Ross had been Bess’s idea. Truman had invited him to Blair House, where they talked for two consecutive evenings before Ross agreed. He was nearly sixty and understood perfectly how demanding the job would be. It also meant a severe cut in salary, from $35,000 a year at the Post-Dispatch to $10,000. “But Charlie,” Truman told him, “you aren’t the kind of man who can say ’no’ to the President of the United States.” Later they had put through a call to Independence to their old teacher, Tillie Brown, to tell her the news.

The reporters wanted to be sure they had her name right.

“Miss Tillie Brown,” Truman said. “Matilda Brown. We always called her Tillie…”

Was that in grade school?

“High school. She taught Charlie and me English.”

(In her own interview with reporters, Tillie Brown would remember Charlie as a “naturally smart boy,” while Harry was “a bright boy who had to dig.”)

On a first tour of the West Wing offices, Truman was annoyed to find that the half-dozen press photographers who covered the White House were allowed none of the comforts of the press room, but confined to a cramped, windowless space of their own. This was how it had always been, he was told. It was not the way it would be any longer, he said. Photographers were to have the same privileges as reporters, beginning immediately. “He made first-class citizens of us,” remembered photographer George Tames of The New York Times, whose first presidential assignment, the year before, had been to photograph Roosevelt and Truman at lunch under the Jackson magnolia.

Reporters found they now had to be on duty at 8:00 in the morning, rather than 10:00 or 10:30 when Roosevelt’s day had begun. They complained jokingly to Truman of having to get up in the middle of the night to be on time for work. “Stick with me and I’ll make men of you yet,” he assured them with a grin.

Among staff holdovers attitudes were changing appreciably, almost by the day, the more they saw of him. He was friendly, considerate, interested in them individually. His physical energy seemed phenomenal and the most startling difference of all from what had been. Lieutenant George M. Elsey, a young Naval Intelligence officer assigned to the top-secret Map Room, remembered being astonished by the simple realization that here was a President who walked, and quickly. “He was alert, sharp…he looked good, very vigorous, very strong,” Elsey recalled. The Secret Service, long accustomed to a President who could move only when they moved him, found themselves suddenly on the go, with a man who could pick up and leave for lunch on the Hill, or anything else he wished, at any moment. With his braces and wheelchair, Roosevelt had been virtually their prisoner.

“See, with President Roosevelt, he was a man you had under control,” remembered Floyd M. Boring of the White House Secret Service detail. “He couldn’t move without you…. Now, here’s a guy, you had to move when he moved. And he moved fast! He was a whiz, just like that! He’d go—and went! And you had to go with him. So, we had to revise our thinking, and the whole strategy of the place changed because of his ability to be in movement and motion.”

One day at noon Truman decided to make an impromptu visit to the Hamilton National Bank a few blocks from the White House at 14th and G. He simply put on his hat and went out the door, with the result that he created a half-hour traffic jam. The lesson learned was that the bank would have to come to the President, not the President to the bank.

Jonathan Daniels, who at first had considered Truman “tragically inadequate,” began to see him in new light. Here, Daniels decided, was no ordinary man. “The cliché of the ordinary American in the White House was a snob phrase,” Daniels would write, “invented by those who, after Roosevelt’s death, hoped to minimize the Presidency.” Further, Truman was not poorly prepared for the presidency, as commonly said. Because he knew so much of American life, because he had experienced himself so many of the “vicissitudes of all the people,” he was really exceptionally well prepared. (In time to come the historian Samuel Eliot Morison would take the same view, calling Truman as well prepared for the presidency as any of his immediate predecessors.) It was Truman’s “too evident modesty” that was so misleading, Daniels decided. Asked by the President to stay on a while longer, he gladly agreed.

Sam Rosenman, a dedicated Roosevelt adviser, press aide Eben Ayers, David Niles, who had handled minority issues and patronage for Roosevelt, and Bill Hassett, Roosevelt’s correspondence secretary, had all, like Daniels, talked of quitting at first chance. Now, when asked to stay by Truman, they too accepted.

Bill Hassett, who had been with Roosevelt at the time of his death at Warm Springs, wrote in his diary on Monday, April 16:

To the White House this morning at the usual time, but with a strange feeling—impossible to realize that F.D.R’s day was done and another had taken over…. The President sent for me. He was very gracious; invited me to remain on the job; frank and forthright in manner. Said that unexpectedly he had been called upon to shoulder the greatest responsibilities, in the discharge of which he would need all the help and cooperation he could get and added, “I need you too.” His attitude toward his duties and obligations magnificent.

None of the staff, however, thought much of the people Truman was installing. “Missourians are most in evidence,” wrote Ayers privately, “and there is a feeling of an attempt by the ‘gang’ to move in.” After a visit to the White House, the journalist Joseph Alsop wrote to his cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, in dismay. In Franklin’s time, it had been a great seat of world power. Now the place was like “the lounge of the Lion’s Club of Independence, Missouri, where one is conscious chiefly of the odor of ten-cent cigars and the easy laughter evoked by the new smoking room story.”

Eddie McKim, clearly out of his depth, made much of his own importance and on occasion drank too much. Jonathan Daniels thought McKim was “weird.” Harry Vaughan, loud and jolly, seemed to serve no purpose beyond comic relief. A strange figure named Johnny Maragon, a former Kansas City bootblack who was in and out of Vaughan’s office, claiming to be the new head of White House transportation, looked to Eben Ayers exactly like a Prohibition gangster. Hugh Fulton, meantime, bragged of his closeness to the President and the lead part he would be playing in policy matters as the President’s speechwriter, once things settled down.

“We were all a strange lot to them and vice versa,” remembered Sam Rosenman. “I had never heard of any of them before they moved in.”

Only two of Truman’s own people appear to have made a favorable impression—Matt Connelly, who would be the President’s appointments secretary, and Rose Conway from Kansas City, a shy, industrious “little bird of a woman” in her late forties who had joined Vice President Truman’s staff only weeks before and who would serve as the President’s secretary.

But McKim would soon be gone. With great regret Truman told him it would be best if he went home to Omaha. (“Well, he was a sergeant in my battery once, I busted him and I can bust him again,” Matt Connelly would remember Truman saying.) Nor was Hugh Fulton to have a place. As Truman had rid himself of the devoted Vic Messall after his first term in the Senate, so he now sent Fulton packing. Messall’s downfall appears to have been some form of financial scheming that Truman found unacceptable. Fulton, it appears, was guilty primarily of sounding his own horn. To everyone’s surprise, the long-serving, unquestionably astute Fulton was offered no official post, nothing whatever, and apparently because he had boasted too often and too conspicuously of his own importance, Truman, for all his reluctance ever to fire anyone, could not tolerate what he called “Potomac Fever,” which he described as a prevalent, ludicrous Washington disease characterized by a swelling of the head to abnormal proportions.

Harry Vaughan, who struck many as the most miscast figure of the lot, remained, as the President’s military aide. When Truman made him brigadier general, it seemed to many a bigger joke than the stories Vaughan told. Vaughan would become to the official family a figure not unlike Truman’s Uncle Harry, a big, voluble, easygoing pal, which gave Vaughan singular importance. Truman seemed to need him around and would tolerate no criticism of him. “I’m still with ya, Chief,” Vaughan would boom with a grin. Vaughan’s stories, contrary to what was said, were not filthy, but more of the barnyard kind. Truman liked earthy humor but never told stories that had to do with sex, nor did he care to hear them. Also contrary to the popular impression, Vaughan never took a drink. Nobody disliked him, though some worried he could mean trouble down the line. “The fact is,” wrote Ayers, “Vaughan, while likeable, seems to lack balance and tact and a sense of proportion.”

In later years, it would be said by some who knew Truman well that for him Harry Vaughan was the fool in the Shakespearean sense, the fool who spoke wisdom, who could cut through the obfuscation and insincerity of so much that a President had to listen to day in, day out, who was incapable of posturing or pretense, and whose occasional uncouth moments, the very lack of “balance and tact and a sense of proportion” that upset people like Eben Ayers, provided not only laughter for Truman but a way of bringing everyone else back down to earth a little.

Truman liked a variety of people around him. He wanted contrasts in style and outlook. It was essential, he thought. The country, after all, was composed of all kinds and he understood how many Harry Vaughans there were. Importantly, Truman also knew from experience how extremely loyal Vaughan was, and for now he needed all the loyalty possible.

When Vaughan brought him some phone taps made by the FBI—a common practice under Roosevelt—and asked if he was interested, Truman glanced at a few pages that concerned the activities of the wife of a White House aide and said he had no time for such foolishness. “Tell them I don’t authorize any such thing,” he said.

Truman had little use for the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, in contrast to Franklin Roosevelt, who had liked the way Hoover got results and greatly enjoyed the spicy secrets Hoover passed on to him about the private lives of important people. It had been Roosevelt, in 1936, who had quietly ordered Hoover to begin gathering political information, a policy Truman strongly disliked. Truman considered Hoover and the FBI a direct threat to civil liberties, and he made no effort now, as Roosevelt had, to ingratiate himself with Hoover—as Hoover saw at once and found infuriating.

Hoover had chosen an FBI agent with a hometown, Truman connection, Morton Chiles, Jr., one of the big Chiles family of Independence, to call at the White House as Hoover’s emissary—to explain to the President that if there was anything the FBI could do for him, he had only to say the word. But having courteously thanked the young man, Truman told him to inform Mr. Hoover that any time the President of the United States wished the services of the FBI, he would make his request through the Attorney General. From that point on, according to a later account by one of Hoover’s assistants, “Hoover’s hatred of Truman knew no bounds.”

“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” Truman would write in his diary after only a month as President. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail…. This must stop….”

Very likely, Truman’s dislike of Hoover had something to do also with the part Hoover and his agents had played in bringing down Tom Pendergast, though he is not known ever to have said so.

Vaughan, nonetheless, appears to have thought well of Hoover, or at least to have liked dealing with Hoover behind the scenes. In time Vaughan would request an FBI phone tap on Thomas Corcoran, the celebrated “Tommy the Cork,” a former Roosevelt aide and Washington attorney, who was said to know everyone of importance in town and was thought to be working against Truman by leaking denigrating material to influential liberals and the press. Truman disliked and distrusted Corcoran, as Vaughan knew. The justification for the tap was White House security, but it was political surveillance pure and simple, and as much as Truman disapproved of such practices—and his contempt for Hoover notwithstanding—he gave his consent. The tap, as it turned out, produced nothing of consequence. Still, Hoover would continue to regard Vaughan as his friend at the White House.

In his first week as President, Truman signed a bill authorizing payment of $135.67 that for sixty-seven years the government had owed to one Charles Dougherty, Sr., for overtime work performed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the year 1879. He signed the Mexican Water Treaty that had been before the Senate his last day presiding there. He received his first foreign dignitary, the very elegant British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who later telegraphed Churchill that the new President seemed “honest and friendly,” and a delegation of Republican senators who had seldom ever set foot in the Executive Office in the Roosevelt years. Robert A. Taft, who led the group, had not been to the White House since 1932. George Aiken of Vermont, glad to see so much all-around good feeling for Truman, was sure it wouldn’t last. “He’ll make enemies sooner or later,” Aiken told Allen Drury later. “If he doesn’t make enemies he just won’t be a very good President, that’s all.”

He saw Sam Rayburn, Bob Hannegan; Huseyin Ragip Baydur, the Turkish ambassador; Sergio Osmeña, president of the Philippines; T. V. Soong, foreign minister of China; Georges Bidault, the French ambassador; his own brother Vivian and Fred Canfil, who took turns sitting in his chair. He was photographed with three survivors of the Iwo Jima flag raising—Pfc. René Gagnon, Pharmacist Mate John H. Bradley, and Pfc. Ira Hayes—and with five-year-old Margaret Ann Forde, the child of a disabled serviceman, as she pinned a poppy on his lapel to launch a fund drive for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Between times, he decided to make Jimmy Byrnes his Secretary of State, and though the announcement would not be made until weeks later, word spread quickly. On Capitol Hill the feeling was he could have made no better choice. Byrnes knew the ropes in Washington as few men did; he understood the Senate and the workings of the White House from experience; he knew Churchill; he had met Stalin. Roosevelt had thought him the man best equipped to be President, and as Secretary of State, he, not Stettinius, would be next in line for the presidency, a consideration that weighed heavily in Truman’s decision.

Sam Rosenman warned Truman that he was making a mistake. Rosenman had become highly cynical about Byrnes, considered him a man primarily interested in himself. “I don’t think you know Jimmy Byrnes, Mr. President,” Rosenman said. “You think you do. In the bonhomie of the Senate, he’s one kind of fellow. But I think you will regret this and if I were you I wouldn’t do it.”

“It was a wonderful relief to preceding conferences with our former Chief to see the promptness and snappiness with which Truman took up each matter and decided it,” Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote after a Cabinet meeting. “There were no long drawn out ‘soliloquies’ from the President, and the whole conference was thoroughly businesslike so that we actually covered two or three more matters than we had expected to discuss.”

Accompanied by Admiral Leahy, Truman went frequently to the Map Room, which had been established by Roosevelt on the ground floor of the main house as a means for him to follow the course of the war, an idea Roosevelt had borrowed from Churchill, who had a similar arrangement at 10 Downing Street. The low-ceilinged room was under tight security. There were blackout curtains at its single window and large maps covering the walls, these filled with colored pins indicating the latest disposition of ships and armies. To Truman, who had been trying to follow the war on his old World War I maps tacked to the wall of his Senate office, the place was a wonder. “Changes in the battle situation were immediately marked…as messages came in from commanders in the field,” he wrote. “Messages came constantly throughout the day and night so that our military picture was always accurate up to the moment.” Leahy was struck by how much world geography and military history Truman knew, and how quickly he absorbed new information. An assistant to the naval aide, Lieutenant William Rigdon, who had been on duty at the White House since 1942, said later of Truman that he never knew anyone to work so hard “to get on the inside of all that had taken place.”

He saw the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Harold D. Smith, who said he would always be bringing him problems, and on Friday, April 20, he saw Rabbi Stephen Wise, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, to discuss the question of resettlement for Jewish refugees in Palestine. Buchenwald, largest of the Nazi death camps, had been liberated. “I pray you believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” Edward R. Murrow had broadcast from the scene. However, a warning from the State Department that the problem of Palestine was “highly complex” had already crossed Truman’s desk. Rabbi Wise, whose appointment was at 11:45, was given fifteen minutes only. At noon Ambassador Harriman arrived.

W. Averell Harriman was the son of E. H. Harriman, the “Little Giant” of Wall Street who ran the Union Pacific Railroad and was said to have feared neither God nor J. P. Morgan. The son looked nothing like his father. He Was tall slim, handsome as the man in the Arrow Collar, as was said, though somewhat cheerless in manner. His low, cultured voice could also lapse into a monotone that some who didn’t know him mistakenly took as a sign of low vitality.

As heir to one of the great American fortunes, Harriman had grown up in luxury surpassing anything known by his friend Franklin Roosevelt. The Harriman estate on the Hudson comprised 20 square miles, included forty miles of bridlepaths and a stone château of one hundred rooms. Young Averell had been to Groton, them Yale, and after his father’s death was virtually handed the Union Pacific, eventually becoming its chairman of the board. He was an art collector—Cézanne, Picasso—and at one point, the country’s fourth-ranking polo player. But he was also a tenacious worker, who had built his own shipping empire and, at age forty, helped found the immensely successful and respected Wall street banking firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman. Until joining the New Deal, he might have been the model for the kind of man that Harry Truman, with his Jacksonian Populist faith, believed to be the root cause of most of the country’s troubles, and that Truman had earlier, in the heat of his railroad investigations, castigated unmercifully on the floor of the Senate. Harriman had what his number two man in Moscow, George Kennan, called “a keen appreciation of great personal power.”

As ambassador to Russia since October 1943, he was known to work eighteen to twenty hours a day. His long, detailed reports were famous at the State Department. In all he had spent more time with Stalin than had any American, or any other diplomat. At the moment he appeared extremely tired and worried. There was a slight tick, a sort of wink, in his right eye.

Truman had never met Harriman until now, nor had he ever really worked with anyone of such background. Harriman was another new experience, and the first of several men of comparable education and eastern polish—Charles Bohlen, John J. McCloy, James Forrestal, Dean Acheson, Robert A. Lovett—who were to play vital roles in Truman’s administration. Even the redoubtable Henry stimson was as yet to Truman a remote presence.

Accompanying Harriman now were Stettinius, Under Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew, and Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, the department’s Russian expert. Stettinius made the introductions, but in the half hour following, he, Grew, and Bohlen said very little.

Truman asked for a rundown of the most urgent problems concerning the Soviet Union.

The Russians had two contradictory policies, Harriman began. They wanted to cooperate with the United States and Great Britain, and they wanted to extend control over their neighboring states in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, some within Stalin’s circle mistook American generosity, and readiness to cooperate as a sign of “softness” and this had led Stalin to think he could do largely as he pleased. Nonetheless, it was Harriman’s view that the Soviets would risk no break with the United States. Their need of financial help after the war would be too great, and for this reason the United States could and should stand firm on vital issues.

Truman said he was not afraid of the Russians and intended to be firm. And fair, of course. “And anyway the Russians need us more than we need them.”

Harriman had wondered how much Truman knew of recent correspondence between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, as well as his own dispatches, and was pleased to find it was quite a lot. Truman had been reading steadily from the Map Room files, night after night, so much that he feared he might be seriously straining his eyes.

Concerns about the Soviet Union had prevailed all through the war but had taken a more serious cast by the winter of 1944–45, even before Yalta. “I can testify,” wrote one State Department official, “that there was no time when the danger from the Soviet Union was not a topic of anxious conversation among officers of the State Department; and by the winter of 1944–45, as the day of victory approached, it became the predominant theme in Washington.”

In March, Churchill warned that the Yalta agreements on Poland were breaking down, that Poland was losing its frontier, its freedom. Harriman reported that American prisoners of war who had been liberated by the Russians were being kept in Russian camps in “unbelievable” conditions. (At lunch one day with Anna Rosenberg, Roosevelt had banged his hand down on the arm of his wheelchair, saying, “Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin.”) In April an American-British effort to negotiate a surrender of the German armies in Italy brought a stinging cable from Stalin, who accused Roosevelt and Churchill of trying to bring off their own separate peace with the Nazis. Roosevelt, infuriated, had kept his response moderate:

It would be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of the victory, now within our grasp, such distrust, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after the colossal losses of life material and treasure.

Churchill cabled Roosevelt urging a “blunt stand” against the Russians, and Roosevelt responded, “We must not permit anybody to entertain a false impression that we are afraid.”

A secret OSS report for the President dated April 2, ten days prior to Roosevelt’s death—a report since made available to Truman—warned that once the war was over, the United States could be faced with a situation more perilous even than the rise of Japan and Nazi Germany:

Russia will emerge from the present conflict as by far the strongest nation in Europe and Asia—strong enough, if the United States should stand aside, to dominate Europe and at the same time to establish her hegemony over Asia. Russia’s natural resources and manpower are so great that within relatively few years she can be much more powerful than either Germany or Japan has ever been. In the easily foreseeable future Russia may well outrank even the United States in military potential.

Russia might revert to the predatory tradition of the czars and “pursue a policy of expansion aimed at bringing all Europe and perhaps Asia under her control,” the report warned. “If she should succeed in such a policy she would become a menace more formidable to the United States than any yet known….”

Harriman had become so exercised over the state of Soviet-American relations that he had wanted to fly home to Washington even before word came of Roosevelt’s death. On April 6, in a lengthy cable to the State Department, he had said the time had come when “we must…make it plain to the Soviet Government that they cannot expect our cooperation on terms laid down by them.”

“We now have ample proof that the Soviet government views all matters from the standpoint of their own selfish interest,” he declared in another strongly worded report.

The Soviet Union and the minority governments that the Soviets are forcing on the people of Eastern Europe have an entirely different objective. We must clearly recognize that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know and respect it.

Roosevelt had undergone a profound change in outlook. Stalin was not a man of his word, he confided to Anne O’Hare McCormick of The New York Times before leaving for Warm Springs.

Still, he had refused to give up trying to work with the Russians. In a last message to Stalin sent the day of his death, Roosevelt said that in the future there must be no more mistrust between them, no more such “minor misunderstandings” as over the German surrender issue. (Before passing the message along to Stalin, Harriman had urged the deletion of the word “minor,” but Roosevelt refused.) To Churchill that same day he wrote: “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out….” He added only: “We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.”

Harriman told Truman that Russian control in Poland or Romania meant not just influence over foreign policy, but use of secret police and an end to freedom of speech. What they were faced with, Harriman said, using a phrase Truman would not forget, was a “barbarian invasion” of Europe.

American policy must be reconsidered. Any illusion that the Soviet Union was likely to act in accordance with the accepted principles in international affairs should be abandoned. He was not pessimistic, Harriman insisted. He believed workable relations with Russia were possible, with concessions on both sides.

Truman said he understood that 100 percent cooperation from Stalin was unattainable. He would be happy with 85 percent.

Molotov was due in Washington in two days. Truman said that if the Polish issue were not settled as agreed at Yalta, then the Senate would very likely reject American participation in the United Nations, and that he would tell this to Molotov “in words of one syllable.”

Harriman told the President how relieved he was “that we see eye to eye.”

On a first inspection tour of the private quarters at the White House, their future home, Bess and Margaret were crestfallen. “The White House upstairs is a mess…I was so depressed,” wrote Margaret. The Roosevelts had lived comfortably among possessions shabby and fine, old, new, ordinary, and sentimental, with little concern for color harmony or ever any attempt at show. They had lived as they had at home, like an old-fashioned country gentleman’s family of “comfortable circumstances.” Mrs. Roosevelt had left untouched the $50,000 allocated by Congress for upkeep and repair on the house. Her focus was on other concerns.

Carpets were threadbare. Walls looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned in years and were covered with lighter patches where pictures had hung. The scant remaining furniture was in sad disrepair. Some of the draperies had actually rotted. It looked like a ghost house, remembered the assistant head usher, J. B. West, who led the tour. Mrs. Roosevelt had told Bess she could expect to see rats.

The group that filed into the Oval Office for what was to be a landmark meeting at two o’clock the afternoon of Monday, April 23, was the same as Franklin Roosevelt would have assembled for the same purpose. There was no one from Truman’s old Senate staff, no new foreign policy adviser or Russian expert of Truman’s own choice, no Missouri “gang,” no one at all from Missouri but Truman. They were all Roosevelt’s people: Stettinius, Stimson, Forrestal, Marshall, King, Leahy, Harriman, Bohlen, Assistant Secretary of State James Dunn, and General John R. Deane, who was head of the Moscow military mission.

Molotov was expected shortly. He had arrived in Washington the day before, and he and Truman had already met briefly and quite amicably after dinner at Blair House, where Molotov, too, was staying. Truman had spoken of his admiration for the part Russia played in the war and told the Soviet minister he “stood squarely behind all commitments and agreements taken by our late President” and would do everything he could to follow that path. It had been Truman’s first encounter with a Russian and it had gone smoothly. But now Stettinius reported the Russians were insisting on their puppet government in Poland regardless of American opinion. Truman remarked that so far agreements with the Russians seemed always a one-way street. If the Russians did not want to cooperate, they could “go to hell.”

Asking for opinions, he turned first to the elderly Henry Stimson, who thought it extremely unfortunate the Polish issue had ever come to such a head. It seemed unnecessary, too hurried, too dangerous. Stimson was greatly alarmed, “for fear we are rushing into a situation where we would find ourselves breaking our relations with Russia….” The United States must be very careful, try to resolve things without a “headlong collision.”

Forrestal strongly disagreed. The situation in Poland was not an isolated example. The Russians were moving in on Bulgaria, Romania. Better to have a showdown now than later, he said. The real issue, added Harriman, was whether the United States would be party to a program of Soviet domination in Poland.

Admiral Leahy, from his experience at Yalta, was sure the Russians would never allow free elections in Poland, and warned that a break with the Soviet Union over Poland could be a “serious matter.”

Truman broke in to say he had no intention of issuing an ultimatum to Molotov. He wanted only to be firm and clear.

Stimson interjected that in their concern about Eastern Europe, the Russians “perhaps were being more realistic than we in regard to their own security.”

From his experience in Moscow, said General Deane, any sign of fear on the part of the United States would lead nowhere with the Russians.

Agreeing with Stimson, General Marshall urged caution. His great concern, Marshall said, was that Russia might delay participation in the war against Japan “until we have done all the dirty work.”

Stimson found himself feeling pity for Truman, as he wrote later in his diary:

I am very sorry for the President because he is new on his job and he has been brought into a situation which ought not to have been allowed to come this way. I think the meeting at Yalta was primarily responsible for it because it dealt a good deal in altruism and idealism instead of stark realities on which Russia is strong….

As the meeting ended, it was clear the tone of American dealings with Russia would now take a different turn. Truman remarked that he would follow the advice of the majority.

“Indeed, he did,” remembered Bohlen.

A survivor of revolutions, Siberia, purges, and war, Vyacheslav Molotov was one of the few original Bolsheviks still in power in the Soviet Union, his importance second only to that of Stalin. Molotov was tough and extremely deliberate in manner, with never a sign of emotion, not a hint of human frailty except for a stutter. In his customary dark blue European suit, with his pince-nez and small mustache, he looked like a rather smug English schoolmaster.

Molotov arrived at the President’s office promptly at 5:30, accompanied by his interpreter, V. N. Pavlov, and the Russian ambassador, Andrei Gromyko. With Bohlen serving as his interpreter, Truman came directly to the point. He wanted progress on the Polish question, he said. The United States would recognize no government in Poland that failed to provide free elections. He intended to go ahead with the United Nations, irrespective of differences over “other matters,” and he hoped that Moscow would bear in mind how greatly American foreign policy depended on public support, and that American economic assistance programs after the war would require the vote of Congress.

Molotov said the only acceptable basis for Allied cooperation was for the three governments to treat one another as equals. The Poles had been working against the Red Army, he insisted. Truman cut him short. He was not interested in propaganda, Truman said. He wished Molotov to inform Stalin of his concern over the failure of the Soviet government to live up to its agreements.

According to Bohlen’s later account, Molotov turned “ashy” and tried to divert the conversation. Truman said he wanted friendship with Russia, but Poland was the sore point. The United States was prepared to carry out all agreements reached at Yalta. He asked only that the Soviet government do the same.

In Truman’s recollection of the scene, Molotov responded, “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”

“Carry out your agreements,” Truman told him, “and you won’t get talked to like that.”

By Bohlen’s account, however, this last exchange never happened. Truman just cut the conversation off, saying curtly, “That will be all, Mr. Molotov. I would appreciate it if you would transmit my views to Marshal Stalin.” Thus dismissed, Molotov turned and left the room.

But whichever way the meeting ended, there had been no mistaking Truman’s tone. Even Harriman admitted to being “a little taken aback…when the President attacked Molotov so vigorously.” In retrospect, Harriman would regret that Truman “went at it” quite so hard. “I think it was a mistake….”

Bohlen, for his part, thought Truman had said only about what Roosevelt would have in the same situation, except that of course Roosevelt would have been “smoother.” The difference was in style.

When word of what happened reached Capitol Hill, Arthur Vandenberg called it the best news he had heard in a long time.

Stimson was gravely worried. There was more the President needed to know. “I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter,” he wrote in a hurried letter to Truman.

I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.

At noon, Wednesday, April 25, Truman’s twelfth day in office, the day after Molotov’s visit and the same day as the opening of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, Stimson again went to the White House, but this time alone. General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, or S-1 as Stimson preferred to call it, was brought in a little later through a side door and by way of the ground floor, to avoid being seen, and asked to wait in a room adjoining the President’s office. General Marshall stayed away entirely, so great was their concern over rousing curiosity among the press.

The war and a lifetime of service to his country had taken a toll on Stimson. On doctor’s advice he was now going home for an afternoon nap whenever possible. The first President he had known was Theodore Roosevelt, who made him an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1905, at the time Truman was clerking in the Union National Bank. When Truman was learning about life on the farm, Stimson had become Secretary of War under William Howard Taft. Coolidge appointed him governor-general of the Philippines. Hoover made him Secretary of State. By the time Franklin Roosevelt made him Secretary of War again in 1940, Stimson was an elder statesman of seventy-two.

A graduate of Yale and the Harvard Law School, a lifelong Republican, Stimson was widely and correctly seen as a figure of thorough rectitude, if a bit old-fashioned and austere. He spoke with a faintly scratchy old man’s voice, wore a heavy gold watch chain across his vest, and parted his hair in the middle, the bangs combed forward over the forehead, a style that had disappeared with wing collars. He was also one of the few men ever to admonish Franklin Roosevelt to his face. “Mr. President, I don’t like you to dissemble to me,” Stimson had once lectured, shaking a crooked, arthritic finger.

Reflecting on Stimson a few years later, Truman would describe him as “a real man—honest, straightforward and a statesman sure enough.” Like Truman he had no patience with hypocrisy or circumlocution. Like Truman he was extremely proud of his service in the field artillery in France in 1918 and preferred still to be called “Colonel Stimson.”

He had first learned of S-1 in November of 1941, when named by Roosevelt to a committee to advise the President on all questions relating to nuclear fission. Since then, he had overseen every stage of development.

He and Truman were alone in Truman’s office. Stimson took from his briefcase a typewritten memorandum of several pages and waited while Truman read it. The words were Stimson’s own and the first sentence especially was intended to shock. Stimson had finished writing it only that morning.

Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.

Although the United States and Great Britain had shared in the development of this “most terrible weapon,” at present only the United States had the capability of producing it. Such a monopoly could not last, however, and “probably the only nation which could enter production within the next few years is Russia.”

Stimson was anything but sanguine. Considering the state of “moral advancement” in the world, “modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”

When Truman finished reading, General Groves was shown in to present another report of some twenty-five pages on the status of the Manhattan Project, which Truman was again asked to read.

The President took one copy [Stimson wrote] and we took the other and we went over it and answered his questions and told him all about the process and about the problems that are coming up and in fact I think it very much interested him…. He remembered the time when I refused to let him go into this project when he was the chairman of the Truman Committee…and he said that he understood now perfectly why it was inadvisable for me to have taken any other course than I had….

Stimson, said Truman later, seemed as concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in shaping history as in its capacity to shorten the war. Stimson asked for authorization to establish a special select committee to study the implications of “this new force” and to advise Truman—to help him in his decision. Truman told him to go ahead.

What questions Truman had asked, neither Stimson nor Groves later said, but in a memorandum for his files, Groves noted: “The President did not show any concern over the amount of the funds being spent but made it very definite that he was in entire agreement with the necessity for the project.” Also, according to Groves, Truman had bogged down several times while reading the longer report, saying he didn’t like to tackle so much all at once. Groves and Stimson replied there was no way they could be more concise. “This is a big project,” Groves told the President.

In fact, S-1 was the largest scientific-industrial undertaking in history, and the most important and best-kept secret of the war. Overall responsibility had been given to the Army Corps of Engineers, with Groves, who had overseen the building of the Pentagon, in charge. It had been launched out of fear that the Nazis were at work on the same thing, which they were, though with nothing like the seriousness or success that were imagined. In less than three years the United States had spent $2 billion, which was not the least of the hidden truths, and, one way or other, 200,000 people had been involved, only a few having more than a vague idea of what it was about. That the diligent chairman of the Truman Committee had known so little was a clear measure of how extremely effective security had been. But then neither did General MacArthur or Admiral Chester A. Nimitz or a host of others in high command know what was going on.

While the United States and Great Britain shared in the secret and technical-scientific details, it was in all practicality an American project—initiated, supervised, financed, and commanded from Washington. Ultimately it was Franklin Roosevelt’s project, his decision, his venture. Without his personal interest and backing it would never have been given such priority. For Truman it was thus another part of the Roosevelt legacy to contend with and again Roosevelt was of little help to him. Roosevelt had left behind no policy in writing other than a brief agreement signed with Churchill at Hyde Park the previous autumn saying only that once the new weapon was ready, “It might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.”

Whether the bomb would work, no one could say for certain. According to Groves, a first test would not be ready until early July.

The Washington Star needed to know what the President ate for breakfast (orange juice, cereal—usually oatmeal—toast, and milk, no coffee). Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London wrote for the President’s exact measurements, requesting that the information be transmitted as soon as possible, and his office obliged: Height—5′9″, chest measurement—42½, waist measurement—35½, size of shoes—9B, size of collar—15½, size of gloves—8, size of hat—7 3/8;.

He addressed the United Nations conference by radio hookup. A poor speech, it was full of windy, mostly meaningless pronouncements of exactly the kind Truman disliked and would never normally use. “None of us doubt,” he said, “that with Divine guidance, friendly cooperation, and hard work, we shall find an adequate answer to the problem history has put before us.” As I. F. Stone observed in The Nation, what Truman would normally have said was, “It’s a tough job. I’m not sure we can do it. But we’re going to try our best.”

On the afternoon of April 25, he went to the Pentagon to talk to Churchill by the transatlantic “secret phone.” There had been a secret German offer to negotiate, a peace feeler from Heinrich Himmler, received through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler wanted to capitulate, but only to the Western Allies, not to the Russians. Obviously the Nazis would have to surrender to all the Allies simultaneously, Churchill said. “That is right. That is exactly the way I feel…. I agree to that fully,” Truman responded. He would cable his news to Stalin at once.

Taking time out for his own first look at the White House living quarters, Truman moved through room after room “at a brisk trot,” according to the assistant head usher J. B. West, for whom this was a first chance for a close-up look at the President. West was struck by how large Truman’s glasses made his eyes appear. “I had the feeling he was looking at me, all around me, straight through me.”

On April 27, fifty miles south of Berlin, American and Russian troops met at the Elbe. A day later came word that Mussolini had been killed by partisans, his body strung up by the feet like a slaughtered pig. On Tuesday, May 1, Hamburg Radio broke the sensational news that Hitler, too, was dead, by his own hand in the command bunker in Berlin. On May 2, the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, the President had to call a press conference to say there was no truth to the rumor of a final German surrender, though Churchill kept hinting at peace within the week.

The Postmaster General and the Secretary of Labor wished to retire. The Attorney General did not, but Truman wished he would. The Director of the Bureau of the Budget needed more of the President’s time. The Secretary of War returned to go over a list of names for the special committee on S-1.

It would be hard to imagine a President with more on his mind.

From Grandview, Missouri, all the while, came a series of memorable letters from Mary Jane Truman—to keep Harry abreast of the trials she was enduring.

April 24, 1945

Dear Harry,

We have received so much mail I cannot remember all the details…. We try to read all about what you are doing and have kept up pretty well so far. I’ve lost seven pounds the last week, but no wonder, breakfast is the only meal we have had on time since you went into office…. someone called for pictures yesterday of Mamma, said he was an artist from Washington. I told him I was sorry but Mamma had had all the pictures she could pose for at present….

Mary Jane’s recurring theme through much of what she wrote was the considerable disservice he had done to them by becoming President. Of immediate concern was whether he could get home for Mother’s Day or whether she and Mamma would have to come to Washington, as he had suggested.

May 1, 1945

Dear Harry,

I do hope that you can come, but if not I feel sure we can persuade Mamma to make the trip. And please tell me if you have any suggestion to make about what you would like me to bring in the way of clothes, for I want to look my best and also get Mamma fixed up all right too and it’s a pretty large order on such short notice….

May 7, 1945

Dear Harry,

I arrived home yesterday and found Mamma well and very much inclined to go Friday if possible. I had planned to go in [to Kansas City] today to get whatever is necessary, but it’s pouring down rain and I have lost my voice, so Dr. Graham said I should stay in. Why do such things have to happen when I have so much to do? I am hoping and hoping that I can get everything ready to go Friday. However, you call me Wednesday instead of me putting the call through. If you can, call early as you can, for if I cannot go shopping tomorrow and Wednesday I don’t see how I can get it all done….

Understandingly, he wrote, “You both have done fine under this terrible blow.”

The five-year-long war in Europe, the most costly, murderous conflict in history, ended on May 7, when the German High Command surrendered to the Allied armies. The terms were signed at 2:40 A.M., in a brick school-house at Reims, Eisenhower’s headquarters. The surrender was unconditional.

Churchill had wanted to make the announcement at once, but Stalin, with the situation on the Russian front still uncertain, insisted they wait. Truman agreed that the announcement would be made by all three Allies at the same time the following morning, May 8, V-E Day.

He broke the news to reporters in his office at 8:30. At 9:00, from the Diplomatic Reception Room where Roosevelt had so often broadcast to the country, he spoke to the largest radio audience yet recorded.

This is a solemn but glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day…. We must work to finish the war. Our victory is but half-won….

In a separate statement he called on Japan to surrender, warning that “the striking power and intensity of our blows will steadily increase,” and that the longer the war lasted the greater would be the suffering of the Japanese people, and “all in vain.” Unconditional surrender, further, did “not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”

New York, London, Paris, Moscow, cities around the world, had erupted in wild celebration, but not Washington, where it was raining and thousands of government workers, having listened to the broadcast, remained at their desks. “I call upon every American to stick to his post until the last battle is won,” Truman had said.

May 8 was his sixty-first birthday. He had been President for three weeks and four days. The day before, Mrs. Roosevelt had moved out of the White House and the Trumans moved in, “with very little commotion,” as he later wrote, “except that Margaret’s piano had to be hoisted through a window of the second-floor living room.” To move Mrs. Roosevelt out had required twenty Army trucks. To move the Trumans from Blair House across the street had required only one.

III

The “Russian situation” concerned Truman more than he let on. Patience must be the watchword if there was to be peace in the world, he wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, knowing that she, like some others, was apprehensive about his approach to the Russians. To Joseph E. Davies, former ambassador to Moscow, he described how he had given Molotov a “straight one-two to the jaw,” but then asked, “Did I do right?” The Russians, Truman told Henry Wallace, were “like people from across the tracks whose manners were very bad.” Wallace had begun to worry that Truman was reacting too quickly, without sufficient information and thought.

Truman had made a sudden, arbitrary move to cut back on Lend-Lease not only to Russia but to France and Great Britain, as soon as the war in Europe ended. Ships already under way had been recalled. Apparently he signed the order without reading it, going on the word of State Department officials that Roosevelt had approved. It was a serious blunder, and he had quickly to countermand his own order.

Some nights he was so exhausted he went to bed at eight. One morning, after staying up much of the night to read the Yalta agreements again, he said that every time he went over them he found new meanings. “His sincerity and his desire to do what is right is continually evident,” observed Eben Ayers.

In a top-secret telegram sent on May 6, even before the German surrender, Churchill had urged that the British and American armies “hold firmly” to their present positions in Germany and Eastern Europe and not pull back to the occupational line agreed to earlier with the Russians, It was essential, Churchill said, to “show them how much we have to offer or withhold.” On May 9, Truman responded, saying, “it is my present intention to adhere to our interpretation of the Yalta agreements.” In Germany this would mean withdrawing from the Elbe back as much as 150 miles, to as far west as Eisenbach.

On May 11 came two more cables from the prime minister, setting forth his anxieties over the Russians and the future of Europe. “Mr. President, in these next two months the gravest matters in the world will be decided,” he said in the first cable. “I fear terrible things have happened during the Russian advance through Germany to the Elbe,” he said in the second. Russian domination in Poland, eastern Germany, the Baltic provinces, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, a large part of Austria, would constitute “an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel.” It was essential that the Allied armies not withdraw from their present positions “until we are satisfied about Poland and also about the temporary character of the Russian occupation of Germany,” as well as “the conditions to be established” in the rest of Eastern Europe. All such matters, Churchill warned, could only be settled before American forces withdraw from Europe “and the Western world folds up its war machines.”

In a telegram of May 12, Churchill’s tone grew still more alarming:

I am profoundly concerned about the European situation…. I learn that half the American air force in Europe has already begun to move to the Pacific Theater. The newspapers are full of the great movements of the American armies out of Europe. Our armies also are under previous arrangements likely to undergo a marked reduction. The Canadian Army will certainly leave. The French are weak and difficult to deal with. Anyone can see that in a very short space of time our armed power on the continent will have vanished except for moderate forces to hold down Germany.

Meanwhile what is to happen about Russia?

“An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,” Churchill continued, using a new expression for the first time. “We do not know what is going on behind.”

Both men agreed to the importance of meeting somewhere soon with Stalin, though Truman felt that for domestic political reasons he should not leave Washington until after June 30, the end of the fiscal year. In the meantime, he would send Harry Hopkins to see Stalin.

Writing to an old friend in Independence on May 13, a month to the day since he took office, Truman said, “It is a very, very hard position to fall into as I did. If there ever was a man who was forced to be President, I’m that man…. But I must face the music, and try to the best of my ability. You just keep on praying and hoping for the best.”

Calling on Truman on May 14, to discuss the joint meeting with Stalin, Anthony Eden was struck by his “air of quiet confidence in himself.”

“I am here to make decisions,” Truman said, “and whether they prove right or wrong I am going to make them.”

“To have a reasonably lasting peace the three great powers must be able to trust each other and they must themselves honestly want it,” he wrote privately. “They must also have the confidence of the smaller nations. Russia hasn’t the confidence of the small nations, nor has Britain. We have.” Then, in frustration, he added, “I want peace and I’m willing to fight for it.”

To Hopkins, he advised using either diplomatic language with Stalin or a baseball bat, whichever would work.

The Hopkins mission had been urged by Bohlen and Harriman, who had flown back to Washington from San Francisco greatly distressed that the United Nations conference was in trouble. Molotov was heading home. Hopkins, it was thought, might succeed in patching things up, since he would be seen by Stalin as both someone who had been close to Roosevelt and who had worked hard all along for a policy of cooperation with Russia. Hopkins could also handle arrangements for the Big Three conference. Though still gravely ill, Hopkins had at once agreed to go.

Meantime, accompanied by Mary Jane, ninety-two-year-old Martha Ellen Truman had arrived for her first visit ever to Washington, after her first flight in an airplane, for a first look at her oldest son since he had become President.

Truman had sent the presidential plane for them, the same four-motored, silver C-54, nicknamed The Sacred Cow, that had carried Roosevelt to Casablanca, Teheran, and Yalta, and to Truman’s delight Mamma was a hit with the Washington press from the moment she stepped from the plane. “Oh, fiddlesticks!” she exclaimed, seeing how many had turned out to meet her. Had she known there would be such fuss, she said, she never would have come. Small and bent, but “chipper as a lark,” she wore a large orchid on the lapel of a dark blue suit and a blue spring straw hat trimmed with a gardenia.

In the car on the way to the White House, Margaret asked Mamma teasingly if she would like to sleep in the Lincoln bed. Mamma, her Confederate blood rising, said if that was the choice she would prefer the floor. Truman thought she would be most comfortable in the Rose Guest Room, where so many queens had stayed, but his mother found the bed too high, the room too fancy. Offering it to Mary Jane, she chose a smaller room next door.

She had arrived in time for Mother’s Day. She stayed a little more than a week, and charmed everyone at the White House. “Oh, you couldn’t help but like her,” Secret Service agent Floyd Boring would remember. “She was point blank, you know.” The second Sunday, a brilliant, blue-sky day with the Capitol dome and Washington Monument gleaming in sunshine, Truman took her for a cruise on the Potomac in the presidential yacht.

Working with J. B. West and a Kansas City decorator, Bess was transforming the private quarters of the White House. Rooms were scrubbed, painted, furniture repaired or discarded. New furniture was purchased (mostly reproduction antiques). New curtains and draperies were installed, walls hung with paintings (landscapes primarily) borrowed from the National Gallery. Bess’s mother moved in, taking a guest room over the North Portico. Reathel Odum, from Truman’s Senate office, who was to serve both as Bess’s personal secretary and as a companion for Mrs. Wallace, was given a room beside Mrs. Wallace.

Truman, Bess, and Margaret had separate rooms. Truman slept in an antique, canopied four-poster in the President’s Bedroom, the room Roosevelt had used, just off the large, central oval room on the south side, which, again like Roosevelt, Truman would use as his private study. It was in this oval room that John Adams had held the first White House reception on New Year’s Day 1801, and that Roosevelt had met with Bob Hannegan, Ed Flynn, and the others on the steaming July night less than a year earlier to decide who was to be number two on the Democratic ticket.

Bess had two rooms—sitting room and bedroom—adjoining the President’s Bedroom, while Margaret was across the hall from her mother, in a corner room overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. “My bedroom is pink with antique white furniture. Deep pink draperies and white window curtains,” Margaret wrote happily in her diary. “It also has a fireplace and mirror. High (25 ft.) ceilings.” She was the first young resident in the White House since the Wilson years and concerned mainly at this point with final exams at George Washington University.

For exercise, Truman had begun using the swimming pool Roosevelt had had built on the ground floor. Truman tried to do six or eight laps in his choppy, self-styled sidestroke, head up to keep his glasses dry, and hoped to get to where he could swim a quarter of a mile.

In the evening before dinner, he and Bess would relax with a cocktail in the so-called “sitting hall,” but as J. B. West remembered, it took a while for the staff to learn their tastes.

On an evening when Bess first ordered old-fashioneds, the head butler, Alonzo Fields, a proudly accomplished bartender, had fixed the drinks his usual way, with chilled glasses, an ounce of bourbon each, orange slices, a teaspoon of sugar, and dash of bitters. But the night following she had asked that the drinks not be made quite so sweet and so Fields had tried another recipe.

This time she waited until morning to complain to J. B. West. They were the worst old-fashioneds she had ever tasted. She and the President did not care for fruit punch. West spoke to Fields, who, the third night, his pride hurt, poured her a double bourbon on ice and stood by waiting for the reaction as the First Lady took a sip.

“Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds,” she said, smiling.

Fields, a tall, handsome black man, would later say of Mrs. Truman that she would “stand no fakers, shirkers or flatterers,” and that the only way to gain her approval was to do your job as best you could. “This done, you would not want a more understanding person to work for.”

J. B. West, who had grown up in Iowa, found her down-to-earth and personable, “correct but not formal.” He liked her. “Like most Midwestern women I’d known, her values went deeper than cosmetics.”

The President impressed him as someone who knew who he was and liked who he was. And as a family all three were extremely fond of each other. “They were essentially very private people who didn’t show affection in public,” West wrote. “But they did everything together—read, listened to the radio, played the piano, and mostly talked to each other.” In twelve years Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had never been in residence in the White House alone. Rarely had they ever taken a meal together.

The full staff for the main house—butlers, cooks, maids, doormen, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, gardeners—numbered thirty-two, of whom the highest ranking were the head usher, Howell Crim; the First Lady’s social secretary, Edith Helm; and the housekeeper, elderly, gray-haired Henrietta Nesbitt, a favorite of Mrs. Roosevelt’s, who had charge of the food and who was the only one who appeared to be a problem, since the food was uniformly dreadful. Ira Smith, who was Chief of Mails, had first come to work as a messenger at the White House in 1897. Samuel Jackson, the President’s personal messenger, had begun his duties during the Taft administration, as had John Mays, the head doorman.

Truman got along splendidly with them all. In time he knew everyone’s name and all about their families and years of service in the house. If there were guests, he would introduce each of the servants, something none of them had ever known a President to do before.

“He knew when a stenographer’s baby caught a cold; when a White House servant lost a relative,” Merriman Smith, White House correspondent for United Press, would remember. “He thought it was hilarious when LeRoy, the White House leaf-raker whom he knew and liked, fobbed himself off as an important official and was shown a box at Hialeah (Florida) race track.”

One story would be told for a long time. On the night of the German surrender, May 8, Truman’s birthday, the head cook, Elizabeth Moore, had baked him a cake. Dinner over, Truman had gone to the kitchen to thank her, and as Alonzo Fields would note, this was the first time a President had been in the White House kitchen since Coolidge, who had been in and out so often it was said he was only being nosy—to see no handouts were being given away.

“I always felt that he [President Truman] understood me as a man, not as a servant to be tolerated,” Fields would write, “and that I understood that he expected me to be a man…. President Roosevelt was genial and warm but he left one feeling, as most aristocrats do, that they really do not understand one.”

Harry Hopkins had told Truman he had made a mistake ever asking the Roosevelt Cabinet to stay. A President ought to have his own people around him, Hopkins lectured. Now the changes began.

Bob Hannegan, to no one’s surprise, was named Postmaster General, the traditional reward for a party chairman, to replace the ailing Frank Walker, who had talked of retirement since before Roosevelt’s death. Lewis Schwellenbach, Truman’s old Senate friend and confidant, was to be the new Secretary of Labor, succeeding Frances Perkins, who had been the first to tell Truman she wished to step down. For Secretary of Agriculture, after the resignation of Claude Wickard, he picked Congressman Clinton Anderson of New Mexico. To replace Roosevelt’s aristocratic Attorney General, Francis Biddle of Philadelphia, he named a relatively unknown Texan, Tom Clark, an assistant attorney general who had run the Criminal Division.

Announcement of the changes caused little stir. At his press conference Truman was asked only if Clark spelled his name with an “e” on the end. Nor did Truman regret the departures. Walker he thought a decent enough man but lacking in ideas. Perkins, though “a grand lady,” knew nothing of politics, and besides he didn’t like the idea of a woman in the Cabinet. As for Biddle, Truman had never much cared for him.

The only sour note was Biddle’s removal, which Truman mishandled. He had no heart for firing people. “Not built right, I guess, to man a chopping block,” he had once observed to Bess. To avoid a confrontation with Biddle, he had one of the staff contact him by phone. Biddle, greatly insulted, said that if the President wished his resignation, the President could ask for it himself. A Cabinet officer should expect no less. So Truman sent for him and admitted he had gone about things the wrong way. He told Biddle he had not wanted to face him. He then asked for his resignation.

“The President seemed relieved,” Biddle wrote in his version of the scene. “I got up, walked over to him and touched his shoulder. ‘You see,’ I said, ‘it’s not so hard.’ ”

The eventual announcement that Jimmy Byrnes would succeed Stettinius as Secretary of State brought the number of replacements to five, half the Cabinet. Just three of the old New Dealers remained—Wallace, Ickes, and Morgenthau—and the expectation was they wouldn’t last much longer. Stimson intended to serve only until the war ended, which left Forrestal as the only one who seemed likely to stay.

In surface ways the new group was a projection of Truman himself. Everybody but Byrnes was from west of the Mississippi. There was no one who was notably brilliant or colorful or a vociferous liberal. All were good, solid Democrats, all perfectly safe choices. But most important, three of the five—Byrnes, Schwellenbach, and Anderson—had served in Congress. Truman was determined both to have a strong Cabinet to which he could delegate a large part of his responsibilities, and to get along with Congress better than Roosevelt had. Even Tom Clark was chosen chiefly on Speaker Sam Rayburn’s recommendation.

To the regret of Admiral Leahy and other career Navy men, Truman also brought in a reserve officer, another Missourian, Navy Captain James K. Vardaman, Jr., to be his naval aide, an appointment approximately on a par to that of Harry Vaughan. Like Vaughan, Vardaman had stood by Truman when it mattered, in the 1940 Senate race. Like Vaughan, he knew how to amuse “the Boss.” After one poker-party cruise on the Potomac in the presidential yacht with Vaughan, Vardaman, George Allen, and John Snyder, Truman wrote in his diary that his sides were sore from laughing.

One further appointment, however, was seen as a first sign of genuine political courage on Truman’s part. Clearly it was not a case of politics as usual, or politics in the Roosevelt style.

With David Lilienthal’s term as head of the Tennessee Valley Authority about to expire, Truman was under great pressure from conservative Democrats to dump him. Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, “Old Mack,” the craggy, slouched president of the Senate and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, was in a “pow’ful tempuh,” threatening to lead the biggest confirmation fight in memory if Truman dared reappoint the liberal Lilienthal, who insisted on merit rather than patronage appointments at TVA. To avoid trouble with McKellar, Roosevelt had already spoken of naming Lilienthal to another job.

Lilienthal, a steadfast, idealistic New Dealer who had been made nearly ill by the thought of Truman taking Roosevelt’s place, was called to the White House. It was Truman’s impression that Lilienthal had been doing a first-rate job and Truman told him so. Then, smiling, he asked if Lilienthal was ready to carry on at TVA. If so, he was reappointed. There would be troubles with McKellar, of course, Truman said, but he had tangled with McKellar before.

And that was about all there was [recorded Lilienthal, incredulous and thrilled]…. No talk about what a “rap” he, as President, was assuming in naming me…no talk, such as…President Roosevelt had given me, about what McKellar could do to disrupt the peace if his wishes concerning me were not respected—none of that—just there it was.

It was an admirable performance. Simple. No mock heroics. Nothing complex. Straightforward!

As it turned out, McKellar’s opposition had little effect. The nomination was confirmed by the Senate on May 23.

Earlier, talking with his staff before seeing Lilienthal, Truman had said with a pleased look, “Old Mack is going to have a hemorrhage.”

Another morning in late May, at their regular nine o’clock meeting, Truman told his staff he had done something about which there might be objection. He had invited Herbert Hoover to come see him. He had written Hoover in longhand the night before. The letter was already in the mail, so there was no use trying to stop it.

The former President had been persona non grata at the White House since Roosevelt first took office in 1933. Truman thought it was time that ended. He wanted to talk with Hoover, he said, about famine relief in Europe. Also, as he did not say, Hoover was the one other mortal who had ever sat in his place, or who knew the feeling of being constantly compared to Roosevelt.

“Saw Herbert Hoover,” Truman wrote in his diary, “…and had a pleasant and constructive conversation on food and the general troubles of U.S. Presidents—two in particular.”

Things were going so well overall, Truman also recorded, that he hardly knew what to think. “I can’t understand it—except to attribute it to God. He guides me, I think.”

IV

Besides Henry Stimson, who served as chairman, the newly organized, entirely civilian and highly secret Interim Committee on S-1 included eight members, three of whom were eminent scientists involved with the project: James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, who was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee; Karl T. Compton, president of M.I.T.; and Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institute in Washington and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Ralph A. Bard was Under Secretary of the Navy and a former Chicago financier. William L. Clayton was Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and a specialist in international trade. George L. Harrison was the president of the New York Life Insurance Company and Stimson’s special assistant on matters related to S-1.

The eighth man was Jimmy Byrnes, who had been appointed by the President as his personal representative.

The first meeting was held on Wednesday, May 9, 1945, in Stimson’s office at the Pentagon. “Gentlemen, it is our responsibility to recommend action that may turn the course of civilization,” the venerable Secretary of War began. Meetings followed on May 14 and May 18. On Thursday, May 31, the committee convened for a crucial two-day session, joined now by an advisory panel of four physicists actively involved with development of the bomb: Enrico Fermi and Arthur H. Compton of the University of Chicago; Ernest O. Lawrence of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley; and, most important, J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was being assembled.

A wide range of subjects was covered at this final session, including relations with Soviets. General Marshall raised the possibility of inviting the Russians to send some of their scientists to witness the first test. Byrnes objected, expressing a view agreed to by all present, that the best program would be to “push ahead as fast as possible in production and research to make certain that we stay ahead and at the same time make every effort to better our political relations with Russia.”

After much discussion, the committee and scientific panel reached three unanimous conclusions:

1. The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible.

2. It should be used against war plants surrounded by workers’ homes or other buildings susceptible to damage, in order “to make a profound psychological impression on as many inhabitants as possible.” (Oppenheimer had assured them the “visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous.”)

3. It should be used without warning.

Byrnes went directly from the meeting to the White House to report to Truman, and Truman, according to Byrnes’s later recollection, said that “with reluctance he had to agree, that he could think of no alternative….”

Stimson, in the meantime, had received a long letter that impressed him greatly and that he passed on immediately to Marshall, calling it a “remarkable document” from an honest man. It was addressed to the President and had come through regular security channels. “I shall take the President’s copy to him personally,” Stimson wrote in reply, “or through Byrnes….”

Dated May 24, it was from an unknown engineer named O. C. Brewster of 23 East 11th Street, New York, who had worked on uranium isotope separation for S-1, but who, since the defeat of Germany, had become tormented over what the release of the energy “locked up in the atom” might mean for the future. “The idea of the destruction of civilization is not melodramatic hysteria or crackpot raving. It is a very real and, I submit, almost inevitable result.” In the early stages of the project, like many others, Brewster had hoped it would be conclusively proved impossible. “Obviously, however, so long as there was any chance that Germany might succeed at this task there was only one course to follow and that was to do everything in our power to get this thing first and destroy Germany before she had a chance to destroy us…. So long as the threat of Germany existed we had to proceed with all speed…. With the threat of Germany removed we must stop this project.” He urged a demonstration of one atomic bomb on a target in Japan, but then no further production of nuclear material.

I do not of course want to propose anything to jeopardize the war with Japan but, horrible as it may seem, I know it would be better to take greater casualties now in conquering Japan than to bring upon the world the tragedy of unrestrained competitive production of this material…. In the name of the future of our country and of the peace of the world, I beg you, sir, not to pass this off because I happen to be unknown, without influence or name in the public eye….

The letter reached the White House, but whether Truman saw it is not known. It was, however, returned shortly with no sign of presidential reaction.

The one hint of Truman’s state of mind to be found in his own hand is a diary entry on Sunday, June 3: “Have been going through some very hectic days,” is his only comment. Later, he would say that of course he realized an atomic explosion would inflict damage and casualties “beyond imagination.”

Actually, no one was very clear on what power the weapon might have. Forecasts provided by the scientific panel for the explosive force varied from the equivalent of 2,000 tons of TNT to 20,000 tons.

Estimates by the scientists on how long it might take the Soviets to develop such a weapon ranged from three to five years, although General Groves personally reckoned as much as twenty years.

Stimson was thinking more of the larger historic consequences. At the final meeting of the committee he had said how vitally important it was to regard the bomb not “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe,” and like O. C. Brewster, he warned that the project might mean “the doom of civilization.” It might be a Frankenstein monster, or it might mean “the perfection of civilization.” (Ernest O. Lawrence of the scientific panel had forecast the day when it might be possible to “secure our energy from terrestrial sources rather than from the sun.”) But no one knew.

On Wednesday, June 6, Stimson came to discuss the report with the President in more detail.

Stimson told Truman he was deeply troubled by reports of the devastation brought on Japan by the B-29 fire raids. He had insisted always on precision bombing, Stimson said, but was now informed by the Air Force that that was no longer possible, since in Japan, unlike Germany, industries were not concentrated but scattered among and closely connected with the houses of employees.

As Stimson appreciated, attitudes about the bombing of civilian targets had changed drastically in Washington, as in the nation, the longer the war went on. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1937, it had been viewed as an atrocity of the most appalling kind. When the war in Europe erupted in 1939, Roosevelt had begged both sides to refrain from the “inhuman barbarism” of bombing civilians. His “arsenal of democracy” speech in December 1940 had had particular power and urgency because German bombers were pounding London. (“What a puny effort is this to burn a great city,” Edward R. Murrow had said.) But the tide of war had turned, and the “ghastly dew” raining from the skies in the Tennyson poem that Truman still carried in his wallet had become more ghastly by far. That winter, in February 1945, during three raids on Dresden, Germany—two British raids, one American—incendiary bombs set off a fire-storm that could be seen for 200 miles. In all an estimated 135,000 people had died.

A recent issue of Life carried aerial photographs taken after three hundred B-29 bombers swept such destruction on Tokyo, said Life, as was hitherto visited on the city only by catastrophic earthquakes. The magazine said nothing of how many men, women, and children were killed, but in one such horrendous fire raid on Tokyo the night of March 9–10, more than 100,000 perished. Bomber crews in the last waves of the attack could smell burning flesh. With Japan vowing anew to fight to the end, the raids continued. On May 14, five hundred B-29s hit Nagoya, Japan’s third largest industrial city, in what The New York Times called the greatest concentration of fire bombs in the history of aerial warfare. On May 23, five square miles of Tokyo were obliterated. Thirty-six hours later, 16 square miles were destroyed. As weeks passed, other coastal cities were hit—Yokahama, Osaka, Kobe.

Stimson told Truman he didn’t want to see the United States “outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” But he was also concerned that targets in Japan might become so bombed out by conventional raids that S-1 would have no “fair background” to show its strength, an observation that seems to have struck Truman as so odd, coming on top of Stimson’s previous worry, that he actually laughed, then added that he understood.

Neither Stimson nor General Marshall was concerned over whether the bomb should be used on Japan, only with how to use it to stop the slaughter as quickly as possible. Stimson’s directive to General Groves in 1942 had been to produce the bomb at “the earliest possible date so as to bring the war to a conclusion.”

As Stimson stressed, the committee’s role was advisory only. The responsibility for a recommendation to the President was his alone, and he was painfully aware of all that was riding on his judgment.

The ultimate responsibility for the recommendation to the President rested on me [he would later write], and I have no desire to veil it. The conclusions of the Committee were similar to my own, although I reached mine independently. I felt that to extract a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his military advisers, there must be administered a tremendous shock which could carry convincing proof of our power to destroy the Empire. Such an effective shock would save many times the number of lives, both American and Japanese, that it would cost.

The possibility of dropping the atomic bomb on some target other than a city, as a harmless technical demonstration for the Japanese, had been considered by the committee and by the scientific panel and it had been rejected. General Marshall had thought initially that the weapon might first be used against such a “straight military objective” as a large naval installation, and then, if necessary, against manufacturing centers, from which the people would be warned in advance to leave. “We must offset by such warning methods,” Marshall had said, “the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.” But by now apparently Marshall had changed his mind, and besides, he was not formally a member of the committee. The scientists were able to propose no demonstration sufficiently spectacular to give the needed “tremendous shock.” Probably only one bomb would be ready. There were worries it might not work, and that any advance announcement of a supposedly all-powerful secret weapon that failed would be worse than no attempt and only bolster Japanese resolve to fight on. Writing for the scientific panel, Oppenheimer said:

The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiation will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternates to direct military use.

Byrnes had introduced the further thought that if the Japanese were told in advance where the bomb was to be dropped, they might bring American prisoners of war to the area. Oppenheimer, who supposedly knew the most about the bomb, stressed that the number of people killed by it would be considerably less than in a conventional incendiary raid. Oppenheimer’s estimate was that twenty thousand would die.

Stimson told Truman what the committee had stressed, and what all his senior military advisers were saying, that it was the “shock value” of the weapon that would stop the war. Nothing short of that would work.

Okinawa was on Stimson’s mind—Okinawa was on all their minds. An attack on the American armada by hundreds of Japanese suicide planes, the kamikaze, had had devastating effect—thirty ships sunk, more than three hundred damaged, including carriers and battleships. Once American troops were ashore on the island, the enemy fought from caves and pillboxes with fanatic ferocity, even after ten days of heavy sea and air bombardment. The battle on Okinawa still raged. In the end more than 12,000 Americans would be killed, 36,000 wounded. Japanese losses were ten times worse—110,000 Japanese killed—and, as later studies show, civilian deaths on the island may have been as high as 150,000, or a third of the population.

“We regarded the matter of dropping the bomb as exceedingly important,” General Marshall later explained.

We had just been through a bitter experience at Okinawa. This had been preceded by a number of similar experiences in other Pacific islands. [The first day of the invasion of Iwo Jima had been more costly than D-Day at Normandy.]…The Japanese had demonstrated in each case they would not surrender and they fight to the death…. It was to be expected that resistance in Japan, with their home ties, could be even more severe. We had had one hundred thousand people killed in Tokyo in one night of bombs, and it had seemingly no effect whatsoever. It destroyed the Japanese cities, yes, but their morale was affected, so far as we could tell, not at all. So it seemed quite necessary, if we could, to shock them into action…. We had to end the war; we had to save American lives.

Among some scientists connected with the project, but not party to the committee’s discussions, there was sharp disagreement with such reasoning.

In early April, Leo Szilard of the University of Chicago, the brilliant Hungarian-born physicist who, with Einstein, had helped persuade Roosevelt to initiate the project in the first place, wrote a long memorandum addressed to Roosevelt saying that use of an atomic bomb against Japan would start an atomic arms race with Russia and questioning whether avoiding that might be more important than the short-term goal of knocking Japan out of the war. Because of Roosevelt’s death, the memorandum was not sent. Instead, Szilard set about arranging an appointment with Truman through a friend and colleague at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, a mathematician named Albert Cahn, who came from Kansas City and had once, to pay his way through graduate school, worked for Tom Pendergast. A date was made for Szilard to see Matt Connelly, the new appointments secretary, and Szilard went to the White House. Connelly, having read Szilard’s memorandum, agreed it was a serious matter. (“At first I was a little suspicious,” he also said, “because the appointment came through Kansas City.”) He told Szilard it was the President’s wish that he see Jimmy Byrnes, and Szilard, who was unaware of Byrnes’s role on the Interim Committee or that Byrnes was soon to become Secretary of State, took an overnight train to Spartanburg, accompanied by a University of Chicago dean, Walter Bartky, and another noted physicist, Harold Urey.

The three men saw Byrnes on May 27, just days before the crucial, last meeting of the Interim Committee. Reading the memorandum, Byrnes was at once annoyed by its tone. The true situation, it said, could be evaluated “only by men who have firsthand knowledge of the facts involved, that is, by the small group of scientists who are actively engaged in this work.” Byrnes was put off also by Szilard himself, a notably eccentric man of expansive ego. “His general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy making made an unfavorable impression on me,” Byrnes later wrote.

According to Szilard, Byrnes said he understood from General Groves that Russia had no uranium and that through possession of the bomb America could “render the Russians more manageable.” Szilard felt certain it would have precisely the opposite effect.

According to Byrnes, what Szilard, Bartky, and Urey told him about the power of the bomb did nothing to decrease his fears of “the terrible weapon they had assisted in creating.”

Szilard left Spartanburg determined to draw up a petition to the President opposing on “purely moral grounds” any use of atomic bombs on Japan. Stopping again in Washington en route to Chicago, he saw Oppenheimer.

Like Stimson, like so many, Oppenheimer by this time was worn out, his nerves on edge. There were problems at Los Alamos. Detonators were not firing as they should, the work was falling behind schedule. Oppenheimer looked a wreck. He had been stricken with chicken pox and lost 30 pounds. Though over six feet tall, he weighed all of 115 pounds.

“Oppenheimer didn’t share my views,” Szilard recalled. “He surprised me by saying, ‘The atomic bomb is shit…a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon that is useful in war.’ ”

To what extent Byrnes discussed Szilard with Truman, if at all, is not recorded. But in his discussions about the atomic bomb, Admiral Leahy had been assuring Truman that “the damn thing” would never work. To Leahy it was “all the biggest bunk in the world.”

On Saturday, June 2, after less than a month in residence, Bess, her mother, and Margaret had packed and left Washington by train to spend a long summer in Independence. Madge Wallace was not happy with life in the White House, nor was Bess. “We are on our way home, underlined, four exclamation points,” wrote Margaret, who, to her father, seemed in a very unsatisfactory humor. “I hope—sincerely hope,” he wrote privately, “that this situation (my being President) is not going to affect her adversely.”

At home, the old house at 219 North Delaware was being patched up and repainted after years of neglect. It would be gray no more, but white now, with “Kentucky green” trim at the windows, as befitting the “summer White House.”

After only a few nights alone, Truman began feeling desolate and more than a little sorry for himself. The first Sunday, giving no advance notice, he walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church and slipped into a back pew unnoticed by most of the congregation. It was where Lincoln had sometimes worshiped, he knew. “Don’t think over six people recognized me,” he wrote in his diary.

One evening Admiral Leahy stayed over for dinner and afterward he and Truman played hosts at a reception for White House employees and their families. But most nights were taken up with work in the upstairs Oval Study, where the long windows stood open to the mild spring air.

From sounds in the night, Truman became convinced the house was haunted and tried to imagine which former residents might be involved:

June 12, 1945

Dear Bess:

Just two months ago today, I was a reasonably happy and contented Vice President. Maybe you can remember that far back too. But things have changed so much it hardly seems real.

I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches—all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show the din is almost unbearable….

General Eisenhower made a triumphal return to the city, spoke to a joint session of Congress, and Truman gave a stag dinner for him at the White House, which everyone thought a big success. “He’s a nice fellow and a good man,” Truman reported to Bess. “He’s done a whale of a job.” There was talk everywhere of running Eisenhower for President, which, Truman told her, was perfectly fine by him. “I’d turn it over to him now if I could.”

Alone in the old house he would poke about in the closets, adjust the clocks. He hated being by himself, hated having breakfast alone, or even going through the motions of dressing for the day. “I’m always so lonesome when the family leaves. I have no one to raise a fuss over my neckties and my haircuts, my shoes and my clothes generally,” he lamented in his diary. “I usually put on a terrible tie not even Bob Hannegan or Ed McKim would wear just to get a loud protest from Bess and Margie. When they are gone I have to put on the right ones and it’s no fun.”

Yet the truth seemed to be that things were going exceedingly, inexplicably well for him. His popularity was beyond imagining. A Gallup Poll reported that 87 percent of the people approved his conduct of the presidency, which was a higher rating even than Roosevelt had ever received. Nor was the woeful man of the evening letters the one who turned up in the office each day. “And as usual, he is in good humor,” Eben Ayers noted one Monday morning. Truman was pleased with his popularity on the Hill, pleased with his press conferences, his staff. He loved having Charlie Ross on duty. Most heartening was the “good progress” made by Hopkins, who returned from Moscow on June 12 and, with Joseph Davies, came for breakfast the next morning. Davies was back from a mission to London to see Churchill.

In long cables from Moscow Hopkins had given full account of his every conversation with Stalin. Though greatly offended by the manner in which Lend-Lease had been shut off, Stalin seemed willing to let the matter pass. He had agreed even to the American position on voting procedure in the United Nations Security Council, which in effect meant the San Francisco Conference was saved.

Churchill, in further cables, had been urging again that there be no withdrawal of American forces to the designated occupation zones in Europe. “Nothing really important has been settled yet,” he warned Truman, “and you and I will have to bear great responsibility for the future.” But Hopkins told Truman any delay in the withdrawal of American troops from the Soviet zone was “certain to be misunderstood by the Russians.” Reportedly General Eisenhower also thought it unwise to keep American forces in the Russian zone. Truman, determined still to do nothing in violation of Roosevelt’s agreements at Yalta, and believing this the best possible way to demonstrate America’s good faith to the Russians and to induce them to carry out their own obligations in return, informed Churchill on June 11 that, as agreed, American troops would pull back, which Churchill saw as a terrible mistake. A few years later, Truman would write:

We were about 150 miles east of the border of the occupation zone line agreed to at Yalta. I felt that agreements made in the war to keep Russia fighting should be kept and I kept them to the letter. Perhaps they should not have been adhered to so quickly….

Regarding Poland, Stalin had told Hopkins he was willing to talk. All of which meant the issue stood again where it was when Roosevelt came home from Yalta, except that now the place and time for such talk was settled. Truman had wanted to meet in Alaska. But as twice before—for both the Teheran and Yalta conferences—Stalin was granted his way. It would be Potsdam, a Berlin suburb in the zone held by the Red Army. The date chosen was July 15.

Truman was so pleased by what Hopkins had achieved, he even thought Hopkins, whose deathlike appearance stunned others at the White House, looked improved in health. The trip had done Hopkins good, Truman felt sure. The Russians, he wrote in his diary, had “always been our friends and I can’t see why they shouldn’t always be.”

By leaving his sickbed to go to Moscow, Hopkins had performed heroic service for his country. Truman was enormously grateful to him and thanked him. Hopkins, who had worked so long and closely with Roosevelt, later told Charlie Ross that it was the first time he had ever been thanked by a President.

The President was trying to understand what to do in the Pacific, trying to fathom MacArthur, whom he had never met, but didn’t like from what he had read and heard—“Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur,” Truman referred to him in the privacy of his diary. “Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.”

His mind was on plans for the invasion and a proposed Navy blockade designed to starve Japan into submission. In a memorandum stamped URGENT, Admiral Leahy noted the President wanted to know the number of men and ships needed:

He wants an estimate of the time required and an estimate of the losses in killed and wounded that will result from an invasion of Japan proper…. It is his intention to make his decision on the campaign with the purpose of economizing to the maximum extent possible in the loss of American lives. Economy in the use of time and in money cost is comparatively unimportant.

“I have to decide Japanese strategy—shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade?” Truman pondered in his diary. “That is my hardest decision to date.” S-1 was not mentioned.

Nor was it mentioned at the extremely important White House meeting to review the invasion plans the afternoon of Monday, June 18, 1945, and this, as the hour passed, struck one of Stimson’s staff, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, as extremely odd. Things were proceeding, McCloy saw, as if the bomb did not exist.

The plan, as presented by General Marshall, was for a two-phase invasion, beginning in November with the southernmost of the Japanese islands, Kyushu, only 350 miles from Okinawa. The operation, said Marshall, would be as difficult as Normandy, but he thought it the only course to pursue. Casualties were hard to predict. He estimated that in the initial phase, the first 30 days only, losses would be similar to those on Luzon, which was about 31,000.

Admiral King said Okinawa would be a more realistic measure, and put the number at 41,000. Admiral Nimitz would forecast 49,000 casualties in the first 30 days, 7,000 more than at Normandy in an equal span of time. MacArthur’s staff estimated 50,000, though MacArthur, who was all for the invasion, considered that too high.

Another estimate at the Pentagon included the invasion of both southern and northern Kyushu, as well as Japan proper (“the decisive invasion”), and the cost of this plan came to 220,000 casualties, nearly a quarter of a million men. But a memorandum of June 4, 1945, written by General Thomas Handy of Marshall’s staff, in listing the advantages of making peace with Japan, said America would save no less than 500,000 to 1 million lives by avoiding the invasion altogether—which shows that figures of such magnitude were then in use at the highest levels. Stimson was certain the Japanese would fight as never before, soldiers and civilians alike, and that the cost of life on both sides would far exceed all other campaigns of the war. The number of American dead and wounded, Stimson feared, could reach a million.

The code name for the overall plan was “Downfall.” The assault on Kyushu, called “Olympic,” was to begin November 1. Operation Coronet, the larger invasion of Japan proper, the main island of Honshu, would follow in March 1946. Prior to the invasion of Honshu, air bombardment would be increased to an absolute maximum, to the point where, said one memorandum, “more bombs will be dropped on Japan than were delivered against Germany during the entire European War.”

Truman approved the plan.

McCloy, who had expressed his own views to Stimson at length the night before, kept silent throughout the discussion. But as the meeting ended, he remembered, “We were beginning to get our papers together and the President saw me. ‘McCloy,’ he said, ‘nobody leaves this room until he’s been heard from.’ I turned to Stimson and he said, ‘Go ahead.’ ”

McCloy replied that the threat of the bomb might provide a “political solution.” The whole invasion could be avoided. An immediate hush fell on the room, as if the mere mention of the ultra secret was out of order.

“I said I would tell them [the Japanese] we have the bomb and I would tell them what kind of a weapon it is. And then I would tell them the surrender terms.” He thought the Japanese should also be told they could keep their Emperor. What if they refused, he was asked. “Our moral position will be stronger if we give them warning.”

Truman indicated he would think about it.

He flew to San Francisco on The Sacred Cow to speak in the Opera House on June 26 at the official signing of the United Nations Charter. They were there, he told the delegates, to keep the world at peace. “And free from the fear of war,” he declared emphatically, both hands chopping the air, palms inward, in rhythm with the words “free,” “fear,” and “war.” San Francisco was his first public appearance since becoming President, and the reception the city gave him took his breath away. A million people turned out to cheer him as he rode in an open car.

A day later he flew into Kansas City for the first time as President, and to the biggest welcome home ever seen in Jackson County. “Dad loved every minute of it,” remembered Margaret. He was photographed having his hair cut in Frank Spina’s barbershop downtown. He dropped in at Eddie Jacobson’s Westport Men’s Wear, drank bourbon and swapped stories with Ted Marks, Jim Pendergast, and seven or eight others from Battery D after dinner at the home of Independence Mayor Roger Sermon. When he spoke at the huge auditorium of the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, every seat was filled. “I shall attempt to meet your expectations,” he said humbly. “But do not expect too much of me.”

The next day, after receiving an honorary degree from the University of Kansas City, he described how, on the flight from San Francisco, after a stop at Salt Lake City, he had looked down on the great plains and thought of his grandfather, Solomon Young. From Kansas City to Salt Lake and home again had taken Solomon Young three months each way. Now his grandson had done it in three and a half hours.

“I am anxious to bring home to you that the world is no longer county-size, no longer state-size, no longer nation-size,” he said. “It is a world in which we must all get along.”

On July 2, he went before the Senate to urge ratification of the United Nations Charter: “It comes from the reality of experience in a world where one generation has failed twice to keep the peace.”

With the time for his departure for Berlin fast approaching, he spent longer hours in his office, which looked more as he himself wanted it to look. Everything belonging to Franklin Roosevelt had been removed. A Rembrandt Peale portrait of George Washington, on loan from the National Gallery, hung now to one side of the mantel facing him. On the other side was a portrait of Simon Bolívar given to him in 1941 by the Venezuelan ambassador. (The gift, on behalf of the Venezuelan government, was to the largest community in the United States bearing the name of the great liberator—Bolivar, Missouri.) Above the mantel was a Remington entitled Fired On, borrowed from the Smithsonian. It showed Indian fighters on horseback under attack in ghostly green moonlight, one horse rearing violently in the foreground, as Truman’s own horse had reared the night in the Vosges Mountains when Battery D was fired on.

Roosevelt’s naval scenes had been replaced with a series of prints of early airplanes. The Roosevelt portrait remained on the wall to Truman’s right. On a table that once held a ship model was a bronze replica of the equestrian Andrew Jackson by Charles Keck that stood in front of the Kansas City Courthouse. Behind his desk, on a table in front of the windows, were portraits of Bess, Margaret, and Mamma Truman, and a hodgepodge of books.

Franklin Roosevelt’s desk had been removed—given by Truman to Mrs. Roosevelt—and replaced with a seven-foot walnut desk that had belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. Its surface, by FDR’s standards, was bare and tidy. Besides a large green blotter and telephone, there were several pairs of eyeglasses in separate cases, two small metal ashtrays for visitors, a model cannon, a clock, two pen sets (one fancy, one plain), pencils, date stamp, calendar, two magnifying glasses, paste jar, glass inkwell, and a battered old ice-water vacuum pitcher, the one item from among FDR’s personal effects that Truman had asked to keep.

In a small silver frame was the 1917 photograph of Bess that he had carried with him to France. Another small frame held a motto of Mark Twain’s, in Twain’s own hand: “Always do right! This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

There was no buzzer on or beneath the desk. Truman didn’t like to “buzz” people. He would get up and go to the door instead. Further, he ordered the removal of a hidden recording device that Roosevelt had used now and then.

To an artist named S. J. Woolf, sent by The New York Times to do a sketch of the President at work, Truman seemed surprisingly relaxed, in view of all that must be on his mind. The responsibilities resting on a President, said Truman, were so heavy that if he were to keep thinking of them and considering what might happen as a result of the decisions he had to make, he would “soon go under.”

Truman was sure the Russians wanted to be friends. He saw “no reason why we should not welcome their friendship and give ours to them.” He looked forward to meeting both Stalin and Churchill, he said. But to Bess he wrote of feeling “blue as indigo” about going.

Henry Stimson, who had attended neither of the previous Big Three conferences, had not been invited to make the trip. This was out of consideration for his health, Truman told him. Acutely aware of how much could hang on last-minute developments concerning S-1, Stimson chose to invite himself. He would go by plane, arriving in Berlin in advance of the President.

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was also extremely eager to be included, and extremely upset when he found he was not. Morgenthau had a plan to strip Germany of all heavy industry and reduce it to an agricultural land, an idea Truman had never taken seriously and that Stimson ardently opposed, on the grounds that an economically strong and productive Germany was the only hope for the future stability of Europe. “Punish her war criminals in full measure,” Stimson advised Truman. “Deprive her permanently of her weapons…. Guard her governmental action until the Nazi-educated generation has passed from the stage…. But do not deprive her of the means of building up ultimately a contented Germany interested in non-militaristic methods of civilization.”

It had also been pointed out to Truman that if some unfortunate mishap were to occur on the trip to Berlin, and he and Secretary of State Byrnes were both to die, then, as the law of succession stood, Henry Morgenthau would become President, a thought that distressed Truman exceedingly; but whether this was because Morgenthau was a Jew—the reason Morgenthau suspected—is not indicated in anything Truman said or wrote.

Morgenthau came to see him in the Oval Office on July 5 to say, according to Truman’s account of the meeting, that it was essential that he, Morgenthau, play a part at Potsdam, and that if he could not, he would resign. If such was the case, said Truman, then his resignation was accepted at once. The announcement was made the same day.

To replace Morgenthau at Treasury, Truman named Fred M. Vinson, who had served fourteen years in Congress, where he was considered an expert on fiscal matters, and five years as a judge on the Circuit Court of Appeals, before being named by Roosevelt to head the Office of Economic Stabilization and later the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. Vinson was a versatile, diligent public figure, if unimpressive in appearance. With his receding chin, the dark circles under his eyes, he had a weary, hound-dog look. He was also an affable old-style Kentucky politician—down-to-earth, humorous, shrewd—and in Truman’s estimate one of the best men in government.

In his own diary account of the breakup Morgenthau made no mention of the Potsdam issue, only that Truman seemed “very weak and indecisive” about whether he wanted Morgenthau to stay on the job until the war ended. According to Morgenthau, he told Truman, “Either you want me to stay until V-J Day or you don’t…. After all, Mr. President, I don’t think it is conceited to say that I am at least as good or better as some of the five new people you appointed in the Cabinet, and on some of them I think you definitely made a mistake.”

A number of years later, in a conversation with Jonathan Daniels, Truman would say, “Morgenthau didn’t know shit from apple butter.”

“I am getting ready to go see Stalin and Churchill,” he wrote to his mother and sister. “I have to take my tuxedo, tails, Negro preacher coat, high hat, low hat and hard hat…. I have a briefcase filled up with information on past conferences and suggestions on what I’m to do and say. Wish I didn’t have to go….”

“How I hate this trip!” he wrote again in his diary on Sunday, July 7, on board the cruiser Augusta, under way to Europe once more for the first time since 1918.

10

Summer of Decision

Today’s prime fact is war.

—HENRY L. STIMSON

I

Truman was accustomed to looking after himself on his travels. He had always bought his own train tickets, carried his own bags, paid his own hotel bills. Traveling by automobile, he liked to be the one to decide which route to take and where to stop for the night. In the glove compartment of the gray Chrysler were the logs he kept, thin little paper-bound notebooks of the kind given away at Standard Oil gas stations. He made careful note of mileage and expenses, recorded that 10 gallons of gas at Roanoke had cost $2.25, or that lunch in Nashville was 45 cents, or that on the drive from Connecticut Avenue to 219 North Delaware Street he put 1,940 miles on the car. Even on campaign swings, with Fred Canfil along, he had preferred to do his own driving and make his own arrangements, which was why traveling now as President was such a change for him.

He could do almost nothing on his own any longer. Everything had to be planned for him. Hundreds of people had to be involved, as he had learned on the trip to San Francisco. For him to go anywhere was “like moving a circus,” he said. So to transport him overseas was a production of phenomenal proportions. For the conference at Potsdam, the State Department, War Department, Army, Navy, and Air Corps, the White House staff and Secret Service were all involved. As were the British and the Russians. Just his own immediate party, a fraction of the total, numbered fifty-three, and the 10,000-ton cruiser Augusta that carried him across the Atlantic went accompanied by the light cruiser Philadelphia. (“It seems to take two warships to get your pa across the pond,” he wrote to Margaret.) At the approach to the English Channel, a British cruiser and six British destroyers were waiting to escort him past the cliffs of Dover. At Antwerp, where the Augusta docked on Sunday, July 15, after eight days at sea, General Eisenhower headed the welcoming delegation. Driving south to an airfield at Brussels, Truman rode in a forty-seven-car caravan along a highway patrolled by the 35th Division, his old outfit, in full battle regalia. At the airfield, the presidential plane, The Sacred Cow, plus two other C-54 transports were waiting to take him and his party on the final leg, a three-and-a-half-hour flight to Berlin. Beyond Frankfurt he had an escort of twenty P-47 Thunderbolts.

The Germany passing below his window was an appalling spectacle. “You who have not seen it do not know what hell looks like from the top,” General Patton would say in a speech. Truman could see shattered bridges, railroads, the wreckage of factories, entire cities in ruins, a scarred, burned land where, he knew, people were living like animals among the debris, scavenging for food. The threat of disease and mass starvation hung everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of displaced, homeless, and dispossessed people wandered the country. Not Abraham Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt, not any war President in American history, had ever beheld such a panorama of devastation.

His plane put down at Gatow airfield in the blazing heat of mid-afternoon and the reception this time included Secretary Stimson, Ambassador Harriman, Admiral King, two Russian generals, the Russian ambassador, Gromyko, and an honor guard from the 2nd Armored Division who had been waiting in the sun since early morning. From Gatow to his final destination, a drive of ten miles through the Soviet-controlled sector, the route was lined with Russian frontier guardsmen, elite Asiatic-looking troops in green caps who stood with fixed bayonets every twenty feet, mile after mile.

The number of Americans attending the conference would be four times greater than at Yalta. Truman’s entourage included Byrnes, Leahy, Bohlen, Charlie Ross, Lieutenant Elsey and Captain Frank Graham from the Map Room; a physician, Captain Alphonse McMahon; a presidential valet, Arthur Prettyman, who had served Roosevelt; a Navy photographer; eleven Navy cooks and stewards; General Vaughan, Captain Vardaman, and, once again, Fred Canfil, the U.S. Marshal of Kansas City, who was temporarily attached to the Secret Service detail as a special bodyguard for the President. (Truman would take particular delight in introducing his burly former courthouse custodian to the Russians as Marshal Canfil, a title they took to signify military rank and so showed him utmost deference.) “He was the most vigilant bodyguard a President ever had,” Truman would say later. “While the conferences were going on, he would stand by a window with his arms folded and scowl out the window at everybody who passed…as if he would eat them alive if they bothered the President of the United States.”

Food supplies, cases of liquor and wine, were flown in. A planeload of bottled water from France arrived daily. Because a planeload of pillows went astray, everybody below the rank of major general would be sleeping without one. So that Truman could maintain private communications with Washington, the Army had spent weeks installing wireless relays and teleprinter circuits across the 100 miles of Soviet-occupied territory separating the conference site from the American sector.

Truman, Churchill, and Stalin were to be quartered in three of twenty-five large houses that had been commandeered and hurriedly refurbished in a wooded Berlin suburb called Babelsberg, beside Lake Griebnitz, three miles from Potsdam. The lakeshore community had survived comparatively undamaged and was now under the intensely watchful eye of thousands of Russian troops and security agents, in addition to swarms of British and American military guards. The green-capped Russian soldiers were everywhere, along streets and highways, at every crossroad, and along the lakefront. They would appear out of the trees, look about, then be gone again. In all, the Russian complement—military, diplomatic, and security—exceeded twenty thousand people.

Truman was staying at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, a three-story yellow-stucco villa on the lakeshore to be known as the “Little White House.” He was told it had belonged to the head of the Nazi movie industry, who had been sent to Siberia. In fact, it had been the home of a noted publisher, Gustav Müller-Grote, and his large family, whose tragic story Truman would only learn years later in an extraordinary letter from one of the sons. Built before the turn of the century, the house had been for years a gathering place for German and foreign scientists, writers, and artists.

At the end of the war my parents were still living there, as indeed they lived there their whole lives. Some of my sisters moved there with their children, as the suburb seemed to offer more security from bombings…. In the beginning of May the Russians arrived. Ten weeks before you entered this house, its tenants were living in constant fright and fear. By day and by night plundering Russian soldiers went in and out, raping my sisters before their own parents and children, beating up my old parents. All the furniture, wardrobes, trunks, etc. were smashed with bayonets and rifle butts, their contents spilled and destroyed in an indescribable manner. The wealth of a cultivated house was destroyed within hours.

Told only that the house was to serve a “prominent purpose,” the family was ordered to pack and be gone in an hour, after which the Russians stripped it of everything, including a library of rare books and manuscripts that were hauled away with a forklift truck to fill a bomb crater. The furnishings Truman found on arrival—dark, heavy Teutonic sideboards and tables, a huge carved desk, overstuffed chairs, a grand piano—had been confiscated elsewhere and rushed in at the last minute.

An American correspondent who managed to get a look inside some weeks later called it a “nightmare of a house.” It was, wrote Tania Long of The New York Times, “oppressive and awesome in its gloom,” filled with depressing still-lifes and hideous lamps. Truman, too, would use the word “nightmare” to describe the interior, though with his interest in architecture he was bothered more by the exterior. Remembering how he had once been quartered in such places as lovely little Montigny-sur-Aube, he called the house a ruined château—ruined, he said, by a German need to cover up anything French. “They erected a couple of tombstone chimneys on each side of the porch facing the lake so they could cover up the beautiful chateau roof and tower,” he wrote in his diary. “Make the place look like hell but purely German….”

There were no screens in the windows, and the mosquitoes, according to several in the party, were as plentiful as at Yalta. Bathroom facilities, in the words of the official log, were “wholly inadequate.”

Still, Truman thought the place adequate under the circumstances, and was not told that the former owners were living in misery only a short distance away. His second-floor suite included a bedroom, living room, large office, and a porch with a view of the lake, which was narrow and winding and looked more like a river, with the woods beyond seeming very near at hand. On the lawn that sloped down to the water’s edge stood three or four American MPs in their white gloves and leggings. It was said the Russians had thrown some German soldiers into the lake who were too severely wounded to walk.

Admiral Leahy was down the hall from the President; Secretary Byrnes and Chip Bohlen on the first floor. Charlie Ross, Vaughan, Vardaman, Canfil, and the Secret Service detail were on the third floor. The Map Room was set up in an L-shaped space off the stair landing, between the first and second floors. The telephone switchboard was in the basement.

Truman arrived appearing rested and well prepared. The weather on the Atlantic had been so fair, the crossing so smooth, he had suffered not at all from seasickness. With the war in Europe over, there had been no need any longer for a zigzag course or darkened ship at night—all very different from his crossing in 1918—and this time he had the admiral’s cabin. There were movies on board and a number of “satisfactory” poker games with Ross, Vaughan, and some of the wire-service reporters who had been allowed to make the trip. Truman took early morning walks on deck and with binoculars watched gunnery practice. To the family in Grandview, he wrote of meeting a seaman on board named Lawrence Truman. “He comes from Owensborough, Ky., and is the great grandson of our grandfather’s brother. He’s a nice boy and has green eyes just like Margaret’s.”

But the week at sea had been primarily a working session with Byrnes, Leahy, and Bohlen, all of whom had been closely associated with Roosevelt and at his side at Yalta. The President had squeezed facts and opinions out of them all day, Leahy later said. Bohlen, too, was struck by how Truman “stuck to business,” rarely taking up time with small talk. Averell Harriman would later find the President “astonishingly well prepared.”

The central issues to be resolved at Potsdam were no different from those at Yalta: the political future of Eastern Europe (and Poland in particular); the occupation and dismantling of Germany; and a commitment from Russia to help defeat Japan, which Truman viewed as his main purpose in going. General Marshall and Admiral King had both stressed the need for Soviet action against Japan, to shorten the war and reduce American casualties. General MacArthur had twice insisted that Russian help was needed.

Truman also had a pet proposal of his own for ensuring free navigation on all inland waterways and the great canals, an idea he was sure would go far to guarantee future peace in the world.

But a further extremely important reason—in many ways the most important reason—for the meeting and for all the trouble and effort of coming so far was his need to get to know the other two of the Big Three (“Mr. Russia” and “Mr. Great Britain,” Truman called them), to see them face to face and size them up, and they him. As American as anything about this thoroughly American new President was his fundamental faith that most problems came down to misunderstandings between people, and that even the most complicated problems really weren’t as complicated as they were made out to be, once everybody got to know one another. He knew also the faith Roosevelt had in personal diplomacy as a consequence of his two meetings with Stalin, at Teheran and Yalta.

Truman had always wanted to succeed at whatever he undertook. There was no one who wanted to win “half so badly as I do,” he had confided to Bess years before, and he had not changed. He knew the value of preparation, of homework—especially if he felt out of his depth, if he were thrown in among and were to be judged by others who appeared to know so much more. “I’ve studied more and worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever did in my life,” he had written in 1918 from the elite artillery school at Montigny-sur-Aube, where everyone else in the class was a college graduate. “I’m going to be better informed on the transportation problem than anyone here,” he had vowed after coming to the Senate.

But from boyhood he also prided himself in his gift for conversation. Given the chance to talk to people, he felt he could get pretty much anything he wanted. “Haven’t you ever been overawed by a secretary,” he had remarked only recently to a visitor in his office, “and finally, when you have reached the man you wanted to see, discovered he was very human?” He was sure that if he could meet Stalin and deal with him, then he could get to know Stalin and understand him; in this, like so many others before him, he was greatly mistaken.

On visits to Washington to see Roosevelt during the war, Winston Churchill had made a point of meeting those senators who were known to have influence. The junior Senator from Missouri, however, had not been on the prime minister’s list. So, while Truman and Churchill had maintained steady correspondence in recent months, and talked by phone, the morning of Monday, July 16, 1945, when the familiar stout figure arrived at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, marked their first meeting. Churchill had wanted his call on the President to be the first order of business. Truman had named the hour—11:00 A.M.—and Churchill arrived on the dot.

Churchill, too, had landed at Gatow the previous afternoon and was staying in a comparably large, if more attractive, lakeside house nearby. With him now were Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, whom Truman had met, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and the prime minister’s daughter and driver, Mary Churchill, who was dressed in the uniform of a junior commander in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and who told Harry Vaughan her father had not been up this early in ten years.

Nor had Churchill prepared himself for the Big Three conference in anything like the way Truman had. He had bothered with no briefings, he came with no agenda. He required neither, he felt. He had spent a holiday near Biarritz painting, as his way of preparing for Potsdam.

Churchill was in the seventy-first year of a life in which he had seen and done more than all but a few. He had been a cavalry officer, foreign correspondent, a prisoner of war in South Africa, head of the British Board of Trade, and First Lord of the Admiralty as early as 1911. He was the author of nineteen books, a painter, husband, father, ardent holiday bricklayer. Once, needing cash, he made $50,000 on a lecture tour in just five months. Born in a palace, he was the son of a lord, the grandson of a duke. His mother, as everyone knew, was an American, the brilliant, beautiful Jenny Jerome of New York. In politics he had begun as a Conservative, changed to a Liberal, switched back to a Conservative again. He had overcome political defeat and disgrace, survived his own recurring dark moods, and being struck down and nearly killed by an automobile in New York. As prime minister through the war, as the pungent, indomitable voice of British resolve, he had become the British lion incarnate, and the great words were his words, not the artifice of a ghost. “The nation had the lion’s heart,” he would say. “I had the luck to give the roar.”

The scowl, the familiar upraised V-sign and jutting cigar, his command of the English language had made him a surpassing symbol and clearly one of the great figures of the age. If asked who in the world they most admired, now that Roosevelt was gone, most Americans would have said Churchill, and probably, after some thought, Truman would have, too. Yet the prospect of sharing the spotlight with such a man was extremely unsettling. Behind all of Truman’s privately expressed apprehension over coming to Berlin was a great deal of plain stage fright—anxiety accentuated by memories of Churchill and Roosevelt together, posing for pictures, commanding attention and affection as few men ever had, and always with perfect confidence and obvious regard for one another. Roosevelt and Churchill had met nine times and exchanged, by Churchill’s count, 1,700 messages. On visits at the White House, the prime minister had made himself so at home that Mrs. Roosevelt decided it was time an official guest residence be established, which led to the acquisition of Blair House. (If one favorite Washington story can be believed, she had found the prime minister padding down the hall in his nightshirt sometime before dawn one morning, a cigar and brandy in hand, saying he had still more to discuss with Franklin and must wake him at once.) He and Roosevelt saw the history of their times as Homeric drama and they the lead players, two professionals perfectly cast and at the top of their form.

“It is fun to be in the same decade with you,” Roosevelt had told him, and in a recent letter to Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt had written how important it was that he get along with Winston. He should talk to him about books, she advised, or let him quote from his marvelous memory of everything from nonsense rhymes to Greek tragedy.

But Churchill had aged. He looked old, he sounded tired and disheartened. The empire he had led with such verve was nearly bankrupt, a great power no longer. On July 5, there had been a general election, the result of which would not be known for another ten days, when the soldier vote was in. The election could have been put off, but Churchill had gone ahead with it on the advice that his popularity was at a peak. While others were confident his victory would be substantial, he, privately, was not so sure.

It would become part of the mythology of the Truman presidency in time to come that Churchill, at their first meeting, thought little of Truman, an idea amplified by Churchill himself in a famous toast years later on board the presidential yacht. “I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard,” he would begin. “I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt….” But in fact Truman made a strong impression from the start. They talked for two hours, and, according to Truman, no business of the conference was considered; but walking back to his own quarters afterward, Churchill told his daughter how much he liked the new President. “He says he is sure he can work with him,” Mary Churchill wrote to her mother. “I nearly wept with joy and thankfulness, it seemed like divine providence. Perhaps it is FDR’s legacy. I can see Papa is relieved and confident.”

Asked later by his friend and physician, Lord Moran, if Truman had ability, Churchill replied that he thought so. “At any rate, he is a man of immense determination,” Churchill said. “He takes no notice of delicate ground, he just plants his foot down firmly upon it.” To make his point, Churchill jumped a little off the wooden floor and brought both bare feet down with a smack.

Truman’s impressions, recorded at the day’s end in his diary, were not so favorable, however. As the White House butler, Alonzo Fields, had noted, commenting on Bess, flattery did not go far with the Trumans.

We had a most pleasant conversation [Truman wrote of Churchill]. He is a most charming and a very clever person—meaning clever in the English not the Kentucky sense. He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me etc. etc. Well…. I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap.

Stalin, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. Where he was, or why, were not known, but the opening of the conference had to be postponed a day.

In the time since Truman had left Washington, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, on orders from Tokyo, had begun discussions with the Soviets on the possibility of bringing an end to the war. On July 12, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shigenori Togo, sent a “Very Secret, Urgent” radio message to Ambassador Sato stating that the Emperor was “greatly concerned over the daily increasing calamities and sacrifices faced by the citizens of the various belligerent countries” and that it was “His Majesty’s heart’s desire to see the swift termination of the war.” His Majesty wished to send Prince Konoye as a special envoy to Moscow to talk.

Sato responded that it was pointless talking about peace with the Soviets. Such proposed negotiations were entirely unrealistic, he stressed. Molotov was not interested. “In the final analysis,” Sato bluntly told Togo, “if our country truly desires to terminate the war, we have no alternative but to accept unconditional surrender or something very close to it.”

The messages were intercepted by American monitors (the Japanese code having been broken years before) and promptly reached Truman. And so, importantly, did Tokyo’s repeated warnings to Sato that Japan would not consent to unconditional surrender.

Also available to the President was a Combined Intelligence Committee report warning that the Japanese might try to cause dissension among the Allies by just such peace overtures. And even had there been no such warning, there was for Truman, as for others trying to appraise the situation, the bitter memory of Japanese peace talks in Washington in December 1941 at the very time of the attack at Pearl Harbor.

On the afternoon of the 16th, his schedule open, Truman decided to see Berlin. A motorcade assembled in the drive outside Number 2 Kaiserstrasse and in ten minutes, with Byrnes and Leahy beside him in the back seat of an open Lincoln, he was speeding down the empty four-lane Autobahn. The day was stifling hot and the wind came as a great relief.

Halfway to the city they met the entire American 2nd Armored Division deployed for his inspection along one side of the highway, a double row of Sherman tanks and halftracks reaching as far as the eye could see. The motorcade drew up, Truman got out. It was the largest armored division in the world, he was told, and a spectacle of military power such as he might only have imagined until now. He climbed into a halftrack, and to review the formation rode standing, slowly, for twenty minutes, down a line of soldiers and equipment for a mile and a half—“good soldiers and millions of dollars of equipment, which has amply paid its way to Berlin,” he thought.

Heading on, the motorcade passed miles of ruin and desolation, bomb craters, blackened burned-out buildings, and seemingly endless processions of homeless Germans plodding along beside the highway carrying or dragging bundles of pathetic belongings. They were mostly old people and children who appeared to be headed nowhere in particular, with nothing but blank expressions on their faces, no anger, no grief, no fear, which Truman found extremely disturbing. At the end of the last war, when the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, came to Paris, exuberant crowds had acclaimed him as a hero and savior. Now most of those trudging past never bothered even to look up.

In the center of Berlin, or what had been Berlin, the world’s fourth largest city and capital of the Reich that was to have lasted a thousand years, the small presidential caravan moved down the famous old streets—Bismarckstrasse, Berlinerstrasse, and Unter den Linden, where the once celebrated Linden trees were no more. The Russians had cleared the main thoroughfares with bulldozers. Rubble on all sides was heaped two and three stories high, between the windowless, roofless hulks of bomb-gutted buildings. Everything was black with soot, and in the oppressive heat the smell of death and open sewers was nearly overpowering.

American and British bombers had laid waste to the city around the clock. Probably fifty thousand people had been killed, five times as many as in the London Blitz. Then, in April, came the Russian artillery and the Russian Army.

On Wilhelmstrasse, Truman’s car pulled up beside the Reich Chancellery and the shell-blasted stone balcony where Hitler had harangued his Nazi followers. Truman did not get out. “It is a terrible thing,” he began, knowing he was expected to say something, “but they brought it on themselves. That’s what happens when a man overreaches himself.” It was all he could find to say.

He saw the Brandenburg Gate and the wreckage of the Tiergarten, the city’s once beautiful central park. In 1939, to honor his fiftieth birthday, Hitler had paraded columns of troops and tanks here, before a crowd of 2 million cheering Berliners.

Slowly the motorcade moved on, winding past the ruins of the Sports Palace, where huge crowds had shouted “Hail, the Führer,” and “Leader, command, we follow,” as Propaganda Minister Goebbels asked if they were true believers in the “final total victory” of the German people; then past the giant, gutted Reichstag, seat of parliament, where a fire set by the Nazis in 1933 and blamed on the Communists had given Hitler the excuse he needed to seize dictatorial power.

Despite all they had read, all they had been told in advance, the photographs and newsreels they had seen, the visiting Americans were unprepared for the reality of conquered Berlin. “I never saw such destruction,” recorded Truman, who had seen his share in 1918. It was “absolute ruin.” To Admiral Leahy, whose military career had begun with the famous voyage of the old Oregon around the Horn to Cuba in 1898, it was a calamity against the civilized laws of war. At a notably subdued dinner that night they talked quietly among themselves of the horrible destructiveness of modern war, now “brought home,” as Leahy said, “to those of us who fought the war from Washington.” Truman was as low as he had felt in a long time.

I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking…[of] Scipio, Rameses II…Sherman, Jenghiz Khan [he wrote that night in his diary]…. I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up there’ll be no reason for any of it.

He kept thinking of the devastated people he had seen wandering in the debris. But they had brought it on themselves, they did it, he would write to Bess.

Churchill, on a tour of Berlin of his own that afternoon, had spent half an hour exploring the Chancellery, the site of Hitler’s bunker. (“This is what would have happened to us if they had won the war,” Churchill was heard to say. “We would have been the bunker.”) Truman had not wished to walk among the ruins, he said, because he would never want those unfortunate people to think he was gloating over them.

Because the reporters who had come to Berlin to cover the conference were excluded from all transactions of importance, denied access to the participants or even to the compound at Babelsberg, and provided with only occasional press releases by Charlie Ross, they had often to concoct stories from very little. Anne O’Hare McCormick speculated in a column for The New York Times that the mysterious Joseph Stalin, too, must have been there somewhere in Berlin that same afternoon, but had kept his presence unknown. It was hard to imagine the Soviet Generalissimo not wanting to survey the conquered city, she wrote, and she described all three men stalking about in the dust and wreckage.

There are moments when the drama of our times seems to focus on a single scene. The meeting at Potsdam is one of those moments. We can hardly take in the sense of what happened until it is spelled out in a picture like this. The picture of three men walking in a graveyard. They are the men who hold in their hands most of the power in the world….

Yet the devastation of Berlin was small scale compared to what had become possible that same afternoon of Monday, July 16. What Truman did not yet know, what none of them knew, was that at a remote part of the Alamogordo Air Base in the desert of New Mexico, at 5:29 in the morning (1:29 in the afternoon in Berlin) there had been a blinding flash, “a light not of this world,” from the first nuclear explosion in history. Stimson received word at his Babelsberg quarters that evening at 7:30, a top-secret telegram from George Harrison in Washington, which Stimson took directly to Truman.

“Operated on this morning,” it said. “Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations.” Details would follow.

II

“Promptly a few minutes before twelve, I looked up from the desk and there stood Stalin in the doorway,” wrote the President in his diary.

It was midday, Tuesday, July 17, and from the high window behind Truman’s shoulder, sunlight streamed into the room. A gilt-framed Victorian still-life of fruit and a dead duck hung over a small marble mantelpiece. His desk—a monstrous, deeply carved affair with huge clawed feet—had been positioned at an angle, facing the door, in the corner of a large Oriental rug. With the Generalissimo were Molotov and the interpreter, Pavlov.

Stalin had arrived the night before and was staying in a thickly wooded area closer to Potsdam, but this, like the time of his arrival and the fact that he had traveled by train more than 1,000 miles from the Kremlin, were all kept secret. It was said he had been detained by official business. The truth was he came late primarily to accentuate his own importance.

Had Truman been outside waiting for Stalin’s arrival, he would have seen a dozen heavily armed Russian guards materialize out of nowhere and surround the house, then, in minutes, the appearance of a long, closed Packard with bulletproof glass so thick that the figures inside were only a blur. As Stalin got out of the car, Harry Vaughan came bounding down the front steps to greet him like a fellow Rotarian, as George Elsey remembered. The Russian guards outside the yellow house were not quite sure what to do.

“I got to my feet and advanced to meet him,” continues Truman’s diary account. “He put out his hand and smiled. I did the same, we shook, I greeted Molotov and the interpreter….”

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili—Stalin, “the Man of Steel”—was the single most powerful figure in the world. He was the absolute dictator over 180 million people of 170 nationalities in a country representing one sixth of the earth’s surface, the Generalissimo of gigantic, victorious armies, and Harry Truman, like nearly everyone meeting him for the first time, was amazed to find how small he was. “A little bit of a squirt,” Truman described him, Stalin standing about 5 feet 5.

He was dressed simply in a lightweight khaki uniform with red epaulets and red seams down the trousers, and he wore no decorations except a single red-ribboned gold star, the Order of the Hero of the Soviet, over the left breast pocket, which gave him a kind of understated authority. His small, squinty eyes were a strange yellow-gray and there were streaks of gray in his mustache and coarse hair. He was badly pockmarked, his color poor—he had what in high Soviet circles was known as “Kremlin complexion,” an unhealthy, indoor pallor made worse by a recent illness—and his very irregular teeth were darkly tobacco-stained. Truman had been told of his crippled left arm, the result of a childhood accident, but this was not especially noticeable. A chain smoker, Stalin held his cigarette in his right hand and gestured with his right hand only. He had unusually large, powerful-looking hands—hands as hard as his mind, Harry Hopkins once said.

Bohlen, who was standing by to translate for Truman, thought Stalin had aged greatly in just the few weeks since he and Hopkins had met with him in Moscow. Stalin moved slowly, stiffly, spoke little and in a very low tone. To Truman he seemed an old man, yet there was less than five years difference in their age. Born in abject poverty in Georgia in 1879, Stalin was the son of a semi-literate, drunken shoemaker and a doting mother who took in laundry. Initially, before turning revolutionary, he had studied for the priesthood.

Truman, in his freshly pressed double-breasted gray suit and two-toned summer shoes, looked a picture of vitality by contrast.

They sat in overstuffed chairs, flanked by Byrnes, Molotov, Bohlen, and Pavlov. Truman told Stalin he had been looking forward to their meeting for a long time. Stalin agreed solemnly that such personal contact was of great importance. In an effort to ease the tension, Byrnes asked Stalin about his habit of sleeping late. Stalin said only that the war had changed many of his habits. Truman tried an informal reference to Stalin as Uncle Joe, the nickname Roosevelt had used, but this too fell flat with the humorless Russian.

Truman said he hoped to deal with stalin as a friend. He was no diplomat, Truman went on. He would not beat around the bush. He usually said yes or no to questions after hearing all the argument. Only then did stalin appear pleased.

They talked briefly of the defeat of Germany, stalin saying he was sure Hitler was alive and in hiding somewhere in Spain or Argentina. Then, abruptly, and entirely on his own initiative, Stalin said that as they had agreed at Yalta, the Soviets would be ready to declare war on Japan and attack Manchuria by mid-August. He had already assured the Chinese that Russia Recognized Manchuria as part of China and that there would be no Soviet interference with internal political matters there.

Truman said he was extremely pleased. But Stalin, as if to be sure Truman understood, repeated that by the middle of August the Red Army would be in the war with Japan, “as agreed at Yalta,” to which Truman expressed his every confidence that the Soviets would keep their word.

At this point Harry Vaughan slipped into the room to ask Truman in a whisper if he was going to invite “these guys” to lunch.

What was on the menu Truman whispered. Liver and bacon, vaughan said. “If liver and bacon is good enough for us, it’s good enough for them,” Truman replied.

When he asked Stalin to stay, Stalin protested, saying it would be impossible. “You could if you wanted to,” Truman said. And Stalin stayed—for creamed spinach soup, liver and bacon, baked ham, Julienne potatoes, string beans, pumpernickel bread, jam, sliced fruit, mints, candy, cigars, which Stalin declined, and a California wine that he went out of his way to praise.

Truman thought the whole occasion went well, exactly because it was so spur of the moment and informal. He liked Stalin, he decided, “and I felt hopeful that we could reach an agreement satisfactory to the world and to ourselves,”

But Stalin nearly always made a good impression of foreigners. Churchill, who once called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” and who warned both Roosevelt and Truman repeatedly of the Russian menace to Europe, confessed still to liking Stalin the man. Roosevelt had been convinced almost to the end that he could get along with “Uncle Joe.” “The truth is,” wrote Jimmy Byrnes, recalling Stalin’s performance at Yalta, “he is a very likeable person.” Joseph E. Davies, who had been ambassador to Russia briefly and would be at Truman’s side daily at the potsdam conference table, had said in a superficial and immensely popular book, Mission to Moscow, published in 1941, that Stalin was uncommonly wise and gentle. “A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him,” wrote Davies. Even Eisenhower, after a visit to Moscow later that summer, would describe Stalin in much the same fashion, as “benign and fatherly.”

Truman, as he wrote, found Stalin to be polite, good-natured, businesslike, “honest—but smart as hell.” There had been not a hint of contention between them. The conference hadn’t even begun, yet already Truman had achieved his main objective, as he recorded triumphantly in his diary. “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about…. I can deal with Stalin.”

That Stalin was also secretive to the point of imbalance, suspicious, deceitful, unspeakably cruel, that he ruled absolutely and by terror and secret police, that he was directly responsible for destroying millions of his own people and the enslavement of many millions more, was not so clearly understood by the outside world at this point as it would be later. Still, the evil of the man was no secret in 1945. In a February issue, published just before Yalta, Time magazine had noted that Stalin and his regime had deliberately caused the deaths by starvation of at least 3 million peasants and liquidated another 1 million Communists who opposed his policies. Facts are stubborn things, said the article, borrowing a line from Lenin, and these were the facts. Actually the facts were more horrible. Probably 5 million peasants had died; probably 10 million had been sent to forced labor camps. “I was remembering my friends,” the composer Shostakovich once remarked, “and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses.”

Stalin himself had told Churchill in 1942 that “ten millions” of peasants had been “dealt with.” At one point in 1940, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he had had many thousands of Polish officers murdered, in what became known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. In truth, “Uncle Joe” was one of the great mass murderers of all time, as much as Ivan the Terrible (his favorite czar), as much nearly as Adolf Hitler.

Yet, wrote Bohlen, “There was little in Stalin’s demeanor in the presence of foreigners that gave any clue of the real nature and character of the man.” Stalin had perfected a talent for disguise:

At Teheran, at Yalta, at Potsdam and during the ten days I saw him during the spring of 1945 with Hopkins, Stalin was exemplary in his behavior. He was patient, a good listener, always quite in his manner and in his expression. There were no signs of the harsh and brutal nature behind this mask….

The mask was the artifice of an accomplished actor and it rarely slipped. Once was at Teheran. Churchill had been arguing that a premature opening of a second front in France would result in an unjustified loss of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. Stalin responded, “When one man dies it is a tragedy. When thousands die it’s statistics.”

Twenty years in politics had taught him a thing or two about people, Truman thought. He had only to look a man in the eye to know. “I was impressed by him,” he would write of Stalin, remembering this first meeting. “…What I most especially noticed were his eyes, his face, and his expression.”

With the lunch over and the opening session of the conference not scheduled to begin until five o’clock, Truman went upstairs in the “nightmare” house and took a nap.

III

The first of the plenary sessions of the Potsdam Conference, last of the wartime meetings of the Big Three, code-named “Terminal,” was held in the Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam, the former summer residence of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, which had served more recently as a military hospital, first for the Germans, then the Russians. A sprawling two-story, ivy-covered stone building in the neo-Tudor style, it looked very like a vast English country house, with gardens extending to the lake and an inner court where the Russians had planted a giant star of red geraniums.

The oak-paneled reception hall, a cavernous, dim space lit by heavy wrought-iron chandeliers, served as the conference room. The color scheme was dark red, black, and gold, and the effect rather foreboding, except for one immense window two stories tall looking onto the gardens and lake.

At the center of the room was a circular conference table 12 feet in diameter, covered in a burgundy cloth, and around it, evenly spaced, were fifteen chairs, five each for the three countries. The three chairs reserved for Churchill, Stalin, and Truman were immediately identifiable by their larger size and an incongruous pair of gilded cupids perched on the back of each. Additional chairs and several small desks were arranged in a larger circle behind, these for other members of the delegation, advisers and specialists, who would come and go as different topics arose.

To enter the room, the three leaders had their own separate doors, each of these heavily guarded by Russian soldiers. When everybody was assembled, the guards withdrew, the doors were closed.

Though wearing the same gray suit as earlier, Truman had put on a fresh white shirt and a bow tie. Churchill, like Stalin, was in a summer-weight khaki uniform and as they took their places, he lit up an eight-inch cigar. Stalin was carrying a briefcase, which he tossed onto the table, as if to say he was ready for business.

Truman sat with Byrnes and Leahy on his right, Bohlen and Davies on the left. In Churchill’s group now was Clement Attlee, Churchill’s Labor Party opponent in the general election, whom the prime minister had decided to include in the national interest, in the event that Attlee turned out to be his successor.

“Never in history has such an aggregation of victorious military force been represented at one conference,” wrote The New York Times; “never has there been a meeting which faced graver or more complex issues; and never have three mortal men borne so heavy a responsibility for the welfare of their peoples and mankind.”

No correspondents for the Times were present, however, nor any of the nearly two hundred other reporters who had made their way to Berlin to cover the story and were, as Churchill said, “in a state of furious indignation.” For the “lid was on” at Potsdam, “everything conducted behind a ring of bayonets,” as Stalin had insisted. Even the number of authorized people permitted in the room at any one time was strictly limited. Once when Byrnes’s secretary brought him some papers and had to wait a few minutes, two women from the Russian staff entered immediately and took chairs until she left.

The conference was officially called to order at 5:10 P.M. Stalin spoke first, saying that President Truman, as the only head of state present, should preside. Churchill seconded the proposal. Truman expressed his appreciation. Then, as in his first speech to Congress, he plunged directly into his prepared remarks, moving rapidly down an item-by-item order of business that he thought the conference should follow. He proposed the establishment of a Council of Foreign Ministers to make the necessary preparations for a peace conference. Immediately Stalin was dubious, questioning any participation by China in a European peace settlement. Truman submitted a draft on how the administration of Germany should be handled. Churchill said he had had no opportunity to examine it. Truman read a prepared statement on implementation of the Yalta Declaration, which pledged the three powers to assist the people of all liberated European countries to establish democratic governments through free election. He was wasting no time getting to the sorest of subjects. “Since the Yalta Conference,” he read, “the obligations assumed under this declaration have not been carried out.” Of particular concern were Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. Again Churchill said he needed time to consider the document.

Truman moved quickly on, calling for a change in policy toward Italy. As soon as possible, Italy must be included in the United Nations. Churchill now protested and to make his point invoked the memory of Roosevelt. They were trying to deal with too many important matters too hastily, said Churchill. He reminded Truman that Italy had attacked Britain at the time France was going down, and that Roosevelt himself had called this a stab in the back. The British had fought the Italians for two years in Africa before American forces ever arrived.

Truman paused, as if brought up short by the mere mention of Roosevelt.

Speaking more slowly now, he said he appreciated the honor of having been made chairman of the meeting. He had come to the conference with certain trepidation, he said. He had to replace a man who was irreplaceable. He knew full well the goodwill and friendship Roosevelt had achieved with the prime minister and the Generalissimo, both for himself and for the United States, and he, Harry Truman, hoped he might merit the same friendship and goodwill as time went on. It was simply and well expressed and what he should have said at the start, and the atmosphere changed at once, as Churchill responded in fulsome, Churchillian fashion. Though no official verbatim record was being kept, Llewellyn Thompson, from the American Embassy in London, and Ben Cohen of Byrnes’s staff were both taking notes:

Churchill [recorded Thompson] said he should like to express on behalf of the British delegation his gratitude to the President for undertaking the Presidency of this momentous Conference and to thank him for presenting so clearly the views of the mighty republic which he heads. The warm and ineffaceable sentiments which they had for President Roosevelt they would renew with the man who had come forward at this historic moment and he wished to express to him his most cordial respect. He trusted that the bonds not only between their countries but also between them personally would increase. The more they came to grips with the world’s momentous problems the closer their association would become.

On behalf of the Russian delegation, said Stalin, he wished to say they “fully shared” the sentiments expressed by the prime minister.

It was a pattern that would prevail, Churchill rumbling on, Stalin being as direct and to-the-point as Truman.

Taking his turn now, his voice very low, Stalin spoke in short segments, leaving ample pauses between, as one practiced in working with an interpreter. He wished to discuss acquisition of the German Navy (which was then in British hands), German reparations, the question of trusteeships for the Soviet Union (by which he meant colonies), the future of Franco Spain, and the future of Poland.

Churchill agreed that the Polish question was foremost, but said the agenda for the next session should be left to the foreign ministers to decide (Eden, Byrnes, and Molotov). Stalin and Truman concurred.

“So tomorrow we will have prepared the points most agreeable,” said Churchill.

“All the same, we will not escape the disagreeable,” countered Stalin.

“We will feel our way up to them,” said Churchill, who was ready to stop for the day.

Stalin turned again to the question of including China in preparations for the peace conference. Churchill thought it a needless complication to bring in China. Perhaps the matter could be referred to the foreign ministers, suggested Stalin, playing Churchill’s game now. If the foreign secretaries decided to leave China out, said Truman, he had no objections.

“As all the questions are to be discussed by the foreign ministers, we shall have nothing to do,” observed Stalin, producing the first laughter at the table.

Churchill thought the foreign ministers ought to provide three or four points for discussion per day, “enough to keep us busy.”

Truman was on edge. This wasn’t at all what he had come for. “I don’t want to discuss,” he said, “I want to decide.”

“You want something in the bag each day,” Churchill responded, as if he were just now beginning to understand the new American President.

Yes, and next time he wished to begin at an earlier hour, Truman said.

“I will obey your orders,” responded Churchill, and at once Stalin stepped in, his eyes on Churchill.

“If you are in such an obedient mood today, Mr. Prime Minister, I should like to know whether you will share with us the German fleet?”

The fleet should either be shared or destroyed, exclaimed Churchill. Weapons of war were horrible things.

“Let’s divide it,” said Stalin. “If Mr. Churchill wishes, he can sink his share.”

The Foreign Secretary thought the prime minister’s performance had been pathetic. The “P.M.” was “woolly and verbose,” and too much under Stalin’s spell, noted Anthony Eden, and he let others know, which annoyed Truman, who took it as an act of disloyalty to Churchill. Alexander Cadogan, in a letter to his wife, said the P.M. simply talked too much, while Truman was admirably businesslike.

It had made presiding over the Senate seem tame, Truman wrote to Bess, clearly pleased with himself and with the comments of his staff.

The boys say I gave them an earful. I hope so. Admiral Leahy said he’d never seen an abler job and Byrnes and my fellows seemed to be walking on air. I was so scared I didn’t know whether things were going according to Hoyle or not. Anyway a start has been made and I’ve gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it…. I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That is the important thing….

Wish you and Margie were here. But it is a forlorn place and would only make you sad.

The letter was written early on July 18 before the day began. To his mother and sister he wrote, “Churchill talks all the time and Stalin just grunts but you know what he means.”

Mamma and Mary Jane had already written six times since he left Washington and he would keep them posted through the entire conference. This morning he had news he knew they would like. Sergeant Harry Truman, Vivian’s oldest son, had joined him for breakfast.

He was on the Queen Elizabeth at Glasgow, ready to sail [for New York]. I told them to give him the choice of coming to the conference or going home. He elected to come and see me. I gave him a pass to Berlin signed by Stalin and by me. Will send him home by plane and he’ll get there almost as soon as if he’d gone on the Elizabeth. He sure is a fine looking soldier, stands up, dresses the part and I’m proud of him.

About mid-morning, Henry Stimson came in looking extremely excited. A second cable from George Harrison had arrived during the night:

Doctor had just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams from here to my farm.

The decoding officer at the Army message center had been amazed, assuming that the elderly Secretary of War had become a new father. Stimson explained the cable to Truman. The flash at Alamogordo had been visible for 250 miles (the distance from Washington to Highhold, Stimson’s estate on Long Island), the sound carrying 50 miles (the distance to Harrison’s farm in Virginia). Truman appeared extremely pleased and at lunch with Churchill, at Churchill’s house, Number 23 Ringstrasse, he showed him the two telegrams. Stalin ought to be told, Truman offered. Churchill agreed that Stalin should know “the Great New Fact,” but none of “the particulars.” Better to tell him sooner than later, Churchill suggested. But how? In writing or by word of mouth? At a special meeting or informally?

Truman thought it best just to tell him after one of the meetings. He would wait for the right moment, Truman said.

They were dining alone. Churchill lamented the melancholy state of Great Britain, with its staggering debt and declining influence in the world. Truman said the United States owed Britain much for having “held the fort” at the beginning of the war. “If you had gone down like France,” Truman told Churchill, “we might be fighting the Germans on the American coast at the present time.”

They talked of the war in the Pacific and Churchill pondered whether new wording might be devised so that the Japanese could surrender and yet salvage some sense of their military honor. Truman countered by saying he did not think the Japanese had any military honor, not after Pearl Harbor. Churchill said that “at any rate they had something for which they were ready to face certain death in very large numbers, and this might not be so important to us as it was to them.” At this Truman turned “quite sympathetic,” as Churchill recounted, and began talking of “the terrible responsibilities upon him in regard to unlimited effusion of American blood.”

“He invited personal friendship and comradeship,” Churchill wrote. “He seems a man of exceptional character….”

From the Churchill lunch Truman went to pay a return call on Stalin, accompanied now by Byrnes and Bohlen, and to his surprise found a second lunch waiting, an elaborate meal in his honor, which in Russian fashion called for numerous toasts.

Stalin told Truman of the secret Japanese peace feeler and passed the Sato message across the table. It might be best, said Stalin, to “lull the Japanese to sleep,” to say their request for a visit by Prince Konoye was too vague to answer. Truman said nothing to indicate he already knew of the Japanese overtures. He would leave the answer up to Stalin, he said.

Bohlen would remember Stalin’s disclosure of the Japanese proposal making a very great impression on Truman, as a sign the Russians might be ready after all to deal openly with them. To his delight Truman also discovered that Stalin, the supreme Soviet strong-man, was substituting white wine for what was supposedly vodka in his glass. The Generalissimo must visit the United States, Truman said. If Stalin would come, Truman promised, he would send the battleship Missouri for him.

He said he wanted to cooperate with U.S. in peace as we had cooperated in war but it would be harder [Truman recorded later]. Said he was grossly misunderstood in U.S. and I was misunderstood in Russia. I told him that we each could remedy that situation in our home countries and that I intended to try with all I had to do my part at home. He gave me a most cordial smile and said he would do as much in Russia.

As the conference resumed that afternoon Churchill again grew extremely long-winded, and though an outward show of friendship continued around the table, an edge of tension could also be felt. In an exchange with Truman, in a single sentence, Stalin hit on the hard reality underlying nearly every issue before them, the crux of so much of the frustration and divisiveness to come:

“We cannot get away from the results of the war,” said Stalin.

The formal business was to be Germany and Truman had suggested they begin at once. Churchill insisted on defining what was meant by Germany. If it meant Germany as geographically constituted before the war, then he agreed to discussion—his obvious point being that the Germany of the moment was one with eastern boundaries being determined by the position of the Red Army.

STALIN: Germany is what has become of her after the war. No other Germany exists….

TRUMAN: Why not say the Germany of 1937?

STALIN: Minus what she has lost. Let us for the time being regard Germany as a geographical section.

TRUMAN: But what geographical section?

STALIN: We cannot get away from the results of the war.

TRUMAN: But we must have a starting point.

Stalin agreed. Churchill agreed. “So it is agreed that the Germany of 1937 should be the starting point,” said Truman, as if they had made a major step forward.

They turned to Poland, a subject that moved Churchill to talk longer even than usual, and so went the remainder of the session.

Truman was exasperated. He could “deal” with Stalin, as he said, but Churchill was another matter. “I’m not going to stay around this terrible place all summer just to listen to speeches,” he wrote that night. To Bess, earlier in the day, he had said Stalin’s agreement to join in defeating Japan was what he came for. Now, his patience low at day’s end, he wrote in his diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [the Manhattan Project, S-1] appears over their homeland.”

At session three the day after, there was sharp talk across the table, much of it from Truman. When the subject of the German Navy was raised again, he said he agreed to dividing the ships three ways, but only after the surrender of Japan. Merchant ships especially were needed. “We will need every bomb and every ton of food.” On the future of Franco Spain, a sore subject with Stalin, Truman said he had no love for Franco, nor had he any wish to take part in another civil war in Spain. “There have been enough wars in Europe.” When the Yalta Declaration came up, Stalin insisted such matters be put off until another time.

Truman was impatient for progress of almost any kind. He was homesick, “sick of the whole business,” he confided to Bess.

The day was saved only by the party he gave that night, a banquet for Churchill and Stalin at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse with music provided by a twenty-seven-year-old American concert pianist, Sergeant Eugene List, who was accompanied on the violin by Private First Class Stuart Canin. Stalin was charmed. To the Americans present it would remain the most memorable evening of the conference.

The two musicians, both in uniform, had been flown in from Paris at Truman’s request. The grand piano had been moved onto the back porch overlooking the lake, where, after dinner, in the lingering light of the summer evening, the whole party gathered. At one point Truman himself played Paderewski’s Minuet in G, the piece Paderewski had demonstrated for him in Kansas City forty-five years earlier. But the highlight was Sergeant List’s performance of the Chopin Waltz in A Minor, Opus 42, which Truman had asked for specifically. List had not known the piece nor had there been time to learn it. Later, in a letter to his wife, he described what happened when he asked if someone in the audience would be good enough to turn the pages of the music for him.

A young captain in the party started toward the piano mumbling something about not knowing how to read music but that he would take a stab at it if I would tell him when to turn. Whereupon…the President waved him aside with a sweeping gesture and volunteered to do the job himself! Just imagine! Well, you could have knocked me over with a toothpick!

Thank goodness I was able to get through the waltz in creditable, if not sensational, manner, despite the general excitement and the completely unexpected appearance of President Truman in the role of page-turner. Imagine having the President of the United States turn pages for you!…But that’s the kind of man the President is.

Truman was delighted to see Stalin so obviously enjoying himself. “The old man loves music,” he told Bess. “Our boy was good.”

By Friday the 20th, the week nearly over, there was still no further word on the test explosion in New Mexico. But when Truman invited Generals Eisenhower and Omar Bradley to lunch, the talk, according to Bradley’s later account, focused on strategy in the Pacific and use of the atomic bomb.

Bradley, a fellow Missourian, had never met Truman until now and liked what he saw. “He was direct, unpretentious, clear-thinking and forceful.” To Bradley it seemed that Truman had already made up his mind to use the new weapon. Though neither Bradley nor Eisenhower was asked for an opinion, Eisenhower said he opposed use of the bomb. He thought Japan was already defeated. To Stimson earlier he had expressed the hope that the United States would not be the first to deploy a weapon so horrible. In time, however, Eisenhower would concede that his reaction was personal and based on no analysis of the subject.

Eisenhower also advised Truman not to beg the Russians to come into the war with Japan, though he acknowledged that “no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.”

If Truman, as implied in his diary, truly believed that “Manhattan” would bring such victory instantly, this would have been the time for him to have said so. But he did not, which suggests either that he was still less than sure about the bomb, or that, contrary to Bradley’s impression, he had still to make up his mind.

“But all of us wanted Russia in the war,” he would tell his daughter some years later. “Had we known what the bomb would do we’d never have wanted the Bear in the picture.”

Lunch over, accompanied by the two generals, Truman went again to Berlin, to the American sector this time, to speak at the raising of the flag that had flown over the Capitol in Washington the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. The ceremony took place in a small cobbled square in glaring sunshine. Stimson and General Patton were present, the tall, theatrical Patton resplendent in buckled riding boots, jodhpurs, and a lacquered four-star helmet. Patton seemed to glow from head to foot. There were stars on his shoulders, stars on his sleeves, more stars than Truman had ever seen on one human being. He counted twenty-eight.

Truman spoke without notes and with obvious emotion, choosing his words carefully, as he stood shoulders braced, thumbs hooked in the side pockets of his double-breasted suit, his eyes shadowed by his very un-military western-style Stetson. It was his own kind of speech—exactly what his address to the United Nations was not—and the first public pronouncement by any of the Big Three since arriving in Germany:

We are here today to raise the flag of victory over the capital of our greatest adversary…we must remember that…we are raising it in the name of the people of the United States, who are looking forward to a better world, a peaceful world, a world in which all the people will have an opportunity to enjoy the good things of life, and not just a few at the top.

Let us not forget that we are fighting for peace, and for the welfare of mankind. We are not fighting for conquest. There is not one piece of territory or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war.

We want peace and prosperity for the world as a whole. [Here the thumbs came out of the coat pockets, his freed hands chopped the air in unison, the familiar gesture, as he stressed each word, “peace and prosperity for the world as a whole.”] We want to see the time come when we can do the things in peace that we have been able to do in war.

If we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made victory possible, to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind. That is what we propose to do.

It was not what Abraham Lincoln might have said, or what Robert Sherwood might have written for Franklin Roosevelt, but it was deeply moving, even for hard-shelled reporters and old soldiers. “What might easily have been made a routine patriotic display,” wrote Raymond Daniell of The New York Times,“and hardly a day passes without one in Berlin, was turned into a historic occasion by the President’s simple, homely declaration of the faith that had sent millions of American boys into battle far from home for a belief few of them could express.” As no one had anticipated, Truman made it a moment “of lasting inspiration to all of us who were there,” recorded General Lucius D. Clay. “While the soldier is schooled against emotion,” Clay wrote years later, “I have never forgotten that short ceremony as our flag rose to the staff.”

On the ride back, Truman was in a generous mood. Turning to Eisenhower he said out of the blue, “General, there is nothing you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.”

Bradley remembered trying to keep a straight face. Eisenhower looked flabbergasted. “Mr. President,” he replied, “I don’t know who will be your opponent for the presidency, but it will not be I.”

That night, recording his thoughts on the day’s session at the conference table, Truman said only that “Uncle Joe looked tired and drawn today and the P.M. seemed lost.” The main topic had been Italy. Little was accomplished.

Before noon on Saturday, July 21, Henry Stimson received by special courier the eagerly awaited report from General Groves, the first description of the first nuclear explosion and, as Stimson said, an “immensely powerful document.” By early afternoon he and General Marshall had reviewed it together, and at 3:30 Stimson brought it to the President. Byrnes was summoned, the doors were closed. Stimson began to read aloud in his scratchy old man’s voice.

The test had been “successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone.” The test bomb had not been dropped from a plane but exploded on top of a 100-foot steel tower. The “energy generated” was estimated to be the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT.

For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion…. For a brief period there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds. This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over ten thousand feet before it dimmed. The light from the explosion was seen clearly at Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City, El Paso and other points generally to about 180 miles away. The sound was heard to the same distance in a few instances but generally to about 100 miles. Only few windows were broken although one was some 125 miles away. A massive cloud was formed which surged and billowed upward with tremendous power, reaching the substratosphere at an elevation of 41,000 feet, 36,000 feet above the ground, in about five minutes, breaking without interruption through a temperature inversion at 17,000 feet which most of the scientists thought would stop it. Two supplementary explosions occurred in the cloud shortly after the main explosion. The cloud contained several thousand tons of dust picked up from the ground and a considerable amount of iron in the gaseous form. Our present thought is that this iron ignited when it mixed with the oxygen in the air to cause these supplementary explosions. Huge concentrations of highly radioactive materials resulted from the fission and were contained in this cloud.

The report described how the steel from the tower had evaporated, and the greenish cast of the pulverized dirt in a crater more than 1,000 feet in diameter.

One-half mile from the explosion there was a massive steel test cylinder weighing 220 tons. The base of the cylinder was solidly encased in concrete. Surrounding the cylinder was a strong steel tower 70 feet high, anchored to concrete foundations. This tower is comparable to a steel building bay that would be found in a typical 15 to 20 story skyscraper or in warehouse construction. Forty tons of steel were used to fabricate the tower which was…the height of a six story building. The cross bracing was much stronger than that normally used in ordinary steel construction. The absence of the solid walls of a building gave the blast a much less effective surface to push against. The blast tore the tower from its foundations, twisted it, ripped it apart and left it flat on the ground. The effects on the tower indicate that, at that distance, unshielded permanent steel and masonry buildings would have been destroyed…. None of us had expected it to be damaged.

Groves also included the impressions of his deputy, General Thomas F. Farrell, who was with Oppenheimer at the control shelter.

“Everyone in that room knew the awful potentialities of the thing that they thought was about to happen,” reported Farrell, who wrote of the explosion’s “searing light” and a “roar which warned of doomsday,” and described how, when it was over,

Dr. Kistiakowsky…threw his arms around Dr. Oppenheimer and embraced him with shouts of glee. Others were equally enthusiastic. All the pent-up emotions were released in those few minutes and all seemed to sense immediately that the explosion had far exceeded the most optimistic expectations and wildest hopes of the scientists. All seemed to feel that they had been present at the birth of a new age….

In his conclusion, Groves wrote, “We are all fully conscious that our real goal is still before us. The battle test is what counts….”

To read it all took Stimson nearly an hour. Whether Truman or Byrnes interrupted with questions or comments is unknown. But when Stimson stopped reading, Truman and Byrnes both looked immensely pleased. The President, in particular, was “tremendously pepped up,” wrote Stimson. “He said it gave him an entirely new confidence and he thanked me for having come to the Conference and being present to help him this way.”

Indeed, all three men felt an overwhelming sense of relief—that so much time and effort, that so vast an investment of money and resources had not been futile. It was not just that $2 billion had been spent, but that it was $2 billion that could have been used for the war effort in other ways. The thing worked—it could end the war—and, there was the pride too that a task of such complexity and magnitude, so completely unprecedented, had been an American success.

Clearly, Truman was fortified by the news. It is hard to imagine that he would not have been. That he and Byrnes felt their hand might be thus strengthened at the bargaining table with the Russians in time to come is also obvious—and perfectly understandable—but by no means was this the primary consideration, as some would later contend.

Truman went directly from the meeting to the Cecilienhof Palace where, as the next session got under way, the change in him was pronounced. He was more sure of himself, more assertive. “It was apparent something had happened,” wrote Robert Murphy, a political adviser to General Eisenhower. Churchill later told Stimson he could not imagine what had come over the President. (When Stimson went to see the prime minister the next day, to read him Groves’s report, Churchill’s response was more emphatic than Truman’s by far: “Stimson, what was gunpowder?” exclaimed Churchill. “What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath.”)

In an exchange across the table, Stalin said the three governments should issue a statement announcing a renewal of diplomatic relations with the former German satellite nations of Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland. When Truman disagreed, Stalin said the questions would have to be postponed.

“We will not recognize these governments until they are set up on a satisfactory basis,” said Truman.

Again they addressed the thorny question of Poland. In vague language at Yalta it had been agreed that Poland was to get new territory on the west, from Germany, to compensate for what Russia had taken from Poland on the east. At issue was Poland’s western border and the fact that the Polish government of the moment (and the Red Army) had already taken over what had been a sizable part of Germany. Truman thought such matters should be settled at the peace conference. It had been agreed, he said, that the Germany of 1937 was to be the starting point.

“We decided on our zones. We moved our troops to the zones assigned to us. Now another occupying government has been assigned a zone without consultation with us…. I am very friendly to Poland and sympathetic with what Russia proposes regarding the western frontier, but I do not want to do it that way.”

In other words, the Russians could not arbitrarily dictate how things were to be, and there would be no progress on reparations or other matters concerning Germany until this was understood.

“I am concerned that a piece of Germany, a valuable piece, has been cut off. This must be deemed a part of Germany in considering reparations and in the feeding of Germany. The Poles have no right to seize this territory now and take it out of the peace settlement. Are we going to maintain occupied zones until the peace or are we going to give Germany away piecemeal?”

He was not contentious, only unequivocal. Churchill was delighted. Eden thought it the President’s best day thus far, as did Leahy, though Leahy was certain the Russians had no intention of changing their course in Eastern Europe, regardless of what was said. Poland was a “Soviet fait accompli,” thought Leahy, and there was little the United States or Britain could do about it, short of going to war with the Russians, which was unthinkable.

There was no trace of tension at the lavish party given by Stalin that night, in honor of his Western Allies. Truman had the best time of his entire stay at Potsdam. Stalin’s affair was a “wow,” he reported to his mother and sister.

Started with caviar and vodka and wound up with watermelon and champagne, with smoked fish, fresh fish, venison, chicken, duck and all sorts of vegetables in between. There was a toast every five minutes until at least 25 had been drunk. I ate very little and drank less, but it was a colorful and enjoyable occasion.

When I had Stalin and Churchill here for dinner I think I told you that a young sergeant named List, from Philadelphia played the piano and a boy from the Metropolitan Orchestra played the violin. They are the best we have, and they are very good. Stalin sent to Moscow and brought his two best pianists and two feminine violinists. They were excellent. Played Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikowsky and all the rest. I congratulated him and them on their ability. They had dirty faces though and the gals were rather fat. Anyway it was a nice dinner.

To Bess he reported that the evening had meant more progress in his relations with Stalin and said again that he already had what he wanted, the promise of Russian support against Japan. Possibly Stalin may also have told him that a million Russian troops were now massed along the Manchurian border.

“He talked to me confidently at the dinner, and I believe things will be all right in most instances. Some things we won’t and can’t agree on, but I already have what I came for.”

Churchill, who cared little for music, told Truman he was bored to tears and going home. Truman said he would stay until the party was over. So Churchill stalked off to a corner, where, with Leahy for another half hour—until the music ended—he “glowered, growled, and grumbled,” as a delighted Truman would tell the story.

Two nights later, when it was his turn as host, Churchill had his revenge. He summoned a Royal Air Force band and instructed them to play as loud as possible all through dinner and afterward.

Possibly the hardest judge of character in the whole American delegation was Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, whose strong mind and long experience had made him invaluable to Roosevelt. A poised, impressive-looking man, King had played a part in every major conference of the war, beginning with the shipboard meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill that produced the Atlantic Charter in the summer of 1941. On the night of Stalin’s dinner at Potsdam, King had leaned over to whisper to Lord Moran.

“Watch the President,” he said, “This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job, not only for the United States but for the whole world.”

Bohlen, who had been at Roosevelt’s side as interpreter at Teheran and Yalta, later described his amazement at Truman’s natural self-possession, his ease with people, the way he “moved through the conference with the poise of a leader of much greater experience.”

The President’s physical well-being impressed nearly everyone. “Churchill and Stalin were given to late hours, while I was an early riser,” Truman would later comment. “This made my days extra long….” Yet he seemed above fatigue. He was out of bed and dressed by 5:30 or 6:00 regularly every morning and needed no alarm clock or anyone to wake him. Subordinates found him invariably cheerful and positive. He was never known to make a rude or inconsiderate remark, or to berate anyone, or to appear the least out of sorts, no matter how much stress he was under. From first to last, he remained entirely himself. “There was no pretense whatever about him,” recalled the naval aide, Lieutenant Rigdon, who was charged with keeping the daily log. The great thing about the President, said Floyd Boring, one of the Secret Service men, was that he never got “swagly.” “He never came on as being superior…. He could talk to anyone! He could talk to the lowly peasant. He could talk to the King of England…. And that was, I think, his secret…. He never got swellheaded—never got, you know, swagly.”

In Berlin the black market—trade in cigarettes, watches, whiskey—and prostitution were rampant. One evening at the end of an arduous session at the palace, a young Army public relations officer, seeing that Truman was about to leave alone in his car, stuck his head in the window and asked if he might hitch a ride. Truman told him to get in and Floyd Boring, who was driving, could not help overhearing the conversation as they headed off. The officer said that if there was anything the President wanted, anything at all he needed, he had only to say the word. “Anything, you know, like women.”

“Listen, son, I married my sweetheart,” Truman said. “She doesn’t run around on me, and I don’t run around on her. I want that understood. Don’t ever mention that kind of stuff to me again.”

“By the time we were home,” Boring remembered, “he got out of the car and never even said goodbye to that guy.”

Another member of the delegation, a State Department official named Emilio Collado, would recall a scene at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse on the afternoon of Saturday the 21st. Arriving with a document for the President to sign, Collado was shown into a large empty room overlooking the lake, where he saw seated at a grand piano “an alert small man in shirt sleeves with a drink on the corner of the piano.” Gathered beside him, singing, were Byrnes and Leahy, both with their jackets off.

I thought it was nice [Collado said years later]…. The President played the piano quite well, in a rather old-time, ragtime manner, and they were having a fine time. They weren’t drunk or anything like that. They each had a drink. I have often thought of that picture: the five-star admiral, the Secretary of State and the President, together on a Saturday afternoon, having a little music. The fact of the matter is that Harry Truman was a very human man. They were having a little quiet relaxation. They had had their lunch…. They had a little free time and there they were…. I can’t say that the singing was very high quality, but the piano playing was quite good.

IV

With the start of his second week at Potsdam, Truman knew that decisions on the bomb could wait no longer.

At 10:00 Sunday morning, July 22, he attended Protestant services led by a chaplain from the 2nd Armored Division. Then later in the morning he went to a Catholic mass conducted by his old friend Father Curtis Tiernan, the chaplain of Battery D, who was serving as Chief of Army Chaplains in Europe and had been flown to Berlin at Truman’s request.

“I’m going to mass at 11:30 presided over by him,” Truman wrote to Bess at mid-morning. “I've already been to a Protestant service so I guess I should stand in good with the Almighty for the coming week—and my how I'll need it.”

Stimson had appeared at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse shortly after breakfast, with messages from Washington saying all was about ready for the “final operation” and that a decision on the target cities was needed. Stimson wanted Kyoto removed from the list, and having heard the reasons, Truman agreed. Kyoto would be spared. “Although it was a target of considerable military importance,” Stimson would write, “it had been the capital of Japan and was a shrine of Japanese art and culture….” First on the list of approved targets was Hiroshima, southern headquarters and depot for Japan’s homeland army.

Early on Monday, Stimson came again to Truman’s second-floor office. A warning message to Japan, an ultimatum, was nearly ready, the document to be known as the Potsdam Declaration. Stimson thought it unwise at this point to insist on unconditional surrender, a term the Japanese would take to mean they could not keep their Emperor. He urged a revision to read that the Allies would “prosecute the war against Japan until she ceases to resist.” But Byrnes had vehemently opposed any such change. Unconditional surrender was an objective too long established, too often proclaimed; it had been too great a rallying cry from the time of Pearl Harbor to abandon now, Byrnes insisted. Truman had reaffirmed it as policy in his first speech to Congress on April 16. It was what the Nazis had been made to accept, and its renunciation with the Japanese at this late date, after so much bloodshed, the acceptance of anything less with victory so near, would seem like appeasement. Politically it would be disastrous, Byrnes was also sure. To most Americans, Hirohito was the villainous symbol of Japan’s fanatical military clique. A Gallup Poll in June had shown that a mere fraction of Americans, only 7 percent, thought he should be retained after the war, even as a puppet, while a full third of the people thought he should be executed as a war criminal. Like others who had been advising Truman, Byrnes considered any negotiations with Japan over terms a waste of time and felt that if Hirohito were to remain in place, then the war had been pointless. Though Truman listened carefully, Stimson failed to convince him otherwise.

Tuesday, July 24, was almost certainly the fateful day.

At 9:20 A.M. Stimson again climbed the stairs to Truman’s office, where he found the President seated behind the heavy carved desk, “alone with his work.” Stimson had brought another message:

Washington, July 23, 1945

Top Secret

Operational Priority

War 36792 Secretary of War Eyes Only top secret from Harrison.

Operation may be possible any time from August 1 depending on state of preparation of patient and condition of atmosphere. From point of view of patient only, some chance August 1 to 3, good chance August 4 to 5 and barring unexpected relapse almost certain before August 10.

Truman “said that was just what he wanted,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “that he was highly delighted….”

Later, Truman wrote of a consensus at Potsdam, among Byrnes, Stimson, Leahy, Marshall, and General Arnold, that the bomb should be used. He recalled that Marshall again stressed the number of lives that would be saved. “I asked General Marshall what it would cost in lives to land on the Tokyo plain and other places in Japan. It was his opinion that such an invasion would cost at a minimum a quarter of a million American casualties….” He himself reached his own conclusion only “after long and careful thought,” he wrote, adding, “I did not like the weapon.”

Very possibly there was no one, clearcut moment when he made up his mind, or announced that he had. Most likely, he never seriously considered not using the bomb. Indeed, to have said no at this point and called everything off would have been so drastic a break with the whole history of the project, not to say the terrific momentum of events that summer, as to have been almost inconceivable.

Some critics and historians in years to come would argue that Japan was already finished by this time, just as Eisenhower had said and as several intelligence reports indicated. Japan’s defeat, however, was not the issue. It was Japan’s surrender that was so desperately wanted, since every day Japan did not surrender meant the killing continued. In theory, Japan had been defeated well before Truman became President. (Studies by the Japanese themselves had determined a year and a half before, by January 1944, that Japan had lost the war.) Yet in the three months since Truman took office, American battle casualties in the Pacific were nearly half the total from three years of war in the Pacific. The nearer victory came, the heavier the price in blood. And whatever the projected toll in American lives in an invasion, it was too high if it could be avoided.

“We had only too abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos,” remembered a captain in Military Intelligence, Charlton Ogburn, Jr. “Thousands of our Marines and soldiers had died rooting Japanese from their foxholes and bunkers when they were perfectly aware that their situation was hopeless.” During the whole war, not a single Japanese unit had surrendered.

While intelligence reports indicated that Japan was beaten, they also forecast that the Japanese would hold out for months longer, meanwhile issuing intermittent peace feelers, both to bring the war to what they would regard as an acceptable conclusion, and “to weaken the determination of the United States to fight to the bitter end….”

The basic policy of the present [Japanese] government [said a combined Intelligence Committee report of July 8, 1945] is to fight as long and as desperately as possible in the hope of avoiding complete defeat and of acquiring a better bargaining position in a negotiated peace. Japanese leaders are now playing for time in the hope that Allied war weariness, Allied disunity, or some “miracle” will present an opportunity to arrange a compromise peace.

Nor, it must be stressed, was there ever anything hypothetical about preparations for the invasion—on both sides—a point sometimes overlooked in later years.

Truman had earlier authorized the Chiefs of Staff to move more than 1 million troops for a final attack on Japan. Thirty divisions were on the way to the Pacific from the European theater, from one end of the world to the other, something never done before. Supplies in tremendous quantity were piling up on Saipan. Japan had some 2.5 million regular troops on the home islands, but every male between the ages of fifteen and sixty, every female from seventeen to forty-five, was being conscripted and armed with everything from ancient brass cannon to bamboo spears, taught to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing tanks. One woman would remember being given a carpenter’s awl and instructed that killing just one American would do. “You must aim at the abdomen,” she was told. “Understand? The abdomen.” The general in charge of defense plans told other senior officers, “By pouring 20 divisions into the battle within two weeks of the enemy’s landing, we will annihilate him entirely and insure a Japanese victory.” Thousands of planes were ready to serve as kamikazes.

To no one with the American and Allied forces in the Pacific did it look as though the Japanese were about to quit. On July 15, The New York Times reported that twenty-five war-front correspondents from the United States and Australia had compared notes and their guess was the war would not end for nearly a year, not until June 1946. At the Pentagon, a long-remembered poster in the halls showed the face of a combat-hardened infantryman looking with grim determination at a map of the Japanese home islands, while across the top in bold letters was slashed the single word “Next!” There was no talk at the Pentagon of an early end to the war. The great concern was the likelihood of huge Japanese forces in China and Southeast Asia fighting on even if the government in Tokyo were to give up.

Truman foresaw unprecedented carnage in any attempted invasion. “It occurred to me,” he would remark a few months later, “that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are.” But whether 250,000 or 20,000 casualties would result was not the issue at the moment, not if the shock effect of a single devastating blow, or two, could stop the war—and particularly when devastating blows, in the form of B-29 raids, had become the standard, almost daily routine.

“Today’s prime fact is war,” Henry Stimson had said at the start of one Interim Committee meeting. The Japanese were the despised enemy, perpetrators of the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor (and then in the midst of peace talks), perpetrators of the bombing of Manila and the Bataan death march. They were the murderers of American prisoners of war, the fanatics who ordered the seemingly insane kamikaze attacks. The details of the Bataan death march had become known only in February and enraged the country. Other atrocities included the Palawan Massacre, during which Japanese soldiers on the Philippine island of Palawan lured 140 American prisoners of war into air-raid trenches, then doused them with gasoline and burned them alive. A few days after the German surrender in May, the papers had carried a photograph of a blindfolded prisoner of war, an American flyer down on his knees, his hands tied behind his back, about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer swinging a sword.

At Potsdam, as Bohlen was to write, “the spirit of mercy was not throbbing in the breast of any Allied official,” either for the Germans or the Japanese.

And how could a President, or the others charged with responsibility for the decision, answer to the American people if when the war was over, after the bloodbath of an invasion of Japan, it became known that a weapon sufficient to end the war had been available by midsummer and was not used?

Had the bomb been ready in March and deployed by Roosevelt, had it shocked Japan into surrender then, it would have already saved nearly fifty thousand American lives lost in the Pacific in the time since, not to say a vastly larger number of Japanese lives.

Nor had anyone ever doubted that Roosevelt would use it. “At no time, from 1941 to 1945, did I ever hear it suggested by the President, or by any other responsible member of the government, that atomic energy should not be used in the war,” wrote Stimson. “All of us of course understood the terrible responsibility involved…President Roosevelt particularly spoke to me many times of his own awareness of the catastrophic potentialities of our work. But we were at war….”

Leahy later said, “I know FDR would have used it in a minute to prove that he hadn’t wasted two billion dollars.”

“I’ll Say that We’ll end the war a year sooner now,” Truman had told Bess in a letter the week before, speaking of Stalin’s agreement to come in against Japan, “and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That’s the important thing.” To him it was always the important thing. An invasion of Japan would be work for ground troops, dirty, God-awful business for infantry and artillery, as he knew from experience. For unlike Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, or any Commander in Chief since the advent of modern war, Truman had been in combat with ground troops. At the Argonne, seeing a German battery pull into position on the left flank, beyond his assigned sector, he had ordered his battery to open fire, because his action would save lives, even though he could face a court-martial. “It is just the same as artillery on our side,” he would say later of the bomb, which would strike many people as appallingly insensitive and simplistic, but he was speaking from the experience of war.

Once, when presiding judge of. Jackson County, he had, by his own private confession, allowed a crooked contractor to steal $10,000 in order to forestall the stealing of ten times the amount. He had permitted evil in order to prevent a larger evil and saw no other choice. Had he done right, had he done wrong, he had asked, writing alone late at night in the Pickwick Hotel. “You judge it, I can’t.”

Conceivably, as many would later argue, the Japanese might have surrendered before November and the scheduled invasion. Conceivably, they could have been strangled by naval blockade, forced to surrender by continued fire bombing, with its dreadful toll, as some strategists were saying at the time. Possibly the single sticking point was, after all, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. But no one close to Truman was telling him not to use the new weapon. General Marshall fully expected the Japanese to fight on even if the bomb were dropped and proved as effective as the scientists predicted. Marshall saw the bomb more as a way to make the invasion less costly. That it might make the invasion unnecessary was too much to expect. “We knew the Japanese were determined and fanatical…and we would have to exterminate them man by man,” he would later tell David Lilienthal. “So we thought the bomb would be a wonderful weapon as a protection and preparation for landings.” Marshall had been so appalled by American casualties at Iwo Jima that he had favored using poison gas at Okinawa.

A petition drawn up by Leo Szilard, urging on grounds of morality that Japan be warned in advance, had been signed by seventy scientists but was not delivered to Washington until after Truman had left for Potsdam. Truman never saw it. But neither did he see the counter opinions voiced by those scientists urging that the bomb be used, and on grounds of morality. “Are not the men of the fighting forces…who are risking their lives for the nation, entitled to the weapons which have been designed,” said one petition. “In short, are we to go on shedding American blood when we have available means to a steady victory? No! If we can save even a handful of American lives, then let us use this weapon—now!”

It is hard to imagine anything more conclusive than the devastation of all the eastern coastal cities of Japan by fire bombs [wrote another scientist]; a more fiendish hell than the inferno of blazing Tokyo is beyond the pale of conception. Then why do we attempt to draw the line of morality here, when it is a question of degree, not a question of kind?

In a poll of 150 scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, 87 percent voted for military use of the weapon, if other means failed to bring surrender. Arthur Compton was asked for his opinion:

What a question to answer [he later wrote]! Having been in the very midst of these discussions, it seemed to me that a firm negative stand on my part might still prevent an atomic attack on Japan. Thoughts of my pacifist Mennonite ancestors flashed through my mind. I knew all too well the destruction and human agony the bombs would cause. I knew the danger they held in the hands of some future tyrant. These facts I had been living with for four years. But I wanted the war to end. I wanted life to become normal again…. I hoped that by use of the bombs many fine young men I knew might be released at once from the demands of war and thus be given a chance to live and not to die.

Churchill was to write of the decision that was no decision, and in retrospect this seems to have been the case. “The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time,” Churchill wrote, “that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”

“Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made,” recalled George Elsey, remembering the atmosphere of the moment. “He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track…. It’s all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.”

For his part, Truman stated later:

The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used. The top military advisers to the President recommended its use, and when I talked to Churchill he unhesitatingly told me that he favored the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war.

Though nothing was recorded on paper, the critical moment appears to have occurred at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse later in the morning of Tuesday, July 24, when, at 11:30, the combined American and British Chiefs of Staff convened with Truman and Churchill in the dining room. This was the one time when Truman, Churchill, and their military advisers were all around a table, in Churchill’s phrase. From this point it was settled: barring some unforeseen development, the bomb would be used within a few weeks. Truman later told Arthur Compton that the day of the decision was the same day he informed Stalin, and that occurred late the afternoon of the 24th.

It happened at the end of a particularly contentious session at the Cecilienhof Palace. The meeting was just breaking up when Truman rose from his chair and alone walked slowly around the table to where Stalin stood with his interpreter.

“I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” Truman remembered. “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ”

Truman did not specify what kind of weapon it was—he did not use the words “atomic bomb”—or say anything about sharing scientific secrets. Stalin seemed neither surprised nor the least curious. He did not ask the nature of the weapon, or how it was made, or why he hadn’t been told before this. He did not suggest that Soviet scientists be informed or permitted to examine it. He did not, in fact, appear at all interested.

To Bohlen, who was watching closely from across the room, Stalin’s response seemed so altogether offhand that Bohlen wondered whether the President had made himself clear. “If he had had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress his reactions would have been obvious,” wrote Churchill, who had kept his eye on Stalin’s face. Byrnes, too, was certain Stalin had “not grasped the importance of the discovery,” and would soon be asking for more details. But this Stalin never did. He never mentioned the subject again for the remainder of the conference.

The fact was Stalin already knew more than any of the Americans or British imagined. Soviet nuclear research had begun in 1942, and as would be learned later, a German-born physicist at Los Alamos, a naturalized British citizen named Klaus Fuchs, had been supplying the Russians with atomic secrets for some time, information that in Moscow was judged “extremely excellent and very valuable.” Stalin had understood perfectly what Truman said. Later, in the privacy of their Babelsberg quarters, according to Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Stalin instructed Molotov to “tell Kurchatov [of the Soviet atomic project] to hurry up the work.” (Also, according to the Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin went even further that evening when he cabled Lavrenti Beria, who had overall supervision of the project, to put on the pressure.)

In years to come Truman often said that having made his decision about the bomb, he went to bed and slept soundly. He would be pictured retiring for the night at the White House, his mind clear that he had done the right thing. But in the strange “nightmare” house at Babelsberg, in the unremitting heat of the German summer, he was sleeping rather poorly and in considerably more turmoil than his later claims ever suggested.

“No one who played a part in the development of the bomb or in our decision to use it felt happy about it,” recalled Jimmy Byrnes, who was quartered downstairs.

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” Truman wrote in his diary on Wednesday, July 25, the day the general military order was issued to the Air Force to proceed with the plan, and “terrible” was the word he would keep coming back to. He wondered if the bomb might be “the fire of destruction” prophesied in the Bible. As if to convince himself, he wrote of how it would be used on military targets only, which he knew to be only partly true.

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo, where the Imperial Palace had been spared thus far].

He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them a chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made useful.

Whether this final thought—that it could be made useful—was his irrepressible, native optimism and faith in progress coming to the fore, or yet another way of trying to convince himself, or both of these, or merely means useful to end the war, is open to question.

V

It would be the thesis of some historians that the atomic bomb figured importantly at Potsdam as Truman’s way of putting pressure on the Russians. But except for his private show of bolstered confidence after hearing Groves’s report, Truman neither said nor did anything of consequence to support this theory and the whole idea would be vigorously denied by those who were present and witness to events. Once, sometime before the test at Alamogordo, Truman reportedly remarked to some of his aides that if the bomb worked, he would “certainly have the hammer on those boys,” but whether by this he meant the Russians or the Japanese was unclear, and there was no intimation ever of a “hammer,” no flaunting of power, in his dealings with Stalin. “The idea of using the bomb as a form of pressure on the Russians never entered the discussions at Potsdam,” wrote Harriman. “That wasn’t the President’s mood at all. The mood was to treat Stalin as an ally—a difficult ally, admittedly—in the hope that he would behave like one.”

At the conference session preceding Truman’s disclosure to Stalin of the bomb secret, the Generalissimo had been as “difficult” as at any time thus far. Truman was firm in his positions, yet never belligerent or reproachful. He had no intention to make reflection upon Stalin or his government, he stressed. The sharp exchanges were between Churchill and Stalin—Churchill having at last recovered much of his old spirit.

The topic on the agenda was the admission to the United Nations of Italy and the Balkan states formerly allied with Germany, the so-called “satellite countries.” It was the American and British position that Italy should be admitted but that Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary (all now firmly in Russian control) should not, until democratic governments were established. Stalin observed that since no democratic elections had been held in Italy either, he failed to understand this benevolent attitude toward Italy. The difference, said Truman, was that everyone had free access to Italy, while for the Western Allies there was no free access to the Balkan countries. (It was a point that Byrnes, too, had been making in meetings of the foreign ministers.)

“We are asking for the reorganization of the satellite governments along democratic lines as agreed upon at Yalta,” Truman said.

Stalin’s calm rejoinder was very simple: “If a government is not fascist, a government is democratic,” he said.

Churchill pointed out that Italy was an open society with a free press, where diplomatic missions could go freely about their business. At Bucharest, by contrast, the British mission was penned up as if under arrest. An iron fence had descended, said Churchill darkly.

“All fairy tales!” exclaimed Stalin.

“Statesmen may call one another’s statements fairy tales if they wish,” answered Churchill.

As Bohlen was to write, no moment at the conference so revealed the gulf between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies.

Taking Churchill’s side, Truman said that difficulties encountered by the American missions in Romania and Bulgaria had also been cause for concern. (That night Churchill would go on at length to Lord Moran about his admiration for Truman’s plain, direct way with Stalin. “The President is not going to be content to feed out of anyone’s hand; he intends to get to the bottom of things,” Churchill would say, rubbing his eyes as if to remind himself he was not dreaming. “If only this had happened at Yalta.” But then after a pause, he added sadly, “It is too late now.”)

Truman tried to salvage the afternoon with progress in another direction. The previous day he had formally introduced his plan to internationalize the world’s inland waterways, rivers, and canals, including the Danube, the Rhine, the Dardanelles, the Kiel Canal, the Suez and Panama canals. All nations, including Russia, were to have access to all the seas of the world. “I do not want to fight another war in twenty years because of a quarrel on the Danube,” he had said. “We want a prosperous, self-supporting Europe. A bankrupt Europe is of no advantage to any country, or to the peace of the world.” Stalin had said he wanted time to consider. So now Truman brought it up again, hoping for the best. Clearly it was important to him.

Stalin cut him off, declaring, “The question is not ripe for discussion.”

On Wednesday, July 25, the conference was put on hold. Churchill was about to leave for London to face the final results of the general election. Anthony Eden and others of the British delegation were also to depart, as well as Churchill’s opponent in the election, the quiet, mousy Clement Attlee, who dressed in a three-piece suit, despite the summer heat, and who seemed as convinced as everyone else that Churchill was certain to win and would return in a matter of days.

Churchill, privately, was full of foreboding. He had had a dream in which he saw himself lying dead beneath a white sheet in an empty room. He knew who it was, he told Moran, because he recognized the protruding feet.

“What a pity,” Stalin said at the close of that morning’s session, when Churchill announced he had no more to say.

Outside afterward, by the front door of the palace, Churchill, Stalin, and Truman posed for a final portrait. Truman, looking very much the American politician, stood in the middle with crossed arms, shaking hands with both men at once, smiling first at one, then the other, as a battery of photographers and newsreel cameramen recorded the moment. Even Stalin broke into a grin.

The next day from London came the stunning news that the Labor Party had won, Churchill was defeated, Clement Attlee was the new prime minister. Hardly anyone could believe it, but the Russians seemed most upset of all. How could this possibly be, Molotov kept demanding. How could they not have known the outcome in advance? Stalin postponed the conference for another few days and was seen by no one.

First Roosevelt, now Churchill, Truman noted privately. The old order was passing. Uneasily he wondered what might happen if Stalin were suddenly to “cash in” and a power struggle convulsed the Soviet Union. “It isn’t customary for dictators to train leaders to follow them in power. I’ve seen no one at this Conference in the Russian lineup who can do the job.” His feelings about Churchill were mixed, as much as he liked him. It was too bad about Churchill, he wrote to his mother and sister, but then he added that “it may turn out to be all right for the world,” suggesting that this way, without Churchill around, he might make better progress with Stalin.

That same day, July 26, at the island of Tinian in the Pacific, the cruiser Indianapolis delivered the U-235 portion of an atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy.” That evening, Byrnes and Truman decided to release the Potsdam Declaration.

Phrased as a joint statement by Truman, Attlee, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, it assured the Japanese people humane treatment. They would not be “enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation.” Once freedom of speech and religion were established, once Japan’s warmaking power had been eliminated and a responsible, “peacefully inclined” government freely elected, occupation forces would be withdrawn.

The words “unconditional surrender” appeared only once, in the final paragraph, and then specified only the unconditional surrender of the armed forces, not the Japanese nation. The alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.”

The fate of Emperor Hirohito was left ambiguous. He was not mentioned. Nor was there any explanation of what form the “prompt and utter destruction” might take.

The declaration was picked up by Japanese radio monitors at six in the morning, July 27, Tokyo time, and Prime Minister Kautaro Suzuki and the Cabinet went into an all-day meeting. Meanwhile, over Tokyo and ten other Japanese cities, American planes were dropping millions of leaflets with a printed translation of the declaration.

Suzuki’s decision was to ignore the matter. The declaration, he said at a press conference, was nothing but a rehash of old proposals and as such, beneath contempt. He would “kill [it] with silence,” he said.

Clement Attlee and his new foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, arrived at Babelsberg the night of Saturday the 28th and Truman was impressed with neither—a couple of “sourpusses,” he decided. Bevin looked as though he weighed 250 pounds.

Mr. Attlee is not so keen as old fat Winston and Mr. Bevin looks rather rotund to be a Foreign Minister [Truman wrote to Margaret]. Seems Bevin is sort of the John L. Lewis type. Eden was a perfect striped pants boy. I wasn’t fond of Eden—he is a much overrated man; and he didn’t play fair with his boss. I did like old Churchill. He was as windy as Langer [Senator William Langer of North Dakota], but he knew his English language and after he’d talked half an hour there’d be at least one gem of a sentence and two thoughts maybe which could have been expressed in four minutes. But if we ever got him on record, which was seldom, he stayed put. Anyway he is a likeable person and these other two are sourpusses. Attlee is an Oxford graduate and talks with that deep throated swallowing enunciation same as Eden does. But I understand him reasonably well. Bevin is a tough guy. He doesn’t know of course that your dad has been dealing with that sort all his life, from building trades to coal mines. So he won’t be new.

“We shall see what we shall see,” he wrote to Bess.

Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had only just arrived, found Truman in an optimistic mood concerning the Russians, in contrast to others in the delegation. Harriman was “very gloomy.” Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.”

All messages to the President from the War Department came in to Babelsberg a half block down the street from Number 2 Kaiserstrasse at the Army message center, where they were immediately decoded. From there they were taken to Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, to the officers on duty in the Map Room, who would give them to the President.

Late on Monday, July 30, another urgent top-secret cable to Truman was received and decoded, but held for delivery until morning in order not to disturb the President’s rest. It was from Harrison in Washington:

The time schedule on Groves’ project is progressing so rapidly that it is now essential that statement for release by you be available not later than Wednesday, 1 August….

The time had come for Truman to give the final go-ahead for the bomb. This was the moment, the decision only he could make.

The message was delivered at 7:48 A.M., Berlin time, Tuesday, July 31. Writing large and clear with a lead pencil on the back of the pink message, Truman gave his answer, which he handed to Lieutenant Elsey for transmission:

Suggestion approved. Release when ready but not sooner than August 2.

Elsey, a lanky, earnest, good-looking young officer, a Princeton graduate who had a master’s degree in history from Harvard, would not remember feeling that he was witness to one of history’s momentous turning points. “Everything seemed momentous in those days at Potsdam,” Elsey would recall. What impressed him was that Truman “didn’t want anything happening until he got away from Stalin, away from Potsdam.” All efforts now were to wind things up by August 2. Stimson was already back at the Pentagon. Marshall was to leave later that day.

The Potsdam Conference should have been a time of celebration. It should have been the most harmonious, most hopeful of the Big Three conferences, a watershed in history, marking the start of a new era of good feeling among the Allied powers now that the common foe, the detested Nazi, was destroyed. Such at least was the promise of Potsdam. But it wasn’t that way, nor in practicality had there ever been much chance it would be. At lunch the first day they met, Stalin had told Truman he wanted to cooperate with the United States in peace as in war, but in peace, he said, that would be more difficult. It was what they all knew, and the underlying tensions felt at the beginning remained to the end.

Truman had kept insisting on results, not talk, something in the bag at the end of every day, as Churchill observed—it was why he was there, Truman would say—and as impatient as he grew, he seems to have felt right to the end that he could succeed. “We have accomplished a very great deal in spite of all the talk…. So you see we have not wasted time,” he wrote to Bess just before Churchill departed. He wanted the future of Germany settled satisfactorily. Germany was the key, the overriding question. He wanted free elections in Poland, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. He wanted Russia to join in the assault on Japan as soon as possible. But only on this last item could he feel he had succeeded. For the rest he faced ambiguity, delays, and frustration, Stalin having no wish to accept any agreement that threatened the control he already had, wherever the Red Army stood. Try as he might, Truman could make little or no progress with Stalin.

Could Roosevelt have done better? It was a question Truman must have asked himself many times. Chip Bohlen thought Roosevelt would have been less successful, since, with his personal interest in earlier agreements with Stalin, Roosevelt would have acted more angrily than Truman when faced with Stalin’s intransigence. To Bohlen, Harriman, and others experienced in dealing with the Russians, Truman had acquitted himself well. “He was never defeated or made to look foolish or uninformed in debate,” Bohlen would write. And since neither Stalin nor Molotov ever tried any tricks or subtleties, but only held stubbornly to their own line, the President’s inexperience in diplomacy did not greatly matter after all. There was never any room for maneuver.

“Pray for me and keep your fingers crossed too,” he wrote to Bess as the final week began.

We are at an impasse on Poland and its western boundary and on reparations [he wrote in his diary]. Russia and Poland have agreed on the Oder and West Neisse to the Czechoslovakian border…without so much as a by your leave. I don’t like it.

But the Red Army had pushed to the Oder River and the western Neisse River and so those rivers were agreed to as Poland’s western frontier. Further, Poland was given the southern portion of East Prussia, including the port of Danzig, while the Soviet Union was granted the northern portion. As for free elections in Poland, it was agreed only that they should be held “as soon as possible,” which in reality meant the Polish issue remained unresolved.

The future of Germany’s former allies in the war—Italy, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Romania—was postponed, left to the Council of Foreign Ministers to resolve at some unspecified time in the future.

Germany, already portioned off into four zones of military occupation—American, British, Russian, and French—was in effect divided down the middle, between East and West. A complete demilitarization of the German state was agreed to. There was never an argument on that. Nazi war criminals were to be brought to justice. And there was no argument here either, not even over the place where the war crimes tribunal would sit—Nuremberg was the decision. And by a complicated formula for reparations the Soviet Union got the lion’s share—mainly in capital equipment—in view of the fact that the Soviet Union had suffered the greatest loss of life and property.

In some instances Stalin did not get what he wanted—Soviet trusteeship over Italy’s former colonies in Africa, a naval base on the Bosporus, four-power control over Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley. But it was the Western leaders who made the big concessions, because they had little choice—Russian occupation of Eastern Europe was indeed a fait accompli, as Leahy said—and because they hoped to achieve harmony with Stalin. It was never possible to get all you wanted in such situations, Truman would explain to the American people, trying to put a good face on the situation. “It is a question of give and take—of being willing to meet your neighbor halfway.”

To such experienced Soviet specialists as Harriman and George Kennan, it was foolishness in the extreme to imagine the Russians ever keeping faith with such words as “democratic” and “justice.” Or to see the arrangement agreed to for Germany as anything other than unreal and unworkable. Kennan, who was not present at Potsdam, would later despair over Truman’s naivete. Harriman, who was present throughout, found himself so shut out of serious discussions by Byrnes that he decided it was time for him to resign.

Truman’s waterways proposal got nowhere. On the next to final day of the conference, August 1, he made one last try, asking only that it at least be mentioned in the final communiqué. Attlee said this was agreeable with him, but again Stalin refused. Truman pointed out that the proposal had been discussed and that he was pressing only this one issue. “Marshal Stalin, I have accepted a number of compromises during this conference to confirm with your views,” he said, “and I make a personal request now that you yield on this point…”

Stalin broke in even before his interpreter had finished with the President’s statement.

“Nyet!” said Stalin. Then, with emphasis, and in English for the first time, he repeated, “No, I say no!”

It was an embarrassing, difficult moment. Truman turned red. “I cannot understand that man!” he was heard to say. He turned to Byrnes. “Jimmy, do you realize we have been here seventeen whole days? Why, in seventeen days you can decide anything!”

In a letter to his mother, Truman called the Russians the most pigheaded people he had ever encountered. He knew them now to be relentless bargainers—“forever pressing for every advantage for themselves,” as he later said—and in his diary he left no doubt that he understood the reality of the Stalin regime. It was “police government pure and simple,” he wrote. “A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.” Later he would tell John Snyder of an unsettling exchange with Stalin about the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940. When Truman asked what had happened to the Polish officers, Stalin answered coldly, “They went away.”

Still—still—Truman liked him. “I like Stalin. He is straightforward,” he wrote to Bess near the windup of the conference. Stalin could be depended upon to keep his word, he would later tell his White House staff. “The President,” wrote Eben Ayers, “seemed to have been favorably impressed with him and to like him.” Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing, Truman would tell Henry Wallace. Furthermore, Truman was pretty sure Stalin liked him. To Jonathan Daniels, Truman would say he had been reminded of Tom Pendergast. “Stalin is as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know.”

Not for a long time, not for a dozen years, would Truman concede that he had been naive at Potsdam—“an innocent idealist,” in his words—and refer to Stalin as the “unconscionable Russian Dictator.” Yet even then he added, “And I liked the little son-of-a-bitch.”

As Truman would later tell the American people, no secret agreements or commitments were made at Potsdam, other than “military arrangements.” However, one secret agreement concerning “military operations in Southeast Asia” was to have far-reaching consequences. He, Churchill, and their combined Chiefs of Staff decided that Vietnam, or Indochina, would, “for operational purposes,” be divided, with China in charge north of the 16th parallel and British forces in the southern half, leaving little chance for the unification or independence of Vietnam and ample opportunity for the return of the French. Truman so informed the American ambassador in China, Patrick J. Hurley, by secret cable the last day of the conference, August 1. At the time, given the other decisions he faced, both military and political, it did not seem overly important.

The thirteenth and concluding session at the Cecilienhof Palace that evening was devoted almost exclusively to the wording of the final communiqué and did not break up until past midnight. The struggle had come down to fine points. Molotov suggested an amendment in a paragraph that described Poland’s western frontier as running from the Baltic through the town of Swinemünde. He wished to substitute the words “west of” for “through,” Molotov said.

“How far west?” asked Byrnes.

“Immediately west,” suggested Bevin.

“Immediately west will satisfy us,” Stalin affirmed.

“That is all right,” said Truman.

“Agreed,” said Attlee.

Truman, in announcing that the business of the conference was ended, said in all sincerity that he hoped the next meeting would be in Washington.

“God willing,” exclaimed Stalin, invoking the deity for the first and only time. Then, in a conspicuously unusual tribute, Stalin commended Byrnes “who had worked harder perhaps than any of us…and worked very well.”

There was much hand shaking around the table and wishes for good health and safe journey. As it turned out, Truman and Stalin were never to meet again. Potsdam was their first and only big power conference.

In his private assessment, Stalin later told Nikita Khrushchev Truman was worthless.

VI

Packing had been going on at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse for several days, everyone, and especially the President, extremely ready to leave.

At 6:45 Thursday morning, August 2, his motorcade was drawn up in the driveway. By 7:15 they were on their way to Gatow airfield, where, at Truman’s request, there were to be no ceremonies. At 8:05 The Sacred Cow was airborne, heading for Plymouth, England, to meet the U.S.S. Augusta. “That will save two days on the ocean because it takes so long to get out of the English Channel when we leave from Antwerp,” he explained in a letter to his mother and Mary Jane. He would be having lunch with the English King, he wrote.

The lunch with King George VI took place on board the British battle cruiser H.M.S. Renown, which, with the Augusta and Philadelphia, was anchored in Plymouth Roads. To his surprise, Truman found the King “very pleasant,” “a good man,” and extremely interested in hearing all about Potsdam.

We had a nice and appetizing lunch [Truman recorded]—soup, fish, lamb chops, peas, potatoes and ice cream with chocolate sauce. The King, myself, Lord Halifax [the British ambassador to Washington], a British Admiral, Adm. Leahy, [Alan] Lascelles [the King’s private secretary], the Secretary of State in that order around the table. Talked of most everything, and nothing…. There was much formality etc. in getting on and off the British ship.

That afternoon, returning the call, the King came aboard the Augusta, inspected the guard, “took a snort of Haig & Haig” (as Truman happily recorded), and asked Truman for three of his autographs, one each for his daughters and the Queen.

Fifteen minutes after the King’s departure, at 3:49, the Augusta was under way.

The following day, August 3, his first full day at sea, Truman called the few members of the press who were on board into his cabin. Seated at a small table covered with green felt, a looseleaf notebook open in front of him, he began telling them about the atomic bomb and its history. He spoke slowly, in measured tones. His emotions seemed divided. “He was happy and thankful that we had a weapon in our hands which would speed the end of the war,” remembered Merriman Smith of the United Press. “But he was apprehensive over the development of such a monstrous weapon of destruction.” How long the United States could remain the “exclusive producer,” Truman wasn’t sure. The material in the notebook was his statement for the country, which had been prepared in advance, before he left for Potsdam.

The frustration of the reporters was extreme. “Here was the greatest news story since the invention of gunpowder,” wrote Smith. “And what could we do about it? Nothing. Just sit and wait.”

On August 4, according to the official log, the President was up and strolling the decks at five in the morning, looking “completely rested from the strain of the long and tiring conference discussions.” After an early breakfast, he spent the day studying conference reports and working on an address to the country. On Sunday, August 5, he attended church services, then returned to his work. Merriman Smith remembered the day as extremely tense and Truman looking worried. Smith and the other reporters tried to talk of other things. “The secret was so big and terrifying that we could not discuss it with each other.” The ship, meantime, was boiling along at a full speed of 26.5 knots.

On the morning of Monday, August 6, the fourth day at sea, the President and several of his party spent time on deck enjoying the sun and listening to a concert by the ship’s band. The ship had entered the Gulf Stream, south of Newfoundland. The sun was out, the weather considerably warmer. The crew had changed now to white uniforms that looked sparkling in the sunshine.

At noon the ship’s position was latitude 39-55 N, longitude 61-32 W. The sea was calm.

Shortly before noon, Truman and Byrnes had decided to have lunch with some of the crew below deck in the after mess. Truman was seated with six enlisted men and just beginning his meal when Captain Graham, one of the Map Room officers, hurried in and handed him a map of Japan and a decoded message from the Secretary of War.

Hiroshima had been bombed four hours earlier. “Results clear-cut successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in any test,” Truman read. On the map Captain Graham had circled the city with a red pencil.

Suddenly excited, Truman grabbed Graham by the hand and said, “This is the greatest thing in history,” then told him to show the message to Byrnes, who was at another table. It was just after noon. Minutes later a second message was brought in:

Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 P.M. Washington-time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.

Truman jumped to his feet now and called to Byrnes, “It’s time for us to get home!” Like the scientists at Alamogordo at the moment of the first test, Truman was exuberant. Tapping on a glass with a fork, he called for the crew’s attention. “Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make. We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!”

With the crew cheering, he rushed out to spread the news. “He was not actually laughing,” wrote Merriman Smith, “but there was a broad smile on his face. In the small dispatch which he waved at the men of the ship, he saw the quick end of the war written between the lines.” At the officers’ ward, telling the men to stay seated, he repeated what he had said in the mess, then added, “We won the gamble.” He said he had never been happier about any announcement he had ever made.

All this happened very fast, and as George Elsey was to recall, the President’s response seemed in no way inappropriate. “We were all excited. Everyone was cheering.” Within minutes, the ship’s radio was carrying news bulletins from Washington about the bomb. Then came the broadcast of the President’s message, the text of which had been released at the White House only moments before, at 11:00 A.M. Washington time.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima…. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe…. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war…. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth….

Not in this or any of the broadcasts was there mention of how much damage had been done at Hiroshima, since no details were yet known in Washington.

Excitement, feelings of relief swept the country—and especially among families with sons or husbands in the service. Surely the war would be over any day.

To the millions of men serving in the Pacific, and those in Europe preparing to be shipped to the Pacific, the news came as a joyous reprieve. One of them was the writer Paul Fussell, then a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant with an infantry platoon in France who was scheduled to take part in the invasion of Honshu, despite wounds in the leg and back so severe that he had been judged 40 percent disabled. “But even if my legs buckled whenever I jumped out of the back of the truck, my condition was held to be satisfactory for whatever lay ahead.” After Hiroshima, he remembered, after the realization “that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

Yet, even so, news of the bomb brought feelings of ambiguity and terror of a kind never before experienced by Americans. Children in households that had been untouched by the war would remember parents looking strangely apprehensive and wondering aloud what unimaginable new kind of horror had been unleashed. Could the poor world ever possibly be the same again?

“Yesterday,” wrote Hanson Baldwin in The New York Times on August 7, “we clinched victory in the Pacific, but we sowed the whirlwind.”

Editorial speculation was extremely grave. “It is not impossible,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “that whole cities and all the people in them may be obliterated in a fraction of a second by a single bomb.” “We are dealing with an invention that could overwhelm civilization,” said the Kansas City Star, and in St. Louis the Post-Dispatch warned that possibly science had “signed the mammalian world’s death warrant and deeded an earth in ruins to the ants.” The Washington Post, in an editorial titled “The Haunted Wood,” said that with Truman’s revelations concerning the new bomb it was as if all the worst imaginary horrors of science fiction had come true.

The weather in Washington had turned abnormally cool for August, making ideal nights for sleeping, but, observed James Reston of The New York Times, thoughtful people were not sleeping so well.

“Some of our scientists say that the area [in Hiroshima] will be uninhabitable for many years because the bomb explosion had made the ground radioactive and destructive of animal life,” wrote Admiral Leahy, who had flown home ahead of the President. “The lethal possibilities of such atomic action in the future is frightening, and while we are the first to have it in our possession, there is a certainty that it will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be used against us.”

Robert Oppenheimer had predicted a death toll of perhaps 20,000. Early reports from Guam on August 8 indicated that 60 percent of Hiroshima had been leveled and that the number of killed and injured might reach as high as 200,000. In time, it would be estimated that 80,000 people were killed instantly and that another 50,000 to 60,000 died in the next several months. Of the total, perhaps 10,000 were Japanese soldiers.

Many thousands more suffered from hideous thermal burns, from shock, and from radioactive poisoning. Later also, there would be eyewitness accounts of people burned to a cinder while standing up, of birds igniting in midair, of women “whose skin hung from them like a kimono” plunging shrieking into rivers. “I do not know how many times I called begging that they cut off my burned arms and legs,” a fifth-grade girl would remember.

Anne O’Hare McCormick, who had described Truman, Churchill, and Stalin poking about the graveyard of Berlin, wrote now of the bomb as the “ultimatum to end all ultimatums” because it was only a small sample of what might lie in store in laboratories where scientists and soldiers joined forces.

No one as yet was blaming the scientists or the soldiers or the President of the United States.

On the afternoon of August 7, just before 5:00 P.M., the Augusta tied up at Norfolk. Truman left immediately by special train for Washington and by the morning of the 8th the country knew he was back at his desk. There was still no word from Japan, no appeal for mercy or sign of surrender. At the Pentagon, Stimson and Marshall worried privately that the bomb had failed to achieve the desired shock effect.

On August 9, the papers carried still more stupendous news. A million Russian troops had crossed into Manchuria—Russia was in the war against Japan—and a second atomic bomb had been dropped on the major Japanese seaport of Nagasaki.

No high-level meeting had been held concerning this second bomb. Truman had made no additional decision. There was no order issued beyond the military directive for the first bomb, which had been sent on July 25 by Marshall’s deputy, General Thomas T. Handy, to the responsible commander in the Pacific, General Carl A. Spaatz of the Twentieth Air Force. Paragraph 2 of that directive had stipulated: “Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff….” A second bomb—a plutonium bomb nicknamed “Fat Man”—being ready, it was “delivered” from Tinian, and two days ahead of schedule, in view of weather conditions.

Later estimates were that seventy thousand died at Nagasaki, where the damage would have been worse had the bombardier not been off target by two miles.

“For the second time in four days Japan felt the stunning effect of the terrible weapon,” reported the Los Angeles Times, which like most papers implied that the end was very near. On Capitol Hill the typical reaction was, “It won’t be long now.”

Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr., of Georgia, one of the most respected, influential figures in Washington, sent a telegram to Truman saying there must be no letup in the assault on the Japanese.

Let us carry the war to them until they beg us to accept unconditional surrender. The foul attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into the war, and I am unable to see any valid reason why we should be so much more considerate and lenient in dealing with Japan than with Germany…. If we do not have available a sufficient number of atomic bombs with which to finish the job immediately, let us carry on with TNT and fire bombs until we can produce them…. This was total war as long as our enemies held all the cards. Why should we change the rule now, after the blood, treasure and enterprise of the American people have given us the upper hand?…

Truman sent Russell a heartfelt answer written that same day, August 9:

I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner.

For myself I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the “pigheadedness” of the leaders of a nation, and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary. It is my opinion that after the Russians enter into the war the Japanese will very shortly fold up.

My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a human feeling for the women and children of Japan.

That night, in his radio address on Potsdam, he made a point of urging all Japanese civilians to leave the industrial cities immediately and save themselves.

“I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb,” he told the American people.

Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it….

We won the race of discovery against the Germans.

Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.

Reflecting on the future and “this new force,” he said with feeling: “It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.”

On the morning Nagasaki was bombed, a crucial meeting of Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War had been taking place in Prime Minister Suzuki’s bomb shelter outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The meeting was deadlocked, with three powerful military commanders (two generals and one admiral) arguing fervently against surrender. It was time now to “lure” the Americans ashore. General Anami, the war minister, called for one last great battle on Japanese soil—as demanded by the national honor, as demanded by the honor of the living and the dead. “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” he asked. But when news of Nagasaki was brought in, the meeting was adjourned to convene again with the Emperor that night in the Imperial Library. In the end, less than twenty-four hours after Nagasaki, it was Hirohito who decided. They must, he said, “bear the unbearable” and surrender.

The Japanese government would accept the Potsdam Declaration with the understanding that the Emperor would remain sovereign.

Truman had been up early as usual the morning of Friday, August 10, and was about to leave his private quarters when, at 6:30, a War Department messenger arrived with the radio dispatch. Byrnes, Stimson, Leahy, and Forrestal were summoned for a meeting at 9:00. “Could we continue the Emperor and yet expect to eliminate the warlike spirit in Japan?” Truman later wrote. “Could we even consider a message with so large a ‘but’ as the kind of unconditional surrender we had fought for?”

Stimson, as he had before, said the Emperor should be allowed to stay. He thought it the only prudent course. Leahy agreed. Byrnes was strongly opposed. He wanted nothing less than unconditional surrender, the policy Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to at the Casablanca Conference in 1943, and he was certain the American people felt the same. The Big Three had called for unconditional surrender at Potsdam, he reminded them. He could not understand “why now we should go further than we were willing to go at Potsdam when we had no atomic bomb and Russia was not in the war.” Truman asked to see the Potsdam statement.

Forrestal thought that perhaps with different wording the terms could be made acceptable and this appealed to Truman.

He decided against Byrnes. He decided, as he recorded in his diary, that if the Japanese wanted to keep their emperor, then “we’d tell ’em how to keep him.” The official reply, as worded by Byrnes, stated that the Emperor would remain but “subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.” If it was not unconditional surrender, it was something very close to it, exactly as Naotake Sato, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, had warned Tokyo it would be a month before.

At a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, Truman reported these developments in strictest confidence. The Allied governments were being notified. Meantime, he had ordered no further use of atomic bombs without his express permission. (One more bomb was available at the time.) The thought of wiping out another city was too horrible, he said. He hated the idea of killing “all those kids.”

To Henry Wallace afterward, Truman complained of dreadful headaches for days. “Physical or figurative?” Wallace asked. “Both,” Truman replied.

Attlee cabled his approval that evening, but the Australians were adamantly opposed. “The Emperor should have no immunity from responsibility for Japan’s acts of aggression…. Unless the system goes, the Japanese will remain unchanged and recrudescence of aggression in the Pacific will only be postponed to a later generation,” said the Australians, who had been excluded from Potsdam and who had fought long and suffered greatly in the war with Japan.

At the same time shattering news was released in Washington, reminding the country that the war continued. On the night of July 29, the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the ship that had delivered the core of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The ship sank in minutes, taking hundreds of its crew with it and leaving hundreds more drifting in the sea. They were there for days, many eaten by sharks. By the time rescue ships arrived, eight hundred lives had been lost.

Chiang Kai-shek cabled his agreement the next morning, Saturday, August 11, and so, reluctantly, did the Australians. The Soviets appeared to be stalling in the hope of having some say in the control of Japan and to drive farther into Manchuria, but eventually Stalin, too, agreed. A formal reply was transmitted to Tokyo. Then the wait began.

Bess Truman had arrived at the White House from Independence; after an absence of more than two months, a semblance of normal domestic life had resumed. On Sunday, Truman was at his desk writing a letter. It was his sister’s birthday. He would have written sooner, he told her, but he had been too busy. “Nearly every crisis seems to be the worst one, but after it’s over, it isn’t so bad….”

To reporters his composure was extraordinary. He took it all, “the drama and tenseness, the waiting and watching of war’s end,” in “cool stride markedly lacking in showmanship and striking for its matter-of-factness.” Secretary Byrnes, who kept coming and going from the somber old State Department Building next door, seemed “a little frantic” by contrast. Rumors were everywhere. Peace was imminent. Crowds had gathered outside, expecting an announcement any moment.

But Sunday passed without word from the Japanese. And so did Monday the 13th. Truman confided to his staff that he had ordered General Marshall to resume the B-29 raids. Late in the day Charlie Ross told reporters the staff would remain on duty until midnight.

The wait continued the next morning. “It began like the days that had preceded it…reporters and correspondents jamming the press room and lobby, some of them worn and tired after hours of waiting and from the tenseness of the waiting and uncertainty,” wrote Eben Ayers. The crowds outside grew noticeably larger by the hour. Across Pennsylvania Avenue thousands of people filled Lafayette Square, the majority of them servicemen and women in summer uniforms.

The answer reached the President at five minutes past four that afternoon, Tuesday, August 14. Japan had surrendered. At 6:10 the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Washington arrived at the State Department to present Secretary Byrnes with the Japanese text, which Byrnes carried at once to the White House.

(The document would have arrived ten minutes sooner but for the fact that a sixteen-year-old messenger, Thomas E. Jones, who picked it up at the RCA offices on Connecticut Avenue to deliver it to the Swiss legation, had been stopped by the police for making a U-turn on Connecticut.)

Just before 7:00 P.M., reporters jammed into Truman’s office for the announcement. Truman stood behind his desk. Seated beside him, or standing in back, were Byrnes, Leahy, Bess, most of the Cabinet, and Sue Gentry of the Independence Examiner, who happened to be in town and had accepted an invitation to tea with Bess that afternoon. Truman had told her to stick around because she “might get a story.” (“He’d just been for a swim,” she remembered. “And I thought, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that he could be relaxed and go take a swim!’ ”)

It was still bright daylight outside, because of the summer clock. In Lafayette Square at least ten thousand people were congregated, held in check only by a thin line of police barriers and Military Police alone Pennsylvania Avenue.

Truman looked crisp and formal in a double-breasted navy blue suit, blue shirt, silver-and-blue striped tie with matching handkerchief. There was some shuffling among the reporters. Truman, smiling, said hello to one or two. A Secret Service man announced, “All in.” Klieg lights were turned on for the newsreel cameras. Truman glanced at the clock. At exactly seven, his shoulders squared, he began reading slowly and clearly from a sheet of paper held in his right hand: “I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government…. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.” General MacArthur had been appointed the Supreme Allied Commander to receive the surrender.

The reporters charged for the door. Truman and Bess returned to the living quarters, but the celebration outside kept growing.

In Grandview, Missouri, in the living room of her small clapboard house, Martha Ellen Truman excused herself to take a long-distance phone call in another room.

“Hello…hello,” a guest heard her begin. “Yes, I’m all right. Yes, I've been listening to the radio…. Yes, I’m all right…. Now you come and see me if you can…. Yes, all right…. Goodbye.”

“That was Harry,” she said returning through the door. “Harry’s a wonderful man…. I knew he’d call. He always calls me after something that happens is over…”

In Lafayette Square someone had started a conga line. Within minutes throngs of people had broken past the barriers and MPs and surged across the street to crowd the length of the White House fence. Streetcars and automobiles stranded in the mob were quickly covered with sailors in white who clambered on top for a better view. Everyone was cheering. Bells were ringing, automobile horns blaring. The crowd set up a chant of “We want Truman! We want Truman!”

With the First Lady beside him, the President went out on the lawn to wave and smile. He gave the V-sign as cheer after cheer went up. “I felt deeply moved by the excitement,” he remembered, “perhaps as much as were the crowds….” He and Bess returned to the house, but the call for him continued, so he came out again onto the porch to make a few impromptu remarks over a microphone.

“This is a great day,” he began, “the day we’ve been waiting for. This is the day for free governments in the world. This is the day that fascism and police government ceases in the world.” The great task ahead was to restore peace and bring free government to the world. “We will need the help of all of you. And I know we will get it.” Another roar of approval reverberated through the trees, as it would have whatever he said.

He crossed the lawn again, coming closer this time to the high iron fence, beaming, waving until his arm ached, the crowds growing ever more exuberant, in what was to be the biggest night of celebration Washington had ever seen. Half a million people filled the streets. The crush around the White House grew to fifty thousand or more. As reported in the papers the next day, one jubilant soldier flung his arms around a civilian, shouting, “We’re all civilians now!”

In just three months in office Harry Truman had been faced with a greater surge of history, with larger, more difficult, more far-reaching decisions than any President before him. Neither Lincoln after first taking office, nor Franklin Roosevelt in his tumultuous first hundred days, had had to contend with issues of such magnitude and coming all at once. In boyhood Truman had pored over the pages of Great Men and Famous Women and Plutarch’s Lives and concluded that men made history, and he had never changed his mind. He remained old-fashioned in this as in other ways. But if ever a man had been caught in a whirlwind not of his making, it was he. “We cannot get away from the results of the war,” Stalin had said at Potsdam, and it was just such results that had beset Truman since the night he raised his right hand and took the oath of office beneath the Wilson portrait. The launching of the United Nations, the menacing presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe, Britain’s bankruptcy, the revealed horrors of the Holocaust, the wasteland of Berlin, the advent of the nuclear age in New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—all were the results of the war, as indeed was his own role now, if one accepted the premise, as most did, that it was the strain of the war that killed Franklin Roosevelt.

What was most striking about the long course of human events, Truman had concluded from his reading of history, were its elements of continuity, including, above all, human nature, which had changed little if at all through time. “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know,” he would one day tell an interviewer. But clearly unparalleled power and responsibility had been thrust upon him at one of history’s greatest turning points, and the atomic bomb, the looming shadow of the mushroom cloud, were absolutely “new things” in the world. The old rules didn’t apply any longer. Europe was a ruin, Britain finished as a world power, Asia devastated and in a state of horrendous confusion. And who was to say about Stalin?

Only once did Truman suggest that history might be something other than he cared to say, that history had its own kind of direction and force—the “greater-than-man force” that Willa Cather wrote of, when describing the start of the earlier world conflict and its effect on the lives of so many small-town men such as he from the heartland of America. In a letter to his mother on August 17, Truman spoke of the past few days as a “dizzy whirl” in which he stood at the center trying to do something.

“Everyone had been going at a terrific gait,” he wrote, “but I believe we are up with the parade now.”

Part Four

Mr. President

11

The Buck Stops Here

Look at little Truman now

Muddy, battered, bruised—and how!

—Chicago Tribune

I

“Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow,” Truman wrote to his mother and sister at the beginning of autumn, 1945.

There were more prima donnas per square foot in public life in Washington than in all the opera companies ever to exist, he told them another day, writing at his desk in October when the trees outside the White House had begun to turn.

On a bunting-draped platform at an American Legion fair at Caruthersville, Missouri, he said that after every war came an inevitable letdown. Difficulties would follow. “You can’t have anything worthwhile without difficulties.” Mistakes would be made. No one who accomplished things could expect to avoid mistakes. Only those who did nothing made no mistakes.

All Americans must cooperate, he said, dedicating a dam at Gilbertsville, Kentucky. It was time for everyone to “cut out the foolishness” and “get in harness.”

A war President no longer, he was finding the tasks of peace more difficult and vexing than he ever imagined. “We want to see the time come when we can do the things in peace that we have been able to do in war,” he had said with such conviction in July, at the small military ceremony in the cobbled square in Berlin. “If we can put this tremendous machine of ours…to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind.” But how? How possibly now, when no one wanted to cooperate any longer?

His troubles had begun with his first postwar message to Congress, only days after the Japanese surrender ceremonies on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Sent to the Hill on September 6, the message was 16,000 words in length (the longest since the Theodore Roosevelt era) and presented a 21-point domestic program that included increased unemployment compensation, an immediate increase in the minimum wage, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee, tax reform, crop insurance for farmers, a full year’s extension of the War Powers and Stabilization Act, meaning the government would keep control over business, and federal aid to housing to make possible a million new homes a year.

We must go on. We must widen our horizon further. We must consider the redevelopment of large areas of the blighted and slum sections of our cities so that in the truly American way they may be remade to accommodate families not only of low-income groups as heretofore, but every income group….

It was an all-out, comprehensive statement of progressive philosophy and a sweeping liberal program of action that Truman had begun work on, dictating his thoughts to Sam Rosenman, on board the Augusta returning from Potsdam, and that he had since put in a full ten days of concentrated effort on, adding new sections, editing and revising. He had no wish to wait for his State of the Union address to present his domestic program. Nor did he intend to go to Congress with it on a piecemeal basis. He wanted one big message, and as time would tell, its significance was enormous, setting his domestic program on a liberal path at the very start. It was one thing to have voted for this kind of program in the Senate, when he was following the head of his party, Rosenman told him. It was quite another to be the head of the party and recommend and fight for it.

For those Republicans and conservative Democrats who had been happily claiming that the New Deal was as good as dead, that the “Roosevelt nonsense” was over at last, because they “knew” Harry Truman, it was a rude awakening. Not even FDR had ever asked for so much “at one sitting,” complained House Minority Leader Joe Martin, and many of Truman’s own party in Congress were equally distressed, equally disinclined to go along with him. The same conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats that had stymied Roosevelt since 1937 stood ready now to block his successor. The House Ways and Means Committee, with fourteen Democrats and ten Republicans, voted to reject the unemployment compensation proposal, and shelved any further consideration of aid to the jobless. As the newspapers were saying, Truman’s anticipated six-month “waltz with Congress” was over before it began.

Labor leaders demanded an end to wage controls, but a hold on prices. Business leaders demanded the opposite. Nobody wanted more inflation of the kind the war had brought. Yet while most everyday commodities were in short supply, nearly everyone seemed to have money to spend—billions of dollars put aside in war bonds and savings accounts.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon rushed to cancel billions of dollars—$15 billion in less than a month. Boeing aircraft laid off 21,000 workers, Ford laid off 50,000, at the very moment when hundreds of thousands of soldiers were pouring home expecting to find jobs. Fully 12 million men and women were in uniform and hoping to return to “normal” life as soon as possible.

Prophecies of economic doom had become commonplace. His own downfall as a post-World War I haberdasher vivid in memory, Truman reminded Congress of what the country had experienced then. “We found ourselves in one of the worst inflations in our history, culminating in the crash of 1920 and 1921. We must be sure this time not to repeat that bitter mistake.” Worse by far and closer to mind was the Great Depression, which had never really ended by 1939, when the war began in Europe. If the end of the war truly meant a return to what had been “normal” before the war, then the prospect was grim indeed.

As everyone knew, the nation had thrived on the war. Production of goods and services in 1945 was more than twice what it had been in 1939. If the cost of living was up by some 30 percent, the income of the average worker had also doubled and unemployment was less than 2 percent, an unbelievable figure. Farm income was five times what it had been when Truman was running the farm at Grandview. Never had Americans known such prosperity. Yet the certainty that hard times would return was also widespread and deeply ingrained. For a whole generation of Americans, fear of another Depression would never go away. It was coming “as sure as God made little green apples,” fathers warned their families at the dinner table, and next time it would be “bad enough to curl your hair.” Nor were the supposed experts any less pessimistic. In his report to the President at a Cabinet meeting on October 19, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace estimated that the drop in the gross national product in the coming months would be $40 billion, the drop in wages $20 billion, which by spring could mean 7 or 8 million unemployed—1939 all over again.

Even had there been time to plan and prepare, even if it had been possible to ignore the clamor to “bring the boys home” and demobilize in a slower, more orderly fashion, the problems of “reconversion” would have been staggering. As it was, sudden peace had caught the country almost as ill-prepared as had sudden war. A populace that had been willing to accept shortages and inconveniences, ceilings on wages and inadequate housing since 1941—because there was “a war on”—seemed desperate to make up for lost time, demanding everything at once.

By October, the country was facing the biggest housing shortage in history. In Chicago alone, reportedly, there were 100,000 homeless veterans. (The city of Chicago would shortly offer old streetcars for sale, for conversion into homes.) Among the letters pouring into the White House was one from a man in Los Angeles who told of meeting a homeless veteran, a medical sergeant, his pregnant wife and small child, and described how he had taken them in for the night because they had no place to go. “Do something,” the writer urged the President.

Labor unions, free of their wartime pledges not to strike, called for “catch-up” pay hikes. Strikes broke out in nearly every industry. In New York, 15,000 elevator operators went out. Elsewhere 27,000 oil workers and 60,000 lumber workers walked off their jobs. In Washington, meantime, New Dealers were leaving the government in droves.

For Truman all this was extremely difficult to understand. He knew relatively little of economics and the economics of reconstruction were complicated. He failed to comprehend how a people who had shown such dedication and will through the war could overnight become so rampantly selfish and disinterested in the common good. “The Congress are balking, labor has gone crazy and management isn’t far from insane in selfishness,” he reported to his mother, who in her small frame house in Grandview remained an indispensable sounding board. He believed as ever in the ancient republican ideals of citizenship. Cincinnatus, the legendary Roman warrior who, after saving his country, laid down his arms and returned to the farm, remained a personal hero. As he liked to point out to visitors, he had replaced the model cannon on his desk with a shiny model plow.

His response was to work harder than ever, as if by keeping a fuller, busier schedule, moving faster, seeing more people, traveling more, he could at least set an example. On one not untypical morning he saw more than a dozen visitors in two hours, including Congressman Albert Gore of Tennessee, who brought him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s; Senator Wheeler; his old Truman Committee aide, Max Lowenthal; the governor of the Virgin Islands; another congressman, Pat Cannon of Florida, who wanted to talk about hurricane damage; the young Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, and his wife; and a group of women sponsoring an Equal Rights amendment. (“A lot of hooey about equal rights,” Truman noted on his appointment sheet as the last of these went out the door.) He “zipped” through work in what one account called “the decisive style that is now recognized as typically Truman.” He made changes with “hurried” strokes of the pen, seldom anything earthshaking, “but everything brisk.” At one press conference he took all of five minutes to announce that he was reorganizing the Labor Department, transferring authority over the Office of Economic Stabilization to the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion under John Snyder, appointing Stuart Symington of St. Louis to a new Surplus Property Administration, accepting the resignation of Secretary of War Stimson, appointing Under Secretary Robert Patterson as Stimson’s replacement, and naming Senator Harold H. Burton of Ohio to the Supreme Court. “Anything else, Mr. President?” asked a reporter, and the room erupted with laughter.

He greatly enjoyed such moments. He loved rewarding a loyal old friend like Snyder with the prestige and power of an important job. It was among the prime satisfactions of the successful politician’s life, not to say what was expected of him as a good Jacksonian Democrat. He had always taken care of his own with jobs large and small, as best he could. He had hated firing Eddie McKim and eventually arranged a vague job for him with the Rural Finance Commission. When Jake Vardaman, the naval aide, began flaunting his supposed authority beyond bounds, irritating too many people at the White House, including Bess Truman, and Vardaman, too, had to be eased out, Truman put him on the Federal Reserve Board, a position for which Vardaman was plainly ill-suited. Even former Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri, who had so often made life difficult for him over the years, was not forgotten. On September 12, Truman made Clark a Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and shortly afterward, when Clark was remarried in the little northern Virginia town of Berryville, Truman stood beside him as best man, something he had never done before.

Two official ceremonial duties that fall moved him deeply, which made both occasions especially memorable.

Before a small, sunny gathering in the Rose Garden on September 21, the day of Henry Stimson’s retirement, Truman presented the elderly Secretary of War with the Distinguished Service Medal and did so with great simple dignity. As his staff had come to appreciate, it was at such occasions that Truman excelled. He was at his best with small groups, close-up and entirely himself, yet keenly aware of the meaning of the occasion. It was Stimson’s seventy-eighth birthday and his last day in Washington. “If anyone in the government was entitled to one [a medal] it is that good man,” Truman wrote to Bess, who was back in Independence.

In November, in the courtyard at the Pentagon, at another no less moving farewell, this for General Marshall, Truman again presented the Distinguished Service Medal, which was the general’s only American military decoration of the war. (Marshall had refused repeatedly to accept any such honors, saying it would be improper for him while men were dying overseas.) To Truman, Marshall, more than any other man, had been responsible for winning the war, and he spoke now of Marshall as a tower of strength to two presidents. “He takes his place at the head of the great commanders of history,” Truman said, clearly meaning that exactly. Later, Truman said there wasn’t a decoration big enough for General Marshall.

But such occasions were rare. More often he was feeling close to despair over how much needed to be done and how little real say he had, how little time there was ever to focus on any one problem. The strain began to tell. “The pressure here,” he told his mother, “is becoming so great I hardly get my meals in, let alone do what I want to do.”.

His speaking trips around the country, intended as a way to bring his message to the people, too often resulted in adverse publicity that was seen as his own doing. At the American Legion fair at Caruthersville, Missouri, talking of the “difficulties” to be faced, he spoke seriously and thoughtfully of the atomic bomb. He had asked Congress for the establishment of a new Atomic Energy Commission under civilian, not military, control, saying, “the release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.” Sounding like the naive Mr. Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he told the crowd that the way to get along in the world was to apply the Golden Rule.

We can’t stand another global war. We can’t ever have another war, unless it is total war, and that means the end of our civilization as we know it. We are not going to do that. We are going to accept that Golden Rule, and we are going forward to meet our destiny which I think Almighty God intended us to have.

But at Caruthersville, in the cotton country of Missouri’s southeastern “Boot Heel,” he also paused on a morning walk to spit in the Mississippi River—an old local rite, he explained to astonished reporters. He played the piano in the little hotel dining room, held open court in a drugstore, went to the races, signed autographs on napkins and blank checks, posed with Legionnaires on a mock locomotive, rang the bell, “did everything,” said the Washington Post, “except have himself shot from the mouth of a cannon.”

At a conference of several hundred Democratic congressmen and senators at a clubhouse on Jefferson Island in Chesapeake Bay, he encouraged everyone to call him Harry and joined a game of stud poker on the porch. An unnamed senator later reported that Harry Truman played “a damn good game,” while another eyewitness (also unnamed), describing what a good time everyone had, said, “There was all we could eat and more than we could drink—only two people passed out.”

The word “cronies” appeared with increasing frequency to depict the President’s friends and associates. Harry Vaughan, his sudden eminence obviously having gone to his head, began holding his own press conferences and making speeches. Vaughan boasted of how at Potsdam he had sold a $55 watch to a Russian for $500, and in a talk before a group of Presbyterian women in Virginia, in an attempt to explain the difference between Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, he said that after a diet of caviar the country was ready for ham and eggs.

Several of the presidential staff grew concerned over the mounting confusion at the White House. Budget Director Harold Smith judged Truman to be a man of “fine keen intelligence,” but regrettably disorganized. At a staff meeting in mid-October, Truman himself admitted to being “in the doldrums” over how things were going. He would cut back on his appointments, he said, cancel some trips—news that “delighted” everyone, wrote Eben Ayers, the assistant press secretary, who worried especially over stories about Harry Vaughan and poker games and drinking, certain that sooner or later they would bring trouble. An unobtrusive, soft-spoken man who was known among the White House press as “Mumbles,” Ayers was secretly keeping a diary that would one day provide an invaluable “inside” record of the Truman years.

Outwardly, Truman appeared unchanged. Reporters described him as “chipper,” “affable,” “jaunty,” looking “rested, fresh, and bouncy,” looking always, wrote columnist Westbrook Pegler, “like his old maw just dressed him up and slicked his hair for the strawberry social.” And he was still exceptionally popular, his approval rating at about 80 percent.

If Congress balked at his requests, he just asked for more. There was nothing unusual about a President being rebuffed by Congress. What was novel was a President who, when repeatedly rebuffed, refused to change his tactics.

He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. And with the cry for demobilization at a peak, he went before a joint session to call for universal military training, an idea that stood no chance, but that he believed in fervently. “We must face the fact that peace must be built upon power, as well as upon good will and good deeds.” Never again could the country count on the luxury of time to arm itself. He wanted mandatory training for one year for all young men between eighteen and twenty, not as members of the armed services, but as citizens who would comprise a trained reserve, ready in case of emergency.

One morning, standing at his desk, he presented to the press a new presidential flag, telling Harry Vaughan to hold it high enough so that everyone could see, “This new flag faces the eagle toward the staff,” Truman explained, “which is looking to the front all the time when you are on the march, and also has him looking at the olive branch for peace, instead of the arrows for war….” Both the flag and presidential seal had been redesigned for the first time since the Wilson years, and Truman meant the shift in the eagle’s gaze to be seen as symbolic of a nation both on the march and dedicated to peace.

On October 26, he went to New York, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to commission a huge new aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Later, from the deck of the battleship Missouri, he reviewed a line of fifty warships in the Hudson River, while overhead flew twelve hundred Navy planes. The eagle had never held such arrows. It was a spectacle of national power such as no Commander in Chief had ever beheld. And it was all rapidly dissolving. Had he tried then, in these last days of 1945, to halt the pell-mell demobilization under way and keep American fighting forces intact, he might have been impeached, so overwhelming was the country’s desire for a return of its young men and women now that the war was won, the enemy crushed. It wasn’t demobilization at all, he later remarked. “It was disintegration.”

Riding in a caravan to Central Park to deliver a Navy Day speech (the first presidential address to be broadcast on television), he was cheered by tremendous crowds—3 to 5 million people at least, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia told Truman and Admiral Leahy as they waved from the open car. To Leahy it was a triumphal procession such as no Roman emperor could have dreamed of.

Yet the press was already judging Truman only fair at his job. He was faulted for dealing with large issues in a “small-scale way,” for too often “muddling through,” while banking on “an apparently irrepressible and often-expressed belief that everything will always work itself out.”

The labor situation grew steadily worse. Picket lines became an established sign of the times. And Truman wavered. In seeming support of labor, he called for reasonable pay raises through collective bargaining. Then, under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to get tough with the unions, he asked Congress to forbid strikes in large national industries for thirty days, until the situation could be appraised by a fact-finding board—an idea that pleased neither labor nor management nor Congress. In the meantime, 175,000 employees of General Motors, workers in plants in 19 states, walked out in a strike that would last more than three months.

His was a thankless job, Truman told the writer John Gunther, who had not seen him since he was Vice President and was struck by the change. “Tiny lines had grown around his mouth,” Gunther wrote. “He looked tired, perplexed, and annoyed.”

On another day Robert Oppenheimer came to see him privately, and in a state of obvious agitation said he had blood on his hands because of his work on the bomb. For Truman, it was a dreadful moment. Oppenheimer’s self-pitying, “cry-baby” attitude was abhorrent. “The blood is on my hands,” he told Oppenheimer. “Let me worry about that.” Afterward he said he hoped he would not have to see the man ever again.

In November the American ambassador to China, Patrick J. Hurley, who had returned to Washington for consultation, announced unexpectedly that he was resigning because of the way the State Department was siding with the Chinese Communists. Hurley broke the news in a speech at the Press Club, barely an hour after telling Truman that all was under control in China and that he would be returning there shortly. “To me, this was an utterly inexplicable about-face, and what had caused it I cannot imagine even yet,” Truman would write years later. At the time he was more explicit. Tearing a yellow news copy from the White House ticker, he stormed into a Cabinet meeting saying, “See what a son-of-a-bitch did to me.”

Clinton Anderson, the Secretary of Agriculture, suggested that the President immediately name General Marshall as the new special ambassador to China and thus take the headlines away from Hurley. It was an inspired suggestion. From the Red Room, Truman telephoned Marshall at his home in Leesburg, Virginia.

“General, I want you to go to China for me,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Marshall replied and hung up.

Truman had hated to make the call. Marshall by then had had all of six days of retirement. Marshall said later that he had ended the call abruptly because his wife walked into the room and he wished to explain to her himself, rather than have her overhear a telephone conversation.

At a Gridiron Club dinner in December, only half in jest, Truman declared that General William Tecumseh Sherman had been wrong. “I’m telling you I find peace is hell….”

His health insurance plan was getting nowhere. Another message, and of equal importance to Truman, called for unification of the armed forces, under a single Secretary of Defense, an idea the Navy vehemently opposed and that Bob Hannegan thought politically unwise, arguing that it was foolish ever to wage an unnecessary fight that he might lose. But Truman insisted. He wanted to break up the power of the West Point and Annapolis cliques, to make the armed services more democratic—a noble aspiration, many around him agreed, but impossible, they felt. It was his duty to send the message, he said, because it represented his conviction.

To Sam Rosenman, who had grown immensely fond of Truman, the chief difference between Truman and Roosevelt was that Truman “paid much less attention to what his actions were doing towards his chances for reelection…. Truman did a great many things that Roosevelt, because he knew the effect it would have, never would have done.”

To many it appeared that the President’s easy familiarity with members of Congress—their talk of good old Harry and so forth—was proving a handicap. If his program was steadfastly in the Roosevelt tradition, they could be quite as obdurate as they had been with Roosevelt just before the war, only now without the fear that, like Roosevelt, Truman might take his case to the country with powerful effect. Truman couldn’t “awe them,” and as was said, in American politics “a fearsome respect” usually achieved better results than camaraderie.

Meantime, privately, Truman felt that Jimmy Byrnes, who was in Moscow at a Foreign Ministers’ Conference, was failing to keep him sufficiently informed. To Henry Wallace he expressed concern that the peacetime use of atomic energy might so reduce the length of the working day that people would “get into mischief.” Once, at a Cabinet meeting in December, Wallace politely but pointedly lectured him for not knowing how many atomic bombs were in stock and for saying further that he really didn’t want to know. “Mr. President, you should know,” Wallace insisted. “The President retreated in some confusion and said he guessed he should know and then covered up by saying, ‘I do know in a general way,’ ” Wallace noted in his diary.

From Byrnes and Wallace both, Truman got the distinct impression that each thought his own judgment considerably superior to that of the President.

To many of the holdovers from the Roosevelt years, as to prominent liberals elsewhere, it appeared the administration was going to pieces. In the stridently liberal New York newspaper PM, columnist Max Lerner offered a scathing assessment of the President, calling him one of history’s “wild accidents.” There had been leaders in the past who had greatness thrust upon them by circumstance, but never one who wore the mantle of great office so uneasily, wrote Lerner, who had been to Missouri and felt he now understood Truman’s strengths and defects. The President’s “first quality” was personal honesty. He was also loyal to his friends and a hard worker. The overriding problem, said Lerner, was his “middle-class mentality”:

In a crisis the middle-class mind falls back on personal virtues and personal relations. In a crisis the middle-class mind shows itself more fearful of labor and strikes and labor’s political power than of anything else. In a crisis the middle-class mind tries to assume a lofty detachment from the deep issues of the day, and tries to blink the real social cleavage and struggles.

These struggles are not reconcilable by a personal appeal for cooperation. In the end you have to choose your side and fight on it…. In the end, President Truman’s basic weakness lies in his failure to understand imaginatively the nature and greatness of the office he holds.

Though Bess, Margaret, and Madge Wallace departed for Independence a week before Christmas, Truman remained at the White House until Christmas morning when he decided to fly home despite dreadful weather. The first snow of winter had fallen on Washington two weeks earlier. On the 19th another five inches fell in a storm that hit much of the country. Christmas morning he awoke to a driving wind, sleet and rain. National Airport was sheathed in ice, he was told. All commercial flights were canceled. But after conferring with his pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Myers, Truman decided to go, and when The Sacred Cow at last appeared out of the clouds over Kansas City, it was more than an hour overdue. Newspapers and radio commentators called the trip foolhardy—“one of the most hazardous ‘sentimental journeys’ ever undertaken” by a chief of state, said The New York Times. Had anyone known the sort of welcome he received on reaching the big gray house on North Delaware Street, the journey would have seemed even more unnecessary, his position still more pathetic. For Bess had been anything but sentimental or approving. At his desk in Washington three days later, Truman would write one of the most forlorn letters of his life:

December 28, 1945

Dear Bess:

Well I’m here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations. I feel like last year’s bird’s nest which is on its second year. Not very often I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you, too, as a lot of other things I do and pretend to do exasperate you. But it isn’t intended for that purpose….

You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least one hundred things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in and tell me I’ve come in at last because I couldn’t find any reason to stay away. I wonder why we are made so that what we really think and feel we cover up?.

This head of mine should have been bigger and better proportioned. There ought to have been more brain and a larger bump of ego or something to give me an idea that there can be a No. 1 man in the world. I didn’t want to be. But, in spite of the opinions to the contrary, Life and Time say I am. [He was on the cover of Time that week as “Man of the Year.”]

If that is the case, you, Margie, and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions must give me help and assistance; because no one ever needed help and assistance as I do now. If I can get the use of the best brains in the country and a little help from those I have on a pedestal at home, the job will be done….

Kiss my baby and I love you in season and out,

Harry

But thinking better of it, he never mailed the letter. It was tucked in a desk drawer together with its unused envelope.

The grim weather held as he struggled to keep control of events, his chief aggravation now the behavior of his Secretary of State.

Before returning from Independence, Truman had been notified by Charlie Ross that Byrnes, in winding up the Moscow conference, had released a communiqué in advance of any summary report to the President. To make matters worse, Byrnes, en route home, notified Ross to arrange air time on all the radio networks, so that he could report to the nation before seeing the President. Clearly, Byrnes had forgotten his manners.

Senator Vandenberg, disturbed that Byrnes had been too conciliatory with the Russians, rushed to the White House demanding to know what was going on.

This was on Friday, December 28, the day of Truman’s plaintive letter to Bess. Afterward, he left for a cruise down the Potomac on the presidential yacht, Williamsburg, again disregarding the miserable weather. When Byrnes landed in Washington the following day, Saturday the 29th, a telegram from Truman was waiting for him: “Suggest you come down today or tomorrow to report your mission…. We can then discuss among other things the advisability of a broadcast by you….”

The relationship between the two men had never been easy or entirely candid. Byrnes did indeed consider himself better equipped and more deserving than Truman to be President and he was not always successful in concealing that. Though Truman considered Byrnes extremely bright, his experience in government unequaled, he had never felt he could entirely trust him. En route to Potsdam, Truman had referred to him in a diary entry as his “able and conniving” Secretary of State. “My but he has a keen mind,” Truman wrote. “And he is honest. But all country politicians are alike. They are sure all other politicians are circuitous in their dealings.”

After a hurried flight by special plane, Byrnes went aboard the Williamsburg at Quantico, Virginia, and met with Truman privately in Truman’s stateroom. A cold rain was falling on the river. Everything outside was gray and forbidding.

By Truman’s account, written much later, he closed the door and gave Byrnes a sharp dressing down:

I told him I did not like the way in which I had been left in the dark about the Moscow conference. I told him that, as President, I intended to know what progress we were making and what we were doing in foreign negotiations. I said that it was shocking that a communiqué should be issued in Washington announcing a foreign-policy development of major importance that I had never heard of. I said I would not tolerate a repetition of such conduct.

Byrnes, however, would insist the conversation was entirely pleasant, and according to others on board, it was not so much Truman as Admiral Leahy who gave Byrnes a hard time. (Leahy, as was known, considered Byrnes “a horse’s ass.”) Dean Acheson, who was not present, but who developed an understanding of both Truman and Byrnes, later speculated that both their impressions were genuine; that Truman, in recalling such encounters, was inclined to exaggerate his “bark,” when in reality he was nearly always extremely considerate of the feelings of others; and that Byrnes, as a veteran of South Carolina politics, would never have taken as personal criticism Truman’s demand to be kept informed.

In any event, the meeting marked a change in the relationship. There was no open break, but Truman’s confidence in his Secretary of State was not to be the same again. Six days later, still steaming mad, he wrote longhand letter to “My dear Jim,” saying that while he wanted to give members of his Cabinet ample authority, he had no intention of relinquishing the authority of the President or “to forego the President’s prerogative to make the final decision.” He was intensely concerned about Russia, tired of “babying” the Soviets. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand, ‘How many divisions have you?’ ”

According to an account that Truman wrote years later, he then called Byrnes to his office and read the letter aloud. But again Byrnes declared that no such scene occurred—if it had, Byrnes said, he would have resigned at once. But for the record Truman noted on the letter in his own hand at the time: “Read to the Sec. of State and discussed—not typed or mailed.” Later, in a conversation with Eben Ayers, Truman said he had most definitely read the letter to Byrnes, “right here in this office with him sitting right where you are. I told him I was not going to give him the letter but wanted to read it to him.” Byrnes’s face, said Truman, had turned “fiery red.”

It was a letter like others to come in Truman’s presidency. He called them his “longhand spasms,” and there appears indeed to have been something sudden and involuntary about them. They seemed to serve some deep psychological need, as a vent for his anger, and were seldom intended for anyone to see. They cleared the air for him. He felt better almost immediately and, unsent, they did no one any harm. Yet in tone and content they bore little or no resemblance to the way he was ordinarily with people. “I have never heard him say, or heard of him saying a harsh, bitter, or sarcastic word to anyone, whatever the offense or failure,” Dean Acheson would write.

II

With the new year under way, there was little time for brooding, seldom time enough for anything. A steel strike loomed, threatening the whole economy. Hurried meetings were held. Official cars came and went in the White House drive. “1946 is our year of decision,” Truman had told the country in a radio broadcast. “This year we lay the foundation for our economic structure which will have to serve for generations.”

The steel workers’ union, headed by Phil Murray, called for a wage increase of 19½ cents an hour. The steel companies, represented by Benjamin Fairless of U.S. Steel, offered 15 cents. At the conclusion of a long, arduous session at the White House on January 12, Truman was able to announce that Murray had agreed to postpone the strike for one week. After another session on the 17th, and still no agreement, Truman proposed that the steel companies grant an increase of 18½ cents. Both sides wanted time to consider and were told that they had until noon the following day.

Murray accepted the President’s proposal, but Fairless refused. On January 19, 1946, at more than 1,000 mills across the country, 800,000 steel workers walked off the job in the biggest strike in history.

The whole country was in the grip of strikes. Some 200,000 meatpackers had struck by now. There was a glass workers’ strike, a telephone strike, a coffinmakers’ strike, a huge strike at General Electric. In Pittsburgh a strike of 3,500 electric company employees caused plant closings that affected 100,000 other workers. Streetcars stopped running, office buildings closed. “This is a disaster,” said Pittsburgh’s Mayor David Lawrence in a radio plea to the strikers to go back to their jobs—and Mayor Lawrence, a Democrat, was long considered a solid friend of labor.

Pressed for a statement about the steel strike at his next press conference., Truman replied, “I personally think there is too much power on each side, and I think it is necessary that the government assert the fact that it is the power of the people.”

But how would the government assert itself?

“We are doing everything we possibly can,” he answered, giving no one much hope.

A week later, he could say only, “We have been working on it all the time.”

No one who had never had the responsibility could possibly understand what it was like to be President, Truman would write later, not even his closest aides or members of his family. There was no end to the “chain of responsibility that binds him, and he is never allowed to forget that he is President.” Problems and decisions of every conceivable variety wound up on his desk, as did criticism and blame. In the fall, Fred Canfil had given him a small sign for the desk. “The Buck Stops Here,” it said. Canfil had seen one like it in the head office of a federal reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, and asked the warden if a copy might be made for his friend the President, and though Truman kept it on his desk only a short time, the message would stay with him permanently.

What sustained him, Truman said, was the belief that there was more good than evil in human beings. Now even that was being put severely to the test. Congress and labor had let him down. Mrs. Roosevelt was telling friends he had the wrong sort of people around him, a theme struck also by columnist Walter Lippmann. The “blunt truth,” wrote Lippmann, was that the men nearest the President did “not have the brains, and have practically none of the wisdom from experience and education to help him be President….” A cartoon in the arch-conservative Chicago Tribune pictured the President as Little Lord Fauntleroy being baited and knocked about by a gang of tough street urchins labeled “Labor,” “Management,” “Party Radical,” “Party Conservative,” and “Foreign Diplomacy.” The caption was in verse:

Little Truman Fauntleroy “

Famous as “that model boy”

Always trying to do good

In the name of brotherhood

Was the leader of his class

Temporarily—alas.

Look at little Truman now.

Muddy, battered, bruised-and how!

Victim of his misplaced trust,

He has learned what good boys must.

In the alley after school,

There just ain’t no golden rule.

The Saturday Evening Post, which claimed to represent the views and values of middle America, said the Truman administration, after ten months in office, could be labeled “at best, undistinguished.” Some Washington journalists, who admired the President’s fundamental decency and determination, felt sorry for him. “It was a cruel time to put inexperience in power,” wrote Richard Rovere.

In the new hit movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which had been written by Roosevelt’s former speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, and was to win nine Academy Awards, actor Fredric March, playing one of the three heroes of the story, three returning veterans of the war, declared bitterly, “Last year it was kill Japs, this year it’s make money,” while at another point his teenage son voiced his fear of the future—of atomic bombs, guided missiles, “and everything.”

People were “befuddled” and needed “time out to get a nerve rest,” Truman wrote to his mother. He wouldn’t mind going on strike himself, he said. As it was, he was planning a trip to Florida.

He had installed a new White House physician, a thirty-five-year-old Army doctor, Colonel Wallace H. Graham, who was the son of the Independence doctor who looked after Mamma Truman. Concerned that the President was working too hard, Graham urged a vacation. On Graham’s orders, Truman had begun taking a brisk walk of two or three miles every morning before breakfast—walks, Truman told Charlie Ross, that were helping him sleep better.

To replace Henry Stimson as Secretary of War, he had named Robert Patterson, and for Chief of Staff, to replace George Marshall, General Eisenhower, both regarded as excellent appointments. But his choice for a new Under Secretary of the Navy had suddenly blown into storm. Truman had picked Ed Pauley, the California oil man and Democratic money raiser who helped engineer his nomination for the vice presidency and who, more recently, had been working on reparation problems in Europe and Japan. Truman liked Pauley, thought him tough, straightforward, and capable of getting things done. He intended that Pauley replace Forrestal eventually, then become the first Secretary of Defense once that office was created. (“I wanted the hardest, meanest son of a bitch I could get,” Truman later said.) He also knew Roosevelt had been planning to make Pauley the Under Secretary of the Navy, and further, that Forrestal approved. But Pauley’s business and political background made him an unwise choice, as others at the White House saw at once. “An oil man should not be head of the department which has such a vital interest in the conservation of the nation’s oil reserve,” noted Eben Ayers privately, “and a politician should not be at the head of the navy.”

The trouble broke when Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was called to testify before the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. On the train returning from Roosevelt’s funeral, Ickes revealed, Pauley had had the nerve to question him on tidelands oil policy—Pauley’s very unsubtle implication being that huge campaign contributions would be made available if California’s jurisdiction over the tidelands went uncontested. Truman, when he heard what Ickes had said, was beside himself, for in a meeting with Ickes just prior to Ickes’s testimony, Truman had told him that while of course he must speak the truth to the committee, Truman hoped he might also be “gentle” with Pauley.

Truman felt betrayed. Ickes felt he had had no choice but to tell what he knew. Asked by reporters if he would withdraw Pauley’s nomination, Truman said he would not. Asked if his relations with Ickes had changed, he said Ickes could be mistaken the same as anyone.

Ickes resigned on February 13, declaring at his own press conference that he had been “unable to commit perjury for the sake of the party” and that he could not possibly serve in the Cabinet any longer and maintain his self-respect. He was against “government by crony,” Ickes further stated, an expression that would not be forgotten.

Outraged that Ickes had implied that he, the President, had asked him to commit perjury, Truman not only accepted the resignation but told Ickes he had three days to clear out.

Though Pauley denied under oath that he had ever made any such proposition to Ickes, the appointment was doomed, and once the committee agreed to affirm Pauley’s personal integrity, the nomination was withdrawn at his request.

The whole affair had been extremely unpleasant, recalling for many people memories of the Harding administration, with its Teapot Dome oil scandals. Ickes, celebrated as “Honest Harold” and the “Old Curmudgeon,” was incurably hard to deal with, as everyone knew, but he had been an exceptional Secretary of Interior and served longer in the job than anyone. Except for Henry Wallace, Ickes was the last of the New Dealers in the Truman Cabinet and his departure, in combination with the bitterness of his parting remarks, was taken by liberals especially as still another extremely discouraging sign. “One has the feeling,” wrote the New York Post, “that a poorer and poorer cast is dealing desperately with a bigger and bigger story.”

Remembering Ickes years later, Truman would describe him as a chronic “resigner.”

He reminded me of old Salmon P. Chase, who was Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln’s Cabinet, and he thought he ought to be President, that he’d be a better President than Lincoln, and he was always resigning. He must have resigned a dozen times….

Lincoln said someplace that old Chase wasn’t happy unless he was unhappy, and that was just about the case with Ickes. I knew he’d turned in his resignation a few times while Roosevelt was President….

The whole thing…was a great pity because he’d been a good man in his day.

The Florida trip was canceled. Truman kept thinking each week that perhaps the next would not be so hectic, he told his staff, but then the next week was always worse. There was always a crisis just around the corner and he had to do something about it. Many in Washington wondered if this was to be the pattern—taking problems as they came, rather than working to achieve large, clear objectives.

His popularity was tumbling. From the record high of 87 percent approval in the months after Roosevelt’s death, it had fallen by February to 63 percent, according to the Gallup Poll.

Some things of importance had been accomplished: A new Central Intelligence Group was organized, a civilian agency separate from the military and the State Department, to gather and analyze intelligence data for the President; Herbert Hoover was appointed to make a survey of the world food crisis; and an Employment Act had been passed by Congress, a landmark for the Truman administration. Though failing to call for full employment, as Truman wished, it did empower the federal government “to use all practical means” to foster “maximum employment,” and set up a President’s Economic Council, something new, to appraise the economic outlook and consider the effect of government programs on the economy.

In addition, Truman had become the first President to recommend statehood for Alaska and Hawaii.

His new Secretary of the Interior, to fill Ickes’s place, was Julius Krug, who was young and widely respected. Privately, and somewhat bitterly, Truman mused that perhaps he should add some new Kitchen Cabinet secretaries as well: a Secretary of Inflation to convince everyone that however high or low prices went, it didn’t matter; a Secretary of Reaction, to abolish airplanes and restore ox carts and sailing ships; a Secretary of Columnists, to read all the columns and report to the President on how the country should be run; and a Secretary of Semantics, to supply big words as well as to tell him when to keep quiet.

The trouble with the President, it was being said, was not that he spoke his mind too often or too candidly, but that he wanted too much to please, to get along with everybody, agree with everybody. It was an approach that might serve in the Senate but not in the Executive Office. In an article titled “Everyman in the White House,” Kenneth G. Crawford wrote in The American Mercury that while Truman was proof of the great American myth that anyone could become President, he was a flat disappointment, “essentially indecisive…essentially vacillating,” too ready to see two sides to every argument.

“He does so like to agree with whoever is with him at the moment,” wrote Henry Wallace, who, as Secretary of Commerce, had been seeing more of Truman than usual during the labor strife. Wallace’s principal worry was American policy concerning the Soviet Union. Expressing his views privately with Truman—arguing that every effort must be made to get along with the Soviets—Wallace found that Truman invariably agreed with him. Yet Wallace knew the contrary views the President was receiving from people like Harriman and Leahy, and felt sure that in private Truman agreed with them, too.

Leahy, for his part, saw Byrnes and others at the State Department as too ready to accommodate the Russians. He worried that “appeasement” would lead to war, as at Munich. In his diary in late February, Leahy recorded that the President “appears to consider it necessary to adopt a strong diplomatic opposition to the Soviet program of expansion….”

In fact, Truman was not of one mind regarding the Soviets, any more than official Washington was, or the country. He did truly wish to get along with the Russians quite as much as did Wallace and, like Leahy, he was steadfastly against appeasement. Nor did he see why he should consider such attitudes contradictory. He had no clear policy or long-range objectives. He was facing events only as they came, trying to be patient, trying to be prudent and maintain balance. But at bottom he had no intention of being either belligerent or weak.

Then, in a rare public address in Moscow on February 9, Stalin declared that communism and capitalism were incompatible and that another war was inevitable. He called for increased production in a new five-year plan to “guarantee our country against any eventuality.” Production of materials for national defense were to be tripled; consumer goods, Stalin said, “must wait on rearmament.” Confrontation with the capitalist West, he predicted, would come in the 1950s, when America would be in the depths of another depression.

Washington was stunned. Even the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it the “Declaration of World War III.” Since Stalin had decided to make military power his objective, wrote Walter Lippmann, the United States was left with no choice but to do the same.

The Red Army was still in Manchuria. The Russian garrison in Iran’s northernmost province, Azerbaijan, was still in place, in disregard of an agreement that it would be withdrawn within six months of the German surrender. On February 16, just a week after the Stalin speech, came the sensational news from Ottawa that a spy ring had been uncovered and charged with trying to steal information on the atomic bomb for the Russians, and the ring included a member of the Canadian Parliament.

But nothing so highlighted Truman’s ambivalence about relations with the Soviets as events surrounding the speech given by Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in the first week of March 1946, a speech Truman had encouraged and that he knew about in advance and approved of, despite what he later said.

Located twenty miles north of Jefferson City in rolling farm land, the little town of Fulton was the site of tiny Westminster College, a Presbyterian men’s school where Harry Vaughan had once played center on the football team. The idea to invite Churchill to speak there had been the inspiration of Dr. Franc L. McCluer, president of the college. McCluer had traveled to Washington to see Vaughan, who took him in to meet “the Boss.” Truman was immediately enthusiastic and penned a postscript to Churchill at the bottom of the invitation: “This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you. Best regards.”

In reply, Churchill told Truman, “Under your auspices anything I say will command some attention….”

In February, while vacationing in Florida, Churchill made a flying visit to Washington to talk with Truman about the speech. “The subject…will be the necessity for full military collaboration between Great Britain and the U.S. in order to preserve peace in the world,” Admiral Leahy recorded. On March 3, returning again to Washington from Florida, Churchill conferred still further with Leahy, this time at the British Embassy, where, propped up in bed, puffing on a huge cigar, Churchill kept scattering ashes over the manuscript pages strewn about him. Leahy found “no fault” in the speech.

The following day, Monday, March 4, riding in Roosevelt’s armored railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, Truman and Churchill left by special train for Missouri, accompanied by Leahy, Vaughan, Charlie Ross, Colonel Graham, and a half-dozen others from the White House staff, plus forty-three reporters and photographers. Truman’s obvious high spirits impressed everyone. He was delighted to be traveling in such good company and bringing Churchill, the most famous speaker in the world, to a college in his home state that no one ever heard of. His mood was infectious. Churchill recited Whittier’s “Barbara Fritchie” and drank five Scotches before dinner.

“Mr. President,” Churchill said later at the card table, “I think that when we are playing poker I will call you Harry.”

“All right, Winston,” Truman replied.

As the evening passed, feigning ignorance of the game, Churchill would remark, to the great amusement of the others, “Harry, what does a sequence count?” Or, “Harry, I think I’ll risk a shilling on a couple of knaves.”

He took a boy’s delight in the game [wrote Charlie Ross]. He couldn’t seem to get the hang of the joker as a wild card for aces, straights and flushes, and so at his suggestion we made the joker completely wild. We played straight poker. The President and the rest of us would have liked to introduce some wild games, but the Prime Minister thought this would be too confusing. Colonel Graham was the principal winner.

About 2:30 in the morning, in the middle of a hand, Churchill put down his cards and said wistfully that if he were born again he would wish to live in the United States, though he deplored a few of its customs. Which customs did he have in mind, the others asked. “You stop drinking with your meals,” he said.

The next morning, Tuesday, March 5, as the train raced along the banks of the Missouri River, Churchill made a few final changes in his speech, which was then mimeographed for distribution on board. It was, he said, the most important speech of his career. Truman, having read his copy, told Churchill it would “do nothing but good” and surely “make a stir.”

Pointing to the President’s seal on the wall of the car, Truman explained that he had had the eagle’s head turned to face the olive branch. Churchill said he thought the eagle’s head should be on a swivel.

The setting and reception at Fulton were all Truman could have wished for. The day was sunny, the temperature in the high sixties, the little town spruced up and looking exactly as he liked to think of Missouri. This was the America he knew best and that he wanted Churchill to see. Thousands of people, many in from the surrounding country, were waiting to cheer them as their motorcade rolled down the red-brick main thoroughfare. At a corner near the college, on the curbstone, sat a delegation of elderly gentlemen with old-fashioned high-topped shoes and canes, who waved colored balloons, and standing behind them were several sailors in uniform.

The Westminster campus, like the town, was decked with both British and American flags. Following lunch at the home of President McCluer, an academic procession started for the gymnasium, Churchill conspicuous in the scarlet robes and plush black cap of Oxford.

In his introduction, Truman said he had never met either Churchill or Stalin until Potsdam, and that he became fond of both. Then, calling Churchill one of the outstanding men of the ages, he said, “I know he will have something constructive to say to the world….”

It was a great honor, perhaps almost unique, Churchill began, for a private visitor to be introduced to an academic audience by the President of the United States.

Amid his heavy burdens, duties, and responsibilities—unsought but not recoiled from—the President traveled a thousand miles to dignify and magnify our meeting here today and to give me an opportunity of addressing this kindred nation, as well as my own countrymen across the ocean, and perhaps some other countries too.

The President has told you that it is his wish, as I am sure it is yours, that I should have full liberty to give my true and faithful counsel in these anxious and baffling times. I shall certainly avail myself of this freedom….

He had, he said, high regard for the Russian people and for his wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. “We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic.” Still, it was his duty, Churchill said, to present “certain facts.” And thus he launched into that part of the speech that was to cause a sensation, giving his own kind of glowering, dramatic emphasis to the indisputable fact that an “iron curtain” had descended in Eastern Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain had descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow….

The Soviets did not want war, but rather the fruits of war, “and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrine.” What was needed in response was a union of the Western Democracies, specifically an English-speaking union of Britain and the United States. For he knew the Russians and there was nothing they so admired as strength, nothing for which they had less respect than weakness, and military weakness most of all.

From the expression on Truman’s face, his applause at several points, it was obvious he approved, as did the audience.

The immediate reaction in the country, however, was strongly in opposition. Editorials accused Churchill of poisoning the already difficult relations between the United States and Russia. America had no need for alliances with any other nation, said The Wall Street Journal. Truman, declared The Nation, had been “remarkably inept” in ever associating himself with the occasion. To Walter Lippmann the speech was an “almost catastrophic blunder.” In Moscow, Stalin said it was a “call to war” with the Soviet Union.

Truman was stunned by the criticism. Returning to Washington, he quickly backed off from responsibility, telling reporters he never knew what Churchill was going to say. It was a free country, he added. Churchill had had every right to speak as he pleased. To Henry Wallace, Truman was equally disingenuous, insisting he had never seen the speech in advance, and that Churchill had “put me on the spot.” When reporters pressed him for his opinion of the speech, now that he had had time to think about it, Truman lamely pleaded “no comment.”

To placate Stalin, he wrote a letter offering to send the Missouri to bring him to the United States and promising to accompany him to the University of Missouri so that he too might speak his mind, as Churchill had. But Stalin declined the invitation.

It was a bad time for Truman. To the press and an increasing proportion of the country, he seemed bewildered and equivocating, incapable of a clear or positive policy toward the Russians. Nor did the situation appear any more focused to those in the administration who were supposedly in the know. At the same time he was disavowing Churchill’s speech, he was also telling Averell Harriman that the refusal of the Soviets to withdraw from Iran could mean war. Harriman, who had quit the Moscow Embassy and was now, at Truman’s urging, to become ambassador to Great Britain, approved wholeheartedly of what Churchill had said, as did Leahy, Forrestal, and Dean Acheson all of whom, like Harriman, would have welcomed a strong endorsement by the President, and blamed Byrnes, whom they saw as too much the compromising politician in his dealings with the Soviets.

In an 8,000-word message from the Moscow Embassy that was to become known soon as “the long telegram,” George Kennan, the scholarly chargé d’affaires, had tried to dash any hopes the administration might have of reasonable dealings with the Stalin regime. The Kremlin, wrote Kennan, had a neurotic view of the world, at the heart, of which was an age-old Russian sense of insecurity. For this reason, the Soviet regime was “committed fanatically” to the idea that in the long run there could be no “peaceful coexistence” with the United States, and further that “it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state broken….” Stripped of the “fig leaf” of Marxism, Kennan said, the Soviets would stand before history “as only the last of a long session of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security for their internally weak regimes.”

But Soviet power, he stressed, was highly sensitive “to the logic of force,” and for this reason usually backed off when faced with strength.

The message had been received at the State Department in February, two weeks before the Churchill speech. Harriman sent a copy to Forrestal, who thought Kennan’s thesis so important he had it mimeographed and circulated through the entire administration, to virtually anyone who had anything to do with foreign and military affairs. Truman, too, read it. But though its long-range influence would be considerable, it was not the immediately galvanizing document sometimes portrayed—not at the White House. On Truman in particular, it does not appear to have had any profound or immediate effect, and most likely for the reason that he had heard much the same case made by Harriman, with his talk of a “barbarian invasion of Europe” at their first meeting the year before. In any event, for attribution, he was taking no stand one way or the other.

At a Cabinet meeting on March 22, Truman expressed surprise over the fact that the Navy was inviting some sixty members of Congress to witness the series of atomic bomb tests scheduled to be held soon on the tiny Pacific atoll of Bikini. He didn’t care how many went after July 1, Truman said, but until then Congress had business to attend. Byrnes questioned the wisdom of such tests, calling them “extremely ill-advised at this time” and warning of detrimental effect on relations with the Soviets. Vice Admiral William Blandy, who was in charge of the operation, reported that 37,000 men were already assigned to take part. When Truman said a decision was needed “here and now,” Byrnes declared he would prefer no tests, but that later would be better. Wallace concurred. Truman said that if the tests were canceled, $100 million would be wasted. He decided the tests would be put off until summer.

The next night Charlie Ross went to the President’s private quarters at the White House to see Truman about a statement announcing the postponement. “He was in his study, working…Mrs. Truman was away and he was waiting for Margaret to come in,” wrote Ross. “We had a drink together. He seemed lonesome.” To Ross, in confidence, Truman said he was less worried about Russia than were most other people.

When reporters questioned whether he shared Harriman’s view of the Russian threat, Truman replied, “I have nothing to say about it.” The easy camaraderie of his earlier press conferences had given way to an atmosphere of greater caution and tension. His sister Mary Jane, who had delighted in sitting in on several of his sessions with reporters during her stay at the White House the previous year, would describe how the questions then had come “thick and fast.” To her it was a wonder that Harry could answer so quickly. “It just didn’t seem to me that they gave him any time at all,” she said, “and all of them got a big bang out of it.” Everybody had seemed to be enjoying every moment. “Once in a while he got a kind of a smarty question,” she remembered. “But…[he] had just as smarty an answer.” Now the smarty answers were to be avoided. Increasingly at press conferences, on the advice of Ross and others on the staff, Truman’s response was “No comment,” or, “Your guess is as good as mine,” or, “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

On April 1, April Fool’s Day, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers called a nationwide coal strike. For hundreds of thousands of miners Lewis was a leader such as had only been dreamed of in years past. As he once told them, “I have pleaded your case not in the quavering tones of a mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.” Understandably, their loyalty to him was unswerving. If he said it was time to strike, they struck. And in the weeks following, on the anniversary of Truman’s first year in office, a flurry of newspaper and magazine articles appeared, appraising his performance as President to date. Truman, who still began the day with four or five morning papers and regularly saw a half-dozen different magazines, probably read them all.

The Saturday Evening Post said charitably that perhaps every President had to learn the hard way. (Truman might have added that that was about the only way he had ever learned anything in his life.) To reporters Bert Andrews and Jack Steele, writing in the New York Herald-Tribune, the central question was whether the President would grow in office. “New Dealers are still unhappy, conservatives are critical, middle-of-the-roaders uncertain. They still find it impossible to decide which way Truman is going.”

Noel F. Busch, in an article in Life, noted a curious quality to be observed often again as time passed. Showing visitors about the presidential yacht, Truman would point out the lounge, the galley, and, guest rooms, then say, “And this is the President’s suite,” as though the President were not aboard and he himself were merely an aide or guide.

Such remarks [wrote Busch] may serve as evidence of tact or humility or both. Taken in conjunction with many other traits of speech and behavior on Truman’s part, they also show a curious reluctance or even inability to think of himself as President without a conscious effort of will.

To the editors of Life’s more overtly Republican sister publication, Time, it was by now quite clear that Truman was a mediocre man, the job too big for him.

A current Washington wisecrack was, “I’m just mild about Harry.” Truman, went another joke, was the weakest President since Pierce. “What did Pierce ever do?” the listener was supposed to ask. “That’s the point!” the teller would exclaim.

To Mrs. Robert A. Taft, wife of the conservative Republican senator from Ohio, was attributed the line, “To err is Truman.”

Some observers, however, were not so quick to dismiss him! “Here is to be seen no flaming leadership,” wrote Arthur Krock, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, “little of what could be called scholarship and no more that is profound. But it is very good and human and courageous. Common sense shines out….”

III

Even without the coal strike it had become the longest, most costly siege of labor trouble in the nation’s history. At one point more than a million workers were out on strike, and though the most crippling shutdown thus far, in the steel industry, was by now settled, the solution had been to grant not just higher wages but an increase in steel prices, all of which was certain to spur further inflation. Nor had its settlement of the steel strike done anything to improve the standing of the administration. Truman’s offer of an 18½ cent increase to the steel workers’ hourly wage had been made without even waiting for his own fact-finding board to report. So now an 18½ cent raise was what everyone wanted.

The General Motors strike dragged on. From the day John L. Lewis pulled his men out of the mines, every major industry was affected. Without coal, the steel plants were again banking their furnaces. Ford and Chrysler were forced to close. Freight loadings were off 75 percent. In Chicago the use of electricity was ordered cut by half.

The issue this time with Lewis was a proposed miners’ welfare fund to be financed by a 5 cent royalty on every ton of coal produced. But Truman detested the hulking Lewis, remembering his bluster and arrogance before the Truman Committee and the strikes he had called during the war. Privately, Truman thought Roosevelt would have been justified if he had had Lewis shot as a traitor. When Truman announced his concern over the legality of the proposed welfare fund, Lewis answered, “What does Truman know about the legality of anything?”

Yet more worrisome still was the mounting threat of a nationwide railroad strike, a calamity no one seemed able to face or forestall and which, when it came, revealed more about Harry Truman than all but a few episodes in his entire presidency.

His public statements were models of restraint. On the surface he was all restraint, unrattled, entirely his familiar, chipper self, the double breasted suits smoothly pressed, shoes shined, a spring to his step, a look of alert vitality behind the thick glasses. He had time still for streams of visitors—“the customers,” he called them—time always to praise or thank those on the staff who had put in longer hours than usual. He rarely missed his half-hour nap after lunch, rarely avoided the variety of ceremonial chores expected of him, and whatever the occasion, he appeared always to be enjoying himself, as though there was nothing else on his mind. In early May, Time portrayed him meeting successive waves of crisis like a swimmer bobbing “lightheartedly” in the surf. “In the week of his 62nd birthday, apparently nothing could shake him.”

Only now and then were there momentary flashes of temper of a kind not seen before. Asked by one of the regular White House reporters at a press conference why they had been given no advance notice of a Cabinet meeting, Truman snapped, “I can hold a Cabinet meeting whenever I choose, I don’t have to tell you….” In the notes he kept on his daily appointment sheets, he now had something caustic or derogatory to say about nearly everyone, including old Senate friends like Burton K. Wheeler, whom he now lumped with the “spineless liberals.” His own _recent choice as the American representative on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Bernard Baruch, was described as wanting “to run the world, the moon and maybe Jupiter.”

Inwardly Truman was an extremely frustrated, resentful, and angry man, worn thin by criticism, fed up with crises not of his making and with people who, as he saw it, cared nothing for their country, only their own selfish interests. “Big money has too much power and so have the big unions—both are riding to a fall because I like neither,” he had written to his mother earlier, and his mood since had only worsened.

A railroad strike coming on top of the coal strike would mean almost unimaginable catastrophe, paralysis everywhere. Negotiations between railway management and twenty different railway unions had dragged on for months, with Labor Secretary Schwellenbach serving not very effectively as Truman’s mediator, while assisted by a new man on the White House staff, a big, gregarious, gum-chewing, former economics professor and labor specialist from Alabama named John R. Steelman. The unions had demanded higher wages. Truman, invoking the Railway Labor Act that provided for a sixty-day mediation period, had ordered a delay in the strike. In April the negotiations fell apart and the strike was set for May 18. More talk followed, Steelman now replacing Schwellenbach as Truman’s principal representative and apparently making progress. Of the twenty unions involved, all but two were ready to reach an accommodation.

The problem was that the two holdouts were the two major unions. What so exasperated Truman was that they were also headed by two of his old allies, A. F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, and Alvanley Johnston, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the same pair who in his “hour of greatest need” in the 1940 senate race backed him when no one would, providing the lion’s share of the money for his campaign. Moreover, at Chicago in 1944 they had been in the thick of the drive to make him Roosevelt’s running mate.

Whitney and Johnston were two white-haired, veteran battlers, both now in their seventies. Whitney, whom Truman knew best and liked, had by far the greatest power, since he represented more than 200,000 trainmen in 1,145 “lodges” nationwide. Johnston, who looked like a cartoonist’s version of a labor boss, with a girth so broad he had difficulty buttoning his suit jacket, spoke for 80,000 locomotive engineers. Between them they could shut down every railroad—all passenger service, all freight movement—from coast to coast and there appeared to be nothing anyone could do about it.

As the coal strike continued, John L. Lewis—large, theatrical, perpetually scowling under a broad-brimmed black fedora—was seen coming and going from the West Wing of the White House, his entrances and exits made always, for the benefit of the newsreel cameras, at a slow, ambling walk, a man very conscious of the fact that he was the center of attention. On May 13, Lewis agreed to a twelve-day truce. But only days later the coal negotiations collapsed and Truman, reading from a prepared statement, told reporters the country was truly in “desperate straits.”

When, at a Cabinet meeting, Truman asked for constructive suggestions On how to handle the strike situation, nobody could offer any.

On May 17, with only a day remaining before the scheduled railroad walkout, Truman summoned Whitney and Johnston to his office. Whitney said they had to go through with the strike. “Our men are demanding it.”

“Well then,” Truman replied, hunching forward in his chair, “I’m going to give you the gun.” As they watched, he signed an executive order for the government to seize and operate the railroads, effective the next day.

Not quite twenty-four hours later, on Saturday the 18th, the two labor leaders agreed to postpone the strike for another five days.

On Sunday with apprehensions growing on all sides, Truman took off on a flying visit to Kansas City for the announced purpose of receiving an honorary degree from little William Jewell College at nearby Liberty, Missouri. He also wanted to see his mother. With the help of friends, he and Vivian had finally managed to buy back from the county all of the old homeplace on Blue Ridge, the farm she so loved, even though, because of her deteriorating health, she would be unable to move back there. (She and Mary Jane would continue on in the small yellow frame bungalow in Grandview, where they had been living since 1940.)

In conversation with friends in Missouri, Truman kept referring to Washington derisively as “that place,” and to the graduating class at William Jewell he said leadership wasn’t worth much without some followers. What the country needed was people who were willing to work, he said, speaking without notes.

We have a society which is organized, and if one cog in the organization gives out the whole structure begins to shake loose. Now let me urge upon you: Get in line, get on the team, do a little work; help make the United States what it must be from now on: the leader of the world in peace, as it was the leader of the world in war. I urge you to be good workers in the ranks.

A White House reporter who made the trip, Felix Belair, Jr., of The New York Times, asked Truman’s physician, Colonel Graham, if perhaps the President was working too hard. Graham agreed, adding with emphasis that there was also nothing anyone could do about it. “That’s the way he is,” said Graham. “I try using a little applied psychology, but you know the President has a pretty good psychology of his own. He does the best he can by his job and he knows there’s no use worrying about it after that.”

But two old Truman friends from Independence, Mayor Roger Sermon and Henry Bundschu, a dry goods merchant and neighbor of the Trumans, warned Belair to watch out for the President’s temper. He might be “an easygoing fellow,” but he was also no one to trifle with. “When the ‘feuding blood’ of his Kentucky ancestors was allowed to get the upper hand, Harry Truman was a man to be avoided,” Belair wrote after talking with Sermon and Bundschu, who said they would prefer three or four ordinary men for enemies to one like Harry.

To Belair, the President was becoming an increasingly fascinating subject, not at all the simple man he had supposed but a “complex personality,” something others had known for a long time and would talk of again. In Independence forty years later one of Truman’s nephews, J. C. Truman, Vivian’s second son, would be asked by a visitor how he would describe his uncle Harry, beyond what everyone knew. After a long pause, he answered, “Complicated!”

On Tuesday, day three of the five-day postponement of the railway strike, Ed Flynn of the Bronx flew in to Washington to see if he could help sway Whitney and Johnston, but without success. Nothing seemed to work. No compromise appeared likely. On Wednesday, Truman ordered seizure of the coal mines and proposed an 18½ cent raise for the rail workers—again more than his own emergency fact-finding board had recommended—and still Whitney and Johnston “viewed the proposal unfavorably.!” By Thursday, May 23, the day the strike was scheduled to begin at 5:00 P.M., Washington time, the situation at the White House had become extremely tense.

The two union leaders were summoned one more time, along with officials representing management, and assigned to different rooms to resume bargaining, John Steelman moving back and forth between them. When Whitney and Johnston again refused Truman’s offer, Steelman told them they simply couldn’t say no to a President, insisting that that was just not done. Their response was that nobody paid attention to this President anyway.

“This was the fifth day of the postponement of the railroad strike and…[it] turned into one of the wildest days at the White House since the end of the war,” wrote Eben Ayers in his diary:

Newsmen thronged the lobby, tense and excited. The President was in his office as usual and met from time to time with Steelman, John Snyder and Schwellenbach…. This situation went on all day long. Early in the afternoon the President ordered John Pye, the colored messenger, who runs the executive lunchroom, to prepare some sandwiches…and they were sent in to the railroad people. I did not go out for lunch nor did my secretaries.

During the course of the day Secretary of State Byrnes came over, secretly, so newspapermen did not know of his visit, and he argued with Whitney and Johnston for some time, trying to point out to them the effect upon our international relations of a general rail strike at this time.

At about four in the afternoon, with only an hour to go before the strike would begin, Truman went out to the South Lawn to host a reception for nearly nine hundred convalescent veterans from Walter Reed and other nearby military hospitals, among, whom were amputees and others so severely disabled that they moved forward in the receiving line on crutches and in wheelchairs, attended by nurses in starched white uniforms. Such garden parties for hospitalized veterans had been an annual May tradition at the White House since 1919, but were discontinued during the war. Truman, some weeks earlier, had asked that the tradition be revived.

The spring afternoon was ideal, with bright sunshine, blue sky, and flowers in bloom. Several of the Cabinet were present with their wives, as were Admiral Nimitz and General Bradley. The Marine Band played. Strawberry ice cream and lemon punch were served, and for more than an hour Truman stood warmly greeting his guests, who were all in uniform and wearing their campaign ribbons.

Always moved by the sight of wounded veterans, Truman was struck especially now by the contrast between these respectful young men who had made such sacrifices for their country, and who were so plainly pleased to meet him, and the two contentious old union bosses inside. He kept smiling, chatting, patting the men on the back, asking where they were from, making every effort to see that they had a good time.

Only once was he seen glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the Cabinet Room, where the long French windows, under the colonnade, stood open to the air. Rumors were passed of progress in the negotiations. A soldier in a wheelchair said, “Draft all the strikers—all of them.” Another claimed he wouldn’t be President for anything. Truman drank a glass of punch. When a Strauss waltz was played, he walked over beside the band to sit and eat a heaping dish of ice cream, tapping his foot in time to the music. By then it was well past five and the strike was on.

There had never been a total railroad stoppage until now. Almost at once the whole country was brought virtually to a standstill. Of 24,000 freight trains normally in operation, fewer than 300 ran; of 175,000 passenger trains, all of 100 moved. Rush-hour commuters were stranded in New York and Chicago. In the West, coast-to-coast “streamliners” stopped and disgorged passengers at tiny way stations in the middle of the desert.

There were poignant scenes [reported Newsweek]: The Chicago woman kept from her father’s deathbed in Minnesota; the 13-year-old Arizona boy en route for an emergency brain operation in California; the woman taking the body of her husband back to Cleveland for burial. Other less painful dilemmas: the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra’s San Francisco-bound special train was abandoned by crewmen; ball clubs found their mid-season travels stymied; the circus, scheduled to leave for Philadelphia, was forced to give Boston an extra dose of the biggest show on earth. Everywhere, the stranded who refused to sleep on emergency cots set up in hotel basements or armories took to bus, airplanes, taxis, and hitchhiking. Washington cabbies had a field day; their price for a ride to Boston was $150, to Atlanta $100.

Newsreel camera crews rushed to film hundreds of freight cars standing motionless in railyards as far as the eye could see, loaded coal cars standing idle, and baggage piled head high in big-city stations.

There were reports of fortunes in lettuce and fruit rotting in Kansas and California. Officials in Washington announced that in Europe hundreds of thousands of people would starve if grain shipments were held up as much as two weeks. Panic buying for food and gasoline broke out everywhere in the country. No one, no community was untouched.

Telegrams flooding the White House came from every quarter and minced no words:

ALL TRAIN SERVICE OUT OF NEW YORK CANCELLED. WHAT NOW?…

HATCHERIES [in Henry County, Missouri] NOW PRODUCING MILLIONS OF CHICKS WEEKLY WHICH ARE A TOTAL LOSS UNLESS SHIPPED IMMEDIATELY BY RAIL WHEN HATCHED….

THIS AGRICULTURAL AREA [Coining, Calif.] WILL BE RUINED IF THE STRIKE CONTINUES….

MR. PRESIDENT, ZERO HOUR IS HERE. WHO IS TO RULE OUR NATION? THE LEGALLY CONSTITUTED AUTHORITIES OR ISOLATED DOMESTIC GROUPS?…

PLEASE FORGET SELFISH POLITICS LONG ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT OTHER PEOPLE BESIDES LABOR LEADERS HAVE TO LIVE AND EAT. THEY ALSO VOTE….

IS THE PRESENT INCUMBENT IMPOTENT IN THE RAILROAD STRIKE? IF SO HE SHOULD RESIGN….

WHY DON’T YOU GO AHEAD AND ACT IN THIS NATIONAL CRISIS. YOU'RE OUR LEADER….

PROMPT ACTION IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE OUR COUNTRY….

LESS TALK AND MORE ACTION….

QUIT PLAYING POLITICS….

TIME TO GET TOUGH….

RESPECTFULLY URGE YOU TO RISE TO THE OCCASION….

Truman had had all he could take. Alone at his desk upstairs at the White House, on a small, cheap ruled tablet of the kind schoolchildren use, he began to write. It was the draft of a speech, a speech he had no intention of giving, but that he needed desperately to get off his chest. It was another of his “longhand spasms,” and the worst.

He filled seven pages. All the pent-up fury of the past weeks, the feelings evoked by the wounded men on the South Lawn, his sense of betrayal at the hands of old friends Whitney and Johnston—and the sense that they were flouting the highest office, not to say belittling him personally—all his stubborn pride, came spewing forth in one of the most intemperate documents ever written by an American President. It was as though somewhere deep within this normally fair-minded, self-controlled, naturally warmhearted man a raw, ugly, old native strain persisted, like the cry of a frontier lynch mob, and had to be released. Probably he wrote in a state of exhaustion late that night. Possibly whiskey played a part. But no one knows. The “speech” could also have been written in the cold light of the next morning, which, if so, makes it still more appalling.

Under his constitutional powers as President, he would call for volunteers to support the Constitution, he said at the start. Then, after a few pages of praise for the Constitution and for the decisive role America had played in winning the war, he continued with what was on his mind:

At home those of us who had the country’s welfare at heart worked day and night. But some people worked neither day nor night and some tried to sabotage the war effort entirely. No one knows that better than I. John Lewis called two strikes in war time to satisfy his ego. Two strikes which were worse than bullets in the back to our soldiers. He held a gun at the head of the Government. The rail unions did exactly the same thing. They all were receiving from four to forty times what the man who was facing the enemy fire on the front was receiving. The effete union leaders receive from five to ten times the net salary of your president.

Now these same union leaders on V.J. day told your President that they would cooperate 100% with him to reconvert to peacetime production. They all lied to him.

First came the threatened automobile strike. Your President asked for legislation to cool off and consider the situation. A weak-kneed Congress didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to pass the bill.

Mr. Murray and his Communist friends had a conniption fit and Congress had labor jitters. Nothing happened. Then came the electrical workers’ strike, the steel strike, the coal strike and now the rail tie-up. Every single one of the strikers and their demagogue leaders have been living in luxury, working when they pleased….

I am tired of the government’s being flouted, vilified and misrepresented. Now I want you men who are my comrades in arms, you men who fought the battles to save the nation just as I did twenty-five years ago, to come along with me and eliminate the Lewises, the Whitneys, the Johnstons, the Communist Bridges [head of the maritime union] and the Russian Senators and Representatives and really make this a government of, by and for the people. I think no more of the Wall Street crowd than I do of Lewis and Whitney.

Let us give the country back to the people. Let’s put transportation and production back to work, hang a few traitors, make our own country safe for democracy, tell the Russians where to get off and make the United Nations work. Come on boys, let’s do the job.

It was patriotism run amok, as well as absurdly inaccurate. Rail workers earned nothing like forty times the pay of a soldier. The salaries of the union leaders were less, not more, than Truman’s own of $75,000 a year, and to describe Whitney or Johnston or John L. Lewis as “effete” was laughable. He was even off in his math, calculating the time elapsed since his war of 1918.

What was very accurately reflected, however, was the intensity of his rage and his determination now to set things straight.

The look on Truman’s face as he strode into a special meeting of the Cabinet Friday morning, May 24, was one White House reporters would not forget. The gray-blue eyes blazed behind his glasses. His mouth was “a thin, hard line pulled down at the corners,” his back straight as a rod of steel. “In the manner of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation,” remembered Cabell Phillips of The New York Times, “he had summoned them not to solicit their views but to tell them what he was going to do.” It was a Harry Truman they had not seen before, but that some on his staff knew well and liked.

“He’s one tough son of a bitch of a man,” Harry Vaughan would say. That was the key to understanding Harry Truman.

With the Cabinet assembled around the table, he asked for suggestions on operation of the railroads. No one had any.

He would go before Congress the following day, he told them, but first address the country by radio that night. He had decided to draft the striking rail workers into the Army.

There was a moment of stunned silence. The Attorney General, Tom Clark, questioned whether the President was overstepping the bounds of the Constitution. Truman was not interested in philosophy. The strike must stop. “We’ll draft them and think about the law later,” he reportedly remarked.

His seven-page speech draft was handed over to Charlie Ross, who, having read it, told Truman as an old friend that it wouldn’t do. Sam Rosenman was sent for and a new speech written, with Rosenman, Ross John Snyder, and Truman himself all contributing. But the main work and at Truman’s request, was done by a rising new star at the White House, Navy Captain Clark Clifford, who had been posted temporarily the summer before as assistant to Jake Vardaman, and then, when Vardaman was removed, had stepped in as naval aide. Clifford was thirty-nine years old, over six feet tall, broad in the shoulders, slim-waisted, and handsome as a screen actor, with wavy blond hair and a silky baritone voice. In his Navy uniform he looked almost too glamorous to be true, or to be taken seriously; but he was calm, clearheaded, polished as a career diplomat, and, as Truman had quickly perceived, exceedingly capable. Indeed, Clifford’s almost chance presence on the staff would prove to be one of the luckiest breaks of Truman’s presidency.

“I’d never been in the White House,” Clifford would remember. “Never occurred to me I ever would be in the White House. Oh, it was exciting! And [at first] as naval aide, there wasn’t much to do. You’re kind of a potted plant…. The first time I arrived there, the first day, Vardaman took me in, he said, ‘President Truman, this is Lieutenant Junior Grade Clifford who is going to look after my office.’ And Truman looked up and said, ‘Big fellow, isn’t he!’ ”

Clifford had been raised in the fashionable west end of St. Louis. His father was an official with the Missouri Pacific Railroad, his mother a lecturer and author of children’s books. An uncle, for whom he was named, Clark McAdams, had been a brilliant editorial page editor for the Post-Dispatch. Educated at Washington University, where he also took a law degree, Clifford himself had been a highly successful trial attorney in St. Louis before the war, while still in his early thirties.

“I think he did feel an affinity with those who had come from that part of the country and been schooled in that part of the country, and spoke very much as he did,” Clifford would say of the President years later. “It was an important factor. I’m not sure he would have admitted to its being, but it happened to be so.” But in no respect did Clifford resemble the other Missourians around Truman. He was of a different generation, an entirely different style, as even the sharpest critics of the administration would acknowledge. “Alone of all the Truman entourage, Clifford has the brains, the personal élan, and the savoir-faire requisite of a big-leaguer,” Washington correspondents Robert S. Allen and William V. Shannon would soon write in a highly critical book called The Truman Merry-Go-Round. Clifford, they judged, was “really of White House class.”

Clifford, who had had little knowledge of Truman, or any particular interest in him, prior to coming to the White House, soon found himself greatly impressed—devoted to the man in a way he would never have expected. “The President is intelligent, forthright and reasonable,” Clifford had written to his mother. “I have developed a deep and abiding affection for him and hope and trust that I may be able to be of some small assistance to him….”

Late the afternoon of the 24th, with no time to spare, Clifford went to work on his first major assignment. Alone at the long, polished table in the Cabinet Room, he labored as he would often again, “grubbing it out” with a yellow legal pad and a soft pencil. For all his many abilities, Clifford was not a facile or inspired writer, nothing like Sam Rosenman. He was not even a good writer, as he conceded, but he worked intensely, writing, erasing, and rewriting one sentence after another, laboriously down the page. He began at five o’clock. By eight a rough draft was ready, and by then a dozen people were in the President’s office, waiting to take part. The revisions went on to the very last minute. Rose Conway, the President’s secretary, was still typing the final pages of his reading copy as he went on the air.

Truman’s own efforts on the ruled tablet paper, meantime, were tucked away in Clifford’s file, to remain undisclosed for another twenty years.

Truman spoke to the country at ten o’clock, eastern time. Margaret, who had been in New York to see a play with her friend Drucie Snyder, John Snyder’s daughter, and who, because of the strike, had had to borrow a car and drive back to Washington, fighting heavy traffic the whole way, arrived at the White House as her father’s broadcast was about to begin. She would remember him looking as tired as she felt.

“I come before the American people tonight at a time of great crisis,” he said. “The crisis of Pearl Harbor was the result of action by a foreign enemy. The crisis tonight is caused by a group of men within our own country who place their private interests above the welfare of the nation.”

His voice was firm, deadly serious. It was “time for plain speaking.” This was no contest between labor and management, but between two willful men and their government.

I am a friend of labor…[but] it is inconceivable that in our democracy any two men should be placed in a position where they can completely stifle our economy and ultimately destroy our country.

He called on the striking railroad workers to return to their jobs as a duty to their country, and warned that if a sufficient number did not return by 4:00 P.M. the next day, he would call out the Army and do whatever else was necessary to break the strike.

He did not say anything about drafting the strikers. That he was saving for his speech to Congress the next afternoon.

Sam Rosenman, who was up most of the night working on the Congress speech, was opposed to the whole idea of drafting the rail workers. Attorney General Clark had also by now put his concerns in writing: “The Draft Act does not permit the induction of occupational groups and it is doubtful whether constitutional powers of the President would include the right to draft individuals for national purposes.” Jimmy Byrnes, too, was strongly opposed. But Truman would not be budged.

The conference on the speech to Congress took place Saturday morning in Truman’s office. John Steelman, meanwhile, had hurried off to see Whitney and Johnston at their suite at the Statler Hotel, determined to make one last try. Truman’s appearance before Congress was scheduled for four o’clock.

The speech was nearly ready at three when Steelman called from the hotel to say he was making progress. The strike might be settled within the hour.

Rosenman and Clifford went into the Cabinet Room and wrote three or four alternative pages. At 3:35 Steelman called again, to report the, situation still unresolved. By now it was past time for Truman to leave for the Capitol. Clifford, the new pages in hand, had to run to catch the President’s car.

It was another sparkling day and as warm as summer. In the crowded House Chamber, even with the air conditioning on, many of the members sat mopping their brows. In the gallery Bess and Margaret could be seen quietly waiting.

When at a few minutes past four Truman walked in, a grim look on his face, the whole room resounded with the biggest ovation he had yet received as President, while in Sam Rayburn’s office close by, Clifford was frantically on the phone again with Steelman, who now said a settlement was “awful close.” Steelman had an agreement on paper in longhand, but it had still to be typed and signed. “He said they had verbally agreed to the points which they had in writing,” Clifford remembered, “but there was no knowing whether they would finally sign.” He would stay by the phone, Clifford told Steelman.

“For the past two days the Nation has been in the grip of a railroad strike which threatens to paralyze all our industrial, agricultural, commercial and social life…. The disaster will spare no one,” Truman said from the rostrum. Strikes against the government must stop. The Congress and the President of the United States must work together—“and we must work fast.”

In the packed press gallery behind him, reporters were writing furiously. “Spotlights blaze, cameras whir, his Missouri voice covers America,” wrote Richard Strout of The New Republic.

He was calling, Truman said, for “temporary emergency” legislation “to authorize the President to draft into the Armed Forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their government.” The audience roared its approval.

At that moment, Les Biffle, Secretary of the Senate, hurried into the chamber and handed Truman a slip of red paper, a note from Clifford. Truman glanced at it, then looked up.

“Word has just been received,” he said, “that the railroad strike has been settled, on terms proposed by the President!”

The whole Congress rose to cheer and applaud, everyone on both sides of the aisle. The sudden interruption by Biffle, the red note in Truman’s hand, the surprise of his announcement had all been like something in a movie. (Some in the audience suspected the entire scene had been concocted for effect, which it had not.) Yet Truman himself made no attempt at dramatics. His grim expression never changed and having come that far in the speech, he continued on, delivering the rest of it as he would have anyway.

The President, who of late had seemed so often bewildered and inadequate, had proved himself extremely tough and decisive when the chips were down, and the reaction of the Congress—and of the country by and large—was instantaneous approval. His “bold action” was praised in the press and by leaders in both parties. He had “grown in national stature,” said the Atlanta Constitution. He had “met magnificently one of the greatest tests of courage ever to face an American President,” declared the Philadelphia Record. Harry Truman, wrote Felix Belair in The New York Times, had shown

he could be tough—plenty tough—when the occasion demanded. He was no less “the average guy” on the streetcar…or driving with the family on Sunday such as he had always been pictured. But just now he was also a man who could rise to the occasion.

The House of Representatives gave him all he wanted, passing the bill to draft the strikers by a margin of 306 to 13, after a debate of less than two hours that same evening.

The Senate, however, refused to be stampeded, largely at the insistence of Senator Taft, who was outraged by the bill, certain that it violated every principle of American jurisprudence. And there were concerns among liberals on the Democratic side as well. Claude Pepper said he would rather give up his seat in the Senate than support such a measure.

A. F. Whitney declared that Truman had signed his own political death warrant. “You can’t make a President out of a ribbon clerk,” Whitney exclaimed at a cheering labor rally in New York’s Madison Square Park. Placards in the crowd said: “Down with Truman,” “Break with Truman.” He was denounced as the country’s number one strikebreaker, called a Fascist, a traitor to the union movement. Later, vowing revenge, Whitney claimed he would spend the last dollar in the treasury of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen to defeat Harry Truman, should he dare run for reelection in 1948.

Prominent liberals were thunderstruck. Sidney Hillman, who was on his deathbed, spoke out against Truman as he never had. “Draft men who strike in peacetime, into the armed services!” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic. “Is this Russia or Germany?” To Truman, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote politely that “there must not be any slip, because of the difficulties of our peacetime situation, into a military way of thinking.”

Ultimately, the proposal to draft the strikers was defeated in the Senate, 70 to 13, the initial cries of Taft and Pepper having grown to a chorus.

But the strike was over, the trains were running again. To the great majority of Americans, Truman had exhibited exactly the kind of backbone they expected of a President. To most it seemed he had been left no other choice. He had done only what he had to do, and shown at last that somebody was in charge.

“I was the servant of 150 million people of the United States,” Truman himself would later say, “and I had to do the job even if I lost my political career.” He had no regrets.

Days later the coal strike, too, ended. On May 29, John L. Lewis met with the coal operators at the White House to sign a new contract. Lewis, it appeared, would be a problem no more, having achieved all he wished for his miners: an 18½ cent-per-hour raise, $100 in vacation pay, a guaranteed five-day workweek, and the 5 cent royalty on every ton of coal mined to go into a welfare fund. While other labor leaders continued the uproar over Truman, the habitually orotund Lewis at last, amazingly, kept silent.

For Truman himself the crisis had provided a chance finally to stand his ground, even take the offensive, none of which did his spirits any harm. Also, importantly, the crisis marked the emergence of Clark Clifford. In another few weeks, Clifford took Sam Rosenman’s former position as legal counsel to the President, and would remain at Truman’s side almost constantly.

IV

The lift that came from settlement of the rail and coal strikes was shortlived for Truman, and whatever confidence he had gained with the American people by his actions, he seemed incapable of holding onto it. As June came and went, as the summer wore on, criticism in the press, dissatisfaction on the Hill continued. Little went right, and with Bess and Margaret back in Independence through the hot months, Truman found himself beset again by loneliness. In August, when Congress left town for its first real break since before the war, and he attempted a vacation of his own, it got off in the wrong direction at first and ended in a storm. Then, in September, he stepped into a silly tangle with Henry Wallace that made him look more of a bumbler than ever in his career. As George Elsey was to remark years later, “Nothing about the Wallace affair was well done. It was miserably handled from one end to the other.”

On June 6, without warning, Truman announced two major appointments, expecting wide approval. To replace Chief Justice Harlan Stone, who had died in April, he had picked Fred Vinson, the Secretary of the Treasury. To fill Vinson’s place, he chose John Snyder. He thought they were exceptionally able men, and trusted both implicitly. Yet to many they were singularly uninspiring choices and seemed to have been made in haste, an impression Truman had only himself to blame for. Asked the day of the announcement when had he made up his mind on Vinson, he snapped, “About an hour and a half ago.”

As Secretary of the Treasury, Vinson had seemed very suitably cast—solid, knowledgeable, with a broad understanding of government machinery. Truman, who had not known Vinson well in the Senate, had since come to admire him greatly, considered him a “devoted and undemonstrative patriot” with, as Truman would write, “a sense of personal and political loyalty seldom found among the top men in Washington.” But Vinson was known more for political sagacity than judicial brilliance, and the choice of the colorless Snyder as his replacement seemed only to underscore the charge of “government by crony.” Portrayed in the press as a “dour little St. Louis banker,” Snyder seemed hardly adequate for the second highest ranking position in the Cabinet. To liberals and former New Dealers especially, Snyder was a pathetic choice. Unadmiring reporters described him as a “repressed” man, with a “pinched, unhappy look,” who “occasionally tries to loosen up with a hefty intake of bourbon or by telling a dirty story.” Among fiscal conservatives, the best that could be said for Snyder was that he might prove cautious. In fact, he was quite cautious, quite conservative, a “plugger” who worked long hours often seven days a week. His appearance to the contrary, he was also a man of much personal warmth, and though lacking in imagination, he had, like Vinson, a great deal of common sense—a quality Truman had often found wanting in more brilliant or charming men. In Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” the poem still neatly folded in his wallet, was the line affirming that it was “the common sense of most”—the common sense of ordinary humanity—which would ultimately “hold a fretful realm in awe.”

In Paris in July, at another drawn-out, acrimonious session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, Secretary of State Byrnes was making little progress with Molotov in the peace treaty negotiations. In April, his relations with the President still strained, Byrnes had told Truman privately that he wished to resign, pleading health problems, but Truman had asked him to stay on at least until the end of the year. Confidentially, through General Eisenhower, Truman informed George Marshall in China that he wanted him to become the next Secretary of State, once Byrnes departed.

Senator Vandenberg, who was part of the American delegation in Paris, came home to report “appalling disagreement” over Germany, and “intense suspicions” between Russia and the West.

There were worries over Russia, worries over Europe, worries over China. In France and Italy, the Communists were emerging as the strongest single political units. In China, the Red Armies of Mao Tse-tung were making steady gains against the Nationalist government forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. To a group of editors and executives from the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company who met with him informally in his office, Truman conceded that the difficulties with China were “very, very bad.”

He was even having troubles back home in Jackson County. Infuriated by a congressman from his own district, Democrat Roger C. Slaughter, who, as a member of the House Rules Committee, had been stalling progress on the Fair Employment Practices bill, Truman decided not to support him for reelection and made a show of bringing Jim Pendergast to the White House to talk about it. “If Mr. Slaughter is right, I’m wrong,” Truman told reporters. He had Pendergast back another candidate in the primary, Enos Axtell, with the result that some in the old Kansas City organization began resorting to their former ways, causing a storm of outrage in the Kansas City Star. When Truman returned to Independence the first week in August to vote in the primary, he discovered that the Star had a reporter staked out with binoculars keeping watch on 219 North Delaware, to record his every move. Seeing the reporter early the next day, Truman made a point of telling him in detail exactly how he had spent the morning thus far, including certain acts performed in the bathroom.

Axtell’s victory in the primary was hailed by Bob Hannegan as a vote of confidence for the President. Reporters in Kansas City, however, turned up evidence of vote fraud, and though three federal judges found only minor violations in the election, Truman’s involvement looked none too good, reviving old stories of his own past connection to the Pendergast machine, not to say doubts about his sense of propriety.

Clark Clifford remembered it as a summer of “wallowing.” Even the President’s health declined. He suffered from an ear infection and a return of stomach pains such as he had not had in years, the result, said Wallace Graham, of “a nervous condition.”

“Obviously, he needs a rest from the strain he’s under,” noted Charlie Ross in his diary, “though he looks the picture of health.”

“Had the most awful day I’ve ever had Tuesday,” Truman wrote to his mother and sister on July 31, “saw somebody every fifteen minutes on a different subject, held a Cabinet luncheon and spent two solid hours discussing Palestine and got nowhere. Today’s been almost as bad but not quite. Got in a swim for the first time since February.”

He was distressed about his mother’s failing health. “She’s on the way out,” he wrote to Bess. “It can’t be helped…. She’s a trial to Mary, and that can’t be helped either.” He wished Bess would be more patient with them.

Bess and Margaret remained in Independence, Bess looking after her own mother, Margaret working with a voice teacher from Kansas City. “Be good and be tough,” she advised her father at the close of one chatty, affectionate letter.

“I still have a number of bills staring me in the face,” Truman wrote to Bess on August 10.

Byrnes called me from Paris this morning asking me not to veto a State Department reorganization bill, which I’d told Clark Clifford I was sure is a striped-pants boy’s bill to sidetrack the Secretary of State. Jimmy told me it wasn’t but I’m still not sure.

I have another one under consideration, which restores civil and military rights to a captain in the quartermaster department. He was court-martialed in 1926 in Panama for some seven or eight charges under the ninety-third and ninety-sixth articles of war. Dick Duncan [a federal district judge in Missouri and former congressman] is interested because the fellow’s from St. Joe and he put the bill through the House and I put it through the Senate on two occasions, and Roosevelt vetoed it both times.

When I read the record I’m not so sure Roosevelt wasn’t right! Ain’t it awful what a difference it makes where you sit! I gave the whole thing to Clifford and told him to give me a coldblooded report on it.

I have another one which is a pain in the neck. Hayden [Senator Carl Hayden], my good friend, and [Congressman Cecil Rhodes] King want it signed. [Clinton] Anderson wants it disapproved and it looks like Anderson is right. It sure is hell to be President.

Longing for a vacation, eager to get away from both Washington and Independence, he had thought first of going to Alaska—he had always wanted to see Alaska—but decided instead on a cruise on the Williamsburg to New England in August and invited his old friend and best man, Ted Marks, to join an all-male party that included Snyder, Ross, Clifford, Vaughan, George Allen, Matt Connelly, and Colonel Graham, enough for an eight-handed game of poker.

Truman loved the Williamsburg. “It’s just wonderful,” he often told its commander, Donald J. MacDonald. “In ten minutes I’m away from everything.” He loved cruising on the river, in placid waters, the green Virginia shoreline slipping by, other boats passing.

When he wasn’t napping or playing cards [MacDonald remembered years later], President Truman was often up on the bridge with us, or sitting on deck. Boats would come alongside and [people] wave to him, which he seemed to enjoy. The boaters were just thrilled to see him. It was a different time, and no one thought of taking a potshot at him. In fact, I think the Secret Service thoroughly enjoyed whenever he went on the Williamsburg, because he became my responsibility. They just went along for the ride. I think often of this….

The first few days, Truman gave up shaving and dipped into Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, The Age of Jackson. But the poker and the comradeship were, as so often, what he obviously liked best and needed most. “Getting together with his old friends with whom he was completely comfortable was the greatest relaxation he had,” remembered Clifford.

See, he had no airs. He never put on airs of any kind. He was much more relaxed with them. He didn’t have to be careful with them. And if he wanted to have a couple [of drinks], why he felt perfectly at ease…nobody ever did it to excess, but that was part of the relaxation. And some of the jokes would be of the type that would not have been told in the White House, and they’d be awfully funny. And perhaps Missouri rural jokes of one kind, and then he had a wonderfully expansive, expressive laugh.

They were important [such times on the Williamsburg]—more important than most people might know because he felt the strains very, very much. He liked to pretend a little that he didn’t. He’d say, “Oh, I sleep fine at night.”

Asked once by a reporter what his attitude was toward card games, Truman replied with a twinkle in his eye, “Card games? The only game I know anything about is that game—let me see—I don’t know what the name is, but you put one card down on the table and four face up, and you bet.”

His enjoyment of poker came mainly from the companionship it provided. He was considered a “fairly good” player, but by no means exceptional.

He was what was called a “loose” player, rarely staying out of a pot and often betting freely with an occasional bluff. He was “full of mischief” at the table. Dealing left-handed, he loved to taunt anyone needing a particular card. Sometimes, after taking a poll of what the others wanted to play, he would deal something else. He liked games with wild cards, and especially a version of ordinary stud poker that he called “Papa Vinson,” after Fred Vinson, who was a particularly skillful player.

“He always plays a close hand, I’ll say that,” Ted Marks remembered. “You can tell when he’s winning, because there’s a kind of smile on his face….” As Truman himself conceded, poker was by far his favorite relaxation, “my favorite form of paper work.” It took his mind off other things more than anything else. It made no difference to him if the stakes were nickels and dimes, and no apparent difference to his enjoyment of the game if he won or lost. Wallace Graham thought the President played poker as much for what it revealed about the other players at the table as for the pleasure of the game itself. The fact that Vinson, for example, was an expert player was not incidental to Truman’s high regard for Vinson.

Clifford, who had played little until coming to the White House, but had bought a book on the game and studied. “assiduously,” would remember that on this and other trips on the yacht, poker, except for meals, took up the better part of most days, but that lunch often lasted two hours or more, because of all the talk, Truman obviously enjoying every moment and contributing more than his share. “I will bet that the subject of his selection as Roosevelt’s running mate in Chicago must have come up forty times…[all the] different facets about it.”

The President’s drinking, widespread stories notwithstanding, was moderate. Some mornings on deck, he might squint at the sky and comment that it must be noon somewhere in the world, and ask for a bourbon. On occasion he would show the effects of several drinks, expressing himself, as Clifford later wrote, “in language less restrained and more colorful than he would otherwise use,” and especially if he had had a particularly vexing week. But he could also nurse a single drink through a whole evening of talk and poker.

“The Williamsburg, being a commissioned vessel, was not supposed to serve liquor,” recalled MacDonald, but as Commander in Chief it was, “of course,” Truman’s prerogative to drink on board if he so wished. “I made no issue of that…. Old Grandad was his favorite.”

When, at Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, they hit cold winds, rain, and fog, Truman ordered a change in plans. They turned and headed south to Bermuda, which, he knew, had been Woodrow Wilson’s favorite retreat, and where finally, in ideal weather, he enjoyed a few days of peace and uninterrupted sunshine. “This is a paradise you dream about but hardly ever see,” he wrote to Margaret on August 23.

But in Hampton Roads on the return to Washington, they sailed straight into a storm. The 244-foot Williamsburg, built in 1930 as a private yacht and purchased by the Navy at the outset of the war, had never been a particularly good seagoing vessel, even after several hundred tons of pig iron were put down in the bilges to improve stability. Now the ship “did all sorts of antics,” as Truman would tell his mother. Violently ill, he took to his bed. “The furniture was taking headers in every direction,” he told Bess, “and it was necessary to stay in bed to keep your legs on.” His stateroom was a shambles. “Papers, books, chairs, clothing, yours, Margaret’s, and Mamma’s pictures mixed up with Time, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, luggage, pillows. Looked as if it never would be in shape again….”

The summer heat of Washington held, and again he was alone in the great white jail, as he had begun calling the White House. Some of the servants had been telling him how the ghost of Abraham Lincoln had appeared over the years. Truman became convinced the house was haunted:

Night before last [he reported to Bess] I went to bed at nine o’clock after shutting my doors. At four o’clock I was awakened by three distinct knocks on my bedroom door. I jumped up and put on my bathrobe, opened the door, and no one there. Went out and looked up and down the hall, looked into your room and Margie’s. Still no one. Went back to bed after locking the doors and there were footsteps in your room whose door I’d left open. Jumped up and looked and no one there! Damn place is haunted sure as shootin’. Secret service said not even a watchman was up here at that hour.

More and more he disliked living there. Better it be made a museum, he thought, and give the President a rent allowance. That way, he told Bess, they could move back to the apartment on Connecticut Avenue, an idea he knew she would welcome.

“You better lock your door and prop up some chairs and next time you hear knocks, don’t answer,” Margaret advised him. “It’ll probably be A. Jackson in person.”

The little oak-paneled elevator that had carried him to the second floor the afternoon of Franklin Roosevelt’s death was being replaced with new equipment. (The old elevator, dating from Theodore Roosevelt’s day, had moved too slowly for Truman and on one occasion broke down, leaving him stranded between floors. He had to ring a gong and wait for the workmen to hurry to the basement and jiggle the apparatus back into motion.) New chandeliers were being installed, his bathtub fitted with a glass shower stall. But he had little faith in the old house.

The stock market was falling. A maritime strike that had begun on the West Coast was rapidly spreading. Next thing, he thought, the White House roof would cave in.

“I’m in the middle no matter what happens,” he wrote mournfully the second week of September, on the eve of the Wallace fiasco.

At a press conference in his office the afternoon of Thursday, September 12, the President was asked by a reporter to comment on a speech scheduled to be given by the Secretary of Commerce at a political rally in New York at Madison Square Garden that evening, copies of which had already been distributed to the press. Truman said he couldn’t answer questions about a speech that had not yet been delivered, at which Charlie Ross and others of the staff standing by appeared to breathe a sigh of relief. “If the President had only stopped there!” Ross later wrote.

The reporter, William Mylander of the Cowles newspapers, pressed on, saying Secretary Wallace referred in the speech to the President himself, which was why he had asked. There was laughter and Truman good-naturedly said that being the case perhaps he should hear the question.

Mylander, who held a copy of the speech in his hand, said it contained a sentence asserting that the President had “read these words” and that they represented administration policy.

That was correct, said Truman.

Was he endorsing a particular paragraph or the whole speech?

He had approved the whole speech, Truman said breezily. Reporters looked at one another.

“Mr. President,” asked Raymond Brandt of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “do you regard Wallace’s speech a departure from Byrnes’ policy…”

“I do not,” Truman snapped back, before Brandt could finish his sentence.

“…toward Russia?”

“They are exactly in line,” said Truman, in a manner implying the question was frivolous, and that he wished reporters would ask something harder.

In truth, he hadn’t read all the speech—or hadn’t been paying attention when Wallace went over it with him—and had given it no thought since. The President, noted Charlie Ross in his diary, had now been “betrayed by his own amiability.”

According to Wallace’s diary account, he and Truman had run through the speech together “page by page,” and Truman agreed with everything in it. “He didn’t have a single change to suggest,” Wallace wrote. Clark Clifford, too, would remember Wallace reading through the speech for the President. But Truman, in his own diary, said he had been able to give Wallace only ten or fifteen minutes, most of which had been taken up with other matters. He had tried to skim through it, Truman wrote, assuming that Wallace was cooperating in all phases of administration policy, including foreign policy. “One paragraph caught my eye. It said that we held no special friendship for Russia, Britain or any other country, that we wanted to see all the world at peace on an equal basis. I said that is, of course, what we want.” It was on the basis of this single paragraph only, according to Truman, that he gave his approval, “trusting to Henry to play square with me.” In private conversation with Charlie Ross, he also admitted that he had looked at only parts of the speech, relying on Wallace’s assurance that the rest was all right.

And most of the speech was indeed “in line” with administration policy. Wallace urged support for the United Nations, called for increased international trade and international control of atomic weapons. But he also condemned British “imperialism” and appeared to be advocating American and Russian spheres of interest in the world, a concept strongly opposed by Byrnes. The United States, Wallace said, had “no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America….” Any “Get Tough” policy was foolhardy. “‘Get Tough’ never brought anything real and lasting—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world power,” Wallace said. “The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.”

At Madison Square Garden, departing from his prepared text, Wallace told an audience of twenty thousand—an audience, in part, vociferously pro-Soviet—“I realize that the danger of war is much less from Communism than it is from imperialism….”

As James Reston wrote in The New York Times the following day, Truman appeared to be the only person in Washington who saw no difference between what Wallace had said and his own policy, or that of his Secretary of State in Paris, who, reportedly, was outraged. An angry Arthur Vandenberg declared there could be only one Secretary of State at a time.

Saturday morning, the 14th, his immediate staff gathered about his desk, Truman openly berated himself for having made so grave a “blunder.” At a press conference that afternoon, he read a carefully prepared statement, and this time no questions were permitted. There had been “a natural misunderstanding,” Truman said. His answer to Mr. Mylander’s question had not conveyed the thought intended. It had been his wish only to express approval of Secretary Wallace’s right to deliver the speech, Truman insisted, not approval of the speech itself.

Having stumbled into trouble, he was clumsily and obviously fabricating in a desperate effort to get himself out and get Byrnes “off the hook” in Paris. “There has been no change in the established foreign policy of our country,” he also said, which was true but did no good. “The criticism continued to mount,” wrote Ross, who had helped prepare the statement.

Dispatches from Paris…indicated that Byrnes and his delegation felt that something more needed to be done. And, indeed, they were right. The question still remained whether Wallace was to be allowed to go on attacking in public the foreign policy line laid down by Byrnes at Paris. The press secretary’s seat became warmer and warmer. I could only reply to questions that the President and Byrnes were not in communication.

The “Wallace episode” boiled on for days. As Wallace continued to tell reporters that he stood by his speech, Truman kept to a light schedule, saying nothing further for attribution.

Then Ross, too, blundered badly. Hearing that columnist Drew Pearson had obtained a long private letter written by Wallace to Truman two months earlier—a letter apparently “leaked” to Pearson by someone in the State Department—Ross, without approval from Truman, agreed with Wallace that the letter should be released to the press, in order to deny Pearson the limelight. When Ross informed the President of what he had done, Truman told him to call Wallace at once and stop release of the letter. But by then it was too late, the letter was out.

Dated July 23, it consisted of twelve single-spaced typed pages more critical even of administration policy than Wallace’s speech had been. Forcefully advocating a new approach to the Soviet Union, Wallace charged, among other things, that certain unnamed members of the U.S. military command advocated a “preventive war” before Russia had time to develop an atomic bomb.

“I’m still having Henry Wallace trouble and it grows worse as we go along,” Truman confided plaintively to his mother on Wednesday, September 18. Wallace was expected momentarily at the White House. “I think he’ll quit today and I won’t shed any tears. Never was there such a mess and it is partly my making. But when I make a mistake it is a good one.”

To Wallace, too, Truman said he had only himself to blame for most of what had happened. He had not known so many sleepless nights since the convention at Chicago.

They talked alone in the Oval Office, Wallace giving no sign that he intended to quit. His mail, Wallace said, was running five to one in favor of his New York speech. “The people are afraid that the ‘get-tough-with-Russia’ policy is leading us to war,” Wallace told him. “You yourself, as Harry Truman, really believed in my speech.” He advised Truman to be far to the left when Congress was not in session, then move to the right when Congress returned. That was the Roosevelt technique, Wallace said. Roosevelt had never let his right hand know what his left hand was up to. “Henry told me during our conversation that as President I couldn’t play square,” Truman would report to Bess, “…that anything was justified so long as we stayed in power.” If Truman would only lean more in his direction, Wallace said, it could mean victory for the Democrats in Congress in November. Truman told him he thought the Congress would go Republican in any event.

He asked Wallace to stop making foreign policy speeches—“or to agree to the policy for which I am responsible.” But Wallace would not agree.

Still Truman refused to fire him. Indeed, he hardly dared offend him. As the last surviving New Dealer in the Cabinet, Wallace was too important symbolically—as Wallace knew, and as Wallace knew Truman knew. For countless liberal Democrats Wallace remained the rightful heir to the Roosevelt succession, while Truman was only a usurper. For Truman to have an open break with Wallace, anything like the Ickes affair, could be politically disastrous. The only agreement reached at last, after two and a half hours of talk, was that Wallace would say no more on foreign policy at least until Byrnes came home.

In the lobby afterward, when reporters asked if everything had been straightened out, Wallace replied, “Everything’s lovely.”

“Henry is the most peculiar fellow I ever came in contact with,” Truman informed his mother. In his diary, he was more explicit. Wallace was unsound intellectually and “100 percent” pacifist.

He wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic bomb secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo. I do not understand a “dreamer” like that…. The Reds, phonies and “parlor pinks” seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.

I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin. They can see no wrong in Russia’s four-and-a-half million armed force, in Russia’s loot of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Manchuria. They can see no wrong in Russia’s living off the occupied countries to support the military occupation.

At the Pentagon, at Truman’s request, Secretaries Patterson and Forrestal issued a joint statement denying they knew of any responsible Army or Navy officer who had ever advocated or even suggested a policy or plan of attacking Russia.

From Paris, Byrnes sent Truman a long, reasoned message asking to be relieved at once:

When the administration is divided on its own foreign policy, it cannot hope to convince the world that the American people have a foreign policy…. I do not want to ask you to do anything that would force Mr. Wallace out of the Cabinet. However, I do not think any man who professes any loyalty to you would so seriously impair your prestige and the prestige of the government with the nations of the world…. You and I spent 15 months building a bipartisan policy. We did a fine job convincing the world that it was a permanent policy upon which the world could rely. Wallace destroyed it in a day.

At 9:30, the morning of Friday, September 20, Truman called Wallace on the phone and fired him, and, as Truman confided to Bess, Wallace was “so nice about it I almost backed out.” Then he added, “I just don’t understand the man and he doesn’t either.”

Further, Wallace offered to return an angry, longhand letter—“not abusive, but…on a low level,” as Wallace described it—that Truman had sent him the night before. “You don’t want this thing out,” Wallace told Truman and Truman gratefully agreed. He was very happy to take it back. Later, Wallace crossed the street from his office and posed for photographers sitting peacefully on a park bench reading the comic papers.

When at a crowded, hurriedly called press conference in his office Truman made the announcement, there were audible gasps from reporters and one long, low whistle. Once the room was cleared, Truman sat down at his desk and turning to Ross, who was standing nearby, said, “Well, the die is cast.”

He had shown, Ross told him, that he would rather be right than President. “I would rather be anything than President,” Truman said.

“No man in his right mind would want to come here [to the White House] of his own accord,” he had written earlier to Margaret. Now, wishing as always to shine untarnished in her eyes, he tried to excuse his handling of the Wallace affair by saying he had no gift for duplicity. To be a good President, he told her, one had to be a combination Machiavelli, Louis XI of France, Cesare Borgia, and Talleyrand, “a liar, double-crosser and unctuous religio (Richelieu), hero and whatnot,” and he didn’t have the stomach for it, “thanks be to God.”

He was mulling history and his own life more and more. On September 26, anniversary of the start of the Argonne offensive of 1918, reflecting on the intervening years, he wrote in his diary as follows, referring to himself only as “a serviceman of my acquaintance.” The rage that filled his earlier rail strike “speech” was absent now, replaced by a kind of melancholy and disappointment, and an underlying resolve to face whatever he must:

Sept. 26, 1918, a few minutes before 4 A.M. a serviceman of my acquaintance was standing behind a battery of French 75’s at a little town called Neuville to the right of the Argonne Forest. A barrage was to be fired by all the guns on the Allied front from Belgium to the Swiss border.

At 4 A.M. that barrage started, at 5 A.M. the infantry in front of my acquaintance’s battery went over. At 8 A.M. the artillery including the 75 battery referred to moved forward. That forward movement did not stop until Nov. 11, 1918.

My acquaintance came home, was banqueted and treated as returned soldiers are usually treated by the home people immediately after the tension of war is relieved.

The home people forgot the war. Two years later, turned out the Administration which had successfully conducted our part of the war and turned the clock back.

They began to talk of disarmament. They did disarm themselves, to the point of helplessness. They became fat and rich, special privilege ran the country—ran it to a fall. In 1932 a great leader came forward and rescued the country from chaos and restored the confidence of the people in their government and their institutions.

Then another European war came along. We tried as before to keep out of it. We refused to believe that we could get into it. The great leader warned the country of the possibility. He was vilified, smeared, misrepresented, but kept his courage. As was inevitable we were forced into the war. The country awoke—late, but it awoke and created the greatest war production program in history under the great leader.

The country furnished Russia, Britain, China, Australia and all the allies, guns, tanks, planes, food in unheard of quantities, built, manned and fought the greatest navy in history, created the most powerful and efficient air force ever heard of, and equipped an army of 8½ million men and fought them on two fronts 12,000 miles apart and from 3,000 to 7,000 miles from the home base, created the greatest merchant marine in history in order to maintain those two battlefronts.

The collapse of the enemies of liberty came almost simultaneously in May for the eastern front and in August for the western front.

Unfortunately the great leader who had taken the nation through the peacetime and wartime emergencies passed to his great reward just one month before the German surrender. What a pity for this to happen after twelve long years of the hardest kind of work, three and a half of them in the most terrible of all wars.

My acquaintance who commanded the 75 battery of Sept. 26, 1918, took over.

The same elation filled the home people as filled them after the first world war.

They were happy to have the fighting stop and to quit worrying about their sons and daughters in the armed forces.

Then the reaction set in. Selfishness, greed, jealousy, raised their ugly heads. No wartime incentive to keep them down. Labor began to grab all it could get by fair means or foul, farmers began black-marketing food, industry hoarded inventories and the same old pacifists began to talk disarmament.

But my acquaintance tried to meet every situation and has met them up to now. Can he continue to outface the demagogues, the chiselers, the jealousies?

Time only will tell. The human animal and his emotions change not much from age to age. He must change now or he faces absolute and complete destruction and maybe the insect age or an atmosphereless planet will succeed him.

V

Harold Ickes called him “stupid.” If the world had to depend on Truman and his administration to keep it out of trouble, wrote Time, then the world had much to worry about. Not in eighty years, not since Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, had a President been the target of such abuse. He was made fun of for his mid-American mannerisms, his Missouri pals, the by now famous devotion to his mother. “Every day is Mother’s Day in the White House,” it was said with a snicker. According to one of the latest Washington jokes in the autumn of 1946, Truman was late for a Cabinet meeting because he woke up stiff in the joints from trying to put his foot in his mouth. A joke from Texas began with reflections on how Roosevelt might have handled the country’s problems, then ended with the line, “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.” A Chicago Sun cartoon that was reprinted widely showed him popeyed and befuddled, one hand on his aching head, asking, “What next?” In Boston, the Henry M. Frost Advertising Agency came up with an inspired two-word campaign slogan for the Republicans: “Had enough?”

Truman’s popularity had vanished. Poll results released the first week in October, a month before the congressional elections, showed only 40 percent of the country approved his performance.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in what struck many as a bald play for the Jewish vote in New York, he called for admitting 100,000 Jewish refugees to the British protectorate in Palestine. But the fact was he had already made the same statement months before, and Republican Thomas E. Dewey, who was running for reelection as governor of New York, now quickly outbid him for Jewish support by demanding that several hundred thousand Jews be permitted to migrate to Palestine.

In another few weeks Truman’s standing in the polls plunged to a low of 32 percent, nearly 50 points below where it had been the year before.

The depression that everyone had so feared had not come. Employment, even with all the strikes, was high. Money was plentiful. Business was booming. But the cost of living had also leaped 6½ points just since the end of 1945 and there were still acute shortages of the things people most wanted—housing, automobiles, refrigerators, nylon stockings, sugar, coffee. And, increasingly, meat. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, fearing a Democratic debacle at the polls, complained to a friend, “This is going to be a damned ‘beefsteak election’!” As November drew closer and the meat shortage grew worse, the Republicans capitalized on a made-to-order issue. Cattle raisers staged a strike, refusing to send cattle to market. “Nothing on meat, Mr. President?” Truman was asked by reporters on October 10. “Nothing on meat,” he said.

Democratic Party Chairman Bob Hannegan warned Truman that if controls on meat prices were not dropped, he could expect a Republican sweep. Truman told his staff he was sure to be damned whatever he did. If he ended controls, he would be accused of caving into pressure. If he left things as they were, he would continue to be seen as cause of all the trouble.

Talk of his Pendergast connection was encouraged, as Republicans stepped up the heat. He became, again, the little machine hack from backwater Missouri. New York showman Billy Rose suggested W. C. Fields for President in 1948, saying, “If we’re going to have a comedian in the White House, let’s have a good one.” The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Congressman Carroll Reece of Tennessee, declared nothing remained of the Democratic Party but three distasteful elements: southern racists, big-city bosses, and radicals bent on “Sovietizing” the country.

Discontent over meat shortages was one thing, fear of Communist influence and infiltration was quite another and in the long run far more important. A Red scare was clearly on the rise. Edward T. Folliard of the Washington Post found “hatred of communism rampant” everywhere he traveled. Harry Truman, the. Republicans charged, was pursuing a policy of appeasing the Russians abroad and fostering communism at home. The Democratic Party, said Senator Taft, was “so divided between Communism and Americanism that its foreign policy can only be futile and contradictory and make the United States the laughing stock of the world.” John Taber, a Republican congressman from Auburn, New York, who had a voice like a bullhorn, warned of Communist infiltration of the universities, even the Army, while in California, another Republican congressional candidate, young Richard M. Nixon, castigated high officials “who front for un-American elements, wittingly or otherwise.”

Yet such attacks were hardly different in spirit from Truman’s own private anxieties over “Reds” and “parlor pinks,” and who could say, after the uncovering of the Ottawa spy ring, that there was no cause for alarm? That summer, under pressure from Attorney General Clark, Truman had secretly agreed to continuation of electronic surveillance in cases where the national defense was involved, a policy instituted by Roosevelt, although, as Clark neglected to tell Truman, Roosevelt’s original authorization in 1940 had been limited to aliens only. In a speech at San Francisco, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI warned that no less than a hundred thousand Communists were loose in the country.

“The shrill pitch of abuse heaped upon the President continued to echo,” wrote Time. “So mild a man as Harry Truman might well wonder at the temper of his countrymen.”

Democrats were filled with despair. Bob Hannegan advised Truman that it would be best if he made no campaign appearances or political speeches, a decision Truman accepted. He kept to the White House. For days, for a portrait by Frank O. Salisbury, the British artist who had done Roosevelt, Truman posed in Charlie Ross’s office, where three windows provided ample north light. On the afternoon the Supreme Court was to make its traditional White House call, he was listening to the deciding game of the 1946 World Series—the St. Louis Cardinals vs. the Boston Red Sox—when a staff aide told him the justices would soon be arriving in formal attire. Truman hurried upstairs and changed into striped trousers and a swallowtail coat, only to find at the reception that he alone was formally dressed.

Few campaigning Democrats even so much as mentioned the President’s name. In some congressional contests, Democratic candidates resorted to playing old recordings of Roosevelt speeches to boost their chances. Senator Harley Kilgore, a warm friend and admirer of Truman, who was running for reelection in West Virginia, found that in the back hollows and coal fields the mere mention of Truman’s name brought a chorus of boos and catcalls. “Here was a man who was actually doing an excellent job,” Kilgore would recall, “but the most you could do was to defend him in a humorous fashion by using the old Western saloon refrain: ‘Don’t shoot our piano player. He’s doing the best he can.’ ”

The capacity to smile when in trouble is a prime requirement for a politician, as Truman, a career politician, had long understood, and now, as so often before in difficult times, he revealed no sign of anger or gloom. He never complained, never acted sorry for himself, or blamed others. He was as cheerful and optimistic, as interested in others, as pleased to see them and to be with them, as ever. As Alonzo Fields, who saw him daily and close-up as only a butler could, later wrote of Truman, he “never seemed to have a problem,” at this or any other time when worries beset him. “I am sure no one in the household could tell when he was troubled.”

On October 14, three weeks before the election, Truman went on the radio to announce that reluctantly he was lifting price controls on meat. On October 23, he flew to New York to address the General Assembly of the United Nations at Flushing Meadow. “The course of history,” he said in a well-reasoned speech, “has made us one of the stronger nations of the world. It has therefore placed upon us special responsibilities to conserve our strength and to use it rightly in a world so interdependent as our world today.” Even the Russians complimented him.

“We went to the Waldorf [afterward],” he wrote Margaret. “Your Ma put on her best bib and tucker and we went down to the ballroom for a reception. Shook hands with 835 people in one hour flat….”

Still he kept silent on politics. Traveling home by train to Independence to vote, he was greeted at Jefferson City by a crowd of cheering schoolchildren who set up a chant: “Make a two-hour speech; make it a full holiday.” But Truman, all smiles, only waved and shook his head, then clamped one hand over his mouth.

The Republicans swept the election, carrying both houses of Congress for the first time since before the Depression, an era so distant to most people that it seemed another world. The margin in the House was 246 Republicans to 188 Democrats, in the Senate, 51 to 45. The Republicans took a majority of the state governorships as well, including New York, where Thomas E. Dewey was reelected by the largest margin ever recorded. In one city after another—Chicago, Detroit, Jersey City, New York—Democratic machines went down to defeat. In Kansas City, Truman’s own handpicked candidate for Congress, Enos Axtell, lost to his Republican opponent by 6,000 votes, which Margaret Truman remembered as “mortifying” for her father.

The Chicago Tribune hailed the Republican triumph as the greatest victory for the country since Appomattox. The New Deal had been finally put to flight, the grip of the Democrats in Washington broken at last. Harry Truman, the “accidental” President, was now also a “minority” President. A young Democratic congressman from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, was so distressed by the Republican landslide and the likelihood of a two-year stalemate in Washington that he proposed Truman appoint Arthur Vandenberg Secretary of State, then resign, and thus make Vandenberg President—an idea that led Truman to refer to Fulbright thereafter as “Halfbright.”

Truman and his family started back to Washington on election day without waiting for the polls to close. By arrangement, however, the election returns were to be put on board the train every hundred miles or so.

That night, Charlie Ross came through the train to invite several Washington reporters to join the President in his private car for a poker game. “The game was hot and heavy until about 2 A.M.,” remembered Merriman Smith of United Press. “The returns had been arriving in a steady stream since 9 P.M. Not once did Truman look at them, nor did he refer to the elections.”

At one point Margaret interrupted to say the results from Independence had come in. Truman, glancing at the slip of paper, shook his head and smiled up at her.

“Why bother with this sort of thing?” he said. “Don’t worry about me—I know how things will turn out and they’ll be all right.”

“Probably no President since Andrew Johnson had run out of prestige and leadership more thoroughly than had Harry Truman when he returned almost unnoticed to Washington on that bleak, misty November morning in 1946,” wrote Cabell Phillips. At Union Station Truman stepped from his car silent but smiling, a book under his arm.

12

Turning Point

This is a serious course upon which we embark…

—Truman to congress, 1947

I

Was Harry Truman an ordinary provincial American sadly miscast in the presidency? Or was he a man of above-average, even exceptional qualities and character, who had the makings of greatness?

“What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star had written on Truman’s first day in office. Now, less than two years later, Walter Lippmann, like a great many others, was convinced the test had not worked. To Lippmann, regarded as the most thoughtful, authoritative political commentator of the time, Truman was an embarrassment. His bravado and quick decisions, Lippmann thought, were a facade for an essentially insecure man filled with anxieties. How could the affairs of the country be conducted by a President who not only had lost the support of his party, but was no longer in command of his administration?

In the years on the farm, when courting Bess—his first campaign—Truman himself had professed to being only a common everyday fellow. He could promise her no more. But he had written also that every farmer “thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little better,” meaning that by the old Jeffersonian faith in which he had been raised, what was ordinary grass-roots American was as good as the best.

Questioned once by a reporter whether he considered himself the sublimation of the average man, Truman rejected the fancy phrase and asked in turn, “Well, what is wrong with being the average man?”

Since 1945 numbers of others had judged him as anything but ordinary. At Potsdam, Churchill immediately perceived the new President to be “a man of immense determination,” and in the fateful spring of 1947, from Chartwell, his home south of London, where he was busy with his memoirs, Churchill would write to tell “My dear Harry” how much he admired “what you have done for the peace and freedom of the world….” For Churchill, the presidency of Harry Truman had become the one cause for hope in the world.

Dean Acheson, who could be extremely hard, even contemptuous in his judgment of men he did not consider his equals, had described Truman, after Roosevelt’s death, as straightforward, decisive, honest, and if inexperienced, likely to learn fast. And in the time since, Acheson had found no reason to think differently. On the morning in November 1946 when Truman arrived at Washington’s Union Station, his political stock at an all-time low, Acheson alone of all the administration was waiting on the platform to greet him, a gesture that Truman, understandably, never forgot. Acheson looked to Truman as a leader. “The captain with the mighty heart,” Acheson would call him.

Arthur Krock of The New York Times, foremost of Washington correspondents, was another who had seen something “very good and human and courageous” in this unlikely President, and at a point when many political commentators were ready to write him off. Felix Belair, White House correspondent for the Times, had decided that while Truman might look as much like “the average guy on the streetcar” as ever, he was a man to rise to the occasion.

So testament from experienced observers that this was a President of considerable substance—and that It would be a mistake to count him out—was already plentiful, even before the great change that came in 1947.

David E. Lilienthal, whom Truman had earlier reappointed head of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), was a trim, agreeable-looking man in his mid-forties, the son of Jewish immigrants, a graduate of DePauw University and the Harvard Law School, and regarded still as a model New Dealer. TVA was a huge success. It had built dams, created lakes, forests, new industries, new farming methods, brought electricity to some 700,000 users, and, during the war, fueled the giant uranium plants at Oak Ridge. And Lilienthal, as much as anyone, had made TVA.

Unlike so many New Dealers who had quit since Roosevelt’s death—who had fled government, as Clark Clifford said, “so fast they were falling all over each other”—Lilienthal had chosen to stay, not once, but twice. In October he had resigned from TVA to become Truman’s designated, though still unconfirmed, head of the new Atomic Energy Commission, which Truman insisted be under civilian control. It was a position potentially as important as almost any in postwar Washington and one for which Lilienthal felt himself inadequately qualified. But then who was qualified? And the President had been extremely persuasive and patient, while Lilienthal went through days of soul searching.

Hardworking, articulate, Lilienthal was an exceptionally able man, if by some people’s standards overly liberal, and his presence in the administration—like that of Byrnes, Marshall, Harriman (who had returned from London to replace Henry Wallace at the Department of Commerce), Acheson, Bohlen, and Clark Clifford—belied the whole idea that Truman had surrounded himself only with Missouri fools and mediocrities.

Lilienthal did not entirely approve of Truman’s performance thus far. As a liberal he had been so shattered by Truman’s call to draft the striking rail workers that after hearing Truman’s speech over the radio, Lilienthal walked out into his garden in Tennessee and stood in a drenching rain, hoping it might wash away his misery. Still Lilienthal had faith in Truman, faith in the man—because Truman had shown such faith in him, but also because he saw qualities of courage and candor rare in a politician. Indeed, he felt better about working for the Truman administration, Lilienthal said, than he had working for Roosevelt, because now he could get straight answers.

Since November, Lilienthal had been extremely concerned about the effect so humiliating a defeat in the elections might have on Truman’s self-confidence and thus on his program. Lilienthal’s own appointment, as a prime example, was bound to stir up a hornets’ nest, once the confirmation process began on the Hill, since the aging, vituperative Senator McKellar of Tennessee, who had fought to deny Lilienthal’s reappointment at TVA and despised him no less than ever, had just been reelected to another term.

Not for a month after the elections did Lilienthal actually see the President, and then only by chance. It was at about five o’clock on an afternoon in early December, when Lilienthal and Clifford were working quietly in the Cabinet Room. The day was nearly over, it was growing dark outside. Clifford nudged him to look up at the French doors that opened to the outside passage to the main house. The President was standing on the other side of the glass, looking in at them and smiling. Not knowing what else to do, Lilienthal rose and bowed awkwardly. Truman waved, still smiling, then moved quickly on, a Secret Service man a half step behind.

Nothing had been said, the whole incident occupied only seconds, but to Lilienthal it was a moment of encouragement worth recording in his diary, as he would also record the hearty welcome Truman gave him a few days later in the Oval Office, when, with the four others on his new commission, Lilienthal came to make a brief progress report. The Army would relinquish no more control over atomic energy than it could possibly avoid, Truman warned. “I know how they are, they are trained not to give up. I know because I am one of them.” Again he was smiling.

As the meeting ended and the group wished the President luck, Truman, thanking them, replied that his luck had been improving lately, this in reference to a recent test of wills with John L. Lewis. But what impressed Lilienthal was “the kind of grim gaiety in his tone and manner….”

The change in the President became more obvious by the day. There had been a “showdown” with John L. Lewis, just after the November elections. At Clark Clifford’s urging, Truman had challenged the legality of still another threatened coal strike. Except this time it was to be a “fight to the finish,” as Truman said. “Oh, God, it was the chance of a lifetime,” Clifford would remember. “ ‘Be right, be strong. Nobody’s bigger than the President of the United States.’ All the signs were right. It looked like Lewis had violated the law…. Roosevelt had toadied to him time and again. But now he pushed the President the wrong way. And he just said one day, ‘Okay, we’re going to go!’ ”

The administration took the powerful labor boss to court, on the grounds that he was violating the Smith-Connally Act, which prohibited strikes against government-held facilities, the coal mines being still technically under government seizure. An injunction was served, and when Lewis let the strike begin on November 20, a federal district judge ordered him to stand trial for contempt. Lewis refused. On December 4, the judge hit the United Mine workers with a stunning $3 million fine, and fined Lewis personally $10,000. Truman, meanwhile, had been to Florida and back, for a few days of vacation at the Key West naval base. On December 7, Lewis gave up and ordered his men back to the mines, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. (In March 1947 the Supreme Court upheld the contempt ruling, though the fine against the union was later reduced.)

It was a resounding victory for the administration and another step up for Clifford. Established now in Sam Rosenman’s old office, the second largest and best office in the West Wing, Clifford was only twenty paces from the President’s desk and saw him six or seven times a day. Often they ate together in the basement lunchroom.

Truman was hugely pleased by the collapse of Lewis. For the first time in months, he was being praised by the press—“Harry S. Truman stood fast, where Franklin Roosevelt met [Lewis] halfway,” said Newsweek—and this, too, of course, he greatly enjoyed. But the real change, in the view of his old friend Charlie Ross and others, had come with the elections. It was the sweeping Republican triumph, ironically, that had given Truman a new lease on life, freeing him at last from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt as perhaps nothing else could have. He owed no one anything any longer. He was free to take charge, to be himself, and show what he could do if he had to. He was on his own again, much as he had been in the 1940 Senate race, when Tom Pendergast was out of the picture and Roosevelt had abandoned him; or as he had been on the farm when his father died, or in France in 1918, when, with his new captain’s bars, he stood alone, trembling, and speechless before his new command.

The President was “now a free man and can write a fine record,” Ross wrote to his sister. “The real Truman administration,” Ross told White House reporters, “began the day after the elections.”

And clearly Truman agreed. In a letter to Bess from Key West, he had vowed, “I’m doing as I damn please for the next two years and to hell with all of them.”

Far from being downcast or tentative about his new role as a “minority” President, he had returned from Florida tanned, rested, eager to get going. He had accepted the verdict of the people in the spirit, he said, that “all good citizens accept the results of any fair election.” The change in Congress did not alter the country’s domestic or foreign problems, and in foreign affairs especially it must be “a national and not a party program.” Of course, conflicts would arise between a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. That was to be expected. But he, Harry Truman, would be guided by a simple idea: “to do in all cases…without regard to political considerations, what seems to me to be for the welfare of all our people….”

In the new 80th Congress, Joe Martin would replace Sam Rayburn as Speaker of the House. In the Senate, instead of Alben Barkley, Taft and Vandenberg would hold the reigns of power, and with the tacit understanding that Taft would attend to domestic issues, Vandenberg to foreign affairs, as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Truman knew the three Republican leaders from years of experience. Vandenberg, whom he knew best and liked best, had been a friend since Truman’s first days in the Senate, and Truman considered him both able and trustworthy. A former newspaper editor from Grand Rapids, “Van” had been an all-out isolationist until the war, but Pearl Harbor, he liked to say, had ended isolationism for any realist. (Once in London during an attack of German robot bombs, Vandenberg remarked to a friend, “How can there be immunity or isolation when men can devise weapons like that?”) It was a conversion of far-reaching consequence. Not only was Vandenberg one of the Senate’s inner circle, and among Republicans the undisputed authority on foreign affairs, but he was a formidable force as a speaker. Large and hearty, he had the mannerisms of a somewhat pompous stage senator—the cigar, the florid phrase, and more than a little vanity, carefully combing a few long strands of gray hair sideways over the top of his bald head. When making a point on the Senate floor, he favored the broad gesture, grandly flinging out one arm in a sweeping arc. His prestige reached beyond national boundaries, and like Truman during his years in the Senate, he had made no enemies.

Vandenberg was the son of a harnessmaker, Joe Martin the son of a blacksmith, backgrounds Truman could identify with, as he could not with the privileged world of Robert A. Taft, whose father had been President William Howard Taft. Martin, who came from North Attleboro, Massachusetts, a factory town south of Boston, had arrived in Congress first in 1925, when his friend Calvin Coolidge was President. And for forty-two years Martin’s outlook had remained fundamentally that of Coolidge. No legislation of importance had been attached to his name, no memorable declaration of political philosophy, but he was a good cloakroom organizer and known as dependable and fair-minded, “straight as a string,” as was said in the home district. A short, square man, he wore poorly fitting three-piece navy blue suits and boxy black policeman’s shoes. Even when speaking to small groups at home he would stand on a chair in order to be seen. A lock of dark hair that fell over the right side of his forehead had become a trademark.

Like his Democratic counterpart, Sam Rayburn, Martin was a bachelor. He neither drank, nor smoked, nor showed much interest in anything beyond politics and the hometown newspaper he owned, the North Attleboro Chronicle. Whatever was good for the district, Joe Martin held, was “pretty much good” for the nation.

On New Year’s Day, busy placing calls to his Cabinet to wish them a Happy New Year, Truman decided to phone Vandenberg and Martin as well, and was encouraged by the results. Vandenberg was “very pleasant,” Martin even more so, assuring the President that cooperation was uppermost in his mind. “He told me that he would be most happy to talk to me any time on any subject,” Truman recorded. “I am inclined to believe that he meant what he said.”

Taft, whom Truman did not call New Year’s Day, was a remote, self-absorbed man, “a cold fish” in the view of many. (“Bob is not austere,” his wife once explained. “He’s just departmentalized.”) Younger than Truman by five years, Taft had been born into affluent, cultivated surroundings in Cincinnati. He had stood first in his class at Yale and later at the Harvard Law School. Though he had served in the Senate since 1938, he looked more like a banker than a politician. He wore rimless spectacles and, like Harry Truman, his hat at dead center. His Cheshire Cat grin was famous.

Often tactless, habitually brusque with those less intelligent than he, Taft was a poor “mixer,” a poor public speaker. He had trouble remembering names. His reputation for hard work and standing by principle, however, his fund of knowledge and ability to cut to the heart of an issue were considered second to none in the Senate. He was “Mr. Republican,” incorruptible, extremely conservative, and, unlike Vandenberg, a confirmed isolationist. But he could also be highly independent—and exasperate the old guard of his party—by advocating such liberal programs as federal aid to education, health, and housing. Senator Wallace H. White of Maine, a quiet, colorless figure, was to be the Republican majority leader in name only; Taft would be the one running things.

Taft, Vandenberg, and Martin were all determined to restore Congress to the prestige and authority that had been lost during the Roosevelt era. Martin would insist in his first address as Speaker, “Our American concept of government rests upon the idea of a dominant Congress.” All three men, furthermore, were considered presidential prospects for 1948, and Taft in particular. Determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, Taft had already tried for the Republican nomination in 1940. Now, with Harry Truman in office, his opportunity looked greater than ever.

Nor, importantly, was Taft interested in cooperating with the administration. “The purpose of the opposition is to oppose,” he was fond of saying. And unlike Vandenberg and Martin, he had little regard for Truman, who to Taft was truly an ordinary man, deficient in background and education, ill-equipped in nearly every way for so heavy a responsibility, in addition to being overly susceptible to the bad advice of liberals.

Among the new faces in Republican ranks in the 80th Congress were Representative Richard M. Nixon of California, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Among the relative handful of new Democrats elected was Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Joe Kennedy.

For all the labor strife of the year before, the country was prospering as it never had, just as Truman declared in his State of the Union message on January 6, 1947. Food production was at a new high. The national income was higher than ever before in peacetime. “We have virtually full employment,” he said with satisfaction.

He looked like a man befitting the message, healthy and purposeful. At seven that morning he had walked from the White House to Union Station to meet the train from Missouri bringing Bess and Margaret, who sat now listening in the gallery.

He called for far-ranging improvements in labor-management relations, a strengthening of the anti-trust laws, a national health insurance program, including support for mental health, child care, and hospital construction. He wanted a “fair level of return” for farmers, aid to veterans, an “aggressive” program of home construction. He promised new progress in civil rights.

In no way was the speech a retreat from the domestic programs he had set forth in his message of 1945. Yet the tone was different, more reasonable, more optimistic. He advocated a balanced budget, a streamlining of the military establishment, international control of atomic energy. He ended with what would later seem a prescient line, about sharing America’s bounty with the war-stricken peoples over the world.

Also, notably missing this time was any mention of Franklin Roosevelt.

Written in large part by Clark Clifford, with help from George Elsey, who like Clifford was in naval uniform no longer but serving as Clifford’s assistant, the speech went far to raise Truman’s standing with Congress. Even greater was the effect of the surprise announcement he made at the White House the following evening: George C. Marshall was to be the new Secretary of State. Jimmy Byrnes had resigned. Marshall was already en route from China.

The appointment of Marshall was one of the best, most important decisions of Truman’s presidency. One wonders, as Truman must have in later years, how differently history might have unfolded had Marshall declined to serve as Secretary of State at that particular moment in world affairs. The reaction everywhere was immediate, virtually unanimous approval. Henry Stimson might have been speaking for the whole nation when he wrote to Marshall: “Your appointment as Secretary of State has filled me with a great sense of security so far as our country is concerned. Mr. Truman made a wise as well as a very shrewd appointment.”

On Capitol Hill, Arthur Vandenberg pushed the nomination through the Foreign Relations Committee without a hearing or opposition, and by calling for a suspension of the rules, ran it through the Senate for unanimous approval the same day. The one possible shadow on the appointment, in the view of some Republicans, was the chance that it might set Marshall up as a future candidate for President, an idea Marshall himself put to rest the same morning he arrived in Washington. He would never be a candidate for any political office, he said, and being Marshall he was taken at his word.

He was sworn in at the White House by Chief Justice Vinson later that morning, Tuesday, January 21, 1947. When a beaming Truman shook his hand and said how much he appreciated Marshall’s willingness to accept “this burden,” Marshall replied simply that he would do his best.

At sixty-six, George C. Marshall was the first career soldier to become Secretary of State. He had been born on the last day of 1880 in Union-town, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, where through boyhood, from his businessman father, he heard repeated accounts of his distinguished Virginia ancestry, including the distantly related John Marshall, the great Chief Justice. “I thought that the continuing harping on the name John Marshall was kind of poor business,” he later said. “It was about time for somebody else to swim for the family.” Graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1901, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and advanced steadily thereafter, serving in the Philippines, Oklahoma Territory, and Fort Leavenworth, until World War I when, as Pershing’s aide, he directed the American advance to the Argonne. Between the wars, he had served three years in China. In 1939, Roosevelt made him chief of staff.

He was slightly under six feet tall, with sandy-gray, close-cropped hair and light blue eyes. His long face, with its long upper lip, had a homespun, fatherly quality and often, in repose, he looked quite sad. With age his shoulders had begun to stoop slightly. As Dean Acheson would write, there was little military glamour about him, nothing pretentious. Rather it was an intangible aura that affected people. Like George Washington, with whom he was often compared, Marshall was a figure of such flawless rectitude and self-command he both inspired awe and made description difficult. Churchill called him “the noblest Roman.” Bill Hassett on Truman’s staff spoke of the “reverence” Marshall inspired. Imperturbable under pressure—“the imperturbability of a good conscience,” George Kennan called it—invariably courteous, he was without a trace of petty vanity or self-serving ambition.

As one of his staff at the State Department later wrote, Marshall did not possess the intellectual brilliance of someone like Acheson, or the gift of eloquence, but he could distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, and this made him invaluable.

Acheson liked to recall in later years that the moment Marshall entered a room, one could feel his presence. “It was a striking and commanding force. His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled respect. It spread a sense of authority and calm.” At the Pentagon some lower-ranking officers had been known to exit from Marshall’s office backwards, and no one of any rank, not even the President, called him “George,” only “General Marshall,” a title, as Acheson said, that suited him as though he had been baptized with it. Once, reportedly, when Roosevelt had called him “George,” he responded, “It’s General Marshall, Mr. President.”

Truman described Marshall as “astute,” “profound,” and more of a listener than a talker. “He never made any speeches at you,” Truman would gratefully recall. “Sometimes he would sit for an hour with little or no expression on his face, but when he had heard enough, he would come up with a statement of his own that would invariably cut to the very bone of the matter under discussion.” But it was Marshall’s rock-bound sense of duty, his selflessness and honesty that Truman especially prized. “He was a man you could count on to be truthful in every way, and when you find somebody like that, you have to hang on to them.”

As Truman the politician also appreciated, Marshall stood high with Republicans on the Hill in a way almost no one else did, and this irrespective of the fact that he had worked so closely through the war with the Democrat they all liked least, Franklin Roosevelt. It had been Marshall who got the first peacetime draft past Congress, Marshall who had confided the secret of the atomic bomb to the congressional leadership, trusting them to keep the secret.

For Marshall, his recent mission to China had been a heavy disappointment. Trying to mediate a peace between the two Chinas of the Nationalist Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists of Mao Tse-tung, he had achieved only a tentative cease-fire. “I hate failure,” he told a friend. But failure was what he had had to announce on the eve of his departure from China. “On the one hand the leaders of the Government are strongly opposed to a communistic form of government,” he reported. “On the other, the Communists frankly state that they are Marxists and intend to work toward establishing a communistic form of government in China….” His efforts with the Kuomintang had been frustrating in the extreme. It was a government riddled with corruption, overburdened with too many generals. “Though I speak ‘as a soldier, I must deplore the dominating influence of the military.” But the Communists fostered only chaos and violent anti-American propaganda, and with more than a million men under arms, their power was gaining.

Marshall had failed in his mission to China, yet no one blamed him for the failure, such was the scale of the problem and his own reputation. No one looked on his new assignment as anything but a very large step forward for the troubled Truman administration.

Marshall assumed his new duties at once and at once the difference was felt. Jimmy Byrnes had been a hardworking Secretary of State, and more effective than generally acknowledged, or than Truman would portray him in his later reflections. But Byrnes had been maddeningly independent, determined to do everything himself, and continuously, uncurably on the move. In 546 days as Secretary, Byrnes had been away 241, and had shown little interest in the department itself. Under Marshall all that changed. “He gave a sense of purpose and direction. His personality infected the whole Foreign Service,” Bohlen remembered. “There was greater clarity in the operation…than I had ever seen before…[and] Marshall never forgot, as Byrnes did, that Truman was President.”

With Truman’s blessing, a new Policy Planning Staff was established under the brilliant George Kennan, who had been recalled from Moscow. Organization overall was made more orderly and efficient. When section heads fell into dispute in his presence, Marshall would tell them, “Gentlemen, don’t fight the problem. Solve it!”

Acheson, who had wished to return to private life, was persuaded to stay on as Under Secretary for another six months. Acheson found working with the general such a joy, wrote David Lilienthal after a dinner at Acheson’s Georgetown home, that he could “hardly talk about anything else.” Marshall, like Truman, was decisive. When Acheson informed Marshall that the State Department had outgrown its quarters in the old Victorian structure beside the White House, and that a new building was available near the Potomac, in the section called Foggy Bottom, Marshall said, “Move.”

To no one was Marshall’s presence more reassuring, or inspiriting, than to Truman. “The more I see and talk to him the more certain I am he’s the great one of the age,” Truman wrote not long after Marshall’s swearing in. “Marshall is a tower of strength and common sense,” he noted privately another time. It was admiration such as Truman felt for no other public figure, no one he had ever known, not Roosevelt, not Churchill, not anyone. Nor was he at all hesitant or concerned over having such a strong-minded man as his Secretary of State—Marshall, Harriman, Patterson, Forrestal, Lilienthal, Eisenhower, they were all strong-minded. Conceivably, Truman could have worried that someone of such Immense reputation as Marshall in so prominent a role would diminish his own standing with the country, that he might suffer by comparison, and Marshall be perceived as more the sort of man who ought to be President. But Truman was neither jealous nor intimidated. He was not so constructed. “I am surely lucky to have his friendship and support,” he wrote, and that was that.

By early February 1947 White House reporters were commenting on the President’s greater ease and relaxation. “He no longer moans to every visitor that he doesn’t want the job and never did,” wrote Joseph Alsop to a friend. After a social call on the President, the former heavyweight boxing champion, Gene Tunney, said he had never seen a more solid citizen. “His eye is clear and he is just as solid as a wall. His jaw is square and his stomach is just as flat as an athlete’s.”

Truman’s popularity in the polls, due in large measure to Marshall’s presence, was back up to 48 percent.

The whole atmosphere was different. Truman had opened the White House to sightseers again after a six-year wartime ban on all but official callers. He and Bess reinstated formal receptions and state dinners for the first time since 1941, and the contrast between the Trumans “at home” in their private quarters and their official social life was amazing.

The President, with his sense of history, wanted White House entertaining done just so, “done to the minute,” by rules that had not changed in half a century, except in wartime. “They brought back all the pageantry,” assistant head usher J. B. West remembered approvingly, “all the formality, all the pomp that we had all but forgotten how to execute.”

We [the White House staff] had to work out the details, so that all the President and his wife had to do was to be in the right place at the right time. For a reception, they’d march down the stairs to the Blue Room and receive the guests, and then march back upstairs. But behind the scenes, we spent weeks of preparation and scheduling for each detail of that “right place” and “right time.”

Attendance at the first reception, to honor the Supreme Court on December 10, had been 1,333. Dress was white tie, the Marine Band played. “The papers say today that Bess and I have shaken hands with 7,000 people this season,” Truman wrote to his mother on February 9. At a full-dress affair for Senator Vandenberg in the State Dining Room, the gold service was used. The night of the diplomatic reception again more than a thousand attended. (Before the war only about five hundred people in total had been accredited to the embassies and legations in Washington.) For one occasion Truman asked Eugene List, the concert pianist, to perform for “the customers,” and again, as at Potsdam, List played the President’s favorite Chopin Waltz in A Minor, but this time without the President’s help as page-turner.

I was somewhat nervous through the entertainment [Truman told his mother], because Mr. Grim the usher and Jim Rowley [of the Secret Service] came and told me that the engineers had found that the chain holding the center chandelier was stretching…. I let the show go and ordered the thing down the next day. If it had fallen I’d been in a real fix….

Truman was glad to see Lent arrive and put an end to such affairs, he told his mother. He was tired of “smirking at people I don’t like.” On February 19, in another letter to Grandview, he could report that “the season” was over, “thank goodness.” But the truth was he had had a fine time, every time. J. B. West would remember that “despite all the denying in the world (which he did), we could see the President enjoyed it. He was an extrovert, a friendly man, and he liked company.”

Hearings on the Lilienthal nomination were causing a sensation, meanwhile, with Senator Kenneth McKellar insisting TVA was a “hotbed of Communism” and that David E. Lilienthal was more than a little suspect. The senator thought it was General Groves who had discovered the secret of splitting the atom and failed to understand why Groves should not therefore be left in command of his discovery.

Looking down from the bench, the senator asked Lilienthal where his parents had been born. When Lilienthal was unable to answer with certainty, McKellar acted as though he had scored an important point. He pressed the issue again another day. This time Lilienthal said he had been able to determine only that it had been in Austro-Hungary, somewhere near Pressburg, in what had since become Czechoslovakia. Again McKellar smiled at the audience as if everything were going his way—Czechoslovakia being under Soviet influence. But when he turned and abruptly asked Lilienthal to explain his views on “the communistic doctrine,” the answer Lilienthal gave held the room spellbound. With his hands folded on the table in front of him, Lilienthal spoke for several minutes, his eyes not on McKellar or the committee, but on a spot somewhere just above his hands, almost as though he were talking to himself. He had felt a kind of smoldering within, he later wrote, “far from anger or temper, but some emotional tempo quite different, but definitely emotional.” As he talked he kept saying to himself, “Don’t deny; affirm.”

I believe in, [he said] and I conceive the Constitution of the United States to rest, as does religion, upon the fundamental proposition of the integrity of the individual; and that all Government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual….

Any forms of government, therefore, and any other institutions, which make men means rather than ends in themselves, which exalt that state or any other institutions above the importance of men, which place arbitrary power over men as a fundamental tenet of government, are contrary to this conception; and therefore I am deeply opposed to them…. The fundamental tenet of communism is that the state is an end in itself, and that therefore the powers which the state exercises over the individual are without any ethical standards to limit them. That I deeply disbelieve.

It is very easy simply to say one is not a Communist. And, of course, if despite my record it is necessary for me to state this very affirmatively, then this is a great disappointment to me. It is very easy to talk about being against communism. It is equally important to believe those things which provide a satisfactory and effective alternative. Democracy is that satisfying alternative.

And its hope in the world is that it is an affirmative belief, rather than simply a belief against something else….

I deeply believe in the capacity of democracy to surmount any trials that may lie ahead provided only we practice it in our daily lives.

And among the things that we must practice is this: that while we seek fervently to ferret out the subversive and anti-democratic forces in the country, we do not at the same time, by hysteria, by resort to innuendo and sneers and other unfortunate tactics, besmirch the very cause that we believe in, and cause a separation among our people, cause one group and one individual to hate one another, based upon mere attacks, mere unsubstantiated attacks upon their loyalty….

Hearsay and gossip had no place in courts of justice. If the principles of protection of an individual and his good name against gossip and hearsay were not upheld by legislatures in their investigating activities, that too would be a failure of the democratic ideal. Then, pausing, he unfolded his hands and said, “This I deeply believe.”

For a moment the room was silent. Then, almost in a rush, members of the committee and people from the audience began crowding around him to praise Lilienthal for what he had said.

From the White House Truman let Lilienthal know that he would not only stand behind the nomination but was in the fight with all he had “if it took 150 years.”

In the days following, a strain of anti-Semitism in the opposition to the appointment became increasingly apparent. Then, without warning, and without waiting for the committee report to reach the floor, Senator Taft announced he would oppose the nomination on the grounds that Lilienthal was not only a “typical power-hungry bureaucrat,” and “temperamentally unfitted” for the job of heading the Atomic Energy Commission, but “soft on the subject of Communism.” Until this point it had been McKellar’s show, and thus largely personal and predictable. (In earlier days the senator had seen Communists behind the anti-poll tax bill, too.) But now with Mr. Republican stepping in, it became a distinctly partisan issue, and, as was said, a major Capitol crisis. The phrase “soft on Communism” caught on immediately.

Lilienthal did not see how he could possibly win with the Republican majority lined up against him. The Taft speech had been “a kick in the teeth.” How long the confirming process might take, and at what toll, no one could say.

“Courage: What is it?” Lilienthal asked in his diary. “Isn’t it the capacity to hang on?”

II

He had been trying for days to find time to write to her, Truman told his sister in a letter in February.

He was more concerned than usual about staying in touch. Mamma had had a fall and fractured her hip. Truman had flown home to see her, but remained gravely worried—and concerned, too, about the burden of care on Mary Jane. “Now Mary, don’t you work too hard.” If she needed help, she was to get it.

“Things have been happening here in a hurry,” he told her. Foreign affairs were uppermost. Marshall was to leave for Moscow in little more than a week, for his first Foreign Ministers’ Conference. He himself would be flying to Mexico in three days, for the first visit to Mexico ever by a President of the United States. “I am spending every day with Marshall going over policy and hoping we can get a lasting peace. It looks not so good right now.”

The date was February 27, 1947. Six days earlier, on the 21st, a month to the day since Marshall took up his duties as Secretary of State, an urgent formal message, a so-called “blue paper,” from the British ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, had been delivered to the State Department. Marshall had been out of town, speaking at Princeton University’s bicentennial convocation. So it was Under Secretary Acheson who telephoned Truman that afternoon. Great Britain, its financial condition worsening, could no longer provide economic and military support for Greece and Turkey. The cost was too great. The Attlee government would withdraw forty thousand troops from Greece and all economic aid would halt as of March 31. The United States, it was hoped, would assume the responsibility.

The news was both momentous and not wholly unexpected. Britain was in desperate straits. All Europe had been hit by one of the worst winters on record. In France, the cold destroyed millions of acres of winter wheat. Snow fell in Paris for the first time in years. In Berlin, where temperatures hovered around zero, people were dying of the cold. Ice clogged the Kiel Canal from the Baltic to the North Sea. Food and fuel were scarce everywhere. In Prague, electric current was being shut off for three hours a day. But Britain was hit hardest, the whole country virtually snowbound. Factories and schools closed. Huge snowdrifts blocked highways and railroads, closed coal mines, and isolated hundreds of small towns. When a bus on a main coastal road ran into a ten-foot drift and a snowplow was brought to the rescue, reported The Times of London, the snowplow, too, was buried. “Weather Threatens Coal Supply,” read the headline in The Times on. February 6. To save power, London offices were being lit with candles. And the storms continued. On February 21, the day of Lord Inverchapel’s message, it snowed again over most of the country.

On January 20, meantime, the British government had issued an economic White Paper describing Britain’s position as “extremely serious.” That Britain would soon have to cut back on its armed forces and overseas commitments was self-evident. The situation, wrote Walter Lippmann, would “shake the world and make our position highly vulnerable and precariously isolated.”

Specific warnings had been crossing Truman’s desk for weeks. As early as February 3, the American ambassador in Athens, Lincoln MacVeigh, reported rumors that the British were pulling out of Greece, where, since 1945, their troops and money had helped maintain a royalist government in a raging civil war with Communist guerrillas. On February 12, another dispatch from MacVeigh urged immediate consideration of American aid to Greece. A few days later, Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a member of a United Nations investigating committee, cabled from Athens that Greece was a “ripe plum” ready to fall into Soviet hands.

Warnings about Turkey had come even sooner. Turkey had “little hope of independent survival unless it is assured of solid long-term American and British support,” cabled General Walter Bedell Smith, who had replaced Averell Harriman as the American ambassador in Moscow.

Truman himself, furthermore, had already made his concern for the future of Greece clear to the Greek government, if not, as yet, to the American people. In the fall of 1946, through Ambassador MacVeigh, Truman had acknowledged that Greece was of vital interest to the United States and promised substantial aid to maintain its independence, providing the Greek government could show that democracy survived there—a question of considerable importance, since the Greek government, as Truman knew and later wrote, “seemed to encourage irresponsible rightist groups.”

But while the crisis in Greece and Turkey came not without warning, the formal announcement of British withdrawal did come, as Truman said, “sooner than we expected,” and its very formality made it seem especially dramatic and unsettling.

February 21 was a Friday. Truman asked Acheson for a report by Monday, and Acheson, Bohlen, and others worked through the weekend at the old State Department, where packing boxes cluttered the halls in preparation for the move to Foggy Bottom. On Monday, Marshall and Acheson met with the President and urged “immediate action” to provide help for Greece, and, to a lesser degree, for Turkey as well. To Marshall the British announcement of withdrawal from Greece was tantamount to British withdrawal from the whole Middle East. He, too, saw the situation as extremely serious. The sum needed for Greece alone just for the remainder of 1947 was a quarter of a billion dollars.

Truman agreed. Greece would have to be helped, quickly and with substantial amounts.

But aid to Greece was only one aspect of the problem. It had been a year now since Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech at Fulton. Something more than a simple aid bill was called for. On this Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Clifford—virtually all who had a say in policy—were agreed. One ranking State Department official, Joseph M. Jones, urged that Secretary Marshall, not the President, go before Congress, to rouse the nation to the reality of the crisis, because, as Jones wrote in an internal memorandum, Marshall was “the only one in Government with the prestige to make a deep impression.”

Things were indeed “happening in a hurry,” as Truman told his sister. The morning of the 27th, he called the congressional leaders to his office for a crucial meeting. They listened first to Marshall, who, in measured tones, told them, “It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.” The choice was “acting with energy or losing by default.”

Acheson, who thought Marshall had failed to speak with appropriate force, asked to be heard. There was no time left for a measured appraisal, Acheson said. Greece was the rotten apple that would infect the whole barrel. “The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. It did not need to win all the possibilities.” When Acheson finished (according to his own later account), Vandenberg told the President in a sonorous manner that if he would say the same thing in the same way to Congress, then he, Vandenberg, would lend his support and so would a majority on Capitol Hill—his clear implication being that aid to Greece and Turkey could be had only if Truman shocked Congress into action. But in his memoirs, for all his regard for Acheson, Truman would make no mention of Acheson’s remarks or the Vandenberg response as described by Acheson. Truman said only that Marshall had made it “quite plain” that the choice was to act or lose by default—“and I expressed my emphatic agreement to this.”

The meeting ended at noon. Nothing was disclosed of what had been said.

The crowds in Mexico City were such as Truman had never experienced. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets to see and cheer an American President for the first time. The trip had been Truman’s idea and the acclaim was thrilling. He returned the “Vivas!” of the throngs (one woman shouted, “Viva Missouri!”), and several times broke away from his Mexican and Secret Service escorts to shake hands with people. “I have never had such a welcome in my life,” he told the Mexican legislature, to whom he pledged anew Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. To a crowd of American citizens later, he said he hoped they would remember that they, too, were ambassadors.

The next morning, he announced suddenly that he wished to make an unscheduled stop at Mexico City’s historic Chapultepec Castle, where, with one simple, unheralded gesture, he did more to improve Mexican—American relations than had any President in a century. Within hours, as the word spread, he had become a hero.

The long motorcade pulled into the shade of an ancient grove of trees. Truman stepped out of his black Lincoln and walked to a stone monument bearing the names of Los Niños Héroes, “the child heroes,” six teenage cadets who had died in the Mexican-American War in 1847, when American troops stormed the castle. According to legend, five of the cadets had stabbed themselves, and a sixth jumped to his death from a parapet rather than surrender. As Truman approached, a contingent of blue-uniformed Mexican cadets stood at attention. As he placed a floral wreath at the foot of the monument, several of the cadets wept silently.

After bowing his head for a few minutes, Truman returned to the line of cars, where the Mexican chauffeurs were already shaking hands with their American passengers.

The story created an immediate sensation in the city, filling the papers with eight-column, banner headlines. “Rendering Homage to the Heroes of ‘47, Truman Heals an Old National Wound Forever,” read one. “Friendship Began Today,” said another. A cab driver told an American reporter, “To think that the most powerful man in the world would come and apologize.” He wanted to cry himself, the driver said. A prominent Mexican engineer was quoted: “One hundred years of misunderstanding and bitterness wiped out by one man in one minute. This is the best neighbor policy.”

President Truman, declared Mexican President Miguel Alemán, was “the new champion of solidarity and understanding among the American republics.”

Asked by American reporters why he had gone to the monument, Truman said simply, “Brave men don’t belong to any one country. I respect bravery wherever I see it.”

The three-day whirlwind visit ended on March 6, when the presidential party departed on The Sacred Cow before dawn. Moonlight reflected on the plane’s wings as Truman looked out the window. Despite the hour and the chill morning air, a thousand people had come to see him off.

Less than a year before, in July 1946, as only a few were aware, Truman had asked Clark Clifford to prepare a comprehensive analysis of Soviet-American relations, the first of its kind.

The project began at once, and though Clifford remained in charge, and with his editing gave the finished effort much of its tone and emphasis, the real work—research and writing—was done by his assistant, George Elsey, who had suggested the project in the first place. He had felt, Elsey later explained, that Truman was judging Russia on “too narrow a basis,” his concerns limited too often to whether or not Russia was keeping its agreements.

By the time Elsey was finished in September 1946, the report ran to nearly 100,000 words. It was immensely detailed and clearly influenced by Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” but most of it had been drawn from interviews with or written reports from a dozen or more key people within the executive branch, including the State and War departments, and in all it was a far more alarming state paper than the “Long Telegram,” even though, as Elsey himself later said, most of the material had been previously called to Truman’s attention by Byrnes, Forrestal, Harriman, Leahy, even Harry Hopkins as early as April 1945.

Titled “American Relations with the Soviet Union,” it began by stating that such relations posed the gravest problem facing the United States and that Soviet leaders appeared to be “on a course of aggrandizement designed to lead to eventual world domination by the U.S.S.R.”

The Soviet Union was “consistently opposed” to British-American efforts to achieve world peace agreements, because the longer peace settlements were postponed, the longer Red Army troops could “legally” remain in “enemy” countries. Moreover, the Soviets were maintaining excessively large military forces in the satellite countries. The Soviets already dominated Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. In Austria only the presence of British, French, and American occupation troops prevented a Soviet takeover.

Communist parties were growing in France and Italy. In a weak and divided China, the USSR was “in a position to exert greater influence there than any other country.” The Soviets were supplying the Communist forces in China, while in Korea, the Soviets had shown that they would consent to the unification of the country only if assured of a “friendly” government.

Most ominous was Soviet military power:

Generalissimo Stalin and his associates…are supporting armed forces stronger than those of any potential combination of foreign powers and they are developing as rapidly as possible a powerful and self-sufficient economy. They are seizing every opportunity to expand the area, directly or indirectly, under Soviet control in order to provide additional protection for the vital areas of the Soviet Union.

The menace was gathering. Russia was rapidly developing “atomic weapons, guided missiles, materials for biological warfare, a strategic air force, submarines of great cruising range….” The Soviet Union, the grim report continued, was also actively directing espionage and subversive movements in the United States.

Since the “language of military power” was the only language the Russians understood, it was necessary that the United States maintain sufficient military strength to “confine” Soviet influence. Therefore, the United States, too, must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare. “The mere fact of preparedness may be the only powerful deterrent to Soviet aggressive action and in this sense the only sure guarantee of peace.”

In reviewing the situation in the Middle East, the report noted that the Soviets hoped for the withdrawal of troops from Greece to establish another of their “friendly” governments there. The Soviet desire for Turkey was a puppet state to serve as a springboard for the domination of the eastern Mediterranean.

Finally, the report concluded that in addition to maintaining its military strength, the United States “should support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R.”

George Kennan, when asked to look at a nearly completed draft, judged it “excellent.” Truman, who was up much of one night reading the final report, called Clifford at his home early the next morning to ask how many copies there were. Ten, Clifford said. Truman wanted the other nine put immediately “under lock and key.” The report was so “hot,” he told Clifford, that if it ever came out its effect on his efforts to resolve the East-West conflict peacefully would be “exceedingly unfortunate.”

How much effect it had on Truman is difficult to gauge. He never said. Clifford, when recounting the Truman years, would stress its great far-reaching influence, while Elsey would be far more modest. “The impact of having it all drawn together may have had some influence on the President,” Elsey would speculate. “Again, I don’t think one can—you never know and neither the President nor anyone else is ever able—to say exactly what all the influences are that help make up his mind.”

All the same, it was Clifford and Elsey who, after Truman’s return from Mexico, put the finishing touches to the historic speech Truman would make before Congress concerning the situation in Greece, and much that was in the speech came directly from the report.

At a Cabinet meeting on March 7, Truman’s first day back from Mexico, Acheson said the complete disintegration of Greece was only weeks away. “If we go in we cannot be certain of success in the Middle East and Mediterranean. If we do not go in there will be a collapse in these areas.” There was also, of course, the possibility of “military risk.”

Truman felt he faced a decision as difficult as any ever to confront a President. The money for Greece was only the beginning. “It means the United States is going into European politics….” The President’s staff viewed the speech as potentially the most important of his career.

A first draft had been prepared at the State Department, but Truman thought it too wordy and technical, more like an investment prospectus, as he later wrote. He also wanted the addition of a strong statement of American policy. Acheson made cuts and revisions, modified several passages, including a key sentence that essentially repeated what had been in the Clifford-Elsey report about helping countries in jeopardy from the Soviet Union, only here the Soviet Union was not to be mentioned by name.

“It is the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” the line read in its original state. Acheson changed it to, “I believe it must be the policy of the United States….”

To Clifford, it was time to take a stand against the Soviets, time for “the opening gun” in a campaign to awaken the American people. As he had urged the President to stand fast against John L. Lewis, so Clifford now urged a strong response to Stalin.

George Kennan, on the other hand, thought the speech went too far, and in Paris, Marshall looked it over with Chip Bohlen, who was accompanying him to Moscow, and both felt there was “too much rhetoric.”

When Bernard Baruch, who had no official position in the administration, let it be known that he too wished to have a say in the matter, Truman refused. “If you take his advice,” Truman said, “then you have him on your hands for hours and hours, and it is his policy. I’m just not going to do it. We have a decision to make and we’l l make it.”

(Hearing the story later from Clifford, David Lilienthal wrote in his diary that “the President’s comment interested me because it was so human: one of the few things a President can enjoy is to decide whom he will consult.”)

Truman had Clifford and Elsey finish up the final draft as suited him. He was no Woodrow Wilson, who could sit down at a typewriter the night before addressing Congress at an historic juncture and tap out his own speech. But he knew what he wanted. “I wanted no hedging…. It had to be clear and free of hesitation or double talk.”

In answer to Marshall’s concern about “rhetoric,” Marshall was told that in the opinion of the executive branch, including the President, the Senate would not approve the new policy without emphasis on the Communist threat. Probably that was correct.

“There is, you know, such a thing as being too intellectual in your approach to a problem,” Clark Clifford would say years later in an interview.

The man who insists on seeing all sides of it often can’t make up his mind where to take hold.

Without any disparagement, that was never a problem for Mr. Truman. He wanted all the facts he could get before he made up his mind. But if he could get only 80 percent of the facts in the time available, he didn’t let the missing 20 percent tie him up in indecision. He believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all. And when he made up his mind that was it….

We’d been through the greatest war in which the world had ever been involved…. This is 1947. The war ended in August of 1945. There was every reason for Harry Truman to say, “This is not for us.” And he kept worrying about it, thinking about it…. I remember thinking there was really nothing to impede the Soviet forces, if they chose to, from just marching straight west to the English Channel…. And yet he decided that it had to be done…. Harry Truman looks at this, and he just steps up to it….

The speech setting forth what became known as the Truman Doctrine was delivered in the House Chamber before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, March 12, 1947, beginning a few minutes past one o’c lock. It was a straightforward declarative statement lasting eighteen minutes. Greece was in desperate need, the situation was urgent. The existing Greek government was not perfect, and the government of the United States, no less than ever, condemned extremist measures of the right or left. Though Turkey, unlike Greece, had been spared the destruction and suffering of the war, Turkey also needed American support.

One of the primary objectives of American policy, Truman said, was “the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free of coercion.” This had been a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan, countries that had tried “to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other countries.”

Dressed in a dark suit and dark tie, he read from an open notebook slowly and with great force. His audience listened in silence. Hardly anyone moved. In the front row, John Snyder had his head bowed. Beside him the perfectly tailored Acheson sat as stiff and straight as if at a memorial service, hands folded in his lap. Further along in the same row, Senator Taft fiddled with his glasses, rubbed his face, then yawned. On the dais behind Truman, Speaker Martin and Senator Vandenberg were following the speech line by line in printed copies.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes….

Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East.

We must take immediate and resolute action….

To many who were listening there in the chamber and over the radio, it seemed an odd, ironic time for a crisis. The United States was the richest, strongest country in the world and prospering as few could have ever imagined. Production was up. Incomes were up. There were few strikes. There was no more waiting for new automobiles, no meat shortages any longer. White shirts, nylon stockings, fishing tackle, and golf balls were back on store shelves. Because of the GI Bill, more than 4 million veterans were attending college, as most never could have in other times. Yet the speech seemed disturbingly like a call to arms, “Well, I told my wife to dust off my uniform,” an ex-soldier enrolled at the University of Oklahoma remarked to a reporter.

The cost of winning the war had been $341 billion. Now $400 million was needed for Greece and Turkey. “This is a serious course upon which we embark,” Truman said at the finish, and the look on his face was serious indeed. “I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious…. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world, and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.”

The entire room rose in applause, but as Acheson later wrote, it was more as a tribute to a brave man than a unanimous acceptance of his policy. Truman, holding the closed notebook with the speech in front of his chest with both hands, nodded to the applause left and right, several times, but he never smiled.

Editorial reaction was overwhelmingly supportive. The New York Times compared the speech to the Monroe Doctrine. To the editors of Time and Life it was a great clearing of the air at long last. “Like a bolt of lightning,” said Life, “the speech cut through the confused international atmosphere.” The President, said Collier’s, had “hit the popularity jackpot.” But support was often expressed with troubling reservations—“Are we to shoulder the mantle of nineteenth century British imperialism?” asked the San Francisco Examiner—and some of the liberal press was outraged. PM charged Truman with scrapping Roosevelt’s whole policy on Russia.

Most important was the objection of Walter Lippmann, who, though favoring aid to Greece, disapproved of the President’s tone. “A vague global policy which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits,” Lippmann warned. “It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted.”

That the speech was of immense importance, signaling a turning point, no one seems to have doubted. “If words could shape the future of nations,” wrote Newsweek, “these unquestionably would. They had clearly put America into power politics to stay.”

On Capitol Hill Senator Vandenberg was quick to stress that he did not consider Greek-Turkish aid as a “universal pattern,” but something only “to fit a given circumstance.” Acheson, too, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the bill was not intended to establish a pattern for the future. The United States, he stressed, would “of course” act “according to the circumstances of each specific case.”

Objections in Congress came from liberals and conservatives alike. Senator Pepper was sure such a policy would destroy all hope of reconciliation with Russia. Senators Byrd and McKellar were opposed chiefly because of cost. “I guess the do-gooders won’t feel right until they have us all broke,” said Republican Representative Harold Knutson of Minnesota.

Truman, within minutes after delivering the speech, had been on his way to the airport and another flight to Florida. The President, explained Wallace Graham, had been “going pretty hard lately” and needed a rest. In plain truth, the President was exhausted. Writing to Margaret from Key West, he said no one had any idea how “worn to a frazzle” he was by “this terrible decision.” But the police state of communism was no different from the police state of the Nazis, he told her. He had known that since Potsdam.

In the time between Truman’s dramatic appearance before Congress and the final vote on aid to Greece and Turkey, the fight in the Senate over the Lilienthal nomination grew intense and abusive. The opposition was nearly all Republican. Senator John Bricker of Ohio, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944, warned that it might be the last chance ever to get the Atomic Energy Commission out of the hands of leftists. Capehart of Indiana said that especially now, in view of the situation in Greece and Turkey, control of atomic energy ought to be returned to the Army, an idea that appealed also to Senator Taft. Brewster of Maine, who had once served on the Truman Committee, claimed Lilienthal’s indifference to communism made him no less a threat than if he were an outright party member.

“If Mr. L. is a communist so am I,” Truman wrote privately. He would carry the fight to the end, Truman vowed. “It is a matter of principle and we cannot let the peanut politicians ruin a good man….” Taft, Truman thought, was succeeding only in making himself look like a fool.

A few Republicans—Knowland of California, Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Aiken of Vermont—declared support for the nominee. But the decisive moment came when Vandenberg spoke to a tense session on the afternoon of April 3, giving what many thought was his finest speech ever.

David Lilienthal, Vandenberg said, was “no part of a communist by any stretch of the imagination.” When Vandenberg called for Lilienthal’s confirmation, the galleries roared with applause.

There was a test vote on an amendment. Lilienthal was with Truman at the White House when Charlie Ross put his head in at the door to report the result. They had won by a margin of 14 votes, more than anyone had thought possible. Truman and Lilienthal shook hands. Atomic energy was “the most important thing there is,” Truman remarked, looking subdued and thoughtful. “You must make a blessing of it, or,” he said, pointing to a large globe in the corner, “we’ll blow that all to smithereens.”

The final, formal vote in the Senate came on April 9, when a total of twenty Republicans defied Taft to support Lilienthal. Of the southern Democrats, only four besides McKellar voted against him. The nomination was confirmed by 50 to 31. It was Truman’s first test of strength with the new Congress and a sweet victory.

Yet the issue of loyalty—the issue of who was or who was not, in Taft’s phrase, soft on communism—was by no means ended. The Republican leadership, having made communism a theme with such success in the fall elections, would keep up the demand for investigations, and Truman, to head off such attacks from conservatives in both parties, had by this time accepted the view of a special commission—and of Attorney General Clark and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover—that a program of loyalty reviews was necessary. The whole concept troubled him. In notes he made of a conversation with the President in May 1947, Clark Clifford wrote: “[He is] very strongly anti-FBI…. Wants to be sure to hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo.’ ”

Further, much too much was being made of “the Communist bugaboo,” Truman thought, and said so in a letter to a former Pennsylvania governor named George Earle. The country was “perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned—we have far too many sane people.”

The political pressures bore heavily, however. Attorney General Clark, conceding that the number of disloyal employees in the government was probably small, argued that even one such person posed a serious threat. J. Edgar Hoover wanted authority to remove anyone from public service whose views were politically suspect. Such people, Hoover warned, might well influence foreign policy in a way that could “favor the foreign country of their ideological choice.” Like many Republicans on Capitol Hill, Hoover saw the State Department as the core of the problem. In his first speech as the new Speaker of the House, Joe Martin had declared there was “no room in the government of the United States for any who prefer the Communistic system.” Accusations that the New Deal had been riddled with Communists were made repeatedly and widely believed, however unfounded. “The long tenure of the Democratic Party had poisoned the air we Republicans breathed,” remembered Martin much later. “Fear of Communist penetration of the government was an ugly new phenomenon. Suspicion of the State Department was rife. We were disturbed and bewildered by the new power of the Soviet Union.”

Truman worried particularly about the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the extremes it might go to under its vile-tempered, and to Truman contemptible, Republican chairman, Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. By acting first on the loyalty issue, Truman hoped to head Thomas off. Also, importantly, he wanted no accusations of administration softness on communism at home just as he was calling for a new hard approach to communism abroad.

On Friday, March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing an elaborate Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. And he did so with misgivings.

Roosevelt, in 1942, had empowered the Civil Service to disqualify anyone from government employment where there was a “reasonable doubt of loyalty,” and by executive order Roosevelt later assigned the Justice Department and FBI to check on the loyalty of government workers. But that had been during the war. Until now, no such step had ever been taken in peacetime.

His purpose, Truman later wrote, was twofold: to guard against disloyal employees in the government work force, and to protect innocent government workers from unfounded accusations. To show that he had no intention of playing politics with the program, he put a conservative Republican, a prominent Washington lawyer named Seth Richardson, in charge of its Review Board.

All federal employees were to be subject to loyalty investigations, whatever their jobs. FBI files and the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee would be called into use. Anyone found to be disloyal could no longer hold a government job. Dismissal could be based merely on “reasonable grounds for belief that the person is disloyal,” yet the term “disloyal” was never defined. Moreover, those accused would be unable to confront those making charges against them, or even to know who they were or what exactly the charges were. In addition, the Attorney General was authorized to draw up a list of subversive organizations.

To David Lilienthal, who well knew the torment that self-proclaimed Communist-hunters could bring down on a loyal government employee, the whole program looked ominous. Anyone serving in the government could be at the mercy of almost any malevolent accuser. “In practical effect,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “the usual rule that men are presumed innocent until proved guilty is in reverse.” Yet Lilienthal, too, conceded that something of the sort probably had to be initiated, and so staunch an upholder of liberal principle as the New York Post called the program a logical answer to subversion. At his next press conference, Truman was asked little or nothing about it. Of more interest was his letter to the former Pennsylvania governor. Was he truly so unconcerned about “the Communist bugaboo”?

“I am not worried about the Communist Party taking over the government of the United States,” Truman replied, “but I am against a person, whose loyalty is not to the government of the United States, holding a government job.” At the time it seemed all the answer anyone could ask for.

In another few months the FBI would begin running “name checks” on every one of the 2 million people on the federal payrolls, a monstrous, costly task. Over four years, by 1951, 3 million employees would be investigated and cleared by the Civil Service Commission, and another 14,000 by the FBI. Several thousand would resign, but only 212 would be dismissed as being of questionable loyalty. None would be indicted and no evidence of espionage would be found.

Clark Clifford would say sadly years later that the whole program had been “a response to the temper of the times,” and that he did not see how Truman could have done otherwise.

But in an interview with the journalist Carl Bernstein, Clifford was considerably more blunt:

It was a political problem. [Clifford told Bernstein] Truman was going to run in ‘48, and that was it….

My own feeling was there was not a serious problem. I felt the whole thing was being manufactured. We never had a serious discussion about a real loyalty problem…. the President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it….

There was no substantive problem…. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured….

(To Bernstein, this was a particularly chilling revelation, since his own parents had been among victims of the Loyalty Program.)

And politically the effect of Executive Order No. 9835 was indeed pronounced, for the moment at least, as Time’s Capitol Hill correspondent, Frank McNaughton, described in a confidential report to his editors:

The Republicans are now taking Truman seriously…[his] order to root out subversives from government employment hit a solid note with Congress, and further pulled the rug from under his political detractors. The charge of “Communists in government” and nothing being done about it, a favorite theme of the reactionaries, simply will not stick any longer…. The Republicans are beginning to realize Truman is no pushover.

That Truman’s concern over J. Edgar Hoover continued to trouble him there is no question. “If I can prevent [it], there’ll be no NKVD [Soviet Secret Police] or Gestapo in this country,” he wrote privately to Bess. “Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me….”

Writing in his memoirs years later, well after the pernicious influence of the Loyalty Program had become all too clear, Truman could say only in lame defense that it had started out to be as fair as possible “under the climate of opinion that then existed.” In private conversation with friends, however, he would concede it had been a bad mistake. “Yes, it was terrible,” he said.

On April 22, 1947, the Senate overwhelmingly approved aid to Greece and Turkey by a vote of 67 to 23. On May 9, the House, like the Senate, passed the bill by a margin of nearly three to one, 287 to 107. On May 22, while visiting his mother in Grandview, Truman sat at the Mission oak table in her small parlor and signed the $400 million aid package. The Truman Doctrine had been sanctioned.

Though it seemed so at the time, and would often be so presented in later accounts, the Truman Doctrine was not an abrupt, dramatic turn in American policy, but a declaration of principle. It was a continuation of a policy that had been evolving since Potsdam, its essence to be found in Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and in the more emphatic Clifford-Elsey Report. It could even be said that it began with Averell Harriman’s first meeting with Truman before Potsdam.

But, be that as it may, the Truman Doctrine would guide the foreign policy of the United States for another generation and more, for better or worse, despite any of the assurances by Acheson and Vandenberg that this was not the intent.

III

It could not have been a more exciting or important time, Clark Clifford would say, recalling events of 1947 and ‘48. “I think it’s one of the proudest moments in American history. What happened during that period was that Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world.”

Others felt the same. A young economic adviser at the State Department, Paul Nitze, would reflect after a long, eventful career in public service that nothing had given him such satisfaction as the work accomplished then. Dean Acheson, Speaking for all of them, would write that they had been “present at the creation.”

Their exhilaration derived in part from the tremendous urgency of the moment. Events moved rapidly. “There was much to be done and little time to do it,” Truman would remember. Plans had to be conceived and clarified with minimum delay, imagination applied, decisions reached, and always with the realities and imponderables of politics weighed in the balance. The pressure was unrelenting. “You don’t sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseam all the points,” George Elsey would say, in response to latter-day critics. “You don’t have time. Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.”

With the stress of deadlines and long hours, emotions often ran high. The struggle to draw up a preliminary report for what would become the Marshall Plan was for George Kennan “an intellectual agony” greater than any he had known. So intense did a debate with his associates become one harried night at the State Department that Kennan had to leave the room and go outside, where he walked, weeping, around the entire building.

What they were attempting was, besides, different from what had gone before. They were pioneering, the state of the world being, as Acheson said, “wholly novel within the experience of those who had to deal with it.”

Of great importance also to everyone’s morale in the spring of 1947 was the changed outlook of the President, a subject which by now had drawn much attention. Dozens of articles appeared describing the “new” Truman, and for the reason that the change was truly striking. He was in “top spirits,” reported The New York Times; the whole “political picture has changed in Washington.” The President was “very different” now, “calm and forceful,” wrote Alden Hatch in Liberty magazine. “The recent change in Harry Truman has been variously ascribed to new advisers, a difference of political climate, or a change in his nature. The fact is that it is not change, but growth.” His voice, his whole manner had a “new authority,” said Collier’s. He was no longer Roosevelt’s “stand in.” Noting that Truman’s public approval rating was up sharply, to 60 percent, Time lauded his “new sense of the dignity of his office.” The President, said Time, had acquired “a new confidence and a new formula: be natural.”

On an afternoon in mid-April, speaking extemporaneously to several hundred members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors who crowded into his office, Truman was as impressive as he had ever been before such a group-relaxed, sure of himself, convincing in a way that seemed to take many of them by surprise. The Truman Doctrine, he said, was no “sudden” turn in policy, and he traced the history of relations with Russia from the time of his first meeting with Molotov there in the same room two years before. He was sure a solution to the problems with the Soviets would be found and that a long era of peace was in store. “I believe that as sincerely as I am standing here.” It was essential “to stand for what we believe is right,” hard as the Russians were to negotiate with. “They deal from day to day, and what’s done yesterday has no bearing on what’s done today or tomorrow. We have to make up our mind what our policy is.”

He had just been talking with a pilot who had flown around the world in sixty-eight hours, he told them. “We must catch up morally and internationally with the machine age. We must catch up with it…in such a way as to create peace in the world, or it will destroy us and everybody else. And that we don’t dare contemplate.”

To his staff it was an inspiring performance, a long way from the fumbling press conferences of the previous year.

The morale of the staff had never been higher. Truman spoke of them proudly and affectionately as his “team.” They were devoted to him, and increasingly as time went on, the better they knew him, quite as much as those who had served with him in the Army. They liked him as a man, greatly respected him as a leader, admiring his courage, decisiveness, and fundamental honesty. The President they worked for, the Harry Truman they saw day to day, bore almost no resemblance to the stereotype Harry Truman, the cocky, profane, “feisty little guy.” Rather it was a quiet-spoken, even-tempered and uncommonly kind-hearted person, whose respect for the office he held enlarged their appreciation not only of him but of their own responsibilities.

“He was, as I’m sure you know, an extremely thoughtful, courteous, considerate man,” George Elsey would tell an interviewer years later. “He was a pleasure to work for…very kindly…never too busy to think about members of his staff…. He had a tremendous veneration and respect for the institution of the Presidency. He demanded at all times respect for the President of the United States….”

William J. Hopkins, an executive clerk who would serve nearly forty years in the White House, said later of Truman that no President in his experience had “set a comparable tone.” Truman, Hopkins emphasized, “liked people, he trusted people, and in turn he engendered a feeling of unqualified loyalty and devotion among his staff.”

A measure of the Truman manner and outlook was the way he conducted his regular morning meeting with the staff, one of the most important events of their day, for the information and sense of direction provided, but also for its overall atmosphere. The staff numbered thirteen, two more than in Roosevelt’s time, and Truman was his own chief of staff. The meetings were informal, yet orderly and businesslike. Truman would open the door of his office on the dot of nine o’clock and one by one they would file in and take their seats.

He was seated at his desk…the staff assembled in a semi-circle around his desk, and much of the day’s business was gone over [remembered Hopkins]. He usually started with Matt Connelly, who would bring up matters relating to presidential appointments, what was on the agenda for the day and upcoming appointments. He would also bring to the President’s attention requests for speeches throughout the country, getting the President’s reactions and (in some cases) commitments. The President would then turn to Charlie Ross and see what problems might arise during the day in his relations with the press. Many matters were discussed in terms of how to answer press questions and deal with certain problems.

Dr. Steelman, of course, was there, and Clark Clifford…and they brought up matters in their areas of responsibility. It was an opportunity to listen to the President’s philosophy and get his directions for the day.

President Truman was a prodigious reader, and each night he would carry home a portfolio, often six or eight inches thick. The next morning, he would have gone through all that material and taken such action as was needed. He had a desk folder labeled for each of his staff members, and at this staff meeting, he would pass out to them documents in their area of responsibility, or on which he wished their advice or recommendations, or on matters he wanted raised with the various departments and agencies. In this way each staff member knew basically what the others were doing, knew to whom the President had given which responsibility—whether it was to respond to a certain request, or to follow through on the preparation of an Executive Order or a speech, or things of that nature.

Truman was as tidy about his desk as he was about his clothes. The “flow of paper was probably the best I have experienced,” remembered Hopkins, whose job, as executive clerk, was to bring to the President and keep track of the immense range of documents requiring his attention or signature—enrolled bills, executive orders, proclamations, executive clemency cases, treaties, departmental directives, nominations for federal office, commissions, messages to Congress—in addition to “gleanings” from the incoming mail, which were routinely delivered to Truman’s desk twice a day, in the morning and again after lunch.

Hopkins, who was himself extremely punctual, also noted admiringly of Truman, “When he went to lunch, if he left word that he would return at 2:00 P.M., he was back without fail, not at 2:05, not at 1:15, but at 2:00 P.M.” The longer he was in office, the more conscious Truman seemed of time. On his desk now he had a total of four clocks, as well as two others elsewhere in the room and his own wristwatch.

Ross, Clifford, Elsey, could each tell his own stories of Truman’s exceptional diligence, the long hours he kept, working as hard or harder than any of them. “Lots of times I would be down there [at the White House] in the evening,” Clifford would remember, “and he’d be sitting upstairs, in the Oval Room upstairs, with an old-fashioned green eye shade on, like bookkeepers wear, and he’d be sitting there reading all this material…and we would talk together, and he took it very, very seriously. And the strain of the job was enormous.”

“He spent virtually every waking moment working at being president,” said Charles Murphy, a new man on the staff in 1947, who was Clifford’s assistant. To convey the kind of sustained effort the presidency demanded, Murphy would compare it to cramming for and taking an examination every day, year after year, with never a letup.

Murphy particularly admired Truman’s gift for simplification. “Not only could he simplify complex matters, he could also keep simple matters simple.”

The staff was continuously amazed by the President’s knowledge of the country, acquired from years of travel by automobile and from the territory covered at the time of the Truman Committee investigations. Charlie Ross claimed that Truman could look out of his plane at almost any point and name the exact region he was flying over.

They liked his sense of humor. “An economist,” he told them, “is a man who wears a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key at one end and no watch at the other.” And all of them, it seems, admired his sense of history, which they saw as one of his greatest strengths. “If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk,” Truman would say sitting in the Oval Office, “it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.” When Truman talked of presidents past—Jackson, Polk, Lincoln—it was as if he had known them personally. If ever there was a “clean break from all that had gone before,” he would say, the result would be chaos.

Once, that spring, at lunch on the Williamsburg, during a brief cruise down the Potomac, Truman and Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary, began talking about the Civil War. As the others at the table listened, the conversation ranged over several battles and the abilities and flaws of various Union and Confederate generals, Truman, as often before, impressing everyone with how much he had read and remembered.

He would like to have been a history teacher, Truman said.

“Rather teach it than make it?” Clifford asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Truman replied. “It would be not nearly so much trouble.”

Clifford had, become particularly important to Truman, in much the way Harry Hopkins had been to Roosevelt, and it was vital, they both knew, that Clifford understand Truman and what he was trying to accomplish in the long run. He did not want an administration like Roosevelt’s, Truman said. Too many of those around Roosevelt had been “crackpots,” he thought. “I want to keep my feet on the ground, don’t feel comfortable unless I know where I’m going. I don’t want any experiments. The American people have been through a lot of experiments and they want a rest from experiments.” He disliked the terms “progressive” and “liberal.” What he wanted was a “forward-looking program.” That was it, a “forward-looking program.”

Perhaps more than Truman knew, they all appreciated the respect he showed them. Charles Murphy, a shy man who spoke only when spoken to, would later remark, “In many ways President Truman really was as tough as a boot, but with his personal staff he was extremely gentle…and his staff returned his kindness with an extraordinary amount of hard work, voluntary overtime, and wholehearted, single-minded devotion.”

By later presidential standards the staff was small and unlike the White House staffs of some later presidencies, those serving Truman made no policy decisions. As George Elsey would remember, no one on Truman’s staff would have dreamed of making policy or making decisions on fundamental economic or political issues, “or any other kind of issue.”

It just has to be said over and over again [Elsey would comment in an interview years later]. There was no vast foreign policy machinery at the White House. There was no vast machinery on any subject at the White House…. [And no one trying to] make their reputations by undercutting…by slitting the throat of a Secretary of State…by proving to the President, by trying to prove to the President, that they’re smarter and more brilliant and their ideas are better [than the Secretary of State]…. None of that existed. Had anybody at the White House tried to behave that way, he would have been out of there in thirty seconds flat.

The loyalty of those around Truman was total and would never falter. In years to come not one member of the Truman White House would ever speak or write scathingly of him or belittle him in any fashion. There would be no vindictive “inside” books or articles written about this President by those who worked closest to him. They all thought the world of Harry Truman then and for the rest of their lives, and would welcome the chance to say so.

For Charlie Ross, the senior member of the staff and the one who had known Truman the longest—longer than anyone in the administration—serving with him, for all the strain of the job and the drastic cut in income it had meant, was the privilege of a lifetime, as Ross would write privately to Truman later that year, on Christmas Day, 1947:

Dear Mr. President:

There is nothing in life, I think, more satisfying than friendship, and to have yours is a rare satisfaction indeed.

Two and a half years ago you “put my feet to the fire,” as you said. I am happy that you did. They have been the most rewarding years of my life. Your faith in me, the generous manifestations of your friendship, the association with the fine people around you—your good “team”—all these have been an inspiration.

But the greatest inspiration, Mr. President, has been the character of you—you as President, you as a human being. Perhaps I can say best what is in my heart by telling you that my admiration for you, and my deep affection, have grown steadily since the day you honored me with your trust.

Truman had rarely received a letter that meant so much to him.

To Dean Acheson it was Truman’s “priceless gift of vitality, the life force itself,” that was his strongest, most inspiriting quality, and always in the darkest, most difficult of times. The President’s supply of vitality and good spirits seemed inexhaustible, wrote Acheson, who, to make his point, would quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V the lines delivered the night before Agincourt:

…every wretch, pining and pale before,

Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks…

His liberal eye doth give to every one…

A little touch of Harry in the night.

It was this “little touch of Harry” that “kept all of us going,” Acheson would remember.

In addition, there was the example of General Marshall, who lent everyone confidence and raised morale not just at the State Department but throughout the administration. “Gentlemen, enlisted men may be entitled to morale problems, but officers are not,” Marshall would tell those who served with him. “I expect all officers in this department to take care of their own morale. No one is taking care of my morale.” Morale improved steadily.

As Acheson would stress, he and others at the State Department felt they were being led by two men of rare quality, the President and the Secretary. On Capitol Hill, in his speech in support of the Truman Doctrine, Sam Rayburn had said the nation “again has leaders asking for certain action,” and his emphasis on leaders in the plural did not go unnoticed.

Marshall’s entire personality inspired confidence, Truman would write. It was Truman’s long-held conviction that men make history. Clearly in the spring of 1947, with the Marshall Plan following on the heels of the Truman Doctrine, things of immense importance happened principally because a relative handful of men made them happen, almost entirely on their own, against great odds, and in amazingly little time.

On Saturday, April 26, 1947, Secretary Marshall returned to Washington from Moscow gravely worried and upset. His sessions with Molotov had been an ordeal, dragging on day after day with little purpose, Molotov acting all the while as if time and the frustrations of the Western Allies were of no concern. Marshall wanted an agreement on the future of Germany. Hoping he might do better dealing directly with Stalin, he made a courtesy call at the Kremlin. But Stalin had asked what difference it made if there was no agreement. “We may agree the next time, or if not then, the time after,” Stalin said, as he idly doodled wolves’ heads with a red pencil.

Stalin’s indifference made a profound impression on Marshall. The Soviets, it seemed, were quite content to see uncertainty and chaos prevail in Europe. It served their purposes to let matters drift. Particularly, they had no wish for a return of order and stability in Germany, let alone a revived prosperity there. Marshall had thought the Russians could be negotiated with, but at Moscow he decided he had been mistaken.

Before leaving Washington, he received an urgent memo from Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Will Clayton warning that conditions in Western Europe were more serious than generally understood. During stops in Paris and Berlin, while going to and from Moscow, Marshall was stunned by what he saw and heard. On the plane back to Washington, he talked of little else but what could be done to save Western Europe.

Time was of the essence, Marshall stressed to Truman. “The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate,” he told the nation in a radio broadcast, April 28.

The next day Marshall summoned George Kennan, instructed him to assemble a special staff “immediately,” and to report “without delay” on what should be done to save Europe. As Kennan later recalled, Marshall had only one piece of advice: “Avoid trivia.”

The idea of economic aid to Europe had been on Truman’s mind for some while. Two years past, in one of their earliest conversations in the Oval Office, Henry Stimson had pointedly told him that an economically strong, productive Germany was essential to the future stability of Europe, a concept Truman readily accepted. In his own State of the Union message in January, Truman had struck the theme of sharing American bounty with war-stricken peoples, as a means of spreading “the faith” of freedom and democracy, and on March 6, even before announcement of the Truman Doctrine, he had said in a speech at Baylor University, “We are the giant of the economic world. Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends upon us.”

Early in May, Truman sent Dean Acheson to fill in for him with a foreign policy speech in a remote little town in Mississippi called Cleveland, at the Delta State Teachers’ College. Kennan and his special staff had as yet to make their report, but Truman had already made up his mind, from what Marshall had said after returning from Moscow, that Europe had to be rescued and quickly. The speech Acheson made was the alarm bell that Truman wanted sounded. The stricken countries of Europe needed everything and could afford to buy nothing. Financial help was imperative, but, as Acheson stressed, the objective was not relief, it was the revival of industry, agriculture, and trade. The margin of survival was so close in Europe that the savage winter just past had been nearly disastrous. Massive funding was needed if Europe was to be saved. “It is necessary if we are to preserve our own freedoms…necessary for our national security. And it is our duty and privilege as human beings.”

What was Europe now, Winston Churchill asked rhetorically in a speech in London on May 14. “It is a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.”

The Kennan Report, “Certain Aspects of the European Recovery Problem from the United States Standpoint,” was delivered to Marshall on May 25. American response to world problems must be more than defensive reaction to Communist pressure, it said. An American aid effort in Europe “should be directed not to combating Communism as such but to the restoration of the economic Health and vigor of European society.” Two days later, Under Secretary Clayton, having just completed an inspection tour of Europe, sent another urgent memo. The situation was worse than anyone supposed. Millions of people were slowly starving. A collapse in Europe would mean revolution and a tailspin for the American economy.

Long sessions followed at the State Department and around the President’s desk. With Truman’s approval, Marshall decided to make a speech at Harvard, where he had been invited to receive an honorary degree at commencement exercises on Thursday, June 5, an idea Acheson opposed for the reason that no one ever listened to commencement speeches. When the moment came, at the podium in the sunshine of Harvard Yard, before an audience of seven thousand, Marshall read his remarks in a soft voice, his head down, as though he did not care especially if they were listening.

The speech had been written by Bohlen in about two days, drawing heavily on the Kennan Report. Whether Truman saw a copy in advance is not recorded, but given Marshall’s extreme care to keep the President always informed, it is almost certain they discussed the matter.

As Marshall wanted, there were no oratorical flourishes. Nor was there any strident anti-Communist language.

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

Two ideas were new and distinguishing. He was calling on the Europeans to get together, and, with American help, work out their own programs. And, by inference, he was leaving the door open to the Soviets and their satellite countries to take part.

It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. That is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support for such a program so far as it is practical for us to do so. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all, European nations.

Then, speaking directly to the American people, Marshall said it was virtually impossible by merely reading articles or looking at photographs to grasp the real significance of conditions in Europe—“and yet the whole world’s future hangs on proper judgment, hangs on the realization by the American people of what can best be done, or what must be done.”

The speech caught nearly everyone by surprise, in Europe no less than in the United States. “We grabbed the lifeline with both hands,” said British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who was the first to see the momentous import of what Marshall had said.

At a staff meeting the next day at the State Department, Marshall asked Kennan and Bohlen whether the Soviet Union would accept an invitation to join the plan. They did not think so, said the two Russian experts, but advised him to “play it straight” with the Soviets and exclude no one. It was a calculated gamble—since Congress was not likely to support any aid program that included the Soviets—but a gamble Marshall was willing to take and that Truman backed.

As kennan later wrote, authorship of the plan was variously claimed and imputed, and he, Bohlen, Acheson, and Clayton were only some of a dozen or more who had had a hand in its creation. Marshall would praise kennan’s work in particular. Clark Clifford would stress the part Acheson played. But Clifford himself had been involved at every stage. In fairness it might have been called the Acheson-Clifford-Marshall Plan.

Truman would always give Marshall full credit. When Clifford urged that it be called the Truman Plan, Truman dismissed the idea at once. It would be called the Marshall plan, he said.

More than once in his presidency, Truman would be remembered saying it was remarkable how much could be accomplished if you didn’t care who received the credit. But in this case he insisted that Marshall be the one most honored because Marshall deserved no less.

He also commented realistically, “Anything that is sent up to the Senate and House with my name on it will quiver a couple of times and die.”

But Truman was the President and so the Marshall Plan would be his inevitably, be it a success or failure. His confidence in Marshall could have misfired and brought embarrassment and trouble to the administration. A Marshall Plan that failed would assuredly have become a Truman Plan.

One member of the Policy Planning Staff, Louis J. Halle, later said of Truman that he had in Marshall a soldier of the highest prestige, in Acheson a man of both commanding intellect and fierce personal integrity who at critical moments, like Truman, was willing to risk his own career rather than abstain from doing what he conceived to be right, and in Kennan a man of Shakespearean insight and vision. Among Truman’s own strongest qualities was “his ability to appreciate these men and to support them as they supported him.”

The Republicans were determined to cut taxes and expenditures, and already since the war, $3 billion had been spent in foreign relief. In a single grant in 1946 the United States had loaned Britain $3.25 billion and now, it seemed, to little purpose. By Will Clayton’s calculations, the Europeans would need $6 or $7 billion in the coming two or three years. When Arthur Vandenberg read this is The New York Times, in an article by James Reston, to say that surely he was misinformed. Congress, Vandenberg said, would never approve such sums, not to save anybody.

As all who were involved with the project appreciated, an enormous effort was called for if the people and the Congress were to be Convinced, and the appeal would have to be both American altruism and American self-interest—the same motivating factors that had propelled the idea from the beginning. When Truman called Sam Rayburn to the White House to brief him on what the cost might be, Rayburn was as incredulous as Vandenberg and insisted it would bankrupt the country. Truman said there was no way of telling how many hundreds of thousands of people would starve to death in Europe and that this must not happen, not if it could be prevented. He was also sure, Truman said, that if Europe went “down the drain” in a depression, the United States would follow. “And you and I have both lived through one depression, and we don’t want to have to live through another one, do we, Sam?”

With Britain’s Bevin taking the lead, a hasty conference was organized in Paris, to which the Soviets sent a sizable delegation headed by Molotov. The provisional and largely Communist-dominated government of Czechoslovakia had already indicated that it wished to be included in the program. Communist leaders in Poland and Romania had shown interest. But five days into the conference, after being handed a telegram from Moscow, Molotov stood up from the table and abruptly announced that the Soviet Union was withdrawing. The Marshall Plan, he said, was “nothing but a vicious American scheme for using dollars to buy its way” into the affairs of Europe.

Stalin had found unacceptable two particular American conditions, a pooling of resources that would include Soviet funds to rebuild parts of Western and Central Europe, and an open accounting of how American money was being spent. Eventually seventeen nations would take part; but under Soviet pressure, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and the other satellite countries of Eastern Europe did not.

By refusing to take part in the Marshall Plan, Stalin had virtually guaranteed its success. Sooner or later congressional support was bound to follow now, whatever the volume of grumbling on the Hill.

Officially it was called the European Recovery Program, or ERP, and the total sum requested was colossal indeed, $17 billion. Bohlen, Kennan, and others from the State Department were assigned to “sell” it to Congress, while a draft of specific plans was being drawn up by Paul Nitze, the young economic adviser. Arthur Vandenberg again played a vital role in the Senate. Marshall himself would eventually make a cross-country speaking tour, to convince business and civic groups, and with great effect, though the daring, wholehearted plan he proposed was not about to happen overnight.

Nor was there a letup in the pressure of events overall. That June, “to curb the powers of big labor,” the Republican-controlled Congress passed by large majorities the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed the closed shop, made unions liable for breach of contract, prohibited political contributions from unions, required them to make financial reports, required their leaders to take a non-Communist oath. On Friday, June 20, after two weeks of deliberation, Truman vetoed the bill, calling it an attack on the workingman, though all the Cabinet but Schwellenbach and Hannegan had urged him to sign it, including John Snyder, his closest friend in the Cabinet. Clark Clifford, however, saw it as another chance to take a stand. Clifford wanted Truman to move more to the left on most matters, “to strike for new high ground,” as he later said. “Most of the Cabinet and the congressional leaders were urging Mr. Truman to go slow, to veer a little closer to the conservative line,” Clifford remembered. “They held the image of Bob Taft before him like a bogeyman.” Thousands of letters pouring into the White House also favored the veto, and Truman, who genuinely believed it was a bad bill, knew a veto would go far to bring labor back into Democratic politics. As his daughter Margaret would one day write, remembering the Taft-Hartley veto, “While he was responding to his presidential conscience, my father did not by any means stop being a politician. The two are by no means incompatible.”

It was only a matter of days until Congress voted to override the veto, and in the House more Democrats voted against the President than with him.

On July 25, Congress passed Truman’s sweeping National Security Act, legislation he had sent to the Hill in February and that would mean mammoth change for the whole structure of power in Washington. Its primary purpose was to unify the armed services under a single Department of Defense and a single Secretary of Defense, a goal Truman had been striving for since taking office. It also established the Air Force as a separate military service, set up a new National Security Council, and gave formal authorization to the Central Intelligence Agency.

IV

Though he felt she needed more training before making a professional debut as a concert singer, Truman had supported his adored daughter Margaret in her ambitions all along. So also had her aunt Mary Jane and Mamma Truman, who had been the most enthusiastic, telling her to “go at it, hammer and tongs.” Bess, however, was not pleased, and Grandmother Wallace declared that the stage was no life for a lady.

“If she wants to be a warbler and has the talent and will do the hard work necessary to accomplish her purpose, I don’t suppose I should kick,” Truman had written to his mother and sister. “She’s one nice girl,” he told them in another letter, “and I’m so glad she hasn’t turned out like Alice Roosevelt and a couple of the Wilson daughters.” To Margaret he wrote that it took “work, work and more work” to get satisfactory results, “as your pop can testify.”

She talked for a while of singing under the name of Margaret Wallace, so as not to appear to be capitalizing on his position. But Mamma Truman, extremely displeased, couldn’t understand any name being substituted for Truman.

Since the start of the year Margaret had been living in a small apartment overlooking Central Park in New York, working with her Kansas City teacher, Mrs. Thomas J. Strickler, who also stayed with her in the apartment as chaperon. Truman felt her absence acutely. Like his mother’s precarious condition since her fall in February, it gave him a feeling of emptiness not easy to face. While he was so intensely preoccupied with his responsibilities, time was moving on, life passing him by.

For someone who had spent so much of his life in such male-dominated vocations as the military and politics, he had few close male friends and no real confidants among the men he knew or worked with, any more now than in boyhood. It was the four women in his life, Bess, Mamma, Mary Jane, and Margaret, who mattered above all, whose company and approval he most valued and needed. Now two of them, Mamma and Margaret, appeared to be deserting him.

“Margaret went to New York yesterday and it leaves a blank place here,” he had written to his mother and sister in January 1947. “But I guess the parting time has to come to everybody….”

In early March, with her first performance in the offing, she received a quick note from him:

Here’s a little dough in case you need R.R. tickets to some mysterious town.

Now don’t get scared, you can do it! And if anyone says you can’t I’ll bust him in the snoot.

Margaret Truman, coloratura soprano, made her radio debut in Detroit on March 16, 1947, as a guest on the Ford Motor Company’s “Sunday Evening Hour,” with the Detroit Symphony conducted by Karl Krueger. As reported in the papers, possibly no vocal performer in history had ever appeared for the first time under such pressure, or before so big an audience and so many critics. The broadcast was nationwide on ABC and reportedly 15 million people were listening, making it the largest radio audience ever for such a performance. “She could not help realizing,” observed The New York Times, “that not only the immense listening public, but…every vocalist, every singing teacher and vocal student who has access to a radio set, was critically appraising her voice and her interpretations.” In addition, singing with an orchestra was a new experience for her.

Scheduled to have appeared on the program the week before, she had had to back out at the last minute because of a sudden attack of throat and chest pains, diagnosed by Wallace Graham as bronchial pneumonia.

Truman was in Key West the night of the broadcast, still resting after his March 12 speech to Congress. The half hour he spent sitting by the radio, waiting for Margaret’s turn on the show to come, was, he said afterward, as long as any he could remember. “Perhaps,” she later wrote, “sheer naivete saw me through.” She was the first daughter of a President ever to attempt a professional career of her own.

I was aware that my father was glued to a radio in the Navy Commandant’s quarters in Key West; that my mother was listening in the White House, that Mamma Truman was listening from her bed in Grandview, and that Grandmother Wallace, who didn’t have much use for the stage, was listening critically in Independence. I couldn’t let anybody down.

She sang three selections, beginning with the Spanish folk song “Cielito Lindo,” then an aria from Félicien David’s La Perle du Bresil, and finishing with “The Last Rose of Summer,” a request of her father’s.

The orchestra indicated its approval with spontaneous applause, and though the Detroit Times said she sang no better than a fairly talented student, the reviews were generally good—kinder than she deserved, she later acknowledged. Noel Straus, music critic for The New York Times, described her voice as “interesting,” and said she had shown remarkable poise and self-control, considering the pressures she was under. Her phrasing was careful, the legato smooth throughout. “Miss Truman’s work from start to finish,” the reviewer concluded in a judgment that greatly pleased her father, “had an allure that resulted from deep sincerity and an unaffected simplicity of approach.”

At home in Kansas City, to the delight of her father, the Star praised her for her courage and called it a “highly agreeable” occasion. The White House switchboard was so engulfed by calls of approval that it had to close down temporarily.

To reporters gathered around at Key West, Truman said he thought she had done “wonderfully,” and for weeks after his return to Washington, it was obvious that nothing pleased him quite so much as to have visitors mention they had heard Margaret on the radio and enjoyed her singing.

Another performance, a full concert this time, was scheduled for May in Pittsburgh. Truman wanted only success for Margaret, but by no means should she become a prima donna.

Wish I could go along and smooth all the rough spots—but I can’t and in a career you must learn to overcome the obstacles without blowing up. Always be nice to the people who can’t talk back to you. I can’t stand a man or woman who bawls out underlings to satisfy an ego.

The Pittsburgh concert had to be postponed at the last minute, however, when word came that Mamma Truman had suffered a stroke and was not expected to live.

Truman flew from Washington immediately. It was his fifth trip home since his mother first fell and broke her hip. Ross, Wallace Graham, the whole presidential entourage were with him and set up headquarters on the eleventh floor of the Muehlebach Hotel. Mamma seemed to improve, knowing he was there, and he stayed on at the Muehlebach for nearly two weeks, driving out from Kansas City to Grandview every day. The weather was poor, chill and raining, and she slept most of the time. As the papers said, “the eyes of the world” were focused on the small yellow clapboard house day after day. Truman worked at the Mission oak table in the parlor. (It was then that he signed the bill for aid to Greece and Turkey.) “Whenever she wakes up,” he told reporters, “she wants to talk to me. I want to be there.”

But then to everyone’s amazement she made a comeback and Truman returned to Washington. He called her nearly every day thereafter, returned for another visit in mid-June, and wrote regularly to Mary Jane, who would read the letters aloud for Mamma. He kept her posted on politics, as he knew she liked. “I’ve come to the conclusion that Taft is no good and Hartley is worse,” he wrote. He also warned her he was about to make a speech she wouldn’t like. It was for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He would be quoting Abraham Lincoln, he said.

Delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on June 29, to a crowd of ten thousand people, it was the strongest statement on civil rights heard in Washington since the time of Lincoln, and the first speech ever by a President to the NAACP. Full civil rights and freedom must be obtained and guaranteed for all Americans, Truman said, with Walter White, head of the NAACP, standing beside him.

When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans.

Many of our people still suffer the indignity of insult, the narrowing fear of intimidation, and, I regret to say, the threat of physical and mob violence. Prejudice and intolerance in which these evils are rooted still exist. The conscience of our nation, and the legal machinery which enforces it, have not yet secured to each citizen full freedom of fear.

We cannot wait another decade or another generation to remedy these evils. We must work, as never before, to cure them now.

He called for state and federal action against lynching and the poll tax, an end to inequality in education, employment, the whole caste system based on race or color. That someone of his background from western Missouri could be standing at the shrine of the Great Emancipator saying such things was almost inconceivable. As he listened, Walter White thought of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “I did not believe that Truman’s speech possessed the literary quality of Lincoln’s speech,” he later wrote, “but in some respects it had been a more courageous one in its specific condemnation of evils based upon race prejudice…and its call for immediate action against them.”

Late in 1946, at the urging of White and others, Truman had established his own blue-ribbon commission on civil rights, with Charles E. Wilson, the head of General Electric, as chairman. It was an unprecedented step and Truman, White was sure, had put his political fortunes on the line. “Almost without exception,” White wrote, “Mr. Truman’s political advisors from both South and North were certain that his authorization of inquiry into the explosive issue of civil rights was nothing short of political suicide…. Mr. Truman stood firm.” The report of the commission would not be ready until October.

Taking his seat again after the speech, Truman turned to White and said he meant “every word of it—and I’m going to prove that I do mean it.”

To his mother, Truman said it was a speech he wished he did not have to make. “But I believe what I say,” he told her, “and I’m hopeful we may implement it.”

He described for her the flowers in bloom at the White House, “down in the yard.” With so much wet weather, were Vivian’s sons able to get in the hay crop, he wanted to know.

He was thinking more than usual about times gone by. The morning of July 26, writing to Bess in Independence, he found himself reminiscing about Uncle Harrison and about Tasker Taylor, their high school classmate who had drowned in the Missouri River after graduation. July 26 had always been known to Missouri farmers as Turnip Day, the day to sow turnips, he told Bess. Once, in 1901, a particularly dry year, Uncle Harrison had walked into the seed store and declared he needed six bushels of turnip seed. Asked why so large an amount, Uncle Harrison said he understood turnips were 90 percent water and that maybe if he planted the whole farm in them the drought would break.

But he must not dwell on the past. “You see age is creeping up on me. Mamma is ninety-four and a half because she never lived in the past.”

An hour or so later, Mary Jane telephoned from Grandview to say Mamma had pneumonia and might not live through the day. Truman ordered his plane made ready, but there was a delay. He wanted to sign the National Security Act and name James Forrestal the new Secretary of Defense before Congress recessed. A few congressional signatures were still needed. At the airport, he held off departure, waiting beside the plane for nearly an hour until the bill was brought to him. Minutes later the plane was airborne.

Somewhere over Ohio, dozing on a cot in his stateroom, he dreamt Mamma came to him and said, “Goodbye, Harry. Be a good boy.” He later wrote, “When Dr. Graham came into my room on The Sacred Cow, I knew what he would say.”

She had died at 11:30 that morning. “Well, now she won’t have to suffer any more,” Truman said. For the rest of the flight he sat by the window looking down at the checkerboard landscape and saying nothing.

Martha Ellen Young Truman had been born in 1852, when Millard Fillmore was President, when Abraham Lincoln was still a circuit lawyer in Illinois, when her idolized Robert E. Lee was Superintendent at West Point, overseeing the education of young men from both North and South. She had seen wagon trains coming and going on the Santa Fe Trail. She had been through civil war, survived Order No. 11, survived grasshopper plagues, flood, drought, the failures and death of her husband, the Great Depression, eviction from her own home. She had lived to see the advent of the telephone, electric light, the automobile, the airplane, radio, movies, television, short skirts, world wars, and her adored eldest son sitting at his desk in the White House as President of the United States. As Margaret would write in memory of her “country grandmother” some years later, “Everything had changed around her, but Mamma Truman had never changed…. Her philosophy was simple. You knew right from wrong and you did right, and you always did your best. That’s all there was to it.”

The funeral at the house in Grandview was simple and private. She was buried on the hillside at the Forest Hill Cemetery, next to her husband.

A few days later in Washington Truman asked Charlie Ross to bring the White House press into the Oval Office.

“I couldn’t hold a press conference this week,” Truman began quietly when they were assembled, “but I wanted to say to you personally a thing or two that I couldn’t very well say any other way, so I asked Charlie to ask you to come in.

“I wanted to express to you all, and to your editors and publishers, appreciation for the kindness to me during the last week.

“I was particularly anxious to tell the photographers how nice they were to me, and to the family, and I didn’t know any other way to do it but just call you in and tell you.

“I had no news to give you, or anything else to say to you, except just that, and I felt like I owed it to you.

“You have been exceedingly nice to me all during the whole business, and I hope you believe it when I say to you that it is from the heart when I tell you that.”

To Margaret he wrote, “Someday you’ll be an orphan just as your dad is now.” Later, when she was on tour, he would tell her:

You should call your mamma and dad every time you arrive in a town…. Someday maybe (?) you’ll understand what torture it is to be worried about the only person in the world that counts. You should know by now that your dad has only three such persons. Your ma, you and your aunt Mary.

On August 24, Margaret sang at the Hollywood Bowl before nineteen thousand people. To the Los Angeles Times her performance was only “satisfactory,” but the audience brought her back for seven curtain calls. On October 17, she returned to Pittsburgh to make her first full-length concert appearance at the city’s immense old Syria Mosque auditorium, before a full house that included her mother, who was hearing her sing in public for the first time. Truman stayed away because he wanted Margaret to have all the attention.

Again her stage presence and rapport with the audience were remarkable for someone so young and inexperienced. The audience loved her. She had nine curtain calls, sang three encores. Everyone seemed to be pulling for her, even the ushers and the press, wrote the music editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Donald Steinfirst. “You felt it in the waves of kindly feelings directed to this girl, standing assuredly with complete poise over the footlights in the spotlight. You wanted to feel that this young girl, who gave up most of the pleasures of White House living, if any such there might be, for a career in music, would realize her life’s ambitions.”

She was wearing a full-length, off-the-shoulder gown of pink taffeta, her blond hair in soft curls, and she sang, as she had in Detroit and Los Angeles, as if she were enjoying every moment. But this time the critics were considerably less kind.

The bold fact is [wrote Steinfirst] that Miss Truman, judging from last night’s performance, and with the usual allowances for youth and debut, is not a great singer; and, in fact, is not at this stage of her career, even a good singer. She is a young woman of a great deal of personal charm, considerable stage presence, apparently a fair knowledge of the fundamentals of singing, but she is not an artist by commonly-accepted standards.

Others said she had launched her career too soon, before she was ready, just as her father had worried she might. The critic in the Pittsburgh Press thought her training “very faulty.”

“I called up Daddy after the concert, and he seemed to be satisfied,” she remembered. “I can’t say I was.”

The tour went on. She sang in Fort Worth, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Shreveport, and Tulsa, and she did better. “Margaret seems to be making a hit wherever she goes,” Truman reported to Mary Jane. Fort Worth was a sellout. So was Amarillo. All the same, he wished she would come home and stay.

Sometimes, relaxing with friends, Truman liked to say that he and his small family might have been a hit as a vaudeville team. Margaret would sing, he would play the piano, and Bess would manage the act. He would then grin at Bess, while she responded with a skeptical look. It had become a family joke.

To those who knew Bess well the manager’s role was perfect casting, and greatly to her husband’s advantage. Margaret spoke of her mother as “the spark plug” of the family. Truman himself said many times he seldom made a decision without consulting “the Boss.”

She had no more interest than ever in the limelight of public life, no desire to play any part beyond that of wife and mother.

Old friends from Independence or members of the White House domestic staff who saw her on an almost daily basis would speak warmly of her kindness, her “rollicking sense of humor.” She would laugh so hard her whole body would shake, laugh, remembered one of the servants, Lillian Parks, “as if she had invented laughter.”

No First Lady in memory had been so attentive to the welfare of the servants, and particularly in the summer months, before the advent of air conditioning in the White House. “It’s too hot to work,” she would say. “If it wasn’t hot,” remembered Lillian Parks, “she’d say, ‘You’ve been working too long. Stop now.’ [She] was the kind of First Lady who hated fussiness, loved cleanliness and neatness and an all-things-put-away look, but who didn’t want her servants to keep working all the time and would order, yes order, them to rest.”

To nearly everyone she seemed “the perfect lady,” the phrase used so often to describe her mother. “She’s the only lady I know who writes a thank you note for a Christmas card, and she writes it in a beautiful hand,” a Kansas City friend would tell a reporter. Marquis Childs of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called her the perfect Missouri lady. Once, when Childs and his wife gave a party at their Washington home for a poet who was an old friend, they invited the Trumans. “Mrs. Truman came with great apologies for her husband…who just couldn’t possibly get away,” Childs remembered. “And the wife of the poet had too much libation, and had to be taken off somewhere, put to bed somewhere. But Mrs. Truman was very polite and never made any fuss of this at all. She was a very proper woman. I think her whole life was Harry Truman….”

Reathel Odum, her secretary, remembered Bess as “the white gloves type.” Serene, shy, and stubborn were other words used often to portray her.

California Congressman Richard Nixon and his wife, attending their first White House reception, were impressed by the way both the President and Mrs. Truman made them feel at home. “They both had the gift of being dignified without putting on airs,” Nixon wrote. “Press accounts habitually described Mrs. Truman as plain. What impressed us most was that she was genuine.”

The longer people knew her, the more they appreciated her quiet strength and quality. Among her greatest admirers were Robert A. Lovett and his wife. Lovett, who, at the end of June 1947 replaced Dean Acheson as Under Secretary of State, was a suave, urbane New York investment banker, a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, and a Yale graduate like Harriman and Acheson. To Lovett there was no question about the importance of Bess Truman. She was “one of the finest women I ever saw in my life,” Lovett remembered. And, “of course,” she helped Truman “immeasurably”: “My wife and I absolutely loved her. She was simply superb….”

Clark Clifford would later describe her as “a pillar of strength to her husband” and credit her with “better insight than her husband into the quality and trustworthiness of people who had gathered around him….”

But if Truman relied on her, as he himself also attested, she clearly was extremely dependent on him. Years later, when asked by a friend what she considered the most memorable aspect of her life, Bess answered at once: “Harry and I have been sweethearts and married more than 40 years—and no matter where I was, when I put out my hand Harry’s was there to grasp it.”

Five foot four and stout, Bess Truman stood as straight as a drum major, head up, shoulders squared. She dressed simply and conservatively. There was nothing ever in any way mannered or pretentious about her. (Throughout her years in Washington, as Jonathan Daniels reported, she laughed at nothing so heartily as the sudden pretensions of some officials’ wives.) She was exactly as she had always been and saw no reason to change because she had become First Lady. Some guests at the White House found her so natural and unprepossessing they had to remind themselves to whom they were speaking. Time said somewhat condescendingly that with her neatly waved gray hair and unobtrusive clothes she would have blended perfectly with the crowd at an A&P.

Asked once by reporters for his view of her appearance, Truman said he thought she looked exactly as a woman her age ought to look.

Many people, meeting Bess Truman for the first time, were surprised by how much younger and more attractive she appeared than in photographs, where her expression was often somber, even disapproving. Something seemed to come over her in public, and particularly when photographers pressed in on her. In receiving lines she often looked bored, even pained, as if her feet hurt—a very different person from the one her friends knew. A Louisiana congressman’s wife, Lindy Boggs, would remember how vivacious the First Lady could be while arranging things for a reception, what delightful company she was behind the scenes. “And then…the minute the doors would open and all those people would begin to come in, she would freeze, and she looked like old stone face. Instead of being the outgoing, warm and lovely woman that she had been previously, the huge crowds simply made her sort of pull up into herself.”

Where Eleanor Roosevelt had seen her role as public and complementary to that of her husband, Bess insisted on remaining in the background. “Propriety was a much stronger influence in her life than in Mrs. Roosevelt’s,” remembered Alice Acheson, the wife of Dean Acheson. It was widely known that Bess played cards—her bridge club from Independence had made a trip to Washington in the spring of 1946, stayed several days at the White House, and was the subject of much attention in the papers—and that she and Margaret, unlike the President, were movie fans. Bess also loved reading mysteries and was “wild” about baseball, going to every Senators game she could fit into her schedule. But she had no interesting hobbies for reporters to write about, no winsome pets, no social causes to champion or opinions on issues she wished to voice publicly. Her distaste for publicity was plain and to many, endearing. She refused repeatedly to make speeches or give private interviews or to hold a press conference, no matter how often reporters protested. “Just keep on smiling and tell ‘them’ nothing,” she advised Reathel Odum. “She didn’t want to discuss her life,” Margaret remembered.

Two early public appearances had turned into embarrassments. She had been asked to christen an Army plane, but no one had bothered to score the champagne bottle in advance, so it would break easily. She swung it against the plane with no result, then kept trying again and again, her face a study in crimson determination. The crowd roared with laughter, until finally a mechanic stepped in and broke the bottle for her. Truman, too, had been amused, as was the country when the newsreel played in the movie theaters, but not Bess, who reportedly told him later she was sorry she hadn’t swung that bottle at him.

The other episode concerned her acceptance, in the fall of 1945, of an invitation to tea from the Daughters of the American Revolution at Constitution Hall, a decision protested vehemently by Adam Clayton Powell, the flamboyant black congressman and minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, whose wife, the pianist Hazel Scott, had been denied permission to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race. Bess, however, refused to change her mind. The invitation, as she wrote to Powell, had come before “the unfortunate controversy,” and her acceptance of such hospitality was “not related to the merits of the issue.” She deplored, she said, any action that denied artistic opportunity because of race prejudice. She was not a segregationist, but she was not a crusader either. Powell responded by referring to her publicly as “The Last Lady of the Land,” which caused Truman to explode over “that damn nigger preacher” at a staff meeting, and like Clare Boothe Luce, Powell would never be invited to the White House.

When at last in the fall of 1947 Bess agreed to respond to a questionnaire from reporters, her answers were characteristically definite and memorable:

What qualities did she think would be the greatest asset to the wife of a President?

Good health and a well-developed sense of humor.

Truman, President in his own right, and Vice President Alben Barkley on the reviewing stand, Inauguration Day, January 20, 1949.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson, by far the strongest, most brilliant, and most controversial member of Truman’s Cabinet through all of the second term. “Do you suppose any President ever had two such men with him as you and the General [Marshall]?” Truman would later write to Acheson.

Truman’s World War I pal and presidential military aide, General Harry Vaughan, who was seen as the ultimate White House “crony.”

Alger Hiss, symbol of Republican charges that the administration was “soft on communism.”

Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Truman loathed and mistakenly believed time and the truth would soon destroy.

Opposite: At midday, June 27, 1950, having announced that Amercian forces would intervene in Korea, Truman, accompanied by Attorney General J. Howard McGrath (left) and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, heads from the White House to his temporary residence across Pennsylvania Avenue at Blair House (above). It was at Blair House, after meeting there with his advisers the two previous nights, that Truman reached his fateful decision on Korea—the most difficult and important decision of his presidency, he felt.

On October 15, 1950, a month after the stunning success of General Douglas MacArthur’s surprise assault at Inchon (above), Truman and MacArthur met at Wake Island in the Pacific, driving off for a first private talk in a battered Chevrolet (below). By all signs the Korean War, Truman’s “police action,” was nearly over.

On his return from Wake, Truman is met at the airport by his Washington high command (from left to right): Special Assistant Averell Harriman, Secretary of Defense Marshall, Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder, Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, Jr., and General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

In late 1950, as the Korean War entered its darkest time, Truman had also to oversee the complete reconstruction of the White House within the gutted shell of the old exterior walls (opposite). And on November 1, two fanatical Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate him (right, one lies wounded at the Blair House front steps).

On December 6 (left), a Washington Post music critic roundly panned his daughter Margaret’s singing, eliciting from her father the most stinging letter of his presidency.

Pages from Truman’s diary, April 6 and 7, 1951.

General MacArthur addresses Congress, April 19, 1951.

MacArthur’s replacement as Far East Commander, General Matthew B. Ridgway (with hand grenades strapped to his chest).

Though often called one of Truman’s most courageous decisions as President, the firing of MacArthur was to Truman simply something that had to be done to keep control of the military where it belonged, in the Oval Office. Left: The outlook from the seat of responsibility and (below) a cartoon from the time by Herblock.

Chicago, July 26, 1952: Truman introduces to the Democratic National Convention the new, somewhat reluctant standard-bearer, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois.

Oxford, England, June 20, 1956: The former President is congratulated by Lord Halifax, Chancellor of Oxford University, after receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Laws.

Florence, Italy, May 27, 1956: Truman chats with Renaissance art authority Bernard Berenson, who found him very unlike the “Give ’Em Hell Harry” of the cartoon at left.

Washington, November 1, 1961: To the delight of President John F. Kennedy, the First Lady, and guests, Truman plays a bit of Paderewski’s Minuet in the East Room, after an absence from the White House of eight years. The principal performer of the evening, Truman’s favorite concert pianist, Eugene List, stands at right.

Margaret and Clifton Daniel on their wedding day, April 21, 1956.

From the window of the Daniels’ New York apartment, Truman greets reporters with grandsons Clifton and William.

A resident of Independence for the last twenty years of his life, Truman said of his time as President, “I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I was going back to.”

Did she think there would ever be a woman President of the United States?

No.

Would she want to be President?

No.

Would she want Margaret ever to be First Lady?

No.

If she had a son, would she try to bring him up to be President?

No.

If it had been left to her own free choice, would she have gone into the White House in the first place?

Most definitely would not have.

What was her reaction to musical criticism of Margaret’s singing?

No comment.

Did any of the demands of her role as First Lady ever give her stage fright?

No comment.

What would you like to do and have your husband do when he is no longer President?

Return to Independence.

“She seems to think Harry ought to run the country, not her,” a Washington cab driver was quoted as saying. It was a sentiment widely shared, and according to Jonathan Daniels, Truman “conspired willingly” with her to protect her privacy.

Asked once if she was interested in any particular period of White House history, Bess said the Monroe years—an interesting observation that the press passed by. James Monroe’s wife, another Elizabeth—Elizabeth Kortright Monroe—had followed the gregarious Dolley Madison, who had been as much the center of attention in her time as had Eleanor Roosevelt. A quiet aristocrat, Elizabeth Monroe married a hard-drinking politician and made a good marriage. In the White House, she had insisted on keeping her life a private matter.

As manager of household expenses, Bess was extremely frugal. She cut back on the size of the White House staff. Mrs. Nesbitt, the elderly housekeeper responsible for years of dreary food on the Roosevelt table, had been sent packing, with the result that both the cooking and the housekeeping improved. Most objectionable had been the cold, hard, dinner rolls, long a White House staple, but which to anyone raised as Bess had been on traditional hot southern biscuits—biscuits baked with Waggoner-Gates “Queen of the Pantry Flour”—were altogether inedible. “It was only on the command of President Truman,” wrote the American correspondent for the BBC, Alistair Cooke, “that her recipe was passed on to the chef and the Trumans reverted to breaking the bread of their fathers.”

“Mrs. Truman was no fussier than her predecessor…. It was just that she had been brought up to be house proud,” recorded J.B. West. She kept close watch on the cost of food, kept her own books, went over all the household bills “with a fine tooth comb,” and wrote every check herself.

According to West and Lillian Parks, both of whom later wrote books about their years of service in the White House, the staff felt closer to the Trumans than to any of the other presidents and their wives, which was saying a great deal, considering how long some of the staff had been employed. John Mays, a doorman who also cut Truman’s hair every two weeks, had been on duty at the White House since the time of Woodrow Wilson. The way the Trumans lived, remembered West, the White House “might as well have been in Independence. As far as everyday living goes, they were no different.” And for all the President’s talk of not liking life in the White House, said West, “He liked living there better than living in his mother-in-law’s house in Independence.”

Truman’s salary in his last years in the Senate, plus what Bess had earned, came to $14,500. As Vice President, his pay was $20,000; as President, it was $75,000. But nearly half of that would go to taxes, and while the government paid for the White House servants, Bess had to pay for their food, plus all meals for the family and guests. In Roosevelt’s time, monthly food bills alone sometimes reached $7,000. Bess had been able to cut that back to about $2,000. In their twelve years in the White House the Roosevelts had never lived within the President’s salary, but the Trumans had no family fortune to fall back on. Margaret would later describe her mother as a chronic penny pincher, of necessity. Still, she was able to save very little year to year. After expenses and taxes on his $75,000 salary, it was reported, the President had about $4,200 left.

In a smart Washington dress shop, browsing one day with Mrs. John Snyder, Bess told the sales clerk mildly but firmly there was no use for her to try on anything, since she couldn’t afford the prices.

According to J.B. West, Bess guarded her privacy like a precious jewel, yet within that privacy played a role far exceeding what any but a few suspected. She did indeed advise Truman on decisions. “And he listened to her.”

Margaret would later write that in her father’s first months in office, Bess had felt shut out of his life, “more and more superfluous,” and especially after the realization that he had not discussed with her his decision on the atomic bomb. The feeling of being left out, wrote Margaret, combined with Bess’s original opposition to Truman’s ever becoming President “to build a smoldering anger that was tantamount to an emotional separation,” which may explain some of her long absences from Washington. Still, Margaret, too, would stress her mother’s influence on her father, saying he constantly talked things over with Bess and would often do as she said. He was “very, very conscious” of her views and needed her approval. “Have you ever noticed Father when he’s with Mother at any sort of public gathering?” Margaret remarked to a reporter at the time. “He’s always trying to catch her glance to see if she approves of what he is saying or doing.”

She remained, as she had been for more than thirty years, the most important person in his life.

Among family and old friends, he freely acknowledged the difference “Miss Lizzie” had made to the course of his life. “Suppose Miss Lizzie had gone off with Mr. Young, Julian Harvey or Harris,” he wrote to Ethel Noland from the White House, recalling old suitors from days long past. “What would have been the result? For Harry I mean. He probably would have been either a prominent farmer in Jackson County or a Major General in the regular army….”

To judge by the letters he wrote to Bess in the fall of 1947, while she was with her mother in Independence, he did indeed want her to know his mind and the details of the problems he faced in a “topsy-turvy world.”

He was preoccupied with the immense projected cost of the Marshall Plan.

Marshall and Lovett were in yesterday and went over the European situation from soup to nuts with me. If it works out as planned it will cost us about 16 billion over a four-year period…. This amount of 16 billion is just the amount of the national debt when Franklin took over. He ran it up to 40 odd and then the war came along and it is 257 but we can’t understand those figures anyway.

A few days later, on September 30, he went on, telling her more:

Yesterday was one of the most hectic of days…. I’m not sure what has been my worst day. But here is the situation fraught with terrible consequences. Suppose, for instance, that Italy should fold up and that Tito then would march into the Po Valley. All the Mediterranean coast of France then is open to Russian occupation and the iron curtain comes to Bordeaux, Calais, Antwerp, and The Hague. We withdraw from Greece and Turkey and prepare for war. It just must not happen. But here I am confronted with a violently opposition Congress whose committees with few exceptions are living in 1890; it is not representative of the country’s thinking at all. But I’ve got a job and it must be done—win, lose, or draw.

Sent letters to Taber, Bridges, Vandenberg, and Eaton requesting them to call their committees together as soon as possible. Had my food committee together and will make a radio speech Sunday. To feed France and Italy this winter will cost 580 million, the Marshall Plan 16.5 billion. But you know in October and November of 1945 I cancelled 63 billion in appropriations—55 billion at one crack. Our war cost that year was set at 105 billion. The 16.5 is for a four-year period and is for peace. A Russian war would cost us 400 billion and untold lives, mostly civilian. So I must do what I can. I shouldn’t write you this stuff but you should know what I’ve been facing…. I haven’t resumed my walks yet but will in a day or two. Too much to read. General Bradley made a report to me today on his European trip and he remarked on my having had to make more momentous decisions than nearly any other President. He’s right, and I hope most of ‘em have been right….

In a month’s time that fall he wrote twenty-two letters to her. That he adored her as much as ever was also among his reasons for the letters. The following June, on their anniversary, he would write:

Dear Bess:

Twenty-nine years! It seems like twenty-nine days.

Detroit, Port Huron, a farm sale, the Blackstone Hotel, a shirt store. County Judge, defeat, Margie, Automobile Club membership drive, Presiding judge, Senator, V.P., now!

You still are on the pedestal where I placed you that day in Sunday school in 1890. What an old fool I am.

Except for Bess and Margaret, and his secretary, Rose Conway, few women ever had the opportunity to observe Truman close at hand or privately. There were no women on his staff in any but secretarial roles, none who sat in on staff meetings or who worked with him or accompanied him beyond the White House. But in that crucial year of 1947, a young Austrian-born artist named Greta Kempton came to the West Wing and with the help of two Secret Service agents set up her heavy wooden easel in the Cabinet Room. She was the first woman who had ever been invited to do a presidential portrait—Truman’s official White House portrait as it would turn out—and she had never met the President. In all there would be five sittings.

“I was very impressed with him,” she remembered. “He came in. I asked him to sit down. He had some papers, but I told him he couldn’t study papers. ‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘This is the time I’m working. You are going to relax.’”

Unaware that the two who had helped her get set up were Secret Service men, she turned and said there would be nothing more, they needn’t stay. Truman, amused, nodded to them and they left.

He sat down…and I could only see a big important man and a big important portrait. I had to switch canvases. It had to be bigger….

The smaller the person, the more against posing they are, the more they feel they’re doing you a favor. Not Mr. Truman…. He never seemed irritated or annoyed…never seemed impatient. He would settle down…and [the room] seemed to take on a feeling of grandeur and peacefulness. I felt very inspired…. He was always helpful. He wanted the finished portrait to be as good as I could possibly make it.

The more he sat the more interested he became in the work, my work—the technique of painting, the canvas. He took a serious interest….

She had told him at the start that under no circumstances was he to see the portrait until it was finished. But once, during a break, he decided to take “a little walk” around the enormous Cabinet table, his direction, as she remembered, “easing toward the canvas.” Sensing what he was up to, she told him again there could be no peeking.

“You mean I can’t have a look at my own portrait?” he said.

She told him no, and with good grace he went back to his chair.

When she had finished and asked if he would like to take a look, he stood in front of the easel for several minutes. “Well, I certainly do like that,” he said, “but, of course, I wouldn’t really know. I’ll have to ask the Boss.”

He telephoned Bess, who came at once, looked at the picture, and heartily approved. It was exactly as she saw him herself, she said.

Against a darkening sky, he sat foursquare, unsmiling, jaw firm, hands at rest on the arms of a wooden chair—a figure of strength and determination in a dark double-breasted suit, white shirt, dark striped tie, the familiar handkerchief in place, the service pin on his lapel, and in the distance, the Capitol Dome.

Now and then, during the sittings, Greta Kempton remembered, he had seemed a little hurried. “But in general I felt he had a great confidence in himself, as if, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ But also some humbleness…. I think he was very even.”

In the summer of 1947, in the journal Foreign Affairs, George Kennan had published an article in which he introduced the idea of “containment,” an expression already in use at the State Department by then. Kennan recommended “a policy of firm containment [of Russia]…with unalterable counterforce at every point where the Russians show signs of encroaching”—until the Soviet Union either “mellows” or collapses. The article was signed simply “X,” but the identity of the author was known soon enough, and in another few months Walter Lippmann issued his own strong rebuttal to the concept in a book called The Cold War, an expression Bernard Baruch had used earlier in a speech, but that now, like the Iron Curtain, became part of the postwar vocabulary.

When and why the Cold War began—whether with announcement of the Truman Doctrine, or earlier, when Truman first confronted Molotov, or perhaps with the eventual sanction of the Marshall Plan by Congress—would be the subject of much consideration in years to come. But the clearest dividing point between what American policy toward the Soviets had been since the war and what it would now become was George Marshall’s return from Moscow. The change came on April 26, 1947, when Marshall, of all men, reported to Truman what Truman had already privately concluded, that diplomacy wasn’t going to work, that the Russians could not be dealt with, that they wanted only drift and chaos and the collapse of Europe to suit their own purposes.

Chip Bohlen, who had been witness to so much—Molotov’s first call on Truman in the Oval Office, the meetings at Potsdam, Marshall’s pivotal session with Stalin at the Kremlin—said the Cold War could really be traced to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917. It had begun then, thirty years before.

Truman, looking back on his first years in office and the decisions he had made, would regret especially that he had been unable to stop wholesale demobilization after the war ended. It had been a grave mistake, he felt.

The Cold War was an expression he never much cared for and seldom used. He called it “the war of nerves.”

In later years, he would be charged with acting too impulsively and harshly with the Russians, with making snap judgments as a new President, without the benefit of experience or understanding. But “patience, I think, must be our watchword if we are to have world peace,” he had written to Eleanor Roosevelt less than a month after assuming office, and, in fact, it had taken two years to arrive at a policy toward the Soviets. He had moved slowly, perhaps too slowly, and always with the close counsel of the same people Franklin Roosevelt too had counted on, and particularly George Marshall.

In September, Truman received a handwritten note from Churchill, to say “how much I admire the policy into wh[ich] you have guided y[ou]r g[rea]t country; and to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you are doing to save the world from Famine and War.”

In a note of thanks, Truman said no man could carry the burden of the presidency and do it all right, but that he had good men around him now.

In mid-October, at an informal meeting in his office with newspaper editorial writers from around the country, he spent most of the time expounding on the vital need for the Marshall Plan. At the end, he was asked whether the United States would ever “get any credit…for sending this stuff to Europe?”

“I’m not doing this for credit,” Truman answered. “I am doing it because it’s right, I am doing it because it’s necessary to be done, if we are going to survive ourselves.”

The Marshall Plan was voted on by Congress in April 1948, almost a year after Marshall’s speech at Harvard, and passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses. It was a singular triumph for the administration, “the central gem in the cluster of great and fruitful decisions made by President Truman,” as Arthur Krock would write. Indeed, it was to be one of the great American achievements of the century, as nearly everyone eventually saw.

“In all the history of the world,” Truman wrote privately a few days after final passage of the program, “we are the first great nation to feed and support the conquered. We are the first great nation to create independent republics from conquered territory, Cuba and the Philippines. Our neighbors are not afraid of us. Their borders have no forts, no soldiers, no tanks, no big guns lined up.”

The United States wanted peace in the world and the United States would be prepared “for trouble if it comes.”

13

The Heat in the Kitchen

If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen.

—a favorite Truman saying

I

Exactly when Truman made up his mind to run for reelection is not known. Several times in 1947 he expressed reluctance to face another four years in the White House, “this goldfish bowl,” and again he considered the idea of Eisenhower as the ideal candidate for the Democrats. He would “groom” the general to follow him, Truman said privately. But when once more he broached the subject to Eisenhower, early in 1947, Eisenhower again declined, saying he had no political ambitions—not that he was not a Democrat.

According to Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall, Truman even offered to go on the ticket with Eisenhower as Vice President, if Eisenhower so desired. “Mr. Truman was a realist and from time to time doubted whether he could win in 1948,” Royall later explained. Eisenhower was the most popular man in America. To judge by the polls he had only to nod his head and the presidency was his.

Except for the “reward of service,” Truman told Secretary of Defense Forrestal, he had found little satisfaction in being President. Bess would “give everything” to be out of the White House, and he and Bess both regretted greatly the constrictions on Margaret’s life. No man in his right mind, Truman wrote to his sister in November 1947, would ever wish to be President if he knew what it entailed.

Aside from the impossible administrative burden, he has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues…. The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ‘em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

“President Truman did not want to run in 1948,” John Steelman later said emphatically.

Yet to others equally close day to day, it was clear the job agreed with him and they were certain he would never willingly abandon it. The whole pattern of his life had been a succession of increasingly difficult tests of his capacity to prove equal to tasks seemingly too large for him. Nor had he failed to meet this latest and greatest of tests. The feelings of inadequacy that had so troubled him after Roosevelt’s death were by now past. He liked being in charge. It showed in his face and in the way he carried himself.

He was a picture of health, his color good, his weight 175, blood pressure 120–128 over 80, which was considered excellent. He still took his daily walks and still at his old Army pace of 120 steps a minute, although lately, with the press of events, he often went in the evening instead of early morning.

He would complain at times of “the folderol” of the presidency, but unquestionably he enjoyed the power of the office and its trappings—the limousines, the yacht, the airplane, the special railroad car—as any vital, ambitious man would. The “abuse” he complained of to his sister was something he had long ago learned to live with. As Cabell Phillips of The New York Times would recall, Truman was “blessed with a tough hide and a secure conscience, so that he could roll with the punches…he responded with simple and exuberant delight to the flattery and deference that were showered upon him wherever he went in public life.” And he did indeed value the “reward of service” in the presidency, as in every office he had held since entering public life. A career politician, he had attained the summit of his profession, and if it was fate that put him there, then that was all the more reason to win it now on his own merits. “The greatest ambition Harry Truman had,” according to Clark Clifford, “was to get elected in his own right.”

Having kept so silent and so uncharacteristically detached during the off-year elections in 1946, only to see his party and himself humiliated, Truman now relished the prospect of taking on the Republicans in an all-out, full-scale championship fight, as he said. He was nothing if not a partisan politician and this was the fight he simply could not walk away from. He had much he wished still to accomplish. And he knew how quickly his own and New Deal programs, the liberal gains of sixteen years, could be undone by a Republican President and a Republican Congress. He felt it his duty to “get into the fight and help stem the tide of reaction,” as he later wrote. “They [the Republicans] did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person…. Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people.”

He saw himself battling as Jefferson had against the Federalists, or Jackson staging a revolution “against the forces of reaction.” In the long line of Republicans who had occupied the White House, he admired but two—Lincoln, for his concern for the common man; Theodore Roosevelt, for his progressive policies. To Truman, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were the giants of the century, and he had no choice, he felt, but to fight for the Democratic heritage that had been passed on to him. “What I wanted to do personally for my own comfort and benefit was not important. What I could do to contribute to the welfare of the country was important. I had to enter the 1948 campaign for the presidency.”

So by late autumn 1947 it was well known within the official family that he was in the race, and by the start of the new year nearly everyone in Washington had concluded he was running and that therefore just about anything he did or said was with that in mind, starting with his State of the Union address.

The speech, an uncompromising reaffirmation of his liberal program, delivered before Congress on Wednesday, January 7, 1948, evoked little applause and little praise afterward. The Republicans, as anticipated, did not like it at all, any more than did the southern Democrats. In less than an hour at the podium, Truman called again for a national health insurance program, a massive housing program, increased support for education, increased support for farmers, the conservation of natural resources, and a raise in the minimum wage from 40 to 75 cents an hour. To compensate for rising prices, he proposed a “poor man’s” tax cut, whereby each taxpayer would be allowed to deduct $40 for himself and for each dependent from his final tax bill. (“Tom Pendergast had paid two dollars a vote,” exclaimed the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Harold Knutson, “and now Truman proposes to pay forty dollars.”) Further, Truman announced he would be sending Congress a special message on civil rights. “Our first goal,” he said, “is to secure fully the essential human rights of our citizens.” The distress among southern Democrats was considerable.

Three weeks later, on February 2, 1948, without conferring with his congressional leaders, he sent the civil rights message. Based on the findings of his own Civil Rights Commission, it was the strongest such program that had ever been proposed by a President. Indeed, until now there had never been a special message on civil rights.

Not all Americans were free of violence, it began.

Not all groups are free to live and work where they please or to improve their conditions of life by their own efforts. Not all groups enjoy the full privileges of citizenship….

The Federal Government has a clear duty to see that the Constitutional guarantees of individual liberties and of equal protection under the laws are not denied or abridged anywhere in the Union. That duty is shared by all three branches of the Government, but it can be filled only if the Congress enacts modern, comprehensive civil rights laws, adequate to the needs of the day, and demonstrating our continuing faith in the free way of life.

Truman called for a federal law against “the crime of lynching, against which I cannot speak too strongly.” He wanted more effective statutory protection of the right to vote everywhere in the country, a law against the poll taxes that prevailed in seven states of the Old South, the establishment of a Fair Employment Practices Commission with authority to stop discrimination by employers and labor unions alike, an end to discrimination in interstate travel by rail, bus, and airplane. He announced also that he had asked the Secretary of Defense to look into discrimination in the military services and to see it was stopped as soon as possible.

In a final request, he asked Congress to act on the claims made by Americans of Japanese descent who, during the war, had been forced from their homes and kept in confinement “solely because of their racial origin”—claims that would not be met until years later.

It was a brave, revolutionary declaration, given the reality of entrenched discrimination and the prevailing attitudes of white Americans nearly everywhere in the country, but especially in the South, where the social status and legal “place” of black citizens had advanced not at all in more than half a century. That Truman believed in both the spirit and the specifics of the message there is no question. Asked at a press conference a few days later what he had drawn on for background, he replied, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Whether the message was bad or good politics in the year 1948 was a matter of opinion. Clark Clifford was certain the President was doing the right thing, morally and politically. To Boss Ed Flynn of the Bronx, who was no less concerned about losing the black vote in New York than he had been in 1944, it was extremely welcome news. But the angry outcry on the Hill suggested that if Truman meant what he said, he was finished in the South and therefore in November as well. Southern congressmen lashed out in language often too raw to print. Harlem, it was said, had more influence with this administration than all the white South. Tom Connally of Texas, an old Truman ally in the Senate, called the message a lynching of the Constitution and vowed the South would not “take it lying down.” Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina boycotted the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner at the Statler Hotel, where Truman was the guest of honor, because, as Johnston explained to reporters, he and his wife might be seated beside a “Nigra.” (As it was, the three black Democrats attending the dinner were at a table in the rear.)

When several southern Democrats, meeting privately with the President, suggested all would turn out well if he “softened” his views, Truman, in a written reply, said his own forebears were Confederates and he came from a part of Missouri where “Jim Crowism” still prevailed.

But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.

Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.

On racial matters, Truman had not entirely outgrown his background. Old biases, old habits of speech continued, surfacing occasionally offstage, as some of his aides and Secret Service agents would later attest. Privately, he could still speak of “niggers,” as if that were the way one naturally referred to blacks. His own sister told Jonathan Daniels that Harry was no different than ever on the subject. Daniels, who had gone to Missouri to gather material for a biography of the President, recorded in his notes that as Mary Jane drove him south from Independence to Grandview one morning, she turned and said, “Harry is no more for nigger equality than any of us”—a statement Daniels, as a southerner, found reassuring.

But Mary Jane, like others, failed to understand that Truman knew now, if they did not, that as President he could no longer sit idly by and do nothing in the face of glaring injustice. The findings of his Civil Rights Commission, in a landmark report entitled To Secure These Rights, had been a shocking revelation. When a friend from “out home” wrote to advise him to go easy on civil rights, appealing to Truman as a fellow southerner, Truman took time to answer privately and at length:

The main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the times and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and themselves. I am not asking for social equality, because no such things exist, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings, and, as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight. When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the [surrounding] country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.

When a mayor and a City Marshal can take a negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State Authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.

On the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway when coal burning locomotives were used, the Negro firemen were the thing because it was a back-breaking job and a dirty one. As soon as they turned to oil as a fuel it became customary for people to take shots at Negro firemen and a number were murdered because it was thought that this was now a white-collar job and should go to a white man. I can’t approve of such goings on and I shall never approve of it, as long as I am here…. I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause….

The murder of four blacks by mob gunfire referred to in the letter had occurred in Monroe, Georgia, in July 1946. Two men and their wives were dragged from a car and gunned down so savagely their bodies were scarcely identifiable. One of the victims, Truman knew from the report of his Commission, had been a newly returned war veteran, and this, like the account of the men dumped from the truck in Mississippi, and of the young black sergeant, Isaac Woodward, who had been pulled from a bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, and brutally beaten and blinded by police, made an everlasting impression on Truman, moving him in a way no statistics ever would have.

“The wonderful, wonderful development in those years,“ Clark Clifford would reflect long afterward, “was Harry Truman’s capacity to grow.”

Of all the President’s aides and Cabinet officers no one had done more than Clifford to push for a strong stand on civil rights, as part of a larger effort to, in Clifford’s words, “strike for new high ground” whenever confronting the Republican Congress. And it was strategy based on close study, no less than moral conviction, for Clifford did nothing without careful preparation and planning. (On the golf course he was known as someone never to play behind, if it could be avoided, since he took so many practice swings before every shot.) A special, confidential report had been prepared on “The Politics of 1948,” a document of thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages prepared by a young Washington attorney and former Roosevelt aide named James A. Rowe, Jr., who had been talking with labor leaders, professional politicians, and newspaper people. It was a political forecast, with suggestions based, as Rowe stressed, solely on appraisal of “the politically advantageous thing to do.” Because Rowe was a law partner of Thomas Corcoran, the influential “Tommy the Cork,” whom Truman so disliked, Clifford decided not to tell Truman of Rowe’s part in the report, but to submit it as his own. And with some editing and added refinements by Clifford and George Elsey it was perceived as, if not exactly a blueprint for the Democrats in 1948, then a guide to navigation.

That Rowe’s authorship was so brushed aside then and later distressed Rowe very little. Such was the nature of the system. “This is, as you know, a typical and acceptable White House staff technique,” he would write to a political scholar years later, “and one which I followed in the days when I was Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt.” Who got the credit was not the point. They were all there to serve the President. Roosevelt especially had preferred people working for him to be equipped with “a passion for anonymity.”

In the Roosevelt and Truman years, George Elsey would remember, “staff was staff.”

The Republican nominee, Rowe predicted, would be Dewey, and Dewey, a “resourceful,” “highly dangerous” candidate, would be more difficult to defeat than in 1944. To win, the Democrats had to carry the West and the farm vote. Labor would have to be “cajoled, flattered and educated,” not because labor might vote Republican, but because labor might “stay home” on election day. The liberals, on the other hand, had to be “fed” idealism. For while few in number, the liberals, like the manufacturers and financiers in the Republican ranks, were extremely influential: “The businessman has influence because he contributes money. The liberal exerts influence because he is articulate.”

The black vote was crucial. “A theory of many professional politicians,” Rowe reported, “is that the northern Negro vote today holds the balance of power in Presidential elections for the simple arithmetical reason that the Negroes not only vote in a block but are geographically concentrated in the pivotal, large and closely contested electoral states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.” Unless the administration made a determined campaign to help the Negro, Rowe insisted, the Negro vote was already lost.

No candidate since 1876, except Woodrow Wilson in 1916, had won the presidency without carrying New York, and crucial to New York, along with the black vote, was the Jewish vote, concentrated in New York City. But unless the Palestine issue was “boldly and favorably handled” by the administration, the Jewish vote was certain to go to the “alert” Dewey, or to Henry Wallace.

Housing and high prices would be the chief domestic issue. The foreign policy issue, of course, would be American relations with the Soviet Union, and, according to Rowe, there was “considerable political advantage” to the administration in its battle with the Kremlin. The Cold War made good election year politics.

In times of crises the American citizen tends to back up his President. And on the issue of policy toward Russia, President Truman is comparatively invulnerable to attack because of his brilliant appointment of General Marshall, who has convinced the public that as Secretary of State he is nonpartisan and above politics.

In a flank attack tied up with foreign policy, the Republicans are trying to identify the Administration with domestic Communists. The President adroitly stole their thunder by initiating his own Government employee loyalty investigation procedure and the more frank Republicans admit it. But their efforts will intensify as the election approaches….

Leadership in the Democratic Party was moribund or worse. It had been so long in power that it was “fat, tired and even a bit senile.” The old boss-run machines were a shambles.

The President appeared to be liked by the American people. “They know that he is a sincere and humble man and, in the cliché often heard, that he is a man ‘trying to do his best.’ ” The problem was the people saw him still as fundamentally a politician, and the politician as such did not hold first place in the ranks of American heroes. The “public picture” of the President, unfortunately, was “not sufficiently varied.” The people wanted more in a chief executive. To resolve the problem, Rowe suggested that Truman be seen less in the company of politicians and more often with such interesting people as famous scientists and best-selling authors. Further, the President should divest himself as rapidly as possible of any remnants of the “Missouri gang.” Rowe (and subsequently Clifford in the final version of the report) proposed that Truman invite Albeit Einstein to lunch at the White House, that Truman, as a matter of routine, be seen and photographed with not less than two interesting, admirable, nonpolitical figures per week.

Most important of all, the President must be seen more by the people. He must get away from Washington, travel the country.

Since he is President he cannot be politically active until after the July convention…. So a President who is also a candidate must resort to subterfuges—for he cannot sit silent. He must be in the limelight. He must…resort to the kind of trip which Roosevelt made famous in the 1940 campaign—the “inspection tour.” No matter how much the opposition press pointed out the political overtones of those trips, the people paid little attention because what they saw was the Head of State performing his duties.

In several respects the report was decidedly mistaken. There was the assumption, for example, that Truman would agree to an idea like inviting Einstein to lunch. Truman had no patience with such public relations gimmickry. It would be synthetic and out of character and he wouldn’t do it, he told Clifford. Nor was he about to cashier Harry Vaughan or Wallace Graham in order to enhance his standing in the public eye. But more striking was Rowe’s mistaken confidence that the solid South would remain loyal to the Democratic Party. It was, he said, inconceivable that any policies initiated by the administration, no matter how liberal, could so alienate the South it would revolt in an election year. “As always the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in formulating national policy it can be safely ignored.”

Since the Republicans controlled Congress, and since the southern Democrats who went along with the Republicans time and again were not about to change their attitudes, there was no reason to try to placate either faction.

“We were telling the President,” Rowe later recalled, “ ‘You can’t get anything done up there on the Hill, so, in effect, you want to send all the legislation you can up there and then give them hell for not doing anything about it….’ ”

How much real influence the memorandum had on Truman is impossible to measure. Probably it was relatively little, certainly less than later claimed. According to Rowe—who was told by James Webb—Truman kept it in the bottom drawer of his desk and read it “every once in a while.” But others would insist the memorandum made little if any impression on Truman, since he already knew most of the best that was in it. “To a politician of Harry Truman’s experience and resourcefulness,” remembered Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, “the ‘famous political memorandum’ would have been a primer.” And in any event Truman would be running the campaign his own way, according to his own ideas, his own political instincts.

As things developed, the boycotting of the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner by Senator Johnston was only a mild preview of southern outrage. Fifty-two southern Democrats in Congress pledged themselves to fight any civil rights program in the Democratic platform and, by implication, any Democratic candidate for President who advocated such heinous liberal ideas. There were threats of a white southern march on Washington and Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, speaking for a committee of southern governors, pledged to defend white supremacy and warned the leadership of the Democratic Party that the South was no longer “in the bag.” The Mississippi Democratic Committee said it would withdraw from the national convention unless “anti-Southern laws” were rejected.

Truman took all this very calmly. Then, on March 8, without fanfare, Senator J. Howard McGrath, Bob Hannegan’s replacement as national chairman, announced formally that the President was in the fight for reelection, adding also that the President’s position on civil rights remained unchanged.

Immediately Alabama’s Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman, two of the South’s most liberal voices in Congress and old friends of Harry Truman, called on him to withdraw and said they would give him no support at the convention. Clearly, a southern rebellion of major proportions was under way.

Troubles of an entirely different nature were besetting Truman, meantime, some minor, even trivial, yet conspicuous and time-consuming just the same.

A huge stir of disapproval and ridicule—editorial indignation, jokes, cartoons—had erupted when he announced a plan to add a new balcony to the South Portico of the White House, extending from his upstairs Oval Study, so that he and his family could enjoy some outside “breathing space” with a degree of privacy. It would mean the first major change in the mansion since the time of Andrew Jackson, when the North Portico was added.

The balcony project was Truman’s own idea and to his extreme annoyance, it met with instant disapproval from the Fine Arts Commission, as well as a large part of the press. He was called “Back Porch Harry” and accused of meddling with a structure that not only didn’t belong to him, but that he was not likely to be occupying much longer. Republicans were delighted, as the “Truman Balcony” became an overnight sensation. Truman, his temper up, stood his ground, arguing that Jefferson himself had used just such upstairs galleries or balconies in his columned buildings at the University of Virginia. (The Washington Star expressed gratitude that the President had never seen the Taj Mahal or the old Moulmein Pagoda, or he might have had even more outrageous notions.) The balcony would make the White House “look right,” Truman insisted. It would do away with the need for the unsightly awnings used in summer to shade the mansion’s downstairs rooms on the south side. “The awnings you will remember were attached about halfway up the beautiful columns and looked always as if they’d caught all the grime and dirt in town,” he wrote to his sister. “Had to be renewed every year [at a cost of $780] and cost $2,000 a year in upkeep. In eight years the portico will be paid for in awning cost and the White House from the south will look as it should.” On his morning walks, when approaching the White House from the south side, he hated the sight of the dirty awnings and the way they “put the beautiful columns out of proportion.” He would go ahead with his balcony. And that was that.

To compound his concerns over the old house, he was informed discreetly by Head Usher Howell Crim that the whole second floor was in imminent danger of falling down. After close examination, an engineer told Truman the ceiling in the State Dining Room was staying in place largely from “force of habit.”

Charlie Ross was in a fury because Harry Vaughan insisted on making his own announcements to the press. The soft-spoken, thoughtful press secretary and the Falstaffian military aide had come to dislike one another more and more. Ross was “terrifically upset,” warning there had to be a showdown; “it had to be either Vaughan or himself,” recorded Eben Ayers.

Wallace Graham, the President’s physician, was accused of gambling in grain futures at the very time the President had denounced commodity speculation as a contributing cause of inflation, and the implications were that Graham had benefited from inside information. Though at first Graham insisted he had “lost his socks” in the market, he eventually admitted to having made a profit of $6,000 on an investment of $5,700. Nonetheless he, like Harry Vaughan, remained on duty at the White House, and the more the press deplored their presence, the more Truman dug in his heels.

“You can guard yourself against the wiles of your enemies,” Ross observed ruefully to Ayers, “but not the stupidity of your friends.”

Henry Wallace, meantime, was crusading up and down the country and drawing huge crowds. His followers included ardent young liberals, working people, blacks, and, conspicuously, members of the American Communist Party. Attacking the Democrats and Republicans alike for their internal “rot,” Wallace proposed turning America’s atomic weapons over to the United Nations, and called for a massive reconstruction program for the Soviet Union to be financed by the United States. He repudiated the Marshall Plan as a marshal plan. He talked of nationalizing the country’s coal mines and railroads. Truman’s political strategists worried that the effect of the Wallace movement on Democratic loyalties could do more damage than defections in the South.

But above all, it was the urgent problem of what to do about Palestine that troubled Truman. Reflecting on her father’s White House years long afterward, Margaret Truman would call this in some ways his most difficult dilemma of all.

II

The issue was complicated, baffling, and charged with emotion, “explosive,” as Truman said, and in the heated climate of an election year, exceedingly sensitive. Its consequences in human terms—for the Jewish people, the Arab Palestinians, in its effect on Middle Eastern relations—could clearly be momentous and very far-reaching.

Truman felt pulled in several directions. Like the great majority of Americans, he wanted to do what was right for the hundreds of thousands of European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, who had suffered such unimaginable horrors. His sympathy for them was heartfelt and deep-seated. As senator, at the mass meeting in Chicago in 1943, he had said everything “humanly possible” must be done to provide a haven for Jewish survivors of the Nazis. Often as senator, he had personally assured Zionist leaders he would fight for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As President, he was further impressed by the report of an emissary sent the summer of 1945 to investigate displaced person camps in Europe and talk to Jewish survivors. Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and former U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, had supplied Truman with an exceedingly moving document describing misery that, as Truman said, “could not be allowed to continue.” And it reinforced his own belief that Palestine was the answer. Palestine, reported Harrison, was “definitely and preeminently” the choice of the Jewish survivors in Europe. Only in Palestine would “they be welcomed and find peace and quiet and be given an opportunity to live and work. No other single matter is, therefore, so important from the viewpoint of Jews in Germany and Austria and those elsewhere who have known the horrors of concentration camps as is the disposition of the Palestine question.”

The two ardent champions of the Jewish cause on the White House staff were Clark Clifford and David K. Niles, Truman’s special assistant for minority affairs. Niles, one of the holdovers from the Roosevelt years and himself a Jew, sensed in Truman a fundamental sympathy for the plight of the Jews that he had never felt with Roosevelt. Had Roosevelt lived, Niles later said, things might not have turned out as they did.

Niles was a short, dark, round-faced, nearsighted man with a receding hairline—as unremarkable in appearance as Clifford was striking—and an extremely shrewd, experienced political troubleshooter with longstanding contacts among Jewish leaders in every part of the country. To White House reporters, as to others on the White House staff, he seemed oddly secretive, even mysterious, spending long weekends in New York with theater people, or in Boston, his home town. It was a reputation Niles cultivated. His own “passion for anonymity” verged on being a mania. “I am a man of no importance,” he would insist quietly. In his tiny, cluttered office on the second floor of the old State Department Building next door, he spent most of his time on the telephone. Between them, Niles and Clifford would keep key Zionists informed of what was going on in Washington and within the White House at almost every step.

Both men were keenly attuned to the politics of the Palestine issue, though Clifford vehemently objected to any charges, then or later, that the November election was the real heart of the matter, that it was all “just politics” to get the Jewish vote.

Support for a Jewish homeland was, of course, extremely good politics in 1948, possibly crucial in such big states as Pennsylvania or Illinois, and especially in New York where there were 2.5 million Jews. More important even than Jewish votes to the destitute Democratic Party could be Jewish campaign contributions. Nor was there any doubt that the Republicans stood ready to do all they could for the Jewish cause and for the same reasons. But beyond the so-called “Jewish vote” there was the country at large, where popular support for a Jewish homeland was overwhelming. As would sometimes be forgotten, it was not just American Jews who were stirred by the prospect of a new nation for the Jewish people, it was most of America.

Politics and humanitarian concerns and foreign policy were all closely, irrevocably intertwined. Yet for Truman unquestionably, humanitarian concerns mattered foremost. His sympathies were naturally with the underdog, but he was influenced too by a lifelong love of ancient history, his own remarkable grasp of the whole complicated chronicle of the Fertile Crescent. For Truman, Palestine was never just a place on the map.

And his own reading of ancient history and the Bible made him a supporter of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine [Clifford remembered], even when others who were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews were talking of sending them to places like Brazil. He did not need to be convinced by Zionists. In fact, he had to work hard to avoid the appearance of yielding to Zionist pressure…. I remember him talking once about the problems of displaced persons. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has someplace to go back to,” he said. “But the Jews have no place to go.”

To Truman, as he himself wrote, it was “a basic human problem.” When his Secretary of Defense, Forrestal, reminded him of the critical need for Saudi Arabian oil, in the event of war, Truman said he would handle the situation in the light of justice, not oil.

Any implication by Forrestal or officials from the State Department that he somehow failed to appreciate the complexities involved, Truman greatly resented. As President he could not possibly dismiss the strategic and economic importance to the United States and Europe of the rapidly developing Middle Eastern oil reserves. Like most Americans, he knew relatively little about the Arabs and their culture, but at the same time he had no wish to damage relations with the Arabs, whose hostility to the establishment of a Jewish state in their midst appeared implacable. American relations with the Arab states had been good until now and like Forrestal, the Chiefs of Staff, fearing an “oil-starved” war, put great stress on the importance of maintaining those relations. To the Arabs it seemed they were being made to pay for the crimes of Hitler.

Much blood had already been spilled in Palestine. Arab groups had attacked Jewish settlements. Jewish terrorists had attacked British troops. Zionist leaders had been jailed. In the summer of 1946, the Jewish terrorist group Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one people. And while Truman remained sympathetic to the claim of the Jews on Palestine and knew that more than 600,000 Jews were already there, he also knew the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Arabs. As he said many times, he had no wish to send American troops to guarantee the survival of the new Jewish state; and from the advice he was getting, that was exactly what would be required.

Also he found the mounting pressures on him by Jewish organizations extremely vexing. A good listener, he had been listening to their pleas and arguments since his earliest days in office, when Rabbi Stephen Wise first called on him, and he had become not just worn down by it all but increasingly suspicious, increasingly resentful of the politics of Palestine. In late 1947, the White House received more than 100,000 letters and telegrams concerning Palestine.

“Mr. President, it is up to you and the other leaders of the American people to set an example to the rest of the world…. Give your support to the Zionist Movement, just as the late President Roosevelt would have done,” he read in a letter from Brooklyn. A telegram from the Philadelphia Womens Division of the American Jewish Congress said:

OUR GOVERNMENT IS HONOR BOUND BY ITS PLEASURES AND PROMISES AND MUST KEEP FAITH WITH HUMANITY. WE MUST GIVE OUR LEADERSHIP AND STRENGTH FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE.

Truman became so exasperated by the flood of Jewish “propaganda,” he told Senator Claude Pepper, that he took a great stack of such mail and “struck a match to it”—a claim that may have expressed his true desire but that appears to have no basis in fact. (“I don’t remember that incident at all,” his secretary Rose Conway later told writer Robert Donovan.)

“What I am trying to do is make the whole world safe for the Jews. Therefore I don’t feel like going to war in Palestine,” Truman wrote in response to one Zionist group, in a letter he never sent. To Mrs. Roosevelt, whom he had made a delegate to the United Nations, he wrote: “The action of some of our United States Zionists will eventually prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done. I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”

When a congressional delegation from New York came to see him about the issue, he sat at his desk irritably shuffling papers and said he wished more people would call on him about the country’s problems, and not their own.

“I am not a New Yorker,” he is supposed to have said at another meeting. “All these people are pleading a special interest. I am an American.” He abhorred special interests of any kind, but several individuals had begun to get under his skin.

Particularly offensive to Truman was the attitude of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, who, with Stephen Wise, was co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council. A Republican and close ally of Senator Taft, Rabbi Silver had helped write a pro-Zionist plank in the 1944 Republican platform. At one point during a meeting in Truman’s office, Silver had hammered on Truman’s desk and shouted at him. “Terror and Silver are the causes of some, if not all, of our troubles,” Truman later said, and at one Cabinet meeting he reportedly grew so furious over the subject of the Jews that he snapped, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.”

To his sister Mary Jane he wrote, “I’m so tired and bedeviled I can’t be decent to people.”

When several American diplomats, who had been called home from the Middle East to advise him, finished presenting the Arab point of view, Truman’s comment was that he didn’t have a great many Arabs among his constituents.

Forrestal’s intense, repeated warnings of the importance of Arab oil, Forrestal’s bitter opposition to any American action that would favor the Zionist cause, had also begun to play on Truman’s nerves. And for his part, Forrestal found himself thinking less and less of a President who seemed so willing to cave in to cheap political expediency.

Truman had not, however, shut himself off from Zionist spokesmen, or, importantly, from contact with his old friend and former business partner, Eddie Jacobson. Like many American Jews, Jacobson was not a Zionist. But he looked to Zionist leaders to solve the problems of the Jewish refugees, and he had been trying to do his part, both for the refugees and for the cause of the Jewish homeland, by escorting small groups to the White House to explain the Zionist position. (Following one such visit in 1946, when he had accompanied Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld of New York, and Charles Kaplan, the vice president of a shirt company, to see the President, Jacobson quipped to reporters, “Kaplan sells shirts, I sell furnishings, and the Rabbi sells notions.”)

Truman was as fond of Jacobson as ever. He knew him to be a devout Jew and a patriotic American and trusted him absolutely, and this was to give Jacobson a role of unusual importance as events unfolded. Until now, Jacobson had asked no favors of Truman or presumed ever to impose on his time. “And when the day came when Eddie Jacobson was persuaded to forego his natural reluctance to petition me and he came to talk to me about the plight of the Jews…I paid careful attention,” Truman later wrote. Indeed, said Truman, it was “a fact of history” that Jacobson’s contribution was of “decisive importance,” a point quite unknown at the time.

The call to make Palestine a Jewish homeland had begun in the late nineteenth century, and prominent among American champions of the cause had been Truman’s late friend Justice Louis Brandeis, who had helped win Woodrow Wilson’s approval of the Zionist dream. In 1917, during the Great War, the British had seized Palestine from the Turks; that same year, in what became known as the Balfour Declaration, the British government formally endorsed the idea of a future Jewish home in Palestine, the ancient kingdom of Israel, a narrow streak on the map, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, comprising all of 10,000 square miles, about the size of Sicily or Vermont.

The war over, Britain was granted a special mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, with the understanding that independence would soon follow. But the British mandate had continued. Only after another world war, only in 1947, had the Attlee government announced that it would withdraw from Palestine, as from Greece, and turn the whole thorny issue over to the United Nations.

So, in effect, Palestine and the destiny of Europe’s displaced Jews was another of those results of World War II—like the bomb and the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe—that had been left for Truman to face.

American policy, generally speaking, favored immediate independence for Palestine, which would then be divided, or “partitioned,” into two separate states, one Jewish, one Arab, joined in an economic union. The United States also supported the idea of large-scale Jewish immigration to the new homeland.

Jews everywhere favored partition. The Arab states were vehemently opposed. The British thought the plan unworkable, and though Winston Churchill, at the peak of his power, had championed a Jewish homeland—“I am a Zionist,” he had bellowed at a meeting in Cairo in 1944—the Attlee government opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine. To the British, Harry Truman seemed “carelessly pro-Zionist.” When, in 1946, Truman had called for the admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin ascribed it to a crude desire for votes in New York and suggested Truman had no wish to see more Jews come to the United States, remarks that set Truman’s teeth on edge.

The more attention given to the issue, the more divisive it became, dividing Jews from Arabs, British from Americans, and more and more in Washington threatening to divide the White House from the State Department, where it was strongly felt the Arabs would never accept partition except under force, and might very well turn to the Soviets for help—a move that could bring the Soviets into the Middle East on the pretext of keeping the peace.

Like the British, senior officers at the State Department favored a United Nations trusteeship over Palestine until the contention between Arabs and Jews could somehow be resolved. George Kennan considered the Palestine situation insoluble for the time being. More outspoken was the head of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, Loy W. Henderson, a suave, knowledgeable career diplomat with a strong sense of duty who was convinced partition of Palestine had no chance of success. Henderson worried about the consequences to the Marshall Plan should Arab oil be cut off, Europe being dependent on the Arab states for 80 percent of its oil. The creation of a new Jewish state at this particular moment, he stressed to Marshall, could be disastrous to the long-range interests of the United States.

Relations between the State Department and such members of Truman’s staff as Clifford and Niles grew extremely difficult. “Some White House men still believe that a number of positions taken by career men on this matter were based on anti-Semitism, not diplomacy,” Jonathan Daniels was to write, naming no names. “And there are men in the State Department who believe that some of the presidential staff were clearly more concerned about Israel in terms of American politics than in terms of American security.” If Clifford was reluctant to stress the domestic political stakes involved, Niles was not. Henderson would remember Niles turning to him at one point and saying sharply, “Look here, Loy, the most important thing for the United States is for the President to be reelected.”

According to Dean Rusk, who was then Marshall’s assistant secretary in charge of U.N. affairs, the real cause of difficulty was not any deviousness on the part of the State Department, but the “conflicting objectives” in the President’s own mind. “This wasn’t understood at the time. With Marshall and State working toward a long-range solution, the Zionists branded anyone not 1,000 percent behind the Zionist cause as having betrayed the president.”

Clifford remained certain the State Department, “to a man,” was doing everything possible to thwart the President’s intentions, and he told Truman so. Truman thought Clifford unduly concerned. “I know how Marshall feels and he knows how I feel,” Truman said, meaning if Marshall was with him, that was all he needed to know.

In Palestine, the whole time, violence and terrorism continued.

It was in late 1947, on Saturday, November 29, over the Thanksgiving weekend, that the United Nations, at the end of a dramatic two-and-a-half-hour session, voted for partition by a narrow margin, the United States taking a lead part behind the scenes to see the measure through. (“We went for it,” Clifford told Jonathan Daniels. “It was because the White House was for it that it went through.”) The Soviet Union, too, had joined the United States in support.

Eddie Jacobson recorded in telegraphic style his own chronicle of the unfolding drama:

Nov. 6th—Wash.—Pres. still going all out for Palestine.

Nov. 17th—Again to White House….

Wed., 26—Received call from White House—everything O.K.

Nov. 27—Thanksgiving. Sent two page wire to Truman.

Friday, received call from his secretary [Matt Connelly] not to worry.

Nov. 29th—Mission accomplished.

Truman, Jacobson noted, had told him that “he [Truman] and he alone was responsible for swinging the votes of several delegations.”

Zionists, Jews everywhere, were elated. In the lobby outside the General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters at Flushing Meadows, in what had been the New York City Building at the 1939 World’s Fair, the Jewish delegation was swept up in the embrace of delegates and visitors from all but the Arab countries. In the hall itself, while members of the Arab delegations walked out, Zionists in the audience were rejoicing. “This is the day the Lord hath made!” a rabbi cried in the delegates’ lounge. “There were Jews in tears, and non-Jews moved by the nobility of the occasion. Nobody who ever lived that moment will ever lose its memory from his heart,” recalled Abba Eban, who was then a young liaison officer with the Jewish Agency, the official Zionist organization.

To the Zionist Organization of America, the vote was “a triumphant vindication” of the Zionist dream and “a victory for international equity.” Rabbi Silver called it a turning point in history, and expressed particular appreciation for the part played by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Here, said the New York Herald-Tribune, was “one of the few great acts of courageous collective statesmanship which our shattered postwar world has been able to achieve.” At a Zionist rally in New York to celebrate the occasion, twenty thousand people tried to jam into an auditorium on 34th Street, a crowd three times the seating capacity.

Britain announced that responsibility for Palestine would be turned over to the United Nations in less than six months, on May 14, 1948. The Arabs said partition meant war, and Truman was warned by the Chiefs of Staff that military intervention by the United States to protect a new Jewish state would require no less than 100,000 troops. (The British were about to withdraw 50,000 troops.) The Arabs, Forrestal told Clifford, would “push the Jews into the sea.”

The hard truth, as Forrestal reported to Truman, was that the deployable troops then available totaled less than 30,000, plus perhaps 23,000 Marines.

Nor was Palestine by any means the sole concern in early February 1948. In Czechoslovakia, a violent coup backed by the Red Army had imposed a pro-Communist government with bewildering speed. It was one of the traumatic events of the postwar era. A feeling of revulsion swept much of the world, as it had only ten years before when the Nazis seized Czechoslovakia. Italy and France appeared to be headed for the same fate.

Truman left for Key West for another greatly needed rest and change of scene which, after all, did little to improve his outlook. “Things look black,” he told Margaret in a letter from Key West on March 3. Russia had kept none of its agreements. “So that now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938/39 with Hitler.”

Two days later, on March 5, came a top-secret cable from General Lucius D. Clay in Berlin reporting a worrisome shift in Soviet attitudes in Berlin, “a new tenseness in every Soviet individual with whom we have official relations.” Until recently, Clay had felt another war was not likely for at least ten years. His sense now was that war could come any time and “with dramatic suddenness.”

If, as later suggested, the real purpose of Clay’s message was to impress Congress on the need to reinstate the draft, this was not understood at the time and its effect on Washington was stunning and entirely real. General Bradley said later that it “lifted me right out of my chair.” Secretary of the Army Royall checked with David Lilienthal to see how long it would take to move atomic bombs to the Mediterranean, closer to Russia. “The atmosphere of Washington today,” wrote Joseph and Stuart Alsop in their column, “is no longer postwar. It is a prewar atmosphere.”

“The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the U.N.,” Truman would write years later, bitter still over the memory. “Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American soldiers, to do this, that, and the other. I think I can say that I kept the faith in the rightness of my policy in spite of some of the Jews.”

Hundreds of thousands of postcards flooded the White House mail, nearly all from Jewish interest groups. Largely as a result of the efforts of the American Zionist Emergency Council, thirty-three state legislatures passed resolutions favoring a Jewish state in Palestine. Forty governors and more than half the Congress signed petitions to the President. David Niles grew so emotional at one meeting in Truman’s office that he threatened to quit unless Truman moved more emphatically in support of the Jewish cause. Ed Flynn came down from New York to tell the President that he must either “give in” on Palestine or expect New York’s opposition to his renomination in July.

Truman’s patience wore thin. He refused to make further comment on Palestine, refused to see any more Zionist spokesmen, even ruling out a visit from Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the grand old man of world Zionist leaders, who, despite failing health, had sailed from London for the expressed purpose of seeing him. Weizmann, a renowned scientist, now seventy-four, had devoted a large part of his life to the dream of a Jewish homeland. Small, charming, and clever, he had been one of the architects of the Balfour Declaration. Also, he and Truman already knew and liked one another. At their first meeting, as Truman remembered, he had not known how to pronounce “Chaim.” “So I called him ‘Cham.’ He liked it. He was a wonderful man, one of the wisest people I think I ever met…a leader, one of the kind you read about.”

They had met secretly in the White House in November 1947, just before the U.N. vote on partition, and the effect on Truman was nearly as pronounced as it had been on the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, thirty years earlier. Spreading a map on Truman’s desk, Weizmann had fascinated the former Missouri farmer with the agricultural possibilities in the Negev Desert, the future control of which was still at issue. Truman pledged his support for the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state. “You can bank on us,” Truman had said, and as Weizmann would write with wry understatement, “I was extremely happy to find that the President read the map quickly and clearly.”

But now Truman had closed the door to “the little doctor,” and this to Weizmann and his American Zionist allies was an especially distressing sign. Through Clifford and Niles, they already knew in detail what opposition they faced at the State Department.

A secret paper from George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff recommended no further support for partition. A report from the new Central Intelligence Agency concluded that partition would not work and urged reconsideration. More important to Truman were the views of George Marshall who, at a meeting of the National Security Council on February 12, had said the United States was “playing with fire while having nothing with which to put it out.”

Marshall saw America as gravely threatened by the Soviet Union, and as a soldier, he was acutely aware of the vital importance of Middle Eastern oil in the event of a war in Europe, which seemed more likely by the day. Marshall had besides a soldier’s distaste for politics. Writing about the Palestine question in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, he had said candidly that “the political situation in this country doesn’t help matters.” At a press conference he was still more emphatic. As long as he was Secretary of State, there would be no “bending” to either political or military threats.

Clifford grew increasingly concerned. “On five occasions I told the President that our position on Israel was going sour,” Clifford recorded. “On each time the President replied, ‘No, Marshall knows how I feel.’”

At the State Department, thousands of letters were received demanding the dismissal of Loy Henderson for being “pro-Arab.”

Henderson was summoned to Truman’s office, to a meeting attended by Clifford and Niles, and asked to defend his position. Henderson felt Clifford and Niles were trying to humiliate him in front of the President. “I pointed out that the views which I had been expressing were those, not only of myself,” Henderson remembered, “but of all our legations and consular offices in the Middle East and of all members of the Department of State who had responsibilities for that area.” The cross-questioning by Clifford and Niles became more and more harsh, until finally Truman stood up and said, “Oh, hell, I’m leaving!”

From his bearing and facial expression [Henderson remembered] I was not at all convinced that even at that late date the President had made the final decision to go all out for the establishment of the Jewish state. Although I was not in a position, of course, to know what his real feelings were, I had the impression that he realized that the Congress, the press, the Democratic Party, and aroused American public opinion in general, would turn against him if he should withdraw his support of the Zionist cause. On the other hand, it seemed to me he was worried about what the long-term effect would be on the United States if he should continue to support policies advocated by the Zionists. He was almost desperately hoping, I thought, that the Department of State would tell him that the setting up in Palestine of Arab and Jewish states as proposed by the U.N. Commission would be in the interest of the United States. This, however, the Department of State thus far had not been able to do.

On arriving at New York from London, Chaim Weizmann had taken ill from the “strain” of events. Every effort to make contact with Truman had failed. Then, late the night of February 20, as Weizmann lay in his room at the Waldorf-Astoria, the president of the national B’nai B’rith, Frank Goldman, put through a call to Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City, getting Jacobson out of bed to ask if he would be willing to help. No one, not even Ed Flynn, could budge the President, Goldman said.

In a hurried letter to Truman, Jacobson begged him to see Chaim Weizmann as soon as possible. But in response, in a letter from Key West dated February 27, Truman said there was nothing new that Weizmann could tell him. The situation, Truman added, was “not solvable as presently set up.”

Jacobson refused to accept defeat. No sooner had Truman returned to Washington than Jacobson arrived from Kansas City. On Saturday, March 13, without an appointment, he walked into the West Wing of the White House, where, outside Truman’s office, Matt Connelly warned him that under no circumstances was he to mention Palestine.

Entering Truman’s office, shaking hands with his old friend, Jacobson was pleased to see how well he looked. Florida had done him good, Jacobson said. For a while they chatted about their families and Jacobson’s business, a subject in which Truman, Jacobson said, “always had a brother’s interest.” They were alone, and with the West Wing largely unoccupied on Saturday, the hush of the room was greater than usual.

Jacobson brought up Palestine. Truman, suddenly tense and grim-faced, responded in hard, abrupt fashion, not at all like himself, Jacobson thought. “In all the years of our friendship he never talked to me in this manner, or in any way even approaching it,” Jacobson would remember. Truman later told Clark Clifford he was not angry at Jacobson so much as at the people who were using Jacobson to get to him.

He had no wish to talk about Palestine or the Jews or the Arabs or the British, Truman said. He would leave that to the United Nations. He spoke bitterly of the abuse he had been subjected to, of how “disrespectful and mean” certain Jews had been to him. Jacobson thought suddenly and sadly that “my dear friend, the President of the United States, was at that moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be….”

Jacobson tried arguing back—“I am now surprised at myself that I had the nerve,” he later wrote—but Truman was unmoved. Jacobson felt crushed.

On a table to the right, against the wall, was one of the President’s prized possessions, a small bronze of Andrew Jackson on horseback, the model of the statue by Charles Keck that Truman had commissioned for the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City. Jacobson had noticed it on other visits, but now, pointing to it, he found himself making an impassioned speech:

Harry, all your life you have had a hero…. I too have a hero, a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived…. I am talking about Chaim Weizmann. He is a very sick man, almost broken in health, but he traveled thousands of miles just to see you and plead the cause of my people. Now you refuse to see him just because you are insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders, even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with these insults and would be the last man to be party to them. It doesn’t sound like you, Harry, because I thought you could take this stuff they have been handing out….

As Abba Eban later wrote, the comparison between Weizmann and Andrew Jackson was unimaginably far-fetched. And it worked.

Truman began drumming his fingers on the desk. He wheeled around in his chair and with his back to Jacobson sat looking out the window into the garden. For what to Jacobson seemed “like centuries,” neither of them said anything. Then, swinging about and looking Jacobson in the eye, Truman said what Jacobson later described as the most endearing words he had ever heard: “You win, you baldheaded son-of-a-bitch. I will see him.”

From the White House Jacobson walked directly across Lafayette Square and up 16th Street to the bar at the Statler where, as never before in his life, he downed two double bourbons.

On March 16, the morning papers were filled with rumors of war. Truman’s concern was extreme. The Marshall Plan was insufficient to check the Soviet menace. American military strength must also be reestablished and quickly. “It is the most serious situation we have faced since 1939,” he wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt. “I shall face it with everything I have.”

He must awaken the Congress and the country. “It was better to do that than be caught, as we were in the last war, without having warned the Congress and the people,” he told his staff.

On March 17, a fine, bright St. Patrick’s Day in Washington with the forsythia in bloom, he went before a joint session on the Hill to ask for immediate passage of the Marshall Plan, for universal military training still one more time, and for a “temporary reenactment” of the draft, to meet the rapid changes taking place in Europe that threatened national security. It was almost exactly a year since his speech from the same podium announcing the Truman Doctrine. And for the first time now, he identified the Soviet Union as the one nation blocking the way to peace. It was a forceful, historic statement:

Since the close of hostilities [World War II], the Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.

It is this ruthless course of action, and the clear design to extend it to the remaining free nations in Europe, that have brought about the critical situation in Europe today…. I believe that we have reached the point at which the position of the United States should be made unmistakably clear…. There are times in world history when it is far wiser to act than to hesitate.

The will to peace, he said, must be backed by the strength for peace. “We must be prepared to pay the price for peace, or assuredly we shall pay the price of war.”

But Congress was fundamentally unmoved.

To Arthur Krock of The New York Times, an acknowledged “hardliner,” Truman deserved great praise for his courage, as well as his disregard for political considerations, since calling for the draft in an election year seemed the poorest possible political strategy. Yet to many in the audience, talk of the “growing menace” of the Russians seemed a blatant election year ploy, and, as such, a poor one. “Frankly, candidly,” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic, “we think Harry Truman is licked. We don’t think any ‘crisis atmosphere’ will elect him.”

A new Gallup Poll indicated that almost irrespective of what Truman might or might not do, he would lose in November to any of four possible Republican nominees: Dewey, Vandenberg, former Governor Harold E. Stassen of Minnesota, and General Douglas MacArthur.

“The simple fact is that Truman isn’t the type of strong man to whom folks turn in time of national danger,” concluded Strout. “The idea of Truman as a ‘man on horseback’ is just funny.”

Shortly after dark on the evening of Thursday, March 18, to avoid being seen by reporters, Chaim Weizmann was ushered quietly into the White House by way of the East Wing. Truman, who had not informed the State Department of what he was up to, insisted the meeting be kept secret. Eddie Jacobson, by now a familiar face to the White House press, had agreed to stay away.

According to later accounts by both Truman and Weizmann, the meeting went well. They talked for three quarters of an hour. Truman said he wanted to see justice done without bloodshed and assured Weizmann that the United States would support partition. “And when he left my office,” Truman would write, “I felt that he had received a full understanding of my policy and that I knew what it was he wanted.” Recalling the event years later, Truman would also remember Eddie Jacobson being present—but then, in a sense, he was.

The situation, however, had become more complicated than Weizmann knew, or than Truman himself seems to have understood, as would be revealed quite dramatically in less than twenty-four hours.

And Truman was partly, if unintentionally, to blame for what happened. He had not only neglected to tell Secretary Marshall, or anyone at the State Department, of Weizmann’s visit and what had transpired—possibly because Marshall was on the West Coast, or more likely because he refused to accept the possibility that he and Marshall might be working at cross-purposes—but he seems to have wholly misjudged the reaction of Jewish groups to the abrupt reversal of American policy that he himself had tacitly sanctioned several weeks before while in Key West and that his own ambassador to the U.N., former Senator Warren Austin, now presented, without warning, on Friday, March 19, the very day after Truman and Weizmann reached their “understanding.”

To give all sides in the Palestine controversy time to cool down, Austin announced before the General Assembly, the United States recommended abandoning the partition plan and called for a temporary U.N. “trusteeship” over Palestine.

It was a complete, seemingly inexplicable turnabout by the administration, and for Jews everywhere shattering, almost unbelievable news. The American Jewish Congress, in an emergency meeting, charged the State Department with conduct both un-American and “thoroughly dishonorable.” On Capitol Hill there were cries of “sellout.” No more shameful decision in international politics had ever been made, charged Congressman Emanuel Celler, Democrat from New York, while a Democratic senator who chose to remain anonymous predicted that the antagonism of Jews in those states where their number was greatest could produce a revolt at the polls in November every bit as damaging to Truman as the anti-Catholic movement had been to Al Smith in 1928.

The New York Times accused the administration of unprecedented ineptness and of caving in to base material concerns:

A land of milk and honey now flows with oil, and the homeland of three great religions is having its fate decided by expediency without a sign of the spiritual and ethical considerations which should be determining at least in that part of the world. Ancient Palestine was once described as “not the land of philosophers but the home of prophets.” It would take a prophet sitting on a rapidly spinning turntable to have foreseen the course which our Government has pursued during the last few months.

The White House was deluged with letters, telegrams, and petitions to the President filled with alarm and outrage over such “whimsical and cynical action,” such “vacillating” and “disastrous” policy. Nor were they all from Jews or Jewish organizations.

“This change can mean nothing but the complete annihilation of that wonderful home loving race of people who have demonstrated the wonders they can accomplish in that country which actually before God and man belongs to them,” wrote a municipal court judge from Council Bluffs, Iowa, named John P. Tinley. “They must not be betrayed. For God’s sake and the sake of humanity do something to correct this terrible blunder.” “Oh, how could you stoop so low!” declared Professor Samuel A. Sloan of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. “Was your action of Friday a ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ with England and the Arab interests? This revolting move must and should be the death of the United Nations…. Won’t you stop trying to be a statesman and act like a human being!”

For Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City, March 19 was “Black Friday.” People enraged over the news kept calling him all day. How did he feel now that his friend Truman had turned out to be a traitor to the Jewish people? “There wasn’t one…who expressed faith and confidence in the word of the President of the United States,” remembered Jacobson, who felt so heartsick he had to take to his bed for the remainder of the weekend.

Not until Monday, when he was back at his store, did Jacobson hear from Chaim Weizmann, who called personally to tell him not to despair. Weizmann, who had more right than anyone to feel betrayed, was certain the President had meant what he said when they met. Jacobson must not forget, Weizmann stressed, that his friend Harry S. Truman was the single most powerful man in the world, and it was up to Jacobson to keep the White House door open.

Truman’s first news of what had happened at the United Nations came in the morning papers, Saturday, the 20th, the day after Austin’s speech. At 7:30 A.M. Truman was on the phone to Clifford at his home, telling him to get down to the White House immediately.

This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy [Truman wrote in a fury on his calendar]. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I never felt so in my life.

There are people on the 3rd and 4th levels of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat. They are succeeding in doing it…

Still unable to accept the idea that it might be Marshall who was opposing his position, or who misunderstood his position, he saw the State Department itself, “the striped pants boys,” as the perpetrators of his troubles.

“Truman was in his office as disturbed as I have ever seen him,” Clifford remembered. “ ‘I don’t understand this,’ he said. ‘How could this have happened! I assured Chaim Weizmann…he must think I’m a shitass.’”

“The President’s statement that the action [at the U.N.] had come without his knowledge seemed incredible,” wrote Eben Ayers after an emergency staff meeting. “The political effect may be terrifically bad and it seemed impossible to believe that those responsible for the action could not have realized the reaction that would result.”

Calling a press conference in Los Angeles that evening, Secretary Marshall said he regarded trusteeship over Palestine as “the wisest course.” He himself had recommended it to the President, Marshall said, and the President had approved. The statement was brief, unadorned, accurate, and helped Truman not at all.

Marshall flew home the following day, Sunday the 21st, and on Monday the 22nd, at the White House he and Loy Henderson met with a calmer, more composed President, who now, in obvious deference to Marshall, said he had given approval to the idea of trusteeship as an intermediate step, and that it was only the “timing” of Austin’s speech that had upset him.

But as he came out of the meeting, Truman was heard to mutter, “This gets us nowhere.”

The fact was he had also specified earlier that nothing be done before the General Assembly that could be taken as a retreat from the partition plan. Further, he had insisted he be shown Austin’s speech in advance. “Send final draft of Austin’s remarks for my consideration,” he had directed on February 22, which clearly the State Department had not done. As Charlie Ross observed in his diary, “No pronouncement of the momentous nature of Austin’s should have been made without prior consultation with the P[resident] or someone on his staff.” But as Ross also observed, it would be unthinkable now for Truman to disavow what Austin had said.

Though Truman made none of these points to Marshall, he felt them acutely, as he felt still that it was those below Marshall who were determined to sabotage his policy, the “striped pants conspirators,” as he now referred to them in a letter to his sister.

At a press conference, speaking anything but plainly, he said trusteeship did not necessarily “prejudice the character of the final political settlement.” Was he then in favor still of partition at some future date? “That is what I am trying to say here as plainly as I can.”

He was straddling, obfuscating. He knew it, the reporters knew it, and he felt miserable. “It was one of the worst messes of my father’s career,” Margaret would attest, “and he could do nothing but suffer.”

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to submit her resignation as a delegate to the United Nations, while two of her sons, Franklin, Jr., and Elliott, joined a disparate but growing number of worried Democrats who wanted to draft General Eisenhower for the presidential nomination.

Truman refused to accept Mrs. Roosevelt’s resignation and paid no attention to her sons.

On April 9, writing to the President from New York, Chaim Weizmann, after thanking Truman for “the personal kindness which you have so often shown me” and for “the sympathetic interest which you have constantly devoted to the cause of our people,” stressed the gravity of the moment and Truman’s own historic role in it:

The choice for our people, Mr. President, is between statehood and extermination. History and providence have placed this issue in your hands and I am confident that you will yet decide it in the spirit of moral law.

On Saturday afternoon, April 11, to avoid the few reporters hanging about the White House, Eddie Jacobson slipped in through the East Wing. Again Truman reaffirmed—and “very strongly,” according to Jacobson—what he had told Weizmann. Moreover, he now assured Jacobson he would recognize the new Jewish state. “And to this,” wrote Jacobson later, “he agreed with his whole heart.” Harry Truman had made up his mind.

As the likelihood of war breaking out in Palestine grew more ominous and the time before the British withdrawal grew shorter, tension at the White House increased measurably and the strain on the President himself did not go unnoticed. “The President,” wrote David Lilienthal after a meeting on April 21, “looked worn—as I haven’t seen him look since I have known him.”

There was never enough time. There was always more than one reasonable, prudent course of action to take. Nothing seemed simple.

At Griffith Stadium, throwing out the first ball at the start of the new baseball season—at a Senators-Yankees game—the ambidextrous President seemed hesitant even about which arm to use, then threw with his left.

News accounts described him as “whirling” about Washington. “Not once, but twice,” Truman had “tootled off” to the National Gallery to see a collection of paintings by the old masters discovered by the American Third Army in a salt mine in Germany. He attended the Gridiron dinner, another rite of spring, and the funeral of a veteran White House clerk, Maurice C. Latta, who had been employed since 1898. From a flag-festooned platform on Constitution Avenue, he reviewed an Army Day parade and later at the White House welcomed the very nervous, young Prince Regent of Belgium with a state dinner. At the nearby Loew’s Capitol Theater, accompanied by Bess and Margaret, he saw the premiere of Frank Capra’s new movie, State of the Union, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, which gave him a lift as nothing had in a long while. “It is a scream,” he wrote to Mary Jane. “If you get a chance go see it. It gives the Republicans hell and, believe it or not, is favorable to your brother.”

The latest Gallup Poll reported his approval rating at only 36 percent. Republicans were overjoyed, Democrats and the liberal press increasingly downcast. “Must it be Truman?” asked The Nation. “Truman Should Quit,” said the front cover of The New Republic. “Harry Truman has none of the qualities demanded by the presidency.” He was “colorless,” “a little man” with a “known difficulty in understanding the printed word.” In The New York Times, Arthur Krock wrote grimly:

When he [Truman] vetoed what he called the “rich man’s” tax bill, which Congress had substituted for his own “poor man’s” bill, numerous Democrats in Congress jumped on the bandwagon to override the veto.

The Democratic Party is imperiling the President’s effectiveness as no major party in this country has done since the Republican radicals impeached Andrew Johnson…. A President whose defeat at the next poll is generally prophesied faces difficulties in performing his office that conceivably bring disaster…. At this writing, the President’s influence is weaker than any President’s has been in modern history.

Early in May, in advance of what was to be a crucial White House strategy conference on Palestine, Truman asked Clark Clifford to prepare the case for immediate recognition of the new Jewish state, which as yet had no name. He was to prepare himself, Truman told Clifford, as though presenting a case before the Supreme Court. “You will be addressing all of us present, of course,” Truman said, “but the person I really want you to convince is Marshall.”

Truman, as he told Clifford, was inclined to think that Marshall was opposed to such recognition. But this had nothing to do with Truman’s regard for the general. Nor was there the least question about Marshall’s own feelings. “I want you to know,” wrote Marshall in a personal birthday greeting to the President on May 8, “that I am keenly aware of the remarkable loyalty you have given me. In return, I can only promise you to do my best and assure you of my complete loyalty and trust in you.”

At a private birthday party for the President, Marshall had been still more emphatic, expressing his regard for the President in words no one present would forget. Indeed, it was one of the greatest tributes ever paid to Harry Truman. The party, at the nearby F Street Club, was given by Attorney General Tom Clark for some forty guests, including the President and Mrs. Truman, and marked one of the rare times that Marshall and his wife accepted an invitation to dine out in Washington. Clark and John Snyder each rose after dinner to offer toasts. Then, unexpectedly, Marshall stood up, pushed his chair out of the way, and leaning forward with his hands on the table began to speak, his expression very serious. Marshall, as everyone present was well aware, never complimented the people with whom he worked. It was not his way.

“The full stature of this man,” he said, his eyes on Truman, “will only be proven by history, but I want to say here and now that there has never been a decision made under this man’s administration, affecting policies beyond our shores, that has not been in the best interest of this country. It is not the courage of these decisions that will live, but the integrity of the man.”

Truman, his face flushed, rose slowly to respond but was unable to speak. The silence in the room was stunning. He stood with his arms half outstretched trying to compose himself. Finally he could only gesture to Marshall and say, “He won the war,” but he spoke with such simplicity and feeling that many guests were crying.

The meeting in the President’s office on the afternoon of May 12 began at four o’clock, just two days and two hours before the British mandate in Palestine was to expire.

Present were Marshall, Robert Lovett, and two of their State Department aides, Robert McClintock and Fraser Wilkins; Clifford, Niles, and Matt Connelly. Saying little, they took seats around Truman’s desk, Marshall and Lovett on the President’s left, with McClintock and Fraser just behind, Clifford sitting directly in front of the President, with Niles and Connelly to his left. Truman made a few preliminary remarks, in which he said nothing about recognition of Palestine, then turned to Marshall, who asked Lovett to present the case for trusteeship. Lovett spoke at some length, during which Marshall intervened briefly to report that during a recent conversation with Moshe Shertok of the Jewish Agency, he, Marshall, had warned that militarily the Jews were embarked on a very risky venture in Palestine, and should the tide turn against them, there was nothing to guarantee help from the United States.

Truman then called on Clifford, who for the first time mentioned recognition, proposing that the United States make the move quickly before the Soviet Union did. The United States should not even wait until the new Jewish state was declared but announce American recognition the very next day, May 13.

“As I talked,” remembered Clifford, “I noticed the thunder clouds gathering—Marshall’s face getting redder and redder.”

“This is just straight politics,” Marshall said. “I don’t even understand why Clifford is here. This is not a political meeting.”

“General,” Truman answered softly, “he is here because I asked him to be here.”

Clifford continued with his statement, speaking for perhaps fifteen minutes. He was calm, orderly, and unhurried, his rich voice, as always, beautifully modulated, one clear, perfectly structured sentence flowing smoothly, flawlessly after another. (“I had really prepared!” he would say, remembering the moment a lifetime later.) But Clifford was also twenty-six years younger than Marshall—and new to the experience of great power and large world decisions. Marshall’s prestige was a palpable presence in the room and made especially memorable, especially intimidating, by his anger. He sat glaring at Clifford the entire time. Possibly it was Clifford’s manner that upset Marshall, who was deeply worried about the world.

Recognition of the new Jewish state, Clifford said, would be wholly consistent with what had been the President’s policy from the beginning. It would be an act of humanity, “everything this country should represent.” The murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis had been the worst atrocity of all time. Every thoughtful human being must feel some responsibility for the survivors, who, unlike others in Europe, had no place to go. He explained the Balfour Declaration. He cited lines from Deuteronomy verifying the Jewish claim to a Palestine homeland.

Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the Lord swear unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them.

There was no real alternative to the partition of Palestine, he said, or to recognition by the United States, since no postponement of the kind imagined by the State Department would ever be tolerated by the Jews. A separate Jewish state was inevitable. It would come to pass in a matter of days. “No matter what the State Department or anybody thinks, we are faced with the actual fact that there is to be a Jewish state.” To think otherwise was unrealistic.

Lovett spoke again. To recognize a Jewish state prematurely, before its boundaries were even known or government established, would be buying a pig-in-a-poke. He produced a file of intelligence reports indicating that numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine were Communists or Soviet agents. The entire matter should remain a U.N. problem, Lovett argued. The United Nations was struggling to determine the future government in Palestine, and this at the specific urging of the United States. Any premature, ill-advised recognition of the new state would be disastrous to American prestige in the United Nations and appear only as “a very transparent” bid for Jewish votes in November.

On this note, Marshall broke in, speaking gravely and with all the weight of his reputation, his anger just barely in control.

Clifford’s suggestions were wrong, Marshall said. Domestic political considerations must not determine foreign policy. At stake was “the great office of the President.” Indeed, said Marshall, looking directly at Truman, if the President were to follow Clifford’s advice, and if in the elections in November, he, Marshall, were to vote, he would vote against the President.

It was an extraordinary rebuke for Truman—“the sharpest rebuke ever for him,” Clifford felt certain—coming as it did from Marshall, “the great one of the age,” whose presence in his administration gave Truman such pride and feeling of confidence.

“That brought the meeting to a grinding halt. There was really a state of shock. The President, I think, was struck dumb by it,” Clifford would say, trying years later to evoke the feeling in the room. “There was this awful, total silence.”

Yet Truman showed no sign of emotion. His expression, serious from the start, changed not at all. He only raised his hand and said he was fully aware of the difficulties and dangers involved, as well as the political risks, which he himself would run. He was inclined to agree with General Marshall, but thought it best they all sleep on the matter.

Marshall and his retinue departed, Marshall refusing even to look at Clifford, who, seething within, began gathering up his papers. It was Marshall’s “righteous goddamn Baptist tone” that was so infuriating, he would later tell Jonathan Daniels—Marshall “didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.” The President, Clifford could only conclude, had agreed with Marshall in order not to embarrass the general in front of the others.

“That was rough as a cob,” Truman said to Clifford, once everyone was gone. Truman told him not to feel badly. As a trial lawyer, Clifford said, he had lost cases before.

“Let’s not agree that it’s lost yet,” Truman said.

Would the United States recognize the new Palestine state, reporters asked the next day.

He would cross that bridge when he came to it, Truman replied.

But by then the bridge was already underfoot. Lovett had telephoned Clifford the evening before, less than an hour after the meeting broke up, to say he and Clifford must talk as soon as possible. Clifford had gone to Lovett’s home in Kalorama, where, over drinks, they agreed something had to be done, or there could be a serious breach between the President and the Secretary. Conceivably, Marshall might resign, which, as Clifford knew, would be the heaviest possible blow to Truman’s standing with the country and undoubtedly destroy whatever small chance he had of being reelected. “Marshall was the greatest asset he had,” Clifford would recall. “He couldn’t afford to lose him.” It was painfully ironic: Marshall, who insisted there be no political considerations, Marshall who was so “above politics,” had himself become the largest of political considerations.

Lovett asked Clifford to think about it, but when Lovett called Clifford the next morning, Clifford told him there was nothing he could do. Lovett would have to persuade Marshall he was wrong.

Truman’s reaction, when Clifford reported all this, was that Marshall, in Truman’s words, needed a little more time.

That was on Thursday, the 13th.

On Friday, May 14, the day the new Jewish state was to be declared at midnight in Jerusalem—6:00 P.M. Washington time—Clifford and Lovett met for lunch in the quiet of the F Street Club and worked out the wording of a statement to be released by the President. Lovett now urged only that there be no “indecent haste” in recognizing the new Jewish state, so that the American delegation at the United Nations could have ample warning. Clifford, however, could not promise that.

Sometime that afternoon, Marshall called the President to say that while he could not support the position the President wished to take, he would not oppose it publicly.

“That,” said Truman to Clifford, “is all we need.”

Clifford put through a hurried call to Elihu Epstein, an official at the Jewish Agency in Washington, to tell him that recognition would occur that day, and to get the necessary papers ready and over to the White House at once. When Epstein asked what was needed, Clifford had to say he didn’t exactly know. “This is very unusual,” Clifford said, “a new country asking for recognition—it doesn’t happen every day.”

Clifford called the State Department, then reported back to Epstein. When the papers finally arrived, the name of the new country had been left blank—to be filled in later—because it was still unknown.

The new Jewish state—the first Jewish state in nearly two thousand years—was declared on schedule at midnight in Jerusalem, 6:00 P.M. in Washington, Eleven minutes later at the White House, Charlie Ross announced de facto recognition by the United States of Israel, as it was to be called.

The American delegation at the United Nations was flabbergasted. Some American delegates actually broke into laughter, thinking the announcement must be somebody’s idea of a joke. Ambassador Austin, the only one of the delegation who had been notified in advance and only at the last moment, was so upset he went home without telling any of the others.

At the State Department, meantime, Marshall had dispatched his head of U.N. affairs, Dean Rusk, by plane to New York to keep the whole delegation from resigning.

There was dancing in the streets in Brooklyn and the Bronx, a huge “salute-to-Israel” rally at the Polo Grounds. In synagogues across the country thanksgiving services were held. At 2210 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, headquarters of the Jewish Agency, a new flag was unfurled—pale blue and white, with a star of David in the center.

In Kansas City, Eddie Jacobson packed his bags and left immediately by plane for New York to see Chaim Weizmann, who was to be the new President of Israel. Three days later, on May 17, Jacobson presented himself at the White House as Israel’s “temporary, unofficial ambassador.”

It would be pointed out as time went on that the United States had granted only de facto recognition of the new Jewish state, whereas the Soviet Union followed with a more formal de jure recognition; that Truman in succeeding months, as Israel was under attack by Arab armies, refused to lift an American embargo on arms shipments to Israel; and that in the United Nations, through that summer and fall, the United States strongly supported a policy of mediation and compromise that the Israelis opposed. But such observations failed to diminish the larger symbolic force and importance of what Truman had done: it was the President of the United States of America who had granted the world’s first recognition of the new Jewish nation. And while experienced observers, including most of his own experts on foreign affairs, considered much of his performance a sorry spectacle of mismanagement—“a comic opera performance,” Time magazine said—there was immense approval in the country. An editorial in the Washington Star expressed well what most Americans felt:

There is a great deal to be said against the past gyrations and topsy-turvy handling of American policy regarding Palestine. But that aspect of the situation is completely overshadowed at the moment…by the swift and dramatic decision of the United States to take the lead among all nations in recognizing the new Jewish State of Israel. It is a wise decision and a heartening one….

As the popular radio commentator and world traveler Lowell Thomas said in his broadcast that evening, Americans in every part of the country would be turning to the Bible for some historical background for “this day of history.”

Truman had no regrets. He had achieved what he intended and had, besides, established a point about who, after all, was in charge of American policy:

The difficulty with many career officials in government [he would later write] is that they regard themselves as the men who really make policy and run the government. They look upon the elected officials as just temporary occupants. Every President in our history has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy…. Some Presidents have handled this situation by setting up what amounted to a little State Department of their own. President Roosevelt did this and carried on direct communications with Churchill and Stalin. I did not feel that I wanted to follow this method, because the State Department is set up for the policy of handling foreign policy operations, and the State Department ought to take care of them. But I wanted to make it plain that the President of the United States, and not a second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making policy….

He felt great satisfaction in what he had been able to do for the Jewish people, and was deeply moved by their expressions of gratitude, then and for years to come. When the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog, called at the White House, he told Truman, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years.”

“I thought he was overdoing things,” remembered David Niles, “but when I looked over at the President, tears were running down his cheeks.”

Loy Henderson was removed from his job. Truman had him reassigned far from Washington and the concerns of American policy in the Middle East. He was made ambassador to India. Interestingly, Henderson would also remain a staunch admirer of Truman, considering him one of the great American presidents. “In my opinion,” Henderson later said, “the morale and effectiveness of the [State] Department were never higher than during the period that Truman was President…. The morale of the department is usually higher when the President is a man who is not afraid to make difficult decisions and who is prepared to accept the responsibilities that flow from such decisions.”

General Marshall continued in his duties as before. When some of Marshall’s friends urged him to resign, Marshall allegedly replied that one did not resign because a President who had the constitutional right to make a decision made one. However, Marshall would not speak to Clark Clifford ever again.

Asked long afterward what he had thought to say to Marshall, to get him to agree at the last moment to American recognition of Israel, Robert Lovett said: “I told him that it was the President’s choice.”

III

The year of the birth of Israel, the year of the Republican tax cut and the Truman Balcony, would be remembered also as the year green (chlorophyll) chewing gum became a fad, the year of a new word game called “Scrabble,” of tail fins on Cadillacs, and an unimaginably daring new bathing suit called the bikini, after the island where the atomic bomb tests were carried out the summer before.

The economy was booming. Profits were up. Farmers were prospering. American prosperity overall was greater than at any time in the nation’s history. The net working capital of American corporations hit a new high of nearly $64 billion. For the steel, oil, and automobile industries, it was a banner year. Unemployment was below 4 percent. Nearly everyone who wanted a job had one, and though inflation continued, people were earning more actual buying power than ever before, and all this following the record year past, 1947, which, reported Fortune magazine, had been “the greatest productive record in the peacetime history of this or any other nation.”

In London, the same summer of the 1948 national political conventions, American athletes—Bob Mathias, Harrison Dillard, Melvin Patton—swept the field in the first Olympic Games since 1936 in Berlin, winning thirty-eight medals.

It was a time of extraordinary technical and scientific achievement. A 200-inch telescope, the world’s largest, was unveiled at Mount Palomar, California. Test pilot Chuck Yeager, flying a revolutionary rocket-plane, the Bell X-l, broke the sound barrier. The transistor was developed, a new antibiotic, Aureomycin, and cortisone to treat rheumatoid arthritis. A new kind of fuel, liquid hydrogen, promised, its inventor claimed, to “send men to the moon.”

For evening entertainment the country was tuning in to such radio favorites as “Duffy’s Tavern” and the Jack Benny Show. Radio dominated, for news and entertainment. But approximately one family out of every eight now owned a “television machine,” as Truman called it, and 1948 would be remembered as the premier year for the “Camel Newsreel Theater,” with John Cameron Swayze, the first nightly television news program. Also, for the first time ever, there would be television broadcasts of the political conventions, these to be held in the same city, Philadelphia, in order to make such coverage easier.

It was the year, too, of Christina’s World, a haunting portrait by Andrew Wyeth of a crippled woman and a forsaken house on a bleak New England hill—a world bearing no relation to that of green gum and supersonic flight—that would become one of the most popular paintings ever done by an American.

The music being sung and danced to in 1948 included such hit songs as “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think,” “It’s a Most Unusual Day,” and a new rendition by Pee Wee Hunt of the old Kansas City favorite, “Twelfth Street Rag.” Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate was on Broadway, and several of the new motion pictures were some of the finest ever made—The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Red Shoes, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. Among the best-selling books were Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Robert E. Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Eisenhower’s account of the war, Crusade in Europe, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, an Indiana University professor whose statistical revelations concerning male promiscuity in postwar American life caused a sensation.

In January, Mahatma Gandhi had been murdered while walking through a garden in New Delhi. In March, Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose father founded Czechoslovakia as a free democracy, either jumped or was pushed to his death from a third-floor window in Prague, news that stirred grief and anger as almost nothing else had done since the end of the war. (“But let the world not misunderstand what he said, with that leap,” wrote Dorothy Thompson. “He said: He who collaborates with Communism chooses slavery, treason, dishonor—or suicide.”) In June would come a crisis in Berlin.

In July, one of Truman’s favorite Americans, General John J. Pershing, died at age 87, and his body lay in state under the Capitol dome. Truman rode to the Capitol without police escort to pay his respects, as he said, “in my role as a Field Artillery Captain in World War I.”

As time would tell, the politics of 1948 would also introduce a number of new words and expressions into common American usage—“whistle-stop,” “Dixiecrat,” and “red herring.”

According to “scientific” polls given much attention in the press, 94 percent of the American people believed in God. According also to the polls, Harry Truman stood no chance of remaining President. “Obviously the Republican star is approaching its zenith,” reported Life, the country’s most popular magazine. Indeed, for all the change and tumult of the times, among the few accepted certainties was that it would be a Republican year, a dull campaign, and a debacle for Truman and the Democrats worse even than 1946.

Two experiences greatly influenced Truman’s outlook through what remained of that spring, and on into summer and fall, giving him both courage and seemingly irrepressible confidence no matter how bleak the forecasts—and they grew steadily bleaker—or how many people deserted him—and there were to be many.

The first had happened eight years before. Nothing, no struggle, no road traveled, could ever again be so difficult or look so hopeless, he felt, as had his chances in the Senate primary of 1940, the summer he ran against Lloyd C. Stark. It was a segment of Truman’s past that many political commentators and forecasters might well have studied closely in 1948. Courage, the saying goes, is “having done it before,” and in 1948 Truman knew he had done it before—against the odds, without money, without newspaper support, without the blessing of Franklin Roosevelt or any serious speculation by those supposedly in the know that he might actually wind up the winner. The persistent talk of his coming defeat in November, the tone of smug certainty in so much that was written and said, all had a very familiar ring to him.

Of greatest importance also was the more immediate experience of a much publicized “nonpolitical” tour made by rail cross-country in June, exactly as recommended in the Rowe Report. For while the two-week expedition was not without its blunders and embarrassments and seemed at times to have been a mistake, Truman found it exhilarating in a way nothing else could have been, and he returned to Washington looking and feeling as vigorous and sure of himself as at any time in his political life.

But courage and confidence, however important, would have been hardly enough without such other imponderable attributes as genuine sympathy for human feelings, humor, common sense, physical vitality—truly exceptional physical vitality for a man in his middle sixties—pride, determination, and a fundamental, unshakable Jacksonian faith in democracy, which to his mind mattered above all. Harry Truman trusted the American people. It would be said often, it sounded corny, and it was true. He loved the politician’s work of “getting out among the people,” loved seeing the country, loved the crowds. When local politicians came aboard the train to shake his hand, at one stop after another on this and later trips, and Truman took time for each of them, he was never just going through the motions, he genuinely liked such people, enjoyed seeing them.

As President he felt more than ever a need to see and make contact with what he called the everyday American. And he always felt better for it. On a recent evening in Washington, on one of his walks, he had decided to take a look at the mechanism that raised and lowered the middle span of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac. Descending some iron steps, he came upon the bridge tender, eating his evening supper out of a tin bucket. Showing no surprise that the President of the United States had climbed down the catwalk and suddenly appeared before him, the man said, “You know, Mr. President, I was just thinking about you.” It was a greeting Truman adored and never forgot.

In the primary summer of 1940 in Missouri, he had worked his way through small-town crowds pumping hands and saying, “I just wanted to come down and show you that I don’t have horns and a tail just because I am from Jackson County.” Now, across the West, the refrain, somewhat modified, was heard again: “I am coming put here so you can have a look at me and hear what I have to say, and then make up your mind as to whether you believe some of the things that have been said about your President.”

His sixteen-car “Presidential Special” departed from Union Station the night of June 3, Truman traveling again in his special armor-plated car, the Ferdinand Magellan, and accompanied by about twenty of the White House staff, including Secret Service agents, and fifty-nine reporters and photographers, which made it a record press party.

The excuse for this “nonpolitical” tour was an invitation to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley, but no one took the nonpolitical claim seriously, least of all Truman, who began with his first brief stop at noon the next day, June 4, at Crestline, Ohio. “On this nonpartisan, bipartisan trip that we are taking here,” he said to the obvious enjoyment of the crowd, “I understand there are a whole lot of Democrats present….”

The principal reason for declaring it an official presidential trip was that the Democratic Committee had no money. The cost was thus charged to the President’s annual travel fund, to the outrage of leading Republicans and much of the press.

What surprised everyone on board, and pleased Truman exceedingly, was the size of the crowds that turned out—1,000 people at little Crestline, 100,000 at Chicago, where he rode to the Palmer House in an open car.

At Omaha, an embarrassing foul-up caused by his old friend Eddie McKim produced much adverse publicity. Fewer than two thousand people attended a major speech, sitting down front in the huge Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backward) Auditorium, leaving eight thousand freshly polished, empty seats stretching behind. McKim, in charge of arrangements, had neglected to publicize the fact that the speech was open to the public and not just to Truman’s old war outfit, the 35th Division, which was holding its reunion in Omaha. It was a stupid blunder. Photographs of the nearly vacant hall appeared all over the country, as a show not only of Truman’s pathetically low popularity but of obvious political ineptitude. Yet Truman did not seem to mind. He went on stage as if speaking to a packed house. Nor did he blame or criticize McKim. “I don’t give a damn whether there’s nobody there but you and me,” McKim would always remember him saying. “I am making a speech on the radio to the farmers. They won’t be there—they’ll be home listening to that radio. They’re the ones I’m going to talk to.”

Far more important to Truman, a better measure than the rows of empty chairs that night, was the welcome he had received in the streets of Omaha earlier the same day, when marching with the 35th Division. Wearing a light tan double-breasted gabardine suit and his favorite two-tone summer shoes, he stepped along at the head of his own Battery D, doffing a western-style hat right and left. He looked as happy as a man could be and the enormous crowd responded wholeheartedly—in Omaha, a Republican town. As Edward T. Folliard reported in the Washington Post, “They lined the streets in this Republican stronghold, 160,000 of them, and gave President Truman a welcome reminiscent of his ‘honeymoon’ days in the White House three years ago.” Frank Spina, Truman’s old barber, marched beside him, carrying the original Battery D guidon. Behind came Eddie Jacobson, Monsignor Tiernan, Eddie McKim, and Jim Pendergast.

The onlookers were thrilled and charmed. Mr. Truman, sensing their friendliness, never looked more pleased [said the Omaha Morning World Herald].

President Truman was at his best Saturday morning…. He marched jauntily, shoulders back. He smiled and waved his hat. Those watching the parade, astonished to see the President walking on the streets of Omaha, laughed and cheered.

In April, in a conversation in his office with Arthur Krock, in answer to Krock’s question whether he detected any change in his own makeup since becoming President, Truman had said he could think of nothing, except a growing sense of being “walled-in.” Now away from Washington, back among his own kind of people, people who would naturally laugh and cheer to see him walking their streets, he felt both free from the walls and much more himself. “The President, you know, is virtually in jail,” he had told the crowd by the tracks at his first stop at Crestline. “He goes from his study to his office and from his office to his study, and he has to have guards there all the time…but when you go out and see people and find out what people are thinking about, you can do a better job….” Now, again and again, he let his audiences know how much being with them was doing for him, how much it meant to him to see them, how buoyed up he felt by their numbers. “It almost overwhelms me to see all the people in western Nebraska in this town today,” he said at little Sidney at the western end of the state, and he was “certainly happy to see this enthusiastic crowd!” at Laramie, Wyoming. “My goodness!” he exclaimed looking over the turnout at Dillon, Montana.

At Butte, a cheering throng lined the sidewalks several deep beside a four-mile parade route. When his train pulled into Missoula late at night and a crowd waited, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, he appeared in his pajamas and bathrobe. “I am sorry I had gone to bed,” he said. “But I thought you would like to see what I look like, even if I didn’t have on any clothes.”

He was folksy—he just wanted to say “Howdy”—and often corny—he was on his way “down to Berkeley to get me a degree”—and the crowds grew steadily bigger.

They told me at a little town in Idaho at 5:15 A.M. the whole town was out [he wrote to Mary Jane]. I wasn’t up. At Pocatello, Id. at 7:15 there were 2000 people and at Ketchum, the P.O. for this place, everybody in the county was there.

There was another widely reported gaffe at Carey, a little town in southern Idaho. Dedicating the new Willa Coates Airport, Truman began to praise the brave boy who had died for his country, only to be informed by a tearful Mrs. Coates that “our Willa” was a girl and that she had died in a civilian plane crash.

Charlie Ross and Clark Clifford had been urging Truman to speak extemporaneously as much as possible, certain that with practice he could become as effective in front of a crowd as they had seen him be so often with small groups in his office. If only the public could know the Harry Truman he knew, Ross often said. In April Truman had spoken off-the-cuff to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in May to a rally of Young Democrats in Washington, and both times with notable success. The press had commented favorably on “the new Truman.” But at times now things he said made his staff cringe. “I have been in politics a long time, and it makes no difference what they say about you, if it isn’t so,” he declared unexpectedly at Pocatello. “If they can prove it on you, you are in a bad fix indeed. They have never been able to prove it on me.”

Reporters on board began singing a many-versed song that included the refrain:

They can’t prove nothing;

They ain’t got a thing on me.

I’m going down to Berkeley

For to get me a degree.

Editorials in the East deplored the carnival air of the trip. The President, said the Washington Evening Star, was making “a spectacle of himself.”

At Eugene, Oregon, recalling his meeting with Stalin at Potsdam, Truman suddenly confided to the crowd gathered about the rear platform of his car: “I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow.” The remark sent reporters scrambling and caused an immediate sensation. From the State Department, Robert Lovett put through an urgent call to Clifford, who tactfully advised the President not to repeat the remark ever again. And Truman never did. “Well, I guess I goofed,” he said, as he rolled on in good spirits.

Crossing into Washington, he made stops at Spokane, Ephrata, Wenatchee, Skykomish, Everett, Bremerton, Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia. At Spokane, he judged, there were “about two acres of people.” At Seattle more than 100,000 people turned out, the largest crowds seen in Seattle in thirty years. Not even Franklin Roosevelt had been given such a reception.

By now a decided pattern had begun to emerge in the speeches, a free-swinging style with Congress the main target.

“You know, this Congress is interested in the welfare of the better classes. They are not interested in the welfare of the common everyday man,” he said at Bremerton.

“Pour it on, Harry!” someone shouted.

“I’m going to, I’m going to,” Truman responded happily.

“Educate yourselves,” he told his audience at Olympia. “You don’t want to do like you did in 1946. Two-thirds of you stayed at home in 1946, and look what a Congress we got! That is your fault, that is your fault.”

A remark to a reporter that the 80th Congress was the worst in history produced immediate howls of outrage from Republicans in Washington. Harry Truman, said House Majority Leader Charles Halleck, was the worst President in history, while Representative Cliff Clevenger of Ohio called him a “nasty little gamin” and a “Missouri jackass.” Speaking in Philadelphia, Senator Taft deplored the spectacle of an American President “blackguarding Congress at whistle stops across the country,” and Democratic Party Chairman Howard McGrath and his publicity director, Jack Redding, immediately saw an opportunity too good to miss. Telegrams went out to the mayors of thirty-five western towns and cities on Truman’s, route to ask if they agreed with Senator Taft’s description of their community as a whistle-stop. “Must have the wrong city,” responded the mayor of Eugene, Oregon. “Grand Isle was never a whistle-stop,” came a reply from Nebraska.

In his commencement address at Berkeley, which was carried on a nationwide radio broadcast, Truman turned to foreign affairs and delivered one of the finest, most thoughtful speeches of his presidency. The setting was the University of California’s huge, sun-drenched football stadium, with fully 55,000 people present, twice the usual attendance at such ceremonies.

The world, said Truman, was in a twilight time between a war so dearly won and “a peace that still eludes our grasp.” The chief cause of unrest was the Soviet Union. The great divide was not between the United States and the Soviet Union, but between the Soviet Union and all the free nations of the world. The refusal of the Soviet Union to work with its wartime Allies for world recovery and world peace was “the most bitter disappointment of our time.”

Different economic systems could live side by side and in peace, he said, but only providing one side was not bent on destroying the other by force.

Our policy will continue to be a policy of recovery, reconstruction, prosperity—and peace with freedom and justice. In its furtherance, we gladly join with all those of like purpose.

The only expansion we are interested in is the expansion of human freedom and the wider enjoyment of the good things of the earth in all countries.

The only prize we covet is the respect and good will of our fellow members of the family of nations.

The only realm in which we aspire to eminence exists in the minds of men, where authority is exercised through the qualities of sincerity, compassion and right conduct….

I believe the men and women of every part of the globe intensely desire peace and freedom. I believe good people everywhere will not permit their rulers, no matter how powerful they may have made themselves, to lead them to destruction. America has faith in people. It knows that rulers rise and fall, but that the people live on.

Two days later, on June 14, at Los Angeles, an estimated 1 million people packed both sides of his parade route from the railroad station to the Ambassador Hotel. “They clung to the roofs of buildings, jammed windows and fire escapes and crowded five deep along the sidewalk,” reported the Los Angeles Times. It was the first visit to the city by a President in thirteen years.

Los Angeles, said Truman with a grin that night at the Press Club, was quite a whistle-stop. Stepping up the attack on Congress, he called for action on price controls, housing, farm support, health insurance, and a broader base for Social Security. Only that morning he had vetoed a Republican bill that would have taken 750,000 people off Social Security.

Schools were overcrowded, he said, teachers underpaid. A bill for aid to education had passed the Senate and would take only ten minutes for the House to pass, but the House was “roosting on it,” he said. “No action! No action!”

The one issue passed over, in this and other speeches along the way, was civil rights. Truman’s advisers were divided over which would help him more, saying nothing about it for now, or speaking out. Truman had decided to say nothing for the time being.

When a smiling Jimmy Roosevelt turned up at the Ambassador Hotel for a private conference, and stood towering over Truman as they shook hands, Truman jabbed his forefinger into Roosevelt’s chest, and according to the only witness to the scene, Secret Service Agent Henry Nicholson, said to him, “Your father asked me to take this job. I didn’t want it…and if your father knew what you are doing to me, he would turn over in his grave. But get this straight: whether you like it or not, I am going to be the next President of the United States. That will be all. Good day.”

Turning east, the train crossed Arizona, New Mexico, and Kansas, with stops the whole way, then on into Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The crowds continued large and friendly. “Are the special privilege boys going to run the country, or are the people going to run it?” he asked. This was the theme. The election, he was sure, would ride on it.

He covered 9,505 miles through 18 states, delivered 73 speeches, and was seen by perhaps 3 million people. The train reached Union Station on a steamy Washington afternoon, Friday, June 18. Truman, his sunburned nose peeling, his lips cracked, was, as reported, “full of bounce.”

From the first day of the 1948 Republican National Convention, when former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce told the cheering, amused crowd that Harry Truman was a “gone goose,” to the final celebration on the convention floor, there was never anything but a feeling of victory in the air.

The convention opened in Philadelphia on Monday, June 21. Of the five most publicized contenders for first place on the Republican ticket—Dewey, Taft, Vandenberg, Stassen, and Martin—Dewey, the favorite of the party’s eastern liberal wing, showed almost overriding strength from the start and won on the third ballot, after Stassen refused to release his delegates to Taft. For his running mate, Dewey chose Governor Earl Warren of California, making it a “dreamboat of a ticket”—two popular, youthful, progressive governors of the two largest, wealthiest states in the Union. If Dewey seemed overly cool and self-assured in manner, Warren had more than compensating warmth. Nor had anyone forgotten how close Dewey had come the last time to defeating the Champion, Franklin Roosevelt. Time and Newsweek agreed that only a miracle or a series of unimaginable political blunders could save Harry Truman from overwhelming defeat.

Truman thought the Republicans had made a mistake. They would have been better off with Taft, he said privately; Taft was an honorable man who deserved the nomination and would have made a tougher opponent than Dewey.

In his acceptance speech, Dewey talked of national unity. “Our people yearn to higher ground, to find common purpose in the finer things which unite us…”

Truman had little time to dwell on the Republicans and their convention. On the day Dewey was chosen, Thursday, June 24, 1948, the Russians clamped a blockade on all rail, highway, and water traffic in and out of Berlin. The situation was extremely dangerous. Clearly Stalin was attempting to force the Western Allies to withdraw from the city. Except by air, the Allied sectors were entirely cut off. Nothing could come in or out. Two and a half million people faced starvation. As it was, stocks of food would last no more than a month. Coal supplies would be gone in six weeks.

Truman faced the issue with notable caution and firmness. It was suggested that the Allies force their way into Berlin by land, with an armored convoy. It was suggested that the United States retaliate by closing its ports and the Panama Canal to Russian ships. Truman rejected such ideas. When, at a meeting in his office with Forrestal, Lovett, and Secretary of the Army Royall, the question was asked whether American forces would remain in Berlin, Truman said there was no need for discussion on that: “We stay in Berlin, period.”

Royall asked skeptically if the consequences had been thought through.

“We will have to deal with the situation as it develops,” Truman said. “We are in Berlin by the terms of the agreement, and the Russians have no right to get us out by either direct or indirect pressure.”

Lovett cabled the American ambassador in London that night: “We stay in Berlin.”

General Clay, the American commander in Berlin, had already begun shipping supplies by air, on a very limited scale, a step considered little more than a palliative. On Monday, June 28, Truman ordered a full-scale airlift.

The same day he sent two squadrons of B-29s to Germany, the giant planes known to the world as the kind that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. But in fact, these had not been modified to carry atomic bombs, a detail the Russians were not to know.

That the Berlin Airlift was about to become one of the most brilliant American achievements of the postwar era and one of Truman’s proudest decisions, strongly affecting the morale of Western, non-Communist Europe, and the whole course of the Cold War, as well as Truman’s own drive for reelection, was by no means apparent to anyone at this point. No one had any idea how things would turn out in Berlin, and Truman was no exception. General Bradley, who had replaced Eisenhower as Chief of Staff, thought the President was being far too vague, when, as Bradley later wrote, “we were nose to nose with massive Soviet military power.” It hardly seemed realistic to expect a major city to be supplied entirely by air for any but a very limited time.

In making his decision, for all the political heat and turmoil of the moment, Truman had consulted none of the White House staff or any of his political advisers. Indeed, throughout the blockade, as George Elsey would recall, the White House staff “had no direct role whatever in any decisions or in the execution of any of the carrying out of the airlift.” There was no talk of how the President’s handling of the crisis would make him look, or what political advantage was to be gained. And neither did Truman try to bolster the spirits of those around him by claiming the airlift would work. He simply emphasized his intention to stay in Berlin and left no doubt that he meant exactly what he said.

Summer had arrived in Washington and that same evening, Monday, June 28, the President and the First Lady took their dinner on the South Porch of the White House, Truman seated so he could enjoy the view. A scrap of paper on which he recorded the scene would later be found among his papers:

A ball game or two goes on in the park south of the lawn. Evidently a lot of competition, from the cheers and calls of the coaches. A robin hops around looking for worms, finds one and pulls with all his might to unearth him. A mockingbird imitates robin, jays, redbirds, crows, hawks—but has no individual note of his own. A lot of people like that. Planes take off and land at National Airport south of the Jefferson Memorial. It is a lovely evening….

In imagination he pictured the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal crossing the grounds of the Washington Monument, as it had long ago, barges anchored somewhere west of the Monument.

“I can see old J. Q. Adams going swimming in it and getting his clothes stolen by an angry woman who wanted a job,” he wrote. “Then I wake up, go upstairs and go to work….”

As Churchill had observed at Potsdam, Truman was a man of immense determination. “Stubborn as a mule,” others often commented. And in nothing that Truman, or anyone else wrote or said as 1948 unfolded is there any indication that once having made up his mind to run for reelection he was ever tempted to withdraw, or like the mockingbird, to sing a song not his own.

“I am not a quitter,” he would say, and that was all there was to it.

Yet game as he may have been, as restored in spirit as, he may have felt after his swing west, there was by all signs no cause for hope among Democrats. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, his prospects could not have appeared much more grim. It was not just that he faced a strong, heavily financed, supremely confident Republican opponent, or the threat of the Wallace movement cutting away at his support among liberals. The whole Democratic Party, the famous, disparate Democratic “coalition” of labor, intellectuals, city bosses, and southern segregationists fabricated by Franklin Roosevelt, was coming to pieces. Harold Ickes, as if to settle old scores with Truman, wrote to tell him:

You have the choice of retiring voluntarily and with dignity, or of being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry. Have you ever seen the ice on the pond suddenly break in every conceivable direction under the rays of a warming sun? This is what has happened to the Democratic Party under you, except that your party has not responded to bright sunshine. It has broken up spontaneously.

The biggest break came now from Ickes’s own liberal side of the party, the doctrinaire New Dealers. The call for Eisenhower started by Roosevelt’s sons had swelled to a chorus, with Claude Pepper, Chester Bowles, former head of the Office of Price Administration, who was now running for governor of Connecticut, Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, who was running for the Senate, all favoring an Eisenhower draft at the convention. The Americans for Democratic Action, the ADA, recently formed as a non-Communist liberal response to the Wallace movement and sometimes known as the “New Deal in Exile,” voiced its preference for Eisenhower over Truman, and if not Eisenhower, then Justice William O. Douglas. Such professional Democrats as Jake Arvey of Chicago, Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York, and Boss Frank Hague of New Jersey also decided it was time for Eisenhower. Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Phil Murray of the CIO joined the Eisenhower movement. And so did Alabama Senators Hill and Sparkman and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, making it appear almost as though the old Roosevelt coalition were regrouping around the glamorous general, who by this time had become president of Columbia University.

And all this was made more remarkable by the fact that no one knew anything of Eisenhower’s politics. No one could say even whether he was a Democrat, let alone what his position on issues might be—on civil rights, Social Security, taxes. Or how to keep peace with Stalin.

To Truman and those loyal to him, the revolt of the old New Dealers was especially grating. It seemed besides an act of personal betrayal, wholly unprincipled and intellectually dishonest. Truman had borne the banner of the New Deal as faithfully as any successor to Franklin Roosevelt possibly could have, was their feeling. No more progressive program had ever been put before Congress than the Truman program. That was a matter of record.

Though Eisenhower had stated publicly several times that he was not a candidate and did not want the nomination, this did little to dissuade his new admirers. Over the Fourth of July weekend, a week in advance of the Democratic Convention, the Eisenhower faction, led by Jimmy Roosevelt, wired each of the 1,592 delegates to choose the “ablest, strongest man available” as their candidate, adding that “no man in these critical days can refuse the call to duty and leadership implicit in the nomination and virtual election to the Presidency of the United States.”

Truman, concluded the veteran New York Times political reporter James C. Hagerty, could look forward to “a hard and possibly losing fight for the nomination….”

In six months he had faced some of the roughest abuse and difficulties of any President in history. He had been castigated by southern Democrats over civil rights, repudiated by a Republican Congress, ridiculed for his White House balcony and his Missouri cronies. He had faced the pressures of the Palestine issue, the increasing threat of war over Berlin, watched his popularity disintegrate in the polls, seen himself portrayed in the press as inept and pathetic. His party was broke. And now the New Dealers were abandoning him, and noisily. No President in memory, not even Herbert Hoover in his darkest days, had been treated with such open contempt by his own party.

“If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen,” Truman liked to say, an old line in Missouri that he had first heard in the 1930s, from another Jackson County politician named E. T. (“Buck”) Purcell.

To a few former New Dealers the whole spectacle was appalling. “I am simply aghast at the unfair way in which President Truman is being ‘judged,’ if the current lynch-law atmosphere can be called ‘judging’!” recorded David Lilienthal in his diary. “And the attitude of liberals and progressives, now whooping it up for Eisenhower or Douglas, is the hardest to understand or to be other than damn mad about.”

Truman’s record [continued Lilienthal on July 5] is that of a man who, facing problems that would have strained and perhaps even floored Roosevelt at his best, has met these problems head on in almost every case. The way he took on the aggression of Russia…his civil rights program, upon which he hasn’t welched or trimmed—My God! What do these people want?

If it is said that he wobbled on veterans’ housing or Palestine or this or that, did F.D.R. never wobble? Don’t be funny; F.D.R. wobbled through the Neutrality Act and Arms Embargo (isolation of the very worst and blindest kind); he wobbled on economic matters all the time…Did F.D.R. ever stand up for public development of power, or human rights, or labor, essentially any more firmly than Truman? And who knows what Eisenhower would do on any of these issues! Bah!

It is grossly unfair. They say the people want someone else; that the people aren’t for him. Well, who in the hell but the Southern extremists and the perfectionist “liberals” together have created the impression (eagerly encouraged, of course, by the reactionaries and the Republicans) that the people don’t have confidence in him?

That makes me mad and rather ill, these hounders of a real man.

When Matt Connelly reported the defection of Frank Hague to Truman, he merely said, “All right, let him go. I never did like him anyhow.” Writing in his diary later the same day, Truman would describe Hague, Jimmy Roosevelt, Jake Arvey, and the ADA as “double-crossers all,” adding, “But they’ll get nowhere—a double dealer never does.” The Democratic leaders opposing his nomination were all acting very foolishly. He was certain Eisenhower was not a candidate, perhaps not even a Democrat. “I don’t think he would be a candidate on the Democratic ticket anyway,” he wrote to a friend. The influence of a sitting President—as leader of his party—was too great to be thwarted. Not even Theodore Roosevelt with all his popularity had been able to deny the Republican nomination to the incumbent Taft in 1912, he reminded his staff.

Did he think he would have enough pledged delegates to win on the first ballot at Philadelphia, Truman was asked at his press conference on July 1.

“Sure,” he said.

But he may not have been so sanguine as professed—not according to a f story later recounted by Arthur Krock, whose source apparently was Kenneth Royall.

At a “bull session” over drinks among some half-dozen administration figures on the South Portico of the White House one evening shortly before the convention, Truman asked what they all thought would happen were Eisenhower’s name put in nomination. Claude Pepper, already in Philadelphia, had proposed that the convention draft Eisenhower as a “national” rather than a party candidate. Everyone but Royall assured the President he would make short shrift of any such attempt. Truman, noticing Royall’s silence, asked for his view. Ike would be nominated by acclamation, Royall said, causing a furor among the others. Truman said nothing, but afterward, at the White House door, an usher told Royall the President wished to see him upstairs. He found Truman in the Oval Study with John Snyder.

“I wanted to tell you,” Truman said, “that I agree with you.”

Then, according to the story, Truman asked how the presentation of Ike’s name could be prevented, and Royall, assuring Truman that the general, too, had the same objective, agreed to see what he could do. “In a telephone conference with Ike,” wrote Arthur Krock, “Royall worked out the statement that Eisenhower sent to Pepper and others that put an end to the effort to present his name.”

On Friday, July 9, Eisenhower again said no, his refusal this time “final and complete,” and “no matter under what terms.” On reading the Eisenhower telegram, Boss Hague reportedly crunched out his cigar, saying, “Truman, Harry Truman. Oh my God!”

Claude Pepper, refusing to give up, declared it “no time for politics as usual” and announced he would run himself. His candidacy lasted a day.

Clark Clifford slipped in and out of Philadelphia to pass the word that the President had telephoned William O. Douglas, who was on vacation in Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. Douglas was Truman’s choice for Vice President. He would give the ticket geographical balance. He was youthful, strong on civil rights, a solid New Dealer. Douglas only wanted time to consider.

Clifford was in the thick of things as usual, but more out of devotion to Truman than any high expectations. “None of us,” he later admitted, “really felt at the time that the nomination meant very much. Our aim was just to get the President nominated. Because it would have been an unconscionable reflection on him, if after four years, the party had turned him down and gone to somebody else.”

Though the Eisenhower boom had passed, it had been a measure of how intensely fearful Democrats had become of a debacle in November. It was not just that Harry Truman would fail to be reelected, but that he would pull everyone down with him. After sixteen years with the all-time winner, FDR, as their standardbearer, they now faced the prospect of a certain loser. And if there was anyone left banking on a revival of party spirit, once everybody was gathered in Philadelphia, the illusion was quickly disabused. The newly arrived delegates who wandered through the city’s empty Sabbath streets on July 10, the day before the opening gavel, looked, it was reported, like nothing so much as mourners at a funeral.

“We got the wrong rigs for this convention,” a cab driver was quoted. “They shoulda given us hearses.”

Attendance was below expectations. Hotels that had been booked solid, their lobbies a continuous hubbub during the Republican Convention just weeks before, were receiving cancelations. Bunting and flags left over from the Republican affair looked pathetically shopworn.

“You could cut the gloom with a corn knife,” remembered Alben Barkley. “The very air smelled of defeat.”

The crowd expected for the opening day at Convention Hall failed to materialize. The galleries were largely empty. Delegates down on the floor milled about during the speeches, or shifted restlessly in their seats, fanning themselves furiously in the almost unbearable heat, for though the auditorium had been refurbished at great expense for this and the Republican Convention, there was no air conditioning and the big television lights, in combination with Philadelphia’s oppressive summer weather, had made the place a steambath. The temperature at the rostrum was 93 degrees.

It was the presence and paraphernalia of television, the lights, cables, wires, microphones, amplifiers, cameras, the swarms of technicians, and the theatrics involved, that gave the event what novelty and interest it had. For many who attended, television would be the best-remembered part of the 1948 Democratic Convention.

Everything possible had been done to make the “political show” come off, and like their Republican counterparts, one Democrat after another now submitted to pancake makeup and eye shadow before going to the rostrum or in preparation for a “candid” off-the-floor interview. Several women addressed the convention wearing brown lipstick, because they were told it would look better on the black-and-white home screens. Reporters in the press gallery wore dark glasses in order to work in the fierce glare of the lights.

At the White House, arrangements had been made for Truman to watch as much or as little of the proceedings as he wished. A new console type DuMont television set with a 12-inch screen had been brought into his office and positioned against the wall to his left. So, in somewhat fuzzy black-and-white images, he would follow the proceedings right from his chair, like no President ever before. When television cameras were set up in the press room for the first time on the afternoon of the 12th, for an NBC broadcast of a half-hour discussion with several White House correspondents, Truman and his staff gathered about the new set to watch.

William O. Douglas had by now decided to refuse second place on the ticket, for the reason, he told Truman, that he wished to remain on the Supreme Court. Truman was deeply hurt. “I stuck my neck all the way out for Douglas and he cut the limb out from under me,” he remarked to his staff. Reportedly Douglas had told others he did not want to be number two man to a number two man.

From the podium at Philadelphia that night, in a rousing keynote address, Alben Barkley brought the convention to life for the first time. The band played “My Old Kentucky Home.” Delegates cheered and stomped. It was a speech made for the occasion, as the old warhorse politician, an orator of the old school and a sentimental, favorite Democrat who had been born in a log cabin, evoked the past glories of the New Deal and heaped unmerciful scorn on the opposition. And it was a speech, not incidentally, made for television. Truman, watching at the White House, was nearly as pleased as the crowd at Convention Hall.

Dewey, in his acceptance speech, had vowed to clean the cobwebs from Washington. Barkley, with perspiration pouring from his brow and nose, declared he was not an expert on cobwebs. “But if memory does not betray me, when the Democratic Party took over the government sixteen years ago, even the spiders were so weak from starvation that they could not weave a cobweb in any department of the government in Washington.”

For the first time it seemed a real convention. Barkley was a hero and a favorite for second place on the ticket. There was even talk of Barkley for President.

Yet Barkley had never said a word about victory in November and mentioned Truman only once in a speech lasting more than an hour. Truman, as much as he had enjoyed the performance, commented that Barkley had all the markings of a man trying for the presidency.

Howard McGrath called from Philadelphia to find out if the President had seen the speech and to say it had put Barkley “out in front” for the nomination for Vice President. If Barkley was what the convention wanted, Truman said, then Barkley was his choice, too.

He tried to reach Barkley by phone that night, but Barkley had gone to bed.

Until now Truman had felt he needed someone like Douglas, a strong liberal, to run with him, and preferably someone younger than he. Barkley was neither. At seventy-one, he was seven years older than Truman, and coming from Kentucky, he would bring no geographical balance to the ticket. The contrast with the Republican ticket could be damaging.

But by phone the next morning Truman asked Barkley why he had never told him he wanted to be Vice President.

“I didn’t know you wanted the nomination,” Truman said.

“Mr. President, you do not know it yet,” Barkley answered.

“Well, if I had known you wanted it, I certainly would have been agreeable,” Truman said, which though hardly a ringing confirmation was sufficient for both to consider the decision settled, and almost immediately afterward in Philadelphia, McGrath told reporters that if the convention saw fit to nominate Senator Barkley for Vice President, the President would be “most happy.” (Barkley, who had been available as a vice-presidential choice at every convention since 1928, told friends that if the nomination were to be his, he wanted it quickly. “I don’t want it passed around so long it is like cold biscuit.”)

As it was, Truman showed more distress over the Douglas refusal than enthusiasm over Barkley. To his staff, he seemed oddly, almost irresponsibly disinterested in the whole matter. He, if anyone, should have appreciated the potential importance of the decision. Yet there was no sign of thoughtful deliberation on his part. “Talking about the vice-presidency,” wrote Eben Ayers, “the President said he never did care much who was nominated with him.”

Excitement over Barkley was quickly eclipsed as a floor fight broke out over civil rights.

“A Negro alternate from St. Louis makes a minority report suggesting the unseating of the Mississippi delegation,” Truman recorded, as he watched the drama unfold on the tiny black-and-white screen. “Vaughan is his name. He’s overruled. Then Congressman Dawson of Chicago, another Negro, makes an excellent talk on civil rights. These two colored men are the only speakers to date who seem to be for me wholeheartedly.”

The following day, Wednesday, July 14, the day scheduled for Truman’s nomination and acceptance speech, the uproar over civil rights turned angry, as a vehement ADA faction headed by Mayor Hubert Humphrey demanded a stronger civil rights plank in the party platform. The existing plank was substantially what it had been in the 1944 platform—mild and ambiguous enough to mollify the southern delegations—and the wording had been agreed to at the White House, Truman and his advisers having decided now was no time to alienate the southerners. Humphrey was warned he would split the party and ruin his own career if he persisted.

But Humphrey and his forces held out for a plank that would emphatically endorse Truman’s own civil rights program, item by item—anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation, fair employment laws, an end to segregation in the armed services. In bitter, heated sessions of the platform committee on the top floor of the Bellevue-Stratford, Humphrey charged that the administration plank was a “sellout” to states’ rights over human rights. When the committee approved the moderate plank, the Humphrey forces took the fight to the convention floor. “We were inherently stronger than Truman’s followers had believed,” remembered one of them, Paul Douglas, a candidate for the Senate in Illinois.

As the majority report of the platform committee was being read before the convention and Humphrey sat near the rostrum waiting his turn to speak, Boss Ed Flynn beckoned Humphrey to show him the minority report, and having looked it over, Flynn said, “Young man, that’s just what this party needs.”

Unlike Jake Arvey and Frank Hague, Flynn had thought the whole Eisenhower idea silly, and that those who imagined otherwise were hacks and amateurs, blind to his own favorite political maxim: “Never confuse wishes with facts.” There was no question that Harry Truman would be nominated, Flynn had been saying, and he wanted to see Harry Truman win.

Humphrey stepped to the podium, his face shining, the audience suddenly hushed. He spoke less than ten minutes and he made history. It was time for the Democratic Party to move forward. “There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years late…. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

As the convention roared its approval, the California and Illinois delegations marched into the aisles. Others followed, joined by a forty-piece band led by James C. Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, while here and there glum, silent southern delegations kept their seats. At the podium Sam Rayburn of Texas, permanent chairman of the convention, looked down disapprovingly, fearing a southern “walkout” would destroy whatever slim chance Truman might have in November and devastate the party, possibly forever. Rayburn tried to stall a vote, but when it came the Humphrey forces won a resounding victory.

Told the Alabama delegation intended to lead a walkout that night, on the final roll call, Rayburn ordered a voice vote instead and the convention again thundered its approval.

At the White House, angered by the turn events were taking, Truman spoke of Humphrey and his followers as “crackpots” who hoped the South would bolt. But the fact was the convention that seemed so pathetically bogged down in its own gloom had now, suddenly, dramatically, pushed through the first unequivocal civil rights plank in the party’s history; and whether Truman and his people appreciated it or not, Hubert Humphrey had done more to reelect Truman than would anyone at the convention other than Truman himself.

There were television cameras at Union Station for the President’s departure that evening and there would be more cameras at the Philadelphia station when he arrived. “No privacy sure enough now,” he wrote, though he remained calm and composed. He had a surprise for the convention and he knew what the effect would be. On their home screens, those still relatively few Americans who owned television sets in 1948 saw him sitting quietly at the window of his private railroad car waiting to leave the station.

The First Lady, Margaret, Charlie Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Ayers, Connelly, and Sam Rosenman were’on board with him, and had dinner en route, while Truman kept to himself in his room going over his notes. It was by radio, approximately halfway to Philadelphia, that he heard the Alabama delegation and part of the Mississippi delegation stage their walkout. “Hard to hear,” he noted. “My daughter and my staff try to keep me from listening. Think maybe I’ll be upset. I won’t be.”

At Philadelphia, where a fine rain was falling, he stepped from the train at 9:15, looking relaxed and spotless in a white linen suit. From the station he was driven directly to the convention hall, now packed to capacity, the crowd noisy and full of anticipation—and suffering intensely from the heat, suit jackets long since discarded, ties and collars undone, shirts stained dark with perspiration.

The seconding speeches had begun and as they dragged on, Truman was kept out of sight, first in McGrath’s so-called “office,” a stifling room with no windows, then in the somewhat cooler air on an outdoor ramp near the stage entrance, overlooking an alley and the railroad tracks. He was joined by Alben Barkley and together they sat chatting side by side hour after hour, Truman in a straight-backed wooden chair, Barkley in a more accommodating red leather armchair that someone had borrowed from the speaker’s platform.

To many who had attended other national conventions over the years, this one was as bungled, as badly managed as any in memory—Newsweek called it the worst-managed, most dispirited convention in American political annals—and the idea that a President of the United States had to wait his turn as Truman did, under such conditions, seemed the final straw. The scene would be portrayed in some accounts as one of the extreme low points of Truman’s career. However, neither Truman nor Barkley saw it that way. Barkley would remember having “a very agreeable visit,” during which they talked about “many things: politics, trivia, how to bring up daughters….” To Truman, too, it was “an interesting and instructive evening,” as he recorded in his diary. Tom Evans, remembering the “hot, horrible night,” would describe Truman sitting calmly in his white suit, “and I give you my word of honor, there wasn’t a wrinkle in it—he was cool…collected…it didn’t seem to bother him at all.”

To be a professional in politics required patience, often great patience, and the strength not to take things too personally, and Truman and Barkley were two veteran professional politicians.

“They did what you do under such circumstances,” recalled George Elsey. “They waited.”

Nearly four hours went by, as the seconding speeches were followed by the balloting for President. At 12:42 Truman was finally nominated, receiving 948 votes, while 263 votes went to Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the last-minute candidate of the South. Then, by acclamation, Barkley was nominated for Vice President.

So it was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Truman and Barkley at last made their entrance, striding onto the platform as the band played “Hail to the Chief.”

Considering the time, the fatigue of the crowd, it was a scene made for failure. Any radio or television audience that Truman might have hoped for was long since asleep. To make matters a little worse, the sister of a former Pennsylvania senator suddenly released a flock of white pigeons—“doves of peace” supposedly—from a floral Liberty Bell, where they had been held all night, cooped up in the heat. The distraught birds careened desperately into the air every which way, smashing into the balcony, the lights, bombarding spectators, and swooping so low over the rostrum that Chairman Rayburn had to fend off several at once, to the delight of the crowd as well as Truman and Barkley who were laughing uproariously. (Years later Truman would describe how one pigeon had actually landed on Rayburn’s bald head, a claim that Rayburn, who saw nothing funny in the situation, stoutly denied, telling an interviewer, “Harry Truman’s a goddamn liar. No pigeon ever lit on my head.”)

Barkley spoke first, and briefly. Then came Truman’s turn.

He advanced to the microphones, his natty white suit gleaming now in the full glare of the lights. And despite the hour, the heat, the discomfort and weariness of his audience, he did what no one would have thought possible. Wasting no time with pleasantries or grand phrases, his head up as he spoke without a script, his voice strong, hands chopping the air, he brought the convention immediately to its feet cheering.

“Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that.” Not until this moment had anyone used the word “win” as though he meant it.

The Democratic Party would win in November because the Democratic Party was the people’s party. The Republicans were the party of the privileged few, as always.

For the first time since 1945 he was speaking not as a leader by accident, by inheritance, but by the choice of his party. He was neither humble nor elegant nor lofty. The contrast with Dewey’s stilted acceptance speech from the same platform could not have been greater. In manner as well as content he was drawing the line so there could be no mistaking one candidate for the other. Mere victory was not the purpose, Dewey had proclaimed, as if he had already been elected. “Our task,” Dewey had said, “is to fill our victory with such meaning that mankind everywhere, yearning for freedom, will take heart and move forward….” Truman declared: “Now it is time for us to get together and beat the common enemy.” He was cracker-barrel plain, using words like “rotten” (for the Republican tax bill) and “poppycock” (for the Republican platform promise to increase Social Security benefits). Life magazine called it his “Li’l Abner Ozark style.” It was exactly in the spirit of the vehement backcountry politics he loved, and where he knew he belonged, the tradition of Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, alive and full of fight.

He listed the gains for farmers, for labor and the poor achieved under sixteen years of Democratic leadership, and he tore into the Republican-dominated 80th Congress for holding up progress on housing, aid to education, medical care, and yes, civil rights.

Everybody knows that I recommended to the Congress the civil rights program. I did that because I believed it to be my duty under the Constitution. Some of the members of my own party disagree with me violently on this matter. But they stand up and do it openly. People can tell where they stand. But the Republicans all professed to be for these measures. But the Congress failed to act….

Indeed, he said, there was a long list of promises in the new Republican platform, things of great importance that the Republicans claimed they wanted but that the Republicans who controlled Congress had prevented his administration from doing.

It was then he unveiled his surprise, his bombshell, and speaking so rapidly the words seemed to run together, as though all joined by hyphens.

I am, therefore, calling this Congress back into session July 26.

On the 26th of July, which out in Missouri we call “Turnip Day,” I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis—which they are saying they are for ‘in their platform…. I shall ask them to act upon…aid to education, which they say they are for…civil rights legislation, which they say they are for….

The cheering and stomping in the hall was so great he had to shout to be heard.

Now, my friends, if there is any reality behind the Republican platform, we ought to get some action from a short session of the 80th Congress. They can do this job in 15 days, if they want to do it. They will still have time to go out and run for office.

He was calling the Republicans’ bluff—“Let ’em make good!”—and the delegates were ecstatic. He had “set the convention on fire,” said The New York Times. “He walked out there,” remembered Clark Clifford, “and reached down within himself, found the strength and the inspiration to make that fiery speech which was necessary to put him over.”

Critics on the left and the right found themselves grudgingly moved by such nerve and audacity in the face of the odds and by his effect on the crowd. “They sensed,” wrote Max Lerner, “that this was the most militant Presidential acceptance speech in either party since Bryan. They liked the fact that he came out of his corner fighting…. It was a great speech for a great occasion, and as I listened I found myself applauding.”

Even The New Republic bestowed the ultimate compliment: the speech was as “cannily suited” to the time and setting as any Franklin Roosevelt might have made. “For that night at least, Harry Truman was a real leader.”

“You can’t stay cold about a man who sticks out his chin and fights,” Time reported one delegate exclaiming.

Truman was likened to the brave sea captain who rallies the crew to save the sinking ship. In fact, he was exactly like the Missouri artillery captain in the Vosges Mountains in 1918 who when his battery panicked under enemy attack stood by his guns and with a fierce harangue got his men back in order again.

The Republicans charged him with crude politics. The call for a special session of Congress was “the act of a desperate man,” “the last hysterical gasp from an expiring administration.”

“Of course, it was politics,” wrote Jonathan Daniels, “and effective politics, tough and native.”

What it did above all, as Truman intended, was to put the focus on Congress and thus on the split between those Republicans who, like Dewey and Earl Warren, favored much that had been set in motion since the 1930s by the New Deal, and those Republicans who remained obstructionists. It made the 80th Congress the issue, put the Republicans on the defense, and left Dewey with the dubious choice of either standing up for the 80th Congress, and thereby assume a share of responsibility for its failings, or remain aloof, which would seem less than courageous for a standardbearer.

As a political strategist Truman had been “devilishly astute,” Speaker of the House Joe Martin later conceded. No President had called an emergency session of Congress in an election year since 1856. “On the 25th of July,” went an old Missouri saying, “sow your turnips wet or dry.” The Congress that met on the 26th (the 25th was a Sunday) would be known as the Turnip Congress.

“Arrived in Washington at the White House at 5:30 A.M., my usual time getting up,” Truman jotted on his calendar for July 15, after the return from Philadelphia.

But go to bed at 6:00 and listen to the news. Sleep until 9:15, order breakfast and go to the office at 10:00. I called a special session of the Congress. My, how my opposition screams. I’m going to attempt to make them meet their platform promises before the election. That is according to the “kept” press and the opposition leadership “cheap politics.” I wonder what “expensive politics” will be like!

In a red-brick auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, two days later, a hurriedly assembled conference of states’ rights Democrats, “Dixiecrats” as they now called themselves, waved Confederate flags and cheered Alabama’s former Governor Frank M. Dixon as he denounced Truman’s civil rights program as an effort “to reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race,” then unanimously chose Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to be their candidate for President, and for Vice President, Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi. The Dixiecrat platform called for “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” Their hope was to deny both Truman and Dewey a majority and thus throw the election into the House of Representatives.

Asked why he was breaking with the Democratic Party now, when Roosevelt had made similar promises as Truman on civil rights, Strom Thurmond responded, “But Truman really means it.”

On July 27, once again at the Philadelphia Convention Hall, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Citizens of America, with more than three thousand delegates—far more than at either the Republican or Democratic conventions—rallied to acclaim Wallace their candidate for the presidency, and Senator Glen H. Taylor, the “Singing Cowboy” of Idaho, as their improbable choice for a running mate. (Taylor, a Democrat, had campaigned for the Senate in 1944 singing, “Oh, Give Me a Home by the Capitol Dome.”)

Black delegates were present in impressive numbers. Nearly a third of the delegates were women. Youth predominated. The average Progressive on hand in Philadelphia was described as twenty years younger and 30 pounds lighter than his or her Democratic or Republican counterpart. Comparably little alcohol was consumed and there were no “smoke-filled rooms” this time. But there was also a noticeable absence of political experience on hand, and though neither Wallace nor Taylor, nor any but a small minority of delegates, were Communists, the conspicuous presence of such celebrated pro-Communists as Paul Robeson and New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio, plus the obvious dominating presence of Communists throughout the whole new helter-skelter Progressive organization, was to many observers and much of the country deeply disturbing.

As he had from the start of his “crusade,” Wallace refused to repudiate his Communist support. He would not repudiate any support that came to him, he said, “on the basis of interest in peace.” Senator Taylor stressed the distinction between “pink” Communists and “red” Communists, telling reporters that the pink variety wished to change the American system through evolution rather than revolution, and that they would support the Progressive cause. In contrast, the red variety would be backing Dewey on the theory that revolution would inevitably follow another Hoover-style administration.

The Progressive platform that emerged from the convention was virtually no different from the Communist Party platform in its denunciation of the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the new draft law, and called for the destruction of American nuclear weapons, which were still the only nuclear weapons known to exist. When a Vermont farmer named James Hayford introduced an amendment saying it was not the Progressive Party’s intention to endorse the foreign policy of any other country, the idea was denounced as “the reflection of pressure from outside” and voted down—which Wallace knew to be a mistake but did nothing to stop.

Wallace delivered his acceptance speech at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park before an exuberant crowd of more than thirty thousand people who had paid for their seats, a Progressive innovation to meet expenses. He blamed American policy for most of the world’s troubles and tensions, never once criticizing the Soviet Union. Concerning Berlin, he said, there was nothing to lose by giving it up in the search for peace. “We stand against the kings of privilege who own the old parties…[who] attempt to control our thoughts and dominate the life of man everywhere in the world.”

IV

In the stifling, relentless heat of summer in Washington, the Turnip Congress got reluctantly under way. Tension over Berlin increased almost by the hour. And to Truman’s extreme annoyance, James Forrestal launched a campaign behind closed doors to turn custody of the atomic bomb over to the military chiefs.

From testimony being given before the House Un-American Activities Committee by a woman named Elizabeth Bentley and a Time magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers, both former Communists, it also appeared a major spy scandal was unfolding.

Visitors to the President’s office found him looking tired and preoccupied. Bess and Margaret having made their annual summer departure for Missouri, he was feeling particularly alone again. “It is hot and humid and lonely,” he wrote the night after putting them on the train. “Why in hell does anybody want to be a head of state? Damned if I know.”

He had had no change of heart about Berlin. American forces would remain. That was his decision, he said again, meeting with Marshall and Forrestal on July 19, and he would stand by it until all diplomatic means had been tried to reach some kind of accommodation to avoid war. “We’ll stay in Berlin—come what may…. I don’t pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make,” he noted privately. He was convinced, as was Marshall, that the future of Western Europe was at stake in Berlin, not to say the well-being of the 2.5 million people in the city’s Allied sectors. Stalin was obviously determined to force the Allies out of Berlin. “If we wished to remain there, we would have to make a show of strength,” Truman later wrote. “But there was always the risk that Russian reaction might lead to war. We had to face the possibility that Russia might deliberately choose to make Berlin the pretext for war….” The Allies had all of 6,500 troops in Berlin—3,000 American, 2,000 British, 1,500 French—while the Russians had 18,000 backed by an estimated 300,000 in the east zone of Germany.

With the airlift now in its fourth week, heavily laden American and British transports were roaring into Berlin hundreds of times a day, and in all weather. They came in low, one after another, lumbering just over the tops of the ruined buildings, as crowds gathered in clusters to watch. German children with toy planes played “airlift” in the rubble as the real drama went on overhead.

It had been General Clay’s initial estimate that possibly 700 tons of food could be delivered to the beleaguered city by air in what would be a “very big operation.” Already some days the tonnage was twice that and now, too, almost unimaginably, coal was arriving out of the sky by the planeload. Pilots and crew were making heroic efforts. At times planes were landing as often as every four minutes—British Yorks and Dakotas, American C-47s and the newer, much larger, four-engine C-54s, which had been dispatched to Germany from Panama, Hawaii, and Alaska. Most planes averaged three flights a day from Frankfurt to Berlin’s Gatow or Templehof fields, a distance of 275 miles. Ground crews worked round the clock. “We were proud of our Air Force during the war. We’re prouder of it today,” said The New York Times. Already, three American crewmen had been killed when their C-47 crashed.

Still, the effort was not enough. On July 15, a record day, 1,450 tons were flown into Berlin. Yet to sustain the city 2,000 tons of food alone were needed every day, plus 12,000 tons of fuel and supplies. In winter, the demands for fuel would be far greater. The mayor of Berlin had said it would be impossible to provide the necessary food and coal supplies by air. “But every expert knows,” reported a London paper, “that aircraft, despite their immense psychological effect, cannot be relied upon to provision Berlin in the winter months.” Allied officials in Berlin worried about the increased activity of Russian Yak fighter planes in the air corridors.

Secretary of the Army Royall ordered General Clay to fly home to Washington to report to the President, which Truman thought a mistake. (“My muttonhead Secretary [of the] Army ordered Clay home from Germany and stirred up a terrific how-dy-do for no good reason,” he wrote to Bess.) At a National Security Council meeting on July 22, Clay said the people of Berlin would stand firm, even if it meant further hardships. Probably the Russians would try to stop any attempt by an armed convoy to break through at this stage, but they were not likely to interfere with air traffic, unless, of course, they were determined to provoke a war. Did the Russians want war, Truman asked. Clay did not think so. No one could be sure. Truman rejected the convoy idea.

When Truman inquired what problems might result from increasing the airlift, General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force Chief of Staff, voiced concern that American air strength elsewhere in the world would dangerously be reduced. But that was a risk Truman would take. The airlift would be vastly increased, he decided, expressing again his “absolute determination” to stay in Berlin. More of the big C-54 transports would be sent. Clay ordered another Berlin airfield built and in response to his call, 30,000 Berliners went to work to clear the rubble and grade the runways.

“There is considerable political advantage to the Administration in its battle with the Kremlin,” James Rowe had written in his effort to outline a political strategy for 1948. “In time of crisis the American citizen tends to back up his President.” So by such reasoning, the Berlin crisis, if kept in bounds, was made to order for Truman. Yet in nothing he said or wrote is there a sign of his playing the situation for “political advantage.” Rather, the grave responsibilities he bore as President at this juncture seem to have weighed more heavily on him than at any time since assuming office. He felt the campaign and its distractions, the drain it put on his time and strength, could not be coming at a worse time, as he told Churchill in a letter on July 10:

I am going through a terrible political “trial by fire.” Too bad it must happen at this time.

Your country and mine are founded on the fact that the people have the right to express themselves on their leaders, no matter what the crisis….

We are in the midst of grave and trying times. You can look with satisfaction upon your great contribution to the overthrow of Nazism and Fascism in the world. “Communism”—so-called—is our next great problem. I hope we can solve it without the “blood and tears” the other two cost.

Only the day before the National Security Council meeting about Berlin On July 21, at the meeting arranged by Forrestal to discuss the custody of the atomic bomb, Truman had looked dreadful and in a moment of annoyance revealed as vividly as he ever would how much more he dwelt on the horror of the atomic bomb than most people, even those close to him, imagined, or than he wished anyone to know.

“The President greeted us rather solemnly. He looked worn and grim; none of the joviality that he sometimes exhibits, and we got right down to business,” wrote David Lilienthal in his diary that night, when the whole scene and everything said were still fresh in his mind.

It was an important session, and a kind of seriousness hung over it that wasn’t relieved a bit, needless to say, by the nature of the subject and the fact that even at that moment some terrible thing might happen in Berlin…. I rather think it was one of the most important meetings I have ever attended.

Present besides Truman, Forrestal, and Lilienthal were the four other members of the Atomic Energy Commission, plus Secretary of the Army Royall, Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington, and Donald F. Carpenter, an executive of the Remington Arms Company who was chairman of the Military Liaison Committee of the National Military Establishment.

It was Carpenter who opened the discussion by reading aloud a formal letter requesting an order from the President that would turn custody of the atomic bomb over to the Joint Chiefs, on the grounds that those who would be ultimately responsible for use of the weapon should have it in their possession, to increase “familiarity” with it and to “unify” command. Truman, who did not appreciate being read to in such fashion, cut him off, saying curtly, “I can read.” He turned to Lilienthal, who said the real issue was one of broad policy and that the bomb must not be the responsibility of anyone other than the President, because of his constitutional roles as both Commander in Chief and Chief Magistrate. Civilian control was essential, Lilienthal said.

But then Symington spoke, delivering an incongruously lighthearted account of a visit to Los Alamos where “our fellas” told him they should have the bomb just to be sure it worked, though one scientist had said he did not think it should ever be used.

“I don’t either,” Truman interjected, his face expressionless. He went on. “I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that…[and here, as Lilienthal recorded, Truman paused and looked down at his desk “rather reflectively”]—that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon. [“I shall never forget this particular expression,” wrote Lilienthal.] It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.”

In times past Truman had spoken of the bomb as a military weapon like any other. In times past he had spoken of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military targets. Not any more. It was an extraordinary declaration, refuting absolutely—as Lilienthal understood—any thought that Truman was insensitive to the horror of the bomb or took lightly his responsibilities as Commander in Chief.

Yet Symington seemed not to understand Truman’s point or the mood of the moment. “Our fellas need to get used to handling it,” Symington repeated, referring now to the military.

They had to understand, Truman said sternly and solemnly, that he had other considerations to weigh. “This is no time to be juggling an atom bomb around.”

He rose from his desk. He had had more than enough. The discussion was ended. The others stood and departed.

“If what worried the President, in part, was whether he could trust these terrible forces in the hands of the military establishment,” wrote Lilienthal that night, “the performance these men gave certainly could not have been reassuring….”

Two days later, at the close of a Cabinet meeting dealing with domestic issues, Truman held Forrestal a moment longer than the others to tell him the bomb would continue in civilian custody.

Privately, Truman had been expressing concern about Forrestal, who, as Truman said, seemed lately unable to “take hold.”

“I went down the river on the yacht Friday at noon and slept around the clock,” Truman wrote to Mary Jane first thing Monday morning, July 26.

I sure enough needed it. And I’ll need some more before November. It’s all so futile. Dewey, Wallace, the cockeyed southerners and then if I win—which I’m afraid I will—I’ll probably have a Russian war on my hands. Two wars are enough for anybody and I’ve had two.

I go to Congress tomorrow and read them a message requesting price control, housing and a lot of other necessary things and I’ll in all probability get nothing. But I’ve got to try.

On Capitol Hill, the special session of Congress opened and later that same day Truman sprung another surprise. Without warning, he announced executive orders to end discrimination in the armed forces and to guarantee fair employment in the civil service.

His reception when he appeared before Congress the next day was noticeably cool. (As a show of their resentment, some members did not even rise from their seats as he entered.) He called for action on an eight-point program, including civil rights—controls on consumer credit, an excess profits tax, strengthened rent control, price controls, action on housing, farm support, aid to education, an increased minimum wage, and change in the Displaced Persons Act that discriminated against Catholics and Jews—all that he had asked for before and had been denied.

From his office in Albany, Governor Dewey said nothing one way or the other, but through his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, encouraged Republican leaders in Congress to give careful consideration to the President’s program. Taft absolutely refused, saying, “No, we’re not going to give that fellow anything.” To Taft, as to most Republicans and much of the public, the whole affair was a cheap political ploy.

The two-week session accomplished little, as Truman had anticipated, except to make his point that a Republican Congress was the great road-block to social progress for the country and to show the gulf between Republican promises and Republican performance.

“They sure are in a stew and mad as wet hens,” he told Bess. “If I can make them madder, maybe they’ll do the job the old gods used to put on the Greeks and Romans….”

On August 4 on Capitol Hill, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Time editor Whittaker Chambers charged that Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Foundation and once one of the “bright young men” of the New Deal, a former official in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, serving fourteen years in the State Department, had been his accomplice in a Communist network. “For a number of years, I, myself, served in the underground in Washington, D.C.,” said Chambers. “I knew it at its top level…. A member of this group…was Alger Hiss.” The news rocked the city. Official Washington was described as “stunned with anger and disbelief.” Speaking off the record, Sam Rayburn told a reporter, “There is political dynamite in this Communist investigation. Don’t doubt that.”

But when, at his press conference the following day, Truman was asked whether he thought the “spy scare” on Capitol Hill was only “a red herring” to divert public attention from inflation, he said he agreed. The hearings were “a ‘red herring’ to keep from doing what they ought to do…. They are slandering a lot of people that don’t deserve it.”

Could they quote him, reporters asked. Yes, Truman replied, adding further to his troubles.

A week later, with the special session of Congress ended, he was fed another line by another reporter, but this time to his benefit. Did he think it had been a “do-nothing” Congress? “Entirely,” Truman said. He thought that was quite a good name for the 80th Congress.

Upstairs at the White House the decline and fall of the old building was no longer theoretical. The floor of Margaret’s sitting room, across the hall from his study, had caved in beneath her piano. His own bathroom, the President was informed, was about to collapse. Nothing of this was disclosed, however, nor would it be until after the elections. “Can you imagine what the press would have done with this story?” Margaret would recall. “The whole mess would have been blamed on Harry Truman.”

“Margaret’s sitting room floor broke in two but didn’t fall through the family dining room ceiling,” he reported to his sister on August 10. “They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the Red Parlor. They won’t let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath.”

He was sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom, in “old Abe’s bed,” he added, and finding it quite comfortable.

14

Fighting Chance

It will be the greatest campaign any President ever made.

Win, lose, or draw people will know where I stand….

—Truman to his sister, autumn 1948

I

The Ferdinand Magellan was the only private railroad car ever fitted out for the exclusive use of the President of the United States. Eighty-three feet in length and painted the standard dark green of the Pullman Company, it had been built originally in 1928 as one of several luxury cars named for famous explorers—Marco Polo, David Livingstone, Robert Peary—then taken over by the government for Franklin Roosevelt’s use during wartime, in 1942, when it was completely overhauled to become a rolling fortress.

The windows were three-inch, bulletproof glass, the entire car sheathed in armor plate—sides, top, bottom, ends, and doors—with the result that it weighed a colossal 142½ tons, or as much as a locomotive, Special trucks and wheels had to be built to carry the weight.

For security reasons during the war, only the word “Pullman” appeared on the outside, and still, in 1948, the only distinguishing exterior features were the presidential seal fixed to the rear platform and three loudspeakers mounted on top of the platform roof.

Inside everything was designed for comfort. At the forward end were galley, pantry, servants’ quarters, and an oak-paneled dining room, which doubled as a conference room for the President, this furnished with china cabinets, a mahogany dining table, and six matching chairs upholstered p in gold-and-green striped damask. Beyond, down a side aisle, were four staterooms, marked A, B, C, and D, the two middle rooms, B and C, forming the Presidential Suite with joining bath and shower. Stateroom B, for the First Lady, was a pale peach color. Stateroom C, the President’s room, had blue-green walls and carpet and satin chrome fixtures.

Past the staterooms, at the rear, was the observation lounge with blue and brown chairs and a blue sofa, walls covered with an attractive light brown tufted material resembling leather, blue velvet curtains at the windows and at the door opening onto the rear platform. The carpeting was dark green.

The whole car was air-conditioned—to its immense weight under way were added some 6,000 pounds of ice for the cooling system—and each room had a telephone that could be hooked up to a trackside outlet whenever the train was standing at a station.

To Truman, who loved trains and loved seeing the country, it was the perfect way to travel, and one he had enjoyed frequently since becoming President. There had been the memorable night of poker with Churchill on the way to Missouri for the “iron curtain” speech, the long “nonpolitical” swing west in June. More recently, he had made a quick one-day tour of Michigan for a Labor Day speech at Detroit’s Cadillac Square, to open his campaign for reelection. Yet for all the miles covered, the days and nights spent on board the Magellan, these prior expeditions had been only prologue to the odyssey that began the morning of Friday, September 17, 1948, when the Magellan, at the end of a seventeen-car special train, stood waiting on Track 15 beneath the cavernous shed of Washington’s Union Station. In June, he had gone 9,000 miles. Now, on what was to become famous as the Whistle-stop Campaign, he would travel all told 21,928 miles, as far nearly as around the world—as far nearly as the voyage of Magellan.

The idea was his own. “I want to see the people,” he had said. There would be three major tours: first cross-country to California again, for fifteen days; then a six-day tour of the Middle West; followed by a final, hard-hitting ten days in the big population centers of the Northeast and a return trip home to Missouri.

“There were no deep-hid schemes, no devious plans,” remembered Charlie Ross, “nothing that could be called, in the language of political analysts, ‘high strategy.’ ” The President would simply take his case to the country in a grueling, no-quarter contest. Mileage meant crowds.

According to Ross, it had been Truman’s original intention to go into all forty-eight states, including those of the Deep South. “He rather relished the prospect effacing up to the Dixiecrats on their homegrounds.” (How did he expect to be received in the South, Truman was asked. “Why with courtesy, of course,” he replied.)

The idea of a Southern trip held appeal [wrote Ross], because it would show that the Boss had courage, but the plan was ultimately ruled out on the ground that every ounce of energy should be used in places where material political gain might be expected. The political courage of the President had already been amply demonstrated.

So for a total of thirty-three days, more than a month, the Magellan was to be center stage for a fast-rolling political roadshow, which, as was said, had but one act and that one act built around just one performer. “We play more towns than the World of Mirth or Brunk’s Comedians…and we work longer hours,” an accompanying reporter would write. For Truman, away from the White House, the big private car would be home, office, presidential command center, campaign headquarters, and the place where, day after day, he would somehow, bravely, almost inconceivably keep hope alive.

No President in history had ever gone so far in quest of support from the people, or with less cause for the effort, to judge by informed opinion. Nor would any presidential candidate ever again attempt such a campaign by railroad.

As a test of his skills and judgment as a professional politician, not to say his stamina and disposition at age sixty-four, it would be like no other experience in his long, often difficult career, as he himself understood perfectly. More than any other event in his public life, or in his presidency thus far, it would reveal the kind of man he was.

“It’s going to be tough on everybody,” he told the staff. “But that’s the way it’s got to be. I know I can take it. I’m only afraid that I’ll kill some of my staff—and I like you all very much and I don’t want to do that.”

The rest of the train was made up of diners, lounges, sleepers, a press car, a dynamo car for power, and a communications car (a converted baggage car operated by the Signal Corps), where radio teletype would provide continuous contact with Washington and thus the rest of the world, a point of critical importance to Truman, who had become more and more uneasy over the situation in Berlin. “I have a terrible feeling…that we are very close to war,” he had written privately the night of September 13.

Security would be a major undertaking. Every grade crossing would have to be checked in advance by the Secret Service. A pilot train—a single locomotive and one car—would run five miles ahead of the President’s train to “absorb” any possible trouble. The railroad official in charge, who had been handling presidential trips since the time of Warren G. Harding, admitted he was a nervous wreck. “Every grade crossing has to be manned when the train passes and I just can’t tell you how many switches have to be spiked until we’ve moved on,” he told a reporter. Once rolling the train would travel under the code name “POTUS,” for “President of the United States,” which gave it the right of way everywhere in the country.

Truman liked to move fast. Roosevelt, because of his infirmities, had preferred a smooth, easy pace of no more than 35 miles an hour when traveling in the Magellan. Truman liked to go about 80.

A cheer went up from the moderate-sized crowd gathered at the Union Station platform, the sound echoing under the vaulted roof as his limousine, easing through a break in the crowd, pulled right to the gate. Truman stepped out looking “positively buoyant,” Margaret close behind. Marshall and Barkley had come to see him off. The First Lady would catch up with the caravan at Des Moines.

Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, Matt Connelly, George Elsey, Charlie Murphy, White House physician Wallace Graham, and Rose Conway, the President’s secretary, were all present and waiting to go on board, in addition to several White House stenographers, Jonathan Daniels, who would help with speeches, and three new speechwriters, David M. Noyes, Albert Z. Carr, and John Franklin Carter. Bill Boyle of Kansas City, an old Truman friend and aid who had served on the Truman Committee, would, like Matt Connelly, be handling political chores.

Counting the whole staff, the Secret Service detail, forty-four reporters and five photographers, the complete entourage numbered some seventy people. The one notable, absentee was Harry Vaughan, who would remain out of sight—and out of contact with the press—for the duration of the campaign, at Truman’s request.

With everything ready, Truman and Barkley posed together on the rear platform for a few last pictures.

“Mow ‘em down, Harry,” Barkley exhorted.

“I’m going to fight hard. I’m going to give ‘em hell,” said Truman, setting the theme at the start.

The odds against him looked insurmountable. The handicaps of the Truman campaign, wrote columnist Marquis Childs, one of the writers on board, “loomed large as the Rocky Mountains.” Henry Wallace and the Dixiecrats had split the Democratic Party three ways. Conceivably, New York and the South were already lost to Truman. The victory of the Republicans in the elections of 1946 had been resounding, and ever since the Civil War, the party winning the off-year election had always gone on to win the presidency in the next election. At Washington dinner parties, as Bess Truman had heard, the talk was of who would be in the Dewey Cabinet. Some prominent Democrats in Washington were already offering their homes for sale. Even the President’s mother-in-law thought Dewey would win.

In the West, where Truman had made an all-out effort in June, predictions were that at best he might win 19 of the 71 electoral votes at stake. Only Arizona, with 4 votes, looked safe for Truman. And the West was essential.

A Gallup Poll of farm voters gave Dewey 48 percent, Truman 38. And the farm vote, too, was essential.

On September 9, a full week before Truman’s train departed Washington, Elmo Roper, a widely respected sampler of public opinion, had announced his organization would discontinue polling since the outcome was already so obvious. “My whole inclination,” Roper said, “is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin and devote my time and efforts to other things.” The latest Roper Poll showed Dewey leading by an “unbeatable” 44 to 31 percent. More important, said Roper, such elections were decided early.

Political campaigns are largely ritualistic…. All the evidence we have accumulated since 1936 tends to indicate that the man in the lead at the beginning of the campaign is the man who is the winner at the end of it…. The winner, it appears, clinches his victory early in the race and before he has uttered a word of campaign oratory.

The idea that the campaign was “largely ritualistic,” a formality only, became commonplace. Life, in its latest issue, carried a picture of Governor Dewey and his staff under the headline: “Albany Provides Preview of Dewey Administration.”

Yet, inexplicably, Truman had drawn tremendous crowds in Michigan on Labor Day. A hundred thousand people had filled Cadillac Square. By train and motorcade he rolled through Grand Rapids, Lansing, Hamtramck, Pontiac, and Flint, where to Truman and his staff the crowds were even more impressive. “Cadillac Square…that was organized,” remembered Matt Connelly. “But we rode from there up to Pontiac…[and] from Detroit to Pontiac I’d see people along the highway. This was not organized and there were a lot of them out there!” According to police estimates the turnout at Truman’s six stops in Michigan totaled more than half a million people.

Often, in later years, the big Truman crowds would be remembered as a phenomenon of the final weeks of the campaign. But this was a misconception. They were there from the start, in Michigan and in traditionally Republican Iowa—in Davenport, Iowa City, Grinnell, Des Moines—beginning September 18, his first full day heading west.

“Newsmen were nonplused,” reported Time. “All across Republican Iowa large crowds turned out…a good deal of the cheering was enthusiastic.”

The main event of the day was the National Plowing Contest at Dexter, forty miles west of Des Moines, where Truman spoke at noon, in blazing sunshine, standing front and center on a high, broad platform, a sea of faces before him, a giant plowing scoreboard behind. The crowd numbered ninety thousand.

The long horizons were rimmed with ripening corn. The atmosphere was of a vast county fair in good times, with throngs of healthy, well-fed, sun-baked and obviously prospering people enjoying the day, as dust swirled in a steady wind and more families arrived in new trucks and automobiles. Lined up in an adjoining field, their bright colors gleaming in the sun, were perhaps fifty private airplanes.

It was a Republican crowd. Iowa had a Republican governor. All eight Iowa representatives in Congress, and both senators, were Republicans. In the last presidential election Iowa’s ten electoral votes had gone to Dewey. But more important to Truman, nearly all his audience were farmers and in the Depression, he knew, Iowa farmers had voted for Roosevelt.

Years before, in 1934, when he had been running for the Senate the first time, a St. Louis reporter had written, “In a fight this quiet man can and does hurl devastating fire.” Now at Dexter he ripped into the Republican “gluttons of privilege…cold men…cunning men,” in a way no one had heard a presidential candidate speak since the days of William Jennings Bryan. The difference between Republicans and Democrats was a difference in “attitude”:

You remember the big boom and the great crash of 1929. You remember that in 1932 the position of the farmer had become so desperate that there was actual violence in many farming communities. You remember that insurance companies and banks took over much of the land of small independent farmers—223,000 farmers lost their farms….

I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who’s hitting you?…

The Democratic Party represents the people. It is pledged to work for agriculture…. The Democratic Party puts human rights and human welfare first…. These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men.

They are cunning men…. They want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship….

It was language that, to many, seemed oddly archaic and out of place in the midst of such obvious prosperity. The Des Moines Register would point to the “incongruity of being a prophet of doom to an audience in time of harvest of bumper crops.” Truman, it was said, was sadly miscast as the new Bryan, his speech “harsh and demagogic.” But he was leading to something quite specific.

In June, when rewriting the charter for the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC)—the agency for federal farm loans—Congress had included an obscure provision prohibiting the CCC from acquiring additional grain-storage bins. It was meant as an economy measure. But since farmers were required to use storage facilities approved or maintained by the CCC in order to qualify for price supports, they stood to lose heavily in the event of wheat and corn crops too large for the existing facilities to handle. If there were no approved bins to store the surplus of a bumper yield, then for the farmers a bumper yield could mean not prosperity but heavy losses.

The bill had gone through unopposed by the Democrats and Truman had signed it. But that was in June when no one was paying it much attention. Now the prospect of a bumper year was no longer hypothetical. The corn harvest would not begin until October, but all that day crossing Iowa, since early morning, those on board the train had seen little else but corn in abundance. The talk in Iowa was of yields of 135 bushels to the acre.

It was the Republican Congress that rewrote the charter for the Commodity Credit Corporation, Truman now charged at Dexter. The Republican Congress, said Truman, had “stuck a pitchfork in the farmer’s back.” Nor would the Republicans stop with limits on grain storage. The “whole structure of price supports” was in jeopardy.

“I’m not asking you to vote for me. Vote for yourselves,” he said, a theme he would strike over and over. To reporters covering the event, the huge crowd seemed friendly yet unmoved. But then who was to say.

Afterward, in a tent behind the platform, a perspiring President in his shirtsleeves pulled up a wooden folding chair to a long table with a red-check cloth and ate country fried chicken and prize-winning cake and pie with thirty farmers and their wives. Asked if he would please speak again, only on a more personal level this time, Truman agreed and returned to the platform.

Was it true he had once been able to plow the straightest furrows in his part of Missouri, he was asked. Yes, said Truman, but only according to an exceedingly partial witness, his mother. But he did have a reputation, he said, for never leaving a “skip place” when he sowed wheat. “My father always used to raise so much fuss about a skip place.”

He talked of the 12-inch, horse-drawn gang plow he rode at Grandview and how it had taken him sometimes four days to plow a field. He didn’t want to go back to those days. “I don’t want to turn back the clock. I don’t want to go back to the horse and buggy age, although some of our Republican friends do,” he said, and this brought a warm cheer.

“He was delightful and the people were delighted,” wrote Richard Rovere of The New Yorker, who had thought the earlier speech “deplorable.”

Truman had begun the day at 5:45. There had been six stops and six speeches before Dexter. After Dexter, he spoke at Des Moines, Melcher, and Chariton, Iowa. “At each stop,” reported the Des Moines Register, “the listeners massed for his rear platform talk were larger than the town’s population.”

“You stayed at home in 1946 and you got the 80th Congress, and you got just exactly what you deserved,” he said at Chariton. “You didn’t exercise your God-given right to control this country. Now you’re going to have another chance.”

He was on a crusade for the welfare of the everyday man, he said next, across the state line, at Trenton, Missouri. At Polo, Missouri, just after 8:00 P.M., he told the delighted crowd he had not been sure whether he would be able to stop there, but that the railroad had finally consented. It was his thirteenth speech of the day and he was sounding a little hoarse.

After a brief visit home Independence the next day, Sunday, September 19, he was on his way again. Crossing Kansas that night, the engineer had the train up to 105 miles per hour, which Truman, from his chair in the lounge, decided was too fast, considering the weight of the Magellan and what might happen to the forward cars should the engineer suddenly have to stop. Calmly, quietly, he asked Charlie Ross to send word to the engineer that there was no great hurry. Eighty miles an hour would do.

“Understand me, when I speak of what the Republicans have been doing. I’m not talking about the average Republican voter,” Truman told the twenty-five thousand people spread across the lawn of the State Capitol at Denver.

Nobody knows better than I that man for man, individually, most Republicans are fine people. But there’s a big distinction between the individual Republican voter and the policies of the Republican Party.

Something happens to Republican leaders when they get control of the Government…

Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and the special interests.

He had just one strategy—attack, attack, attack, carry the fight to the enemy’s camp. He hammered the Republicans relentlessly, in speeches at Grand Junction, Colorado, Helper, Springville, and Provo, Utah. “Selfish men have always tried to skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed. And…[their] instrument in this effort has always been the Republican Party,” he charged at Salt Lake City, to a standing-room-only crowd in the cavernous Mormon Tabernacle. At Ogden, he warned of “bloodsuckers who have offices in Wall Street.” The 80th Congress, he said at Reno, Nevada, was run by a “bunch of old mossbacks still living back in 1890.”

The country must not go backward, he would keep saying over and over, because he felt with all his heart that Americans were a forward-looking people and that his own program, as he had told Clark Clifford earlier, was a forward-looking program. If the old guard Republicans were to get control under a Republican administration, they would dismantle the progress made by the New Deal and in foreign affairs, retreat back into isolationism, which would be disastrous for the country and the world. He was certain of this and determined to keep it from happening.

To the crowd beside the Southern Pacific tracks at Roseville, California, he declared the Republican “do-nothing Congress tried to choke you to death in this valley,” by cutting off appropriations for publicly owned electric power lines. “You have got a terrible Congressman here in this district. He is one of the worst,” he told the citizens of Fresno, referring to Republican Bertrand W. Gearhart, who had once denounced George Marshall on the floor of the House.

One correspondent, Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, would later characterize the Truman campaign as “sharp speeches fairly criticizing Republican policy and defending New Deal liberalism mixed with sophistry, bunkum piled higher than haystacks, and demagoguery tooting merrily down the track.”

Truman was at his best speaking to small crowds and without notes and, often, when the subject was himself, his family, his own pioneer background and outlook on life. He was described by some of the eastern reporters as a “feed mill type of talker” and “excellent indeed” with a small-town crowd. These “little speeches,” thought Charlie Ross, were more important than the major addresses. “They got him close to the people.”

At both Grand Junction, Colorado, and the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, he reminisced about Grandfather Solomon Young and his journeys over the plains, his friendship with Brigham Young. “Oh, I wish my grandfather could see me now,” he said spontaneously at Salt Lake, and the audience first laughed, then broke into prolonged applause. “Those pioneers had faith and they had energy,” he said, seeming himself to embody an excess of both qualities.

Though he refused to put on Indian war bonnets or to kiss babies, he was thankful always for the gifts ceremoniously presented at stop after stop—hats, spurs, baskets of fruit (“I’ll be eating peaches from now until I get to Washington”). And nearly always he had something to say about the local scenery, local history, local achievements and interests.

They tell me [he said at Mojave] that in 1883—that was the year before I was born—that a gentleman by the name of Webb built ten grand, big wagons here in this town, bought himself a hundred head of mules, and began to haul borax out of the Mojave Desert—and that was the origin of Twenty-Mule Team Borax which we always kept in the house when I was a kid. I never thought I would be here as President at the place where it originated and talking to you people about your interests in the welfare of the country.

He expressed love of home, love of the land, the virtues and old verities of small-town America, his America. “Naturally, if we don’t think our hometown is the greatest in the world, we are not very loyal citizens. We all should feel that way,” he told the loyal citizens of American Fork, Utah.

“You don’t get any double talk from me,” he declared from a brightly decorated bandstand first thing in the morning sunshine at Sparks, Nevada. “I’m either for something or against it, and you know it. You know what I stand for.” What he stood for, he said again and again, was a government of and for the people, not the “special interests.”

He was friendly, cheerful. And full of fight.

“You are the government,” he said time after time. “Practical politics is government. Government starts from the grass roots.” “I think the government belongs to you and me as private citizens.” “I’m calling this trip a crusade. It’s a crusade of the people against the special interests, and if you back me up we’re going to win….”

“The basic issue of this campaign is as simple as can be: it’s the special interests against the people.” “I’m here on a serious mission, and because it is so serious, I propose to speak to you as plainly as I can.” “In 1946, you know, two-thirds of you stayed home and didn’t vote. You wanted a change. Well, you got it. You got the change. You got just exactly what you deserved.” “Now use your judgment. Keep the people in control of the government….” “I not only want you to vote for me but I want you to vote for yourselves, and if you vote for yourselves, you’ll vote for the Democratic ticket….”

The crowds would be gathered at station stops often from early morning, waiting for him to arrive. Men and boys perched on rooftops and nearby signal towers for a better view. There would be a high school band standing by, ready to play the national anthem or “Hail to the Chief,” or to struggle through the Missouri Waltz, a song Truman particularly disliked but that it was his fate to hear repeated hundreds of times over. His train would ease into the station as the band blared, the crowd cheered. Then, accompanied by three or four local politicians—usually a candidate for Congress or state party chairman who had boarded the train at a prior stop—Truman would step from behind the blue velvet curtain onto the platform, and the crowd, large or small, would cheer even more. One of the local politicians would then introduce the President of the United States and the crowd would cheer again.

At the ten-minute stops, he would speak for five minutes, beginning with praise for the local candidate for Congress or some issue of local interest, then moving quickly from the general to the particular. He would lambaste the Republican Congress for the high cost of living or failing to vote the grain-storage bins, for the Taft-Hartley Act or the “rich man’s tax bill,” for slashing federal support for irrigation and hydroelectric power projects in the West. It was the Republicans in Congress who were holding back progress in the Central Valley of California. Republicans at heart had no real interest in the West—not in water, not in public power. The Republicans who controlled the Appropriations Committees in the House and Senate, those upon whom the future of federal projects in the Central Valley depended were not Californians, they were not westerners: “They are Eastern Republicans.”

“Give ‘em hell, Harry!” someone would shout from the crowd—news accounts of his promise to Barkley to “give ‘em hell” having swept the country by now. The cry went up at one stop after another, often more than once—“Give ‘em hell, Harry!”—which always brought more whoops, laughter, and yells of approval, but especially when he tore into the 80th Congress.

(“I never gave anybody hell,” he would later say. “I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.”)

At the close, he would ask if they would like to meet his family and the crowd never failed in its response. The routine became standard. He would first introduce Bess—“Miz Truman”—who would step out from behind the blue curtain, looking pleased and motherly. He would take her hand and she would stand at his right, saying nothing. If the crowd was small and especially friendly, he would refer to her as “the Boss.” Then, proudly, he would present “Miss Margaret,” whose appearance nearly always brought the biggest cheer of all, and to the obvious delight of her father. She would be carrying an armful of roses, a few of which she would throw to the crowd. Truman would lean over the brass rail to grasp one or two outstretched hands. Someone would signal the local band to start playing again, and with warning toots of the whistle, with reporters scrambling to get back on board, the crowd cheering and the three Trumans waving, the train would pull slowly out of the station.

No matter what the outcome of the campaign, wrote Richard Rovere, millions of Americans would remember for the rest of their lives this final tableau of the “Three Traveling Trumans.”

It will be a picture to cherish and it will stand Harry Truman in good stead for the rest of his life. Travelling with him you get the feeling that the American people who have seen him and heard him at his best would be willing to give him just about anything he wants except the Presidency.

It could be said also they had seen and heard for themselves a President who was friendly and undisguised, loyal to his party, fond of his family, a man who cared about the country and about them, who believed the business of government was their business, and who didn’t whine when he was in trouble, but kept bravely, doggedly plugging away, doing his best, his duty as he saw it, and who was glad to be among them. He wasn’t a hero, or an original thinker. His beliefs were their beliefs, their way of talking was his way of talking. He was on their side. He was one of them. If he stumbled over a phrase or a name, he would grin and try again, and they would smile with him.

“There is an agreeable warmheartedness and simplicity about Truman that is genuine,” wrote Richard Strout for his column in The New Republic. A presidential train was probably the worst of all places to gauge public opinion, he added. “Nevertheless, reporters keep pinching themselves at the size of the crowds and their cordial response.”

At Los Angeles, at Gilmore Stadium, with screen stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Ronald Reagan—all ardent liberal Democrats—seated prominently on stage beside him, Truman hit hard at Henry Wallace, warning liberal Democrats to “think again” if they thought a vote for the third party was a vote for peace. With Communists “guiding and using” it, the third party did not represent American ideals. A vote for Wallace only played into the hands of the Republican “forces of reaction.” Now was the hour for the liberal forces of America to unite. “Think again. Don’t waste your vote.

At San Diego, ten thousand turned out, despite threatening skies and the early hour of 9:00 A.M., and gave him the most enthusiastic welcome thus far. After the stop at Oceanside, California, where the train pulled within sight of the rolling surf of the Pacific, the route was east again.

By then, Friday, September 24, he had been on the road a week, and while some on board had already begun to show signs of strain, Truman, who bore much the heaviest burden, remained steady as a rock. Nor had he left the duties and concerns of the Oval Office. A White House pouch arrived daily—papers requiring his signature, letters to be signed, letters to be read, reports from department heads, reports to Congress, sealed manila envelopes marked “Confidential,” as well as copies of the Kansas City Star and the Independence Examiner. A memorandum from Head Usher Howell Crim reported on the quantity of plaster descending in the East Room.

The Berlin crisis and the risks involved in the airlift weighed heavily on Truman. Though the quantity of supplies being flown into the city had increased since August, the disturbing truth was that the airlift was supplying less than half of what Berlin needed. “We are not quite holding our own,” General Clay had cabled. In another few days, in Dallas, at Truman’s request, General Walter Bedell Smith, the American ambassador to Moscow, would come quietly aboard the train to give his assessment to Truman of Stalin’s mood and the chances of war.

Staff work on board had acquired a pattern of a kind, though little about it was systematic or efficient or ever very formal. Of the major speeches only the one at Dexter, Iowa, had been prepared well in advance. The rest—for Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles—were produced under way, with the combined efforts of Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Murphy, and the new writers Noyes, Carr, and Carter. No speech was ever the work of one writer, and no speech failed to go through several drafts. Truman himself went over every line, worked “painstakingly” on every draft, and was the first to approve suggested deletions. “That’s good,” he would say. “Never use two words when one will do best.” Convoluted structure and highblown or evasive phrases greatly annoyed him. “That’s not the way I would say it,” he would remark as the group sat around the mahogany table in the dining room of the Magellan, working late into the night. “Let’s just say what we mean.”

“Nobody had any special pride of authorship, but we did get into heated arguments now and then,” wrote Ross. “The President would grin and say, ‘All right, you fellows fight it out and I’ll decide.’ ” Ross wanted Truman to ease up on the abusive language and state his case in more dignified fashion. But Truman was determined to keep the heat on. He had also introduced a new line about the housing shortage that made the others wince. If they went to the polls and did their duty on November 2, Truman would tell the crowd with a smile, then he wouldn’t have to go “hunting around in this housing shortage.” He could stay right in the White House. It was a line he liked and that he was sure the people liked. So he kept it.

Background material, particularly material useful for the rear platform appearances, was provided by a “Research Division” of the Democratic National Committee—three or four “bright young men” who had been holed up in a small office off DuPont Circle in Washington and who, according to George Elsey, “worked like dogs and ground out an incredible amount of material. All kinds of historical, literary, political and economic data flowed through them, and news clippings, photostats of useful documents, anything that would give spark and vitality and originality and vigor to President Truman’s campaign effort.”

Elsey’s task was to sort and edit it all, then keep the President supplied with pertinent items to choose from, and in proper order as they sped along. “I was the ‘whistlestopper’ on the job doing the outlines, getting the stuff together, and feeding these back to him,” he remembered. “I felt I got twenty-five years exercise walking from my car to his car in the weeks of the campaign.”

Bill Boyle would be credited with “planning every inch” of Truman’s itinerary. Constantly in touch with state party leaders, he advised Truman on which towns mattered, and why.

Traveling ahead of the train, as “advance men,” were Oscar Chapman, the Under Secretary of Interior, and Donald Dawson, of the White House staff. They were responsible for all the details of local ceremonies, to make sure the local politicians knew where and when to come on board Truman’s train, and that no such fiasco as the empty hall at Omaha in June ever happened again.

Between stops, in the comparative quiet and privacy of the Magellan, the candidate himself remained even-tempered and steadfastly confident. The strain on him was unrelenting. Yet he showed no signs of wear-and-tear or faltering expectations. He knew he was behind and in private said so. But he was also sure he would catch up and move ahead by November, when it would count—a view shared by almost no one else on board, though few, other than the press, ever talked about it.

Once, late in an especially long day, a noticeably weary First Lady asked Clark Clifford if he thought the President really believed he could win and Clifford said yes. “He gives every appearance under every condition,” Clifford answered.

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know where it comes from.”

Though several of his staff were gravely concerned about the split in the Democratic ranks—the campaigns under way by the Progressives and the Dixiecrats—Truman seems never to have taken the candidacies of Wallace and Thurmond as serious threats.

Henry Wallace was running hard. In August he had bravely campaigned through the South, decrying segregation and refusing to stay in hotels that enforced discrimination. In North Carolina angry crowds pelted him with eggs and rotten tomatoes. Traveling the rest of the country mainly by plane, he would eventually roll up more mileage even than Truman, his main theme remaining constant throughout: the Progressive Party was “the peace party” that could end the Cold War through direct negotiations with the Soviet Union. At Los Angeles, speaking at the same stadium where Truman had, Wallace drew a larger crowd than Truman had, and it was a paying crowd. But attendance overall at Wallace rallies and speeches was falling off, the excitement of his Progressive “crusade” plainly in decline, as he was perceived—and portrayed more and more in the press—as “playing Moscow’s game.” Of the Republicans and Democrats, he said they were “equally sinister” in their policies, both being in the grip of Wall Street and the Pentagon.

Strom Thurmond kept harping on states’ rights and demanding that the “evil forces” in control of the Democratic Party be “cast out.” He called Truman’s Fair Employment Practices Committee “communistic.” Racial integration of the armed services was “un-American.” The South must hold the line. “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” He and the Dixiecrats would win 140 electoral votes in the South, Thurmond said, more than sufficient to force the election into the House. But almost no one took the claim seriously, and Truman least of all.

In his speeches, Truman never mentioned Wallace or Thurmond by name. But then never in the major addresses or in any of his largely extemporaneous remarks to small crowds in out-of-the-way places did he speak of Dewey by name. Dewey was always “my Republican opponent,” or “the other fellow.”

He never criticized or ridiculed Dewey in a personal way. Interestingly, Dewey was never even a subject of discussion on board the Ferdinand Magellan. There was no talk of Dewey’s personality or failings, no gossiping about him, or ever any consideration of attacking him on personal grounds. It would not be recalled that the President ever even mentioned Dewey.

II

Governor Thomas E. Dewey had gone aboard his own campaign train at Albany on Sunday, September 19, two days after Truman left Washington, and Dewey, too, delivered his first major speech in Iowa, at Des Moines on Monday the 20th, two days after Truman spoke at the Dexter plowing contest. Starting later than Truman, Dewey would travel nowhere near so far, and at a much more leisurely pace. And he would deliver far fewer speeches—all this, like everything about the Dewey campaign, having been carefully thought out in advance. As the candidate and his advisers proudly informed the press, nothing was to be left to chance.

Press coverage of Dewey’s advance across the country was also to be far greater than that Truman received. There were ninety-two reporters riding the “Dewey Victory Special”—ninety-eight by the time the train reached California—roughly twice the number traveling with the President, and they were catered to, their everyday needs handled with a skill and efficiency unknown on the Truman train. Copies of the candidate’s speeches were nearly always available twenty-four hours in advance, as they seldom ever were on the Truman train. An internal public address system fed Dewey’s remarks directly to the press car and dining cars, so reporters need not bother leaving their air-conditioned comforts. Coffee and sandwiches were provided to reporters at odd hours, their laundry attended to, their luggage moved from train to hotel for overnight stops. To those who had traveled with both candidates, the Truman operation, by comparison, was forty years behind the times.

“If you wanted anything laundered [on the Truman train], you did it yourself, in a Pullman basin,” Richard Rovere informed his readers in The New Yorker.

When you detrained anywhere for an overnight stay, it was every man for himself. You carried your duffel and scrambled for your food. If a man was such a slave to duty that he felt obliged to hear what the President said in his back-platform addresses, he had to climb down off the train; run to the rear end, mingle with the crowd, and listen. Often this was a hazardous undertaking, for the President was given to speaking late at night to crowds precariously assembled on sections of roadbed built up fifteen or twenty feet above the surrounding land. The natives knew the contours of the ground, but the reporters did not, and more than one of them tumbled down a cindery embankment.

A condescending tone entered into a lot of what was written about Truman and his efforts. His whole campaign, as Jonathan Daniels said, was given a “sort of rube reputation” by the largely eastern press traveling with him. The Dewey campaign, by contrast, was described as “slick,” “tidy as a pin,” everything handled with “junior-executive briskness.” The favored drink on board the “Dewey Victory Special” was the martini, not bourbon as on the Truman train. The favorite game was bridge, not poker. Dewey himself was cool, careful, “supremely self-confident,” and from the start elevated in tone.

“Tonight we enter upon a campaign to unite America,” he told the crowd at Des Moines, where, reportedly, he was leading Truman by a resounding 51 to 37 percent.

“We propose to install in Washington,” Dewey said, “an administration which has faith in the American people, a warm understanding of their needs and the competence to meet them. We will rediscover the essential unity of our people and the spiritual strength which makes our country great. We will begin to move forward again shoulder to shoulder….”

There were no harsh or divisive accusations, no pitting of farmers against Wall Street, no pitchforks in the back or angry, staccato assaults on any segment of government or society.

A Republican congressman from Minnesota, August H. Andresen, had written to warn Dewey of discontent among farmers, saying, “We cannot win without the farm vote.” But Dewey refrained also from any mention of farm problems.

His voice was deep and resonant, as flowing as the smoothest radio preacher—everything Truman’s voice was not. Dewey was dignified. He spoke ill of no one, offended no one. He had no surprises, he took no risks. And the pattern prevailed, his text seldom more rousing than a civics primer. “Government must help industry and industry must cooperate with government,” he would say with a grand preacherlike sweep of the right arm.

“America’s future is still ahead of us,” he also said.

They were not speeches of the kind he had given in 1944, when he had hit hard and often, charging Franklin Roosevelt with failure to end the Depression, failure to build American defenses before Pearl Harbor. At one point, he had called Roosevelt truly “the indispensable” man—“indispensable to the ill-assorted, power-hungry conglomeration of city bosses, Communists, and career bureaucrats which now compose the New Deal.” But there would be no such harangue this time, because this time Dewey was not the challenger. This time he had the election sewed up.

It was an odd reversal of roles, with the incumbent President running as the challenger and his opponent performing as though he were already elected and the campaign a mere formality. Dewey had only to mark time, be careful, make no mistakes, say or do nothing silly or improper, and the presidency was his.

So the speeches were kept unceasingly positive. He was for unity, for peace, for “constructive change.” He was not running against the New Deal. He was not even running against Harry Truman, whom he never mentioned, any more than Truman spoke of him, which was another odd turn. “Governor Dewey is deliberately avoiding any sharp controversy with the Democratic incumbent,” reported The New York Times as the “Victory Special” rolled through California, passing, at one point, within only a few miles of the Truman train.

In some ways the two candidates were much alike. Both were efficient with their time, alert, and energetic. They always looked spanking clean and pressed. Both were men of medium stature, though Truman, the one so often referred to disparagingly as “the little man,” was an inch taller than Dewey, who was 5 feet 8 inches. And unlike Truman, Dewey was extremely sensitive about his height.

They were each diligent, career public servants who genuinely believed that good government was possible and the best politics. They both loved music. Truman had dreamed of being a concert pianist, Dewey of being a concert singer and still loved to sing (especially “Oklahoma” in the bathtub). Each was devoted to his family. Dewey’s wife, Frances, a particularly photogenic woman with a somewhat shy but winsome manner, was generally seen as an asset to his political career; and they had two teenage sons, Tom, Jr., and John.

Like Truman, Dewey was a product of small-town middle America. He had grown up in Owosso, Michigan, where his father, the editor of the local newspaper, was vitally interested in politics, just as John Truman had been.

Beyond there, however, the similarities ended. Where Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man—raised, educated, formed in thought and outlook in the era before World War I—Dewey was of a different generation. Dewey had never lived with the burden of farm debt; he had never been to war, he had never been bankrupt. Born in 1902, eighteen years after Truman, he was the first candidate for President born in the twentieth century. His middle American origins, moreover, were hardly apparent any longer. Educated at the University of Michigan and the Columbia Law School in New York, he had made his entire career in the East, and with his homburg hats and cultivated voice, he had left Owosso far behind.

Where Truman had been, as Nellie Noland said, “a late bloomer all along,” attaining prominence only past the age of fifty, Dewey had soared almost from the start, achieving national fame as the crusading district attorney of New York while still in his thirties. He was “the Gangbuster,” a national hero. In 1938, at age thirty-six, he had made his first run for governor of New York. Trying again in 1942, he became New York’s first Republican governor in twenty years. Running for a second term in 1946, he rolled up the biggest victory in the state’s history, winning by nearly 700,000 votes.

As governor he cut taxes, doubled state aid to education, raised salaries for state employees, reduced the state’s overall indebtedness by over $100 million, and put through the first state law in the country prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. If elected now, he would be, at forty-six, the youngest President since Theodore Roosevelt. Given his youth, ambition, his proven ability, it was not inconceivable that Thomas E. Dewey could serve as long as, or longer than Franklin Roosevelt. If he were to have four full terms, he would be in the White House until 1965, and even then would still be younger than was Truman in 1948.

But, as often noted, Dewey was also extremely cautious and cold in manner, at least in public, which for a politician was what mattered. On the campaign trail, he seemed not to care for the gifts he was offered or to mix with the crowd. He was incapable of unbending. Where Truman, at the end of a platform talk, would ask, “Would you like to meet my family?” Dewey would say stiffly, “I’m pleased to present Mrs. Dewey.”

“Smile, governor,” a photographer had called at a campaign stop in 1944. “I thought I was,” said Dewey. A remark attributed to the wife of a New York Republican politician would be widely repeated. “You have to know Mr. Dewey well,” she said, “in order to dislike him.”

He was so self-controlled as to seem mechanical—Dewey came on stage, wrote Richard Rovere, “like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind”—and there was a hard look in the dark eyes, a look that had served him well as a prosecutor. “Those eyes tell you this guy doesn’t crap around,” a staff man once said.

It was Dewey’s small, dark “bottle-brush” mustache that the public knew him best for and that many people disliked, or wished he would get rid of, mustaches having been long out of fashion among public men. He had grown it on a bicycle tour of France years earlier and kept it because his wife approved. To the actress Ethel Barrymore, the mustache and Dewey’s diminutive size made him look “like the bridegroom on the wedding cake,” a remark greatly amplified by the acerbic, much-quoted daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and that may have done Dewey real harm in the campaign.

To the reporters on board his train, he seemed aloof, even haughty. They were kept at a distance, and though they were certain he would win—and most believed he would make an efficient chief executive—almost none of them liked him, which was quite the reverse of how they felt about Truman. Dewey’s “mechanical smile…and his bland refusal to deal with issues, have got under everybody’s skin,” wrote Richard Strout of the mood in the press car. Dewey, it was cracked, was the only man who could strut sitting down.

In sharp contrast to Truman, who had never wanted to be President, Dewey had started running for the job as early as 1939, in advance of the Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie. Dewey believed it was his destiny to be President. “It is written in the stars,” he said privately.

That it was written in the polls as well also carried enormous weight with him, for, unlike Truman, Dewey took such samplings with utmost seriousness. He was the first presidential candidate to have his own polling unit.

On several major issues Dewey, as a liberal Republican, held the same or very similar views as Truman. Dewey backed aid to Greece. He supported the Marshall Plan. He believed in a strong military defense, including Universal Military Training. He was for recognition of Israel. He supported the Berlin Airlift and wanted further progress made in civil rights. As he and his advisers saw things, the real struggle waited beyond November, not with the Democrats in Congress, but with Taft, whom Dewey intensely disliked. (On more than one occasion Dewey had been heard to say that the Ohio senator should have carnal relations with himself.)

The dominating strategy of the Dewey campaign, to say as little as possible, was Dewey’s own—“When you’re leading, don’t talk,” he would tell the Republican politicians who came aboard his train. The “Dewey high command,” however, had more influence than did the people around Truman. They included campaign manager Herbert Brownell, Jr., whose headquarters were in Washington, but who talked to Dewey every night by phone; Paul Lockwood, Dewey’s veteran executive assistant; and Elliott Bell, an old friend who wrote speeches and served as unofficial chief of staff on the train. These were able, experienced men. Brownell had been Dewey’s campaign manager the last time, as well as chairman of the Republican Party. Lockwood had been with Dewey since his days as district attorney. Elliott Bell, a former financial writer for The New York Times, had managed Dewey’s two triumphant campaigns for governor.

And they all agreed: the campaign was going fine. Nor had other Republican politicians objected thus far. “We always asked them what our strategy should be,” remembered Bell, “and they all said that as matters stood Dewey was in and the thing to do was not stir up too much controversy and run the risk of losing votes.” The consensus was that Dewey would have done better in 1944 had he not gone on the attack as he did. So why repeat the mistake?

“The tone of his campaign was set,” wrote Time approvingly—Time, like its sister publication Life, having concluded that Dewey was as good as elected. The real concern among the Dewey staff, reported Time, was over what Truman might do between now and January to upset things, and particularly in the field of foreign policy. “The responsibilities of power already weighed on them so heavily that a newsman inquired blandly: ‘How long is Dewey going to tolerate Truman’s interference in the government?”

Dewey, said Life, would keep his composure “no matter how much his rival taunted, teased and dared him to come out in the alley and scrap.” Dewey himself remarked that he would never “get down in the gutter” with Truman. He would have preferred a more worthy opponent. In the seclusion of his private car, Dewey wondered aloud, “Isn’t it harder in politics to defeat a fool, say, than an abler man?”

To help guarantee a Dewey victory, J. Edgar Hoover was secretly supplying him with all the information the FBI could provide. Dewey and Hoover were old friends and got along well. Hoover had put the resources of the bureau at Dewey’s disposal months before, in the expectation that when Dewey became President he would name Hoover as his Attorney General. “The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman, though there wasn’t much,” remembered an assistant to Hoover, William C. Sullivan, who was one of those assigned to cull the files.

We resurrected the president’s former association with Jim Pendergast…and tried to create the impression that Truman was too ignorant to deal with the emerging Communist threat. We even prepared studies for Dewey which were released under his name, as if he and his staff had done the work…. No one in the bureau gave Truman any chance of winning.

Only on the issue of Communists in government was Dewey willing to taunt Truman. “I suggest you elect an administration that simply won’t appoint them in the first place,” Dewey said at one stop after another, the line always drawing applause.

In Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl, flanked on stage by Republican movie stars—Gary Cooper, Jeanette MacDonald, and Ginger Rogers, who came from Independence, Missouri—Dewey described communism on the march. “The tragic fact is that too often our own government…seems so far to have lost faith in our system of free opportunity as to encourage this Communist advance, not hinder it…. Communists and fellow travelers [have] risen to positions of trust in our government…[and yet] the head of our own government called the exposure of Communists in our government ‘a red herring.’ ”

Dewey did not try to inflame crowd passions. He opposed outlawing Communists. “We’ll have no thought police,” he said. Still the charge that the government was “coddling” Communists, a charge that had been injected into the campaign by the House Un-American Activities Committee, would be made again and again at nearly every stop.

Joseph Alsop described the typical Dewey speech as “over-rehearsed” and “a trifle chilling.” Marquis Childs warned in his column that in the “very expertness” of his campaign, Dewey might be “laying up future trouble for himself.” Privately among the Dewey people there was an increasing uneasiness over the size of the crowds, which, as Time conceded, were “good—but no more than good.” At Salt Lake City, Dewey, like Truman, filled the Mormon Tabernacle to overflowing, but the turnout along the streets had been nothing like that for Truman. “We hit Salt Lake City about five P.M.,” Elliott Bell would recall. “I was struck by the fact that there were very few people on the sidewalks—and a good many people walking hardly bothered to look at the motorcade.”

“Then we went into Texas and everybody said Texas was going to be cold to the President,” Truman would later tell a crowd in Neosho, Missouri, recounting his latest adventures.

And the first city we stopped in was El Paso, and everybody in El Paso was down at the station. The Chief of Police said he estimated the crowd at 25,000. Then we went over and had breakfast with John Garner, former Vice President, a good friend of mine, and he gave me a breakfast to write home about. We had chicken and white-wing dove, and we had ham and bacon and scrambled eggs and hot biscuits and I don’t know what all. And the governor of Texas met me there as did Sam Rayburn, and we went across Texas, and I must have seen a million people in Texas.

Pounding his way across Texas, Truman had seemed to gather strength by the hour and give more of himself to the campaign with every stop. He was fighting for his political life and having a grand time at it.

“He is good on the back of a train because he is one of the folks,” said Sam Rayburn. “He smiles with them and not at them, laughs with them and not at them.”

With the rest of the Old South in revolt over his stand on civil rights, Truman had to hold on to Texas and its twenty-three electoral votes. Yet racial bias ran strong in Texas—segregation, poll taxes, outright race hatred. In Texas he was in Dixiecrat territory for the first time, which was why a “cold” reception had been assumed. There had even been rumors of threats on his life, of Dixiecrats claiming “they’d shoot Truman, that no-good son-of-a-bitch and his civil rights.” It was the first time a Democratic nominee for the presidency had ever found it necessary to court Texas, and banking on friendships with such longstanding, powerful Democrats as Rayburn and Garner, Truman had decided to make it the most strenuous campaign ever waged there by a non-Texan.

A high point was the breakfast put on by “Cactus Jack” Garner at Uvalde, which, reporters discovered to their surprise, was a tree-shaded town with neat green lawns and no sign of anything remotely like cactus. Served on the glass-enclosed porch of Garner’s big, buff-colored brick house, the breakfast was the best he had had in forty years, Truman later told the delighted crowd outside. Ten thousand people and a high school band had been at the Uvalde station to greet him at 6:50 that morning. Now several thousand cheered as he stood on the front porch with Garner, Rayburn, and Governor Beauford Jester, none of whom was known for his devotion to civil rights. (Jester, not long before, had called Truman’s civil rights program a “stab in the back.”)

John Garner and he had been friends “a long, long time,” and they were going to be friends as long as they lived, Truman said. “I’m coming back for another visit sometime. I fished around for another invitation and got it.”

Old friendships, old loyalties would hold, in other words, not only now for the sake of politics, but later, too, whatever changes were in the wind. The crowd understood what he meant and the crowd applauded.

So pleased was Bess Truman by the warmth of the reception that she broke precedent and stepped forward to the microphone to say thank you, proving thereby “beyond all doubt,” reported Robert Donovan in the New York Herald-Tribune, “what an extraordinary occasion it was.”

At San Antonio later the same day, Sunday, September 26, an estimated 200,000 people filled the streets, and at a dinner that night at the Gunter Hotel, speaking spontaneously and simply of his feeling for people and his wish for peace, Truman achieved what Jonathan Daniels called “an eloquence close to presidential poetry.”

Our government is made up of the people. You are the government, I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants. I can’t order you around, or send you to labor camps or have your heads cut off if you don’t agree with me politically. We don’t believe in that….

I believe that if we ourselves try to live as we should, and if we continue to work for peace in this world, and as the old Puritan said, “Keep your bullets bright and your powder dry,” eventually we will get peace in this world, because that is the only way we can survive with the modern inventions under which we live.

We have got to harness these inventions for the welfare of man, instead of his destruction.

That is what I am interested in. That is what I am working for.

That is much more important than whether I am President of the United States.

“Truman Gains Texas Votes by ‘Human Touch’ Method,” read the headline in the San Antonio Express. When a reporter for the Express polled the correspondents on board the train, he found nearly all now thought Truman had at least “a fighting chance.”

In not quite four days in Texas, he made twenty-four stops, spoke twenty-five times. He had perfect weather and enthusiastic crowds the whole way. Monday, September 27, the biggest day, began with a rear platform talk at San Marcos at 6:40 in the morning. As the day wore on he spoke at Austin, Georgetown, Temple, Waco, Hillsboro, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, Dallas, Greenville, and the little rail stop of Bells, where he told the crowd, “I am going over to Bonham…and make the speech…. It’s only 12 miles—why don’t you just get in the car and come on over to Bonham, and I will give the Republicans the gun over there. I think you will like it!” The Bonham speech, last of the day, was carried by radio nationwide.

On board with him through the day were Rayburn, Governor Jester, and Congressman Lyndon Johnson, candidate for the Senate, who had just been certified by the Democratic State Convention as having defeated his rival in the primary, former Governor Coke Stevenson, by a total of 87 votes out of roughly 1 million cast.

At Waco a boy waved a Confederate flag and there were scattered boos from the crowd when Truman shook hands with a black woman. Otherwise, all was harmonious. But then neither did he mention civil rights.

At Rebel Stadium in Dallas, where authorities quietly did away with segregation for the day and blacks and whites were mingled in the cheering crowd as never before, Truman, for the first time, hit hard at the Republicans for the hypocrisy of their “high-level” campaign—the Dewey speeches:

So in making their speeches they put them on a very high level, so high they are above discussing the specific and serious problems which confront the people…. Republican candidates are apparently trying to sing the American voters to sleep with a lullaby about unity…. They want the kind of unity that benefits the National Association of Manufacturers…the real estate trusts…[the] selfish interests…. They don’t want unity. They want surrender. And I am here to tell you people that I will not surrender….

Bonham, in the fertile Blackland Prairie, was Sam Rayburn’s hometown, and at Bonham Truman went after Dewey again, saying Republican unity meant unity of the Tafts and the Martins of Congress—“unity in giving tax relief to the rich…unity in letting prices go sky high…unity in whittling away all the benefits of the New Deal.” Was that really what they wanted, he asked the crowd.

Some things are worth fighting for…. We must fight isolationists and reactionaries, the profiteers and the privileged class…. Our primary concern is for the little fellow. We think the big boys have always done very well, taking care of themselves…. It is the business of government to see that the little fellow gets a square deal…. Ask Sam Rayburn how many of the big money boys helped when he was sweating blood to get electricity for farmers and the people in small towns….

It was all language his audiences understood. He was truly, as Rayburn said, “one of the folks” and they let him know how much they approved.

At a reception later, at Rayburn’s white frame house west of town, hundreds of people waited in a long line across the front lawn. “They came in droves and kept coming,” remembered Margaret. When Truman’s Secret Service detail, worried for his safety, refused to let him stand in the receiving line unless the names of all the guests were provided Rayburn exploded, “I know every man, woman, and child here.” They were all his friends, every one, Rayburn said; he would vouch for them personally.

So while Truman stood at the door shaking hands, and sipping now and then on a surreptitious bourbon-and-water, Rayburn called out each name. But then Rayburn exclaimed to the governor, “Shut the door, Beauford, they’re comin’by twice.”

For the Republicans money was never a problem. Talk of the big money behind Dewey was another sign supposedly of just how far out in front Dewey was, how certain his victory—on the theory that big money never followed a loser. But to find backing for Truman was nearly impossible. At small White House receptions for Democrats that spring and summer, Truman himself had had to ask for financial help, something he detested, just to get his campaign under way. At one such gathering in the Red Room in early September he had stood on a chair to say, in effect, that while he knew most people thought he was going to lose, he thought the President of the United States should have sufficient funds to take his case to the people, but that as things were he could not do that. There was no money to buy radio time. One of the most important parts of his speech in Detroit on Labor Day had to be cut, he said, because of insufficient funds to stay on the air. Now there was not money enough to get the train out of Union Station. His plea, reportedly, produced over $100,000.

When Truman asked Bernard Baruch to serve on the finance committee, Baruch refused, saying it was not his policy to play so partisan a role—an answer that infuriated Truman, who in sharp reply wrote, “A great many honors have passed your way…and it seems when the going is rough it is a one-way street.” Baruch, his pride hurt, spoke of the President as “a rude, ignorant, uncouth man.”

Others, too, turned him down, until finally he named for financial chairman Louis A. Johnson of Clarksburg, West Virginia, a former commander of the American Legion and Assistant Secretary of War who had headed the finance committee of the Democratic Party from 1936 to 1940. Johnson was a looming, bald-headed, headstrong corporation lawyer and millionaire who stood over six feet tall and weighed 250 pounds. A subject of controversy in the past, he would be again in time to come, to Truman’s regret. But he took the job now when nobody else would, and he achieved amazing results, given the fact that no one other than Truman thought the ticket had the slightest chance.

Averell Harriman and Will Clayton were among the larger contributors. Harriman gave $5,000; Clayton, $9,000. Others included Stuart Symington; David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers; Milton S. Kronheim, Sr., who controlled the wholesale liquor business in Washington; Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee; William Helis, a Louisiana oil man known as “the Golden Greek,” who had been Governor Earl Long’s biggest money backer; Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney; and Pearl Mesta, the Washington hostess who came on board the Truman train at Gainesville, Texas, for the ride across Oklahoma, where her first husband had made a fortune in oil.

Floyd B. Odlum, the head of Atlas Corporation, a Wall Street investment company, put in $3,000, then rounded up another $20,000 from his associates. But the largest contribution seems to have come from Truman’s old Kansas City friend Tom Evans, the drugstore king, who, after giving $3,000 himself, raised some $100,000 more in the Middle West.

As the train headed across Oklahoma, the weather remained ideal. Truman in “fine fettle,” spent much of the time out on the back platform waving at people as he sped along. If he was worried about campaign funds or anything else, no one would have known it. During a stop at Ardmore, having expressed his admiration for the Palamino horse of a cowboy who met the train, Truman examined the animal’s mouth and declared it was six years old. “Correct!” exclaimed the delighted cowboy and the story appeared across the country: “Truman Gets Right Dope from Horse’s Mouth.”

The crowd at Ardmore was somewhere near forty thousand, more even, it was said, than for Gene Autry. At remote stations where no stops were scheduled people waited just to see the train go through. At Paul’s Valley, Truman asked if it was true they grew taller corn than in Iowa and five thousand people happily roared yes. “Hello Harry,” came shouts from the throng at Norman.

At Oklahoma City 100,000 turned out; 20,000 were at the State Fair Grounds for his speech. He had chosen Oklahoma as the time and place to answer Republican charges of communism in government and he was “strictly on the offensive.” Such Republican tactics were only a “smoke sreen” to hide their failure to deal with housing, price controls, education—real problems. His own Loyalty Program, he claimed, had proven the loyalty of 99.7 percent of all federal workers. It was not Republican talk that checked the Communist tide, but programs like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and that was “a plain and unanswerable fact.” The government was not endangered by Communist infiltration. Publicity-seeking, electioneering Republicans with their irresponsible charges were doing more to damage national security than to strengthen it.

The speech was considered so important that for the first time the Democratic National Committee had dipped into its slim resources to pay for nationwide radio time.

But by then the money had run out. There was not enough even to move the train out of the station.

The crisis was resolved when Governor Roy J. Turner of Oklahoma, and a businessman from Shawnee, W. Elmer Harber, organized an emergency collection party on board the Ferdinand Magellan and raised enough contributions—“a substantial sum”—to keep the train rolling for another several weeks. But even so, remembered Charlie Ross, the campaign was never more than “one jump ahead of the sheriff.”

The day following, Wednesday, September 29, was one of the biggest of the campaign. At Eufaula, Oklahoma, Truman gave his one hundredth speech. Before the day ended, he spoke sixteen times. There were crowds at Shawnee, Seminole, Wewoka, Muskogee, “tremendous” crowds at Tulsa. Crossing into Missouri, Truman told the throng at Neosho that he had already talked to 500,000 people that day—an understandable overstatement, given all he had seen. And so it went the rest of the journey through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. At Mount Vernon, Illinois, leaving his train to travel by motorcade, he stumped the down-state mining country for 140 miles, through five counties that had not gone Democratic in fifty years. “Mr. Truman [reported The New York Times] was the first Chief Executive to campaign in southern Illinois and the people turned out by the thousands, breaking through police lines, swarming around and through the procession of cars and yelling a noisy greeting.”

With his headlong lambasting of Wall Street and “the special interests,” the constant harkening to grim memories of the Depression, he sounded often as if he were running against Herbert Hoover. But at Carbondale, the sixth of nine stops in southern Illinois, he talked as he had not until now of the postwar era, of the “history” he himself felt responsible for and proud of, knowing how many in his audience remembered how differently things had gone after the first war.

A Democratic administration working with a Democratic Congress had seen to a swift reconversion in 1945, not only avoiding a postwar recession but achieving

a peak of more jobs, a higher civilization, and better standards of living than ever before.

There is nothing like that in the history of the world after a great war. Bear that in mind…. Not very much has been said about that, but we had no riots and no bloodshed. We didn’t have people crying for jobs. We didn’t have farmers marching on Washington. We didn’t have returning soldiers marching on Washington, because we took care of them in educational institutions and absorbing them back into the economy of the country without a debacle.

We enacted the Employment Act of 1946, pledging all our resources and efforts to the maintenance of prosperity.

We brought the United States to a position of unquestioned leadership in world affairs. Don’t let anybody tell you anything different.

A warm reception in Kentucky had been anticipated, if for no other reason than Alben Barkley’s presence on the ticket. But the crowds there surpassed all predictions. Truman was “never more human,” reported the Louisville Courier-Journal. “He got down to earth and talked the language of the people….” At Shelbyville, where a banner stretched ln front of a wood-frame depot said: “Welcome Home President Truman and Family, Grandchildren of Shelby County,” he talked of his grandfather, who had been married there. At Lexington, heart of the Bluegrass horse country, he reminded everyone that it didn’t matter which horse was ahead or behind at any given moment in the race—it If was the horse ahead at the finish that counted. To the several thousand gathered on the tracks at Morehead, Kentucky, pressing as close as possible to the rear platform of his car, he left no doubt what he expected of them:

Now, whatever you do, go to the polls early on election day, and don’t waste any time. Just take that ticket and vote the Democratic ticket straight down the line, and you will be helping your country, and helping yourselves. You will not only be voting for me…but you will be voting for yourselves and your best interests. And I believe that is exactly what you are going to do.

At Montgomery, West Virginia, the final stop at 10:45 that night, Truman was so stunned by the size of the turnout at such an hour that before beginning his remarks he asked the photographers to turn their cameras around and take a picture of the people. That was the real news to show he country, he said.

But what to make of the phenomenon of the Truman crowds?

Most correspondents attributed it to ordinary curiosity. Truman had made his campaign a vaudeville act, said Time, so naturally people would come out to see the show. The American people had a high regard for the office of President and so naturally wanted to see the man who occupied it, wrote Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, who had been on the train from the beginning. Fletcher Knebel of the Cowles papers would remember in particular the stop at Shelbyville:

The early morning haze was still hanging over the hills, and the sun wasn’t up. But gathered around the railroad tracks, as far as you could see in any direction, was this incredible crowd of people—men holding kids up on their shoulders so they could see, little boys climbing trees and roofs, old grandpappies and men in overalls. Of course, we experts in the press car talked about the crowd, and we finally decided it didn’t mean a damned thing. “Anybody will come out to see a man who is President of the United States, just to say they’ve seen one in the flesh. But that doesn’t mean they’d vote for Harry Truman.” He was going to lose. We believed it, because we wrote it every day.

Some correspondents, Jonathan Daniels noted, had convinced themselves that Truman’s crowds were not Truman followers at all, but people wishing to see a very nice man on his way to oblivion.

To Walter Lippmann, who, as usual, was observing the world from his ivy-covered home in Washington, all such speculation was immaterial. Lippmann deplored the whole spectacle of a President chasing about the country devoting himself to parades and hand shaking, trying to “talk his way to victory.” To Lippmann, who was secretly offering Dewey advice on foreign policy and who shared Dewey’s contempt for Harry Truman, this was no time for a President to be away from his duties, and this President had been gone sixteen days. Unwittingly, wrote Lippmann, Truman had proven how little he mattered.

He had only begun to fight, Truman told the crowd waiting to welcome him at Union Station in Washington, Sunday morning, October 2. He would be heading off again in another few days. Others—his wife, daughter, his press secretary—looked exhausted, but not the President.

To his sister he wrote, “We made about a hundred and forty stops and I spoke 147 times, shook hands with at least 30,000 [people] and am in good condition to start out again….” It would be the greatest campaign any President had ever made, he promised. “Win, lose, or draw people will know where I stand….”

So much would be written and said about the Truman campaign of 1948, about the scrappy “Give-’em-hell-Harry” style that evolved, the headlong vigor and determination of the folksy, doomed candidate, that other factors bearing on the outcome were often overlooked. Truman was and remained his own show. Nor had any President ever worked harder at running for reelection. But other efforts behind the scenes were of considerable importance. Like all campaigns, his was a combination of many elements besides the candidate himself. Jack Redding, publicity director for the Democratic National Committee, would later write of the “classic unities of politics,” saying they were as vital to a campaign as were the unities of time, place, and action to a successful drama. “When the unities fuse, the results achieved are far in excess of the sum of the parts.” That Redding, Howard McGrath, and others worked as hard and effectively as they did was all the more remarkable given that they, too, knew perfectly what the odds were against them.

It was Redding, for example, who enlisted the services of the manager of a Polish-language newspaper in New York, Michel Cieplinski, who saw that all Truman press releases were translated into various foreign languages before being sent to foreign-language papers and radio stations around the country. Later, this would seem an obvious idea, but no one else had done it until then, and as Redding recalled, acceptance of the material was immediate. Truman stories were carried substantially as written—in Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Swedish—and with 35 million people of foreign birth in America, or roughly 25 percent of the population, of whom 11 million were eligible to vote, this was no small break.

McGrath appreciated particularly the political importance of foreign-born Americans—it was with their support that he had been elected governor three times in Rhode Island—and he understood how greatly the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as Truman’s policy on immigration, mattered to such groups, that for no other reason than his stand on foreign policy, Truman had an excellent chance of winning their support.

It was arranged for the President to have his portrait painted by a beloved Polish artist, Tadé Styka, who, though an avowed Republican, became an immediate convert after hearing Truman speak to a group of Polish editors about the problems of the world as they affected Poland. (“Another hell of a day. I’m sitting for an old Polish painter, and I don’t like to pose—but it’s also part of the trial of being President,” Truman had written in his diary on September 14. “He’s painted a nice stuffed-shirt picture.”) In October, after Styka presented the portrait at a formal ceremony at the White House, all seventy-two Polish papers in the country ran a picture of the painting, as well as Styka’s personal praise for the President. To publicist Redding, it was a “political triumph.”

Meantime, for the amusement of the press, a selection of the platitudes and banalities of the Dewey speeches was prepared and distributed:

“Our streams abound with fish.”

“The miners in our country are vital to our welfare.”

“Everybody that rides in a car or bus uses gasoline and oil.”

“Ours is a magnificent land. Every part of it.”

A sixteen-page, four-color comic-book biography was produced, The Story of Harry Truman, which, panel-by-panel, portrayed the Independence boyhood, the courtship of Bess Wallace, Truman’s time on the farm, and how the neighbors judged him (“By crackies, in spite of Harry Truman’s newfangled ideas about farmin’, he’s a durned good ‘un!”). His part in the war took up two and a half pages, followed by his business failure (“You’d think the Republican Administration would do something to help small businessmen”), and the high points of his public service, including the presidency. To many the comic-book format seemed highly unfitting for a President. Several at the White House complained that it should never have been permitted without Truman’s knowledge. But he had known and approved, and the book was a success. Three million copies quickly disappeared. In some places schools permitted distribution among students, who took the books home. Time, in a special feature, hailed it as “something new in ‘campaign literature’,” while regretting that it made no mention of “the late, great-bellied” Tom Pendergast.

Even more important and effective was a ten-minute Truman film, a “short” to be shown in movie theaters. (With approximately 20,000 theaters in the country, the weekly movie audience in 1948 was about 65 million.) Hearing that a Dewey film was being produced and paid for by the Republicans, Jack Redding, with no money available for films, threatened to have theaters picketed as unfair unless a “balancing” Truman story were made available. In response, the movie industry decided to produce a Truman film for nothing—Universal Newsreels lost the flip of a coin and did the work. With so little time left, and to keep costs to a minimum, The Truman Story was put together almost entirely from available newsreel footage, with the result that the finished production had a feeling of authenticity missing in the Dewey film, most of which had been staged. The candidate was seen as “neighbor Truman,” shaking hands with people on the streets of Independence (including a black man in bib overalls). He was shown visiting Eddie Jacobson in his store, at Grandview with his mother, but above all as the President, signing the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, addressing Congress, reviewing troops, conferring with Secretary Marshall beside the large globe in the Oval Office.

The two-reel film that had cost the Truman campaign nothing and was considered much more effective than its counterpart on Dewey would, in the final week before the election, play in theaters in every part of the country. “Thus, during the last six days of the campaign no one could go to the movies anywhere in the United States without seeing the story of the President,” boasted Redding, who considered it the most important publicity break of the campaign.

Seventy-one-year-old Alben Barkley, meantime, was crisscrossing the country in a chartered DC-3 called The Bluegrass. In contrast to his much younger Republican counterpart and rival, Earl Warren, who was touring by train, Barkley had initiated what he called history’s first “prop-stop” campaign. He flew 150,000 miles and delivered 250 speeches, mostly in small cities, farm towns, coal and railroad towns, labor halls, and small hotel dining rooms, his audiences sometimes numbering only in the hundreds. The press called him “the poor man’s candidate,” and Barkley enjoyed himself hugely, telling stories, speaking extemporaneously at almost any length, and giving no sign of wanting anything for himself, only to help the President and any number of local Democratic candidates. His own best help, he liked to say, came from the Republicans. Dewey’s speeches reminded him, Barkley said, of an old Tennessee politician known as “Fiddlin’ Bob” Taylor, who, in the era of the free silver issue, ran for governor by playing a violin and using his magnificent speaking voice to say as little as possible about anything specific, until finally he was pressed to state where he stood on the money question. “He paused dramatically,” Barkley would say, savoring the story, “and he said, ‘Here is where I stand. I am for a little more gold, a little more silver, a little more greenback—and a sprinkling of counterfeit.’ ”

When a reporter in New Haven, Connecticut, asked Barkley if he honestly thought the Democrats had a chance, Barkley replied, “Certainly. What do you think I’m running around for?”

One idea hatched behind the scenes by two of the new speechwriters proved a major embarrassment. David Noyes and Albert Carr, who were partial to the dramatic phrase or gesture—it was they who contributed the “pitchfork-in-the-back” line at Dexter—had concluded that the President needed to announce a bold move to dramatize his desire for world peace, and soon.

They proposed he send the Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, on a special mission to Moscow to see Stalin. That Vinson, as a member of the Supreme Court, had no connection with the diplomatic role of the executive branch, that Vinson knew nothing of the crisis in Berlin beyond what was in the papers, or had any experience in Soviet affairs, or in dealing with Stalin, were apparently not considered serious drawbacks.

Truman agreed to the scheme—a decision that suggested as nothing else would that for all his show of confidence he knew perfectly how desperate his situation was and was therefore willing to try almost anything. Undoubtedly, too, he hoped that so daring and unorthodox an approach might just give Stalin the chance to “open up,” as he later wrote. He still thought Stalin could be reached, reasoned with, man-to-man. “If we could only get Stalin to unburden himself to someone on our side he felt he could trust fully, I thought perhaps we could get somewhere.”

On his second day back at the White House, Sunday, October 3, without notifying George Marshall, who was at a United Nations General Assembly meeting in Paris trying to deal with the Berlin crisis, Truman called the Chief Justice to his office and asked him to make the trip.

Vinson was astonished. Members of the Court, he said, should confine themselves to their Court duties, and especially in an election year. But then, dutifully, Vinson consented to go.

The plan was for Truman to announce the mission on a special radio broadcast to the nation. Charlie Ross was instructed to arrange with the networks for a free, nonpolitical half-hour, for a statement of “major importance.” The State Department was alerted, to make the necessary clearances with Stalin. Truman would remember requesting also that “every possible precaution” be taken against premature leaks.

The atmosphere at the White House was extremely uneasy. Nerves were on edge. Those of the staff who had been traveling with the President were still exhausted, while a number of those who had remained behind felt overworked and unappreciated. “There is much confusion and taut nerves [recorded the faithful diarist Eben Ayers], due to…the belief that the President is going to be defeated. There are a few optimists in the place. There are jealousies and undercurrents all through the staff.”

The proposed “Vinson Mission” made tensions still worse. Clifford and Elsey argued vehemently against it, “almost violently,” Elsey remembered.

But when Truman met with his advisers in the Cabinet Room on Tuesday, October 5, the majority view was that only a dramatic, “even desperate” measure could save the campaign.

Excusing himself from the meeting, Truman went to the Map Room to inform Marshall by teletype. But Marshall, appalled by the very idea of the Vinson scheme, vehemently objected, with the result that Truman immediately called the whole thing off.

When he returned to the Cabinet Room to report his decision, several at the table, including Jonathan Daniels, addressed him in no uncertain terms, arguing that the mission was his last, best chance. But Truman cut them off. “We won’t do it,” he said.

To Daniels, it was one of the most vivid moments of all he had witnessed in the White House. If ever there was a point when Truman seemed at his best, when he was more than large enough for the job, Daniels later wrote, it was then, and

at a time when, by all reports, he seemed smaller than ever.

He got up and went out of the glass-paned door to the terrace by the rose garden and walked alone—very much alone that day—back toward the White House itself. He was wrong, I thought, but he was strong, I knew. There were no dramatics about it. He never said he would rather be right than President. The next time I saw him he was laughing with the reporters, the politicians and the police as he got back on that long train which everyone seemed too sure was taking him nowhere.

He was gone just three days this time. A quick swing through eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and upstate New York had been decided on, as an extra effort. The “Vinson Mission,” presumably, was dead and buried, and no one the wiser. But there had been a leak. The radio networks, understandably, had insisted on knowing the nature of the “nonpolitical” announcement before relinquishing a free half hour in the middle of a presidential campaign. So Ross had told them “in confidence.”

The story of the aborted peace mission broke wide open. Editorials accused Truman of attempted appeasement, of playing politics with foreign policy. “His attempted action was shocking because it showed that he had no conception whatever of the difference between the President of the United States and a U.S. politician,” wrote Time. The campaign that had never had a chance was said to have been dealt a fatal blow. Dewey, publicly, decided to let the President’s action speak for itself. Off the record, he told reporters huffily, “If Harry Truman would just keep his hands off things for another few weeks! Particularly, if he will keep his hands off foreign policy, about which he knows considerably less than nothing.”

When Marshall flew in from Paris on Saturday, October 9, and stepped from his plane looking “ashen-faced,” it was said he had come home to resign. In fact, though Marshall was in poor health, his relations with Truman were excellent. Indeed, Marshall assumed part of the blame for what had happened, apologizing to Truman for not having kept him better informed on the progress of negotiations in Paris.

Truman was not worried about the fuss in the papers. He found it hard to believe that the American people would fault a President too harshly for wanting to achieve peace in the world. He had been encouraged also by his three-day swing. At Albany, Dewey’s own capital, ten thousand people had come down to the station in an early morning downpour to cheer and shout, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!”

On Sunday, October 10, he was back on board the train, still behind in the polls, still exuding confidence, and with just three weeks to go.

III

Were one to pick a single representative day of all the many days in Harry Truman’s drive for the presidency in 1948, a day that in spirit and content could serve as a classic passage in his whistle-stop odyssey, probably it would be Monday, October 11, when he barnstormed through central Ohio at the start of what was to prove a crucial swing into the Middle West.

Like the larger campaign; the day began in an atmosphere of gloom.

When Truman arrived in Cincinnati at 7:00 A.M., it was cold and raining. The streets from the railroad station to the Netherland Plaza Hotel, where he was to speak, were deserted. A reporter for the Des Moines Register, who had been traveling on board the Truman train for weeks, described him as looking that morning “like a man who had received bad news but felt the show must go on.”

The morning was bleak and the whole plan for the day seemed pointless. At stake were Ohio’s twenty-six electoral votes, but Ohio, the Buckeye State, was as formidable a Republican stronghold as any of the forty-eight states, with a Republican governor, nineteen Republican congressmen (as opposed to four Democrats), and two famous Republican senators, Taft and John Bricker, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944. Moreover, Truman had decided to spend much of the day in rural Ohio, in places where, in 1944, the vote had run as much as 70 percent for Dewey.

It had been Bill Boyle who had urged Truman to campaign in Ohio and whose political sagacity Truman had decided to bank on. Boyle, who was still in charge of Truman’s itinerary, was directing things now from an office at Democratic headquarters in Washington.

From Cincinnati, home of the Tafts, in the southwest corner of the state, Truman would head north on the B&O Railroad to Hamilton and Dayton, then on to a string of little towns, Sidney, Lima, Ottawa, and Deshler, where the train would turn east on the main line of the B&O, to stop at Fostoria, Willard, Rittman, and finally, that night, at industrial Akron, in the northeast corner. It was a trip of 350 miles. That Truman would even bother with towns like Ottawa or Willard struck many as a waste of time. But then to many observers the whole campaign was a waste of time. Dewey, who had carried Ohio against Roosevelt in 1944, was so sure of carrying it again, he would not actively campaign there. At one point while stopped in Ohio, Dewey did not trouble himself even to step out onto the rear platform, but sat in his compartment with the blind drawn. Told there was a crowd outside hoping to catch a glimpse of him, Dewey did not bother to raise the blind.

In eleven speeches at eleven stops, in the span of a fifteen-hour day, Truman hammered away steadily and happily at his same favorite themes—the high cost of living, the need for adequate housing, the intransigence and shortsightedness of the 80th Congress, the evils of the Taft-Hartley Act, and his desire for peace. He sang the praises of Franklin Roosevelt, and in the speech at Akron, the major speech of the day, he embraced as he never quite had in so many words the “entire philosophy” of the New Deal as his own, vowing “to build upon it an always better way of life.”

There were no startling claims or announcements. He just kept pressing the attack, mindful always of where he was and to whom he was speaking. He praised the people of Hamilton for their wartime production record, a subject he knew about, he said, from his years on the Truman Committee. “I grew up on a farm and I always like to see good farming country,” he said at rural Ottawa, then spent ten minutes describing the gains and prosperity achieved by farmers in the “Democratic years” since 1932.

At Lima, home of a locomotive factory, he shouted, “I’ve worn out three locomotives and we’ll use three more before we get through, so that will make it good for business here….”

“Well, I say thank God for the whistle-stops of our country. They are the backbone of the nation,” he told the citizenry of little Fostoria.

Bess and Margaret appeared on cue from behind the blue curtain and always to the delight of the crowd. “Would you like to meet the Boss?” Truman asked at Lima, adding that most married men had bosses at home. “He’s the President,” wrote the editor of the Lima News, and yet, “he’s just an ordinary family man, proud of his wife and daughter. He has something in common with many who heard him.”

(It was shortly after this that Bess told the candidate that if he called her “the Boss” one more time, she would get off the train.)

After the dreary start at Cincinnati the skies had literally cleared. The rain ended, the sun broke through. A crisp autumn wind was blowing, and with the maples beginning to turn gold and red, Ohio was a calendar picture for October in small-town, rural America.

From Hamilton on, the whole way, the crowds were big and responsive and Truman’s vitality returned, as if he had been given a powerful injection. The sight of ten thousand people spilling out in all directions at Hamilton produced what the Des Moines reporter called “the most striking change in the Democratic candidate’s demeanor I have witnessed in all our trips.” Everyone was surprised by the size and mood of the crowds. Ohio’s youthful, handsome former governor, Frank Lausche, who was running a “lone wolf campaign for another try at the governorship, had come aboard at Cincinnati, not at all sure that being seen with Harry Truman was the best thing for his fortunes. But as he told Truman in dismay, he had never seen such throngs. At Dayton, where he and Truman rode in a motorcade, there were fifty thousand lining the route. Lausche, who had planned to get off the train at Dayton, decided he would stay on board.

No two of Truman’s speeches were the same. Nearly all of what he said was spontaneous, his energy and enjoyment appearing to compound as the day went on, the more miles he covered, the more he talked of “the common people,” “the American people,” or “you good people of Deshler,” or Dayton or Fostorfa or Willard. As before, he played on fear of hard times, the memory of lean years, knowing from experience what so many who turned out to see him had been through, knowing, for example, how, among farmers, recollection of the 1920s in no way resembled the cliché, good-time picture of the Jazz Age. “If you don’t want to go backward,” he said at Ottawa, “if you don’t want to slide downhill to bankruptcy and poverty the way you did in the Republican 12 years of rule back there in the 20’s, you better get out early on election day and look after your own interests.” He knew, he had been through it.

Take stock of your prosperity now, he was saying. Remember, it wasn’t the Republicans who pulled the country back on its feet.

His opponent, he said, talked all the time of unity, because he didn’t dare do anything else. “He’s afraid that if he says anything, he will give the whole show away.” Meantime, the real leaders of the Republican Party in the “do-nothing” 80th Congress had been “sent off into the bushes to hide until the campaign is over.”

The people had a right to know where the candidates stood. That was why he had come to their town. They were entitled to know what the issues were, entitled to take a look at their President and hear what he had to say and decide for themselves. That was the idea of democracy: the people decide.

“They tell me that Seneca County is a Republican county,” he said at Fostoria. “Well, that’s all right with me. I want the Republicans of Seneca County to know what I think…”

His best trackside talk of the day was at Willard, in Huron County, Ohio, at 4:55 in the afternoon. It was a perfect example of Truman the barnstormer at top form.

A railroad town of plain, square frame houses and a population of four thousand, Willard had been called Chicago Junction until 1917, when it was renamed for Daniel Willard, president of the B&O Railroad. There was a surgical gloves factory in town, a Rotary Club, a good high school football team, and a World War II honor roll at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Pearl Street listing 876 names. Will Rogers was known to have had lunch once in the restaurant in the red-brick, Italianate railroad station.

Truman’s train stopped just east of the station, and Truman, looking west from the rear platform, the late afternoon sun full in his face, appeared still fresh and clean in a dark blue double-breasted suit and dark blue tie. Flags snapped in the wind. A crowd of several thousand pressed closer, cheering, waving to him, calling, “Hi, Harry!” As in so many other places, people who had brought small children held them on their shoulders, so they could say one day they had seen the President.

The excitement in Willard had begun building long before the train appeared down the tracks. When Franklin Roosevelt’s train stopped at Willard during the campaign of 1944, and thousands of people had gathered, Roosevelt never appeared. They saw only his dog Fala.

Truman was introduced by Harlow A. Stapf, the proprietor of a popular bar and grill in Willard and president of Huron County’s Young Democratic Club, who, to Truman’s delight, was wearing a campaign necktie with Truman’s portrait on it.

Truman began with a few customary words of appreciation for the warm welcome, which he followed with a note of local history, in this instance, Daniel Willard, who, as Truman said, was still fondly remembered for his generosity to suffering families of the town during the Depression. Several key themes were then sounded—housing, inflation, the 80th Congress—and Truman did a little advance drumbeating for the main speech to come, at Akron, which was to be carried by radio.

A personal observation on the value of opinion polls was also added at Willard, for the first time. The complete talk, all spontaneous, lasted twelve minutes. Characteristically, it was without flourishes. There were no quotations for effect, no big words. He used no jargon, no stock jokes, nothing cute. But the intent of his thought was always clear. He spoke in good, solid, complete sentences—as indeed he did the whole way along, through the entire campaign. From what he said, his audience never had any trouble knowing what he meant.

I have had a most wonderful reception in Ohio today. It has been just like this all across the State of Ohio. We started in Cincinnati and came up the western border of the State, and now we are headed for Akron, and it seems as if everybody in the neighborhood and in every city has turned out, because they are interested in what is taking place in the country today and in the world.

It is good to be here in Willard this afternoon, even for a short stop. You people here in Willard have a great tradition, a tradition set by Dan Willard many years ago when he was President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. I think it is significant that the name of Dan Willard is loved and respected all over the country, because he was the man who believed in the common people of the nation. He liked and respected the people who worked for him, and he recognized their right to join a union and bargain collectively.

Now, Dan Willard did not sneer at the “whistle-stops” of our country. He trusted people, and people trusted him. I think that is a good principle. It is a good way to run a railroad, and it is a good way to run a country. That is the way I have tried to run the country, but the Republican Congress would not cooperate, this 80th Congress.

Now, that is the way, with your help, we are going to run the country for the next 4 years.

The Republican candidate and the Republican Congress do not trust the people. They just work along at their old problem of trying to fool the people into voting for the interests of the few. They try to do it without telling you what they think. I have been out among the people now for nearly a month. I believe you have got a right to know what I think, and I have been telling you what I think.

Tonight, in Akron, I am going to talk over the radio about the Republican Taft-Hartley law. I am really going to tear the mask off the Republican Congress and the Republican candidate.

In Cincinnati this morning, at a splendid meeting, I talked about housing. I told the people there how your President had tried for 3 years to get a decent housing bill passed. At other places we stopped at in Ohio, I talked about prices. I told the people how your President had twice called Congress into special session in an effort to get something done about inflation that is picking your pockets.

Since I have been in the White House, there has not been a moment of doubt about where I stood on issues which are of concern to the people of America today. I have always spoken out and I have taken a stand on every issue as it has come up. I don’t wait for any polls to tell me what to think. That is a statement some of the Republican candidates cannot make.

You know, since I started this campaign, I have talked to over 3 million people in various communities. They have come down to the train, just as you did this afternoon, because they were interested in this election. They know that the peace of the Nation and the peace of the world depend, to a large extent, on this election. They know that the continued prosperity of our Nation depends upon this election, and they want to know where the candidates stand on the issues. And that is what I have been telling you as simply and as plainly as I know how.

There is not a single, solitary man or woman in the United States today who can’t find out in two minutes where I stand on the important matters like foreign policy, labor, agriculture, social security, housing, high prices, and all the other problems we as a nation have to face.

But there is not a single, solitary man or woman in the United States who has been able, within the last 2 months, to find out where the Republican candidate stands on these issues.

I think he is going to get a shock on the second of November. He is going to get the results of one big poll that counts—that is the voice of the American people speaking at the ballot box.

And he is going to find out that the people have had enough of such fellows as the one from this district who has been helping the 80th Congress to turn the clock back. And I think you are going to elect Dwight Blackmore to Congress in his place. And I think you are going to elect Frank Lausche Governor of Ohio.

If you do that, you will be voting in your own interests, and when you vote in your own interests on the second of November, you cannot do anything else but vote the straight Democratic ticket, and I won’t be troubled with the housing problem. I will live in the White House 4 more years.

Now, that will be entirely to your interests. You will have a Congress who believes in the people, and you will have a President who has shown you right along that he believes in the welfare of the country as a whole, and not in the welfare of just a few at the top.

Akron, heart of the rubber industry, a big labor town, solidly Democratic, had been expected to give the Democratic standardbearer a good reception, however dismal his prospects. But the welcome at Akron was “tumultuous,” everything that Cincinnati failed to provide, and more. People jammed the streets three and four deep, an estimated sixty thousand, in what was reported in the national press as “the biggest political show in the city’s history,” everyone “cheering wildly” as Truman passed. The Akron Armory was packed. It was the perfect, grand finale for the day and Truman was radiant.

“I have lived a long time—64 years—and I have traveled a lot,” he told the crowd, “but I have never seen such turnouts as I have seen all over this great country of ours…. The Republicans have the propaganda and the money, but we have the people, and the people have the votes. That’s why we’re going to win!”

Reporters traveling with Truman agreed it had been one of if not his best day of the campaign. By conservative estimates, the day’s crowds totaled 100,000 people, even before Akron.

By eleven that night he was back on the train and heading west again. At 8:00 A.M. the next morning, at Richmond, Indiana, he was out on the rear platform ready to start another day.

It had been known for some while that Newsweek magazine was taking a poll of fifty highly regarded political writers, to ask which candidate they thought would win the election. And since several of the fifty had been on the train with Truman during the course of the campaign—Marquis Childs, Robert Albright of the Washington Post, Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune—there had been a good deal of speculation about the poll. It appeared in Newsweek in the issue dated October 11, and on the morning of Tuesday, October 12, three weeks before election day, at one of the first stops in Indiana, Clark Clifford slipped off the train to try to find a copy before anyone else. The woman at the station newsstand pointed to a bundle wrapped in brown paper, telling him to help himself. “And there it was!” remembered Clifford years afterward.

Of the writers polled, not one thought Truman would win. The vote was unanimous, 50 for Dewey, 0 for Truman. “The landslide for Dewey will sweep the country,” the magazine announced. Further, the Republicans would keep control in the Senate and increase their majority in the House. The election was as good as over.

Returning to the train, Clifford hid the magazine under his coat. With the train about to leave, the only door still open was on the rear platform.

So I walked in. President Truman was sitting there, and so I cheerily said, “Good morning, Mr. President.” He said, “Good morning, Clark.” And I said, “Another busy day ahead.” “Yes,” he said…. So I walked off…and I got almost by him when he said, “What does it say?” And I said, “What’s that, Mr. President?” He said, “What does it say?” And I said, “Now what does what…?” He said, “I saw you get off and go into the station. I think you probably went in there to see if they had a copy at Newsweek magazine.” And he said, “I think it is possible that you may have it under your jacket there, the way you’re holding your arm.” Well, I said, “Yes, sir.”

So I handed it to him…. And he turned the page and looked at it…[and] he said, “I know every one of these 50 fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.”

Truman put the magazine aside and made no further mention of it. “It just seemed to bounce right off of him,” Clifford remembered.

There were three stops in Indiana, four crossing Illinois, where farmers on tractors waved small flags or held up hand-lettered “Vote for Truman” signs.

“I was with Truman in the central part of the state,” wrote Paul Douglas, Democratic candidate for the Senate. “There was great applause, and there were constant shouts of ‘Give ‘em hell, Harry’…and he was at home with the crowd…he was simple, unaffected, and determined. We were proud of him.”

At Springfield after dark old-time campaign flares burned, the streets were filled with people. No one could come to Springfield without thinking of Abraham Lincoln, Truman said in his speech.

I just wonder tonight, as I have wondered many times in the past, what Lincoln would say if he could see how far the Republican party has departed from the fundamental principles in which he so deeply believed. Lincoln came from the plain people and he always believed in them….

He crossed into Wisconsin and Minnesota. At Duluth, where he rode in an open car with Hubert Humphrey, fully half the population, some sixty thousand people, lined Superior Street for two miles, crowding so close in places that the car brushed their clothes.

At St. Paul, an overflow crowd at Municipal Auditorium whistled, stamped, and shouted as he delivered one of the best fighting speeches of the campaign.

Now, I call on all liberals and progressives to stand up and be counted for democracy in this great battle…. This is one fight you must get in, and get in with every ounce of strength you have. After November 2nd, it will be too late…. The decision is right here and now.

But we are bound to win and we are going to win, because we are right! I am here to tell you that in this fight, the people are with us.

The crowd at St. Paul numbered 21,000—15,000 inside the auditorium, another 6,000 outside. Dewey, in his appearance at St. Paul two days later, drew only 7,000.

Heading east again, Truman said there were going to be “a lot of surprised pollsters,” come November 2.

Some of the Dewey people were beginning to worry. When Dewey asked his press secretary, Jim Hagerty, how he thought Truman was doing, Hagerty said, “I think he’s doing pretty well.” Dewey replied that he thought so, too.

When at Kansas City Dewey met privately with Roy Roberts of the Star, he was told the farmers of the Middle West were defecting from the Republican ticket in droves and that he had better do something about it quickly. Time was now describing Dewey’s crowds as only “mildly curious,” his speeches as “not electrifying.”

“Our man is ‘in,’” reporters were assured by the Dewey staff. “He doesn’t have to win votes, all he has to do is avoid losing them.” Dewey himself told Taft that he had found over the years that when he got into controversies he lost votes—an observation Taft thought disgraceful.

There was much that Dewey could have said in answer to Truman. The “do-nothing” 80th Congress was after all the Congress that had backed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Truman’s assault on the Taft-Hartley Act failed to note that a majority of his own party in the House had voted approval and then to override his veto. The evil influence of Wall Street on the Republican Party, as described by Truman, might have been made to sound a bit hollow, had it been pointed out that such important figures within his own official family as Harriman, Lovett, and Forrestal had all come to Washington from Wall Street. Truman’s dismissal of Henry Wallace had been a fiasco. His handling of the railroad strike might well have been made a major issue. “The only way to handle Truman,” Taft wrote later, “was to hit every time he opened his mouth.” But Taft was a cantankerous man and Dewey was determined to stick to his own strategy.

Meantime, a “slight misadventure” at a town called Beaucoup, in Illinois, had raised a stir. Just as Dewey was about to speak at Beaucoup, his train had suddenly lurched a few feet backward toward the crowd. There were screams, people fell back in panic. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” Dewey blurted angrily into the microphone. “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise….”

The cold arrogance of the remark did Dewey great damage. The story appeared everywhere, and with it, the observation of the engineer—“the lunatic”—who said, “I think as much of Dewey as I did before and that’s not very much.”

With only two weeks to go, a new Gallup Poll showed Dewey’s lead cut to six points. In the seclusion of the Governor’s Mansion at Albany, Dewey ordered a showing of all the newsreels of the campaign and what he saw left him greatly disturbed. He was losing ground steadily, he was told. But when his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, put through calls to some ninety Republican committeemen and women around the country, all but one urged him to keep to the present strategy.

Among professional gamblers, the betting odds against Truman on the average were 15 to 1. In some places, they were 30 to 1.

Besides the gamblers’ odds, the opinion polls, the forecasts by columnists, political reporters, political experts, Truman by now had the majority of editorial opinion weighed heavily against him. His frequent claim that 90 percent of the papers opposed his election was a campaign stretch of the truth. It was 65 percent, which in fact meant overwhelming press support for Dewey, and especially since it included virtually all the biggest, most influential papers in the country. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Star, the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal all endorsed Dewey. The Detroit Free Press called Truman intellectually unqualified. The Chicago Tribune, though far from admiring the liberal Republican candidate, simply dismissed Truman as “an incompetent.”

An editorial backing Truman, such as appeared in the Boston Post, under the heading “Captain Courageous,” was a rare exception. Harry S. Truman, said the Boston paper, was

as humbly honest, homespun and doggedly determined to do what is best for America as Abraham Lincoln.

In standing by his party and its inherent principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, he has emulated other great Americans—Jefferson, Jackson, Cleveland, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Alfred E. Smith. Like them, in the words of the old song, he—

Dared to be a Daniel,

Dared to stand alone,

Dared to hold a purpose firm

Dared to make it known.

By that token he should win. America likes a fighter.

More representative were such conclusions as drawn in the Los Angeles Times: “Mr. Truman is the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time.”

Even papers that expressed an open fondness for the President as a man chose not to support him. “However much affection we may feel for Mr. Truman and whatever sympathy we may have for him in his struggles with his difficulties,” said a front-page editorial in the Baltimore Sun, “to vote him into the presidency on November 2 would be a tragedy for the country and for the world.”

For Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, George Elsey, for everyone riding the Truman train, the campaign had become an unimaginable ordeal—interminable, exhausting in a way comparable to nothing in their experience.

“If you’re winning, you’d be surprised how you can withstand fatigue,” Clifford would say later. “If you’re losing it becomes oppressive…. They were long, long days. I was young and strong, and in perfect health. From time to time I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.”

The candidate, who bore the main brunt, seemed indefatigable, his outlook entirely positive. Between speeches he could lie down and go immediately to sleep, however pressed others were, however rough the road bed. “Give me 20 minutes,” he would say.

“Strain seemed to make him calmer and more firm,” Jonathan Daniels recalled. At no point in the entire campaign did any of the staff, or the press, or his family ever see Truman show a sign of failing stamina, or failing confidence.

Once during a lull en route to St. Paul after the stop at Duluth, Truman had asked George Elsey to write down the names of the forty-eight states, after which he gave Elsey the number of electoral votes for each and told him how they would go. By his count he would win with 340 electoral votes. Dewey would have 108, Strom Thurmond 42, Henry Wallace none.

“He was not putting on a show for anybody,” Elsey would recall. “Obviously he wasn’t trying to influence or persuade or sell me. This is what the man himself believed.”

“He either honestly believes he will win…or he is putting on the most magnificent and fighting front of optimism that any doubtful candidate ever did,” wrote Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune.

The Truman staff was another matter, Andrews noted. They all appeared “a bit grim.”

The work went on from seven in the morning until past midnight, day after day, until they lost all sense of time, until every day became merged with every other and everything became a blur. Margaret would remember the world beginning to seem like an endless railroad track. She would sit by the window and take idle snapshots of the passing countryside—telephone poles whizzing past, empty plains, country roads that seemed to lead nowhere.

As Ross wrote, the President was driving himself “unmercifully,” and no one on the staff wished to do any less. Ross, “the old philosopher,” suffered from arthritis and heart trouble, yet worked twelve, fourteen hours a day, knowing how much Truman counted on him. “For years afterward,” Clifford said, “I’d sometimes wake up at night in a cold perspiration thinking I was back on that terrible train.”

And day by day, steadily, the crowds grew larger. Clearly, something was happening. The mood of the crowds, their response to Truman was changing. People seemed always to be happier after hearing him speak.

“I remember thinking,” said Clifford, “ ‘Well, I don’t know whether we’re going to make it or not, but, by God, I bet if we had another week we would surely make it.’ There was something rolling…. We could sense it and the newspapermen could sense it.”

Robert C. Albright, the veteran political correspondent for the Washington Post, speculated, “Could we be wrong?”

“We’ve got them on the run and I think we’ll win,” Truman wrote to his sister from the White House on October 20. After a day in Washington, he had flown to Miami, where 200,000 people filled the streets. From Miami he flew north to Raleigh, where there were “people all along the way from the airport which is fifteen miles out of town.”

Things were looking decidedly more hopeful on several fronts. In Berlin, with improved landing facilities and more efficient air-traffic control after months of experience, the airlift was plainly succeeding at last, against all odds and forecasts. At his desk in the Oval Office on Friday, October 22, Truman authorized the dispatch to Berlin of still more of the giant C-54 transports, another twenty-six planes. “The airlift will be continued until the blockade is lifted,” General Clay declared triumphantly in Berlin. Winter supplies for the city were guaranteed.

Back on his train again, Truman was telling a delighted crowd at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that the GOP stood for “Grand Old Platitudes,” and at a thunderous rally at Hunt Armory in Pittsburgh, he declared, “I am an old campaigner, and I enjoy it.”

His opponent, Truman said, acted like a doctor whose magic cure for everything was a soothing syrup called unity. And here were the American people going for the usual once-every-four-years checkup.

“Say you don’t look so good!” Truman said, acting the part of the doctor.

“Well, that seems strange to me too, Doc,” he answered, as the voice of the people. “I never felt stronger, never had more money, and never had a brighter future. What is wrong with me?”

“I never discuss issues with a patient. But what you need is a major operation.”

“Will it be serious, Doc?”

“Not so very serious. It will just mean taking out the complete works and putting in a Republican administration.”

The audience roared with laughter. He had made the cool, letter-perfect Dewey a joke at last.

Chicago went all out. Politicians who had taken part in the great Roosevelt rallies of 1936 and 1940 said they had never seen anything like it. Possibly as many as fifty thousand people marched in the parade from the Blackstone to Chicago Stadium. Another half million lined the route. Marching bands blared, fireworks burst overhead. Yet, oddly, not everyone was cheering. Here and there, remembered Paul Douglas, were people with tears in their eyes. “The newspapers had convinced them that Truman was going to lose, and they believed that the gains they had made under the New Deal were going to be taken away. They seemed to feel something precious was about to be lost, and they wanted to come out and show their sympathy arid support for the doughty little warrior who was doing battle for them against such great odds.” Privately, Douglas felt that he, too, like Truman would go down to defeat in his bid for the Senate.

At the packed stadium, to a crowd of 24,000 Truman delivered his most savage speech of the campaign, a wild attack, uncalled for, in which he said a vote for Dewey was a vote for fascism. The authors of the speech were again David Noyes and Albert Carr, whose main purpose, Noyes later said, was to provoke Dewey into fighting back, a strategy Truman accepted. “An element of desperation comes into a campaign,” Clifford would say in retrospect. “And fatigue leads to it.”

Dewey was properly outraged, so much so he drafted a new speech for his own scheduled appearance at Chicago, but then was persuaded by his advisers to drop it, not to get into a slugging match with Truman. He mustn’t get nasty, mustn’t make mistakes with victory so close. Reportedly, Dewey’s wife said that if she had to stay up all night to see him tear up what he had written, she would do it.

“They have scattered reckless abuse along the entire right of way coast to coast,” Dewey would say only in Chicago, speaking of Democrats in general, “and now, I am sorry to say, reached a new low in mudslinging…. This is the kind of campaign I refuse to wage….”

Truman offered no explanations or apologies. He was on his way east, and the “tide was rolling.” Dewey’s “Victory Special” would follow directly after him a day later.

At Boston a quarter of a million people banked Truman’s parade route, cheered and yelled and enjoyed the obvious enjoyment written all over the candidate’s face. To the packed house at Mechanics Hall, Truman said Republican talk of unity was all “a lot of hooey—and if that rhymes with anything, it is not my fault.”

On Thursday, October 28, after nine stops and nine more speeches in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the Truman campaign reached New York, where the outpouring of humanity and enthusiasm exceeded everything thus far. Had Truman’s whole career gone uncelebrated until now, the roaring, ticker-tape welcome that New York gave him would have made up for it. Over a million people turned out. Arriving at Grand Central Station in late afternoon, Truman set off on a nine-mile tour through the city, through the October twilight, led by a thundering motorcycle escort of a hundred machines. Truman was perched on the top of the back seat of an open car. Bess and Margaret followed six cars back.

The confetti, ticker-tape and [shredded] telephone book demonstration along 42nd Street was extraordinary [wrote Meyer Berger in The New York Times]. It fell in great flurries and much of it landed on the Open cars. It curled and twisted from high windows. It fell in other places like driven snow. Through it all, the President’s figure, at times, was only dimly seen. He was smiling and he never stopped waving to curb crowds and to men and women clustered at high windows….

As he rolled through Seventh Avenue, in the garment district, loudspeakers, cranked to full volume, blared “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

He made three rousing outdoor speeches—at Union Square, City Hall, and Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side—spoke at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, then again that night, his fifth speech of the day, at Madison Square Garden, where two of his old nemeses, Albert Whitney and Harold Ickes, joined him on stage while the band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” A crowd of sixteen thousand roared its approval when Truman—evoking the memory of Al Smith, Robert Wagner, and Franklin Roosevelt—pledged his faith in the New Deal, pledged his support of Israel, and again, as at Pittsburgh, brought down the house with another doctor story. For weeks, he said, he had had the odd sensation that someone was following him. It had troubled him so he asked the White House physician about it, but the White House physician had said not to worry. “There is one place where that fellow is not going to follow you—and that’s into the White House.”

The race nearly over, Truman was determined to finish strong. Friday the 29th, under a clear blue sky, in what by now was being described as “Truman weather,” he covered thirty-six sunlit miles through the city. He was seen and cheered, police said, by 1,245,000 people. There was not a discordant note through the whole day. Tugs on the East River tooted a greeting. In the Bronx, crowds screamed: “Hi, Harry” and “Hi, Margaret.” “You can throw the Galluping polls right into the ash can,” he told a delighted throng in Queens. If the campaign was only a ritual, as said so often, then it was a ritual people loved and they loved him for embracing it with such zest.

In Harlem he made his only civil rights speech of the campaign. It was no impassioned personal declaration, but focused on the work of his Civil Rights Commission and its “momentous” report. Nonetheless, his appearance marked the first time a major party candidate for President had stumped Harlem, and after reminding his almost entirely black audience that he had already issued two executive orders to establish equal opportunity in the armed services and federal employment, he vowed to keep working for equal rights and equal opportunity “with every ounce of strength and determination I have.” The cheering in Harlem was the loudest of all.

When he rose to speak at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that evening, the audience gave him a twelve-minute ovation.

For months efforts had been made to persuade Eleanor Roosevelt to say something, anything, to help Truman—efforts that Truman himself refused to have any part in—but all to no avail. From Paris, where she was attending the United Nations session, she wrote to Frances Perkins that she had not endorsed Truman because he was “such a weak and vacillating person” and made such poor appointments. Now, at the last minute, she changed her mind, hoping to help the Democrats to carry New York.

“There has never been a campaign where a man has shown more personal courage and confidence in the people of the United States,” she said in a broadcast from Paris.

The scene of the final rally of the campaign, and the last platform appearance Harry Truman would ever make as a candidate for public office, was the immense Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, where there was not an empty seat.

Discarding the speech efforts of his staff, he went on the attack, lashing out one last time at the Republican Congress, the Republican press, the Republican “old dealers,” and the Republican candidate. The stomping, cheering crowd urged him on.

He felt afterward that he had done well. In any case, he had done the best he knew how.

The odyssey was over. Sunday, October 31, Halloween, was spent at home at 219 North Delaware Street. “Home!” remembered Margaret. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Truman worked on an election-eve radio address to be delivered from the living room the following night.

From the bottom of my heart I thank the people of the United States for their cordiality to me and their interest in the affairs of this great nation and of the world. I trust the people, because when they know the facts, they do the right thing….

Election day, up at five, he took his usual morning walk, read the papers, and had breakfast. Then, trailed by a swarm of reporters and photographers, he, Bess, and Margaret went to Memorial Hall three blocks away on Maple Avenue and voted.

A final Gallup Poll showed that while he had cut Dewey’s lead, Dewey nonetheless remained a substantial five points ahead, 49.5 to 44.5. The betting odds still ranged widely, though generally speaking Dewey was favored 4 to 1.

The New York Times predicted a Dewey victory with 345 electoral votes. “Government will remain big, active, and expensive under President Thomas E. Dewey,” said The Wall Street Journal. Time and Newsweek saw a Dewey sweep. The new issue of Life carried a full-page photograph of Dewey “the next President” crossing San Francisco Bay by ferry boat. Alistair Cooke, correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, titled his dispatch for November 1, “Harry S. Truman, A Study in Failure.”

Changing Times, the Kiplinger magazine, announced on its front cover in bold, block type, “What Dewey Will Do.” Walter Lippmann wrote about the work Dewey had cut out for him in foreign policy. Drew Pearson, who thought Dewey had run “one of the most astute and skillful campaigns in recent years,” surveyed the “Dewey team,” the “exciting, hardworking, close-knit clique” that would be moving into the White House. Marquis Childs questioned whether the Democratic Party could ever be put back together again, while in their final column before election day the Alsop brothers worried over “how the government could get through the next ten weeks with a lame-duck president: Events will not wait patiently until Thomas E. Dewey officially replaces Harry S. Truman.”

For Truman there were but two irregular, entirely unprofessional samplings to take heart from. One was from Les Biffle, the Senate Secretary, who, on his own, posing as a “chicken peddler,” had traveled about rural areas asking people how they felt about the election. Truman needn’t worry, Biffle had reported—the common people were for him. The other was from the Staley Milling Company of Kansas City, which had taken a “pullet poll” among farmers who bought chicken feed in sacks labeled “Democratic” or “Republican.” The Democratic feed had pulled well ahead, but then the company decided there must be something wrong and so abandoned its polling efforts.

Among the campaign staff, the state of physical and emotional exhaustion, the sense of relief that finally the ordeal was over, all but precluded any capacity for rational judgment of the outcome. Their devotion to the President was greater than ever, but that, of course, was another matter. Yet some now honestly thought he might just make it. In Washington, after a quiet day at the White House, Eben Ayers worked out his own remarkable assessment of the situation in the privacy of his diary:

Were it not for all these predictions and the unanimity of the pollsters and experts, I would say the President has an excellent chance. All the signs that I see indicate it. The crowds which have turned out for him on his campaign trips have grown steadily…. I cannot believe they came out of curiosity alone. Other conditions are favorable to the President, the general prosperity of the country. It is contrary to political precedent for the voters to kick out an administration in times of prosperity.

The Dewey personality and campaign has not been one to attract voters. He is not liked—there is universal agreement on that. I have repeatedly asked individuals, newspapermen and others, if they could name one person who ever said he liked Dewey and I have yet to find one who would say “yes.” The Dewey campaign speeches have dealt only with national “unity,” with the promise to do things better and more efficiently. He has not discussed issues clearly or met them head-on at any time. I have repeatedly asked my wife if it is possible that the American people will vote for a man whom nobody likes and who tells them nothing.

Late in the afternoon of election day, Truman decided to disappear from the scene. It was an odd move and one never quite explained. The impression was he wanted to be alone, simply to get away from everyone and everything and be by himself. Only his immediate family and the Secret Service knew where he was going.

The Secret Service was about to have a changing of the guard at 219 North Delaware. At 4:30 a Secret Service field car, a black four-door Ford carrying the night shift, pulled into the driveway behind the house. The day shift was ready to leave, to drive back to Kansas City, to presidential headquarters at the Muehlebach Hotel.

A crowd had gathered in front of the house. Truman went out the kitchen door and climbed into the back seat of the Ford with Agents Henry Nicholson and Gerard McCann on either side of him. Agent Frank Barry took the wheel and Jim Rowley, head of the detail, got quickly into the front seat beside the driver. The car pulled away, drawing no attention.

They drove to Excelsior Springs, the little resort town across the Missouri in Clay County, and checked into the Elms Hotel, the same place Truman had escaped to sixteen years earlier, crushed by disappointment the night he learned he was not to be Tom Pendergast’s choice for governor.

The sprawling three-story stone-and-timber hotel was the latest of several that had occupied the site since mineral springs were discovered there in the 1880s. Its chief attractions were seclusion, peace, and quiet. Franklin Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, and Al Capone were all known to have escaped from public view at the Elms. On this November night the place was nearly deserted.

The rooms picked by the Secret Service were on the third floor rear, at the end of a long hall. Truman, who had left home without baggage, borrowed bathrobe and slippers from the hotel manager and went for a steambath and a rubdown, after which, at 6:30, he had a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of buttermilk sent up to his room. As he ate, he switched on the bedside radio.

The first final returns were from a town in New Hampshire called Hart’s Location, where the vote, including two absentee ballots, was Truman 1, Dewey 11. By eight o’clock Missouri time, Dewey was ahead in such key eastern states as New York and Pennsylvania, but Truman was leading in the popular vote overall, nationally.

About nine, Truman called Jim Rowley into the room. He was going to get some sleep, Truman said, but Rowley was to wake him if anything “important” happened.

“We all, of course, stayed awake,” remembered Agent McCann. “There was nothing to do but stay awake.”

The head of the Secret Service, James J. Maloney, was in New York, having decided Governor Dewey was certain to be the next President. Maloney and five of his men had taken up positions outside an upper-floor suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, where Dewey was relaxing with family and friends waiting to go down to the packed Roosevelt ballroom to announce his victory.

The crowd outside 219 North Delaware had grown larger, filling the sidewalks on both sides of the street and much of the front lawn. A stream of automobiles passed steadily by, their drivers slowing to see the excitement or to call to friends. Newspaper and radio correspondents had set up headquarters across the street, on the porches of the Luff and the Noland houses.

The night air was cool. Lights burned in every window of the Truman house, though the shades were all drawn except in the window of the upstairs hall, where a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt could be plainly seen.

Reporters were counting on the President to make an appearance. “We waited and waited and waited,” remembered Sue Gentry of the Examiner, for whom, like others who lived in the neighborhood, it was turning into one of the most exciting nights ever in Independence. For by 11:00 P.M., though several commentators and the Republican chairman, Brownell, were still predicting a Dewey victory, Truman, incredibly, was still ahead in the popular vote. The crowd on the lawn began singing—“For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

Then the porch light went on and Margaret came out. She stood on the porch smiling and making a hopeless gesture with both arms.

“Dad isn’t here,” she announced. “I don’t know where he is,” she said, which wasn’t true.

The reporters were incredulous. “We couldn’t believe it,” remembered Sue Gentry. Some of the crowd began drifting away.

The lights in the windows remained on all night, as they would remain on in houses all over town and all over the country.

“What a night,” Margaret wrote in her diary, conscious that she was at the center of history in the making. By midnight Truman was ahead in the popular count by 1 million votes.

I haven’t been to bed at all. I’ve been running up and down the stairs all night answering the phone on the direct-line telephone [to the Presidential Suite at the Muehlebach] to Bill Boyle who gave me the returns. We are ahead, but at about 1:30 A.M. we hit a slump—then gradually came up again. Dad has slipped away to Excelsior Springs and the reporters are going crazy trying to find him. They have offered me anything if I’ll just tell them in which direction he went.

Sometime near midnight, Truman awoke and switched on the radio, picking up NBC and the clipped, authoritative voice of political commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, the voice that had reported Munich in 1938 and that to much of America was the very sound of the news. Though the President was ahead by 1,200,000 votes, Kaltenborn said, he was still “undoubtedly beaten.” Truman switched him off, turned over, and went back to sleep.

Through their vigil over the next several hours, Agents Rowley, Nicholson McCann, and Barry also stayed tuned to NBC. “And all of a sudden,” remembered Rowley, “about four in the morning comes this thing that the tide has changed. And so I figured, ‘This is important!’ And so I went in and told him. ‘We’ve won!’ And he turns on the radio.”

Truman, Kaltenborn was saying, was ahead by 2 million votes, though Kaltenborn still did not see how Truman could possibly be elected, since in key states like Ohio and Illinois the “rural vote,” the Dewey vote, had yet to be tallied.

“We’ve got ‘em beat,” Truman said. Rowley was told to get the car ready. “We’re going to Kansas City.”

IV

The black Ford pulled in front of the Muehlebach a few minutes before six o’clock, just as it was getting light. The street was empty.

At presidential headquarters, the penthouse on the seventeenth floor, Truman found only four who were up and about—Matt Connelly, Bill Boyle, and two Kansas City attorneys, Jerome Walsh and young Lyman Field, who had been barnstorming for Truman on his own all across Missouri, and who now, as the one nearest the door, had the honor of being the first to shake the President’s hand and wish him congratulations.

Charlie Ross, sprawled across one bed, appeared to be dead drunk, but 1 he was only exhausted. It had been a rough night for all of them, but for Ross especially. The press had been furious with him for not saying where Truman was, and Ross, finally, had lost his temper, showing “his first case of nerves” since the campaign began. He didn’t know where the President was, nor did Matt Connelly. None of them knew.

The rooms were a shambles. “The`re wasn’t a drop of liquor around, by the way,” wrote Jerome Walsh later, trying to describe the scene. “It was all black coffee and cigarettes and four telephones jangling…. At 6:00 we were out on our feet.”

Truman, though unshaven, appeared rested and bright-eyed, “as refreshed as a man with two weeks’ vacation behind him.” Shedding his coat, he sat down on the couch and asked “how things were going.”

Though Dewey had carried New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Truman had won in Massachusetts, carried all the Old South but four states—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which had gone to Thurmond—and was leading in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Colorado. He was ahead by slim margins in Illinois, Ohio, and, so far, crucially, in California. In the popular count he was ahead by nearly 2 million votes. Dewey had yet to concede.

But what most impressed those in the room was Truman’s perfect calm at such a moment. To Lyman Field, the President seemed “wholly unconcerned.” Here, by every sign, was a man on the verge of pulling off the biggest political upset in American history. He had confounded the experts, the professionals in both parties, not to say a nationwide chorus of columnists and poll takers. The President who had had to fight just to get the nomination from his own party was beating the opponent everybody had said was unbeatable. It was not only a supreme moment of triumph in a long political life, but one of the greatest personal victories of any American politician ever. Yet here he sat as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “He just seemed the same old Harry Truman,” Field would say forty years later, the memory of that morning still a wonderment to him.

Jerome Walsh was so moved by Truman’s total composure that he decided to record the scene while everything was still fresh in his mind, in a letter to a friend written just days later:

He displayed neither tension nor elation. For instance someone remarked bitterly that if it hadn’t been for Wallace, New York and New Jersey would have gone Democratic by good majorities. But the President dismissed this with a wave of his hand. As far as Henry was concerned, he said, Henry wasn’t a bad guy; he was doing what he thought was right and he had every right in the world to pursue his course. Someone else pointed to a Kansas City Star headline which read, “Election in Doubt” or something like that. The President grinned. “Roy Roberts will change that in a few hours,” he said. I did not hear the name Dewey mentioned by the President.

I am trying to give you…a sense of the astonishment we all felt at the unbelievable coolness with which the President faced up to the whole situation, the manner in which he took the thing for granted, as if he had read the answer in a crystal ball two weeks before. At 6 A.M. there still was plenty of reason for Governor Dewey to refuse to concede. Conceivably Ohio might have switched in late returns. California or Illinois might have toppled and the President’s lead been sharply reversed…. Actually, Mr. Truman, at 6 A.M., hardly seemed interested in the matter. To him the election was won, had always been won since the day he began carrying his fight to the people, and his mind was already turning to other aspects of his program…. The serenity of the President…suggested to all of us, I think, that his years of crisis in office have equipped him with a very large reserve of inner strength and discipline to draw upon.

Walsh, as he further wrote, could not help but think of Abraham Lincoln. “Is this sentimental outpouring?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”

Charlie Ross would remember being awakened by somebody shaking him at 6:30. “I looked up and there was the boss at my bedside—grinning. We all started talking at once.”

Truman put through a call to Bess and Margaret, both of whom burst into tears at the sound of his voice.

He called in a barber, had a shave and a trim, then changed into a fresh white shirt, blue polka-dot tie and double-breasted blue suit.

By 8:30, Ohio went for Truman, putting him over the top with 270 electoral votes. A celebration broke out in the Presidential Suite. Vivian Truman, Ted Marks, Eddie Jacobson, Al Ridge, Tom Evans, and Fred Canfil arrived. The hall outside was jammed with exuberant well-wishers.

At 9:30 Truman was declared the winner in Illinois and California. By now, too, it was clear the Democrats had won control of both houses of Congress.

At 10:14 (11:14 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York), Dewey conceded the election. A wild cheer went up on the seventeenth floor of the Muehlebach, and as the doors to the suite were thrown open, more friends, politicians, and reporters pushed their way in.

“Thank you, thank you,” Truman kept saying, shaking hands, and behind the thick glasses there were tears in his eyes.

At Independence, minutes later, every bell, whistle, siren, and automobile horn seemed to go off at once. It had never occurred to anyone in town to plan a victory celebration, but now Mayor Roger Sermon quickly declared a holiday. Schools were let out and at day’s end in a roaring spontaneous outpouring of pride and goodwill forty thousand people jammed the Square to see and honor the victorious native son.

Speaking from a small podium, visibly touched by what was the biggest crowd in the history of the town, with his courthouse behind him, Truman called it a celebration not for him but for the country.

V

The country was flabbergasted. It was called a “startling victory,” “astonishing,” “a major miracle.” Truman, said Newsweek on its cover, was the Miracle Man.

He had won against the greatest odds in the annals of presidential politics. Not one polling organization had been correct in its forecast. Not a single radio commentator or newspaper columnist, or any of the hundreds of reporters who covered the campaign, had called it right. Every expert had been proven wrong, and as was said, “a great roar of laughter arose from the land.” The people had made fools of those supposedly in the know. Of all amazing things, Harry Truman had turned out to be the only one who knew what he was talking about.

Actress Tallulah Bankhead sent Truman a telegram: “The people have put you in your place.” Harry Truman, said the radio comedian Fred Allen, was the first President to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk.

A few papers had predicted a close election. A Washington correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black paper, had also described how, in theory, Truman might win. John L. Clark of the Courier had traveled with the Truman train part of the time and had taken seriously the size of the crowds. Victory for the President in twenty-three states outside the South, plus a break in the South, or an upset in California or New York, could spell victory for the President, Clark wrote, though he did not predict this would happen. Nor did the author Louis Bean, who, in a book published in July, How to Predict Elections, also offered the theoretical possibility of a Truman upset.

As it was, Truman carried 28 states with a total of 303 electoral votes, and defeated Dewey in the popular election by just over 2,100,000 votes. In the final tally, Truman polled 24,105,812, Dewey 21,970,065.

Dewey, who won in 16 states, had 189 electoral votes. Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond each polled slightly more than 1,100,000 votes. Thurmond, with his victory in four southern states, had 39 electoral votes. Wallace, who failed to carry a single state, thus received no votes in the Electoral College.

The outcome in the congressional races was 54 Senate seats for the Democrats, 42 for the Republicans. In the House the Democratic victory was overwhelming, 263 seats to 171.

Though Dewey had carried the three industrial giants of the Northeast, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as well as his own home state of Michigan, Truman had defeated him soundly in thirteen of the country’s biggest cities and captured the Republican stronghold of the rural Midwest, carrying Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Iowa, “the very citadel of Republicanism.” Truman held on to seven states in the South, despite Strom Thurmond. He carried the four border states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and his own Missouri, where he won by more than a quarter of a million votes. In the West, where at the start only Arizona had looked safe for the Democrats, he took every state but Oregon.

Truman also held Dewey to a smaller part of the total vote nationwide (45.1 percent) than Dewey had in 1944 running against Roosevelt.

As would be pointed out, Truman’s margin of victory in such key states as Ohio, Illinois, and California had been narrow. He won Ohio by a bare 7,000 votes, Illinois by 33,000, California by 17,000. A switch in any two of these three states would have left him with less than a majority in the Electoral College and thrown the decision to the House of Representatives. Had Dewey won in all three states, then Dewey would have eked out victory in the electoral vote and thus won the presidency, while Truman finished in front in the popular tally. A cumulative shift of just 33,000 votes apportioned to the three states would have done it.

But it was also true that a similar shift in other states would have made Truman an even bigger winner. Truman very nearly won in New York, for example, and unquestionably would have had it not been for Henry Wallace, who rolled up half a million votes in the state (which was half Wallace’s national total). “I think the mistake was not giving more time to New York. We should have carried New York,” Clark Clifford would say. Dewey won there by only 61,000—in his own state—and New York meant 47 electoral votes. Had there been no Henry Wallace, or a Strom Thurmond, Truman might well have gained another 85 electoral votes, giving him an Electoral College landslide.

Efforts to explain why the impossible had happened began at once, as did, understandably, a great deal of soul searching among reporters, editors, and broadcasters who had fallen down on the job so very conspicuously.

To H. L. Mencken, who delighted in the outcome exactly because it “shook the bones of all…[the] smarties,” the answer was simply in the contrast of the two contestants as they presented themselves to the voters. “Neither candidate made a speech on the stump that will survive in the schoolbooks, but those of Truman at least had warmth in them,” wrote Mencken in one of his last columns, at the close of a long career of appraising the American political scene. “While Dewey was intoning essays sounding like the worst bombast of university professors, Truman was down on the ground, clowning with the circumambient morons. He made votes every time he gave a show, but Dewey lost them.”

To Dewey himself, it had all turned on the farm vote. “The farm vote switched in the last ten days,” he claimed in a letter to Henry Luce, “and you can analyze figures from now to kingdom come and all they will show is that we lost the farm vote….”

Joe Martin, who with the new Democratic majority in the House was to be Speaker no longer, said the fault was with the Republican Party, which had “digressed” too far from the people. Like many of the old guard, Martin and Taft both thought Dewey had run an abysmal campaign. “You’ve got to give the little man credit,” said Arthur Vandenberg, in a somewhat patronizing tribute to Truman. Taft, furious, said, “I don’t care how the thing is explained. It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House.”

To the surprise of many, it would turn out that the Democrats had spent more on the campaign than the Republicans, the common impression to the contrary, $2,736,334 compared to $2,127,296—though many of the largest donations to the Democrats came pouring in after the fact, after November 2, some $700,000 in postdated checks.

A special study drawn up by the Republican Policy Committee would conclude, in essence, that the Republicans had only themselves to blame. They had “muffed” their best chance in sixteen years to win the presidency and keep control of Congress. The fault was mainly with the Dewey strategy and the Dewey performance, his “aloofness,” speeches “high above the voters’ heads,” the mistake of “swallowing uncritically the Democratic propaganda.” Dewey, said the report, had been “drugged” by the polls, and thus “sacrificed the initiative.” Truman’s hard-hitting assault on the 80th Congress, “however unprincipled and demagogic,” had been “brilliant” since it had enabled him to “divert the battle” away from his own and his party’s record. “He succeeded in arousing public indignation…. The Democratic sweep in Congress and its retention of the presidency is eloquent testimony to the brilliance of their strategy.”

As amply substantiated by a number of studies, the farm vote, the labor vote, the black vote, and the vote of the West had all counted heavily in Truman’s success and in the Democratic sweep overall—just as the Rowe memorandum had forecast.

Nor was there any question about the value of the kind of campaign Truman chose to run. His big effort in Texas, for example, gave him the largest majority in Texas of any state. The extra swing by automobile that he made in the traditionally Republican counties of downstate Illinois turned the tide there and was decisive in carrying Illinois. The campaign through rural Ohio on October 11, the whistle-stop day that had seemed to others a wasted effort, apparently did make a difference. In counties that Dewey had carried in 1944, Truman was the winner.

Ethnic minorities voted strongly for Truman. Catholic voters, too, it was found, had gone Democratic in large majorities. In some predominantly Catholic wards in Boston and Pittsburgh the vote for Truman exceeded past tallies for Al Smith and FDR.

In the noise and excitement of the Presidential Suite after Dewey conceded, Truman reportedly said, “Labor did it.” But while several of the biggest unions in the country did work hard to get out the vote and supplied major financial backing for his campaign, John L. Lewis and Alvanley Johnston were in Dewey’s camp, and to lose in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan was hardly a sign that labor had carried the day.

More important, as Dewey said, was the farm vote and here, just as the Truman forces foresaw, the drop in the price of corn played a part. Once, in 1921, falling grain prices had bankrupt haberdasher Truman. Now they helped keep President Truman in the White House. Of the eight largest corn-producing states, he carried all but two.

Black support for Truman had been overwhelming. He polled more than two thirds of the black vote, a percentage higher than ever attained by Franklin Roosevelt. In such crucial states as Ohio and Illinois it could be said that the black voter had been quite as decisive as anyone in bringing about a Truman victory. Speaking of Truman’s civil rights program and its impact on the election, J. Howard McGrath called it both honest statesmanship and politically advantageous. “It lost us three Southern states, but it won us Ohio, Illinois, would have carried New York for us if it had not been for Henry Wallace, and it was a great factor in carrying California.”

The precarious state of the world also appeared to have benefited the Truman campaign, and particularly as it became clear that the Berlin Airlift was a resounding success. Several of Truman’s sharpest critics, Walter Lippmann among them, now also grudgingly concluded that even the “inept” Vinson affair had proved a political net gain for Truman after all. “The bear got us,” said Dewey’s staff man, Elliott Bell, referring to the Russian menace.

Also, clearly, a host of strong Democratic candidates were a major factor. In Illinois, most notably, Truman’s slim but crucial margin of 31,000 votes stood in sharp contrast to the resounding triumphs of Paul Douglas in his senate race and Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for governor. Douglas won by 400,000 votes, Stevenson by a still more astonishing 570,000 votes.

Hubert Humphrey had won his senate race in Minnesota. Estes Kefauver, who had campaigned in a coonskin cap, was the new Senator-elect from Tennessee, another state in the Truman column. Democratic candidates for governor had won in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Frank Lausche had been elected governor in Ohio by a margin of more than 200,000 votes.

Predictions of a Dewey landslide, it was widely believed, had lulled Republican voters into a state of false complacency. Had the polls not been so one-sided and unanimous, many argued, there would have been a bigger Republican effort, fewer Republican “stay-at-homes” on election day, and a Dewey victory. But a study of the campaign conducted by analyst Samuel Lubell for the Saturday Evening Post indicated quite the opposite. Republican victories in the industrial East, said Lubell, had been largely the fault of apathy among old Roosevelt voters who had concluded Truman didn’t have a chance. “Far from costing Dewey the election, the [Democratic] stay-at-homes may have saved him almost as crushing a defeat as Landon suffered in 1936.”

George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and other public opinion specialists were openly dumbfounded. He didn’t know what happened, Gallup said. “I couldn’t have been more wrong. Why I don’t know,” Roper admitted.

From later studies, it appears the polls were reasonably accurate up until mid-October, the point when Gallup completed his final survey of the campaign for the forecast that was released just before election day. The fault was probably not that the polls were imperfect, but that they were two weeks out of date. And it was in those final two weeks apparently that a massive shift took place.

Nearly everywhere in the country, it seems, a large number of people who agreed that Dewey was certain to win, and who no doubt would have bet on his winning, went to the polls and voted for Truman.

In Ohio, “up and down the state,” reported William Lawrence of The New York Times, not a single Truman voter with whom he talked had expected Truman to win. “But a majority of the ‘little people’ from the mines, mills and farms, having made their decision quietly and thoughtfully, went out and voted for him anyway.”

Two Ohio farmers, joking about the dissatisfaction of a neighbor who had voted for Dewey, were overheard saying, “What’s the matter with that fellow anyway? Can’t he stand four more years of prosperity?”

“I kept reading about that Dewey fellow,” said another man, “and the more I read the more he reminded me of one of those slick ads trying to get money out of my pocket. Now Harry Truman, running around and yipping and falling all over his feet—I had the feeling he could understand the kind of fixes I get into.”

He had talked all summer of voting for Dewey, a farmer in Guthrie County, Iowa, told a reporter. “But when voting time came, I just couldn’t do it. I remembered…all the good things that have come to me under the Democrats.”

She voted for Truman, said Freda Combs of Decatur, Illinois, because he was “the common man’s man.”

To his immense readership in every part of the country, Walter Lippmann explained the outcome as a posthumous triumph for Franklin Roosevelt. The election, Lippmann said, was simply another victory for the New Deal.

It was a view with which Truman modestly concurred. “It seemed to have been a terrific political upset when you read the papers here in this country,” Truman would write in response to a letter of congratulations from Winston Churchill. “Really it was not—it was merely a continuation of the policies which had been in effect for the last sixteen years and the policies that the people wanted.”

But to Edward Folliard of the Washington Post, as to most others who had witnessed the campaign firsthand, what it had all come down to was Harry Truman’s own “gallant battle,” his faith in himself and in the voters. As a barnstormer, the President was “surely the best of his time.”

There was something in the American character that responded to a fighter, said the Washington Post on its editorial page. “The American people admire a man with courage even though they don’t always agree with him,” wrote Drew Pearson, who had been as blatantly mistaken in what he wrote prior to November 2 as almost anyone in journalism. “You just have to take off your hat to a beaten man who refuses to stay licked,” conceded the ultra-conservative New York Sun.

Richard Strout, in The New Republic, would describe election night as an experience no political writer would ever forget:

There was personal humiliation for us as a prophet, but a glowing and wonderful sense that the American people couldn’t be ticketed by polls, knew its own mind and had picked the rather unlikely but courageous figure of Truman to carry on its banner.

The feeling was widespread that so heavy a blow to the prestige of the polls could only be good for the country. As Eben Ayers wrote, “There has been a danger, it has seemed to me, that the polls would reach a point, if they continued to be right, where they could easily control the outcome of an election.”

Some of the most intense and interesting of all postmortems went on at the New York headquarters of Time Incorporated, where telegrams from readers poured in saying, “Ha, Ha, Ha!” A “burden of doubt” had been cast over Time and Life, the editors were “deeply unhappy,” said editor-in-chief Henry Luce in a confidential memorandum to his department heads. Luce blamed himself as much as anyone. “I personally paid less attention to this campaign than to any previous campaign in my lifetime,” he admitted. Reporters and editors had been deluded not just by the polls but by politicians in both parties. Everybody should have known better, everybody should have taken his job more seriously, Luce said, and worked right to the end—“like Harry Truman did!”

To Luce the main cause for Dewey’s defeat was Dewey. “His personality was against him.”

The managing editor of Time, T. S. Matthews, took the position that there was nothing new about the press being wrong on elections. The press was often out of touch with the popular will.

I think the press has been pretending to much more wisdom (or is it smartness?) than it had any right to claim, and has been getting away with murder for some time [Matthews wrote to Luce]. The plain fact now appears to be that (as far as politics is concerned, at least) the press hasn’t known what time of day it is for years.

The great mistake now would be to see Truman as a political miracle-worker. “It was not a one-man miracle—that’s too easy—but an unsuspected, overlooked, misreported national phenomenon.”

But to the managing editor of Life, Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr., the problem centered on bias. “Of course, we did not intentionally mislead our readers,” he wrote.

But I do think that we ourselves were misled by our bias. Because of that bias we did not exert ourselves enough to report the side we didn’t believe in. We were too ready to accept the evidence of pictures like the empty auditorium at Omaha and to ignore the later crowds. We were too eager to report the Truman “bobbles” and to pass over the things that were wrong about the Republican campaign: empty Dewey speeches, the bad Republican candidates, the dangers of Republican commitments to big business. I myself had many misgivings about these things but thought that what the hell, the election was already decided, we could get after the Republicans later….

Truman’s victory, said Thorndike, was “primarily a personal triumph.”

And this, as it turned out, was the conclusion of Time in its first issue after the election. “He did it all himself,” said the magazine in tribute to Truman the politician. He was the “new champion” in American politics, “the absolute boss of a resurgent Democratic party.”

“TRUMAN WORKS A POLITICAL MIRACLE,” ran the headline on the lead story in Life. Truman was now “the durable hero in shining spectacles,” “one of the fightin’est men” who ever went through a campaign.

To such staunch Truman loyalists as Sam Rayburn and George Marshall, to the weary White House staff workers who had been with him all the way, there was never any question as to why Truman won. He had done it by being himself, never forgetting who he was, and by going to the people in his own fashion.

Harry Truman deserved 90 percent of the credit, said Sam Rayburn. “You have put over the greatest one-man fight in American history,” wrote Marshall to Truman on November 4. “You did exactly what you told me and what nobody else believed possible.”

“I think that Harry Truman grew, too,” wrote Charlie Ross, “grew spiritually.” Truman had campaigned so hard, said Ross, because he genuinely believed the essential welfare of the country was at stake. He wanted peace in the world, prosperity at home, and he wanted to make the Democratic Party truly the party of the people. Also, wrote Ross, there was a “purely personal” motive. “He had been described as a little man, fumbling, inept, not measuring up to the President’s job. He had a human desire to prove his detractors wrong.”

Like others, Clark Clifford thought Dewey’s people had done a poor job. “I think Dewey’s whole campaign was a mistake…. They were greedy and dumb, and anxious to get back to power.” But that was not the explanation for Truman’s success. Nor did Clifford think it was due to extraordinary political acumen on Truman’s part.

It wasn’t in my opinion because he was a skilled politician that he won. He was a good politician…a sensible politician…. But that wasn’t why he was elected President…. It was the remarkable courage in the man—his refusal to be discouraged, his willingness to go through the suffering of that campaign, the fatigue, the will to fight every step of the way, the will to win….

It wasn’t Harry Truman the politician who won, it was Harry Truman the man.

Early the morning of Thursday, November 4, as Truman stepped out onto the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan during a brief stop in St. Louis, photographers snapped the picture that would be remembered and enjoyed more than any other of the campaign. Truman was smiling, chatting with reporters, when someone handed him a copy of the Chicago Tribune, his least favorite newspaper, across the front of which ran the huge, soon-to-be famous headline: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Holding the paper aloft with both hands, grinning from ear to ear, the man who had been given no better than a fighting chance seemed to be saying not only, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” but that in America it is still the people who decide.

Like some other photographs of other presidents—of Theodore Roosevelt in a white linen suit at the controls of a steam shovel in Panama, or Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, or Franklin Roosevelt, chin up, singing an old hymn beside Winston Churchill on board the Prince of Wales in the dark summer of 1941—this of Harry Truman in 1948 would convey the spirit of both the man and the moment as almost nothing else would.

On Friday, November 5, Truman returned to Washington in triumph. The welcome was the biggest, most enthusiastic outpouring for a President in the history of the capital. So great had been the excitement in the city the day before that the papers had forecast crowds of perhaps half a million people. But at least 750,000—two thirds of the city—lined his route from Union Station to the White House.

The day was warm, sunny, perfect. Truman, Bess, Margaret, Vice President-elect Barkley and his daughter, Mrs. Max Truitt, and Howard McGrath rode in a huge, seven-passenger open Lincoln, with two Secret Service men standing on the rear bumper. Truman and Barkley sat up on the back of the rear seat.

Passing the stone-fronted offices of the Washington Post, Truman looked up to see a big sign strung across the second floor: WELCOME HOME FROM CROW-EATERS.

The day after the election, the staff of the Post had sent a telegram asking him to attend a “Crow Banquet,” to which all newspaper editorial writers, political reporters, pollsters, radio commentators, and columnists would be invited. The main course was to be old crow en glâce. Truman alone would be served turkey. Dress for the guest of honor would be white tie, for the others, sackcloth. In response Truman had written that he had “no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eat crow figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”

Confetti showered down. A band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Truman waved his hat and smiled.

At the White House, he stepped to a microphone on the North Portico to say thank you. The whole stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, all of Lafayette Square, everywhere, as far as he could see, there were people, waving, cheering, calling out to him.

Part Five

Weight of the World

15

Iron Man

Clearly he was conscious of the terrible responsibility his victory had won him. His would be decisions affecting, possibly, the very future of mankind. Ahead of Harry Truman’s America, nameless, half-imagined dangers lurked in every shadow. None knew this better than he.

—Washington Evening Star, Inauguration Day, 1949

I

Thursday, January 20, 1949, was chill and dazzling in Washington, with a stiff wind out of the north and “100 percent” sunshine, as the National Weather Bureau reported. The cloudless sky over the city was a vivid sea blue. Colors everywhere stood out in the sparkling winter atmosphere. Everything gleamed in sunlight—white marble, band instruments, scarlet tunics, brass buttons, long lines of polished black official cars. From Capitol Hill to the White House, along the whole length of Pennsylvania Avenue, hundreds of flags whipped in the wind like the flags in patriotic films.

It was a day made to glorify the occasion, “a perfect Inaugural Day,” as the President’s daughter wrote in her diary. The temperature by noon was in the high 30s, though with the wind, it felt colder.

There had been no full-scale inaugural festivities in Washington since before the war, and this was to be the biggest, most costly inauguration on record, the parade the greatest in the city’s history. The year before, when their return to presidential power had seemed such a certainty, the Republicans who controlled the 80th Congress had voted an unprecedented $80,000 for the most lavish inaugural day ever. Now the jubilant Democrats, with delighted approval from the President, had decided to spend it all.

The size of the crowds was astonishing. More than a century before, in 1829, on a comparably bright winter day, Democrats had descended upon the city from “every point on the compass” to see Andrew Jackson take the oath in front of the East Portico of the Capitol. It was the first time the ceremony had been held there, and fifteen to twenty thousand people attended. At Jackson’s famous White House reception afterward, the mob had grown so unruly that to relieve pressure and save the building, pails of whiskey had been carried out onto the lawn. Now, to see Harry S. Truman, the modern Jacksonian, another “man of the common people” and “hero of the great political drama of 1948,” ride to the Capitol and take the same oath at the same place, more than a million people were gathered, more than ever before in history.

They had been pouring into the city for days, whole delegations in western hats, big-city politicians with their retinues, labor bosses, committeewomen, delegates from the American Legion, the NAACP, Boy Scout troops, Florida bathing beauties, and fifty extremely proud residents of Independence, Missouri, led by Mayor Roger Sermon, as well as ninety-eight veterans of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, with Monsignor Curtis Tiernan as their nominal leader. Entertainers and screen stars arrived—Gene Kelly, Jane Powell, Jane Froman, Lena Horne, Edgar Bergen, Abbott and Costello—and the big bands of Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton, in addition to Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra.

Most hotels were sold out, some at triple the normal rate, and for the first time in the city’s history black guests were staying at several of the best hotels, since Truman, as no President before, had ordered that black Americans were to be as welcome as anyone at the main events of the inaugural.

The “invited guests” for the East Portico ceremony alone, those with seats beneath the inaugural stand, numbered 17,740, and another 44,000 paid $2 to $10 for seats in the wooden grandstands along the parade route.

It was also to be the first inauguration broadcast on television. As great as were the crowds on hand, another audience ten times greater would be watching—an estimated 10 million in fourteen cities connected by coaxial cable. This would make it the largest number of people ever to watch a single event until then. Indeed, more people would see Harry Truman sworn in as President on television on January 20, 1949, than had witnessed all previous presidents taking the oath since the first inauguration of George Washington. (As far away as St. Louis, the western limit of the cable, the pictures, like the day in Washington, were reported “bright and clear.”) And 100 million more would be listening by radio.

Yet, as often said afterward, there was no one who took part, no one watching the parade, no one at the dinners and dances, who had a better time than the man at the center of the spectacle, for whom, by all signs, it was the happiest day of his life, “his day of days,” as his daughter would say. “Weather permitting, I hope to be present,” Truman had written in high spirits, in answer to his own invitation to the ceremonies.

It had been two months since the Key West vacation in November, and much had transpired. Because of conditions at the White House, the President and his family were now living across the way in Blair House, at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue. The old Executive Mansion, as Truman had been informed the day of his return to Washington after the election, was in such a “dangerous” state it could collapse any moment. Ironically, the only safe place in the building was his new balcony. (“Doesn’t that beat all!” he said.)

The facts of the situation were made public for the first time; the White House was closed to visitors. The President, the First Lady, and Margaret all departed for Key West—for Bess and Margaret it was a first visit to the “Little White House” in Florida—and with painters and decorators working night and day, Blair House was made ready, furniture moved in, in time for the family’s return at Thanksgiving.

Privately Truman could not have been happier with the change and for the chance to make sure the White House was restored as it should be. With his love of building, love of history, he was genuinely interested in every detail of the project. “It is the President’s desire that this restoration be made so thoroughly complete that the structural condition and all principal and fixed architectural finishes will be permanent for many generations to come,” wrote Lorenzo Winslow, the architect in charge. At the time, it was thought the job would take a year.

The West Wing, built by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, remained sound and would continue in service. So again Truman was “commuting” to the Oval Office on foot from across Pennsylvania Avenue, as he had in the first weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Flanked by Secret Service agents, he would cross the street in the morning, twice again at lunchtime, and again at day’s end. Traffic stopped, tourists gaped. Once, in early December, when a car with Virginia plates nearly ran him down, the driver, after a screeching stop, pressed his hands to his head, pondering what he had nearly wrought, but Truman walked on unconcerned. It was obvious from the President’s stride, wrote Life, reporting the incident, that he was “a new and very happy man…[who] knew where he was going….”

Shortly after Thanksgiving, Truman had made one of the most fateful decisions of his presidency. George Marshall, who was soon to undergo surgery for the removal of a kidney, had said he wished to retire, and Truman, after some deliberation, picked Dean Acheson to be the next Secretary of State, beginning with the new term. Truman had made the offer to Acheson privately at Blair House. At first speechless, Acheson had said he was not qualified to meet the demands of the office. This, responded Truman, was undoubtedly so, but then he could say the same for himself, or any man. The question was whether he would do the job?

Often in informal conversation, Truman would say there were probably a million men in the country who could make a better President than he, but that this was not the point. He, Harry Truman, was the President. “I have the job and I have to do it and the rest of you have to help me.”

The Berlin Airlift, still proceeding with great effect, was never far from his mind. China was a worry, more and more, as the forces of Mao Tse-tung won one smashing victory after another. From Tokyo, General MacArthur was warning that the “fall” of China imperiled America, while at home, the Red scare grew worse. On December 15, Alger Hiss had been indicted for perjury.

In Independence for Christmas, Truman took his daily walks, tipped his hat to neighbors, and, as reporters noted, carefully knocked the snow from his boots before going into the house. Between Christmas and the inauguration, his days grew increasingly crowded. Up regularly before dawn, he was busy every hour, except for a brief nap after lunch. Members of Congress and the Cabinet made a steady parade in and out of his office. He approved the withdrawal of the last American troops from Korea—a decision to which no great portent was attached by anyone at the time—and, on New Year’s Day, issued a statement recognizing the new Republic of Korea. On Wednesday, January 5, 1949, he went to the Hill to deliver his State of the Union message to the new 81st Congress, calling again for the same progressive social measures he had championed the year before, except now he had a new name for his domestic program, “the Fair Deal,” a name he had coined himself; and, unlike January 1948, when almost no one was listening, everyone now paid close attention.

At a news conference on January 7, visibly moved, he announced the retirement of Marshall and Acheson’s appointment. Another day, he slipped out of the West Wing to fly to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to visit with the convalescing Marshall.

There was the new budget to present, calling for $41.9 billion, the largest ever in peacetime, half of which was to go for defense and foreign aid. There was his inaugural address to work on, meetings to prepare for, more press conferences, a Truman-Barkley Club dinner, and, the night before the inauguration, at the Mayflower Hotel ballroom, a full-dress Presidential Electors dinner, where he surprised and delighted his audience with an impromptu impersonation of H. V. Kaltenborn declaring on election night, in his hard, clipped style, that, “While the President is a million votes ahead in the popular vote…when the country vote comes in, Mr. Truman will be defeated by an overwhelming majority.” The audience exploded with laughter and applause. Truman seemed to glow with vitality and confidence.

He was a man with much to be pleased about, and at age sixty-four, after nearly four years in office and the most arduous political campaign ever waged by a President, he looked as he said he felt, “fit as a fiddle.” His personal popularity, according to the latest polls, had bounced back up to 69 percent, as high as it had been in three years. Congress had raised his salary, from $75,000 to $100,000, and added an extra $50,000, tax-free, for expenses. Bess, all through the week before the inauguration, is said to have positively “bubbled” with good humor.

But there was also a strain of somber obligation in what he said to the crowd at the Mayflower. “I was not in any way elated over the election. In no sense did I feel anything unusual had happened to me. I felt only the responsibility, and that is what we are faced with now.” Privately he worried about the dangers of being in the midst of such immense power and influence as to be found in Washington. “Every once in a while I notice it in myself,” he confided to some of his staff, “and try to drag it out in the open.”

His inaugural day had begun at 6:45, when, having had four and a half hours sleep following the gala of the night before, he stepped out onto the front stoop at Blair House. It was still dark. Pennsylvania Avenue was quiet. A pale moon hung over the great granite confection of the Old State Department Building across the street.

“Happy Inauguration Day, Mr. President,” a reporter called from the sidewalk.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Truman said, glancing at the sky. “Looks like old man weather is going to be with us again.”

He was wearing a dark overcoat, gray suit and gray fedora. He looked alert and rested. Secret Service men moved up and down the steps, or stood at the curb beside his waiting limousine. The move to Blair House was causing them increased concern, since the four-story building fronted directly on the busy avenue, nearly flush with the sidewalk, the front door only ten steps above street level. Scores of pedestrians passed by at all hours of the day. Every time the President came out the door he would be an easy mark. His bedroom, on the second floor, faced the street.

In minutes he was off in the car, again to the Mayflower for a reunion breakfast of Missouri ham and grits with “the boys” from Battery D, who, to the tune of “Tipperary,” sang: “You’re a great, great guy—Harry Truman, for you we’d march through hell.” He didn’t give a damn what they did after one o’clock that afternoon, he told them, but until then they were to stay sober.

“These boys are real,” he told reporters. “They have no axes to grind. They don’t want any jobs. They’re just here. They don’t call me Mr. President. They call me Captain Harry.” He wanted them with him today, as a “kind of honor guard.”

From the Mayflower the big car sped to the White House, flags snapping from the front fenders. Already crowds were converging on Lafayette Square. People waved as the car passed, or shielded their eyes against the morning sun, trying to catch a glimpse of him. From the West Wing, after perhaps fifteen minutes at his desk, he returned to Blair House to change. At ten on the dot, in inaugural attire, frock coat and striped trousers, and accompanied now by Bess and Margaret, he drove the two blocks to St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, the historic “Church of the Presidents,” for a prayer service. Only a small number attended—the Cabinet, a few friends, a few parishioners—since at Truman’s request there had been no prior announcements of the service. Sitting in pew 63, traditionally reserved for the President since the time of James Madison, he joined in the opening hymn, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” and read responsively from the 122nd Psalm: “Pray for peace…Peace be within thy walls…Peace be within thee…”During the prayers, as Bess and Margaret, both Episcopalians, knelt beside him, Truman sat with his head bowed. “With Thy favor…behold and bless Thy servant, Harry, the President of the United States, and all others in authority.”

It was a day in which he would fill many roles, from Captain Harry to Servant Harry to President of the United States. For a time, technically, he was not even President but plain Citizen Harry again, for by law his term of office expired at noon and as the morning wore on, things began falling behind schedule.

He rode to the Hill with Alben Barkley, the two of them now in white silk scarfs and top hats, sitting up for all to see in the back of the huge open Lincoln. At the Capitol, the ceremonial greetings inside the Rotunda took longer than expected. By the time everyone was in place outside on the inaugural platform, by the time the invocation had been delivered, by Dr. Edward Pruden of Washington’s First Baptist Church (Truman’s church), the national anthem sung by tenor Phil Regan, and Alben Barkley, looking like an old Roman, sworn in as Vice President by Justice Stanley Reed, and another prayer spoken by Rabbi Samuel Thurman of the United Hebrew Congregation of St. Louis, it was approaching 12:30.

Truman put aside his hat, scarf, and overcoat. He stood bareheaded in the wind, his right hand raised, a straight-backed, bespectacled figure with closely cropped gray hair, his expression deadly serious. Above him in the winter sun rose the immense white columns and dome of the Capitol. His wife and daughter and some fifteen members of his family sat nearby among the highest officials of the land, many of whom he had known since first coming to Washington. And it was Chief Justice Vinson, his mop of gray hair blowing in the wind, who administered the forty-three-word oath, which Truman repeated slowly and clearly, his left hand on two Bibles, a large facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible, a gift from the people of Independence, and, on top, the same small Gideon edition that had served under such different circumstances on April 12, 1945.

The oath completed, Truman, like Andrew Jackson at his inaugural, bent quickly and kissed the Bible.

It was 1:29, and for the first time as President in his own right, he turned to face the microphones and the expectant crowd.

I accept with humility the honor which the American people have conferred on me. I accept it with a resolve to do all I can for the welfare of this nation and for the peace of the world….

(“How strange the matter-of-fact Missouri twang had sounded in the spring of 1945 to a world familiar with another man’s phrase and another man’s diction,” wrote one reporter. “Today for listeners everywhere there was nothing strange about it. This simply was the President speaking.”)

Each period of our national history has had its special challenges. Those that confront us now are as momentous as any in the past. Today marks the beginning not only of a new administration, but of a period that will be eventful, perhaps decisive, for us and for the world.

He looked solemn and determined as he read from a looseleaf notebook. The voice was surprisingly strong. There was no hesitation, no stumbling over words. It was plain that he had worked on all of it, knew every line. Those close by on the platform could see his breath frosting the air.

The speech was devoted exclusively to foreign policy. Though a major statement of American aspirations, its focus was the world—the “peace of the world,” “world recovery,” “people all over the world.” He denounced communism as a false doctrine dependent on deceit and violence. The line between communism and democracy was clear:

Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters.

Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and fairness.

Communism subjects the individual to arrest without lawful cause, punishment without trial, and forced labor as the chattel of the state. It decrees what information he shall receive, what art he shall produce, what leaders he shall follow, and what thoughts he shall think.

Democracy maintains that government is established for the benefit of the individual, and is charged with the responsibility of protecting the rights of the individual and his freedom in the exercise of those abilities….

The future of mankind was at stake, and without naming the Soviet Union, he stressed that “the actions resulting from the Communist philosophy are a threat to the efforts of free nations to bring about world recovery and lasting peace.”

Democracy was the “vitalizing force” in the world. The American people stood “firm in the faith” that had inspired the nation from the beginning. Americans were united in the belief “that all men have a right to equal justice under law and equal opportunity to share in the common good.”

He was affirmative in spirit, and characteristically he had specific proposals to make, four points, as he said. The United States would continue to support the United Nations; it would keep “full weight” behind the Marshall Plan; and the United States would join in a new “defense arrangement” among the freedom-loving nations of the North Atlantic, “to make it sufficiently clear…that any armed attack affecting our national security would be met with overwhelming force.”

But it was the final proposal, his fourth point, that caught everyone by surprise. He called for a “bold new program” for making the benefits of American science and industrial progress available to “underdeveloped” countries. It was the first mention of what would become known as the Point Four Program.

The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—had no place in the plan, Truman said. Half the people in the world were living in conditions close to misery, and for the first time in history the knowledge and skill were available to relieve such suffering. The emphasis would be on the distribution of knowledge rather than money.

The material resources which we can afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible…. Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors, but also against their ancient enemies—hunger, misery, and despair.

The applause was immense and sustained. He was extending the promise of America beyond America. Poverty, he had said in his State of the Union address, was just as wasteful and just as unnecessary as preventable disease. Now he had extended that idea.

“Truman Proposes ‘Fair Deal’ Plan for the World,” said the headline in the Washington Post. Moreover, he had been eloquent and moving, as he had seldom ever been. Many thought it the finest speech he had ever made. Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln would all have approved and joined in the applause, said The New York Times.

Before the parade, in the interlude during which the President was to be received at lunch in the Capitol, a giant air armada like none ever seen over Washington roared across the sky, some seven hundred planes, including transports like those supplying Berlin and five gigantic new six-engined B-36 bombers that had flown, nonstop, 2,000 miles from Texas.

As the last of the planes passed, the grim President of the inaugural platform, the man with the weight of the world on him, became radiant Harry Truman once more, as he and Barkley, bundled again in overcoats and grinning broadly under their high silk hats, pulled away in the open Lincoln and started slowly back down Pennsylvania Avenue.

To either side now marched the Battery D honor guard, two lines of somewhat portly, gray-haired middle Americans swinging white ash walking canes, keeping pace with the big car rather smartly and all more or less in step as the delighted crowd cheered them on. (Only two would drop out in the mile-and-a-quarter route to the White House.)

The whole pageant struck countless viewers, including many who had witnessed numerous inaugurations, as profoundly stirring. It was a day of dedication for the democratic spirit, with all elements large and small momentarily in harmony.

The clear sunlight, the President’s evident high spirits [said The New York Times], the patience and cheerfulness of the great crowds, such moving episodes as the presence of a guard of honor of Mr. Truman’s comrades of the First World War…the slowly moving masses of men and vehicles coming down the Avenue from the seat of the national legislative power to the seat of its executive power, the booming of the Presidential salute, the planes overhead, the whole mood of the occasion—all these things seemed to speak of a confident and even exultant Americanism…. It was democracy looking homeward across a great continent, but also looking outward toward the world in which democracy will never again be impotent or ashamed or apologetic.

Behind the President, the procession stretched seven miles and would take, in all, three hours to pass. Truman, on reaching the White House, watched the show from a glass-enclosed reviewing stand and he missed none of it. West Point cadets, midshipmen from Annapolis, the Marine Band, the United States Army Band, all came swinging by, companies of WACS, WAVES, the Richmond Blues wearing white-plumed helmets, high school bands, police bands, drum majorettes, beauty queens, trick riders, state governors in open cars, a mounted posse of Kansas City “cowboys”—15,153 men, women, and children in costume, uniform, and civilian dress, more than 40 bands, 55 floats, trucks, jeeps, armored cars, more than 100 horses, 4 mules from Lamar, Missouri, and an old-time circus calliope tooting “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” With Barkley beside him, Truman clapped his gloved hands, waved, chatted, laughed out loud, beat time to the Marine Hymn, swayed his head to the strains of “Dixie,” bounced up and down on the balls of his feet to keep warm while sipping from a white paper cup of what was reportedly coffee but assuredly was not. “Like the honest Missouri extrovert that he is,” wrote Roger Butter-field for Life, “he did not try to hide his moods—the crowds and the cameras saw them all.”

Governor Adlai Stevenson passed by in advance of the Illinois float. General Eisenhower, in a spontaneous tribute that the crowd adored, stood in the back of his open car and saluted the President. Truman beamed and waved his top hat. When a Plymouth Rock float passed by, its cast of Pilgrims suddenly broke out cameras and began snapping pictures of him.

Every state, every size, shape, and color of American democracy, passed in review in the chilly afternoon sunshine. The last inaugural parade, eight years before, in 1941, when the country was arming for war, had been a grim procession of military might. The mood now was different. The crowd in the grandstand opposite the President, people in bright scarfs and winter coats, some wrapped in blankets, was a happy crowd; just as it was now a larger, more plentiful America by far. Harry Truman was President of a nation of 147 million people, an increase in population of more than 15 million since the census of 1940. No President in history had ever taken office at a time of such prosperity and power. Industrial production outstripped any previous time in the nation’s past, and all other nations of the world. The bumper harvest of the previous fall had been the biggest on record. “There never was a country more fabulous than America,” the British historian Robert Payne would write in 1949, after an extensive tour of the country:

She bestrides the world like a Colossus: no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations…. It is already an axiom that the decisions of the American government affect the lives and livelihood of the remotest people. Half the wealth of the world, more than half the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world’s machines are concentrated in American hands….

“The parade was the most fun I have ever had at a parade,” wrote David Lilienthal. But the President, as the papers said, was “the fellow who was having the best time of anyone.”

Only twice did he seem to register disapproval. When the Dixiecrat candidate, Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, rode by waving happily, Truman gave him a cold stare. Then as Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia, another champion of white supremacy, approached, Truman turned his back. But the only real snub was of Thurmond. Truman had turned as Talmadge passed because an electric heater beneath his feet had short-circuited, sending up smoke, and he was trying to put out the fire.

As the sun fell behind the Old State Department Building and the afternoon grew colder, a Texas delegation appeared, led by a car with a banner on its side: “Lieutenant Governor Shivers.” The crowd and the President roared.

Truman stayed to the end, and at the inaugural ball that night at the armory, he was still going strong at nearly two in the morning. No dancer, he watched and waved from a balcony to a crowd of some five thousand people. He was dressed in white tie and tails, while Bess, “smiling and vivacious,” wore a shimmering, full-length gown of silver lamé. With them were Mary Jane Truman, J. Vivian Truman and his daughter Martha Ann, Frank and Natalie Wallace, George and May Wallace, Nellie and Ethel Noland.

“Everybody looked wonderful,” wrote Margaret, who wore pink tulle and spent most of the night on the dance floor. Happiest of all was her father, “whose face was shining like a new moon.”

II

In contrast to his first years in office, and so much to follow, the first six months of the new term were a breather for Truman. Until midsummer 1949, things went well on the whole, the outlook remained hopeful. No calamitous domestic issues erupted. There were no sudden international crises to contend with. Greece and Turkey did not fall to Communist takeovers, nor would they. Nor would France or Italy. Best of all was a decided easing of tension over Berlin that began just days after the inauguration.

Realizing that the airlift was an established success, and that in fact the blockade had backfired on them, the Russians signaled “a change in attitude.” Stalin was backing down. For the first time since Potsdam, the tide seemed to be turning. Secret negotiations followed—“It can almost be stated as a principle that when the Soviets are serious about something they do it in secret,” Chip Bohlen observed—and on May 12, 1949, the blockade ended: The lights of Berlin came on again. The airlift was over, after a year and two months, 277,804 flights, and the delivery of 2,325,809 tons of food and supplies.

For Truman it was a momentous victory. Firmness and patience had prevailed without resorting to force. War had been averted.

On May 12 also, the Allied powers approved establishment of a new German Federated Republic, whereby the West Germans were to rule themselves with their own government at Bonn.

Things overall looked “fifty percent better” than a year ago, Truman confided to Lilienthal. Not even the advance of Communist forces in China seemed to discourage him. At Potsdam, Stalin had told him the people of North China would never be Communists and Truman thought that was “about right.” The dragon was going to “turn over,” he said, “and after that perhaps some advances can be made of it.” With what Lilienthal described as a “big grin and a large dose of his particular brand of charm, which is not inconsiderable,” Truman talked enthusiastically of what a program like TVA could mean for a country like China, “to put it on its feet.”

By then, too, the North Atlantic Treaty had been signed in Washington on April 4, after much hard, skillful negotiation by Secretary of State Acheson. The United States, Canada, and ten Western European countries joined in a defense pact whereby an attack on any one would be taken as an attack on all: For the United States, it marked a radical departure with tradition—the first peacetime military alliance since the signing of the Constitution—but had such an agreement existed in 1914 and 1939, Truman was convinced, the world would have been spared two terrible wars. He ranked NATO with the Marshall Plan, as one of the proudest achievements of his presidency, and was certain that time would prove him right. And though Acheson and British Foreign Secretary Bevin had done most of the work, it was Truman who provided the commitment, unreservedly, just as he had with the Marshall Plan. His first major act after the election in November had been to instruct the State Department to open negotiations for the new alliance, and he rightly considered it his treaty. “We have really passed a milestone in history,” he said in his toast at the state dinner at the Carlton Hotel, following the signing ceremony.

Objections in the Senate, among conservative Republicans, might be fierce, but he had no doubt the treaty would be approved. As it turned out, opposition in the Senate and the press was unexpectedly mild, approval broad. On July 21, the Senate voted ratification by a vote of 82 to 13.

The establishment of NATO, the success of the Berlin Airlift, the prospect of a prosperous, self-governing West Germany as part of the Western Alliance, all made for a greatly improved atmosphere for Truman. “He looks more relaxed…those drawn lines from his eyes across his cheekbones seemed to be considerably modified,” Lilienthal noted.

In March he had taken off again for Key West, for another “working vacation,” his sixth at Key West since becoming President. The place appealed to him as nowhere else. He loved the warm sea bathing and balmy tropical nights, as perhaps only an inland North American can. His quarters were in what had been the commandant’s residence at the Key West naval base, a modest-sized white frame house in the West Indian, style with jalousied porches, simply but comfortably furnished. Hibiscus and bougainvillaea bloomed in the garden. The cares, the pressures, the formality of the presidency, all began to subside almost from the moment he arrived.

He put on bright patterned sports shirts—“Harry Truman shirts,” as they became known—and set off on his early morning walks through the picturesque old town of Key West, stopping sometimes for a cup of coffee at a local lunch counter. The White House pouch arrived daily; members of the Cabinet, congressional leaders, the Joint Chiefs, flew in and out for meetings, and some days he was on the phone far more than he liked; but he enjoyed a daily swim, or rather churning the turquoise water in his self-styled sidestroke, head up to keep his glasses dry, while one or two Navy boats stood guard, to keep other boats at a distance and to watch for barracudas. He loafed in the sun with members of the staff, joked, swapped stories, read, listened to classical music on the phonograph, took an afternoon nap, played poker on the porch nearly every evening, slept soundly, and started off each new day, before his walk with a shot of bourbon.

His privacy on the base was complete. Nor was security ever a problem, which pleased the Secret Service. The staff all enjoyed themselves, as did the thirty-odd reporters who usually made the trip and who had little else to do but enjoy themselves. And with everyone so obviously pleased with his choice of vacation spot, so pleased to be included, pleased to be with him, Truman enjoyed himself that much more. “He was great down in Key West!” remembered Jim Rowley, by then head of the Secret Service detail.

Soon they were all sporting Harry Truman shirts. To Truman’s great delight, even Sam Rayburn, during a visit in November, had put on one printed with flocks of cranes and swaying palm trees.

Back in Washington on May 8, at a party celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday in the ballroom of the palatial Larz Anderson House on Embassy Row, as toasts were raised, Truman looked better by far than he had since 1945, “like a man who had few qualms about the future,” according to one account. “The President,” said his physician, Wallace Graham, “is as close to being an iron man as anyone I know at his age.”

The one distinct shadow on these “first sunny months” of 1949 was the tragic fate of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who as far back as the previous summer had begun looking weary and troubled and who, since the election, had been acting quite strangely. An intense, introverted, extremely dedicated man by nature, Forrestal had worked himself to a state of near collapse, yet wished only to hold on and work harder.

Truman had begun losing confidence in Forrestal even before the fall campaign. Struggling to bring about the reorganization of the military services—an unprecedented, killing task—Forrestal had become increasingly indecisive and absorbed in details. “He won’t take hold,” Truman complained. At one point, exasperated with Forrestal’s handling of a problem, Truman had sent an uncharacteristically curt note saying, “This is your responsibility.” Then, with the campaign under way, there had been suspicions about Forrestal’s loyalty, whether his meetings with Thomas E. Dewey really concerned defense matters, as Forrestal said, or were arranged in the hope of staying on in the Dewey administration. Drew Pearson called it an open secret that Forrestal wanted to hold on to his job regardless of the outcome in November, and several of those closest to Truman grew convinced that politically the Secretary of Defense was no longer to be trusted.

Forrestal had also been one of the few members of the Cabinet since the departure of Henry Wallace to disagree with the President over policy—over Palestine and civilian control of the atomic bomb most notably—and now he was adamantly opposed to Truman’s position on defense spending. To achieve a balanced budget, Truman insisted on a defense ceiling of $15 billion, a sum equal to more than a third of the entire federal budget, but that Forrestal thought dangerously low given the scale of the Soviet menace.

Criticism of Forrestal by the press had grown steadily since his unpopular stand on the Palestine issue, with Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell leading the attack in their columns and radio broadcasts. And for Forrestal who had long courted the press, this was all extremely painful. He was called a tool of Wall Street and the oil companies, an imperialist, an anti-Semite. Pearson and Winchell tried to create doubt about his personal courage, with a trumped-up account of how years before, Forrestal had fled out the back door of his New York City home as jewel thieves accosted his wife. On an NBC Radio broadcast in January, a guest claimed that the I. G. Farben works in Frankfurt had not been bombed during the war because Forrestal owned I. G. Farben stock—a totally false charge that NBC later retracted.

The more amplified the attacks became, the more Truman, who hated to dismiss anyone under almost any circumstances, was inclined to keep Forrestal where he was. Truman would not have him leave “under fire.” In February, Drew Pearson had attacked Harry Vaughan for accepting a decoration from the Argentine dictator Juan Perón, a decoration that several others, including Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, had received earlier, but about which nothing had been said. Pearson had called for Vaughan’s immediate dismissal and Truman publicly responded by calling Pearson an “S.O.B.,” which raised a new storm of adverse comment and gave Truman a great deal of satisfaction. “No commentator or columnist names any members of my Cabinet, or my staff,” he said. “I name them myself And when it is time for them to be moved on, I do the moving—nobody else.” It was a sentiment that had been felt by other presidents before him and would be often again by more who followed in his place, but that none stated so openly in so many words.

Forrestal, as he told a friend, felt that Truman had always been very fair with him. Truman was “the best boss I have ever known.” To another friend he wrote that the American people were fortunate to have in the highest office “a man who, while he reflects the liberal forces both in this country and throughout the world, is nevertheless conservative in the real sense of that word—a conserver of the things we hope to keep.”

Forrestal was still greatly admired by several of those whose judgment Truman particularly valued. Eisenhower, whom Truman had recently asked to serve as an informal “presiding officer” of the Joint Chiefs, considered Forrestal one of the best men in public life and, as Eisenhower recorded privately, more perceptive than Truman concerning “the mess we are in due to neglect of our armed forces.”

Except for my liking, admiration, and respect for his [Forrestal’s] great qualities I’d not go near Washington, even if I had to resign my commission completely [Eisenhower wrote in his diary in January 1949]. To a certain extent these same feelings apply to H.S.T., but he does not see the problems so clearly as does Jim, and does not suffer so much due to the failure to solve the problems. I like them both.

But Forrestal, as Eisenhower also noted, was “looking badly…. He gives his mind no recess, and he works hours that would kill a horse.”

(Eisenhower would himself soon find the bickering between the services all but intolerable. He was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and worrying about his blood pressure. By mid-March he was suffering from severe stomach cramps, and Truman sent him off to recuperate for three weeks at the Little White House in Key West.)

A reporter seeing Forrestal on inauguration day was shocked by his “baffled” look. Afflicted with insomnia and loss of appetite, Forrestal appeared strangely drawn and aged, his shirt collars too large for him. Some days he would telephone the President several times on the same subject, which left Truman mystified. Privately, Forrestal told a few close friends his phone was being tapped. At meetings he would unconsciously scratch at a particular part of his scalp until it turned raw.

When, in early February, Forrestal told Truman he was resigning and would leave by June 1, Truman saw it would have to be sooner than that.

As Forrestal knew, Truman, for some time, had been considering Louis Johnson as his replacement—Johnson the headstrong financial wonder-worker of the Whistle-stop Campaign, who had once served as Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of War—and Forrestal agreed with the choice, or so he said. Johnson, on meeting Forrestal to discuss the transition, concluded after an hour, as he later told Drew Pearson, that Forrestal was insane, or possibly taking drugs.

“Forrestal wanted to resign long before he did,” Truman would write, “and I kept him from it, although I realized later that I should have let him quit when he wanted. He left because of failing health, and that’s all there was to it.”

On Tuesday, March 1, Truman summoned Forrestal to the White House to ask for his resignation. Truman also urged him to take a vacation, though he said nothing about seeking medical attention.

Forrestal maintained the necessary composure for public appearances in the following weeks, but only barely. He was present at the Pentagon on March 28 when Louis Johnson was formally installed as Secretary of Defense, and later in the day he stood mute at another ceremony at the White House, when Truman presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. But the next day, Forrestal, “a very sick man,” was flown to Florida, to Robert Lovett’s home at Hobe Sound, where he told Lovett, “They’re after me.” In the days following he made at least one attempt at suicide.

Unaware of what was happening in Florida, but having now heard reports that Forrestal thought he was being followed by foreign agents, Truman asked the head of the Secret Service, U. E. Baughman, to look into the matter at once. The report, marked “Secret” and dated March 31, said Forrestal’s suspicions were unfounded, that he had become of late “exceedingly nervous and emotional,” and so distraught by the time of his last day as Secretary of Defense that he had not even known his own servants.

As a result of his apparent lack of ability to make a positive decision and carry it out, he was assisted and escorted to the plane [to Florida] by two friends and former associates. When Mr. F. exhibited a last minute reluctance to make his departure, one of the friends reportedly said to the other: “We have to do something—we can’t keep him around here.”

Forrestal, the report concluded, was suffering from a “slight nervous breakdown,” which apparently was as much as Truman had been told up to that point.

In Florida, a Navy psychiatrist and the renowned Dr. William C, Menninger had been sent for, and on April 2, Forrestal was flown back to Washington to be admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment of “nervous exhaustion.”

Drew Pearson reported that Forrestal was “out of his mind” and claimed incorrectly that in Florida Forrestal had rushed out into the street screaming, “The Russians are coming.”

Truman called on Forrestal at Bethesda the first week in May and thought Forrestal seemed “his old self.”

Two weeks later, on Sunday, May 22, at two in the morning, Forrestal sat in his room on the sixteenth floor of the hospital copying lines from Sophocles’ “Chorus from Ajax”:

Worn by the waste of time—

Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save

In the dark prospect of the yawning grave…

About three o'clock he walked across the hall to a small kitchen. After tying one end of the sash from his bathrobe to a radiator and the other end around his neck, he jumped from the unbarred window. His body was found on the roof of the third floor, the sash still around his neck.

The news rocked Washington. Suicide among high-ranking government figures was unknown. Other Cabinet members had resigned over the years, or been fired under a cloud, but none had ever taken his own life. Truman, in his words, was “inexpressibly shocked and grieved.” The First Lady, haunted by memories of her father, was, as Margaret later revealed, “terribly shaken.” At Easter, only the week before, Bess had sent Forrestal a bouquet of roses and in a note of appreciation he had said how much they had “helped brighten a bleak day.”

I am moved that you should trouble to send me a token but it’s typical of your thoughtfulness. A Happy Easter to you and the President and Miss Truman. You all deserve it.

The President and Vice President, former President Hoover, the Cabinet, much of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, General Marshall, an estimated six thousand people were present for Forrestal’s burial with full military honors at Arlington.

Truman, angry, troubled, doubtless remorseful that he hadn’t acted sooner to relieve Forrestal from duty, accused Drew Pearson of “hounding” him to death. Pearson wrote that it was Truman’s call for Forrestal’s resignation that “undoubtedly worsened the illness.” David Lawrence, in his column in the Washington Star, said it was not work that killed Forrestal, but the President’s loss of confidence in him.

Questions about the tragedy persisted. Why had Forrestal, in his condition, with suicidal tendencies, been placed in a sixteenth-floor room? Had his priest been denied the chance to see him? As time went on, and fear of Communist conspiracy spread in Washington, it would be rumored that pages from Forrestal’s diary had been secretly removed on orders from the White House—that Forrestal, the most ardent anti-Soviet voice in the administration, had in fact been driven to his death as part of a Communist plot and the evidence destroyed by “secret Communists” on Truman’s staff.

But as ever in Washington, it was who was in power that mattered most and so the focus of attention swiftly shifted to the new Secretary of Defense, who, with his previous experience in the department, his reputation for getting things done, had seemed well equipped for the job. Louis Johnson was tough, hardheaded, and, importantly, committed to the President’s policy of holding the line on spending. On the Hill, Democrats and Republicans liked what they saw. The Senate approved the appointment unanimously. But in little time Johnson’s personal style and mode of operation made him a figure of extreme controversy. He hit the Pentagon like a cyclone.

Johnson’s first move was to evict several high-ranking officers from the largest office in the building and make it his own. He resurrected General Pershing’s old desk and installed Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, as a deputy. Half of all Pentagon employees, some twenty-five thousand people, were shuffled about in a gigantic game of musical chairs. He did away with outdated service boards, cut back the use of official cars.

Johnson was doing what Truman had asked for. From his experience on the Truman Committee, Truman was convinced that huge sums were being wasted in defense spending. He had a basic distrust of generals and admirals when it came to spending money. In late April, with no advance warning to the President or the Secretary of the Navy, Johnson suddenly canceled construction of a new $186 million supercarrier, United States, a major component in the Navy’s whole program—with the result that the Secretary of the Navy, John Sullivan, resigned in a rage. Truman, who liked Sullivan and did not blame him for resigning, nonetheless approved the cancelation. Still, Johnson’s manner troubled him greatly.

In May, to the disbelief of the Joint Chiefs, Johnson ordered another $1.4 billion slashed from the military budget. To those who charged he was weakening the country’s defense, Johnson boasted that the United States could “lick Russia with one hand tied behind our back.”

Where Forrestal had been small, introverted, and apolitical almost to a fault, Johnson was a great boisterous bear of a man who shouted to make his point to an admiral or general, and exuded such overt political ambition, stirred such speculation as to his true motives, that he felt obliged after only a few months on the job to state publicly several times that he was not running for President. The press quoted an unnamed high official who said Johnson was making two enemies for every dollar he saved.

As was becoming rapidly apparent, Louis Johnson was possibly the worst appointment Truman ever made. In a little more than a year, many who worked with him, including Truman and Dean Acheson, would conclude that Johnson was mentally unbalanced. “Unwittingly,” wrote General Bradley later, “Truman had replaced one mental case with another.”

The President, the country read, was “in high good humor,” “cheerful and chipper.” And busy. He named Attorney General Tom Clark to the Supreme Court, made Howard McGrath the new Attorney General, put Bill Boyle, his old Kansas City protégé and whistle-stop mastermind, in McGrath’s place at the head of the Democratic Party. He also picked Perle Mesta to be the new minister to Luxembourg, an appointment of no great importance but remembered fondly because it inspired a hit Broadway musical, Call Me Madam, with music by Irving Berlin, and Ethel Merman in the title role.

But even before spring vanished in the furnace heat of June and another long summer settled on the city, Truman’s good cheer and optimism were being put to the test. The wave of anti-communism that had been gathering force since the charges against Alger Hiss erupted the previous summer now grew more serious, with Cardinal Spellman of New York, among others, saying America was in imminent danger of a Communist takeover. In December 1948, Hiss was indicted for perjury, but the real issue, everyone knew, remained the same: Was he or was he not a Communist spy? And how many more like him were there in government?

The country, Truman assured reporters, was not going to hell. They ought to read some history. America had been through such times before. “Hysteria finally died down, and things straightened out, and the country didn’t go to hell, and it isn’t now.” When the Hiss trial ended in a hung jury in July, another trial was scheduled for the fall. As Truman failed to foresee, the issue was not going to go away.

Then at midsummer the outlook became dramatically worse. Indeed, by August 1949 Truman had entered a time of severe trial. Events beyond his control—in China and the Soviet Union—rocked the Western world as nothing had since the war, while on Capitol Hill, as if to provide a kind of perverse comic relief, Harry Vaughan was summoned before a Senate investigating committee.

The news from China had been grim all year, Truman’s oddly sanguine remarks on the subject to David Lilienthal notwithstanding. The Chinese Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek had been crumbling fast before the onrush of the Communists. The American military adviser to Chiang, General David Barr, reported that

the military situation has deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of United States troops could effect a remedy…. No battle has been lost since my arrival due to lack of ammunition or equipment…. [The Nationalist] debacles, in my opinion, can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership…the widespread corruption and dishonesty through the [Nationalist] armed forces….

In April a Communist army of a million men crossed the Yangtze River, south into the last provinces still loyal to Chiang. The outcome, the complete fall of China to the forces of Mao Tse-tung—an outcome implicit as early as 1946 in what George Marshall reported after his fruitless year in China—had by spring become a foregone conclusion.

Vehement alarm was sounded. Angry, vindictive charges were made against the administration by what had become known as the “China Lobby,” whose numbers included religious and patriotic groups across the country, prominent Republicans in Congress, and Time and Life publisher Henry R. Luce, who was the son of missionaries to China. Life had carried an article by General MacArthur titled “The Fall of China Imperils the U.S.” Time warned that the Red tide rising in Asia threatened to engulf half the peoples of the world.

Yet it was the administration’s own attempt to account for its China policy, an effort intended to clarify what was about to happen in China before it happened, and thereby calm the country, that gave focus to this momentous turn of history as nothing else had, and with unexpected consequences.

At a morning press conference on August 4, Truman announced the release of a massive State Department report, United States Relations with China: With Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949, 409 pages in length, with another 645 pages of appended documents in smaller print. He had asked to have it compiled, Truman said, as a “frank and actual record…clear and illuminating…everything you want to know about the policy” from the 1840s forward.

As Dean Acheson stressed in a preface to the report, the United States had poured more than $2 billion into support for Chiang Kai-shek since V-J Day—money and arms to help destroy communism in China—but it had not been enough. The fault, said Acheson, was in the internal decay of the Nationalist regime, its rampant corruption, lack of leadership, its indifference to the aspirations of the Chinese people. “The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the…United States…. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not.”

Truman, his spelling no better than ever, had said in a handwritten note earlier that a “currupt” Nationalist government was the cause of China’s woes. “We picked a bad horse,” he told Arthur Vandenberg.

The “China White Paper” caused a sensation. Affection for China was widespread in the country. Generations of American children had carried nickels and dimes to Sunday School to support missionaries in China. Books by Pearl Buck about Chinese peasant life had won the hearts of millions of readers; Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo, and his smiling, photogenic, Wellesley-educated wife had been America’s loyal allies through the war. Now the State Department was declaring officially that China, the largest nation on earth, was lost to communism. Instead of serving as a palliative, as Truman and Acheson intended, the report inflamed the controversy. The New York Times judged it a “sorry record of well-meaning mistakes.” More outraged critics called it a whitewash, a deliberate distortion, and worse, “a smooth alibi for the pro-Communists in the State Department who…aided in the Communist conquest of China.” In the Senate, Republican William Knowland of California wondered aloud, and without a shred of evidence, whether Alger Hiss had helped shape China policy. The China Lobby raised the cry that Truman and Acheson had “lost” China, as though China had been America’s to lose. A few Democrats, too, joined in the attack, including Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

At the same time, Harry Vaughan was back in the news in what had all the signs of a full-blown White House scandal. A Senate subcommittee chaired by Democrat Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina had begun investigating so-called “five percenters,” those who, for 5 percent commissions, used their supposed influence to secure contracts or favored treatment from the government. Vaughan, it was revealed by several witnesses, had used his high position—“his general’s stars, his White House telephone and his place in Harry Truman’s affections”—to ease the way for such men-about-Washington as James V. Hunt, a former Army officer who claimed to be one of Vaughan’s best friends, and “Mysterious” John Maragon, truly an old friend of Vaughan’s, who in the first weeks of Truman’s presidency in 1945 had been seen about the West Wing so often he was thought to be one of the staff.

When it was shown that Hunt had improper influence with the chief of the Army Chemical Corps and the Quartermaster General, Truman immediately ordered the retirement of the first and the suspension of the second officer.

Most of Vaughan’s activities in behalf of such friends dated from just after the war. As a favor to Hunt he had helped obtain scarce lumber for construction of a California race track, a project being blocked by government restrictions on building materials needed for housing. For Maragon, he secured a permit for the purchasing of molasses, another scarce item. For a Chicago perfume manufacturer, another of Hunt’s clients, he arranged a priority flight to Europe by Air Transport Command—at the time when Germany had just surrendered and virtually all transport facilities were preempted for military use—an arrangement whereby the Chicago manufacturer returned home with perfume essence valued at $53,000.

There was nothing illegal about the operations of the five percenters, nothing illegal about what Vaughan had done. But as had also been disclosed, the same Chicago perfume manufacturer, David A. Bennett, had made Vaughan a gift of a cold-storage food container, a “deep freezer,” valued at approximately $400. Moreover, at Vaughan’s suggestion, Bennett sent five more freezers: one to the First Lady, which broke down and had to be junked, one to Fred Vinson, who was then Secretary of the Treasury, one to J. K. Vardaman, who installed it in his Rappahannock County, Virginia, mountain retreat, another to Matt Connelly, and another to John Snyder, who returned it.

Summoned before the Hoey Committee, Vaughan insisted he had only been trying to be helpful. “I do these people a courtesy of putting them in contact with the persons with whom they can tell their story,” he explained.

It was, of course, what every politician in Washington did almost daily. Nor was there a law against public officials accepting gifts from friends and constituents, as many news accounts were careful to point out. The President himself was constantly receiving and accepting gifts of all kinds—paintings, prize turkeys, country hams, Havana cigars, liquor, even a Ford automobile, during his first year in office. The freezers, said Vaughan, were “an expression of friendship and nothing more,” and Chairman Hoey, after Vaughan’s two days of testimony, acknowledged there was no evidence of corruption on Vaughan’s part. Yet the damage was done. The freezers had been kept confidential and Vaughan’s use of his privileged position, if not illegal, had been decidedly inappropriate and inept. His poor judgment, the almost ludicrous lack of propriety that had so long concerned others at the White House like Charlie Ross and Eben Ayers, had caught up with him.

Though his manner before the committee was calm and respectful, even impressive at times, by appearance Vaughan seemed anything but a figure of rectitude. Grossly overweight, his uniform, for all its brass and ribbons, looking about as military as pajamas, he was like a cartoonist’s portrait of corruption. Thomas Nast would have gloried in the chance to draw him, as slouching back in his witness chair Vaughan lit up a big cigar.

The Republicans on the committee had prepared, as Time wrote, for a political barbecue with Vaughan as the pig on the spit. But the one who enjoyed it most, glowering at the witness, pointedly addressing the uniformed general as “Mr. Vaughan,” was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Was it true, asked McCarthy, that he had taken campaign contributions from “Racket King” Frank Costello?

“Am I supposed to know Frankie Costello?…How did he get in here?” responded Vaughan, rightfully incredulous.

If the hearings had proven anything, it was only that Vaughan was an embarrassment who in the guise of a general played courthouse politics from the White House in a style reminiscent of the Harding days. “Five percenters” and “deep freezers” became odious new catchwords, to the extreme pleasure of the Republicans.

“Ross and I discussed the whole thing at some length,” wrote Eben Ayers. “We agreed that Vaughan is entirely to blame for his troubles and the troubles he has brought on the President and others. But he seems to have no realization of what harm he has caused….”

What Truman did was just what everyone who knew him well knew he would do. Had he been constituted differently, had he been able to see the commotion over Vaughan as justified, and not an attack on him personally—which was how he interpreted it—had he been able to see that Vaughan was a serious liability and been willing to sacrifice him for the sake of the public trust, not to say his own reputation, then things might have gone differently. But he did not, and this, as time would tell, was a mistake.

Beneath everything, Truman not only liked Vaughan, but liked how Vaughan conducted himself, and particularly with respect to the press. When, in the midst of the hearings, Vaughan had arrived back in Washington after a vacation and was confronted by reporters at Union Station, he had warned them to go easy on him. “After all I am the President’s military aide, and you guys will all want favors at the White House someday.” Asked about his connection with the five percenters, he said, “That’s nobody’s goddamn business and you can quote me,” a response that so warmed Truman’s heart when he read it that he pinned a mock decoration on Vaughan for “Operation Union Station.”

“I think,” Alben Barkley would later comment, “that Mr. Truman was far too kind and loyal to certain old friends who took advantage of him and whose actions sometimes were no credit to his administration.”

When Vaughan offered to resign, Truman told him to say no such thing in his presence ever again. They had come into the White House together, Truman said, and they would go out together.

Only weeks later came the most stunning news of all, portending, as David Lilienthal wrote, “a whole box of trouble.” An Air Force weather reconnaissance plane, flying at 18,000 feet from Japan to Alaska, had detected signs of intense radioactivity over the North Pacific, east of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Soon planes elsewhere over the Pacific were reporting radioactivity as much as twenty times above normal. The radioactive cloud was tracked by the Air Force from the Pacific nearly to the British Isles, where it was picked up by the RAF.

It took several days for scientists to analyze the data. Their conclusion was reached the afternoon of Monday, September 19. Lilienthal, who was on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, received the news that night in memorable fashion. As he and his wife were returning from a dinner party to their house near the northern shore of the island, they saw the figure of a man suddenly loom up out of the ground fog, caught in the glare of their headlights. It was General James McCormack, who looked bemused, thought Lilienthal, “as if I frequently found him on a windswept moor, in the dead of night, on an island….”

Later, alone with Lilienthal in an upstairs room lit by a single kerosene lamp, McCormack gave Lilienthal his report.

The coal-oil lamp between us [Lilienthal wrote], the shadows all around; outside, through…[the] windows, the Great Dipper and the North Star off toward the lights of New Bedford…. I took it with no outward evidence of anything more than a budget problem….

Was he disturbed over something, his wife asked after they had gone to bed. “Oh some. One of those things,” he said.

By 8:20 the next morning, he and McCormack were on their way to Washington in an Air Force C-47. Lilienthal was to see Truman at the White House that afternoon. By 11:30 he was at his office conferring with a hurriedly assembled advisory commission of nuclear scientists, chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who looked frantic. There was no question, said Oppenheimer, the Russians had detonated an atomic bomb.

“Vermont affair, we are here,” Lilienthal wrote, “Vermont” being the code name for the Russian bomb.

How was the President taking the news? Would he tell the country? And how soon?

Lilienthal saw Truman promptly at 3:45 and later, in his diary, in almost telegraphic style, he put down this extraordinary account of their half hour together:

The President was reading a copy of the Congressional Record, as quiet and composed a scene as imaginable; bright sunlight in the garden outside….

He said: want to talk about this detection report—knew about it—knew it would probably come—German scientists in Russia did it, probably something like that. Be glad to call in the Joint Committee [on Atomic Energy] chairman, ranking minority member, tell them…. Not going to say anything myself now; later when this [Truman pointed to a newspaper with headlines about the devaluation of the British pound] quiets down, maybe in a week; realize may leak, lots people know—still take that chance, meet it when it comes.

I said: may I have permission to state [my] views, despite fact you have reached conclusion? He took off his glasses, first time I saw him without them, large, fine eyes. Considerate, fine air of patience and interest. I tried to set out affirmative virtue of making it [the announcement] now and initiating matter rather than plugging leaks…. First, would show Pres. knows what is going on in Vermont [Russia]…. Second, Pres. knowing and saying so would show him not scared, hence others needn’t be; third, would show Pres. will tell people when things come along they need to know that won’t hurt being told.

[The President agreed that] maintaining confidence of people in him, taking cue from his own calm, was good point, but not afraid of that. Can’t be sure anyway [that the Russians actually had the bomb]. I stepped into that: is sure, substantial—and great surprise even to [the] most pessimistic. Really?—sharp look….

But [an announcement] by him [might] cause great fears, troubles. They [the Russians] changed…talking very reasonably again, things look better [since the end of the Berlin crisis]; this may have something to do with it. Not worried; took this into account; going to work things out….

Three days later, the morning of Friday, September 23, with the White House press crammed into his office, Charlie Ross asked first that the door be closed, then passed out a mimeographed statement from the President. In an instant reporters were stampeding for the press telephones, smashing the head of a stuffed deer in their rush.

I believe the American people, to the fullest extent consistent with national security, are entitled to be informed of all developments in the field of atomic energy. That is my reason for making public the following information.

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R….

As the statement also said, the eventual development of “this new force by other nations was to be expected.” Nonetheless, the news was three to five years ahead of most predictions and the realization came as an immense shock. The four-year American monopoly on the atomic bomb was over. And though there was no panic in the country, the fears and tensions of the Cold War were greatly amplified. It was a different world now.

A week later, on October 1 in Peking, the People’s Republic of China, the most numerous Communist nation in the world, with more than 500 million people, one fifth of humanity, was officially inaugurated.

Very soon afterward, in October 1949, in a series of highly secret meetings at the offices of the Atomic Energy Commission, discussion began on the subject of a thermonuclear or hydrogen weapon—a superbomb, or “Super”—which would have more than ten times the destructive power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Russian bomb, it was felt, had changed the situation “drastically.” And if the Russians were capable of producing an atomic bomb, then the Russians too were in a position now to push forward with the more devastating weapon.

The initial proposal for the “Super” had come from Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission, with strong support from the physicist Edward Teller.

James B. Conant, who had served on the President’s Interim Committee on the first bomb, was flatly opposed. So was Oppenheimer. Enrico Fermi seemed at first to favor going ahead, then changed his mind. In the end, the scientific advisory committee expressed its opposition to the project on both technical and moral grounds. General Bradley was for it mainly for its “psychological” importance. Clearly, there would have to be a presidential decision.

Lilienthal had privately concluded that he, too, was against the Super. (“We keep saying, ‘We have no other course!’ Lilienthal wrote. “What we should be saying is, ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’”) But the morning of Tuesday, November 1, he met with Dean Acheson to explain the “essence of the business,” so Acheson might take it up with the President “soon,” before he, Lilienthal, and others presented it in greater detail.

What a depressing world it was, Acheson remarked after listening to Lilienthal. He didn’t know how Lilienthal had lived with “this grim thing.”

In the evening of that same first day in November 1949, the President sat down to dinner at Blair House alone. Bess Truman, as she had been for most of the summer, was away in Independence, looking after her mother; Margaret was in New York, pursuing her singing career, and as always, their absence left him feeling downcast, if not occupied with work or people around him. Several times over the long, difficult summer, in letters home, he had grown more reflective than usual, recounting events that had brought him to where he was. “We can never tell what is in store for us,” he had said to Bess. “Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think or wish for such a position,” he told Nellie and Ethel Noland. He had “succeeded in getting myself into more trouble than Pandora ever let loose in the world.”

If he felt Bess’s absences more than usual, it was because their life together now, in Blair House, seemed such an improvement over what it had been across the avenue. The house itself, even with the quick cosmetics applied the year before, was not only nothing very grand, but a bit dowdy. It creaked and groaned, trembled noticeably whenever streetcars passed by outside. Its dark, old cellar was full of rats, as was well known by the Secret Service men, who hated ever having to go down there. And with Washington’s Emergency Hospital located just around the corner on F Street, ambulance sirens screamed by in the street below the President’s bedroom window often several times a night. Of all the presidents they had known, some of the Secret Service men would later say, only Harry Truman would have been willing to live in the place.

But with Margaret no longer at home, and without the burden of White House entertaining, the President and the First Lady had more time alone together, sitting in the small back garden reading, having lunch, or resting. Indeed, it was the first time in their married life that they had ever had a house to themselves. “Very discreet, very polite, they spent a lot of time behind closed doors in Blair House,” remembered J. B. West. Maids joked about the “lovebirds” upstairs, and in recounting his memories of the Truman years, West would later provide the one known suggestion of the sexual attraction between these two very private, essentially Victorian people.

Sometime earlier that fall, when Bess had returned from a long stay with her mother in Independence, both she and the President had been so “jubilant,” so obviously happy to be with each other again, that the whole domestic staff felt a lift of spirits. Everybody kept grinning, West remembered.

The next morning, when West reported to the First Lady’s study at nine as usual, to go over the day’s menu, she told him “in a rather small, uncomfortable voice” that there was a little problem with the President’s antique bed. Two of the slats had broken during the night, she said, blushing.

He would attend to it immediately, said West, who had concluded, as he later wrote, that the Trumans were definitely not “antiques.”

Now, the evening of November 1, with Bess back again in Independence, and after “another hell of a day,” Truman penned one of the most delightful of all his diary sketches of himself—part melancholy, part amusing, entirely human and in character:

Had dinner by myself tonight. Worked in the Lee House office until dinner time. A butler came in very formally and said, “Mr. President, dinner is served.” I walked into the dining room in the Blair House. Barnett in tails and white tie pulls out my chair, pushes me up to the table. John in tails and white tie brings me a fruit cup. Barnett takes away the empty cup. John brings me a plate, Barnett brings me a tenderloin, John brings me asparagus, John brings me carrots and beets. I have to eat alone and in silence in a candle lit room. I ring—Barnett takes the plate and butter plates. John comes in with a napkin and a silver crumb tray—there are no crumbs but John has to brush them off the table anyway. Barnett brings me a plate with a finger bowl and doily on it—I remove finger bowl and doily and John puts a glass saucer and a little bowl on the plate. Barnett brings me some chocolate custard. John brings me a demitasse (at home a little cup of coffee—about two good gulps) and my dinner is over. I take a hand bath in the finger bowl and go back to work.

What a life!

III

Of the nine members of his Cabinet, none was so conspicuous or had more influence on Truman than the elegant, polished Dean Acheson, Secretary of State. His place was unrivaled. Unlike Woodrow Wilson, whose portrait over the mantel in the Cabinet Room still kept watch over gatherings of the Cabinet each Friday morning at ten, Truman had no inside adviser like Colonel Edward House. Nor was there anyone serving as international troubleshooter the way Harry Hopkins had for Roosevelt. The relationship between Truman and Acheson was clear and unimpeded, as Truman wished. Acheson ran the vast operations of State, With its twenty-two thousand employees, but he was also the President’s continuous contact with the world, his reporter and interpreter of world events, as well as his chief negotiator and spokesman on foreign policy. Apart from Cabinet meetings, where Acheson sat on Truman’s immediate right, they saw each other regularly twice a week—Mondays and Thursdays at 12:30—and talked by phone almost daily.

Truman considered the importance of the office of Secretary of State second only to his own, and had filled the job three times now with men of proven ability and strong personality. Of Edward Stettinius, the Secretary he had inherited from Roosevelt and quickly replaced, Truman wrote, “a fine man, good looking, amiable, cooperative, but never an idea old or new.” No figurehead Secretary, no mere dispenser of White House policy would answer. But in Acheson he had found his most exceptional Secretary, and one who, unlike either of his two predecessors, Byrnes and Marshall, had assumed the responsibilities of the office after years of experience in the department and after having already played a decisive part in the two landmark achievements of Truman’s first term, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

There was no one in the administration, or in the Cabinet, or on the White House staff, whose views overall, whose sense of proportion, timing, sense of history, whose personal code and convictions concerning America’s role in the world carried such weight with the President as Acheson, or whose trust and friendship were to mean as much in the long run.

“It was a great thing between Mr. Truman and me,” Acheson would recall.

Each one understood his role and the other’s. We never got tangled up in it. I never thought I was the President, and he never thought he was the Secretary…. It is important that the relations between the President and his Secretary be quite frank, sometimes to the point of being blunt. And you just have to be deferential. He is the President of the United States, and you don’t say rude things to him—you say blunt things to him. Sometimes he doesn’t like it. That’s natural, but he comes back, and you argue the thing out. But that’s your duty. You don’t tell him only what he wants to hear. That would be bad for him and for everyone else.

Truman often referred to Acheson as his “top brain man” in the Cabinet.

That Harry Truman of Missouri, product of the Pendergast machine, “bosom pal” of Harry Vaughan, could possibly have anything in common with Dean Gooderham Acheson, Groton ’11, Yale ’15, Harvard Law ’19, or feel at ease in such a partnership, struck many as almost ludicrous. Acheson was still another surprise in the presidency of this continuously surprising President.

He seemed to be everything Truman would find objectionable, the ultimate “striped pants boy,” were one to judge by appearance—and in Acheson’s case it was nearly impossible not to judge by appearance, since that, at first glance, was much the most impressive thing about him.

With his beautiful, chalk-stripe English flannel suits, his striking carriage, his bristling guardsman’s mustache and luxuriant eyebrows, Acheson looked not quite real, more like an actor cast for the part of Secretary of State, a tall, slim, imperious, emphatically English-looking Secretary of State. Everything was in order—expensive English shoes rubbed to a fine gloss, the correct quantity of cuff showing spotlessly, hair brushed back from a noble brow. He was just over six feet tall, but the perfect tailoring and perfect posture, the lift of the head, made him seem taller still. He could not go unnoticed. Among the fond memories of Washington in these years would be the sight of the Secretary of State on his way to work in the morning, leather dispatch case in hand, walking the mile and a half from his home in Georgetown accompanied by Justice Felix Frankfurter, who, nearly a head shorter, seemed to take two steps for every one of the Secretary's. Two celebrated conversationalists, they talked the whole way, and reportedly never about government, while Frankfurter’s car followed behind to drive him to the Court, once he and Acheson parted company at the steps of the State Department.

“If Harry Truman were a painter,” said a Republican congressman, “and had never laid eyes on Acheson, and sat down to paint a picture of a foreign minister, he would come up with a life-size oil of Dean.” For years Senator Lyndon Johnson entertained friends with his imitation of Acheson entering a committee room, nose in the air. Averell Harriman, who had known Acheson since they were undergraduates at Yale and who worried that Acheson’s appearance might prove a handicap, urged him to at least get rid of the mustache, saying, “You owe it to Truman.” But the mustache would stay, and if anything about Acheson’s appearance or manner or background ever bothered Truman, he did not say so.

To Truman the State Department was “a peculiar organization, made up principally of extremely bright people who made tremendous college marks but who have had very little association with actual people down to the ground.” They were “clannish and snooty,” he thought, and he often felt like firing “the whole bunch.” Yet no such feelings applied to the Secretary. Acheson was doing a “whale of a job.” Truman hoped he would never leave the government.

Acheson, who was fifty-six years old in 1949, had been raised in the small-town America of other times, in Middletown, Connecticut, at the turn of the century, a setting not unlike Independence, Missouri. His mother was the heir to a Canadian whiskey fortune. His father, English by birth and a veteran of the Queen’s Own Rifles, was an Episcopal minister, and later bishop of Connecticut, whose frequent admonition to his son was, “Brace up!” Like Truman, Acheson had had his first youthful brush with the “real world” working with a railroad crew. Like Truman, he relished history and biography. He, too, adored Mark Twain. If Acheson was a fashion plate, so, of course, was Truman in his way.

They had their morning walks in common. Both were men of exceptional physical vitality. Both were amateur architects. Truman spoke often of the influence Justice Brandeis had on him in his first years in Washington; Acheson had first come to the city, after law school in 1919, to clerk for Brandeis, from whom, he often said, he learned more than from anyone. Politically, like Truman, Acheson considered himself a little left of center.

His stiff appearance to the contrary, Acheson was also a warmhearted man with a wit of a kind that greatly appealed to Truman. Acheson enjoyed a convivial drink, a good story. (With his father a minister and his mother a distiller’s daughter, he liked to say, he knew both good and evil at an early age.) And like Truman, he was devoted to his family. When his oldest daughter, Mary, was stricken with tuberculosis in 1944 and had to be sent to a sanatorium at Saranac, New York, for an extended cure, Acheson wrote to her every night, often revealing how much more of life he savored than was commonly understood.

At lunch at the Capitol I was asked to sit at a table with Jessie Sumner of Illinois, the worst of the rabble rousing isolationists…. We got along famously. She is a grand old girl and reminded me of the madam in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, sort of low, humorous and human. We became great friends and are going to lunch again. I often wonder whether I have any principles at all. It’s a confusing world.

Writing once to Ethel Noland, Truman had said, “You know all of us have a very deep sentimental streak in us, but most of the time we are too timid or too contrary to show it.” Acheson, when asked years later by Eric Sevareid how so much trust and affection could have developed between two such seemingly different men as he and the President, said the answer was complicated, but that much of it had to do with what he called Truman’s “deeply loving and tender nature,” adding, “This isn’t the general impression of him at all.” When Acheson’s daughter had to undergo a serious operation while Acheson was out of the country, and it was not certain she would pull through, Truman personally called the hospital every day for a report, which he himself then transmitted to Acheson by overseas phone.

“Well, this is the kind of person that one can adore,” Acheson later said. “You can have an affection for that man that nothing can touch.”

Truman, Acheson knew, was far more sentimental than generally known, or than he wished people to know, far more touched by gestures that to many might seem routine. On board his plane later in the year, bound again for Key West, he would write Acheson a brief longhand note marked and underscored “Personal.”

It was good of you to see us off. You always do the right thing. I’m still a farm boy and when the Secretary of State of the greatest Republic comes to the airport to see me off on a vacation, I can’t help but swell up a little.

“And then he was so fair,” Acheson would say. “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.”

Moreover, Truman welcomed other people’s ideas. “He was not afraid of the competition of other ideas…. Free of the greatest vice in a leader, his ego never came between him and his job.”

Felix Frankfurter, in listing the elements of Acheson’s personal code, would put loyalty first, followed by truthfulness, and “not pretending to be better than you are.” Truman had not forgotten that it was Acheson alone who was at Union Station to greet him, after the humiliation of the off-year elections in 1946. Acheson, Truman told David Lilienthal, was a fine man, “loyal, sensible, not like some men who are brilliant.”

That Acheson had an exceptional capacity for hard work, that he also subscribed to the philosophy that civilization depended largely on a relatively small number of people who were willing to shoulder the hard work necessary, contributed greatly to Truman’s regard for him. Acheson believed in clear, orderly thinking. He knew there were no easy answers, no quick remedies. With the world as it was, he said, Americans would have to get over the idea that the problems facing the country could be solved with a little ingenuity or without inconvenience.

He did not see the Cold War as an inevitable clash between good and evil. To say that good and evil could not exist in the world was absurd, he told an audience of military officers at the National War College in December 1949:

Today you hear much talk of absolutes…people say that two systems as different as ours and that of the Russians cannot exist in the same world…that one is good and one is evil, and good and evil cannot exist in the world…. Good and evil have existed in this world since Adam and Eve went out of the Garden of Eden.

The proper search is for limited ends which soon enough educate us in the complexities of the tasks which face us. That is what all of us must learn to do in the United States; to limit objectives, to get ourselves away from the search for the absolute, to find out what is within our powers…. We must respect our opponents. We must understand that for a long, long period of time they will continue to believe as they do, and that for a long, long period of time we will both inhabit this spinning ball in the great void of the universe.

As would become apparent to everyone soon enough, Acheson was not only the most important member of Truman’s Cabinet, but the most important appointment Truman ever made. And unlike Byrnes and Marshall, he would serve as Secretary throughout a full term, despite vilification such as few in American public life had ever known. He would be seen as an immense political liability, called a fool and a traitor. Nor were his critics and adversaries to be found only among the ranks of the Republicans. One especially determined to challenge his authority at every chance, to see Acheson taken down several pegs, if not entirely, was Louis Johnson, who clearly disliked him and whose cutting remarks soon reached the White House. Greatly displeased, Truman warned Johnson to stop it. “Acheson is a gentleman,” Truman told James Webb, the former Director of the Budget, who was now Acheson’s under secretary. “He won’t descend to a row. Johnson is a rough customer, gets his way by rowing. When he takes out after you, give it right back to him.”

Others who knew Acheson thought that in a showdown Johnson wouldn’t have a chance. Oliver Franks, the British ambassador and a close friend, described Acheson as “a romantic” and “a blade of steel.”

He had a serious—a very serious—problem to decide before long, Truman told Lilienthal on November 7, Acheson having by then talked to him about the superbomb.

He hoped to have a full report from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) committee soon, Lilienthal replied.

Yes, said Truman. He wanted the facts, of course.

The report, with its unanimous conclusion by the advisory committee that the superbomb should not be developed, plus a concurring recommendation by the AEC, was delivered two days later, on November 9. The AEC had decided against the bomb by 3 to 2, with Lilienthal the deciding vote. The following day, Truman named Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal to act as a special committee of the National Security Council—the Z Committee, as it was called—to advise him whether to proceed with the Super and whether “publicity” should be given the matter. A week later all Washington knew a superbomb was under consideration.

A Washington Post reporter, Alfred Friendly, had picked up the first hint of the story from remarks made on a local television broadcast in New York by Democratic Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, who made his disclosure while airing his fears about the ability of scientists to keep secrets. So suddenly the “H-bomb,” a new word, was a public issue.

Physicists Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence were lobbying hard for proceeding with it. Karl T. Compton, who served on the Interim Committee in 1945 and had only just retired as head of MIT, wrote to Truman saying that in the absence of an international agreement on the control of atomic energy, the United States had no choice but to go ahead with the Super.

At the State Department, stirred by moral outrage, George Kennan labored intensively on a close analysis of the problem and in a long memorandum to Acheson, a plea “as earnest and eloquent” as he knew how to make it, he not only declared against the project but urged that the United States set an example. The last hope for humanity was international control of all weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. The United States should announce it was “prepared to go very far, to show considerable confidence in others, and to accept certain risk for ourselves,” in order to achieve international agreement. To go forward with this still more fearsome next step would be to commit the country and the world to an indefinite escalation of destructiveness and cost.

So the voices against the Super were essentially three, Lilienthal, Kennan, and Oppenheimer, who apart from his own moral objections did not think such a bomb was technically feasible.

But Kennan, like Lilienthal, was about to retire, and the new head of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, Paul Nitze, agreed with the Joint Chiefs. To Nitze, Soviet possession of the atomic bomb meant not only that the United States must proceed with work on the H-bomb but build up its conventional forces as well.

Acheson, who, after Hiroshima, favored an atomic partnership with the Soviet Union, had by now come full circle. In effect, he told Kennan to take his Quaker ideas and go.

I told Kennan if that was his view he ought to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach his Quaker gospel but not push it within the Department. He had no right being in the Service if he was not willing to face the questions as an issue to be decided in the interests of the American people under a sense of responsibility.

“How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to ‘disarm by example’?” Acheson asked rhetorically in conversation with another associate.

The top-secret debate went on for three months, from November 1949 to the end of January 1950, and much of it in Acheson’s immense fifth-floor office at the State Department—a room that reminded him, he said, of the cabin-class dining salon on one of the old North German Lloyd ocean liners. But the three-man Z Committee of Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal met only twice, due primarily, as Acheson said, “to the acerbity of Louis Johnson’s nature.” Johnson and Lilienthal argued bitterly.

The first of these sessions was on December 22, the second and last on January 31.

Between times Truman kept to a full presidential schedule. He appointed Oscar Chapman as Secretary of Interior, after the resignation of Julius Krug. He received the new Shah of Iran on a first state visit; posed for photographs with five crippled children for the March of Dimes campaign; issued an executive order authorizing the Federal Housing Administration loans of $20 million for low-rent housing in twenty-seven states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico; issued an executive order to the FHA to deny financial assistance to new housing projects with racial or religious restrictions; exchanged Christmas greetings with the Pope; and learned from the Secret Service that in 1949 alone there had been a total of 1,925 threats, Written or oral, against him or his family. (“The day will come,” said one, “when I will have your heart out and give it to the ants as food.”)

Four days into the new year, in a recently redecorated House Chamber, he delivered his fifth State of the Union message. If American productive power continued to increase at the same rate as it had in the previous half century, he told the Congress, then national production fifty years hence would be four times as great, the average family income three times what it was in 1950, or $12,450 a year, which struck many as unimaginable. “Today, by the grace of God, we stand in a free and prosperous nation with greater possibilities for the future than any people have ever had before in the history of the world….”

At a press conference on January 7, 1950, he presented his annual budget—a big green book the size and weight of a New York telephone directory—and answered questions about it. The total figure was $42.4 billion, which included an increase of $1 billion for domestic programs. But most, some $30 billion, was to pay for wars past and for the present national defense, listed to cost $13.5 billion. It was a budget that did not balance. The estimated deficit was $5 billion, which would mean a national debt by 1952 of $268.3 billion.

In a message to Congress he asked for a “moderate” tax increase to bring in an additional $1 billion.

For an hour at the Shoreham Hotel one night, he stood at the door of a private dining room shaking hands with virtually every Democrat in Congress. He addressed the A.F. of L. dinner and a civil rights conference; he held five more press conferences.

He also faced the fact that Clark Clifford and David Lilienthal, two of his best, were leaving in February, to return to private life. The loss of Clifford would be a real blow. But Clifford was worn out and deeply in debt, his living expenses over the past four years having run far ahead of his White House salary. He would stay on in Washington to practice law. Lilienthal, too, was exhausted and knew the time had come to move on. Truman, as he said, felt as though “the bottom had fallen out.”

More serious, and worrisome, however, was the assault on Dean Acheson. In December, angry over the loss of China and the supposed infiltration of Communists everywhere, the Republicans in both houses of Congress called on Truman to fire Acheson. Then, in New York, on January 21, at the end of a long second trial, Alger Hiss was found guilty of perjury—he had lied about passing secret documents—and that night Republican Congressman Richard Nixon, who as the only lawyer on the House Un-American Activities Committee had played a leading part in the case against Hiss, went on the radio to accuse the administration of a “deliberate” effort to conceal the Hiss “conspiracy.” On Wednesday, January 25, the day Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison, Acheson was asked at a press conference at the State Department if he had any comments.

The question was not unexpected. At his confirmation hearings the year before, Acheson had acknowledged that Hiss was a friend and remained a friend, adding that his own friendship was not easily given nor easily withdrawn. Hiss’s brother, Donald, a partner in Acheson’s law firm, had served as Acheson’s assistant when Acheson was Assistant Secretary of State. Now to the throng of reporters he said, “I should like to make it clear to you that whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyers may take in this case, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”

It was no impulsive response. Acheson had thought long about what to say, and as many in the room sensed at once, it was a decisive moment in the history of the Truman administration. He continued, his voice full of emotion:

I think anyone who has known Alger Hiss or has served with him at any time has upon his conscience the very serious task of deciding what his attitude is and what his conduct should be. That must be done by each person in the light of his own standards and his own principles. For me there is little doubt about those standards and principles. I think they were stated for us a very long time ago…on the Mount of Olives and if you are interested in seeing them you will find them in the 25th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew beginning with verse 34.

An aide stood at the door with a Bible ready for those reporters who wished to check the reference: “I was a prisoner and ye came unto me.”

Perhaps the voice of the late bishop of Connecticut, Acheson’s father, sounded in the citation, wrote the New York Herald-Tribune, one of the few papers to praise Acheson for what he had said.

This newspaper has felt it necessary at times to criticize and oppose Mr. Acheson in his policies…. But of this statement made on Wednesday in a difficult hour, we are glad to declare in our judgment it was as courageous as it was Christian.

It was also a political disaster. The news reached Capitol Hill almost instantly. Senator Joseph McCarthy interrupted the flow of business in the Senate to report “the most fantastic statement” just made by the Secretary of State. Did this mean, McCarthy asked, that the Secretary would “not turn his back on any other Communists in the State Department?”

His press Conference ended, Acheson went immediately to see Truman, who by then had seen the news ticker story. Acheson offered to resign. Truman, Acheson wrote to his daughter, was “wonderful about it…said that one who had gone to the funeral of a friendless old man just out of the penitentiary [Tom Pendergast] had no trouble knowing what I meant and proving it.

“So there we are,” Acheson added, “and as the Persian King had carved on his ring, ‘This, too, will pass.’ ”

But pass it did not. The damage done to himself and the President was worse than either knew. Richard Nixon called Acheson’s statement “disgusting.” Republican Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska exploded in a tirade. “I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, ‘Get out! Get out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years!’”

The atmosphere in Washington, the atmosphere in which the decision on the hydrogen bomb was being weighed, had become charged with rancor and fear. At his press conference the next afternoon, Friday, January 27, Truman was asked first whether he too would refuse to turn his back on Alger Hiss—to which he replied, “No comment”—then, what his views were on the H-bomb, as though the two issues were directly connected. He would have nothing to say until he made a decision, Truman answered, thus acknowledging for the first time that the issue existed.

Comment and speculation on the bomb continued. Headlines called it the “Ultimate Bomb,” the “Hell Bomb.” Life ran an aerial photograph of Chicago showing how much of the city would be obliterated—50 square miles—by one such weapon. In the Washington Post, where for years he had been drawing the atomic bomb as a sinister presence looming over peace conferences or taking the measure of the world, cartoonist Herb Block now portrayed the atomic bomb holding the giant hand of an infinitely larger, more menacing creature labeled “Superbomb,” and asking a terrified Uncle Sam, “Want to meet my friend, too?”

Eleanor Roosevelt and Bernard Baruch announced their support for building the bomb. Harold Urey of the University of Chicago, a leader in atomic research who, in 1934, had won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of heavy hydrogen, declared in a speech in New York that the United States could not intentionally lose the armaments race without risking its liberties.

Rumors of bitter animosity within the administration, talk of who was for and who was against the H-bomb became a Washington obsession. On Capitol Hill, Democratic Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was reportedly “almost in tears” over the prospect of the bomb not proceeding. War with the Russians was inevitable, the powerful senator assured Lilienthal. The thing to do was “blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us—we haven’t much time.” To Truman he wrote, “If we let Russia get the Super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain—whereas if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves.”

The Joint Chiefs wanted a “crash program.” General Bradley wrote that it was “folly to argue whether one weapon is more immoral than another. For, in a larger sense, it is war itself which is immoral, and the stigma of such immorality must rest upon the nation which initiates hostilities.” Despite an understanding that deliberations on the bomb would be kept within the Z Committee, Louis Johnson quickly sent Bradley’s memorandum to Truman.

Like a patient sitting in a doctor’s anteroom while the specialists discuss his case [wrote Time], the U.S. public…sat outside while the President, his military, scientific and diplomatic advisers debated whether to construct the…most powerful explosive weapon the world has yet dreamed of…. But since the principle of the hydrogen bomb was also known to the Russians, temporizing was risky and might be fatal. The simple fact, unpleasant though it might be, was that if the Russians are likely to build an H-bomb, the U.S. will have to build it, too.

When on Tuesday, January 31, 1950, Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal with several of their aides convened for the final session of the Z Committee in Room 216 of the Old State Department Building, it was Acheson who took charge. He had concluded that work should proceed on the hydrogen bomb and presented the draft of a statement to be made by the President.

Johnson agreed, but Lilienthal did not like rushing things through in an “atmosphere of excitement.” A decision to go ahead with the bomb now would probably make a new approach to the atomic arms race impossible. He thought the country’s almost sole reliance on this kind of weapon was extremely unwise and that going ahead with it would give the American people a “false and dangerous assurance…that when we get this new gadget ‘the balance will be ours’ as against the Russians.” He questioned what the project would do to defense budgets and foreign policy.

Acheson, who greatly admired Lilienthal and who would later describe Lilienthal’s objections as “eloquently and forcefully” expressed, said he could not overcome two “stubborn facts”: that delaying work on the bomb would not delay Soviet work on their bomb; and that the American people would simply not tolerate a policy of delay.

“We must protect the President,” Johnson said. And though he still had grave reservations, Lilienthal, too, agreed to sign the statement.

Accompanied by Admiral Sidney W. Souers, the executive secretary of the National Security Council, the three men walked to the White House. Their meeting had lasted two and a half hours. The meeting with the President took seven minutes.

Truman had already made up his mind, perhaps as much as ten days earlier, or at least that was the impression of his immediate staff, though he had said nothing specific. Acheson knew this. Apparently they all did. The President, wrote Lilienthal, was “clearly set on what he was going to do before we set foot inside the door.”

As Truman looked over the statement, Acheson said Lilienthal had some additional views to express.

Truman, turning to Lilienthal, said he had always believed the United States should never use “these weapons,” that peace was “our whole purpose.” Lilienthal said that while he did not overrate the value of his own judgment, he felt he must express his grave reservations about the proposed course. Try as he might, he could not see it as the wisest move. However carefully worded, however issued, the statement would only magnify the essentially mistaken policy of relying on atomic weapons as the country’s chief defense.

There was too much talk in Congress “and everywhere,” Truman broke in. People were “so excited.” He didn’t see that he had any alternative.

“Can the Russians do it?” he asked the group. It was his only question. They all nodded.

“We don’t have much time,” interjected Admiral Souers.

“In that case,” said Truman, “we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.”

As he signed the statement, Truman said he recalled another meeting of the National Security Council concerning Greece, when “everybody predicted the end of the world if we went ahead, but we did go ahead and the world didn’t come to an end.” It would be “the same case here,” he said.

While the President went home to Blair House for lunch, Charlie Ross again handed out a mimeographed sheet.

It is part of my responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor. Accordingly, I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb….

Lilienthal described the mood at the AEC afterward as that of a funeral party. For him it was a night of heartache. “I hope I was wrong, and that somehow I’ll be proved wrong,” he wrote. “We have to leave many things to God….” Albert Einstein, in a rare appearance on television, talked of the radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and warned, “General annihilation beckons.”

To what extent Truman had struggled with the decision, or dwelled on it afterward, is not known. He left nothing in writing. Nor can Acheson’s influence on him be readily gauged, though doubtless it was considerable. Acheson, as Truman said, was one of the most persuasive men he had ever known.

It would have been preferable surely—wiser, more prudent—to have given the entire question longer, closer examination, and under less stress, even assuming Truman would have decided no differently. The country could have been better prepared. There would have been time for a clear, explanatory presidential address to the nation, instead of a mimeographed announcement. So disquieting, so momentous, and so costly a step deserved better.

In any event, as anticipated, public and editorial approval of the decision was overwhelming—the President had made “the right and inevitable” decision. Then, in only a matter of days, the level of apprehension was raised still higher by news from London that Klaus Fuchs, a former atomic scientist at Los Alamos, had confessed to being a Russian spy, and by the sudden claim of Senator Joseph McCarthy that he had in his possession a list of more than two hundred known Communists employed at the State Department.

IV

With the onrush of so much sensational, seemingly inexplicable bad news—China lost, the Russian bomb, Alger Hiss, the treason of Klaus Fuchs—breaking with such clamor, all in less than six months, the country was in a state of terrible uncertainty.

“How much are we going to have to take?” asked Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana.

Life devoted much of one issue to show how vastly Russian military strength exceeded that of the United States—an army of 2,600,000 men, compared to an American force of 640,000, 30 Russian armored divisions to one American. The United States produced 1,200 new planes a year, the Russians 7,000. Only the American Navy stood first, but the Soviets already had a more powerful fleet than Germany had had at the start of the last war and three times the number of American submarines. While America spent 6 percent of its national income on military strength, the Russians were spending 25 percent. And so on. “War Can Come; Will We Be Ready?” asked the Life headline.

It was, of course, a question of paramount importance within the administration. For months behind the scenes Acheson had been arguing that Truman’s $13 billion limit on defense spending was no longer realistic. Now with his decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb Truman authorized a complete review of military policy. At both the State Department and the Pentagon, work began on a sweeping new report, and with the pressure on, relations between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense grew steadily more contentious. At a meeting in March, Louis Johnson exploded with such temper—banging down his chair, shouting objections, hammering his fist on the table—that Acheson could only conclude that Johnson, like Forrestal, had cracked under the strain.

When Acheson reported to Truman what had happened, Truman was appalled. Probably it was then he knew that Johnson would have to go—when the time was right.

Fear gripped Washington and the country. “The air was so charged with fear,” remembered Herb Block, “that it took only a small spark to ignite it.” And the spark was McCarthy. When Block, in one of his cartoons in the Post, labeled an overflowing barrel of tar “McCarthyism,” another new word entered the language along with the H-bomb.

Until that January, Joseph R. McCarthy, Wisconsin’s forty-one-year-old junior senator, had been casting about for an issue that might lift him from obscurity. All but friendless in the Senate, recently voted the worst member of the Senate in a poll of Washington correspondents, McCarthy appeared to be a hopeless failure. Over dinner one evening at the Colony Restaurant, a Catholic priest, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University, suggested he might sound the alarm over Communist infiltration of the government, and McCarthy, who had already made some loud, if unnotable, charges about Communist subversion, seems to have realized at once that he had found what he needed. A month later, in a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in West Virginia, he waved a piece of paper, saying he had “here in my hand” the names of 205 “known Communists” in the State Department. The speech went largely unnoticed, but at Salt Lake City and Reno soon afterward he made essentially the same claim, except the number was cut to fifty-seven, and they were referred to now as “card-carrying” Communists. He made headlines across the country. Back at the Senate he carried on for five hours, claiming to have penetrated “Truman’s iron curtain of secrecy” and come up with eighty-one names.

The charges were wild and unsupported. McCarthy had no names, he produced no new evidence. He was a political brawler, morose, reckless, hard-drinking, a demagogue such as had not been seen in the Senate since the days of Huey Long, only he had none of Long’s charm or brilliance. The press called him desperate, a loudmouth and a character assassin. His Communist hunt was “a wretched burlesque of the serious and necessary business of loyalty check-ups.” But he was no more bothered by such criticism than by his own inconsistencies, and whatever he said the press printed, his most sensational allegations often getting the biggest headlines. To more and more of the country it seemed that even if he might be wrong in some of his particulars, probably he was onto something, and high time.

Harry Truman, McCarthy charged, was the “prisoner of a bunch of twisted intellectuals” who only told him what they wanted him to know. Attacking Acheson, he said, “When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed Communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.” As McCarthy kept up the assault, Acheson received so much threatening mail that guards had to be posted at his house around the clock.

While numbers of his fellow Republicans silently deplored McCarthy’s methods, others—Bridges, Brewster, Capehart, Mundt, Wherry—began lending support. “I will not turn my back on Joe McCarthy,” said Brewster. Encouragement came too from Senator Taft, who had been the first to introduce the “soft on Communism” issue in the 1946 elections and who now admitted publicly that he was egging McCarthy on, to press the attack, to “keep talking and if one case didn’t work out, to bring up another.” All the anger and resentment felt by Republicans like Taft over Truman’s surprise upset in 1948 had found an outlet.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called for a complete investigation of McCarthy’s charges. A special subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee began hearings under the chairmanship of Millard Tydings of Maryland, one of the most respected, influential Democrats in the Senate. The assumption was that in the bright light of public exposure, McCarthy and his tactics could not long survive.

But the attention only magnified him. The hearings in the Senate’s marble-columned Caucus Room gave him center stage and the full attention of the press day after day. “You are not fooling me,” he said. “This committee [is] not seeking to get the names of bad security risks, but…to find out the names of my informants so they can be kicked out of the State Department tomorrow.” By the end of March, in the six weeks since his initial outburst at Wheeling, McCarthy had not named a single Communist.

He announced he had the name of the “top Russian espionage agent” in the United States, indeed the “onetime” boss of Alger Hiss and his espionage ring. The man, said McCarthy, was Owen J. Lattimore, formerly of the State Department and currently director of the Johns Hopkins School of International Relations. As time would show, Lattimore was neither a Communist nor ever an influential figure at the State Department. He had worked for the department all of four months in 1946, as an adviser on a reparations mission in Japan. The accusation was a fraud. “If you crack this case,” McCarthy told the committee, “it will be the biggest espionage case in the history of this country.” He was willing, he said, to stand or fall on that.

In mid-February 1950, at about the time McCarthy’s reckless charges were first making headlines, Truman agreed to an exclusive interview with Arthur Krock of The New York Times, during which he impressed Krock as a man of exceptional inner calm and strength.

In an age of atomic energy, transmuted into a weapon which can destroy great cities and the best works of civilization, and in the shadow of a hydrogen detonant which could multiply many times that agent of destruction, a serene President of the United States sits in the White House with undiminished confidence in the triumph of humanity’s better nature and the progress of his own efforts to achieve an abiding peace.

Harry S. Truman, said Krock, might seem to many a controversial figure. But to those who had the chance to talk with him intimately, his faith in the future had a “luminous” quality.

He sits in the center of the troubled and frightened world…. But the penumbra of doubt and fear in which the American nation pursues its great and most perilous adventure…stops short of him. Visitors find him undaunted and sure that, whether in his time or thereafter, a way will be discovered to preserve the world from the destruction which to many seems unavoidable….

David Lilienthal, who came to the Oval Office on February 14 for a final farewell meeting with the President, described it later as “one of the happiest sessions I’ve ever had with him.”

“About these scientists,” Truman said, “we need men with great intellects, need their ideas. But we need to balance them with other kinds of people, too.”

Lilienthal, perhaps as much as anyone, knew the weight of the burdens Truman carried. Yet Truman looked “tip-top…his eye clear.” Studying him, listening to him talk, Lilienthal was amazed. As he later wrote, “My admiration and wonder at his relaxed way of looking at things, and his obvious good health…reached a new high.”

But his wife of thirty years knew differently, and to her alone, he portrayed himself differently. She grew increasingly concerned about his health, the stress the McCarthy attacks put on him. His headaches had returned. In mid-March Bess urged another retreat to Florida, to recover his strength. “You see everybody shoots at me, if not directly, then at some of the staff closest to me,” he wrote to her from Key West.

In the Senate, Republican Styles Bridges had now joined McCarthy and stepped up the attack. Truman had liked Bridges, long considered him a friend. John Snyder had become a target lately. Rumors were Snyder was drinking too much.

Caustic comments in the press about Harry Vaughan, the almost constant abuse of Dean Acheson, and belittling comments on his own performance, all that he seemed impervious to, in fact bothered Truman greatly and he was feeling not just a little sorry for himself.

The general trend of the pieces [he wrote to Bess] is that I’m a very small man in a very large place and when some one I trust joins the critical side—well it hurts. I’m much older and very tired and I need support as no man ever did.

What has made me so jittery—they started on Snyder and have almost broken him, then Vaughan, whose mental condition is very bad. Now they are after my top brain man in the Cabinet. The whole foreign policy is at stake just as we are on the road to a possible solution…. I’m telling you so you may understand how badly I need your help and support now.

McCarthy, he felt, was a temporary aberration, “a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.” Even so he had had enough. On March 30, midway through his Key West stay, Truman decided to speak out. By then, according to the polls, half the American people held a “favorable opinion” of the senator and thought he was helping the country. Truman’s own standing, by stark contrast, had plunged to 37 percent, nearly as low as in the spring of 1948.

He called a rare press conference on the lawn beside the Little White House, where with sunny skies overhead and a breeze stirring the palms, talk of the junior senator from Wisconsin seemed strangely incongruous. Looking well tanned and fit in a light linen suit and open shirt, Truman sat in a white wicker chair, with reporters gathered about him in a circle.

Did he expect Senator McCarthy to turn up any disloyalty in the State Department?

“I think,” he said with a hard look, “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.”

And there were others, he said—Wherry and Bridges. The Republicans had been searching in vain for an issue for the fall elections. They had tried “statism,” the “welfare state,” “socialism.” Some were even trying to dig up “that old malodorous dead horse called ‘isolationism.’” He was furious. This “fiasco” going on in the Senate, he said, jabbing a finger in the air, was an attempt to sabotage bipartisan foreign policy. It was a dangerous situation, and it had to be stopped. Dean Acheson, he added emphatically, would go down in history as one of the great secretaries of state. There was no question about that.

Was Owen Lattimore a Russian spy?

“Why of course not. It’s silly on the face of it.”

It was a dramatic moment, a performance, reporters thought, that equaled Franklin Roosevelt at his angry best.

Taft accused Truman of having libeled McCarthy. “Do you think that’s possible?” Truman responded, when a reporter raised the question at the next press conference, back in Washington.

To a gathering of the Federal Bar Association, he gave his assurance that no known instance of Communist subversion, or subversion of any kind, had gone uninvestigated by the FBI or as a result of his own Loyalty Program. “There is no area of American life in which the Communist Party is making headway, except maybe in the minds of some people….” That his own Loyalty Program might have contributed to the overall atmosphere that gave rise to McCarthy is a thought he seems not to have entertained—not then at least.

“I think our friend McCarthy will eventually get all that is coming to him. He has no sense of decency or honor,” Truman wrote to Owen Lattimore’s sister.

You can understand, I imagine, what the President has to stand—every day in the week he’s under a constant barrage of people who have no respect for the truth and whose objective is to belittle and discredit him. While they are not successful in these attacks they are never pleasant so I know just how you feel about the attack on your brother. The best thing to do is to face it and the truth will come out.

Yet nothing Truman or anyone else said seemed to diminish McCarthy or the fear he spread in the government and the nation. When Truman, who had first refused to turn security files over to the Tydings Committee as a matter of principle, decided to let Tydings and the committee come to the White House to look at the files of the eighty-one people accused by McCarthy—in an effort to help Tydings discredit McCarthy and answer a Republican charge that he, Truman, was “covering up” evidence—it proved a bad decision. Now even the President appeared to be caving in to Joe McCarthy.

Tydings, in a state of near panic, was on the phone to the White House three and four times a day. Truman’s staff grew extremely worried and on edge. Truman told them to stay calm. McCarthy would destroy himself, he said. The man was a liar. He would be found out and expelled from the Senate. That was how these things worked, and that was how it should be handled. Truman wondered only if there was anyone in the Senate with backbone enough to do the job.

When, in the first week of June, the senator with backbone turned out to be a Republican and the Senate’s only woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who declared she did not want to see the Republican Party “ride to victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear,” Truman told his staff she had done “a fine thing,” though he thought she should have been tougher still and more specific.

It was on a particularly glorious day that spring, on Sunday, April 9, 1950, with lilacs and azaleas blooming in profusion and the cherry blossoms coming full around the Tidal Basin, that Truman drafted a statement in his own hand that he planned to make public two years hence. April 11 marked the end of his fifth year in office, and he had decided not to run for another term.

In 1947, as a rebuke to the memory of Franklin Roosevelt and his four terms, the Republicans of the 80th Congress had passed the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment Truman opposed, limiting presidents to two terms. With ratification by the states, it would become law in 1951. But since it had been worded not to include Truman, he was free to run again in 1952, as many if not most people assumed he would.

He had been thinking about the “lure in power,” and the example set by his hero Cincinnatus, the Roman general who had turned away from power. He was neither discouraged nor angry over the course of events. He remained in many ways a man of iron, as Wallace Graham said, and more, “a happy man,” in the words of one White House reporter, “and as far as the observer could tell boundlessly sure of himself.” But quietly on his own, without discussion with anyone other than his wife, he had decided he would announce his retirement in the spring of 1952, when he would be sixty-eight:

I am not a candidate for nomination by the Democratic Convention.

My first election to public office took place in November 1922. I served two years in the armed forces in World War I, ten years in the Senate, two months and 20 days as Vice President and President of the Senate. I have been in public service well over thirty years, having been President of the United States almost two complete terms.

Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, as well as Calvin Coolidge stood by the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and F.D.R. made the attempt to break that precedent. F.D.R. succeeded.

In my opinion eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in this capacity.

There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.

This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want the country to continue as a Republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom could have had a continuation in the office, then we will start down the road to dictatorship and ruin. I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by F.D.R. It should not be done. That precedent should continue—not by Constitutional amendment but by custom based on the honor of the man in office.

Therefore to reestablish that custom, although by a quibble I could say I have only had one term, I am not a candidate and will not accept the nomination for another term.

The tone, to be sure, was a bit self-congratulatory, and whether his confidence in reelection was altogether sincere or an added touch for the record—lest anyone see him retiring from the field in fear—is hard to say. The implied charge that Franklin Roosevelt had been something less than a man of honor by choosing to run more than twice was in keeping with his own position on the issue in 1940, but not in 1944, when he was the running mate. Still, it was a statement of conviction like none written by an American President. Nor is there any doubt of his devotion to the Cincinnatus ideal. As events would verify, this was no whim of the moment.

He said nothing on the matter. The two handwritten pages were quietly put away.

The explosive secret report on the country’s military strength known as NSC-68 (Paper No. 68 of the National Security Council) was ready by the end of the first week in April. Produced primarily by Paul Nitze, under the direction of Dean Acheson and with the participation of the Defense Department, it was delivered to Truman on April 7 and discussed with him for the first time at a White House meeting of the National Security Council on Tuesday, April 25. Like the Clifford-Elsey memorandum of an earlier day, it was intended to shock. Charlie Murphy, who had replaced Clark Clifford as special counsel to the President, would remember being so frightened by what he saw in an early draft that he spent a whole day reading it over and over.

An apocalyptic theme was struck at the start: “This Republic and its citizens, in the ascendancy of their strength, stand in their deepest peril….” The American colossus, the report said in effect, was sadly wanting in real military might. Its policy of “containment,” as advanced by George Kennan, was no better than a policy of bluff without the “superior aggregate military strength”—the conventional forces—to back it up. Nuclear weapons were insufficient and, in any event, the Soviets would probably achieve nuclear equality by 1954.

A massive military buildup was called for. This would put “heavy demands on our courage and intelligence.” The financial burden would be extreme. Though no cost estimates were included, the figures discussed with Truman ranged from $40 to $50 billion a year, at least three times the current military budget.

“The whole success,” Truman read in the concluding paragraph, “hangs ultimately on recognition by this government, the American people and all the peoples that the Cold War is in fact a real war in which the survival of the world is at stake.”

So, while Albert Einstein was warning that annihilation beckoned, the Secretary of State and his associates, as well as the Defense Department, were saying anything short of a massive military buildup, including nuclear arms, was to put survival at risk.

In writing such papers, papers intended to shape national policy, Acheson would later explain, one could not approach the task as one would in writing a doctoral thesis. “Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” In the particular instance of NSC-68, he conceded, the purpose was to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government.’”

Truman, however, was not to be bludgeoned. His response was the same as it had been with the Clifford-Elsey Report. He put it away under lock and key. NSC-68 and Life magazine might both point up in dramatic fashion the perilous state of American military strength, but he refused to rush to a decision, even if he did not dispute their claims. His approach was essentially what it had been at the time of the Berlin crisis, essentially what it was in the face of McCarthy—he would make no drastic moves until he knew more.

Feeling the need for contact again with the American people, he set off by train in May for another “nonpolitical” cross-country tour, ostensibly to dedicate Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. Not once in two weeks of travel, never in more than fifty speeches in fifteen states, did he mention Joe McCarthy or sound a call to arms. Instead, he seemed to glow with patience and optimism. The Cold War would be “with us for a long, long time,” he lectured. “There is no quick way, no easy way to end it.” Yet even so, in the long run, there were no problems that could not be solved.

Whether he would have attempted anything like the buildup called for in NSC-68 had events not taken the calamitous turn they did in late June, will never be known. But it seems unlikely.

At his weekly press conference on June 1, he said he thought the world was closer to real peace than at any time in the last five years.

V

The silver plane of the President began its long, smooth descent over the farmland of Missouri at approximately 1:45, Central Standard Time, the afternoon of Saturday, June 24. Truman had planned a weekend at home with his family, nothing official on the schedule, “a grand visit—I hope,” as he said in a note to a friend early that morning. “I’m going from Baltimore to see Bess, Margie and my brother and sister, oversee some fence building—not political—order a new roof for the farm house….”

He had begun his day at Blair House as customary, scanning the Post, the Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, all filled that morning with the spreading Communist scare. The University of California had fired 157 employees for refusing to sign an anti-Communist oath. At an annual convention in Boston, the NAACP had resolved to drive all known Communists from its membership. In Washington, a federal judge had denied pleas for acquittal to three screenwriters, part of the so-called “Hollywood Ten,” who had refused to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether they were Communists. In a photograph on page 1 of the Times, a round-faced former Army sergeant named David Greenglass was being escorted in handcuffs from a New York court where he was charged with being part of the Klaus Fuchs spy ring at Los Alamos. On page 4 of the Times, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Trygve Lie of Norway, was reported responding angrily to a reporter’s question as to whether he was, or ever had been, a Communist. “By God, there should be some respect for my integrity,” he had exploded.

The one encouraging note for Truman was an announcement by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a member of the Tydings Committee, that weeks of effort at the White House, going over the files of the eighty-one “cases” charged by Senator McCarthy, had produced no evidence of consequence.

The weather forecast, an item Truman never failed to check, called for a hot and humid day, with a high of 90 degrees and a chance of late thundershowers.

His plane, the Independence, took off from National Airport at mid-morning and before heading west, stopped briefly at Baltimore, where Truman dedicated the city’s new Friendship Airport, with an eight-minute speech stressing peace and constructive confidence. (“We would not build so elaborate a facility for our air commerce if we did not have faith in a peaceful future….”) Through much of the flight afterward, huge thunderheads loomed in the distance. In a violent storm earlier in the day, a Northwest Airlines plane had gone down over Lake Michigan with fifty-eight people on board, all of whom were lost in the nation’s worst air disaster. But Truman’s trip was smooth and uneventful. Landing at Kansas City at two o’clock, he came down the steps from the plane looking fresh, relaxed, even “jaunty” in the Missouri heat.

At the house in Independence, a crowd of several hundred waited beside a new iron fence five feet high recently installed by the Secret Service. The time was now past when anyone could mingle on the Truman lawn.

As he stepped from the car, somebody shouted that he should have been at the Eagles’ meeting the night before. “There are lots of places I’d like to go that I can’t get to,” Truman answered cheerfully with a wave, then started up the walk.

The baking summer afternoon passed quietly, the windows of the old house open wide to what little air was moving. Bess and Margaret had gone to a wedding. Automobiles passed on Van Horne, now renamed Truman Road—a gesture by the town that had pleased Truman not at all—but the sound was faint, mild compared to the steady hubbub outside Blair House. The lazy privacy of the interlude was just what Truman needed. He had not been home since Christmas.

Dinner was called by Vietta Garr at 6:30. Truman and Mrs. Wallace took their customary places at either end of the table. Margaret would recall a “very pleasant family dinner,” after which they moved out onto a newly expanded, screened porch off the kitchen, where they sat talking, “small talk,” until dark, when everyone moved back inside to the study.

By nine, Truman was ready for bed. It had been a long day. The time difference between Independence and Washington was two hours, since western Missouri was not on daylight saving time.

At about 9:20, the telephone rang in the hall. Dean Acheson was calling from his country house in Maryland.

“Mr. President,” he said, “I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”

There had been a report from John Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul, Acheson explained. The North Koreans had crossed the 38th parallel, in what Muccio, an experienced officer, described as a heavy attack, not just a patrol foray of the kind there had been before.

Acting on his own initiative, Acheson had already notified the Secretary General of the United Nations to call a meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

He would leave for Washington at once, Truman said. (“My first reaction was that I must get back to the Capital,” he later wrote.) Acheson, however, advised him to wait. There was no need to take the risk of a night flight, and it might alarm the country.

“Everything is being done that can be,” Acheson said. “If you can sleep, take it easy.” He would call tomorrow when he knew more.

According to Margaret, her father returned from the phone in a state of extreme agitation, having already concluded the worst. “My father,” she wrote, “made it clear, from the moment he heard the news, that he feared this was the opening of World War III.” It was to be a long night for the family.

Sunday morning, the feeling again was of full summer in Missouri, hot and humid.

Of the seventeen churches in Independence, the first to sound its bells, at eight o’clock, was St. Mary’s, the old red-brick Catholic church on North Liberty, followed later by the new clarion at First Presbyterian, two blocks from the house, which played hymns until 10:45, by which time church bells all across town had begun their Sunday crescendo.

Bess and Margaret would leave for services at Trinity Episcopal shortly before eleven. But Truman by then had driven off to Grandview in a Secret Service car. They were all to act as normal and unconcerned as possible, “business as usual,” he had instructed before leaving.

He stretched his stay at Grandview through most of the morning. Chatting amiably with his brother Vivian, he looked over a new milking machine, admired a new horse, and shook hands with Vivian’s five grandchildren before moving on to see Mary Jane. To no one did he say anything about Korea, even though reports of the invasion were in the morning headlines and on the radio.

He reached 219 North Delaware shortly before noon to find Eben Ayers waiting with a copy of Ambassador Muccio’s telegram: “IT WOULD APPEAR FROM THE NATURE OF THE ATTACK AND MANNER IN WHICH IT WAS LAUNCHED THAT IT CONSTITUTES AN ALL-OUT OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA.”

A swarm of reporters and photographers appeared at the front gate. On his way out, Ayers told them that naturally the President was concerned.

Bess and Margaret had only just returned from church when Acheson’s second call came at about 12:30.

Dad took it [Margaret recorded in her diary] and a few minutes later he went to pack and told me to call Kansas City and get Eben Ayers to call all the people who came out with him to say that he would arrive at the airport between 2:00 and 2:15.

The departure from Kansas City was so swift and sudden that some of Truman’s own staff, as well as the White House correspondents who traveled by chartered plane, were left behind. As the Independence took off, Bess, Margaret, and Vivian Truman stood watching in silence, Bess looking much as she had the night of Franklin Roosevelt’s death.

“Everything is extremely tense,” wrote Margaret at home that night. “Northern or Communist Korea is marching in on Southern Korea and we are going to fight.” Apparently from what she had seen and heard, she had no trouble knowing her father’s mind.

The Independence touched down at National Airport at 7:15 that evening, Sunday, June 25. Dean Acheson, Louis Johnson, and Budget Director James Webb were waiting on the tarmac as Truman stepped from the plane looking grim and troubled. “That’s all,” he told photographers who were pressing for another shot. “We’ve got a job to do.”

Webb would later recall Truman saying in the limousine as they sped to the city, “By God, I am going to let them have it,” and Louis Johnson, in the jump seat in front of Truman, swinging about to shake his hand.

On the flight from Missouri, by radio, Truman had notified Acheson to summon an emergency meeting at Blair House, beginning with dinner at 7:30. His hours of privacy in the plane had provided opportunity for a lot of hard thinking, Truman later wrote. This was not the first time in his generation when the strong had attacked the weak. He had thought about Manchuria and Ethiopia.

I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act it encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead…. If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threats and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors. If this was allowed to go unchallenged, it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.

The attack by North Korea had come as a total surprise. There had been incidents along the 38th parallel, Korea had been seen as a potential trouble point, but it was only one of numerous trouble points around the world and had never figured high on anyone’s list. The last American troops had recently been withdrawn from South Korea. Describing the perimeter of American interests in the Pacific in an extemporaneous speech at the National Press Club in January, Acheson had not even included Korea. (The charge made later that the speech had thus inspired the Communist attack on South Korea would prove groundless.) Just that June, testifying on the Hill, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk had said he saw no likelihood of war in Korea. Indeed, among the manifold uncertainties at the moment was whether the invasion of South Korea was only a feint, a preliminary to a larger attack elsewhere, on Yugoslavia perhaps, or Formosa, or Iran.

As Truman had been notified en route to Washington, the U.N. Security Council had met that afternoon and adopted an American resolution calling for immediate cessation of “hostilities” and the withdrawal of North Korean forces to the 38th parallel. The vote was 9 to 0. There was no Soviet vote—no Soviet veto—because the Soviet representative, Jacob Malik, had walked out earlier in the year, when the Security Council refused to unseat Nationalist China, and he had not returned.

Besides the President, Acheson, Johnson, and Webb, the group gathered at Blair House included ten others: three from the State Department, Dean Rusk, Philip Jessup, and John Hickerson; the three service secretaries, Frank Pace, Jr., who had replaced Kenneth Royall as Secretary of the Army, Francis P. Matthews of the Navy, and Thomas K. Finletter of the Air Force; General Omar Bradley; and the three Chiefs of Staff, General Lawton Collins, Admiral Forrest Sherman, and Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg. That made fourteen and they arrived, reported The New York Times, “as an atmosphere of tension, unparalleled since the war days, spread over the capital.”

Drinks were served in the garden after Truman came downstairs from calling Bess to say he had arrived safely. He asked that there be no discussion of the crisis until dinner was over and the Blair House staff had withdrawn. Shortly after eight, dinner was announced by Alonzo Fields. They ate at the long mahogany table in the dining room, doors to the garden open to the warm evening air, and, for some reason, the hurriedly assembled meal—fried chicken, shoestring potatoes, asparagus, biscuits, vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce—would be remembered as especially good and well served, “excellent,” according to Acheson.

With the table cleared, it became the conference table and the meeting began, Acheson opening with a “darkening report,” after which Truman asked for everyone’s views.

The United States, said Rusk, had occupied South Korea for five years and had therefore a particular responsibility for South Korea, which, if absorbed by the Communists, would be “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” Bradley, who with Louis Johnson had just returned from Japan, and was feeling so ill he barely made it through the evening, said, “We must draw the line somewhere” and Korea was as good a place as any. (Acheson, some months later, was to say that if the best minds in the world had set out to find the worst possible location to fight “this damnable war,” the unanimous choice would have been Korea.) Russia, in Bradley’s view, was not ready for war, only “testing us.”

There was no dissenting response. Nor did anyone present have the least doubt that what was happening in Korea was being directed from Moscow. But then this was also the prevailing view in the country and the press. It was the “Russian-sponsored” North Korean Army that had launched the invasion, according to bulletins in the papers. As Bradley would write, “Underlying these discussions was an intense moral outrage, even more than we felt over the Czechoslovakia coup in 1948.”

That everyone at the table was in fundamental agreement became quickly clear, Truman’s own obvious resolution having stiffened them all. “He pulled all the conferees together, by his show of leadership,” one of them would say later, preferring to remain anonymous. Repeating Bradley’s phrase, Truman agreed the line must be drawn “most emphatically.” North Korea must be stopped. The Russians, he said, were trying to get Korea by default, gambling that the United States would be so fearful of starting another world war that it would put up no resistance.

“I thought we were still holding the stronger hand,” he later wrote, “although how much stronger, it was hard to tell.”

Admiral Sherman and General Vandenberg thought a combination of naval forces and air cover would be sufficient to do the job. And though Generals Bradley and Collins disagreed, they opposed any commitment of American ground forces in Korea, at least for the time being.

The possibility of active intervention by Soviet forces greatly concerned Truman. No one seemed to think the Russians were ready for a world war, but who was to say. Truman asked about Russian fleet strength in the Far East, Russian airpower, and requested an immediate intelligence report on “possible next moves” by the Soviets elsewhere in the world.

Recalling the evening, Truman would write that what impressed him most was “the complete, almost unspoken acceptance on the part of everyone that whatever had to be done to meet this aggression had to be done. There was no suggestion from anyone that either the United Nations or the United States should back away from it.”

As Truman had determined, it was Acheson who led the meeting, Acheson who proposed the decisions Truman made. General MacArthur was to send arms and supplies to South Korea as swiftly as possible. American civilians in Korea were to be evacuated under the cover of American airpower. The Seventh Fleet would proceed from the Philippines to guard the Formosa Strait, to prevent any attack from Communist China on Formosa, or, as Acheson said, vice versa.

As the meeting was breaking up, Johnson made what in time would be remembered as a remarkable observation. Having just been with MacArthur in Japan, he thought it important that any instructions to the general be detailed, “so as not to give him too much discretion.”

Truman, in an exchange with John Hickerson, the Assistant Secretary of State for U.N. Affairs, said the decisions he had just made had been for the United Nations. He had believed in the League of Nations with all his heart, Truman said, but the League had failed. The United Nations must not fail. “It was our idea, and in this first big test we just can’t let them down.”

As the group departed just before eleven, using the back door to avoid reporters, Truman said no one was to make any statement until he did.

It would be said of Harry Truman that without consulting Congress or the American people, he had rushed to judgment; that “as Hermann Goering, when he heard the word culture, reached for his gun, Harry Truman when he heard the word problem, reached for a decision.” But the last thing Truman wanted was a war in Korea, or anywhere, and angry as he may have been over the attack, as determined as he obviously was to do what he felt had to be done, he had nonetheless, so far, made no irrevocable move.

On Monday, as the news from Korea grew worse, he issued a statement notable only for its generalities. The widespread impression was that the United States was going to take little or no action. According to the latest communications from MacArthur, the South Koreans appeared incapable of stopping the North Korean advance: “Our estimate is that a complete collapse is imminent.”

That night, after supper alone, Truman summoned another emergency session, a second “war cabinet” meeting at Blair House, and decided to provide American air and naval support to the forces of South Korea and to press for immediate United Nations support.

No action should be taken north of the 38th parallel, he said, adding, “not yet.”

In addition, he ordered an increase of American forces in the Philippines and a speedup of military aid to Indochina.

No ground troops had yet been committed to Korea. And no one at the meeting recommended that. General Bradley would remember Acheson “dominating” the meeting, as he had the night before. Bradley, as he wrote later, was gravely concerned over the possibility of a ground war in Asia. Whatever troops were sent, MacArthur would surely ask for more. Besides, “We had no war plan for Korea.” Bradley suggested they “wait a few days.” Acheson agreed.

“I don’t want to go to war,” Truman said with a force they would all remember.

“Everything I have done in the past five years,” he remarked sadly as the meeting ended, “has been to try to avoid making a decision such as I had to make tonight.”

Headlines the next day, Tuesday, June 27, reported North Korean tanks sweeping into the South Korean capital of Seoul. The government of South Korea had fled, its president, Syngman Rhee, bitterly describing American help as “Too little, too late.” In a broadcast from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, Communist Premier Kim II Sung vowed to “crush” South Korea as swiftly as possible.

At the White House events moved rapidly, as the leaders of Congress, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Joint Chiefs rolled up to the West Wing in one official car after another. More than forty people were gathered. By 11:30 the doors of the Cabinet Room were closed. Half an hour later the meeting had ended. The congressional leaders had given the President their undivided support. No one had said a word against what he had decided. Further, he had been advised to proceed on the basis of presidential authority alone and not bother to call on Congress for a war resolution. A hundred reporters stood waiting anxiously in the lobby when minutes later Charlie Ross set off a “whirlwind,” handing them the first word from Truman that he had ordered American air and naval forces to support South Korea in its hour of peril:

“The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war….”

Cheers broke out in the House and Senate when the statement was read aloud. By a vote of 315 to 4, the House promptly voted a one-year extension of the draft law. In the Senate, Republican William Knowland called for “overwhelming support” for the President from all Americans regardless of party.

At the United Nations, debate began on a resolution to back the American decision—a resolution adopted that night at 10:45, the Soviet Union being still absent. For the first time in history, a world organization had voted to use armed force to stop armed force.

The response of the American people—by mail, telegrams, phone calls to the White House and Congress—the response of the press, of nearly everyone whose opinion carried weight in Washington and in the country, was immediate, resounding approval—a point that would be very soon forgotten. Editorials praised Truman for his “bold course,” his “momentous and courageous act.”

Although the President was well and faithfully advised [wrote Joseph and Stewart Alsop], no one can fail to admire the blend of plain guts and homely common sense that has marked his own handling of his immense crisis. This, indeed, was one of the occasions when Truman seemed to sum up the good things in America.

James Reston said much the same thing in The New York Times. Truman, said the Washington Post, had given the free world the leadership it desperately needed.

These are days calling for steady nerves, for a strict eye on the ball, and for a renewed resolve to keep our purposes pure in the grapple we have undertaken with men who would plunge the world into darkness. The occasion has found the man in Harry Truman.

The Wall Street Journal, Walter Lippmann, Thomas E. Dewey, George Kennan, General Eisenhower, all agreed it was time to draw the line. Eisenhower believed, “We’ll have a dozen Koreas soon if we don’t take a firm stand.” Henry Morgenthau, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., Phil Murray, Walter Reuther, and Sam Goldwyn sent telegrams in praise of Truman’s decision. Cordell Hull called.

White House mail ran strongly in favor of the President’s action. “You may be a whiskey guzzling poker playing old buzzard as some say,” wrote a Republican from Illinois, “but by damn, for the first time since old Teddy left there in March of 1909, the United States has a grass roots American in the White House.”

Even Taft and Henry Wallace gave their support, though Taft urged some congressional say in the matter. British Ambassador Oliver Franks reported to his government that virtually all shades of opinion backed the President. The entire mood in the capital had suddenly, dramatically changed. “I have lived and worked in and out of Washington for twenty years,” wrote Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor. “Never before in that time have I felt such a sense of relief and unity pass through the city.”

Appearing before a meeting of the Reserve Officers Association, an audience of a thousand people at the Mayflower Hotel, Wednesday morning, Truman received a standing ovation.

On Thursday, June 29, at his first press conference since the crisis began, he said with emphasis, “We are not at war.” Could he be quoted? “Yes,” Truman said. “We are not at war.”

Would it be correct, asked a reporter, to call this a police action under the United Nations? “Yes,” Truman replied. “That is exactly what it amounts to.”

Later this would be called another of his press conference blunders—he had allowed a reporter to put words in his mouth. But it was no mistake. A “police action under the United Nations” was precisely how he wished it to be viewed. Nor, importantly, did anyone see reason then to fault him.

It was in the middle of the night in Washington, at 3:00 A.M. Washington time, Friday, June 30, that the Pentagon received still another report from General MacArthur, this based on his first personal inspection of the situation in Korea. “The only assurance for holding the present line and the ability to regain later lost ground,” it said, “is through introduction of United States combat forces into the Korean battle area.” Any further attempt to check the North Korean advance with air- and seapower alone would be a waste of time. So bleak were things at this stage, even an all-out U.S. effort—Army, Navy, and Air Force—might be “doomed to failure.” Time was of the essence—“a clear-cut decision without delay is imperative.”

When Frank Pace telephoned Blair House, it was still dark outside. Truman was already up and shaved. He took the call by his bedside at 4:47 A.M. Pace relayed the grim report. MacArthur wanted two divisions of ground troops.

Truman never hesitated. It was a moment for which he had been preparing himself for days and he made his decision at once.

Later he would say that committing American troops to combat in Korea was the most difficult decision of his presidency, more so than the decision to use the atomic bomb. He did not want to start another world war, he had been heard to say privately more than once during that most crucial week. “Must be careful not to cause a general Asiatic war,” he now wrote in his diary, later that same day, Friday, June 30. What would Mao Tse-tung do? he wondered. Where would the next Russian move come?

“Now, your job as President,” Acheson would observe years later, “is to decide. Mr. Truman decided.”

Later, too—many years later—Acheson would make public a note he received from the President that, as Acheson said, well illustrated the quality of the man who “bound his lieutenants to him with unbreakable devotion.” It was written in longhand:

7/11/50

Memo to Dean Acheson

Regarding June 24 and 25—

Your initiative in immediately calling the Security Council of the U.N. on Saturday night and notifying me was the key to what followed afterwards. Had you not acted promptly in that direction we would have had to go into Korea alone.

The meeting Sunday night at Blair House was the result of our action Saturday night and the results afterward show that you are a great Secretary of State and a diplomat.

Your handling of the situation since has been superb.

I’m sending you this for your record.

Harry S. Truman

16

Commander in Chief

There was nothing passive about Harry Truman. He was the commander in chief in law and in fact.

—GEORGE ELSEY

I

In the five years since the nation was last at war, the President’s office had changed very little, with one notable exception. The melodramatic, moonlit Remington, the painting called Fired On that had hung over the mantelpiece opposite Truman’s desk in 1945, had been replaced by a commanding, full-figured portrait of George Washington, while below, in front of the fireplace, stood Truman’s big office globe, his gift from General Eisenhower.

Thus from his desk now, Truman could look up at both the nation’s first Commander in Chief, resplendent in full uniform, and the world at large, a subject that weighed on him more now than ever—the world and the threat of global war, the world and the imperative need not to repeat past mistakes, the world and Harry Truman.

He was not one to worry about decisions, once made, he told a reporter, but with the “Korean affair” he could not help worrying about the inevitable consequences. “Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war,” he would tell the nation in an historic radio and television broadcast the evening of July 19, still unwilling to call what was happening in Korea a war, but an “act of aggression” by the Communist leaders.

The Washington portrait, by Rembrandt Peale, was on loan from the National Gallery. The globe, which, with its heavy three-legged stand of polished mahogany, stood nearly chest high, had been Eisenhower’s when he was Allied Commander in Europe. Truman had chosen the new arrangement himself. He was acutely conscious of everything in the room, liked it all just so. Once when Charlie Ross picked up Truman’s engagement calendar from the desk to check something, then put it back down slightly askew, Truman, while chatting on, immediately lined it up again as before.

The globe especially gave the fireplace end of the room, the northern arc of the Oval Office, a weight and importance it had not had before. Photographers now, when posing the President, liked to have him stand there, particularly for portraits with his generals. He would be asked to put his right hand on the globe, as if explaining something, a natural pose, since in discussions with the Joint Chiefs—or members of the Cabinet or Congress or his own staff—Truman would frequently go to the globe to make a point. “Harry, don’t you sometimes feel overwhelmed by your job?” he had been asked by Republican Senator Tobey of New Hampshire, and Truman had stepped to the globe and turning it slowly said, “All the world is focusing on this office. The nearest thing to my heart is to do something to keep the world at peace. We must find a way to peace, or else civilization will be destroyed and the world will turn back to the year 900.”

Now, in the first weeks of the Korean crisis, he would put his finger on various spots in Europe or the Middle East—on the Elbe or the Iranian-Soviet border—then turning the globe, point to the pale gray, of the Korean peninsula, between the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, a place most Americans still had trouble finding on a map.

“This is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman would say. “If we are tough enough now, there won’t be any next time.”

The whole of the Korean peninsula, north and south, was almost half again the size of Greece, roughly 84,000 square miles in total. The distance from top to bottom, from the Yalu River, which formed North Korea’s border with Manchuria, to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, was about 600 miles, while the distance across varied from 125 to 200 miles.

The Republic of South Korea—everything below the arbitrary dividing line of the 38th parallel—was slightly larger than the state of Indiana. Its population of 20 million was double that of North Korea, and its economy chiefly agricultural, whereas most Korean industry was in the north.

The demarcation line of the 38th parallel had no basis in Korean history, geography, or anything else. It had been settled on hastily in the last week of World War II, as a temporary measure to facilitate the surrender of Japanese troops—those north of the line had surrendered to the Soviets, those south, to American forces. The decision had been made late one night at the Pentagon by then Colonel Dean Rusk and another young Army officer named Charles Bonesteel, who picked the line of latitude 38 degrees north because it had the advantage of already being on most maps of Korea.

From Seoul, South Korea’s fallen capital city, to Pusan, its largest port at the southeastern end of the peninsula, was 275 miles by the main road and rail line—all extremely crucial miles just now, as news of the advancing North Korean “People’s Army,” the NKPA, grew steadily worse. July 1950 had become a wretched time in Korea and in Washington. News accounts portrayed Truman as “chipper” or “jaunty” no more, but as looking exhausted, seeming to “walk with the weary man’s heavy tread.” One Sunday, on a rare outing on the Williamsburg down the Potomac, he excused himself after lunch with his staff and slept the rest of the afternoon.

His press conferences were no longer held in his office but across the way in the old State Department Building, in the ornate, musty Indian Treaty Room, which offered more space for an expanding press corps. (He was also fed up with the way reporters spilled ink from their fountain pens on the rug in his office.) To repeated questions about his outlook, he maintained that “of course” he was hopeful. But as they knew from daily bulletins, and he knew better still from his morning briefings by Omar Bradley, the news from Korea was nearly all bad.

Bradley, one of the outstanding generals of World War II, was not given to exaggeration. Plain-mannered, likable, raised in Moberly, Missouri, he was Truman’s kind of man, with more inner iron than generally understood and what his deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon, General Matthew Ridgway, described as “a fine, orderly mind.” Until the Korean crisis, Bradley had reported to the President only on occasion, but he came now to the Oval Office every morning at 9:30 sharp, to unfold his map of Korea and commence his grim report in the dry, oddly high-pitched voice of a Missouri schoolteacher.

American ground forces and what was Left of the Army of the Republic of Korea, the ROKs, were being rapidly chopped to pieces. The first American ground troops—all of 256 men, two and a half companies of the 24th Infantry Division—had gone into action south of Seoul, making a brave stand near Osan, on July 5, and they had been falling back ever since, fighting desperately to keep retreat from turning to rout. Airlifted from Japan, they had been rushed into action without adequate preparation. Many were young draftees with no combat experience; nearly all were soft from garrison duty in Japan; and, like their ROK allies, they were pathetically ill-equipped in the face of a highly disciplined enemy advancing in massive numbers and with heavy Russian T-34 tanks. As the newspapers were saying, it was all tragically reminiscent of the Nazi Blitzkrieg in France in 1940. “The size of the attack, and the speed with which it was followed up,” Truman would tell the nation, “make it perfectly plain that it had been plotted all along.”

When at a meeting of the National Security Council on July 6, Vice President Barkley asked how many North Koreans were in the operation, Bradley said 90,000. American forces numbered about 10,000, the South Koreans 25,000.

In combat, American and ROK forces were often outnumbered three to one, or ten to one, in some places twenty to one. They had no tanks, no artillery, or any weapons capable of slowing the Russian tanks. (It had actually been American policy to keep the South Korean forces under-equipped before this, so as not to encourage aggressive action by South Korea against the North.) World War II bazookas bounced off the Russian tanks like stones. Matthew Ridgway would later say it was as if a few troops of Boy Scouts with hand weapons had tried to stop a German Panzer unit.

The retreat was fought in drenching rains and punishing heat, temperatures regularly over 100 degrees. July was the monsoon season in Korea. Weapons rusted, clothes rotted. With communications broken and mud roads clogged by tens of thousands of fleeing refugees, the chaos was overwhelming. American troops were wholly unfamiliar with the terrain. They knew nothing of the Korean people or the Korean language. They fought and fell back, fought and fell back, with little sleep or food, and in the terrible heat drank from drainage ditches by rice fields fertilized with human manure. As a consequence, violent dysentery ripped through their ranks. “Guys, sweat soaked, shitting in their pants, not even dropping them, moved like zombies,” remembered an American infantryman. “I just sensed we were going to find another hill and be attacked, then find another hill and so forth, endlessly forever.” Casualties were as high as 30 percent. “What a place to die,” a young soldier was quoted in the papers. Some Americans cut and ran, victims of “bugout fever.”

With his map propped on an easel before the President’s desk, Bradley went over the situation one morning in mid-July, pointing out various units, noting the length of the American-ROK line across the peninsula and the necessity of gradual withdrawal. The hope was to continue delaying actions—the most difficult kind of military maneuver—pulling back until a defensive, shortened line in the southeastern corner was reached and established.

American and ROK forces fell back from Osan to the Kum River, then to the temporary capital of Taejon, where a furious, house-to-house battle raged on July 19 (July 18 in Washington). With the city in flames, the commanding general of the 24th Division, William F. Dean, disappeared, reportedly last seen trying to stop an enemy tank with his Army .45 revolver.

Published accounts described suicidal enemy attacks, “waves” of North Koreans, a “Red tide.” “For every ten we killed another ten came charging over the hill to replace them,” an American soldier was quoted in the Washington Post. Before breakfast one morning at Blair House, Truman read on the front page of The New York Times of seven slaughtered American soldiers, prisoners of the North Koreans, who had been found by the roadside, their hands tied behind their backs and shot through the face.

“This is no orthodox war,” wrote Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald-Tribune, the only woman covering the war thus far.

“The stragglers are still coming in—small exhausted groups of them,” reported a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, a few days after the Battle of Taejon.

Their wits and will to live carried them through enemy lines, over mountain trails, through sniper-infested country to this rain-soaked river bottom where camp is pitched.

More than 200 of them had walked out. They had been forced to the hills after fighting in Taejon Thursday. By round-about trails that took them 50 miles through hostile country they reached safety before dawn today [July 22].

Another group of 25 arrived later in the morning, led by a lieutenant colonel. They had started about 80 strong, but only this handful made it all the way. The others dropped from exhaustion along the route.

The retreat continued, through the steep passes of the Sobaek Mountains, to still another defensive line, on high ground behind the Naktong River. In seventeen days of savage fighting, American and ROK forces had fallen back seventy miles.

It was, in many respects, one of the darkest chapters in American military history. But MacArthur, now in overall command of the U.N. forces, was trading space for time—time to pour in men and supplies at the port of Pusan—and the wonder was the North Koreans had been kept from overrunning South Korea straightaway. Despite their suffering and humiliation, the brutal odds against them, the American and ROK units had done what they were supposed to, almost miraculously. They had held back the landslide, said Truman, who would rightly call it one of the most heroic rearguard actions on record.

On July 29, the tactical U.N. commander in the field, General Walton Walker, issued a “stand-or-die” order. There would be no more retreat, Walker said. Pusan must not fall. “There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan.” Every man must fight to the death if necessary, until help arrived.

The speech, designed no doubt for home consumption, struck the troops as uncalled for. The prospect of another Dunkirk or Bataan had I not occurred to them. “I never did like running,” a private from Philadelphia told Marguerite Higgins.

One of Truman’s important but little noted first moves in the fateful last week of June had been to recall Averell Harriman from Europe, where he had been a kind of roving ambassador, and make him a special assistant to help with war emergency problems; and one of Harriman’s first moves in his new role was to press upon the President the need for congressional support for what he was doing in Korea. He urged Truman to call for a war resolution from Congress as soon as possible, while the country was still behind him. Dean Acheson, however, disagreed, insisting that such a resolution was unnecessary and unwise. The President, said Acheson, should rest on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief. It was true that congressional approval would do no harm, but the process of obtaining it, Acheson thought, might do great harm. In the mounting anxiety over how things were going in Korea, the timing was wrong.

Truman sided with Acheson, telling Harriman further that to appeal to Congress now would make it more difficult for future presidents to deal with emergencies.

Later when Robert Taft and others began criticizing the President [Harriman would recall] I was convinced the President had made a mistake. This decision, however, was characteristic of President Truman. He always kept in mind how his actions would affect future presidential authority.

In the first week of July MacArthur requested thirty thousand American ground troops, to bring the four divisions of his Eighth Army to full strength. Just days later, on July 9, the situation had become so “critical” that MacArthur called for a doubling of his forces. Four more divisions were urgently needed, he said in a cable that jolted Washington.

How much more could the United States commit to Korea, given the dangers in other parts of the world? General Bradley and the Joint Chiefs continued to view what was happening in Korea as a possible feint in a larger Kremlin strategy. Truman, at a meeting of the National Security Council, said he would “back out” of Korea only if a “military situation” had to be met elsewhere.

The hard reality was that the Army had only ten divisions. In Western Europe there was but one, and as Winston Churchill noted in a speech in London, the full allied force of twelve divisions in Western Europe faced a Soviet threat of eighty divisions. The NATO allies were exceedingly concerned lest the United States become too involved in distant Korea.

Years of slashing defense expenditures, as a means to balance the budget, had taken a heavy toll. And while the policy of “cutting the fat” at the Pentagon had been pushed by Republicans and Democrats alike—with wide popular approval—and lately made a noisy crusade by Louis Johnson, it was the President who was ultimately responsible. It was Truman’s policy—and along with the “fat,” it was now painfully apparent, a great deal of bone and muscle had been cut. For all its vaunted nuclear supremacy, the nation was quite unprepared for war, just as such critics of the policy as James Forrestal had been saying.

Now, in these “weeks of slaughter and heartbreak,” all that was to change dramatically and with immense, far-reaching consequences.

Truman himself had changed. Members of the White House staff spoke of the “aching pain” of the President’s disappointment, since the Communist invasion of South Korea crushed his dream of peace. He was working eighteen hours a day and the strain showed. Margaret would write of her father’s anguish as American troops were hurled back. Korea was “constantly” on his mind.

At the same time, Truman was undergoing extensive dental treatment. In three weeks beginning July 8, he had two bridges, four single crowns, and a filling replaced, in a series of twelve sessions at Walter Reed Hospital. And through all this, according to the records, he had anesthesia only once, for one of the crowns. Why he subjected himself to such an ordeal just then is puzzling, unless it was to safeguard his health overall, in anticipation of the stress of the war only growing worse.

Solemn, “war-conscious” crowds, as they were described, gathered outside Blair House every time word spread that he was meeting with his military advisers. Many Americans, perhaps most, had first thought of the Korean conflict as truly a “police action,” a mere brushfire affair that would be quickly extinguished once American forces arrived. Now letters and telegrams poured into Washington, to the White House and Congress, decrying the way things were being handled. “It would seem General Vaughan is running the Korean situation,” said one. “Are we being sabotaged by the State Department?” asked another. Those addressed to Truman were at one point running twenty to one against the war:

I wonder how well you have been sleeping these last nights? Mothers and fathers all over our beloved land are spending sleepless nights worrying again over their boys being sent to fight wars on foreign soil—wars that are no concern of ours….

WE DEMAND THAT YOU STOP MURDERING AMERICAN BOYS AND KOREAN PEOPLE….

In heaven’s name, what are you doing? The blood hasn’t dried from World war 2…. We have nothing to do with Korea. These people are capable of settling their own affairs….

LET THEM HAVE THE ATOM BOMB NOW….

I am the mother of a soldier in Korea. I am an American, I mean a good American. I love this country and all it stands for…. I am writing to you, because I want my son home, he is my only child, and very young. Please, Mr. President, I implore you….

YOU DID IT ONCE BEFORE STOP DROP ONE OVER THE KREMLIN AND GET IT OVER WITH.

In the Senate, Taft called for Dean Acheson to resign. Owen Brewster wanted to let MacArthur use the atomic bomb “at his discretion.” Newspapers carried photographs contrasting the cheerful, confident President of spring with die grave, lined President of summer. “The grin in which his face was formerly permanently wreathed has disappeared,” wrote the Alsop brothers. “So, at last, has the euphoric presidential conviction that ‘everything’s going to be all right.’ ”

To the Alsops and others who had long deplored the decline of American military power, it was a case now of “we told you so.” The influence of Louis Johnson at the Pentagon had been “little less than catastrophic”—“damn near treasonous,” Joseph Alsop would later say privately. Truman had been naive at best. With the Korean crisis, however, Truman had undergone a “complete change.”

The great historic shift began at a meeting of the Cabinet on Friday, July 14. Again, as at the fateful Blair House sessions, it was Acheson who took the initiative, urging an immediate expansion of all military services and huge increases in military spending. Truman agreed. And from this point forward there was to be no turning back, not in his lifetime or in that of any of those around the table.

On Wednesday, July 19, first in a special message to Congress, then in an address to the nation, Truman said the attack on Korea demanded that the United States send more men, equipment, and supplies. Beyond that, the realities of the “world situation” required still greater American military strength. He called for an emergency appropriation of $10 billion—the final sum submitted would be $11.6 billion, or nearly as much as the entire $13 billion military budget originally planned for the fiscal year—and announced he was both stepping up the draft and calling up certain National Guard units.

“Korea is a small country thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American,” he told the nation, standing stone-faced in the heat of the television lights, a tangle of wires and cables at his feet. By their “act of raw aggression…I repeat, it was raw aggression,” the North Koreans had violated the U.N. Charter, and though American forces were making the “principal effort” to save the Republic of South Korea, they were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was a “landmark in mankind’s long search for a rule of law among nations.”

As a call to arms it was not especially inspirational. Nor did he once use the word “war” to describe what was happening in Korea. But then neither was there any question about his sincerity, nor was he the least evasive about what would be asked of the country. The “job” was long and difficult. It meant increased taxes, rationing if necessary, “stern days ahead.”

Possibly in time the strident warnings and enjoinders of NSC-68 would have effected such a turn in policy. But Korea made all that academic now. Truman’s commitment to military power was theoretical no longer. In another televised address at summer’s end, he would announce plans to double the armed forces to nearly 3 million men, saying such costs and obligations were to be part of the nation’s burden for a long time to come.

Congress appropriated the money—$48.2 billion for military spending in fiscal 1950–51, then $60 billion for fiscal 1951–52.

Was he considering use of the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman was asked at a press conference the last week of July. No, he said. Did he plan to get out of Washington any time soon? No. He would stay on the job.

That Truman was extremely vexed with his Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, and less than fond or admiring of his Far Eastern Commander, Douglas MacArthur, was well known to his staff and a cause of gathering concern at the Pentagon. “He would have saved himself a lot of grief had he relieved both men at the onset of the war,” was the subsequent view of General Bradley. Johnson had begun to show “an inordinate egotistical desire to run the whole government,” Truman later recorded. “He offended every member of the cabinet…he never missed an opportunity to say mean things about my personal staff.” His Secretary of Defense, Truman speculated, was suffering from a “pathological condition.”

When Truman learned from Averell Harriman that Johnson had been praising Senator Taft—over the phone, and in Harriman’s presence—for Taft’s attacks on Acheson (and then promised Harriman to do all he could to make Harriman Secretary of State, once Acheson was out of the way), Johnson was, in effect, finished. From Eben Ayers’ diary, it is known that the President confided Harriman’s story to Charlie Ross on July 3. The next morning, July 4, Truman drove to Leesburg, Virginia, with Margaret for what was ostensibly a holiday visit with General Marshall, who, since recovering his health, had become head of the American Red Cross. “A most interesting morning,” was all that Truman noted in his own diary.

Yet to fire Johnson then, with things going so badly in Korea, to shame the man who had been most conspicuous in carrying out Truman’s own policies at the Pentagon, would not have been a move of the kind Truman admired. So weeks passed and Louis Johnson remained.

As for MacArthur, Truman’s private view seems to have been no different from what it had been in 1945, at the peak of MacArthur’s renown, when, in his journal, Truman had described the general as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat,” a “play actor and bunco man.” The President, noted Eben Ayers, expressed “little regard or respect” for MacArthur, called him a “supreme egotist” who thought himself “something of a god.” But working with people that one did not necessarily like or admire was part of life—particularly the politician’s life—and if removing Louis Johnson would have been difficult under the circumstances, firing the five-star Far Eastern Commander would have been very nearly unthinkable. John Foster Dulles told Truman confidentially that MacArthur should be dispensed with as soon as possible. Dulles, the most prominent Republican spokesman on foreign policy and a special adviser to the State Department, had returned from a series of meetings with MacArthur in Tokyo convinced that the seventy-year-old general was well past his prime and a potential liability. In a private conference in the Oval Office, Dulles advised Truman to bring MacArthur home and retire him before he caused trouble. But that, replied Truman, his blue-gray eyes large behind his glasses, was easier said than done. He reminded Dulles of the reaction there would be in the country, so great was MacArthur’s “heroic standing.”

In later years it would be stressed by some writers that Truman had little regard for generals, even viewed them with contempt, considering them limited in outlook and ability. He himself, in retirement, would say most generals were “dumb,” “like horses with blinders on,” and would Fault their West Point education (the education he had so wanted as a youth but was denied). His bias, however, was not against generals overall, but such figures as MacArthur who seemed to feel they were above everyone else. Truman hated caste systems of any kind, disliked stuffed shirts of all varieties, and his experiences in France in 1918 had left him with an abiding dislike of the military caste system and its West Point stuffed shirts in particular.

However, his latter-day remarks notwithstanding, Truman’s regard for such generals as Bradley and Ridgway (both West Pointers) could not have been much greater. He had long considered Bradley a model officer and very quickly that summer he had come to rely on Bradley as an adviser more than anyone in his administration except Acheson. Ridgway, too, greatly impressed Truman and would in time more than justify Truman’s confidence in him. Then there were Eisenhower and Marshall—Eisenhower, the man Truman had been willing to step aside for, to make him President, and Marshall, “the great one,” whom Truman revered above all men.

Nor, importantly, did Truman at this stage express any doubt concerning MacArthur’s ability. If anything, he seems to have been banking on it.

By the first week in August, American and ROK forces, dug in behind the Naktong River, had set up the final defense line to be known as the Pusan Perimeter, a thinly held front forming an arc of 130 miles around the port of Pusan. On the map it looked like a bare toehold on the peninsula. On the ground the fighting went on as savagely as before. The monsoons had ended. Now the troops cursed the heat and dust so thick that supply trucks kept their headlights on at midday. But the retreat was over. Besides, the headlong advance of the North Koreans had cost them heavily—their casualties had been worse even than the Americans imagined. Their supply lines were now greatly overextended. U.N. forces controlled the sea and air, while at Pusan, the buildup of American tanks, artillery, and fresh troops was moving rapidly. At his briefing for the President on Saturday, August 12, in his customary, dry, cautious way, Bradley, for the first time, described the situation as “fluid but improving.”

Averell Harriman, meanwhile, had returned from a hurried mission to Tokyo, bringing the details of a daring new MacArthur plan.

Harriman had been dispatched to tell the general of Truman’s determination to see that he had everything he needed, but also to impress upon him Truman’s urgent desire to avoid any move that might provoke a third world war. This was Truman’s uppermost concern and there must be no misunderstanding. In particular, MacArthur was to “stay clear” of Chiang Kai-shek—a sore point since MacArthur had made a highly publicized flying visit to Formosa on July 31 to confer with Chiang, after which he had been photographed kissing Madame Chiang’s hand. Chiang, Truman had instructed Harriman to tell MacArthur, must not become the catalyst for a war with the Chinese Communists.

Harriman, as Truman appreciated, had known MacArthur on a first-name basis since MacArthur was Superintendent at West Point in 1920.

Accompanied by Ridgway and General Lauris Norstad of the Air Force, Harriman had left for Tokyo on August 4, and on the morning of their return to Washington, August 9, Harriman went directly from the airport to Blair House, taking no time to shave or shower or have breakfast. As he would later explain, Harriman had scheduled his return so he could see the President at about 7:00 A.M., the best time to “catch him alone.”

MacArthur had no reservations about the decision to fight in Korea, “absolutely none,” Harriman reported. MacArthur was certain neither the Chinese Communists nor the Russians would intervene in Korea. Concerning Chiang Kai-shek, MacArthur had assured Harriman that of course, as a soldier, he would do as the President ordered, though something about MacArthur’s tone as he said this had left Harriman wondering.

Of greater urgency and importance was what Harriman had to report of a plan to win the war with one bold stroke. For weeks there had been talk at the Pentagon of a MacArthur strategy to outflank the enemy, to hit from behind, by amphibious landing. The details were vague and the Joint Chiefs remained highly skeptical. But in Tokyo, Harriman, Ridgway, and Norstad had been given a grand unveiling, a brilliant, two-and-a-half-hour exposition delivered by MacArthur “with all his dramatic eloquence,” as Ridgway wrote. The three men were completely won over, “enthralled,” said Harriman, and ready to go home and argue for the plan. It could mean “our salvation,” Harriman told Truman.

The idea was to make a surprise amphibious landing on the western shore of Korea at the port of Inchon, 200 miles northwest of Pusan. The problem was that Inchon had tremendous tides—tides of 30 feet or more—and no beaches on which to land, only sea walls. Thus an assault would have to strike directly into the city itself, and only a full tide would carry the landing craft clear to the sea wall. In two hours after high tide, the landing craft would be stuck in the mud.

To Bradley it was the riskiest military proposal he had ever heard. But as MacArthur stressed, the Japanese had landed successfully at Inchon in 1904 and the very “impracticabilities” would help ensure the all-important element of surprise. As Wolfe had astonished and defeated Montcalm at Quebec in 1759, by scaling the impossible cliffs by the Plains of Abraham, so, MacArthur said, he would astonish and defeat the North Koreans by landing at the impossible port of Inchon. But there was little time. The attack had to come before the onset of the Korean winter exacted more casualties than the battlefield. The tides at Inchon would be right on September 15.

“I made clear to the President the difficulties of the plan,” Harriman later said, “including the very heavy tide which would make landing any reinforcements impossible until the next high tide.”

Truman told him to see Johnson and Bradley “as fast as you can.” Though Truman had made no commitment one way or the other, Harriman left the house convinced that Truman approved the plan.

At the Pusan Perimeter desperate fighting raged on, American casualties mounting—6,886 by August 25, by mid-September double that number. Soldiers who had fought in Europe were calling Korea a tougher war than any they had known. In a long, searing dispatch in Time and Life, correspondent John Osborne described it as “an ugly war,” “sorrowful,” “sickening,” “an especially terrible war.” No one who saw it firsthand would ever speak of it as a “police action.” The savagery of the North Koreans was appalling, but that of some South Korean police was hardly less. Americans described seeing enemy troops within plain sight changing from the green uniforms of the North Korean Army to the common white trousers and blouses of the Korean peasants. The awful uncertainty of who was friend and who was foe had already forced American troops to their own appalling acts and attitudes.

This means not the usual, inevitable savagery of combat in the field but savagery in detail—the blotting out of villages where the enemy may be hiding; the shooting and shelling of refugees who may include North Koreans in the anonymous white clothing of the Korean countryside, or who may be screening an enemy march upon our positions….

The buildup of men and arms pouring into Pusan was phenomenal. Still, warned Osborne, “We may be pushed out of Korea.”

By early August, General Bradley could tell the President that American strength at Pusan was up to 50,000, which with another 45,000 ROKs and small contingents of U.N. allies, made a total U.N. ground force of nearly 100,000. Still the prospect of diverting additional American forces for MacArthur’s Inchon scheme pleased the Joint Chiefs not at all. Bradley continued to view it as “the wildest kind” of plan.

But on August 10, after a series of intense White House meetings, the Joint Chiefs and National Security Council approved the strategy in principle. As further sessions followed in Tokyo and in Washington, Bradley, Admiral Sherman, and General Collins expressed “the gravest misgivings,” as Bradley reported to Truman at a briefing Saturday, August 26, the same day the Associated Press broke a statement from MacArthur to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he strongly defended Chiang Kai-shek and the importance of Chiang’s control of Formosa: “Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.” It was exactly the sort of dabbling in policy that MacArthur had assured Harriman he would, as a good soldier, refrain from.

Truman was livid, “his lips white and compressed.” Dispensing with the usual greetings at his morning meeting with Acheson, Harriman, Johnson, and the Joint Chiefs, he read the whole of MacArthur’s statement aloud. Acheson, outraged, called it rank insubordination. To Bradley the message was “the height of arrogance.” Harriman was the most upset of all. Truman would later say he considered but rejected the idea of relieving MacArthur of field command then and there and replacing him with Bradley. “It would have been difficult to avoid the appearance of demotion, and I had no desire to hurt General MacArthur personally.”

Truman asked Louis Johnson to have MacArthur withdraw the statement. When Johnson demurred, Truman dictated the message himself and told Johnson to act on it at once.

But whatever his anger at MacArthur, to whatever degree the incident had increased his dislike—or distrust—of the general, Truman proceeded with discussion of the Inchon plan, and in spite of objections voiced by Bradley and the others, he decided to give MacArthur his backing. “The JCS inclined toward postponing Inchon until such time that we were certain Pusan could hold,” remembered Bradley. “But Truman was now committed.” On August 28, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur their tentative approval.

It was, they all knew, an enormous gamble. Several of MacArthur’s own staff, as would later be known, thought the plan unwise. MacArthur himself called it a 5,000-to-l shot. Bradley wrote that “a failure could be a national or even international catastrophe, not only militarily, but psychologically.” Truman had been strongly influenced by Harriman and by a memorandum of support from Ridgway. But in the last analysis, he relied on his own instincts. “It was a daring strategic conception,” he would write later. “I had the greatest confidence it would succeed.”

In time to come, little would be said or written about Truman’s part in the matter—that as Commander in Chief he, and he alone, was the one with the final say on Inchon. He could have said no, and certainly the weight of opinion among his military advisers would have been on his side. But he did not. He took the chance, made the decision for which he was neither to ask nor receive anything like the credit he deserved.

“Hell and high water every day,” was Truman’s description of the next several weeks. He had decided to show Louis Johnson the door.

On Wednesday, September 6, General Marshall came alone to the White House, and Truman, as he had twice before when he needed him, asked Marshall to return to service, this time as Secretary of Defense. Marshall warned Truman to consider carefully. “I’ll do it,” he said. “But I want you to think about the fact that my appointment may reflect upon you and your administration. They are still charging me with the downfall of Chiang’s government in China. I want to help, not hurt you.”

Greatly moved, Truman wrote to Bess, “Can you think of anyone else saying that?”

Three days later, Saturday, September 9, after one last Oval Office session on Inchon, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur a final go-ahead. The landing was to take place on September 15, in less than a week.

On Monday, the 11th, Truman summoned Louis Johnson and told him he must quit. Further, in announcing his resignation, Johnson was to recommend General Marshall as his successor.

Johnson looked as if he might faint. Truman felt dreadful. Johnson pleaded for time to think it over. He could have a day, Truman said, but there would be no change. Returning the next afternoon with an unsigned letter of resignation in hand, Johnson begged Truman not to fire him. When Truman insisted he sign the letter, Johnson broke down and wept. He had seldom ever been so miserably uncomfortable, Truman later said. He had known Johnson for thirty years.

The resignation of Johnson and the nomination of Marshall were announced at once.

In the early hours of September 15—it was afternoon in Washington, September 14—the amphibious landing at Inchon began. As promised by MacArthur, the attack took the enemy by total surprise, and as also promised by MacArthur, the operation was an overwhelming success that completely turned the tables on the enemy.

The invasion force numbered 262 ships and 70,000 men of the Tenth Corps, with the 1st Marine Division leading the assault. Inchon fell in little more than a day. In eleven days Seoul was retaken. Meantime, as planned, General Walker’s Eighth Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and started north. Seldom in military history had there been such a dramatic turn in fortune. By September 27 more than half the North Korean Army had been trapped in a huge pincer movement. By October 1, U.N. forces were at the 38th parallel and South Korea was in U.N. control. In two weeks, it had become an entirely different war.

In Washington the news was almost unbelievable, more by far than anyone had dared hope for. The country was exultant. It was a “military miracle.” A jubilant President cabled MacArthur: “I salute you all, and say to all of you from all of us at home, ‘Well and nobly done.’ ”

For nearly three months, since the war began, the question had been whether U.N. forces could possibly hang on and survive in Korea. Now suddenly the question was whether to carry the war across the 38th parallel and destroy the Communist army and the Communist regime of the north and thereby unify the country. MacArthur favored “hot pursuit” of the enemy. So did the Joint Chiefs, the press, politicians in both parties, and the great majority of the American people. And understandably. It was a heady time, the excitement of victory was in the air. Except for a few at the State Department—Chip Bohlen, Paul Nitze, George Kennan, who had returned to service temporarily—virtually no one was urging a halt at the 38th parallel. “Troops could not be expected…to march up to a surveyor’s line and stop,” said Dean Acheson. “As a boundary it had no political value.”

Truman appears to have been as caught up in the spirit of the moment as anyone. To pursue and destroy the enemy’s army was basic military doctrine. If he hesitated or agonized over the decision—one of the most fateful of his presidency—there is no record of it.

The decision was made on Wednesday, September 27. MacArthur’s military objective now was “the destruction of the North Korean Armed Forces”—a very different objective from before. He was authorized to cross the 38th parallel, providing there was no sign of major intervention in North Korea by Soviet or Chinese forces. Also, he was not to carry the fight beyond the Chinese or Soviet borders of North Korea. Overall, he was free to do what had to be done to wind up the war as swiftly as possible. George Marshall, now Secretary of Defense, told him to “feel unhampered tactically and strategically,” and when MacArthur cabled, “I regard all of Korea open for military operations,” no one objected.

Carrying the war north involved two enormous risks—intervention by the Chinese and winter. But MacArthur was ready to move, and after Inchon, MacArthur was regarded with “almost superstitious awe.”

By diplomatic channels came warnings from the foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China, Chou En-lai, that if U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel, China would send troops in support of North Korea. In Washington—at the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House—such warnings were judged to be largely bluff.

At the end of the first week of October, at Lake Success, New York, the United Nations recommended all “appropriate steps be taken to ensure conditions of stability throughout Korea,” which meant U.N. approval for proceeding with the war. Just days later, on October 9, MacArthur sent the Eighth Army across the 38th parallel near Kaesong, and the day following, Truman made a surprise announcement. He was flying to an unspecified point in the Pacific to confer with General MacArthur on “the final phase” in Korea.

II

It was the kind of grand, high-level theater irresistible to the press and the American public. Truman and MacArthur were to rendezvous, as was said, like the sovereign rulers of separate realms journeying to a neutral field attended by their various retainers. The two men had never met. MacArthur had been out of the country since 1937. Truman had never been closer to the Far East than San Francisco.

The meeting place was a pinpoint in the Pacific, Wake Island, a minute coral way station beyond the international date line.

The presidential expedition was made up of three planes, the Independence with Truman, his staff, physician, and Secret Service detail; an Air Force Constellation carrying Harriman, Rusk, Philip Jessup, Army Secretary Pace, and General Bradley, plus all their aides, secretaries, and Admiral Arthur Radford, commander of the Pacific Fleet, who came on board at Honolulu; and a Pan American Stratocruiser with thirty-five correspondents and photographers. General MacArthur flew with several of his staff, a physician, and Ambassador John Muccio.

As a courtesy, Truman let MacArthur choose the place for the meeting, and for Truman, Wake Island meant a flight across seven time zones, a full round trip from Washington of 14,425 miles, while MacArthur had only to travel 4,000 miles from Tokyo and back. Events were moving rapidly in Korea, Truman would explain, “and I did not feel that he [MacArthur] should be away from his post too long.”

To many the whole affair looked like a political grandstand play to capitalize on the sudden, unexpected success of the war and share in MacArthur’s Inchon glory on the eve of the off-year elections in November. The President had been out of the headlines for some time, it was noted. Now he was back, and for those Democrats in Congress who were up for reelection, it was “the perfect answer to prayer and fasting.” MacArthur himself, en route to Wake Island, appeared disgusted that he had been “summoned for political reasons.” In fact, the idea for the meeting had originated with the White House staff as “good election year stuff,” Charlie Murphy remembered, and at first Truman had rejected it for that very reason, for being “too political, too much showmanship.” Apparently it was only after being reminded that Franklin Roosevelt had made just such a trip to meet with MacArthur at Hawaii in 1944 that Truman changed his mind.

Dean Acheson, who was conspicuously absent from the presidential entourage, had strongly disapproved and asked to be excused. “While general MacArthur had many of the attributes of a foreign sovereign…and was quite as difficult as any, it did not seem wise to recognize him as one,” Acheson would write. “The whole idea was distasteful to me. I wanted no part in it and saw no good coming from it.”

Truman, too, appears to have had second thoughts, even as he flew the pacific. “I’ve a while of a job before me,” he wrote to Nellie Noland from the plane east of Hawaii. “Have to talk to God’s right-hand man tomorrow….”

That a dramatic meeting between the President and his Far East Commander could, at this juncture, have great political value was, of course, undeniable. But to many who took part in the meeting, the charge that it was only, or even primarily, a political ploy would be emphatically dismissed as absurd. “Sheer nonsense,” said Bradley.

The importance of the occasion, like its drama, centered on the human equation, the vital factor of personality. For the first time the two upon whom so much depended, and who were so strikingly different in nature, would be able to appraise one another not at vast distance, or through official communiqué or the views of advisers only, but by looking each other over. As Admiral Radford commented at the time, “Two men can sometimes learn more of each other’s minds in two hours, face to face, than in years of correct correspondence.” Truman, after returning, would remark simply, “I don’t care what they say. I wanted to see General MacArthur, so I went to see him.”

Also what would be largely forgotten, or misrepresented by both sides in time to come, after things turned sour, was how the meetings at Wake Island actually went, what the President and the general actually concluded then, once having met.

Truman’s plane put down at 6:30 A.M., Sunday, October 15, just as the sun rose from the sea with spectacular brilliance, backlighting ranks of towering clouds. The single airstrip stretched the length of the island.

MacArthur was there waiting. In a later account of Truman’s arrival at Wake, as given to the author Merle Miller by Truman and Wallace Graham, MacArthur would be pictured deliberately trying to upstage Truman by circling the airstrip, waiting for Truman to land first, thus putting the President in the position of having to wait for the general. But it did not happen that way. MacArthur was not only on the ground, he had arrived the night before and was at the field half an hour early. Averell Harriman, whose plane had come in a few minutes before the Independence and who stood waiting with MacArthur, would remember MacArthur asking what the meeting was about. Harriman had said it was to discuss how a political victory could be attained in Korea, now that MacArthur had won such a brilliant military victory. “Good,” said MacArthur. “The President wants my views.”

With an eye on Truman’s plane as it began its approach, MacArthur took Harriman by the arm and started walking toward the runway. Harriman spoke of the strong support the President had given the Inchon operation. MacArthur said that at Inchon, he, MacArthur, had taken “grave responsibility” upon himself. Perhaps, said Harriman, MacArthur should consider the responsibility the President had assumed in backing him, and to this, noted Harriman, MacArthur registered keen interest.

As Truman stepped from the plane and came down the ramp, MacArthur stood waiting at the bottom, with “every appearance of warmth and friendliness.” And while onlookers noted also that the general failed to salute the President, and though Truman seems to have been somewhat put out by MacArthur’s attire—his open-neck shirt and “greasy ham and eggs cap” (MacArthur’s famed, gold-braided World War II garrison cap)—the greeting between them was extremely cordial.

MacArthur held out his hand. “Mr. President,” he said, seizing Truman’s right arm while pumping his hand, which experienced MacArthur watchers knew to be the number one treatment.

“I’ve been waiting a long time meeting you, General,” Truman said with a broad smile.

“I hope it won’t be so long next time, Mr. President,” MacArthur answered warmly.

Truman was dressed in a dark blue, double-breasted suit and gray Stetson. In Honolulu, he had outfitted his whole staff in Hawaiian shirts, but he looked now conspicuously formal, entirely presidential, and well rested, having slept during most of the last leg of the flight.

For the benefit of the photographers, he and MacArthur shook hands several times again, as a small crowd applauded. Then the two men climbed into the back seat of a well-worn black two-door Chevrolet, the best car available on the island, and drove a short distance to a Quonset hut by the ocean, where, alone, they talked for half an hour.

According to Secret Service Agent Henry Nicholson, who rode in the front seat beside Floyd Boring, the driver, Truman began talking almost immediately about his concern over possible Chinese intervention in Korea. Nicholson would distinctly recall Truman saying, “I have been worried about that.”

At the Quonset hut, according to Truman’s own account in his Memoirs, MacArthur assured him victory was won in Korea and that the Chinese Communists would not attack. When MacArthur apologized for what he had said in his Veterans of Foreign Wars statement, Truman told him to think no more of it, he considered the matter closed—a gesture that so impressed MacArthur that he later made a point of telling Harriman.

What more was said in the Quonset hut is not known, since no notes were taken and no one else was present. But clearly the time served to put both men at ease. Each, to judge by his later comments, concluded that the other was not as he had supposed.

Like so many others meeting MacArthur for the first time, Truman was struck by the engaging manner, the remarkable physical bearing, the celebrated “presence.” The general, Truman would write, “seemed genuinely pleased at this opportunity to talk with me, and I found him a most stimulating and interesting person. Our conversation was very friendly—I might say much more so than I had expected.”

MacArthur, for his part, later told Harriman that newspaper accounts and magazine articles did not do the President justice. In his own Reminiscences, MacArthur would write: “I had been warned about Mr. Truman’s quick and violent temper and prejudices, but he radiated nothing but courtesy and good humor during our meeting. He has an engaging personality, a quick and witty tongue, and I liked him from the start.”

About 7:30 they reemerged in the brilliant morning sunshine and again drove off in the Chevrolet, now to a flat-roofed, one-story, pink cinder-block shack, a Civil Aeronautics administration building with a wind sock floating above, close to the beach where the Japanese had stormed ashore in 1941. Beyond the beach, blue Pacific rollers crashed over the dark hulks of two Japanese landing boats.

Others, some seventeen advisers and aides, were waiting in a large, plain room opening onto several smaller anterooms, these separated only by half-length, louvered swinging doors. Truman, setting a tone of informality, said it was no weather for coats, they should all get comfortable. He sat in his shirtsleeves at the head of a long pine table, MacArthur on his right, Harriman on the left, the rest finding places down the table or against the walls. MacArthur, taking out a briar pipe, asked if the President minded if he smoked. Everyone laughed. No, Truman said, he supposed he had had more smoke blown his way than any man alive.

The conference lasted less than two hours, during which Harriman, Bradley, Dean Rusk, and Philip Jessup each kept notes, and quite openly. A State Department stenographer, Vernice Anderson, who was sitting in an adjoining room just beyond one of the half doors, and could thus hear clearly most of what was said, also took notes in shorthand. She had been asked to wait outside until she was needed to type up a final communiqué at the close of the meeting, but she kept her shorthand record of the meeting “automatically,” as she later explained, because it seemed the thing to do. No one had told her to and no one had told her not to. Because she remained out of sight, she would be portrayed later by MacArthur’s admirers as a “planted” eavesdropper “lurking behind the door,” her presence decried as “playing politics at about its lowest level.” MacArthur was said to have been deeply offended when a transcript of the meeting, based on a composite of all the notes taken, including those by Anderson, was made public. Yet when MacArthur received copies of the transcript less than a week after the conference, he expressed no surprise or displeasure, and suggested no changes.

The meeting proceeded without formal agenda, and as MacArthur later wrote, no new policies or war strategies were proposed or discussed. But the discussion was broad-ranged, with MacArthur doing most of the talking, as Truman, referring only to a few handwritten notes, asked questions. As so often before, MacArthur’s performance was masterful. He seemed in full command of every detail and absolutely confident. “He was the most persuasive fellow I ever heard,” remembered Charlie Murphy; “indeed a military genius,” said Frank Pace. The time moved swiftly.

MacArthur had only good news to report. The situation in Korea was under control. The war, “the formal resistance,” would end by Thanksgiving. The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, would fall in a week. By Christmas he would have the Eighth Army back in Japan. By the first of the year, the United Nations would be holding elections, he expected, and American troops could be withdrawn entirely very soon afterwards. “Nothing is gained by military Occupation. All occupations are failures,” MacArthur declared, to which Truman nodded in agreement.

Truman’s first concern was keeping it a “limited” war. What were the chances of Chinese or Soviet intervention, he asked. “Very little,” MacArthur said.

Had they interfered in the first or second months it would have been decisive. We are no longer fearful of their intervention…. The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Of these probably not more than 100,000 to 125,000 are distributed along the Yalu River. They have no Air Force. Now that we have bases for our Air Force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be the greatest slaughter.

The Russians, MacArthur continued, were a different matter. The Russians had an air force in Siberia and could put a thousand planes in action. A combination of Chinese ground troops and Russian airpower could pose a problem, he implied. But coordination of air support with operations on the ground was extremely difficult and he doubted they could manage it.

The support he had been given from Washington was surpassing, MacArthur stressed. “No commander in the history of war,” he said, looking around the table, “has ever had more complete and adequate support from all agencies in Washington than I have.”

How soon could he release a division for duty in Europe, Bradley wished to know. By January, MacArthur assured him.

Dean Rusk, concerned that the discussion was moving too fast, passed Truman a note suggesting he slow down the pace. Too brief a meeting, Rusk felt, would only fuel the cynicism of a press already dubious about the meeting. Truman scribbled a reply: “Hell, no! I want to get out of here before we get into trouble.”

Much of the time was taken up with questions concerning the rehabilitation of Korea, now that victory was at hand. There were questions about costs, concern over what to do about war criminals, a question from Bradley on what was to be done with some sixty thousand North Korean prisoners. (“They are the happiest Koreans in all Korea,” MacArthur said. “For the first time they are well fed and clean.”) Then, briefly, the discussion moved to the French effort against the Communists under Ho Chi Minh in Indochina, a situation Truman and MacArthur both found puzzling. MacArthur could not understand why the French couldn’t “clean it up” in a few months. He couldn’t understand it either, Truman said. Later, talking with Dean Rusk, MacArthur said that all the French needed was an aggressive general.

When Truman said there was no need for discussion of Formosa, since he and MacArthur had already talked “fully” about it and were in “complete agreement,” MacArthur said nothing—which suggests either that he and Truman covered more concerning Formosa than MacArthur’s VFW remarks, or, more likely, that MacArthur had no inclination to disagree now, no desire to say anything that might detract from the rosy picture he was painting or disrupt the harmony of the moment.

As to the need for additional United Nations troops, MacArthur would leave that for Washington to decide, and it was then, at about 9:05, that Truman called a halt.

“No one who was not here would believe we have covered so much ground as we have been actually able to cover,” he said. He suggested a break for lunch while a communiqué was prepared. But MacArthur declined, saying he was anxious to get back to Tokyo and would like to leave as soon as possible, which to some in the room seemed to border on rudeness. “Whether intended or not,” wrote Bradley, “it was insulting to decline lunch with the President, and I think Truman was miffed, although he gave no sign.”

“The communiqué should be submitted as soon as it is ready and General MacArthur can return immediately,” Truman said. The conference had lasted one hour, thirty-six minutes.

In later studies, some historians would write that Truman had traveled extremely far for not much. But to Truman, at the time, it had all been worth the effort. He was exuberant. He had never had a more satisfactory conference, he told the reporters present. Tony Leviero of The New York Times described him beaming “like an insurance salesman who had at last signed up an important prospect.”

As the communiqué was being drawn up, Truman and MacArthur, off to themselves, even talked politics. MacArthur asked the President whether he planned to run for reelection—the Emperor of Japan wished to know, MacArthur quickly added. Truman responded by asking MacArthur what his own political ambitions were.

“None whatever,” MacArthur said. “If you have a general running against you, his name will be Eisenhower, not MacArthur.”

Truman laughed. He liked and admired Eisenhower, considered him a friend, but, said Truman, “Eisenhower doesn’t know the first thing about politics.”

The communiqué, which MacArthur read and initialed, stressed “the very complete unanimity of view” that had made possible such rapid progress at the conference table and called MacArthur “one of America’s great soldier-statesmen.” At the airstrip, in a little ceremony just before boarding his plane, Truman said still more as he honored MacArthur with a Distinguished Service Medal. He praised MacArthur for “his vision, his judgment, his indomitable will and unshakeable faith,” his “gallantry and tenacity” and “audacity in attack matched by few operations in history.”

Later, on the way home, in a speech at San Francisco carried worldwide by the Voice of America in twenty-six languages, Truman would refer repeatedly to MacArthur, the man who had written a “glorious new page” in military history. “It is fortunate for the world that we had the right man for this purpose—a man who is a very great soldier—General Douglas MacArthur.”

There was no substitute for personal conversation with the commander in the field who knows the problems there from firsthand experience, Truman said in the speech. But he had felt also a “pressing need” to make clear that there was “complete unity in the aims and conduct of our foreign policy.”

MacArthur, too, left Wake Island in high spirits. On the flight to Tokyo, according to Ambassador Muccio, MacArthur was at his “sparkling best,” “effervescent.” After listening to Truman’s San Francisco speech, he immediately cabled the President his warm approval.

The whole spirit of Wake Island was one of relief and exhilaration. The awful bloodshed in Korea, the suffering, was all but over, the war was won. If MacArthur said there was “very little” chance of the Chinese coming in, who, after Inchon, was to doubt his judgment, and particularly if what he said confirmed what was thought in Washington? (“On this one MacArthur and the rest of us were all wrong,” Dean Rusk would write in retrospect.) If Truman and MacArthur had disliked or distrusted one another before the meeting, they apparently did so no longer. If the conference had accomplished that alone, it had been a success.

As things looked late the morning of Sunday, October 15, 1950, on Wake Island, MacArthur would be winding up the war almost any day. “Come up to Pyongyang. It won’t be long now,” were his parting words to the Washington reporters who saw him off at the airstrip. The problems ahead in Korea, presumably, were to be problems only of peace and rehabilitation, problems of just the kind MacArthur, with his experience in postwar Japan, was equipped to handle.

For Truman, the Commander in Chief, his decision of June 30, to commit American arms and prestige to check aggression in Korea, the moves made to make it a United Nations effort, had never looked so sound. His “police action,” for all the dark hours of summer, had succeeded. The Communist advance was thrown back. He had matched words with deeds. He had done what he felt he must for the good of America and the world, made the right choices after all, chosen the right general, backed him, gambled on his audacity. And it had all worked. Korea, it seemed, could be included now with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, NATO, as among the proudest accomplishments of his presidency. With the Korean crisis settled, the war nearly over, the dreadful possibility of a larger world conflict was also passing, which, to Truman, exceeded all other considerations. If he was beaming like a successful insurance salesman, if MacArthur was “effervescent,” they had good reason.

Truman believed and often said that how a person stood in history had a lot to do with the timing of his death. Had he or MacArthur died then or shortly after—had one of their planes gone down, or either succumbed to heart failure—their place in history and their record of achievement would have looked quite different from what would follow.

They said goodbye in the glaring sunshine of midday at Wake Island as Truman boarded the Independence.

“Goodbye, sir,” MacArthur said. “Happy landing. It has been a real honor talking to you.”

It was their first and their last meeting. They never saw each other again.

III

By all signs Truman gave little thought to his own physical safety while President. When your time was up, it was up, was his feeling and it did not matter much what precautions were taken. He liked the Secret Service agents who watched over him, most of whom came from small towns or backgrounds much like his own and none of whom ever asked anything of him. “I like them more than all the top-notchers,” he once told Margaret. Particularly he enjoyed chatting with the two or three who regularly accompanied him on his morning walks. He knew where they came from, whether they were married or had children, which church they attended. “He would treat us almost like sons,” remembered one, Rex Scouten. “He talked nearly the whole time as we walked—about the Army [Truman liked the fact that Scouten, too, had been in the artillery], about his growing up in Missouri, and the Civil War. He’d go by a building and he’d tell you all about the building and why it was designed the way it was….”

His interest in them, they knew, was more than passing. When Truman learned, for example, that Floyd Boring’s wife had had a baby, he had another Secret Service man drive him to the hospital to visit with her and see the child.

But the unbroken presence of protectors, the feeling of being constantly under guard, grated on him. He never became accustomed to it. He would have much preferred less security than more. If after moving to Blair House he had any misgivings about the security problems it posed, he never said a word.

At midday on Wednesday, November 1, 1950, two weeks after the Wake Island conference, Truman returned to Blair House at the end of an extremely disquieting morning. According to a report from his new head of the CIA, General Walter Bedell Smith, it had been “clearly established” that the forces now opposing U.N. troops in North Korea included Chinese Communist soldiers, their numbers estimated as high as fifteen to twenty thousand.

The day in Washington was unseasonably hot—the hottest November day on record, 85 degrees in the shade along Pennsylvania Avenue.

Truman joined Bess and Madge Wallace for a quiet lunch, then went upstairs for a nap. At 2:50 he was scheduled to leave for Arlington Cemetery, to speak at the unveiling of a statue of British Field Marshal Sir John Dill, a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff during World War II, who had died in Washington in 1944 as a result of his wartime service.

Because of the heat, Truman took off his clothes and stretched out on the four-poster bed in his underwear, the window open.

The rest of the house grew quiet. Bess and her mother had retired to another room. Downstairs, the front door stood open to the street, the screen door latched. On duty in the comparative cool of the front hall was Secret Service Agent Stuart Stout.

“The house was so quiet, the day so close, it was a struggle to stay awake,” remembered the assistant head usher, J. B. West, who with head usher Howell Crim was in their small office just off the hall.

Outside, three White House police were posted, all sweltering in winter uniforms. Except for the heat, the afternoon was passing like any other. People strolled by beneath the President’s window. Streetcars and automobiles moved along in the bright sun of the avenue. Autumn leaves floated down from the trees.

To ease the monotony somewhat, the guards worked on a rotation system, “the push,” and at 2:15 the push began, placing Private Donald Birdzell at the bottom of the front steps, just under the canopy, where he stood facing the street. In two white-painted guard booths on the sidewalk to his left and right, about 30 yards apart, were two more uniformed White House guards. In the booth to the left, east toward Lafayette Square, Private Joseph Davidson sat talking with Agent Floyd Boring. (“I’d come out more or less to chat,” Boring recalled. “[Davidson] had a pair of glasses on, and I’d never seen him with glasses on before…. I said, ‘Why the glasses? To see these girls going by here?’ ”)

In the guard booth up the sidewalk, to the right, was Private Leslie Coffelt.

A fourth White House policeman, Joseph Downs, who had just been relieved by Coffelt, was starting for the basement door when two slim, neatly dressed men approached Blair House from opposite directions, coming along the sidewalk with the other pedestrians. The time was 2:19.

The two looked so subdued and unobtrusive in their dark suits and hats that a clerk in the hotel near Union Station where they stayed the night before had mistaken them for divinity students. The man approaching from the west, toward Leslie Coffelt’s booth, was Griselio Torresola. He was twenty-five years old. The other, coming from the east, was Oscar Collazo, who was thirty-six. They were both from New York, both Puerto Ricans, and fanatic Puerto Rican nationalists. To bring attention to their cause they had decided to kill the President.

Torresola was armed with a German Luger. Collazo, who had never fired a pistol before, carried a German Walther P-38. Between them they had sixty-nine rounds of ammunition.

Torresola paused at the window of Coffelt’s booth and began saying something in a loud voice, apparently in an effort to divert attention from his partner, Collazo, who by then had walked directly past the other booth—past Davidson and Boring—and was heading straight for the Blair House stoop, where Donald Birdzell had his head turned, looking west toward Coffelt.

Birdzell would remember hearing a faint but unmistakable metallic click. Whirling about, he saw Collazo just eight or ten feet away, pointing the P-38 at him and trying to fire.

The gun went off, as Birdzell grabbed for his own pistol. Birdzell was hit in the right leg, but amazingly, instead of shooting back, and despite his leg, he had the presence of mind to run out into Pennsylvania Avenue, to draw the fire away from the President’s quarters. As he moved, Collazo pivoted and kept firing, hitting him again. Birdzell crumpled by the streetcar tracks, but turned on one knee and shot back.

By now gunfire was exploding on all sides. Torresola had stepped to the open door of the west sentry booth and opened up on Coffelt point-blank. With bullets ripping his chest and stomach, Coffelt went down and began slowly to bleed to death. Torresola spun and fired at Joseph Downs, the White House policeman at the basement door, hitting him three times. Downs somehow struggled through the door yelling for help.

“It all happened so rapidly…I didn’t really know what the hell was going on,” Floyd Boring remembered. There were screams, shouting. People everywhere were running for cover. The noise of gunfire was terrifying—twenty-seven shots in two minutes.

Boring and Davidson opened fire on Collazo. A bullet clipped his ear, another his hat. With his second shot Boring hit him in the chest and Collazo went face down on the sidewalk, legs splayed out beside the front step, his hat still on.

Torresola, meantime, had wheeled and fired at Birdzell out by the streetcar tracks. Struck now in his good leg, Birdzell pitched forward, yet kept firing, his pistol braced on the pavement at arm’s length. Then the dying Leslie Coffelt somehow got hold of his own pistol and brought Torresola down with a single shot through the head.

With that, suddenly, it was over and for a few seconds, strangely silent. Then people came running from every direction—more police, photographers, Secret Service agents and reporters from the White House, a crowd of hundreds.

In the front hall, Agent Stout, who had rushed to the gun cabinet in the usher’s office, stood ready now at the front door with a Thompson submachine gun.

J. B. West, stepping into the hall, saw the First Lady on the stairway. What was happening, she asked. There had been a shooting, West said. He remembered her gazing at him, “eyes wide,” then hurrying back up the stairs.

Truman, in the roar of gunfire, had jumped from his bed and rushed to the window. Seeing him, someone on the sidewalk had shouted, “Get back! Get back!” until he moved away.

Ambulances nosed through the crowd outside. A rumor spread that the President had been murdered. Traffic backed up for blocks in every direction.

Birdzell lay motionless in the street, blood flowing onto the pavement from both legs. Coffelt was sprawled on his back beside his sentrybox. Downs, who had been dragged to a basement room, was asking for a priest.

Torresola was dead, doubled in a heap beneath a boxwood hedge. Collazo was still alive.

Truman quickly dressed and came downstairs. Looking out from the first floor, he could see a cluster of police bending over Collazo at the front stoop and Charlie Ross making his way through the police and up the steps. Would the President still be going to Arlington? “Why, of course,” Truman said.

In another fifteen minutes, he was on his way out the back door, and with seven or eight Secret Service men following immediately behind in a big open car, some of them hanging onto the sides, his limousine wheeled out of the driveway and sped across the Potomac.

At Arlington, the several hundred people gathered for the ceremonies saw Truman step from the car looking grim but calm. No one knew what had happened, until ten minutes later when a motorcycle messenger arrived to pick up a photographer’s film and immediately the word spread, a murmur running through the crowd. Standing beside the equestrian bronze of Sir John Dill, Truman kept to his prepared remarks as if nothing had happened. “It is important to the peace of the world to understand each other and have full faith in each other’s sincerity. That is all we ask. That is all we want….”

Only afterward, on hearing that Private Leslie Coffelt had died at the hospital, did Truman become extremely upset. As he would say later, when a plaque in Coffelt’s memory was placed on a new iron fence in front of Blair House, Coffelt had been one of the best-liked officers on the White House force.

Officers Birdzell and Downs eventually recovered from their wounds and returned to their jobs.

Ironically, Truman had done more for Puerto Rico than any previous President. He favored the right of the Puerto Rican people to determine their political relationship with the United States and had said so several times. He had named the first native Puerto Rican as governor of the island, and extended Social Security to the people of Puerto Rico.

“But Truman was…just a symbol of the system,” Oscar Collazo would insist in explanation. “You don’t attack the man, you attack the system.”

Convicted on four counts, including the murder of Coffelt, Collazo was sentenced to death in the electric chair. However, in 1952, and as a gesture to the people of Puerto Rico, Truman would commute the sentence to life imprisonment. In 1979, after twenty-nine years in Leavenworth Penitentiary, Collazo would be pardoned by President Jimmy Carter.

“A President has to expect these things,” Truman told reporters as he set off on his morning walk the day after the shooting. The outing looked casual, as though nothing had changed. Truman, stepping out at his usual brisk pace through the quiet city, appeared no different than on other mornings. But he was being watched over now by at least a dozen more Secret Service men in addition to the four immediately beside him—some walking well ahead or across the street, others, more heavily armed, following in a slow-moving automobile.

Keeping his regular scheduled press conference that afternoon, Truman insisted in response to questions that he had never been in danger. The only thing one need worry about, he told Admiral Leahy, was bad luck and that was something he never had. But he kept thinking about what had happened. It had all been so “unnecessary,” he said in a note to Acheson, “and the people who really got hurt were wonderful men.” The gunmen had been fools, “stupid as they could be.” “I know I could organize a better program than they put on,” he wrote, a sign that he knew perfectly well how differently things might have gone. His plan to attend the ceremony at Arlington had been in the morning paper. The assassins had only to have waited another twenty minutes, until he came out of the house.

On November 5, in St. Louis, on his way to Independence to vote, he sat in a hotel room writing in his diary:

[Leaving the airport] we started for St. Louis in a closed car. It was cold and the wind was northwest. People all along the way wanted to see the President—not me! Some saw me and the usual “There he is!” “Hello, Harry” was the result. Most of the people in the U.S.A. are kindly happy people and they show it by smiling, waving and shouting….

Because two crackpots or crazy men tried to shoot me a few days ago my good and efficient guards are nervous. So I’m trying to be as helpful as I can. Would like very much to take a walk this morning but the S[ecret] S[ervice]…and the “Boss” and Margie are worried about me—so I won’t take my usual walk.

It’s hell to be President….

He was “really a prisoner now,” he told Ethel Noland. The “grand guards” protecting him at Blair House had never had a fair chance. “The one who was killed was just cold bloodedly murdered before he could do anything.”

In Washington henceforth there would be no more walking across the street from Blair House to the West Wing. Truman would be driven back and forth in a bulletproof car with a roof that, as he said, would “turn a grenade,” a floor to “stop a land mine.”

He had always imagined he might take care of any would-be assassin, as had Andrew Jackson, who, when shot at by a deranged assailant at the Capitol, went after the man with his cane.

IV

From November 1, the day of the assassination attempt, through December 1950 was a dreadful passage for Truman. Omar Bradley was to call these sixty days among the most trying of his own professional career, more so even than the Battle of the Bulge. For Truman it was the darkest, most difficult period of his presidency.

The off-year elections, though nothing like the humiliation of 1946, were a sharp setback for the Democrats and in some ways extremely discouraging. Local issues were decisive in many congressional contests, but so also were concerns over the war in Korea and what Time referred to as the suspicion that the State Department had “played footsie with Communists.” “The Korean death trap,” charged Joe McCarthy, “we can lay at the doors of the Kremlin and those who sabotaged rearming, including Acheson and the President, if you please.” Senator Wherry said the blood of American boys was on Acheson’s shoulders. In Illinois, Republican Everett Dirksen, running against Senator Scott Lucas, the Democratic majority leader, said, “All the piety of the administration will not put any life into the bodies of the young men coming back in wooden boxes.”

McCarthy, who was not up for reelection, had vowed to get Lucas and Millard Tydings both, and both senators, two of the administration’s strongest supporters, went down in defeat. Tydings especially was the victim of distortions and lies. In the campaign in Maryland, McCarthy and his aides circulated faked photographs showing Tydings chatting with Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party. In the California Senate race, Richard Nixon defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas by calling her, among other things, “pink down to her underwear.”

One of the saddest things of all, Truman told a friend, was the way McCarthyism seemed to have an effect. In thirty years of marriage, Bess Truman had seldom seen him so downhearted, blaming himself for not keeping the pressure on McCarthy.

Fifty-two percent of the votes cast in the country had gone to the Republicans, 42 percent to the Democrats. The Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress, but the Democratic majority in the Senate had been cut from twelve to two, in the House from seventeen to twelve. And though Truman had taken no time for campaign speeches, except for one in his own state, in St. Louis on the way home to vote, the outcome was seen as a personal defeat. In the Senate, for all practical purposes, he no longer had control. Furthermore, Arthur Vandenberg, upon whom Truman had counted so long for nonpartisan support, was seriously ill and not likely to return.

“Some Republicans interpret the election as meaning that you should ask for the resignation of Mr. Acheson,” a reporter said at his next press conference.

Mr. Acheson would remain, “Period,” said Truman.

Was he blue over the elections? Not at all, he said. And in truth, the elections were a minor worry compared to what was happening in Korea.

That Chinese troops were in the war was by now an established fact, though how many there were remained in doubt. MacArthur estimated thirty thousand, and whatever the number, his inclination was to discount their importance. But in Washington concern mounted. To check the flow of Chinese troops coming across the Yalu, MacArthur requested authority to bomb the Korean ends of all bridges on the river, a decision Truman approved, after warning MacArthur against enlarging the war and specifically forbidding air strikes north of the Yalu, on Chinese territory.

Another cause of concern was MacArthur’s decision, in the drive north, to divide his forces, sending the Tenth Corps up the east side of the peninsula, the Eighth Army up the west—an immensely risky maneuver that the Joint Chiefs questioned. But MacArthur was adamant, and it had been just such audacity after all that had worked the miracle at Inchon. “Then there were those,” wrote Matthew Ridgway, “who felt that it was useless to try to check a man who might react to criticism by pursuing his own way with increased stubbornness and fervor.”

With one powerful, “end-the-war” offensive, one “massive comprehensive envelopment,” MacArthur insisted, the war would be quickly won. As always, he had absolute faith in his own infallibility, and while no such faith was to be found at the Pentagon or the White House, no one, including Truman, took steps to stop him.

Bitter cold winds from Siberia swept over North Korea, as MacArthur flew to Eighth Army headquarters on the Chongchon River to see the attack begin. “If this operation is successful,” he said within earshot of correspondents, “I hope we can get the boys home for Christmas.”

The attack began Friday, November 24, the day after Thanksgiving. Four days later, on Tuesday, November 28, in Washington, at 6:15 in the morning, General Bradley telephoned the President at Blair House to say he had “a terrible message” from MacArthur.

“We’ve got a terrific situation on our hands,” Truman told his staff a few hours later at the White House, having waited patiently through the morning meeting, dealing with routine matters, as those around the room brought up whatever was on their minds.

The Chinese had launched a furious counterattack, with a force of 260,000 men, Truman said. MacArthur was going over on the defensive. “The Chinese have come in with both feet.”

They were all the same, familiar faces around him—Charlie Ross, Matt Connelly, Harry Vaughan, Charlie Murphy, Bill Hassett, George Elsey, William Hopkins—with one addition, the author John Hersey, who was writing a “profile” of the President for The New Yorker and had been given permission to follow him through several working days, routine working days presumably. (It was unprecedented access for a writer, but Hersey had appealed to Truman on the grounds that what he wrote might be a contribution to history.)

Truman paused. The room was still. The shock of what he had said made everyone sit stiff and silent. Everything that had seemed to be going so well in Korea, all the heady prospects since Inchon, the soaring hopes of Wake Island were gone in an instant. As Hersey wrote, everyone present knew at once what the news meant for Truman, who would be answerable, “alone and inescapably,” for whatever happened now in Korea. The decision to go beyond the 38th parallel had been his, just as the decision to risk the Inchon invasion had been his. Only this time the results had been different.

William Hopkins, the executive clerk, handed the President a stack of letters for his signature, most of them responses to correspondence about the assassination attempt. (In the weeks following the attempt, Truman received some seven thousand letters expressing gratitude that he was unharmed. He insisted that each of these be answered and he personally signed all seven thousand letters of acknowledgment.) As he wrote his name again and again, working down the pile, he talked of the “vilifiers” who wanted to tear the country apart. The news from Korea meant the enemy had misjudged American resolve. There had been an article in Pravda about deep divisions in Washington, he said. “We can blame the liars for the fix we are in this morning…. What has appeared in our press, along with the defeat of leaders in the Senate, has made the world believe that the American people are not behind our foreign policy….”

He began outlining the immediate steps to be taken to inform the Cabinet and the Congress. Thus far he had shown no emotion. But now he paused again, and suddenly, as Hersey recorded, all his “driven-down” feelings seemed to pour into his face.

His mouth drew tight, his cheeks flushed. For a moment, it almost seemed as if he would sob. Then in a voice that was incredibly calm and quiet, considering what could be read on his face—a voice of absolute personal courage—he said, “This is the worst situation we have had yet. We’ll just have to meet it as we’ve meet all the rest….”

There were questions. Was the figure really 260,000 Chinese? Yes, Truman replied. Probably nothing should be announced yet, said Ross. Truman agreed. For the staff, watching him, the moment was extremely painful. Unquestionably, as he had said, it was the worst news he had received since becoming President.

But then he seemed to recover himself, sitting up squarely in his high-backed chair. “We have got to meet this thing,” he said, his voice low and confident. “Let’s go ahead now and do our jobs as best we can.”

“We face an entirely new war,” MacArthur declared. It had been all of three days since the launching of his “end-the-war” offensive, yet all hope of victory was gone. The Chinese were bent on the “complete destruction” of his army. “This command…is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength.”

In following messages MacArthur called for reinforcements of the “greatest magnitude,” including Chinese Nationalist troops from Formosa. His own troops were “mentally fatigued and physically battered.” The directives under which he was operating were “completely outmoded by events.” He wanted a naval blockade of China. He called for bombing the Chinese mainland. He must have the authority to broaden the conflict, MacArthur insisted, or the administration would be faced with a disaster.

That same day, November 28, at three o’clock in the afternoon, a crucial meeting Of the National Security Council took place in the Cabinet Room—one of the most important meetings of the Truman years. For it was there and then in effect, with Truman presiding, that the decision was made not to let the crisis in Korea, however horrible, flare into a world war. It was a decision as fateful as the one to go into Korea in the first place, and stands among the triumphs of the Truman administration, considering how things might have gone otherwise.

General Bradley opened the discussion with a review of the bleak situation on the battlefield. Alben Barkley, who rarely spoke at such meetings, asked bitterly why MacArthur had promised to have “the boys home for Christmas”—how he could ever have said such a thing in good faith. Army Secretary Pace said that MacArthur was now denying he had made the statement. Truman warned that in any event they must do nothing to cause the commander in the field to lose face before the enemy.

When Marshall spoke, he sounded extremely grave. American involvement in Korea should continue as part of a United Nations effort, Marshall said. The United States must not get “sewed up” in Korea, but find a way to “get out with honor.” There must be no war with China. That was clear. “To do this would be to fall into a carefully laid Russian trap. We should use all available political, economic and psychological action to limit the war.”

Limit the war. Don’t fall into a trap. The same points would be made over and over in time to come. “There was no doubt in my mind,” Truman would write, “that we should not allow the action in Korea to extend to a general war. All-out military action against China had to be avoided, if for no other reason than because it was a gigantic booby trap.”

“We can’t defeat the Chinese in Korea,” said Acheson. “They can put in more than we can.” Concerned that MacArthur might overextend his operations, Acheson urged “very, very careful thought” concerning air strikes against Manchuria. If this became essential to save American troops, then it would have to be done, but if American attacks succeeded in Manchuria, the Russians would probably come to the aid of their Chinese ally.

The thing to do, the “imperative step,” said Acheson, was to “find a line that we can hold, and hold it.”

Behind everything they faced was the Soviet Union, “a somber consideration.” The threat of a larger war, wrote Bradley, was closer than ever, and it was this, the dread prospect of a global conflict with Russia erupting at any hour, that was on all their minds.

The news was so terrible and came with such suddenness that it seemed almost impossible to believe. The last thing anyone had expected at this point was defeat in Korea. The evening papers of November 28 described “hordes of Chinese Reds” surging through a widening gap in the American Eighth Army’s right flank, “as the failure of the Allied offensive turned into a dire threat for the entire United Nations line.” The whole Eighth Army was falling back. “200,000 OF FOE ADVANCE UP TO 23 MILES IN KOREA” read the banner headline across The New York Times the following day. The two calamities most dreaded by military planners—the fierce Korean winter and massive intervention by the Chinese—had fallen on the allied forces at once.

What had begun was a tragic, epic retreat—some of the worst fighting of the war—in howling winds and snow and temperatures as much as 25 degrees below zero. The Chinese not only came in “hordes” but took advantage of MacArthur’s divided forces, striking both on their flanks. The Eighth Army under General Walton Walker was reeling back from the Chongchon River, heading for Pyongyang. The choice was retreat or annihilation. In the northeast the ordeal of the Tenth Corps was still worse. The retreat of the 1st Marine Division—from the Chosin Reservoir forty miles to the port of Hungnam and evacuation—would be compared to Xenophon’s retreat of the immortal ten thousand or Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow.

“A lot of hard work was put in,” Truman would remember of his own days in Washington.

For most of his time in office, Truman had enjoyed extremely good relations with the working press of Washington. He genuinely liked and respected most reporters—made himself available to them for questioning at regular weekly press conferences, or on his morning walks to any who felt up to it. “Remember, photographers are working people who sell pictures,” he once advised Margaret. “Help them sell them. Reporters are people who sell stories—help them sell stories.” And in turn reporters liked and respected him more perhaps than he realized. When he stepped before them in the Indian Treaty Room, at his press conference the day after the assassination attempt, the long applause they gave him was from the heart.

“No President of the last 50 years was so widely and warmly liked by reporters as Mr. Truman,” Cabell Phillips would write.

He “used” the press occasionally as most Presidents have done to test the wind. But he never tried to “con” them with flattery and devious favoritism…. Harry Truman worked less to ingratiate himself with people but succeeded better at it than any important public figure I have ever known. He did it, I think, because he was so utterly honest with and about himself, so free of what we call “side” or “put on.”

Press Secretary Charlie Ross, too, deserved part of the credit for such feelings, for never had he thought it necessary to “sell” Truman to them.

It was the great press lords of the day, the powerful publishers and editors, and several of the syndicated columnists—the “paid columnists,” the “guttersnipe columnists”—whom Truman despised: “What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts, editor of the Kansas City Star, had written in patronizing fashion on Truman’s first day in office. Henry Luce considered Truman the “reductio ad absurdum of the common man.” Michael Straight, editor of The New Republic, had written in 1948 that Truman had “a known difficulty in understanding the printed word.” Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell, and Drew Pearson had all hit him hard, and in ways he would not forget.

Privately he spoke of the lot with vivid contempt. Roy Roberts was “a fat no-good can of lard,” Pegler “a rat,” Winchell and Pearson “newsliars.” The Alsop brothers were “the Sop Sisters.” He detested the newspapers of the Hearst and Scripps-Howard chains, and the lowest of all, still, was Colonel Robert (“Bertie”) McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune. As Truman saw things, McCormick and his kind made their fortunes as character assassins, while those who did the dirty work for them, like some of the columnists, were no better than whores in that they offered their favors for money. “The prostitutes of the mind in my opinion…are much more dangerous to the future of mankind than the prostitutes of the body,” he wrote in a letter he never mailed to Frank Kent, a columnist for the Washington Star whom he particularly disliked. That November, hearing from a friend that a Chicago Tribune writer named Holmes was in Kansas City asking questions about Truman and his family, Truman wrote in reply, “You might tell the gentleman named Holmes that if he comes out with a pack of lies about Mrs. Truman or any of my family his hide won’t hold shucks when I get through with him.”

But for those who covered him daily at the White House, who had traveled with him in 1948, who had been to Key West, he had no such feelings—Cabell Phillips and Tony Leviero of The New York Times, Edward Folliard of the Washington Post, Merriman Smith of United Press, Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, Robert Nixon of the International News Service, Joe Short of the Baltimore Sun. And it was they, his friends, not the “newsliars” or the Bertie McCormicks, who again stood to ask their questions at a sensational press conference the morning of November 30, 1950, when Truman stumbled into still more trouble, blundering as he had never before with reporters, his remarks sending shock waves around the world.

The Indian Treaty Room was packed—more than two hundred stood as he came in—and at first all went well. He began by reading a prepared text, a strong, compelling statement of policy.

Neither the United States nor the United Nations had any aggressive intentions against China. What was happening in Korea, however, was part of a worldwide pattern of Russo-Communist aggression and consequently the world was threatened now with a serious crisis.

As he had once decided to take a stand at Berlin, Truman was now resolved to stay in Korea, and he said so. He was not bombastic, he was not eloquent, only clear and to the point.

We may suffer reverses as we have suffered them before. But the forces of the United Nations have no intention of abandoning their mission in Korea….

We shall continue to work in the United Nations for concerted action to halt this aggression in Korea. We shall intensify our efforts to help other free nations strengthen their defenses in order to meet the threat of aggression elsewhere. We shall rapidly increase our military strength.

The statement had been worked over with extreme care by a dozen or more of the White House staff and State Department. It said nothing about the atomic bomb. The subject of the bomb had never even been discussed during preparation of the statement.

But then the questions began, reporters rising one by one, Folliard of the Post first asking Truman if he had any comments on the criticism of MacArthur in the European press.

“They are always for a man when he is winning, but when he is in a little trouble,” Truman replied, “they all jump on him with what ought to be done, which they didn’t tell him before.” General MacArthur was doing “a good job.”

Taking an exaggeratedly deep breath, Folliard then said the particular criticism was that MacArthur had exceeded his authority, went beyond the point he was supposed to go.

“He did nothing of the kind,” Truman snapped.

Other reporters began pressing him. What if the United Nations were to authorize MacArthur to launch attacks across the Yalu into Manchuria?

Truman stood erect as always, his fingertips pressing on a tabletop as he spoke. Sometimes between questions he would sip from a glass of water or twist the heavy gold Masonic ring on his left hand.

“We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.”

Did that include the atomic bomb?

“That,” said Truman unhesitatingly, “includes every weapon we have.”

Did this mean there was “active consideration” of use of the bomb?

The room was still. The topic that had never been considered appropriate for a press conference had suddenly become the focal point. Truman should have cut off discussion of the bomb before this. But he seems not to have understood where the questions were leading him, while the reporters saw no reason to refrain from pressing him, if, as it appeared, he meant to rattle the bomb a little.

“There has always been active consideration of its use,” Truman replied, adding, as he shook his head sadly, that he did not want to see it used. “It is a terrible weapon and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.”

Merriman Smith, sensing that the President had said more than he meant to, offered him a chance to back off by asking for clarification. “Did we understand you clearly that the use of the bomb is under active consideration?”

Yet Truman insisted: “Always has been. It is one of our weapons.”

Did this mean use against military objectives or civilian, another of the veteran White House press, Robert Nixon, started to ask, but Truman cut him off, saying, “It’s a matter that the military people will have to decide. I’m not a military authority that passes on those things.”

The correspondent for NBC, Frank Bourgholtzer, wished him to be more specific.

“Mr. President, you said this depends on United Nations action. Does that mean we wouldn’t use the atomic bomb except on a United Nations authorization?”

“No, it doesn’t mean that at all,” Truman shot back. “The action against Communist China depends on the action of the United Nations. The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of the weapons, as he always has.”

He had said far more than he ever intended and had been inaccurate besides, but the reporters had their story. The press conference ended at 10:30 A.M. By 10:47 a United Press bulletin was on the wire: President Truman said today that the United States has under consideration use of the atomic bomb in connection with the war in Korea. The Associated Press followed, adding that whether the bomb was used depended on American military command in the field, the clear implication being that the decision was being left to MacArthur. Huge headlines filled the early editions of the afternoon papers.

Truman’s answers had been devastatingly foolish, the press conference a fiasco. The White House was besieged with calls. An exhausted Eben Ayers, writing privately that night, would describe it as one of the “wildest days” ever. The reaction in Europe was extreme alarm, and especially in Britain, where the news threw the House of Commons into a state of panic such as old-time members had never seen. Acheson hurried to the White House with the draft of a “clarifying” statement. Charlie Ross, under greater pressure than at any time since becoming press secretary, was called into the Oval Office to lend a hand in “damage control.” The statement, ready by mid-afternoon, said that while “the use of any weapon is always implicit in the very possession of that weapon,” only the President, by law, could authorize use of the atomic bomb, and “no such authorization had been, given.” Ross, as he presented the statement, looked and sounded completely spent, the circles under his eyes deeper and darker even than usual, his voice husky. The damage, he knew, had already been done.

By late afternoon came word from London that Prime Minister Clement Attlee was on his way to “confer” with the President. “PRESIDENT WARNS WE WOULD USE ATOM BOMB IN KOREA,” said the front page of The New York Times the next morning. “NO NO NO,” ran a headline in the Times of India.

The air of crisis rapidly compounded. The next morning, Friday, December 1, Truman met with the congressional leadership in the Cabinet Room to hear Walter Bedell Smith, head of the CIA, explain before a huge map of the Soviet Union and its satellites how events in Korea related to events in Europe. The Russians, Smith reported, had just completed maneuvers involving more than half a million men and consolidated their Siberian forces under a single command, an unusual step that “deserved watching.”

There were joint State-Defense “crisis meetings” in the War Room at the Pentagon later in the day and again on Sunday, December 3, some six hours of talk.

As Acheson would write, all the President’s advisers, civilian and military, knew something was badly wrong in Korea, other than just the onslaught of the Chinese. There were questions about MacArthur’s morale, grave concern over MacArthur’s strategy and whether on the actual battlefield a “new hand” was needed to replace General Walker. It was quite clear, furthermore, that MacArthur, the Far East Commander—contrary to the President’s reassuring remarks at his press conference—had indeed deliberately disobeyed a specific order from the Joint Chiefs to use no non-Korean forces close to the Manchurian border.

But no changes in strategy were ordered. No “new hand” replaced Walker. No voices were raised against MacArthur. Regrettably, the President was ill-advised, Bradley later observed. He, Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, had all “failed the President.” Here, in a crucial few days, said Acheson later, they missed their chance to halt the march to disaster in Korea. Acheson was to lament their performance for the rest of his life. Truman would never put any blame on any of them, but Acheson would say Truman had deserved far better. “I have the unhappy conviction,” Acheson wrote nearly twenty years later, “that none of us, myself prominently included, served him as he was entitled to be served.”

Matthew Ridgway would “well remember” his mounting impatience “that dreary Sunday, December 3,” as hour after hour in the War Room discussion continued over the ominous situation in Korea.

Much of the time the Secretaries of State and Defense participated in the talks, with no one apparently willing to issue a flat order to the Far East Commander to correct a state of affairs that was going from bad to disastrous. Yet the responsibility and authority clearly resided right there in the room….

Unable to contain himself any longer, Ridgway spoke up, saying immediate action must be taken. They owed it to the men in the field and “to the God to whom we must answer for those men’s lives,” to stop talking and do something. For the first time, Acheson later wrote, “someone had expressed what everyone thought—that the Emperor had no clothes on.” But of the twenty men who sat at the table, including Acheson, and twenty more along the walls behind, none spoke. The meeting ended without a decision.

Why didn’t the Joint Chiefs just send orders and tell MacArthur what to do, Ridgway asked General Vandenberg afterward. Because MacArthur would not obey such orders, Vandenberg replied.

Ridgway exploded. “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” he said. But Vandenberg, with an expression Ridgway remembered as both puzzled and amazed, only walked away.

The day following, in another closed session, this time at the State Department, Dean Rusk would propose that MacArthur be relieved of command. But again, no one chose to make further comment.

MacArthur, meanwhile, was being taken to task by the press, as he had never been. Time, which had long glorified him, charged him with being responsible for one of the worst military disasters in history. The “colossal military blunder” in Korea, declared an editorial in the New York Herald-Tribune, had shown that MacArthur would “no longer be accepted as the final authority on military matters.” Unused to such criticism, his immense vanity wounded, MacArthur started issuing statements of his own to the press. He denied that his strategy had precipitated the Chinese invasion and said his inability to defeat the new enemy was due to restrictions imposed by Washington that were “without precedent.”

Truman did not hold MacArthur accountable for the failure of the November offensive. But he deplored MacArthur’s way of excusing the failure, and the damage his statements could do abroad, to the degree that they implied a change in American policy. “I should have relieved General MacArthur then and there,” he would write much later.

As it was, he ordered that all military officers and diplomatic officials henceforth clear with the State Department all but routine statements before making them public, “and…refrain from direct communications on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines, and other publicity media.” Dated December 6, the order was widely and correctly seen as directed to MacArthur. He was still expected to express his opinions freely—it was his duty to express his opinions—but only within the councils of the government.

Truman did not relieve the Far East Commander, he later explained, because he knew no general could be a winner every day and because he did not wish to have it appear that MacArthur was being fired for failing.

What he might have done had Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs spoken up and insisted that MacArthur be relieved is another question and impossible to answer.

For now the tragedy in Korea overshadowed everything. If MacArthur was in trouble, then everything possible must be done to help. “We must get him out of it if we can,” Truman wrote in his diary late the night of December 2, following an intense session at Blair House with Acheson, Marshall, and Bradley that had left him feeling desperately low. “The conference was the most solemn one I’ve had since the Atomic Bomb conference in Berlin.”

The talk had been of evacuating all American troops—of an American Dunkirk in Korea after all. Marshall was not even sure such an operation would succeed, should the Chinese bring in their own airpower. “It looks very bad,” Truman wrote.

Yet bad as it was, there was no mood of panic, and this, as those around him would later attest, was principally because of Truman’s own unflinching response. “Mr. President, the Chinese simply must not be allowed to drive us out of Korea,” Acheson said at one point, when things looked darkest, and Truman calmly agreed. When Clement Attlee arrived in Washington and argued, in effect, that the Far East should be abandoned in order to save Europe, Truman said no.

The bloody retreat in Korea continued. Pyongyang fell “to overwhelming masses of advancing Chinese,” as the papers reported. General Walker’s Eighth Army was heading for the 38th parallel. “World War III moves ever closer,” said Life. “The Chinese Communist armies assaulting our forces…are as truly the armies of the Soviet Union as they would be if they wore the Soviet uniform.” Everywhere in Washington the talk was of the “desperateness” of the situation. Senator McCarthy called on Acheson and Marshall both to resign and talked of impeaching Truman. But Truman remained calm and steady. “I’ve had conference after conference on the jittery situation facing this country,” he wrote in his diary. “Attlee, Formosa, Communist China, Chiang Kai-shek, Japan, Germany, France, India, etc. I’ve worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is here. I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”

[The President] thought that if we abandoned Korea the South Koreans would all be murdered and that we could not face that in view of the fact that they have fought bravely on our side and we have put in so much to help them [read the official minutes of his discussions with Attlee]. We may be subject to bombing from Manchuria by the Russians and Chinese Communists which might destroy everything we have. He was worried. He did not like to go into a situation such as this and then to admit that we were licked. He would rather fight to the finish. That was the way he had felt from the beginning…. He wanted to make it perfectly plain here that we do not desert our friends when the going is rough.

When Attlee urged that no decision be made on use of the atomic bomb without prior consultation with the British government, and possibly a formal agreement, Truman declined. He would not use the bomb without consulting the British government, Truman replied, but then neither would he state that in writing. If a man’s word wasn’t any good, he said, it wasn’t made better by putting it on paper.

The goal of uniting Korea by force had been abandoned. The best hope now was to arrange an armistice back at the 38th parallel, and to this end the British agreed to help through the United Nations. On the policy that the war must not be widened, Truman and Attlee were in full agreement.

Attlee arrived in Washington on Monday, December 4. Little was said to the press about the substance of the first day’s meeting, but at the end of the second day, Tuesday, December 5, in response to the pressures on him to release something, Charlie Ross met with some forty reporters at the White House. It was early evening, and Ross, like the President and the prime minister, was planning to attend a conceit by Margaret Truman scheduled to begin in another few hours at Constitution Hall.

Limited as to how much he could say, Ross took time to describe in detail the luncheon held for the prime minister on board the Williamsburg, and with mock patience, spelled out such terms as “au jus” for the benefit of the reporters. “Charlie,” wrote Eben Ayers, “seemed in good form….”

The briefing over, Ross agreed to repeat the essence of what he had said for Frank Bourgholtzer and the NEC television crew. A microphone was set up on his desk. As he waited, Ross lit a cigarette and leaning back in his chair, smiled at his secretary, Myrtle Bergheim.

“Don’t mumble,” she kidded him.

“You know I always speak very distinctly,” he joked, then fell over sideways.

Bourgholtzer thought he was clowning. Myrtle Bergheim grabbed for the phone and called Wallace Graham, whose office was on the floor below and who immediately dashed upstairs. But Charlie Ross was already dead of a coronary occlusion.

In the tribute he wrote shortly afterward in longhand, alone at his desk in the Oval Office, Truman said:

The friend of my youth, who became a tower of strength when the responsibilities of high office so unexpectedly fell to me, is gone. To collect one’s thoughts to pay tribute to Charles Ross…is not easy. I knew him as a boy and as a man….

Patriotism and integrity, honor and honesty, lofty ideals and nobility of intent were his guides and ordered his life from boyhood onward. He saw life steady and saw it whole…

But when Truman walked down the corridor to the press lounge where the reporters waited, he found he was unable to read what he had written. His voice broke on the first sentence.

“Ah, hell,” he said. “I can’t read this thing. You fellows know how I feel anyway…” He turned and with tears running down his face walked back to his office.

Ross had been sixty-five, a year younger than Truman. As Wallace Graham now revealed, Ross had had two or three prior mild heart attacks, but had refused to retire, preferring to remain on the job.

Concerned that the news of Ross’s death would be too upsetting for Margaret before she went on stage, Truman gave orders that she was to be told nothing until after the concert, a decision she would later resent. Had she known, she could have said something in tribute to Ross, or possibly changed her repertoire.

The President and First Lady accompanied the prime minister to Constitution Hall, where all 3,500 seats were taken, the place aglow with a “brilliant audience.” When Margaret came on stage, radiant in pink satin, and made her bow to the presidential box, Truman smiled and applauded. No President had ever been such a frequent concertgoer in Washington. He was a “regular” at Constitution Hall, at times, if the program included Mozart or Chopin, bringing the score with him. But tonight, even with his “baby” on stage, Truman looked extremely downcast.

She sang a light program that included selections from Schumann, Schubert, and a Mozart aria from The Marriage of Figaro. She drew waves of applause and was called back for four encores. A complimentary review in the Washington Times-Herald the next day would say she sang “better than ever before in her brief career.” The Mozart aria was “fresh” and “unforced,” her voice “charming.”

“Afterward, Dad was effusive, even for him,” she herself would write. “He hugged me and said he had never heard me sing better.”

But others in the audience had found the performance wanting. She was “really pretty bad that night,” recalled John Hersey. “She had a nice voice, but somebody, her coach, must have been pushing her too far.” And the Times-Herald review was not the one her father saw first thing the next morning.

At Blair House at 5:30 A.M. Truman opened the Washington Post to a review in the second section, page 12, by music critic Paul Hume. “Margaret Truman, soprano, sang in Constitution Hall last night,” it began.

Miss Truman is a unique American phenomenon with a pleasant voice of little size and fair quality. She is extremely attractive on stage…. Yet Miss Truman cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time—more last night than at any time we have heard her in past years. There are few moments during her recital when one can relax and feel confident that she will make her goal, which is the end of the song.

Miss Truman has not improved in the years we have heard her…she still cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish.

She communicates almost nothing of the music she presents…. And still the public goes and pays the same price it would for the world’s finest singers….

It is an extremely unpleasant duty to record such unhappy facts about so honestly appealing a person. But as long as Miss Truman sings as she has for three years, and does today, we seem to have no recourse unless it is to omit comment on her programs altogether.

It was a truly scathing review, though many of its harshest criticisms had been expressed before and Margaret, for some time now, had been advised by the Wagnerian opera star Helen Traubel not to rush her career, that her voice was as yet too small and inexperienced. Traubel, who liked Margaret and greatly admired her determination, said she needed five more years of study, at the least. When Traubel stressed this to the President, insisting that Margaret be able to stand on her own and not rely on his position, Truman, according to Traubel’s later account, banged his fist on the desk in firm agreement. “That’s exactly what I want.”

It was the timing of the review in the Post, more than what Paul Hume had said, that caused Truman to explode. If it hadn’t been the review, it might have been something else, given the stress he was under and his grief.

In the Blair House study, on a White House memo pad, he began what was to be his most notorious “longhand spasm” of all, a seething 150-word letter to Hume that he sealed in an envelope, addressed, fixed with a 3-cent stamp, and carried with him over to the White House.

To an elderly White House messenger named Samuel Mitchell, Truman asked if it was not an especially pleasant day. When Mitchell agreed, Truman suggested that he might like to take a stroll outside and on his way drop a letter in a mailbox on the street.

Had Charlie Ross still been on duty, the letter might have been stopped in time. Seeing the review, Ross would have known at once what Truman’s response would be. “Charlie Ross would never have let the Paul Hume letter get out,” George Elsey would say. “Charlie was…a calming fine influence on Truman, a tempering influence…much more than a press secretary.”

Though Hume and his editor at the Post decided to do nothing about the President’s letter, copies were apparently made and in short order it appeared in full on page 1 of the tabloid Washington News.

Mr. Hume: I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” [Truman here was quoting a phrase he had once heard used by Steve Early.]

It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man [Hume was thirty-four] who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work.

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!

[Westbrook] Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.

Margaret, who was by then in Nashville continuing her tour, refused to accept the news. She was positive, she said, that her father would not use such language. “In the first place, he wouldn’t write a letter to Mr. Hume. My father wouldn’t have time to write a letter.” It was not hard to get hold of White House notepaper, she added, though she didn’t know why anyone would do such a thing and sign her father’s name.

Privately, Truman agreed he should never have written the letter, but now that he had, he would stand by it. To Margaret he said he had the right to be two people, the President and himself. It was Harry S. Truman the human being who wrote the letter, he told her.

But to the devoted White House staff, this inclination to see himself as both Truman the President and Truman the human being was not entirely a virtue or necessarily an admirable characteristic. Truman, remembered George Elsey, would forget that the rest of the country might not make such a differentiation. “When he would write a boiling hot letter to a music critic or would call Drew Pearson a son-of-a-bitch…behaving as Harry S. Truman, not as President of the United States…this caused embarrassment to him and I think reflected on the office, which, of course, was the last thing in the world he wanted to have happen.”

Earlier embarrassing outbursts had included the angry letter to Bernard Baruch during the 1948 campaign that caused Baruch to call Truman a “rude, uncouth, ignorant man,” and a letter in which Truman had said he wouldn’t appoint John L. Lewis dog-catcher. In another, a letter to a congressman written the previous summer, he had called the Marine Corps “the Navy’s Police Force” and accused the Marines of having “a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s,” a charge for which he had publicly apologized. But nothing equaled the furor that erupted now over the Hume letter.

Hume himself, who greatly regretted that the letter had ever been made public, told reporters he was entirely sympathetic to the President. “I can only say that a man suffering the loss of a friend and carrying the burden of the present world crisis ought to be indulged in an occasional outburst of temper.” But the gesture had little dampening effect.

The Chicago Tribune put the American people on notice that their President’s “mental competence and emotional stability” were in question. A flood of letters-to-the-editor in papers across the country expressed shock over the President’s “uncouthness,” his lack of self-control. “It cuts to the quick to realize that we have a President who isn’t even a gentleman,” read one of hundreds of letters to the White House, and this from an “out-and-out” Democrat. “Truly we have chosen a ‘common’ man President. Yes—very common.” There were suggestions also that Truman might begin to take himself and his daughter a bit less seriously. “My sympathy is with you about Margaret,” wrote one man. “My four children cannot sing either.”

While some who wrote took Truman’s side, saying he had done only what any loyal, loving father worth his salt would have under the circumstances, such sentiments were in the minority. White House letters and telegrams ran nearly two to one against him and many, from mothers and fathers for whom the incident could only be seen in the context of the tragedy in Korea, voiced a deep-seated outrage that had to have touched Truman more than he ever let on.

In times such as the present when the entire country is under abnormal duress and strain, your undue “concern” over your daughter’s music career is completely ridiculous.

Why don’t you apologize to Mr. Hume, and then persuade your daughter to give up singing and take up some kind of war work where the public will appreciate her efforts.

HOW CAN YOU PUT YOUR TRIVIAL PERSONAL AFFAIRS BEFORE THOSE OF ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY MILLION PEOPLE. OUR BOYS DIED WHILE YOUR INFANTILE MIND WAS ON YOUR DAUGHTER’S REVIEW. INADVERTENTLY YOU SHOWED THE WHOLE WORLD WHAT YOU ARE. NOTHING BUT A LITTLE SELFISH PIPSQUEAK.

How many of these Truman actually saw is not known. But one letter from a Mr. and Mrs. William Banning of New Canaan, Connecticut, he both saw and held on to. It had been mailed with a Purple Heart enclosed.

Mr. Truman:

As you have been directly responsible for the loss of our son’s life in Korea, you might just as well keep this emblem on display in your trophy room, as a memory of one of your historic deeds.

One major regret at this time is that your daughter was not there to receive the same treatment as our son received in Korea.

Truman put the letter in his desk drawer, keeping it at hand for several years.

V

It was Harry Truman’s longstanding conviction that if you did your best in life, did your “damndest” always, then whatever happened you would at least know it was not for lack of trying. But he was a great believer also in the parts played by luck and personality, forces quite beyond effort or determination. And though few presidents had ever worked so hard, or taken their responsibilities so to heart in time of crisis as Truman had since the start of the war in Korea, it was luck, good and bad, and the large influence of personality, that determined the course of events time and again, and never more so than in late December 1950, in the midst of his darkest passage.

Two days before Christmas, on an icy highway north of Seoul, General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, was killed when his jeep ran head on into an ROK Army truck. Walker’s replacement—as requested by MacArthur and approved immediately by Truman—was Matthew Ridgway, who left Washington at once, arriving in Tokyo on Christmas Day. At his meeting with MacArthur the next morning, Ridgway was told to use his own judgment at the front. “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.” MacArthur, wrote Dean Acheson later, “never uttered wiser words.”

That afternoon, Ridgway landed at Taegu, and in the weeks following came a transformation no one had thought possible. Rarely has one individual made so marked a difference in so little time. With what Omar Bradley called “brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership,” Ridgway restored the fighting spirit of the Eighth Army and turned the tide of war as have few commanders in history.

Since the Chinese onslaught of November 28, the Eighth Army had fallen back nearly 300 miles, to a point just below the 38th parallel, and for a while, Ridgway had no choice but to continue the retreat. Press reports described U.N. forces rolling back down the two main roads through Seoul as a continuous flow morning until night. “The retreating ROK soldiers were the most miserable troops I ever saw,” wrote one correspondent. Millions of Korean refugees had also taken to the roads. “What are you going to do when the enemy doesn’t care how many men he loses?” an American officer was quoted. Seoul was in flames again. President Rhee and his government had fled to Pusan. Abandoning Seoul, Ridgway withdrew as far as Oswan, near the very point where the first green American troops had gone into action in July. Now, instead of the murderous heat of summer, they fought in murderous cold.

The mood in Washington remained bleak. MacArthur continued to urge a widening of the war—again he proposed bombing and blockading China and utilizing the troops of Chiang Kai-shek—and as before his proposals were rejected. Dire consequences would follow, he implied, unless policy were changed.

The troops are tired from a long and difficult campaign [MacArthur reported], embittered by the shameful propaganda which has falsely condemned their courage and fighting qualities…and their morale will become a serious threat in their battlefield efficiency unless the political basis upon which they are being asked to trade life for time is clearly delineated….

Truman found such messages “deeply disturbing.” When a general complained about the morale of his troops, observed George Marshall, the time had come for the general to look to his own morale.

The CIA was advising that it would be “infeasible under existing conditions…to hold for a protracted period a position in Korea.” The best hope was an armistice. His primary consideration, MacArthur was told, was the safety of his troops and the defense of Japan.

Under the extraordinary limitations and conditions imposed upon the command in Korea [MacArthur responded]…its military position is untenable, but it can hold, if overriding political considerations so dictate, for any length of time up to its complete destruction.

MacArthur called on the administration to recognize the “state of war” imposed by the Chinese, then to drop thirty to fifty atomic bombs on Manchuria and the mainland cities of China.

The Joint Chiefs, too, told Truman that mass destruction of Chinese cities with nuclear weapons was the only way to affect the situation in Korea. But that choice was never seriously considered. Truman simply refused to “go down that trail,” in Dean Rusk’s words.

Only once do I recall serious discussion about using nuclear weapons [Rusk later wrote]: when we thought about bombing a large dam on the Yalu River. General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff, personally had gone to Korea, flown a plane over the dam, and dropped our biggest conventional bomb on it. It made only a little scar on the dam’s surface. He returned to Washington and told us that we could knock the dam out only with nuclear weapons. Truman refused.

Truman also still refused to reprimand MacArthur. Rather he treated MacArthur with what Acheson considered “infinite patience”—too much infinite patience, Acheson thought, having by now concluded that the general was “incurably recalcitrant” and fundamentally disloyal to the purposes of his Commander in Chief. On January 13, 1951, Truman sent MacArthur a long, thoughtful telegram, generously praising him for his “splendid leadership” and stressing again the great importance of the whole costly effort in Korea as a means “to demonstrate that aggression will not be accepted by us or by the United Nations.” But “great prudence” must be exercised, Truman stated.

Steps which might in themselves be fully justified and which might lend some assistance to the campaign in Korea would not be beneficial if they thereby involved Japan or Western Europe in large-scale hostilities….

In the worst case, it would be important that, if we must withdraw from Korea, it be clear to the world that that course is forced upon us by military necessity and that we shall not accept the result politically or militarily until the aggression has been rectified.

Truman had by now declared a national emergency, announced emergency controls on prices and wages, and still greater defense spending—to the amount of $50 billion, more than four times the defense budget at the start of the year. He had put Charles E. Wilson, head of the General Electric Company, in charge of a new Office of Defense Mobilization, appointed General Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of NATO, and in a radio and television address to the nation on December 15, called on every citizen “to put aside his personal interests for the good of the country.” So while doing all he could to avoid a wider war, he was clearly preparing for one.

As General Marshall later attested, “We were at our lowest point.”

But then the morning of Wednesday, January 17, Marshall telephoned Truman to read an astonishing report just in from General Joe Collins, who had flown to Korea for talks with Ridgway. “Eighth Army in good shape and improving daily under Ridgway’s leadership,” Marshall read. “Morale very satisfactory…Ridgway confident he can obtain two to three months’ delay before having to initiate evacuation…. On the whole Eighth Army now in position and prepared to punish severely any mass attack.”

Plainly MacArthur’s bleak assessment of the situation, his forecasts of doom, had been wrong and the effect of this realization was electrifying. As the word spread through the upper levels of government that day, it would be remembered, one could almost hear the sighs of relief. The long retreat of the Eighth Army—the longest retreat in American military history—had ended. On January 25, 1951, less than a month after Ridgway’s arrival, the Eighth Army began “rolling forward,” as he said.

Ridgway had gone about his business with drive and common sense, seeing first to the basic needs of his troops—better food, warmer winter clothing, improved Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH units). He emphasized close communications, less dependence on roads and highways, more attention to holding the high ground, and better, more punishing use of airpower and artillery. With his own confidence, his natural vitality, his frequent and conspicuous presence at the front, dressed for battle with two hand grenades strapped to his chest, he set a strong example. The Army had been Ridgway’s life, as it had been for his father before him. He was keenly intelligent, austere, superbly fit at age fifty-six, and already celebrated as the pioneer of the airborne assault in World War II. But Ridgway also understood MacArthur. He admired MacArthur’s abilities and knew his limitations. More important, Ridgway both understood and approved of the administration’s policy. Not only did he admire Harry Truman, he thought him a great and courageous man.

In Washington, every inclination now, as Bradley would write, was to look “beyond MacArthur” to Ridgway for reliable military judgments. Until now Washington had been almost entirely dependent upon MacArthur’s headquarters for information, dependent on MacArthur’s own opinions, his strategy. Now all that was over, his influence on planning was ended, a new phase of the war had begun. As far as military operations were concerned, wrote Bradley, MacArthur had become “mainly a prima donna figurehead who had to be tolerated.”

With the Eighth Army on the offensive again, advancing relentlessly—to the Han River, to Inchon, then Seoul, retaking what was left of the capital city on March 15—morale in Washington revived. The advent of the new field commander was, as Acheson said, an event of immeasurable importance. “While General MacArthur was fighting the Pentagon, General Ridgway was fighting the enemy.”

With a force of 365,000 men, Ridgway faced an enemy of more than 480,000, but Ridgway’s use of concentrated artillery, “the really terrifying strength of our firepower,” as he said, plus the spirit of “as fine a fighting field army as our country has yet produced,” more than made up for the difference. By the end of March, having inflicted immense casualties on the Chinese, the Eighth Army was again at the 38th parallel.

Yet Ridgway’s progress seemed only to distress MacArthur further. The American ambassador in Tokyo, William Sebald, found the Far Eastern Commander “tired and depressed.” Unless he was allowed to strike boldly at the enemy, MacArthur said, his dream of a unified Korea was impossible. He complained of a “policy void.” He now proposed not only massive attacks on Manchuria, but to “sever” Korea from Manchuria by laying down a field of radioactive wastes, “the by-products of atomic manufacture,” all along the Yalu River. As so often before, his request was denied.

MacArthur’s need to upstage Ridgway verged on the ridiculous. On the eve of a new Ridgway offensive in late February, MacArthur flew to the front and standing before a dozen correspondents, while Ridgway remained in the background, declared he had “just ordered a resumption of the offensive,” when in fact he had had nothing to do with any part of the operation.

Talking to journalists on March 7, MacArthur lamented the “savage slaughter” of Americans inevitable in a war of attrition. When by the middle of March, the tide of battle “began to turn in our favor,” as Truman wrote, and Truman’s advisers both at the State Department and the Pentagon thought it time to make a direct appeal to China for peace talks, MacArthur refused to respond to inquiries on the subject. Instead he decried any “further military restrictions” on his command.

To MacArthur, as he later wrote, it appeared that Truman’s nerves were at a breaking point—“not only his nerves, but what was far more menacing in the Chief Executive of a country at war—his nerve.”

Truman ordered careful preparation of a cease-fire proposal. On March 21, the draft of a presidential statement was submitted for approval to the other seventeen U.N. nations with troops serving in Korea. On March 20 the Chiefs of Staff had informed MacArthur of what was happening—sending him what Truman called the “meat paragraphs” of the statement in a message that seems to have impressed MacArthur as nothing else had that there was indeed to be no all-out war with Red China. His response so jarred Washington as to leave a number of people wondering if perhaps he had lost his mind—first there had been Forrestal, then Louis Johnson, now MacArthur. Years afterward Bradley would speculate that possibly MacArthur’s realization that his war on China was not to be “snapped his brilliant but brittle mind.”

On the morning of Saturday, March 24, in Korea (Friday the 23rd in Washington), MacArthur, without warning, tried to seize the initiative in a manner calculated only to inflame the situation. He issued his own florid proclamation to the Chinese Communists, which in effect was an ultimatum. He began by taunting the Red Chinese for their lack of industrial power, their poor military showing in Korea against a U.N. force restricted by “inhibitions.” More seriously, MacArthur threatened to expand the war.

The enemy, therefore, must by now be painfully aware that a decision of the United States to depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the areas of Korea, through an expansion of our military operations to his coastal areas and interior bases, would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.

In conclusion, MacArthur said he personally “stood ready at any time” to meet with the Chinese commander to reach a settlement.

All Truman’s careful preparations of a cease-fire proposal were now in vain. MacArthur had cut the ground out from under him. Later MacArthur would dismiss what he had said as a “routine communiqué.” Yet his own devoted aide, General Courtney Whitney, would describe it as a bold effort to stop one of the most disgraceful plots in American history, meaning the administration’s plan to appease China.

The news reached Washington after nightfall.

MacArthur, with his “pronunciamento,” wrote Acheson, had perpetrated a major act of sabotage. To Acheson, it was “insubordination of the grossest sort”; to Bradley, an “unforgivable and irretrievable act.”

At eleven o’clock that night in Washington, Friday, March 23, Acheson, Lovett, Rusk, and two other senior State Department officials, Alexis Johnson and Lucius Battle, met at Acheson’s house in Georgetown and talked until past midnight. Lovett, ordinarily a man of imperturbable temperament, was angriest of all. MacArthur, he said, must be removed at once. Acheson agreed and quoted Euripides: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

At Blair House, Truman sat in an upstairs study reading and rereading the text of the MacArthur ultimatum. “I couldn’t send a message to the Chinese after that,” he would say in later years, trying to recall the disappointment and fury he felt. “I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea…I was never so put out in my life…. MacArthur thought he was the proconsul for the government of the United States and could do as he damned pleased.”

In his Memoirs, Truman would write that he now knew what he must do about MacArthur.

This was a most extraordinary statement for a military commander of the United Nations to issue on his own responsibility. It was an act totally disregarding all directives to abstain from any declarations on foreign policy. It was in open defiance of my orders as President and as Commander in Chief. This was a challenge to the President under the Constitution. It also flouted the policy of the United Nations….

By this act MacArthur left me no choice—I could no longer tolerate his insubordination….

And yet…MacArthur was not fired. Truman said not a word suggesting he had reached such a decision. At a meeting with Acheson, Lovett, and Rusk in the Oval Office the next day, Saturday the 24th, Truman, by Acheson’s account, appeared to be in a state of mind that combined “disbelief with controlled fury.” Acheson and Lovett, for all their own anger, worried about adverse public reaction, given the mood of the country and MacArthur’s immense prestige. People were fed up with the war. MacArthur was promising victory. If the President challenged that, he would appear to be, as Lovett said, “on the side of sin.” Truman’s decision was to send MacArthur only a restrained reprimand, a message he himself dictated to remind MacArthur of his order of December 6 forbidding public statements that had not been cleared with Washington.

Truman was moving with extreme caution. Some, later, would call this an act of political guile. Others would see it as another of those critical moments, like the Berlin crisis, when he drew on his better nature as President, refusing to act impulsively or irresponsibly, whatever his own feelings.

Meantime, on March 14, the Gallup Poll had reported the President’s public approval at an all-time low of only 26 percent. And by the end of March, there were appalling new statistics on the war from the U.N. Secretariat: U.N. forces had now suffered a total of 228,941 casualties, the greatest part of them by far being South Korean (168,652) and American (57,120).

Truman was dwelling on the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan during the Civil War, in the autumn of 1862, when Lincoln had been forced to relieve McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac. Truman had sent one of his staff to the Library of Congress to review the details of the Lincoln-McClellan crisis and give him a report. Lincoln’s troubles with McClellan, as Truman knew, had been the reverse of his own with MacArthur. Lincoln had wanted McClellan to attack and McClellan refused time and again. But then, when Lincoln issued orders, McClellan, like MacArthur, ignored them. Also like MacArthur, McClellan occasionally made political statements on matters outside the military field. Asked what he thought about this, Lincoln, according to a story Truman loved, said it reminded him of the man who, when his horse kicked up and stuck a foot through the stirrup, said to the horse, “If you are going to get on, I will get off.”

Lincoln was patient [Truman later wrote], for that was his nature, but at long last he was compelled to relieve the Union Army’s principal commander. And though I gave this difficulty with MacArthur much wearisome thought, I realized that I would have no other choice myself than to relieve the nation’s top field commander….

I wrestled with the problem for several days, but my mind was made up before April 5, when the next incident occurred.

On Thursday, April 5, at the Capitol, House Minority Leader Joe Martin took the floor to read the text of a letter from MacArthur that Martin said he felt duty-bound to withhold no longer.

In February, speaking in Brooklyn, Martin had called for the use of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in Korea and accused the administration of a defeatist policy. “What are we, in Korea for—to win or to lose?…If we are not in Korea to win, then this administration should be indicted for the murder of American boys.” Martin had sent a copy of the speech to MacArthur, asking for his “views.” On March 20, MacArthur had responded and virtually all that he said was bound to provoke Truman, as Martin well knew. Since MacArthur’s letter carried no stipulation of confidentiality, Martin had decided to make it public.

The congressman was right in calling for victory, MacArthur wrote, right in wanting to see Chinese forces from Formosa join the battle against communism. The real war against communism was in Asia, not in Europe: “…here [in Asia] we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words…if we lose the war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom…. There is no substitute for victory.”

The letter was on the wires at once. At the White House, a new assistant press secretary named Roger Tubby took the ticker bulletin and rushed to the Oval Office, to find Truman sitting quietly reading General Bradley’s book, A Soldier’s Story. Truman appeared unconcerned.

“Mr. President,” said Tubby, “this man is not only insubordinate, but he’s insolent, and I think he ought to be fired.”

Truman looked again at the ticker sheet. “Well,” he said, “I think they are maneuvering the general out of a job.”

At the Pentagon, Bradley called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs. “I did not know that Truman had already made up his mind to relieve MacArthur,” Bradley remembered, “but I thought it was a strong possibility.” The Joint Chiefs, however, reached no conclusion about MacArthur.

On Friday, April 6, official Cadillacs filled the White House driveway. Marshall, Bradley, Acheson, and Harriman met with the President for an hour. Saying nothing of his own views, Truman asked what should be done. When Marshall urged caution, Acheson agreed. To Acheson it was not so much a problem of what should be done as how it should be done.

The situation could be resolved [remembered Acheson] only by relieving the General of all his commands and removing him from the Far East. Grave trouble would result, but it could be surmounted if the President acted upon the carefully considered advice and unshakable support of all his civilian and military advisers. If he should get ahead of them or appear to take them for granted or be impetuous, the harm would be incalculable.

“If you relieve MacArthur,” Acheson told Truman, “you will have the biggest fight of your administration.”

Harriman, reminding the President that MacArthur had been a problem for too long, said he should be dismissed at once.

“I don’t express any opinion or make known my decision,” Truman wrote in his diary. “Direct the four to meet again Friday afternoon and go over all phases of the situation.”

He was a model of self-control. MacArthur, in his own memoirs, would describe how, having read Truman’s letter to the music critic, he saw, himself “at the apex of a situation that would make me the next victim of such uncontrolled passion.” But those close to Truman knew that “uncontrolled passion” was never a problem. Under the pressures of this tensest of times, with so much of his own stature and political welfare riding on his every move, he was at his steadiest. For the next several days an air of unnatural calm seemed to hang over the White House. “The wind died down,” remembered Joe Martin. “The surface was placid…nothing happened.”

Truman telephoned the Vice President. Given all that had happened, Barkley concluded reluctantly, a compromise was out of the question—MacArthur would have to go. When Truman called Chief Justice Vinson and Speaker Sam Rayburn to the Oval Office, Vinson, like Marshall, advised caution. What Rayburn said is not known.

On Saturday, Truman met again with Marshall, Acheson, Bradley, and Harriman, and again nothing, was resolved. Marshall and Bradley were still uncertain what to do. They were hesitating in part, according to Bradley’s later account, because they knew the kind of abuse that would be hurled at them personally—an understandable concern for two such men at the end of long, distinguished careers. The previous fall, in acrimonious Senate debate over Marshall’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense, Republican William E. Jenner of Indiana had called Marshall “a front man for traitors” and a “living lie.” Firing MacArthur now, wrote Bradley, was certain to provoke more such savage assaults on Marshall by those Acheson called the “political primitives.” Nor could he, Bradley, expect to escape similar treatment.

On Monday, April 9, the same foursome convened with the President once more, this time at Blair House. But now the situation had changed. The Joint Chiefs had met the afternoon before and concluded that from a military point of view, MacArthur should be relieved. Their opinion was unanimous.

“There was no question about the Chiefs being in thorough agreement on this,” Bradley’s aide, Colonel Chester Clifton, would later say:

They had become disenchanted with MacArthur…and on military rather than on political grounds.

A part of their dissatisfaction was with some of his strategic and tactical decisions, such as, splitting his forces in Korea and jumping off on his November offensive with inadequate field intelligence about the enemy….

What really counted was that MacArthur had lost confidence in himself and was beginning to lose the confidence of his field officers and troops. There is nothing in the book that more seriously undermines a commander’s effectiveness than this. When it happens, he’s through….

And when he committed the final error of insubordination to the Commander-in-Chief—and there’s absolutely no question about that—they had no trouble at all deciding what had to be done.

Now at Blair House, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman all agreed that MacArthur should be relieved, and only after each had spoken, Truman, for the first time, said he was of the same opinion. He had made his decision. He told Bradley to prepare the necessary papers.

“Rarely had a matter been shrouded in such secrecy at the White House,” reported the Washington Post the morning of Tuesday, April 10. “The answer to every question about MacArthur was met with a ‘no comment’ reply.”

On Capitol Hill, an unidentified “congressional official” told the Post that the President had decided against removing the Far East Commander. Representative Martin said he favored bringing MacArthur home to report to Congress. In Tokyo, according to a United Press dispatch, a member of MacArthur’s staff said meetings between the general and Secretary of the Army Pace were “going forward with an air of cordiality”—thus seeming to refute rumors that Pace had been sent to dismiss MacArthur. A photograph on page 1 of the Post showed a smiling MacArthur welcoming an even more smiling Pace on his arrival at the Tokyo airport.

A Post editorial, meantime, expressed concern that MacArthur’s repeated efforts “to run away with the diplomatic ball” had “excited little more than a ripple among the American people,” and blamed the administration for its “muting” of the issue. Civil supremacy was at stake. The President ought to take a firm hand. “Any reassertion of the President’s authority as Commander in Chief and initiator of the country’s foreign policy would win him, we feel sure, the support of the American people. That’s what they are crying out for—leadership….”

The morning cartoon by Herb Block showed “Captain Harry Truman” asleep on his World War I army cot, trembling in fear, too terrified to challenge the five-star general.

At the end of a routine morning staff meeting, the President quietly announced—“So you won’t have to read about it in the papers”—that he had decided to fire General MacArthur. He was sure, Truman added, that MacArthur had wanted to be fired.

He was sure also that he himself faced a political storm, “a great furor,” unlike any in his political career. From beyond the office windows, the noise of construction going on in the White House was so great that several of the staff had to strain to hear what he was saying.

At 3:15 that afternoon, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman reported to the Oval Office, bringing the drafted orders. Truman looked them over, borrowed a fountain pen from Bill Hassett, and signed his name.

They were to be sent by State Department channels to Ambassador Muccio in Korea, who was to turn them over to Secretary Pace, who by now was also in Korea, with Ridgway at Eighth Army headquarters. Pace was to return at once to Tokyo and personally hand the orders to MacArthur—this whole relay system having been devised to save the general from the embarrassment of direct transmission through regular Army communications. All aspects of the issue thus far had been kept secret with marked success, but it was essential there be no leaks in the last critical hours, as Truman made clear to his new press secretary, Joe Short, the White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun whom Truman had picked to replace Charlie Ross. Announcement of the sensational MacArthur news was not to be made until the following morning.

The next several hours passed without incident, until early evening, after Truman had returned to Blair House. Harriman, Bradley, Rusk, and six or seven of Truman’s staff were working in the Cabinet Room, preparing material for release, when Joe Short received word that a Pentagon reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Lloyd Norman, was making inquiries about a supposed “major resignation” to take place in Tokyo—the implication being that somehow MacArthur had already learned of Truman’s decision and was about to resign before Truman could fire him.

Bradley telephoned Truman at about nine o’clock to report there had been a leak. Truman, saying he wanted time to think, told Bradley to find Marshall and Acheson. Marshall, it was learned, had gone to a movie with his wife, but Acheson came to the White House immediately, and like Rusk and George Elsey, he thought it would be a mistake to do anything rash because of one reporter’s inquiry. As he had from the start, Acheson again stressed the importance of the manner in which the general was dismissed. It was only fair and proper that he be informed before the story broke.

Harriman, Charlie Murphy, Matt Connelly, Joe Short, and Roger Tubby argued that MacArthur must not be allowed to “get the jump” on the President. The story must come from the White House, not Tokyo. The announcement should be made that night.

Such a decision, thought Elsey, would look like panic on the part of the White House. It would be undignified, unbefitting the President. But as Elsey later recalled, “There was a degree of panic.”

There was concern that MacArthur might get wind of this and might make some grandstand gesture of his own. There were rumors flying around that he was going on a world-wide broadcast network…. And in effect, the White House was, I’m afraid, I’m sorry to say it, panicked by the fear that MacArthur might get the jump.

Meantime, something apparently had gone wrong with the transmission of the President’s orders. Nothing had been heard from Muccio about their receipt.

Had George Marshall been present that night—or Charlie Ross—possibly things would have been handled differently.

Truman would remember Bradley “rushing over” to Blair House at a late hour. Actually, the time was just after ten and Bradley came accompanied by Harriman, Rusk, Joe Short, and Matt Connelly. By 10:30, Truman had decided.

Short telephoned Roger Tubby at the White House to have all the orders—those relieving MacArthur, as well as those naming Matthew Ridgway his successor—mimeographed as quickly as possible.

“He’s not going to be allowed to quit on me,” Truman is reported to have said. “He’s going to be fired!” In his diary, Truman recorded dryly, “Discussed the situation and I ordered messages sent at once and directly to MacArthur.”

From a small first-floor study in his Georgetown home, Dean Acheson began placing calls to Tom Connally, Les Biffle, and John Foster Dulles, to tell them what was about to happen. At the State Department, Rusk spent a long night telephoning the ambassadors of all the countries with troops in Korea. “Well, the little man finally did it, didn’t he,” responded the ambassador from New Zealand.

At the White House, switchboard operators began calling reporters at their homes to say there would be an extraordinary press conference at 1:00 A.M. And at 1:00 A.M. in the White House press room, Wednesday, April 11, Press Secretary Short handed out the mimeographed sheets.

Truman, in his second-floor bedroom at Blair House, was by then fast asleep.

General MacArthur learned of his recall while at lunch in Tokyo, when his wife handed him a brown Signal Corps envelope.

If Truman had only let him know how he felt, MacArthur would say privately a few hours later, he would have retired “without difficulty.” Where the Tribune reporter got his tip was never learned. MacArthur would later testify that he had never given any thought to resigning.

According to what MacArthur had been told by an unnamed but “eminent” medical authority, Truman’s “mental instability” was the result of malignant hypertension, “characterized by bewilderment and confusion of thought.” Truman, MacArthur predicted, would be dead in six months.

Truman Fires Macarthur

The headline across the early edition of the Washington Post, April 11, 1951, was the headline everywhere in the country and throughout much of the world, with only minor variations. The reaction was stupendous, the outcry from the American people shattering. Truman had known he would have to face a storm, but however dark his premonitions, he could not possibly have measured what was coming. No one did, no one could have. One southern senator in the course of the day described the people in his part of the country as “almost hysterical.” The senator himself was almost hysterical. So were scores of others on Capitol Hill and millions of Americans.

The day on Capitol Hill was described as “one of the bitterest…in modern times.” Prominent Republicans, including Senator Taft, spoke angrily of impeaching the President. The full Republican leadership held an angry emergency meeting in Joe Martin’s office at 9:30 in the morning, after which Martin talked to reporters of “impeachments,” the accent on the plural. “We might want the impeachments of 1 or 50.” A full-dress congressional investigation of the President’s war policy was in order. General MacArthur, announced Martin, would be invited to air his views before a joint session of Congress.

Senator Nixon demanded MacArthur’s immediate reinstatement. Senator Jenner declared the country was “in the hands of a secret coterie” directed by Russian spies. When, on the floor of the Senate, Jenner shouted, “Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction,” the gallery broke into applause.

A freshman Democrat from Oklahoma, Senator Robert Kerr, rose to defend the President. If the Republicans believed the nation’s security depended on following the policy of General MacArthur, Kerr said, then they should call for a declaration of war against Red China. Otherwise, Republican support of MacArthur was a mockery. Tom Connally reminded his colleagues that Americans had always insisted on civilian control over the military, and three Senate Republicans, Duff of Pennsylvania, Saltonstall and Lodge of Massachusetts, spoke in agreement.

But such voices were lost in a tempest of Republican outrage. The general’s dismissal was “another Pearl Harbor,” a “great day for the Russian Communists.” MacArthur had been fired “because he told the truth.” “God help the United States,” said Senator James P. Kem, Republican of Missouri.

In New York two thousand longshoremen walked off their jobs in protest over the firing of MacArthur. A Baltimore women’s group announced plans for a march on Washington in support of the general. Elsewhere enraged patriots flew flags at half-staff, or upside down. People signed petitions, fired off furious letters and telegrams to Washington. In Worcester, Massachusetts, and San Gabriel, California, Truman was burned in effigy. In Houston, a Protestant minister became so angry dictating a telegram to the White House that he died of a heart attack.

The legislatures of four states—Florida, Michigan, Illinois, and California—voted resolutions condemning the President’s action, while the Los Angeles City Council adjourned for a day of “sorrowful contemplation of the political assassination of General MacArthur.” In Chicago, in a front editorial, the Tribune called for immediate impeachment proceedings:

President Truman must be impeached and convicted. His hasty and vindictive removal of Gen. MacArthur is the culmination of a series of acts which have shown that he is unfit, morally and mentally, for his high office…. The American nation has never been in a greater danger. It is led by a fool who is surrounded by knaves….

“IMPEACH THE IMBECILE”…“IMPEACH THE LITTLE WARD POLITICIAN STUPIDITY FROM KANSAS CITY”…“SUGGEST YOU LOOK FOR ANOTHER HISS IN BLAIR HOUSE,” read telegrams typical of those pouring into Washington. In the hallways of the Senate and House office buildings, Western Union messengers made their deliveries with bushel baskets. According to one tally, of the 44,358 telegrams received by Republicans in Congress during the first 48 hours following Truman’s announcement, all but 334 condemned him or took the side of MacArthur, and the majority called for Truman’s immediate removal from office.

Republicans were overjoyed. “This is the biggest windfall that has ever come to the Republican Party,” exclaimed Senator Styles Bridges.

A number of prominent liberals—Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Justice William O. Douglas—publicly supported Truman. Douglas, who had told Truman as early as October that MacArthur should be fired, wrote, “In the days ahead you may need the strength of all your friends. This note is to let you know that I am and will be in your corner…I know you are right.”

While by far the greatest clamor came from those in the country outraged over what Truman had done, there was no lack of conviction, even passion, among people who felt he was in the right, that a fundamental principle was at stake. And to many of these same people, how one felt about Harry Truman personally was immaterial.

“It makes not the slightest difference if Mr. Harry Truman is an ignorant person who never graduated from college, who once worked in a haberdashery shop, who was a protégé of one of our worst city bosses and came into the presidency through accident,” the Reverend Dr. Duncan E. Littlefair said in a sermon at the Fountain Street Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Neither does it make any difference if General MacArthur is a man of astounding personality, tremendous achievement, graduated first in his class in the great College of the Army and has had a distinguished career and has proven a wonderful administrator of the Japanese people or that we like him better than we do Harry S. Truman. Principle, principle, must always be above personality and it must be above expediency. The principle here we recognize…[is] that control of this country must come through the president and the departments that are organized under him and through Congress, and that any decision that comes from that person through those means is not to be dismissed because we don’t like the personality who expressed it, nor is it to be overridden because we have a conquering hero….

Another letter of support addressed to the President came from the Washington Post music critic, Paul Hume.

Throughout Europe, MacArthur’s dismissal was greeted as welcome news. “MAC IS SACKED,” declared the London Evening Standard. The French, reported Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, were “solidly for Truman.” Not a single paper in Paris had failed to support his decision.

But most impressive was the weight of editorial opinion at home, despite vehement assaults in the McCormick, Hearst, and Scripps-Howard newspapers, or the renewed glorification of MacArthur in Henry Luce’s Time and Life.

The Washington post, The New York Times, the New York Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, the Miami Daily News, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Denver Post, the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor, all these and more endorsed Truman’s decision. Importantly the list also included such staunch Republican papers as the Des Moines Register and Tribune and the New York Herald-Tribune, which went out of its way to praise Truman as well for his strength of character:

The most obvious fact about the dismissal of General MacArthur is that he virtually forced his own removal. In high policy as in war there is no room for a divided command…. General MacArthur is a soldier of the highest abilities…to lose his service and his talents is in a very true sense a tragedy for the nation, yet he is the architect of a situation which really left the President with no other course. With one of those strokes of boldness and decision which are characteristic of Mr. Truman in emergencies, a very difficult and dangerous problem has been met in the only way it could have been met….

In his “Today and Tomorrow” column, Walter Lippmann commended Truman and Marshall both for having “done their duty.” And the working press, according to the Saturday Review, privately sided with Truman by a margin of six to one, though most reporters thought the dismissal had been poorly handled.

The clamor in the country, the outrage, the noisy hostility to Truman, the adulation of MacArthur continued, however, and would grow greater still when MacArthur made his triumphal return. Nothing had so stirred the political passions of the country since the Civil War.

At the heart of the tumult was anger and frustration over the war in Korea. Nobody liked it. Senator Wherry had begun calling it “Truman’s War,” and the name caught on. People were sick of Truman’s War, frustrated and a bit baffled by talk of a “limited war.” America didn’t fight to achieve a stalemate, and the cost in blood had become appalling. If it was a United Nations effort, then the United States seemed to be bearing the heavy side of the burden. According to the latest figures, there were more than ten thousand Americans dead, another fifty thousand wounded or missing in action. The country wanted it over. MacArthur at least offered victory.

To a great part of the country MacArthur was a glorious figure, a real-life, proven American hero, the brilliant, handsome general who had led American forces to stunning triumph in the greatest of all wars wherein there had never been any objective but complete and total victory. “Douglas MacArthur was the personification of the big man…Harry Truman was almost a professional little man,” wrote Time in a considerably less than unbiased attempt to appraise the national mood, but one that nonetheless applied to a large part of the populace. For someone of Truman’s modest attainments, a man of his “stature,” to have fired Douglas MacArthur seemed to many Americans an act smacking of insolence and vindictiveness, not to say dreadful judgment. Nor did the way it happened seem right. Reportedly, the firing had been carefully timed so as to make the morning papers “and catch the Republicans in bed.” Rumors also attributed the announcement to another of Truman’s dead-of-the-night temper tantrums, or heavy drinking. In a speech in Milwaukee, having called Truman a “son-of-a-bitch,” Joe McCarthy charged that the decision had been influenced by “bourbon and Benedictine.” Even to more fair-minded Republicans than McCarthy and others of the party’s vociferous right wing—as to a great many Democrats—it seemed to have been a graceless, needlessly unkind way to terminate a great career. Who did “little Harry Truman” think he was?

Old admirers of Franklin Roosevelt speculated on how differently “the master politician” might have handled things—made MacArthur ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, perhaps.

But in a larger way, for many, the firing of MacArthur was yet another of those traumatic turns of events of recent years—like the fall of China to Communist control, like the advent of the Russian bomb—that seemed to signal a world out of joint, a world increasingly hard to understand and threatening.

According to a Gallup Poll, 69 percent of the country backed General MacArthur. The fact that the country and nearly every leading Republican had strongly supported Truman’s decision to go into Korea the previous June, the fact that in November MacArthur, the supreme military strategist, had presided over one of the worst debacles in American military history, or that only 30 percent of the country expressed a willingness to go to war with China, were all overlooked.

Truman was not to appear at a big public event until April 20—not until after MacArthur had made his return and appeared before Congress—and when he did, to throw out the first ball at the opening game at Griffith Stadium, he was booed to his face, something that had not happened since Herbert Hoover attended a ball game in 1931.

Except for a brief broadcast from the White House the night following his dismissal of MacArthur, April 11, Truman had maintained silence on the matter. General MacArthur was “one of our greatest military commanders,” he told the nation, but the cause of world peace was far more important than any single individual.

The change in commands in the Far East means no change whatever in the policy of the United States. We will carry on the fight in Korea with vigor and determination…. The new commander, Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway, has already demonstrated that he has the great qualities of military leadership needed for this task.

We are ready, at any time, to negotiate for a restoration of peace in the area. But we will not engage in appeasement. We are only interested in real peace….

We do not want to widen the conflict….

He went about his schedule as though all were normal. On April 13, he had his picture taken as, smiling confidently, he began his seventh year in the Oval Office. One evening he and Bess went to the theater, another to see a British film of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman.

MacArthur landed at San Francisco Tuesday, April 17, to a delirious reception. He had been away from the country for fourteen years. Until now, the American people had had no chance to see and cheer him, to welcome the hero home. Ten thousand were at the San Francisco airport. So great were the crowds on the way into the city, it took two hours for the motorcade to reach his hotel. “The only politics I have,” MacArthur told a cheering throng, “is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—God Bless America.”

When Truman met with reporters the next day, April 18, at his first ‘press conference since the start of the crisis, he dashed all their expectations by refusing to say anything on the subject. Scheduled to appear before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on Thursday, April 19, the day MacArthur was to go before Congress, Truman canceled his speech, because he felt it should be the general’s day and did not wish anything to detract from it.

Only in a few personal letters did Truman touch on the matter, and then briefly, simply, and without apologies or complicated explanations. “I was sorry to have to reach a parting of the way with the big man in Asia,” he wrote to Eisenhower, “but he asked for it and I had to give it to him.”

There would be “hell to pay” for it for perhaps six or seven weeks, he told his staff and the Cabinet. But eventually people would come to their senses, including more and more Republican politicians who would grow doubtful of all-out support for the general. Given some time, MacArthur would be reduced to human proportions. Meanwhile, Truman could withstand the bombardment, for in the long run, he knew, he would be judged to have made the right decision. He had absolutely no doubt of that. “The American people will come to understand that what I did had to be done.”

As a boost for failing spirits, someone circulated among the White House staff a mock “Schedule for Welcoming General MacArthur” to Washington:

As it was, a cheering crowd of twelve thousand people waited until past midnight at National Airport to welcome MacArthur when his plane landed.

Secretary Marshall, General Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs were at the foot of the ramp to greet him, as Truman had agreed was only proper. But so also was Major General Vaughan, whose presence may have been Truman’s idea of a small joke of his own.

At 12:31 P.M., Thursday, April 19, in a flood of television lights, Douglas MacArthur walked down the same aisle in the House of Representatives as had Harry Truman so often since 1945, and the wild ovation from the packed chamber, the intense, authentic drama of the moment, were such as few had ever beheld.

Neither the President’s Cabinet, nor the Supreme Court, nor any of the Joint Chiefs were present.

Wearing a short “Eisenhower” jacket, without decoration, the silvery circles of five-star rank glittering on his shoulders, MacArthur paused to shake hands with Vice President Barkley, then stepped to the rostrum, his face “an unreadable mask.” Only after complete silence had fallen did he begin.

“I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country.”

There was ringing applause and the low, vibrant voice continued, the speaker in full command of the moment.

The decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea had been sound from a military standpoint, MacArthur affirmed. But when he had called for reinforcements, he was told they were not available. He had “made clear,” he said, that if not permitted to destroy the enemy bases north of the Yalu, if not permitted to utilize the 800,000 Chinese troops on Formosa, if not permitted to blockade the China coast, then “the position of the command from a military standpoint forbade victory….” And war’s “very object” was victory. How could it be otherwise? “In war, indeed,” he said, repeating his favorite slogan, “there can be no substitute for victory. There were some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They were blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches, with unmistakable emphasis, that appeasement begets new and bloodier war.”

He was provocative, and defiant. Resounding applause or cheers followed again and again—thirty times in thirty-four minutes. He said nothing of bombing China’s industrial centers, as he had proposed. And though he said “every available means” should be applied to bring victory, he made no mention of his wish to use atomic bombs, or to lay down a belt of radioactivity along the Yalu. He had been severely criticized for his views, he said. Yet, he asserted, his views were “fully shared” by the Joint Chiefs—a claim that was altogether untrue and that brought a deafening ovation. Republicans and most spectators in the galleries leaped to their feet, cheering and stamping. It was nearly a minute before he could begin again.

To those who said American military strength was inadequate to face the enemy on more than one front, MacArthur said he could imagine no greater expression of defeatism. “You cannot appease or otherwise surrender to Communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.” To confine the war to Chinese aggression in Korea only was to follow a path of “prolonged indecision.”

“Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” He paused, then, softly, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “I could not answer.”

A record 30 million people were watching on television and the performance was masterful. The use of the rich voice, the timing, surpassed that of most actors. The oratorical style was of a kind not heard in Congress in a very long time. It recalled, as one television critic wrote, “a yesteryear of the theater,” and it held the greater part of the huge audience wholly enraptured. Work had stopped in offices and plants across the country, so people could watch. Saloons and bars were jammed. Schoolchildren saw the “historic hour” in classrooms or were herded into assemblies or dining halls to listen by radio. Whether they had any idea what the excitement was about, they knew it was “important.”

“When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams,” MacArthur said, his voice dropping as he began the famous last lines, the stirring, sentimental, ambiguous peroration that the speech would be remembered for.

The hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” And like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.

Goodbye.

A “hurricane of emotion” swept the room. Hands reached out to him. Many in the audience were weeping. “We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!” exclaimed Republican Representative Dewey Short of Missouri, a former preacher. To Joe Martin, it was “the climaxing” of the most emotional moment he had known in thirty-five years in Congress. Theatrics were a part of the congressional way of life, Martin knew, but nothing had ever equaled this.

It was MacArthur’s finest hour, and the crescendo of public adulation that followed, beginning with a triumphal parade through Washington that afternoon, and climaxing the next day in New York with a thunderous ticker-tape parade, was unprecedented in American history. Reportedly 7,500,000 people turned out in New York, more than had welcomed Eisenhower in 1945, more even than at the almost legendary welcome for Lindbergh in 1927. It was “awesome,” wrote Time. “Everybody cheered…a man of chin-out affirmation, who seemed a welcome contrast to men of indecision and negation.”

But, in fact, not everybody cheered. There were places along the parade route in New York where, as MacArthur’s open car passed, people stood silently, just watching and looking, anything but pleased. In Washington, one senator had confided to a reporter that he had never feared more for his country than during MacArthur’s speech. “I honestly felt that if the speech had gone on much longer there might have been a march on the White House.” Even Time noted that while Republicans in Congress might consider MacArthur a godsend, few were ready to endorse his proposals.

Truman had not listened to MacArthur’s speech, or watched on television. He had spent the time at his desk in the Oval Office, meeting with Dean Acheson as usual at that hour on Thursdays, after which he went back to Blair House for lunch and a nap. At some point, however, he did read what MacArthur had said. Speaking privately, he remarked that he thought it “a bunch of damn bullshit.”

As Truman had anticipated, the tumult began to subside. For seven weeks in the late spring of 1951, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees held joint hearings to investigate MacArthur’s dismissal. Chaired by Democratic Senator Richard B. Russell, the inquiry opened on May 3 in the same marble Caucus Room, 318 of the Senate Office Building, where the Truman Committee had conducted its sessions. Though the hearings were closed, authorized transcripts of each day’s sessions, edited for military security reasons, were released hourly to the press.

MacArthur, the first witness, testified for three days, arguing that his way in Korea was the way to victory and an end to the slaughter. He had seen as much blood and disaster as any man alive, he told the senators, but never such devastation as during his last time in Korea. “After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited. Now are you going to let that go on…?” The politicians in Washington had introduced a “new concept into military operations—the concept of appeasement,” its purpose only “to go on indefinitely…indecisively, fighting with no mission….”

But he also began to sound self-absorbed and oddly disinterested in global issues. He would admit to no mistakes, no errors of judgment. Failure to anticipate the size of the Chinese invasion, for example, had been the fault of the CIA. Any operation he commanded was crucial, other considerations were always of less importance. Certain that his strategy of war on China would not bring in the Soviets, he belittled the danger of a larger conflict. But what if he happened to be wrong, he was asked. What if another world war resulted? That, said MacArthur, was not his responsibility. “My responsibilities were in the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various agencies of the Government are working night and day for an over-all solution to the global problem. Now I am not familiar with their studies. I haven’t gone into it….” To many, it seemed he had made the President’s case.

The great turning point came with the testimony of Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs, who refuted absolutely MacArthur’s claim that they agreed with his strategy. Truman, from the start of the crisis, had known he needed the full support of his military advisers before declaring his decision on MacArthur. Now it was that full support, through nineteen days of testimony, that not only gave weight and validity to the decision, but discredited MacArthur in a way nothing else could have.

Speaking solemnly, Marshall began by saying it was “a very distressing necessity, a very distressing occasion that compels me to appear here this morning and in effect in almost direct opposition to a great many views and actions of General MacArthur. He is a brother Army officer, a man for whom I have tremendous respect….”

The administration was not turning its back on an easy victory in Korea, Marshall said, because there could be no easy or decisive victory in Korea short of another world war. The present policy might indeed seem costly, but not compared to an atomic war. There had been complaints of stalemate, demands for quick, decisive solutions at the time of the Berlin crisis, too, he reminded the senators. The war in Korea was in its tenth month, but the Berlin crisis had lasted almost fifteen months before ending in a “notable victory.”

Just what did Secretary Marshall consider the “Korean business,” he was asked. “A police action? A large or small war?…”

“I would characterize it as a limited war which I hope will remain limited,” Marshall replied evenly.

Bradley, his first day in the witness chair, testified with unexpected vigor and delivered a telling blow with what would be the most quoted line of the hearings. MacArthur’s program to step up and widen the war with China, Bradley said, would “involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

Never, said the Joint Chiefs, had they subscribed to MacArthur’s plan for victory, however greatly they admired him.

From a purely military standpoint, General Collins was asked, had General MacArthur’s conduct of the war in Korea been compatible with General MacArthur’s outstanding conduct of the war in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945? That, said Collins, was a question he would prefer not to answer, and no one insisted.

The dismissal of MacArthur, said all of them—Marshall, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs—was more than warranted, it was a necessity. Given the circumstances, given the seriousness of MacArthur’s opposition to the policy of the President, his challenge to presidential authority, said Marshall, there had been “no other course but to relieve him.”

The fidelity of the military high command to the principle of civilian control of the military was total and unequivocal.

Such unanimity of opinion on the part of the country’s foremost and most respected military leaders seemed to leave Republican senators stunned. As James Reston wrote in The New York Times, “MacArthur, who had started as the prosecutor, had now become the defendant.”

The hearings ground on and grew increasingly dull. The MacArthur hysteria was over, interest waned. When in June, MacArthur set off on a speaking tour through Texas, insisting he had no presidential ambitions, he began to sound more and more shrill and vindictive, less and less like a hero. He attacked Truman, appeasement, high taxes, and “insidious forces working from within.” His crowds grew steadily smaller. Nationwide, the polls showed a sharp decline in his popular appeal. The old soldier was truly beginning to fade away.

The furor of the MacArthur crisis had taken a heavy toll. It had spread confusion and increasing doubt about the war in Korea, increasing skepticism about the leadership in Washington and particularly about the President himself. Politically, the damage to the administration and to the Democratic Party had been serious. Even among Truman’s strongest supporters, he was criticized for both the way the dismissal had been handled and for failing to convince the country that he was right. Where was the eloquence, the power of “the bully pulpit” of the presidency when it was so desperately needed? “Having made this courageous decision, Truman failed to mobilize the country behind him,” Bradley would write in retrospect. Truman’s address to the nation the night of the MacArthur dismissal had been, in Bradley’s estimate, “a complete flop.”

A Gallup Poll in late May showed that while support for MacArthur had dropped to 30 percent, support for Marshall and Bradley was only 19 percent, and three out of four of those polled regarded the MacArthur hearings as “just politics.”

Many then, and more in time to come, would say that Truman’s biggest mistake had been not firing the general months before, a view with which Truman himself wholeheartedly concurred.

Truman would regard the decision as among the most important he made as President. He did not, however, agree with those who said it had shown what great courage he had. (Harriman, among others, would later speak of it as one of the most courageous steps ever taken by any President.) “Courage didn’t have anything to do with it,” Truman would say emphatically. “General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That’s all there was to it.”

But if the firing of MacArthur had taken a heavy toll politically, if Truman as President had been less than a master of persuasion, he had accomplished a very great deal and demonstrated extraordinary patience and strength of character in how he rode out the storm. His policy in Korea—his determined effort to keep the conflict in bounds—had not been scuttled, however great the aura of the hero-general, or his powers as a spellbinder. The principle of civilian control over the military, challenged as never before in the nation’s history, had survived, and stronger than ever. The President had made his point and, with the backing of his generals, he had made it stick.

“Truman’s conflict with MacArthur,” wrote Dean Rusk, “was more than a clash of egos or contest of wills; Truman was concerned about the presidency…. I am convinced that 95 percent of Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur hinged on the relationship of the president as the Commander in Chief to his general and on civilian control of the military.”

MacArthur did truly believe that he was above the President. MacArthur himself later told the historian Samuel Eliot Morison that a theater commander should be allowed to act independently, with no orders from the President, the United Nations, or anyone; then, to be sure that there could be no mistaking his meaning, MacArthur repeated the statement.

President Harry S. Truman was President and Commander in Chief still, and he was Harry S. Truman still, anything but disconsolate or defeated. Already, before the Senate hearings ended, he had reemerged and begun fighting back in his own way, sounding often as he had in the 1948 campaign. Speaking at an Armed Forces Day dinner on May 18 at the Statler, Truman reminded his full-dress audience that even as “we sit here tonight…partaking of food on white tablecloths and enjoying ourselves…there are men fighting and dying…to reach that peace for which we have been striving since World War II…. You must quit your bickering here at home…you must quit playing petty politics….”

Of the war in Korea, he said, “We are fighting for time…for us. There is always an emphasis on the casualties in Korea…. But did it ever occur to you that [they] will be one small drop in the bucket from one of those horrible bombs of which we talk so much.

“Think—think—think,” he said, his voice low, almost shaking, “what a responsibility your President faces. If you would think, and think clearly, you would get behind me and help win this peace…. It is up to you.”

If “victory” in Korea meant risking a world war—a war of atomic bombs—Truman would settle for no victory in Korea. That was the line he had drawn. There was a substitute for victory: it was peace. And he would stand by his policy of limited war for that specific objective.

“And look at the alternatives these critics have to present,” he said in a speech at Tullahoma, Tennessee.

Here is what they say. Take a chance on spreading the conflict in Korea. Take a chance on tying up all our resources in a vast war in Asia. Take a chance on losing our allies in Europe. Take a chance the Soviet Union won’t fight in the Far East. Take a chance we won’t have a third world war. They want us to play Russian roulette with the foreign policy of the United States—with all the chambers of the pistol loaded.

This is not a policy…. No president who has any sense of responsibility for the welfare of this great country is going to meet the grave issues of war and peace on such a foolish basis as that.

In the same speech, delivered June 25, almost a year to the day since his decision to go into Korea, he said, in effect, that he was ready to negotiate a settlement of the war at the 38th parallel.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Jacob Malik, had just proposed a Korean armistice. At Tullahoma, Truman gave the Soviets his fast answer.

“We are ready to join in a peaceful settlement in Korea now, just as we have always been.”

17

Final Days

I have tried to give it everything that was in me.

—TRUMAN

I

In the summer of his seventh year in office, the sixty-seven-year-old President looked the picture of health. His color was good; his clothes, impeccable as always, fit perfectly; his walk was firm and full of purpose. He saw people all day, yet seemed to have time for everyone. Visitors to the Oval Office found a man who stood immediately to greet them, shoulders back and smiling, and who, at his desk, gave them his full attention. Radiating vitality and confidence, he seemed completely at home in his job, as one could only be with experience. Mens sana in corpore sano was the old adage he had learned in high school Latin, “a sound mind in a sound body.” Clark Clifford, who dropped by on occasion, would say he never knew anyone of the President’s age who remained physically and psychologically so sound and solid.

He still walked two miles “most every morning,” Truman had recorded in his diary.

I eat no bread but one piece of toast at breakfast, no butter, no sugar, no sweets. Usually have fruit, one egg, a strip of bacon and half a glass of skimmed milk for breakfast; liver and bacon or sweet breads or ham or fish and spinach and another nonfattening vegetable for lunch with fruit for dessert. For dinner I have a fruit cup, steak, a couple of nonfattening vegetables and an ice, orange, pineapple or raspberry…So—I maintain my waist line and can wear suits bought in 1935!

The morning bourbon—an ounce of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey taken after the two-mile walk and a few setting-up exercises and the rubdown that usually followed the morning walk—had also become routine. Whether the bourbon was on doctor’s orders, or a bit of old-fashioned home medicine of the kind many of his generation thought beneficial to the circulation past age sixty (“to get the engine going”), is not known. But it seemed to agree with him.

And how Harry Truman looked, how he carried himself, the timbre of his voice, his air of confidence were all subjects of increasing interest in the summer of 1951, once the MacArthur crisis had passed, as a means of divining whether he intended to carry on in the job beyond the next election. Did he or did he not plan to run again in 1952?

At a press conference, a visiting reporter from Macon, Georgia, said with a drawl, “Mr. President, this is my first conference. My impression of you is that you look a lot younger than I thought you would.” With everyone in the room, Truman laughed.

“Could you tell me if you feel like you are in better physical condition now than you were when you first became President?”

He never felt better, Truman said, looking pleased. “I am still young enough to make a good race—foot race, I mean.” And there was more laughter.

“That wouldn’t be an announcement, would it?”

“No, no.”

To those at the White House who saw him daily, at all hours and often under extremely trying circumstances, he was still the Truman of old, hardworking, cheerful, never short with them, never petty. He seemed to have some kind of added inner balance mechanism that held him steady through nearly anything, enabling him not only to uphold the fearful responsibilities of his office and keep a killing schedule, but to accept with composure the small, silly aggravations that also went with the job. It was a level of equanimity that at times left those around him hugely amused and even more fond of him.

At still another banquet at the Statler one evening, the head table waiters managed to confuse the orders they had about a special meal for Joe Short, who had ulcers. It was Truman who was served a bowl of milk toast, which he ate without complaint, thinking that perhaps Dr. Graham had requested it for him.

One day on the Williamsburg, Graham sat on the fantail dictating into a recording machine, his lap full of letters, mostly inquiries about the President’s health, his weight, diet, manner of exercise. Truman walked over, picked up the letters from Graham’s lap, and threw them overboard. “You constantly tell me to relax. Now you relax,” Truman said laughing.

His resilient cheerfulness was both a wonder and, to some who worked with him, disconcerting at times. It was almost as though he did not fully understand how serious his troubles were, how truly grim and menacing his horizons appeared, even with the MacArthur crisis out of the way. Only in the eyes, behind the thick glasses, could the fatigue sometimes be seen. Only on rare off moments would he say something to suggest how much else he felt.

Once, while paying a visit to the office of the engineer in charge of the White House renovation, General Glen E. Edgerton, whose desk was in a shack on the South Lawn amid a cluster of temporary buildings put up when the work began, Truman had paused to read a framed verse on the wall. Written for Edgerton by a plumbing contractor named Reuben Anderson, it so appealed to Truman that he read it aloud:

Every man’s a would be sportsman, in the dreams of his intent,

A potential out-of-doors man when his thoughts are pleasure bent.

But he mostly puts the idea off, for the things that must be done,

And doesn’t get his outing till his outing days are gone.

So in hurry, scurry, worry, work, his living days are spent,

And he does his final camping in a low green tent.

“Hurry, scurry, worry, work!” Truman sighed. “That’s the way it is.”

Another day, in September, riding in his limousine on the way to make a speech to a gathering of churchmen, he again sighed and said that sometimes he wondered if it was all worth the effort.

Though peace talks had begun in Korea, at Kaesong on July 8, the war was grinding on with unabated savagery. Joe McCarthy continued to spew charges of treason and espionage, the worst of his venom aimed now at George Marshall. Congress was stalling on a raise in taxes to pay for the war, threatening to cut foreign aid, and there were new charges of further scandal within the administration. Earlier, in the lull after the MacArthur hysteria, Herb Block, in a Washington Post cartoon titled “The tumult and the shouting dies; the captains and the kings depart,” had shown Truman working alone into the night, his desk piled with reports labeled “Korea,” “Europe,” “A-Bomb,” “H-Bomb,” “Troops,” “Planes,” “United Nations,” “Economic Program,” “Peace,” and “War.” In the time since his burdens had only increased.

By midsummer, American troops had been fighting and dying in Korea for as long nearly as Truman and his generation had fought and died in France in World War I, and the struggle in Korea had become increasingly like World War I. The seesaw swings of fortune, the sweeping end runs and pellmell retreats and advances, were past now, the fighting concentrated near or along the 38th parallel. Some of the bloodiest, most desperate battles of the war were fought for limited topographical features—a numbered hilltop or ridgeline—where often, as in France in 1918, the enemy was heavily dug in, fortified with barbed wire, mines, and elaborately camouflaged tunnels. Newspapers and news broadcasts were filled with accounts of the Battle of Hill 1179, Bloody Ridge, Heartbreak Ridge. American casualties ran sometimes as high as three thousand a week, never less than three hundred. By late August the peace talks had broken down. By summer’s end total American casualties had passed 80,000, with 13,822 dead. Losses among the ROK and other U.N. forces were greater still. What the costs had been to the enemy in dead and wounded, or to the people of Korea, were as yet undetermined.

The war Truman had never wanted or expected, but knew to be of utmost importance to the future of the world—the most important decision of his presidency, he believed—had come to overshadow his whole second term. He knew what the reality was in Korea. “I know what a soldier goes through,” he would say with feeling. He knew the anguish of families at home. But when would it end? Who could say? What could he do that he was not already doing? The worries and frustrations were incessant.

One August morning at Blair House, he read in the papers that the body of an American soldier killed in action, Sergeant John Rice, had been brought home for burial in Sioux City, Iowa, but that at the last moment, as the casket was to be lowered into the grave, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park had stopped the ceremony because Sergeant Rice, a Winnebago Indian, was not “a member of the Caucasian race” and burial was therefore denied. Outraged, Truman picked up the phone. Within minutes, by telephone and telegram, it was arranged that Sergeant Rice would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors and that an Air Force plane was on the way to bring his widow and three children to Washington. That, as President, was the least he could do.

The scourge of Joe McCarthy, that Truman had thought would end soon, was poisoning the entire political atmosphere all the while. McCarthy’s attack on Marshall from the floor of the Senate in mid-June was his most vile yet, a wild harangue lasting nearly three hours. The “mysterious, powerful” Marshall and Dean Acheson were part of a Communist conspiracy, a conspiracy of infamy so immense, said McCarthy, that it surpassed any “such venture” in history. It was Marshall who had created the disastrous China policy, Marshall whose military strategy had made the war in Korea a pointless slaughter. Harry Truman, no longer master of his house, was being guided by a “larger conspiracy, the world-wide web of which has been spun in Moscow.” In the final hour of the speech McCarthy was addressing a virtually empty chamber—all but three senators had walked out. The press deplored these “senseless and vicious charges,” but McCarthy carried on, traveling the country. He still had no evidence. He exposed not a single Communist in government. Yet none of that seemed to matter, as he shouted and threatened and waved fistfuls of so-called “documentation.”

One night in the dining room at Blair House, Truman had called a secret meeting attended by Attorney General McGrath, four Democratic senators—Anderson, Monroney, Hennings, and Sparkman—a veteran Kentucky congressman named Brent Spence, Solicitor General Philip B. Perlman, Democratic Party Chairman William Boyle, Clark Clifford, who again sat in, and the author John Hersey as a kind of witness to history. Truman wanted confidential advice. What could be done about McCarthy?

As Hersey would recall, Truman gave a “pithy and bitter” summary of McCarthy’s methods—“his hectoring and innuendo, his horrors and dirty tricks…his bully’s delight in the ruin of innocents.” All this was tearing the country apart, Truman said. But what antidote could he as President use against such poison?

Senator Clinton Anderson mentioned a “devastating” dossier that had been assembled on McCarthy, complete with details on his bedmates over the years, enough to “blow Senator McCarthy’s whole show sky high.” Suggestions were made that the material be leaked to the press. But Truman smacked the table with the flat of his hand, and as Hersey remembered, “His third-person self spoke in outrage; the President wanted no more such talk.”

Three pungent comments of Harry Truman’s on the proposal that had just been made have stuck in my mind ever since [Hersey would write]. This was their gist:

You must not ask the President of the United States to get down in the gutter with a guttersnipe.

Nobody, not even the President of the United States, can approach too close to a skunk, in skunk territory, and expect to get anything out of it except a bad smell.

If you think somebody is telling a big lie about you, the only way to answer is with the whole truth.

Now repeatedly at press conferences when asked his views on the senator or the influence of McCarthyism, Truman, though plainly seething, would answer only, “No comment.”

Marshall, too, refused to respond, saying privately that if at this point in his life he had to explain that he was not a traitor, then it was hardly worth the effort.

To what degree the attacks by McCarthy influenced Marshall’s decision to retire is not clear. But on September 12, with great reluctance, Truman announced that the Secretary of Defense was stepping down for the final time, the extraordinary career was over. No man, said Truman, had ever given his country more distinguished and patriotic service.

There was a gathering sense of strong, central figures leaving the stage. Arthur Vandenberg had died of cancer in the spring. Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations and one of the keenest and best of Truman’s military advisers, dropped dead of a heart attack in August. Now Marshall, Truman’s “strong tower,” was departing.

Nor were Truman’s days in the West Wing quite the same without Charlie Ross. Press secretary Joe Short was highly professional, but a taut, intense man, very different from the gentle, wise Ross. The only one left on the staff who came close to filling Ross’s place in Truman’s affections was Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary, who was of the same generation as Truman, and whose kind-hearted outlook, interest in history, and sense of humor greatly appealed to Truman. Hassett would bring him funny items clipped from magazines, joke with him about the endless obligatory letters that had to be cranked out to every conceivable kind of organization, the absurd proclamations that were called for. And from years of experience as a Vermont newspaperman and working for Roosevelt, Hassett had his own kind of wisdom to contribute. But Hassett was seventy-one years old and an alcoholic, as Truman knew.

With charges of scandal—mounting evidence of favoritism, outright corruption—filling the headlines again, the whole atmosphere in the West Wing grew increasingly strained. Joe Short, Roger Tubby, George Elsey, and Bill Hassett were seething with indignation over the damage done by the “chiselers” within. They saw the President being used by so-called loyal associates for their own pernicious ends, and his continuing tolerance of them could only mean shame and trouble ahead, not just for Truman but for the Democratic Party.

“My house is always clean,” Truman had said at a press conference in March. Somehow, he seemed incapable of imagining any of his people doing anything illegal or dishonorable. The accusations and innuendo coming from the Hill, the reports in the papers were all exaggerated, Truman insisted.

“He tended to live a day at a time and do the best he could each day as it came along,” George Elsey remembered. “Maybe it was the farmer in him. You go out and do the day’s work.”

In February 1951 a Senate subcommittee chaired by Arkansas Democrat j, William Fulbright had issued a preliminary report called Study of Reconstruction Finance Corporation: Favoritism and Influence that implied misconduct in the operations of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which dispensed low-interest government loans to business. Among those implicated were Democratic Party Chairman William Boyle, White House aide Donald Dawson, who was Truman’s administrative assistant in charge of personnel, and a former RFC examiner and friend of Dawson’s named E. Merl Young, whose wife, Loretta, also worked at the White House, as an assistant to Rose Conway, Truman’s secretary.

The implication was of an influence ring, the power of which stemmed directly from the White House itself. Newspaper accounts indicated that Boyle and Dawson both had been unduly active in support of loan applicants. Dawson, reportedly, had exercised “considerable influence” over certain RFC directors, even “tried to dominate” the agency. But the one mentioned most frequently and who attracted the most attention was E. Merl Young. Though he was no relation to Truman, Young, for years, had allowed people to think he was, supposedly through Truman’s grandparents, Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, and the odd part was that Young looked enough like Truman to be taken for his son. As a high-paid, fast-talking Washington “expeditor,” Young traded on his former association with the RFC, his friendship with Dawson; and as now disclosed he had lately given his wife, the White House stenographer, a $9,540 pastel mink coat paid for by the attorney for a firm that received an RFC loan. Overnight the mink coat, like Harry Vaughan’s deep freezers, became a symbol of corruption in the Truman White House. The fact that Boyle, Dawson, and E. Merl Young were also all from Missouri—like Vaughan, like Wallace Graham, who had had his troubles earlier over speculation on grain futures—served not only to renew old charges of “government by crony,” but to recall Truman’s past connections to the Pendergast machine.

After careful study of the “peculiar Washington species known as the influence peddlers,” wrote Time, the Senate investigating subcommittee had discovered some distinctive markings and characteristics:

The finest specimens claim Missouri as their habitat, have at least a nodding acquaintance with Harry Truman, a much chummier relationship with his aides and advisers, and can buzz in and out of the White House at will. They also have a great fondness for crisp currency.

Truman denounced the report, called it “asinine,” because while its insinuations were in effect serious charges, it also piously stressed that no charges were being made. “Well, now,” he told reporters, recalling his own experience as head of a Senate investigating committee, “when I made a report to the Congress, I made specific charges if I thought they were necessary.” But like his dismissal of the Hiss case as a “red herring,” the word “asinine” struck sparks, infuriating Senator Fulbright, who announced he would begin public hearings. Nor did Truman improve matters by portraying Fulbright as “an overeducated S.O.B.”

Truman had somebody from the White House staff make a fast check of RFC correspondence and was told, as he had anticipated, that the RFC files contained hundreds of “pressure letters” from members of Congress, including a number from Fulbright himself and Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, another Democrat on the investigating committee. (Douglas, quickly checking his own files, found three such letters, which he immediately read into the record, conceding that probably he had “gone too far.”) His temper up, Truman put through a call to the Capitol and had Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, the leading Republican on the committee, summoned away from an executive session. Tobey, a veteran on the Hill, was a man Truman had long liked and admired, but now Truman angrily warned him to watch his step. Paul Douglas would later write that Tobey returned from the call looking pale and solemn. Truman had told him the “real crooks and influence peddlers” were members of the committee, as they might soon find out.

But when Democrats Fulbright and Douglas went to the White House to meet with Truman, to urge him to “clean house” and allow Dawson to testify before the committee, they found him disarmingly subdued.

“You have been loyal to friends who have not been loyal to you,” said Douglas, who would remember the silence that followed as Truman turned in his chair and looked sadly out the window at the slanting rain.

“I guess you are right,” he said softly.

In May, Truman put Stuart Symington in as head of the RFC and Symington moved expeditiously to straighten things out.

There was an increasing sense nationwide that the moral fabric was breaking down all about. For a year now, Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had been staging televised hearings in one city after another, looking into activities of organized crime, and the testimony of such big-time underworld figures as Joe Adonis and Frank Costello had caused a sensation.

“You bastards. I hope a goddamn atom bomb falls on every goddamn one of you,” said the girlfriend of gangster Bugsy Siegel, Virginia Hill Hauser, who wore a $5,000 silver-blue mink stole the day of her appearance before the Kefauver Committee.

The New York advertising firm of Young & Rubicam took a full page in the newspapers to register concern:

With staggering impact, the telecasts of the Kefauver investigation have brought a shocked awakening to millions of Americans.

Across their television tubes have paraded the honest and dishonest, the frank and the furtive, the public servant and the public thief. Out of many pictures has come a broader picture of the sordid intermingling of crime and politics, of dishonor in public life.

And suddenly millions of Americans are asking:

What’s happened to our ideals of right and wrong?…

What’s happened to our principles of honesty in government?

What’s happened to public and private standards of morality?

That summer of 1951 came the shocking news that ninety West Point cadets, including a large part of the Army football team, were expelled for cheating on examinations. Truman was sickened by the West Point scandal. It made him feel discouraged, he said, in a way nothing else had in a long time. When other colleges began making offers to the dismissed football players, he felt even worse.

As time passed and Dawson, Young, and Boyle testified on the Hill, along with scores of others, it often became difficult to distinguish truth from hearsay, or to tell how much that had gone on was illegal or only an impropriety, or old-fashioned, petty political wangling and stockjobbing. Corporations of questionable stability had been propped up or rescued by multi-million-dollar RFC loans, and too often, it appeared, because of political influence. A director of the RFC named Walter L. Dunham testified that Donald Dawson had told him to clear all top personnel matters of the RFC with the White House, and Dunham’s telephone log showed 45 calls from or about Dawson, 151 calls from Bill Boyle or his office, mostly all to urge Dunham to see some “very dear friend” or other on an RFC matter. Yet Dunham also stressed that Dawson had never tried to influence him on an RFC loan.

Dawson, in his turn, insisted he had done no wrong. Acknowledging that he had stayed without charge at a Miami hotel on three different occasions, Dawson said he understood this was a common practice, that even some senators were on the hotel’s free list, a point no one on the committee chose to press. A handsome man with a smooth, ingratiating manner, Dawson gave the appearance of someone who definitely knew his way around, yet claimed he never realized that the Miami hotel had a $1.5 million RFC loan. “I did nothing improper, but I would not do it again,” said Dawson. In conclusion, Senator Fulbright assured Dawson that the object of the hearings was not to embarrass him. “You were sort of a necessary background,” Fulbright said. As Senator Douglas later conceded, Dawson made a “good showing,” only “minor peccadilloes” were proved against him.

While the RFC hearings continued, a House committee began investigations of irregularities in the tax administration, looking into charges of bribes, shakedowns, and gross negligence.

To his staff, Truman said it was all politics and all aimed at him. He could not see that either Dawson or Boyle had done anything seriously out of line and refused even to reprimand them. He liked people, he told Bill Hassett privately, and was loath ever to think of anyone as evil or unredeemable.

“Mr. President,” Joe Short warned, “I don’t think this business is going to blow over.”

Meanwhile, Merl Young, who, because of his wife, had a White House pass, would breeze in cheerfully after work to pick her up. Seeing Young one evening, Roger Tubby had a momentary urge to slam into him. “He was dressed in flashy sport clothes and talked almost gaily to Officer Ken Burke at the door,” Tubby wrote later, still angry.

It was the appearance of wrongdoing, the presence of someone like Merl Young at the White House, that Truman seemed unwilling to respond to with appropriate action, and the appearance of wrongdoing, whether representative or not, only grew worse.

In July the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke a story charging that Bill Boyle had received $8,000 for arranging a half-million-dollar RFC loan for a St. Louis printing firm, the American Lithofold Corporation, and that part of the fee had been paid after Boyle became chairman of the Democratic Party.

“Ah, me,” wrote Roger Tubby, after returning to the White House from a vacation. “I wonder if this is all as bad as it appears—yes—then, is it as bad or worse than the stuff which goes on in every presidency?” Tubby was forty, a bright, idealistic Yale graduate and former Vermont newspaper reporter who had been a press aide at the State Department before coming to the White House and who in the time since had become devoted to Truman. Like his predecessor as assistant press secretary, Eben Ayers, Tubby was keeping a diary. He was also a great worrier, with premonitions of Truman ending up, as some critics were saying, like Warren G. Harding. “Poker, poker, I wonder why he played so much,” Tubby had commented on Truman in his diary at Key West in April, “a feeling of vacuum otherwise, no struggle, excitement?…companionship, banter, escape from the pressing problems of state?” Now Tubby wrote:

T[ruman] has to take strong action to save himself…. There are rumors of new exposés in Internal Revenue—let the W[hite] H[ouse] take the lead in checking and cleaning up, instead of appearing to be forced to action as in RFC business. Check, then fire Boyle. Lay about with a good broom. It probably won’t be done—probably too late anyhow…to do good politically…never too late otherwise.

In Vermont for two weeks—yes, guess that’s right, Truman and Acheson made good decisions. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MINK COAT? WHAT ABOUT THAT LETTER TO THE MUSIC CRITIC?

So he has an Achilles heel, maybe two of ’em. But he fights doggedly on for the right things. But why, why, why doesn’t he make it easier for himself, for all of us, really, in the world?

Another day, Tubby would write of the President, “He does not like to dwell upon the weakness and foibles of his party, or even of the GOP—he is a builder, looking far into the future….”

Once when he had served as budget director, prior to becoming Secretary of the Army, Frank Pace had asked the President why he continued to tolerate the influence of machine politicians on his administration, and Truman, with a chuckle, had replied, “Frank, you make a splendid director of the budget, but a lousy politician.”

For Truman, the attack on Boyle was cutting close to the bone. He had known Boyle since Boyle was a child in Kansas City, growing up in a prosperous Irish Catholic family where politics was a life force. Boyle’s mother, Clara, had been a Pendergast precinct worker, an energetic, God-fearing woman still honored and respected in Kansas City, and someone Truman greatly admired, calling her “one of the best Democrats Missouri ever produced.” By age sixteen Boyle had organized a Young Democrats Club in the city’s affluent Fourth Ward, and until now he had never been accused of misconduct or dishonesty. Truman liked him. He had put Boyle in one job after another over the years, and from the time Truman first brought him to Washington, as an assistant counsel for the Truman Committee, Boyle had remained a staunch, resourceful enthusiast, working hard for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket in 1944 and harder still for the Truman campaign in 1948, while between times prospering as a Washington lawyer. Boyle was commonly credited as one of the “masterminds” of Truman’s upset victory in 1948. Once Truman installed him as chairman of the Democratic National Committee he became truly, as the papers said, a political power-house.

No one seeing Bill Boyle in the lobby of the Mayflower or the Statler would have had trouble guessing his occupation. A well-dressed, six-foot, fleshy “good fellow” with a round Irish face, he was the picture of a professional politician. He had a “nice way” about him, an “index card memory” for names, and though not known for efficiency or a particularly sharp mind, he knew politics from experience in a way that others, like most of Truman’s staff, never would. He talked the language, he had “the feel.”

Boyle’s chief trouble was with alcohol, and this had infuriated Truman more than once in times past. On the night of the 1944 presidential election, Boyle had been one of those in the suite at the Muehlebach who got so drunk that Bess and Margaret left in disgust. “Your views on Mr. Boyle and the other middle-aged soaks are exactly correct,” Truman had written to Margaret afterward, apologetically.

I like people who can control their appetites and their mental balance. When that isn’t done I hope you will scratch them off your list. It is a shame about Boyle. I picked him up off the street in Kansas City, because I thought he’d been mistreated by the people out there for whom he’d worked. He had the chance of a lifetime to become a real leader in politics and to have made a great name for himself. John Barleycorn got the best of him and so far as I’m concerned I can’t trust him again….

But Truman had not scratched him from his own list, he did trust Boyle again, and remained genuinely fond of him. “Bill’s all right! Don’t let anybody tell you differently!” he had told those gathered for a huge black-tie dinner in Boyle’s honor at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium in September 1949. Truman and Barkley both had flown from Washington for the occasion. “All these are friends to tie to,” Truman had continued, sparkling with warmth for Boyle, McGrath, and Bob Hannegan, his three party chairmen since becoming President. “They are there when you need them, and that’s the kind of friends I like to have around me.” It was the old professional creed—politics as a matter of friends—and his Kansas City audience gave a roar of approval.

But conspicuously present among the more than two thousand at the dinner had been several well-known North Side gamblers, including the ruling Kansas City racketeer of the day, Charles Binnagio, who only months later was shot to death in a gangland killing reminiscent of the city in its worst days. The press had taken careful note of such “friends” present to honor Boyle, just as the press highlighted the fact that Binnagio had been gunned down in a Democratic clubhouse located on Truman Road and that his bullet-riddled body fell beneath a poster-sized portrait of President Harry S. Truman.

To many on the White House staff Boyle now looked like a very large liability.

“So Boyle is not only stupid and inefficient, but also, it seems, a crook,” wrote Roger Tubby, so angry he could hardly contain himself.

He should of course resign, or offer his resignation. But these chiselers who use, and who do terrible damage to, the President don’t resign. He should be fired as soon as the President is satisfied there has been wrong doing…. The important thing is that the President be saved from his friends.

Bill Hassett urged Truman to rid himself of Boyle without delay. “Your friends will destroy you,” Hassett pleaded.

“It’s all right, Bill,” Truman said, as if trying to calm a child. “It’s all right.”

Truman quietly ordered a confidential investigation by Charlie Murphy, his precise, scrupulously honest counselor whose importance was far greater than generally understood. Murphy’s report was ready by midsummer, and at a subsequent press conference, Truman said he would stand by Boyle. No one connected with the Democratic National Committee ought ever to take fees for favors or services, Truman said, and it was his impression that Boyle had not. “I have the utmost confidence in Mr. Boyle. And I believe the statements that he made to me.”

In his memorandum, Murphy reported that a thorough search of the RFC records had revealed “no effort of any kind whatever” by Boyle to influence the loan made to the American Lithofold Corporation.

Monthly reports filed by the Company with the St. Louis office of the RFC during 1949 and 1950, while the loan was outstanding, indicate that the Company paid Boyle $1500 in the Spring of 1949…. This appears to be entirely consistent with the statement which Boyle has made that he was retained by the Company for general legal services for two and one half months in the Spring of 1948, that he gave up the account voluntarily in April 1949, when he became a full-time, salaried employee of the Democratic National Committee….

The RFC examiner for the Lithofold loan had never met Boyle, never communicated with him directly or indirectly on that particular subject or any other. Murphy had concluded there was nothing “fishy” about the RFC loan. “I believe that the facts I have developed substantiate the statement Mr. Boyle himself has already issued concerning this matter, and that they indicate pretty clearly that he had nothing to do with the granting of the loans in question and that there is no reason why he should be subjected to criticism, express or implied, on that account.”

Murphy’s report could only have pleased Truman greatly, while also reinforcing his own natural inclination to see attacks on any of his people as fundamentally political and directed at him. It might sound egotistical, Truman remarked, but he thought he was as good a judge of people as anyone who had ever sat in his chair. He had made some mistakes, and he had had to fire some people consequently. But, he added, “You can’t punish a man for not seeming to be right if he isn’t wrong.”

In October, a new revelation relieved considerably the sting of the Boyle accusations. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Guy George Gabrielson, testified that he had been paid $25,000 for “looking after” the loans of a Texas corporation, Carthage Hydrocel, Inc., and had intervened many times with the RFC on behalf of the firm. Gabrielson found it amusing that anyone might think his activities improper. “It is inconceivable to me,” he told the committee, “to believe that a chairman of a party that is not in power could have any possible influence.” But as reported, embarrassed Republicans in Congress did not think it would sound so inconceivable to the voters.

When, in time, the Senate committee issued its final report, Boyle would be cleared of any wrongdoing. In the oddly inverted wording of the report, he was guilty only of conduct that was “not such that it would dispel the appearance of wrong-doing.” But by then, “for reasons of health,” Boyle had also resigned as Democratic national chairman and scandals in the tax bureau loomed larger than any thus far.

For more than a year, Treasury Secretary John Snyder had been trying to get to the bottom of persistent rumors of corruption in various tax collectors’ offices around the country. But Snyder had made little progress. Then in April 1951, the collector in St. Louis, James P. Finnegan, resigned only after being cleared by a grand jury. In July, Truman had to fire two more collectors, Denis W. Delaney in Boston and James G. Smyth in San Francisco. Eight of Smyth’s associates were also suspended, and a few months later, the collector in Brooklyn, Joseph P. Marcelle, was fired.

All four men—Finnegan, Delaney, Smyth, and Marcelle—had been appointed by Bob Hannegan, when Hannegan was head of the Bureau of Internal Revenue under Roosevelt, and all had taken their jobs with the understanding that tax collection need only be a part-time responsibility, that they were free to do other things as well. Like Hannegan, all four men were also the products of big-city Democratic machines, and in fact corrupt practices—or at the least flagrant “irregularities”—had been rampant during their terms of office. Finnegan was indicted for bribe taking and misconduct, Delaney, the Boston collector, for taking bribes to “fix” tax delinquencies. In San Francisco, Smyth, too, was indicted—for fixing tax fraud claims—and in Brooklyn, Marcelle was found to have cheated on his own tax returns and amassed, through his law practice, nearly a quarter of a million dollars beyond his $10,750-a-year salary as tax collector.

Meantime, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, George J. Schoeneman, had suddenly resigned “for reasons of health,” and the resignations of the assistant commissioner, Daniel A. Bolich, and the bureau’s chief counsel, Charles Oliphant, followed almost immediately.

In November, Truman had to fire the head of the tax division at the Justice Department, Assistant Attorney General T. Lamar Caudle. A House investigating committee would conclude that Caudle, though undoubtedly an honorable man, had been naive in his dealings with tax fixers.

By December, George Elsey would report in a White House memorandum that signs of corruption were spreading so fast the staff was unable to document them all.

In Truman’s defense, it was stressed that the tax collectors under fire were holdovers from the Roosevelt administration. Also, Truman had moved swiftly and forcefully to clean house in the tax bureau, a point no one could contest. By December, 113 employees of the Internal Revenue Bureau, including six regional collectors, had been fired from their jobs. When Boyle was replaced by a new Democratic national chairman, Frank E. McKinney, Truman also determined that collectors of the Internal Revenue would no longer be patronage jobs but put under civil service.

Nonetheless, corruption in the tax bureau was truly appalling, the housecleaning long overdue, and if Bob Hannegan had made his key appointments under Roosevelt, Hannegan had also been known as a thorough Truman man, another Missouri crony. Hannegan had himself been a first-rate head of the tax bureau, but Hannegan was no longer available to speak in his own defense—he had died of heart failure in October 1949. And whatever the comparative guilt or stupidity of an unfortunate figure like T. Lamar Caudle, it would be remembered that his wife, too, was the recipient of a mink coat, a Christmas present from an attorney who had dealings with the tax division.

Would he be taking drastic action to clean up the government, Truman was asked at a press conference in December. “Let’s say continue drastic action,” he replied.

“Wrongdoers have no house with me,” he said, an expression that left reporters looking puzzled and that Truman later told his staff he had used since boyhood. (Time would report that it was a colloquialism as old at least as Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet’s father, angry with her for refusing to marry Paris, tells her: “Graze where you will, you shall not house with me.”)

Did he ever feel as though he had been “sold down the river” by his friends?

“Well, who wouldn’t feel that way,” he snapped angrily. But beyond that he would say no more.

“Boss, you’re going to have to run in ’52,” Harry Vaughan told him one day, as Truman sat at his desk. “Who else is there?”

“We’ll get someone,” Truman answered, a twinkle in his eye.

“You know there isn’t anybody else. You’ll have to run.”

“We’ll see,” said Truman, and Vaughan came out of the office convinced the President would run again.

Vaughan, as he told the others, had no misconceptions about what was ahead for him personally, should Truman not run.

“Once I’m outa the White House,” Vaughan said one noon hour in the staff lunchroom downstairs, “I know perfectly well that these jokers who bow and scrape and call me General would pass me by on the street and if they saw me say, ‘Why there goes that fat god-damned son-of-a-bitch!’ ”

It was one of those moments when several of the staff were reminded why, after all, the President had kept Vaughan around for so long.

The only one not pointedly urging Truman to run again was Bill Hassett, who was due to retire soon himself and who told Truman that for his own sake and the sake of his family, he should do the same.

In Korea, though peace talks had resumed, now at Panmunjom, the war went on. The sticking point in the talks was the fate of 132,000 North Korean soldiers held prisoner by the U.N. Command. Originally, it had been agreed that the end of hostilities would bring an immediate exchange of all prisoners. But now the United States opposed that policy, since nearly half of the North Korean prisoners of war, some 62,000, had no wish to be repatriated. Truman insisted that they be given the choice of whether to go home. At the end of World War II Stalin had executed or sent to Siberia thousands of Soviet soldiers whose only crime was to have been captured by the enemy. “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery,” Truman declared, and he would not be budged.

American casualties in Korea were now far less than in the first year of the war. Still every week meant more death and suffering. Korea was consuming lives and resources, poisoning American politics, devastating Truman’s presidency. No one wanted the war ended more than he. According to the polls, half the American people favored using the atomic bomb to get it over with. And though determined to keep to his policy of restraint, even he had his own fantasies about the ultimatum he might hand the Soviets. In another of his solitary ventings of anger and frustration, a lengthy private soliloquy in longhand, he wrote:

Dealing with Communist Governments is like an honest man trying to deal with a numbers racket king or the head of a dope ring…. It seems to me that the proper approach now would be an ultimatum with a ten day expiration limit, informing Moscow that we intend to blockade the China coast from the Korean border to Indo-China, and that we intend to destroy every military base in Manchuria, including submarine bases, by means now in our control, and if there is further interference we shall eliminate any ports or cities necessary to accomplish our peaceful purposes.

That this situation can be avoided by the withdrawal of all Chinese troops from Korea and the stoppage of all supplies of war and materials by Russia to Communist China. We mean business. We did not start this Korean affair but we intend to end it for the benefit of the Korean people, the authority of the United Nations and the peace of the world.

We are tired of these phony calls for peace when there is no intention to make an honest approach to peace….

Stop supplying war materials to the thugs who are attacking the free world and settle down to an honorable policy of keeping agreements which have already been made.

This means all out war. It means that Moscow, St. Petersburg, Mukden, Vladivostock, Pekin[g], Shanghai, Port Arthur, Dairen, Odessa, Stalingrad and every manufacturing plant in China and the Soviet Union will be eliminated.

This is the final chance for the Soviet Government to decide whether it desires to survive or not.

But no one heard him ever say such things. He had no such intentions. The seven sheets of desk notepaper that he had filled were put away in a drawer and on he went with the hard work of his responsibilities. “I know of no easy way to be President,” he would say.

At Washington dinner parties, and increasingly to reporters, prominent Republicans talked almost gleefully of the “damndest” campaign ever in 1952 on the issues of communism, corruption, and Korea. Taft was already running. Others, Republicans and Democrats, spoke more and more of Eisenhower as the ideal candidate. By December, Attorney General McGrath was being questioned by the House committee investigating the Internal Revenue scandals and Truman’s standing in the polls had fallen to an all-time low. Only 23 percent of the country approved of how he was handling his job.

But by then the staff had been told. In mid-November, during a brief vacation at Key West, Truman had gathered them about the poker table on the porch at the Little White House to read aloud the statement he had written on April 12, 1950, and that he planned to release in the coming spring, in April 1952, well in advance of the Democratic National Convention. He was not running again; but for the next five months, he cautioned them, there must be utmost secrecy. He was only telling them now, he explained, so they could start making their own plans. Once having told them, he seemed greatly relieved.

“From that day forward,” Roger Tubby was to write several months later, “I have not discerned any difference in any of our feelings for, or relations with the President—we are, and I think it proper to generalize for the staff, devoted to him as before.”

Later still, it would be seen as a measure of that devotion that none of those who knew Truman’s plans for 1952 ever said a word. The secret was kept for five months, as he had asked.

In the first week of the new year, on January 5, 1952, Winston Churchill, who in recent months, at seventy-seven, had returned to office as prime minister, arrived for a brief visit. Churchill had sailed on the Queen Mary. Truman sent the Independence to New York to bring him to Washington and Truman was there at National Airport to welcome him. Churchill, white-haired, wearing the familiar derby and smoking a long cigar, looked greatly aged, more stooped than ever, his walk slower. But to those watching as he and Truman greeted one another, he was “the old warrior,” “the old lion” still, with an air of dramatic dignity about him. To Truman, Churchill was the greatest public figure of the age, as he often said. To Dean Acheson, this was an understatement. One would have to go back four centuries to find his equal, Acheson insisted. “What Churchill did was great; how he did it was equally so…. Everything felt the touch of his art—his appearance and gestures….”

That evening, following dinner on board the Williamsburg, the table cleared, Churchill began talking of the state of the world, the menace and paradoxes of the Soviet empire. He acknowledged the importance of American nuclear power, and warmly praised Truman’s leadership of the free world, including, as Churchill said, Truman’s “great decision” to commit American forces in Korea. For Acheson, Averell Harriman, and others present, it was an occasion to be long remembered.

Looking at Truman, Churchill said slowly, “The last time you and I sat across the conference table was at Potsdam, Mr. President.” Truman nodded.

“I must confess, sir,” Churchill went on, “I held you in very low regard then. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt.” He paused. “I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

In a dark period for Harry Truman, a winter of tawdry scandal, of interminable war in Korea and greatly diminished public confidence in his leadership, the gallant old ally had again, and as only he could, served as a voice of affirmation.

II

During his initial years in the White House, Truman had often referred to it derisively as “the great white jail,” “the great white sepulcher of ambitions,” or “the taxpayers’ house.” He had found living there difficult, often very lonely. But he was also the President who, with the war over, reestablished state dinners and receptions in the grand, formal rooms of the mansion, insisting on respect for tradition in most every detail. He and the First Lady had returned “pageantry” to the White House, as J. B. West said, and plainly this had given him great pleasure.

As much perhaps as anyone who had ever lived there, Truman felt the aura of the old structure’s past, the lingering presence of the strong personalities who had been its occupants down the years, even to the point, some nights, of hearing their ghosts stalking the center hall upstairs or knocking at his door. As Ethel Noland and others had observed, history for Truman was never just something in a book, but part of life, and of interest primarily because it had to do with people. Often when he spoke of Andrew Jackson or John Quincy Adams or Abraham Lincoln, it was as if he were talking about someone he knew. One cold Saturday morning near the end of 1950, he had led John Hersey on a tour of the White House renovation, at a time when the inside of the building looked like any big construction project, with steel beams, raw concrete floors, and metal ductwork contained within the shell of the old exterior walls. There were no partitions. Nothing remained of the original interior. It looked, thought Hersey, as if someone had decided to set up a modern office inside a deserted castle. Yet Truman stepped briskly along describing the historic features of one room after another, as though they were all still there, everything in place. The tour became a kind of fantasy, “a game of imagining,” as Hersey wrote. Truman pointed out the Red Room, the Blue Room, the Green Room, then, at the far end, the East Room.

“You know, the White House was started in 1792,” he said, “and the first ones to move in were John Adams and his wife, in 1800, and when they moved in, only six rooms in the whole building were ready to be lived in. This East Room was just a stone shell, so Abigail Adams used to string up her wash to dry in here. Imagine it! Later on, when the room was dolled up, Jackson bought twenty spittoons to go in here. They cost twelve-fifty apiece.”

When Hersey asked if the intention was to restore the interior more or less as it had been before the building was dismantled, Truman answered emphatically, “Oh, yes indeed!”

History aside, Truman also understood the building’s immense power as symbol. Since his first weeks in office, he had made steady use of such lesser symbols as the presidential yacht, the presidential plane, railroad car, and limousines. It was not just that he enjoyed them, but that he knew the degree to which they represented the dignity and importance of the office. Now, in an ironic bit of timing, as his tormentors in the press and opposition party made much over the “mess in Washington” by use of such other symbols as deep freezers and mink coats, Truman found some relief from his daily burdens, welcome diversion from war and scandals and politics, in the work of saving and returning to service the ultimate symbol of his high place in American life. The creator of acclaimed Missouri roads and courthouses—and of what had become the nation’s best-known balcony—could be a builder again, restorer and guardian of one of democracy’s shrines, the oldest building of the federal city. And little else that he was able to accomplish in these last years of his presidency would give him such satisfaction.

From its beginning stages he had cared intensely about the project. “It is the President’s desire,” the official White House architect, Lorenzo Winslow, had written in the spring of 1949, “that this restoration be made so thoroughly complete that the structural condition and all principal and fixed architectural finishes will be permanent for many generations to come.”

The first dismantling had begun December 13, 1949, after six months of planning. Truman had hoped to have full responsibility for the project—it was, after all, the President’s house—but was turned down by Congress. A Congressional Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion was established, its six members appointed by the President, including two from the Senate, two from the House, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the president of the American Institute of Architects. The senior member of the commission, old Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, the president pro tempore of the Senate, who was by then eighty, became chairman, while Glen E. Edgerton, a retired major general from the office of the Army Chief of Staff, was made executive director of the work. But it was the White House architect, Winslow, who worked most directly with Truman, and it was to be Truman, in the last analysis, who made nearly all the major decisions and a good many others as well.

The last major overhaul of the old mansion had been in Theodore Roosevelt’s day, in 1902. Under the direction of Charles McKim of the renowned New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, & White, the main floor especially had been transformed from something resembling a dowdy Victorian hotel to a kind of Beaux-Arts elegance, with the added touch of magnificent new electrical light fixtures and chandeliers. But the work was fundamentally cosmetic and accomplished in a huge rush. Structural needs had been bypassed, making the house in all less stable than it had been before. It had been truly a “botch job,” as Truman said, and a principal cause of the conditions Truman faced forty-seven years later.

Although the exterior sandstone walls, the roof, and a fire-resistant third floor that had been added in the 1920s, during the Coolidge era, were in stable condition, the rest of the house was on the verge of collapse and a fearful fire hazard. Great loads had been put on the interior bearing walls. Beams had been notched or cut for plumbing or electrical wiring. The entire second floor, most of which had been rebuilt after British soldiers burned the house in 1814, was unsafe. “The character and extent of structural weakness were found to be truly appalling,” said the Commissioner of Public Buildings in his report. (Winslow had claimed he could prove mathematically that it was impossible for the house to remain standing.) The plumbing was all largely makeshift and long outdated, the heating system and electrical wiring all inadequate and obsolete.

The main question to be decided in 1949 was whether to remove the existing interior of the house below the third floor, keeping the outside walls, and then rebuild everything within; or to take down the whole building, preserving and numbering the exterior stones in the process, so they could be reassembled when the new building went up. In the words of a later report, “The decision between these plans presented a matter of not inconsiderable complexity, especially since there were involved not only the construction factors, but the compelling sentimental aspects of the matter.” To have proceeded by dismantling the outside walls would have made the project less difficult and less costly, saving as much as. $300,000 or $400,000. But only one member of the commission, Democratic Congressman Louis C. Rabaut of Michigan, had argued for that approach. To the rest, tearing down the White House was unacceptable. It would have seemed an act of desecration. Truman never considered the idea.

Had he and the commission decided otherwise, the walls of the White House would have begun coming down in early 1950, as McCarthy was beginning his assault. The country would have had to have seen the complete demolition of the building, down to the ground, at about the time the news from Korea had turned so dreadful the following summer, with American troops fighting desperately to hang on at the Pusan Perimeter.

As it was, the exterior remained intact, while within, everything below the third floor was removed, piece by careful piece to begin with—after which came the full-scale demolition until the entire inside was hollowed out and the house had become a cavernous empty shell, the old outside walls held in place by steel framing. Trucks and bulldozers moved in to begin excavation for two entirely new basement levels. It was an extraordinary sight. “They took the insides all out,” Truman wrote in his diary. “Dug two basements, put in steel and concrete like you’ve never seen in the Empire State Building, Pentagon or anywhere else.” He loved making inspection tours, often using the workers’ catwalks, high above ground.

The work was projected to cost $5,412,000 and be completed by December 1951. John McShain, Inc., of Philadelphia was, as low bidder, made general contractor. The firm had built the Pentagon, the Jefferson Memorial, and had a high reputation in Washington, but when Truman, walking over from Blair House one morning, saw a big McShain sign on the North Lawn of the White House, he told head usher Howell Grim to have “that thing” removed at once.

The project was far bigger and more complicated than commonly appreciated. Most of Washington and the country never realized all that was involved or the extent to which it was to become the house that Harry Truman built.

For 149 years the outside walls of the house had been standing on clay. Now, for proper underpinning, 4-foot-square pits were dug to a depth of about 25 feet, down to a firm stratum of gravel—some 126 pits in all, these filled with reinforced concrete, thereby forming the foundation for the structural steel frame of the house that went up within the original walls. The old brick of the interior bearing walls—the backing for the stone—was also found to be too soft and had to be removed, thus for the first time revealing the inside surfaces of the original stones, many of which, to Truman’s delight, bore the mark of Masonic symbols. (He was also pleased to learn that on the Saturday in October 1792 when the Free Masons of Georgetown had laid the first stone, in the presence of President George Washington and the architect of the house, James Hoban, they had afterward paraded back to Georgetown, to “Mr. Sutter’s Fountain Inn,” where toasts were raised to the fifteen United States, the President, and “masonic brethren throughout the universe.”)

Original ornamental plaster cornices designed by James Hoban were found in the East Room hidden behind plaster put on in 1902. A well dug by Thomas Jefferson was discovered beneath the east wall. In his temporary office out on the South Lawn, General Edgerton kept an assortment of curiosities uncovered: a brick with a dog’s footprint in it, a pike blade found buried under the North Portico, an ancient pair of workman’s shoes.

All the principal rooms of the main floor—those used for state occasions—were to be rebuilt as “faithful reproductions” of the original rooms. The second and ground floors, too, would be restored with only minor changes.

The best of the original furnishings, beyond what was already at Blair House, had been put in storage at the National Gallery. Old mahogany doors and window sashes, mantelpieces, hardware, and floorboards deemed worth saving for reuse in the building, all paneling from the East Room and State Dining Room, were numbered, tagged, and carried away to federal warehouses across town. Twenty surplus mantels were given to museums, while some 95,000 old bricks were trucked off to Mount Vernon for the restoration of garden walls and to reconstruct George Washington’s orangery.

The public, too, was offered the choice of a dozen different White House relic “kits,” these ranging from a single foot-long piece of original, hand-split lath, for 25 cents, to a single brick (“as nearly whole as possible”) for a $1, to enough old pine to make a walking stick or gavel, for $2. The charge was intended only to cover the cost of distribution. A small metal “authentication plate” was also provided with each item. For $100, one could get enough bricks to surface a fireplace.

Truman had warmly endorsed the idea of offering such souvenirs, and receipts wound up exceeding expenses by $10,000. Originally he had said he wanted to send gavels made of White House wood to all forty-eight state governors. When the stones showing the original stonemasons’ marks were uncovered, he ordered a large number of them removed, some to be reset in the walls of the restored ground-floor kitchen, the rest to be sent to the grand lodges of the Masonic orders of every state, as a token of the bond between Freemasonry and the founding of the nation.

But as the pace of demolition stepped up, an immense quantity of material that might have been saved was not. Tons of old pine flooring, scrap lumber, ancient plumbing fixtures, pine doors, brick, and stone were hauled away to Forts Belvoir and Myer in nearby Virginia, some of it to be used in construction, but the large part as landfill. Chair rails, door frames, beautiful plaster moldings (once they had been measured and cast for reproduction) were scrapped, as part of the wreckage. For nearly a month, trucks loaded with White House “debris” went rolling back and forth across the Potomac to Virginia.

By the standards of latter-day preservation work, this was a needless and tragic loss. The justification would be cost and the President’s own desire to see the job finished in reasonable time.

Before the renovation, there had been sixty-two rooms in the mansion, twenty-six halls and corridors, fourteen bathrooms. With the project complete, there were to be more than one hundred rooms, forty corridors and halls, and nineteen bathrooms. There would be 147 windows, 412 doors, 29 fireplaces, 12 chimneys, 3 elevators. There would also be a television broadcast room and a bomb shelter, two definite and costly signs of the times.

Most of the additional rooms and baths were on the third floor (thirty-one rooms and nine baths) and in the new basement levels, which, when finished, would resemble the off-stage service and utility complex of an up-to-date 1950s hotel. There were storage rooms, a laundry, a dental clinic, medical clinic, staff kitchen, barbershop, pantries, everything very institutional-looking. Few buildings anywhere in the country had such advanced mechanical and electrical equipment as went into the new White House that was emerging. The main electrical control board looked big enough for a theater. Plumbing, heating, air conditioning, kitchen appliances, elevators, incinerator, fire alarm systems, wall safes—all were the most advanced of the day, and cost well over $1,250,000. To accommodate the refrigeration compressors for the air conditioning, a tremendous additional excavation had to be made outside, next to the North Portico.

To make the lowest basement bombproof, an additional $868,000 was spent, and with no questions asked. The Secret Service and Truman’s military advisers had convinced him of the necessity. The decision was made in the grim first months of the Korean War, when it seemed a third world war could come any time. “The President has authorized certain protective measures at basement level in and adjacent to the wings of the White House,” the commission was informed on August 16, 1950. “Plans for this work are now being developed by the Architect of the White House….”

The change meant many tons of additional steel and concrete in corridor walls and the floor above, work that was rushed ahead full speed. The bomb shelter was completed in less than a year, long before the upstairs levels were even close to finished.

The entrance, at the end of a subterranean passage at the northeast end of the house, was a four-inch steel door with a narrow window at eye level, like the entrance to a speakeasy. In the event that the President and those with him reached the shelter after an atomic attack had already occurred, they were to shed their clothes once inside a small entrance hall, then, naked, proceed into another somewhat larger hall, where they would shower—to remove any radioactive material—and put on emergency clothing, which by the summer of 1951, like everything else in the shelter, was all ready and waiting.

Beyond was a large room with some seventy army cots neatly stacked against one wall, gas masks, chemical toilets, and acetylene torches (in case the occupants had to cut their way out of the steel door). In adjacent rooms were an emergency generator, a larder of Army rations, and a communications center, with radios, cryptographic machines, and telephone switchboard with direct lines to the Pentagon, state police headquarters, and a secret military relocation center near Leesburg, known as Mt. Weather. Accommodations for the President and his family consisted of an 8 by 10-foot room, four bunk beds, a toilet, and a supply of books.

Those inside, Truman was informed during a first visit to the shelter, would probably survive an atomic attack. The facility, however, would not sustain a direct hit. As the Secret Service and most of his staff already knew, Truman intended, in the event of an attack, to remain at the White House or in the shelter, both during and afterward, largely for “morale reasons.”

(Once when a radar operator incorrectly reported the approach of twenty-five unscheduled, unidentified planes—which turned out to be one plane—and several of the White House staff went below to the shelter, Truman did not.)

In the early months of the White House project, the work had proceeded ahead of schedule; but with the onset of the Korean War, and increasing shortages of building materials, progress slowed, costs began to rise. About 250 men were on the job. The work went on six days a Week. Truman came and went repeatedly, so often as time passed that the men scarcely bothered to glance up or take notice.

“He considered it his project. He was saving the White House,” remembered Rex Scouten, one of the Secret Service agents who regularly accompanied the President on such rounds and who, years later, would become head usher, then curator of the White House. “He was also showing his desire to get it done with.”

Truman wanted everything handled correctly, on the job and on paper. When he learned of a movement within the commission to dispense with making complete plans of the installations in the new building—as a way of cutting costs—he responded at once with a terse memorandum to the head of the General Services Administration:

It is absolutely essential that the conduits, both wire and water, and all the complicated arrangements underneath the floors and the air conditioning service, be put on paper so that future mechanics of the White House can find things when it is necessary to make repairs. One of the difficulties with the old White House was that nobody knew where anything went and why it was there.

Now there just isn’t any sense in not having in the Archives, in the General Service Headquarters and in the White House complete plans of all installations. I want this done and if it requires an extra appropriation to get it done we will get that done too.

His own principal contribution to the design of the building concerned the grand stairway, which he insisted be relocated to the east side of the main entrance hall and made more open, more fitting for the ceremonial processions of the President and his guests of honor. Before, the stairway had been largely out of sight.

Often over the years, Truman had told friends and members of his staff that had he been forced as a young man to choose a profession other than politics, he would have been either a farmer, an historian, or an architect. Now, working with Winslow, he could pore over plans and drawings to his heart’s content, as he had once with Edward Neild, when building the Kansas City Courthouse; and at first, he and Winslow got along extremely well. A tall, personable, highly gifted man, Winslow had been an important figure at the White House since the 1930s. He cared intensely about the building, knew and loved its history. Privately, he even communed with the spirits of a few departed presidents. (“Franklin Roosevelt appeared and presented a rose to me as did Andrew [Jackson],” Winslow had recorded in his diary after an evening over a Ouija board in the summer of 1950.) A married man, he was also romantically involved with several women, and while Truman seems to have been aware of this, he appears only to have grown annoyed by it when the project started to fall behind schedule. Losing his patience, Truman could often become quite abrupt with Winslow.

Most of the time, however, they worked smoothly together, each admiring the other’s strengths and pleased to find how often they agreed. Winslow would write long memoranda reporting on progress, or listing current problems, and Truman would give his answers in the margins or between paragraphs in longhand. When, for example, Winslow reported that the commission intended to dismantle the temporary sheds on the South Lawn and set up various storage rooms and facilities for the workers in the new basement areas, Truman scrawled, “No! HST.”

It is probable [Winslow continued] that ground floor areas will be…used for contractor’s offices [and] without a doubt there will be considerable damage done to the various interior finishes that cannot be repaired satisfactorily at the last minute.

Don’t use them. HST

The basement areas should be kept as clean as possible after being finished. For any of these areas to be put into use as storage and dressing rooms for laborers and mechanics is inconceivable in a residence of this kind.

Just do not do it. HST

I am inclined to believe that the sheds on the south lawn should remain until nearly all the work is finished throughout the interior of the building. If this is done all tools, paints and other materials may remain stored outside the building where they properly should be stored.

Right.

As each room is completely finished it should be locked and kept locked until the furnishings are moved in for occupancy. After that time no workmen or government personnel should be permitted free access throughout the building without specific permission from the Executive Director of the Commission.

Right as can be. HST

In August 1951 the plasterers went out on strike for two weeks, slowing progress still more. The laying of the fine parquet floors, a slow process at best, seemed to go on endlessly, since few craftsmen could be found who knew how the work should be done and those available were often advanced in years and worked very slowly.

The contract for furnishing and decorating the house went to B. Altman & Company of New York, which did the entire project at cost. When a number of socially prominent New Yorkers who had served on a White House advisory committee in years past began pressing for the chance to contribute their views, Truman wrote that

I want it distinctly understood that this matter will be closely watched by me and that no special privileged people [will be] allowed to decide what will be done….

I am very much interested in the proper replacement of the furniture in the White House in the manner in which it should be placed, and since I am the only President in fifty years who has had any interest whatever in the rehabilitation of the White House, I am going to see that it is done properly and correctly.

This settled, the work went on, directed principally by B. Altman’s young chief of design, Charles T. Haight, who was tireless, forceful, and got along well with both the President and the First Lady, even as Truman made his presence felt more and more.

He kept pressing for greater speed. He wanted everything ready by Christmas 1951. He hoped to have at least a year in the house, before his term of office expired. As the new year began, work on the floors was still behind schedule. Installation of marble and paneling was incomplete. Bath fixtures had yet to arrive, and though some twenty painters were at work, only the third floor, the guest and servant quarters, had been finished.

There was no letup in the racket and confusion. In February 1952, the main floor was a thicket of scaffolding, paint buckets, and stacks of lumber, as Truman led a half-dozen reporters on a preview tour. The builders were speeding things up, he said, obviously pleased. He had “taken a curry comb to them.” He intended to move in by April. The reporters confessed difficulty in imagining how the finished interior would look.

On March 15, The New York Times reported that things were “moving at the double quick” at the White House.

Two large moving vans stood under the White House front portico. From them movers carried furniture through the White House double doors. Graders were smoothing off a new front lawn just ahead of landscapers who were rolling down turf that arrived in great truck-loads….

Twelve days later, late in the afternoon on Thursday, March 27, Truman arrived back in Washington after a week’s stay at Key West and, joined by Bess, was driven to the White House, entering by the north gate on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It was spring again and the mansion looked warm and cheerful in the dusk, with lights glowing from every window on the ground floor. As a further note of cheer, a large cherry tree in full blossom had been planted just that day in the front lawn.

Beneath the North Portico several of the White House staff, members of the commission, and others stood waiting, with a cluster of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen. Along the sidewalk, by the iron fence, a crowd applauded and called welcome.

Head usher Howell Crim greeted the President at the door. John Mays, the veteran doorkeeper who had been at the White House since the time of William Howard Taft, took the President’s coat.

Truman, “tanned and appearing in excellent health,” “obviously highly pleased,” as reporters jotted in their notebooks, stepped inside. After an absence of three years, four months, the President of the United States was again in residence at the White House.

Every light was burning, everything shimmered with light—crystal chandeliers and red carpets, window glass, marble columns, gilt-framed mirrors. Wood floors shone like polished glass. Walls and ceilings glistened with new paint. The effect was stunning. It all looked much the same as before, yet brighter, more spacious, and finished to perfection.

With Bess, Truman toured the whole of the first floor. To the white and lemon-gold splendor of the East Room had been added new mantelpieces of Tennessee marble, in honor of the chairman of the commission, Senator McKellar. Except for two magnificent grand pianos standing in opposite corners and two newly acquired Adam benches against the far wall—eighteenth-century benches designed by John Adam of Edinburgh—the room was bare of furniture, its parquet floor shining like glass beneath the same two crystal chandeliers that had hung there before but that had been reduced slightly in scale. The Green Room—once Jefferson’s bedroom, later a dining room, later still a diplomatic reception room—looked no different from before, with the same silk on the walls, the same white Carrara marble mantels ordered by James Hoban in 1816. Above the entrance to the Blue Room, however, was a new presidential seal. Previously the seal had been embedded in the floor of the main hallway, but Truman had insisted it be moved—he didn’t like the idea of people walking on it.

The oval-shaped Blue Room itself had been changed from dark to royal blue, with a large motif in gold on its silk damask walls, while the Red Room had new damask walls, new draperies and valances—all very red—setting off another Hoban mantel of lustrous white Carrara marble. Truman was particularly fond of a small French clock on the mantel in the Red Room and of four portraits on the walls: of William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. The painting of Roosevelt, by John Singer Sargent, was, Truman liked to say, “the most expensive picture” in the house.

Where the State Dining Room had been formerly rather subdued, even somber, with dark oak paneling, it was now painted a soft green, a “lovely color,” Truman thought, and a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George P. A. Healy hung now over the mantel in a heavy gilt frame.

Because Bess had made a previous commitment to appear at a Salvation Army dinner at the Statler that evening, Truman dined alone, in the family dining room, off the State Dining Room, under a recently donated antique cut-glass chandelier and a spotless replacement of the ceiling where Margaret’s piano had once poked a hole.

“Bess and I looked over the East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, and State Dining Room,” he recorded that night. “They are lovely. So is the hall and state stairway…. I spent the evening going over the house. With all the trouble and worry, it is worth it….” The cost had been $5,832,000. It could have been done for less, he thought, and taken less time, if he had been fully in charge. But he was extremely pleased all the same. He had been told by the architect and engineers that it had been built to last another five hundred years. He hoped it would be a thousand years.

On Tuesday, April 22, when the White House was reopened for public tours, 5,444 people went through. On Saturday afternoon, May 3, with the pride of a new householder, Truman led his own television tour of the mansion. The broadcast was carried by all three networks and three network announcers—Walter Cronkite of CBS, Bryson Rash of ABC, and NBC’s Frank Bourgholtzer—took turns accompanying him and asking questions. Thirty million people were watching, the largest audience ever for a house tour. There was no script and Truman was at his best, relaxed, gracious, amusing, and knowledgeable. “His poise, his naturally hearty laugh, and his intuitive dignity made for an unusual and absorbing video experience,” wrote Jack Gould, television critic for The New York Times. In the East Room, to demonstrate the tone of the magnificent Steinway—“the most wonderful tones of any piano I have ever heard,” Truman told Frank Bourgholtzer—he sat down and gave an impromptu performance of part of Mozart’s Ninth Sonata, then crossed the room to the Baldwin, an American-made piano, as he said, and from a standing position, played a few more bars on it as well.

He spoke of Alice Roosevelt’s wedding in the East Room and recalled that Franklin Roosevelt had lain in state there.

The President was an inexhaustible source of information [wrote Jack Gould]. He explained the decor and furnishings and offered a host of anecdotes on former occupants of the White House. Yet through his narratives there always ran an underlying note of deeply sincere and moving awe for the historic continuity of the Presidency.

Time called his performance “outstanding.” The country loved the new White House and, for the moment, very much liked the man who occupied it.

III

For quite some time, Truman had been thinking about the question of a successor, someone to head the Democratic ticket in November 1952 and take his place in the White House after inauguration day in January 1953. The Republicans, he expected, would choose Taft, and the prospect of Taft as President was intolerable to Truman. There must be no isolationist takeover that would destroy everything he had worked for.

By late summer 1951, he appears to have concluded that the ideal Democratic candidate, “the most logical and qualified,” was Chief Justice Fred Vinson. But Vinson declined, saying he had been out of politics too long. In November Truman tried again, inviting Vinson to Key West where they could talk freely in the privacy of the Little White House, but not until after Truman had had a meeting with Eisenhower over which there was to be a good deal of controversy.

Whether Eisenhower, still the nation’s number one hero, would run for President, remained the great imponderable, though to judge by reports coming from his NATO headquarters in Paris, he was warming to the idea.

The first week of November, on a brief visit to Washington, the general had lunch with Truman at Blair House and reportedly Truman again offered his full support if Eisenhower would accept the Democratic nomination. The meeting took place on the 5th. On the 7th, Arthur Krock broke the story in The New York Times. Krock’s source, he later disclosed, was Justice William O. Douglas, who told Krock he had heard it from Truman himself and in the presence of Chief Justice Vinson and one or two others from the Court, during a reception at Blair House later the same day as Truman’s lunch with Eisenhower. “You can’t join a party just to run for office,” Eisenhower was described saying to Truman. “What reason have you to think I have ever been a Democrat? You know I have been a Republican all my life and that my family have always been Republicans.”

At Key West a week later, Truman denied the story, as had Eisenhower in Paris, both publicly and privately. “He told me Arthur Krock’s story that Truman had offered him the Democratic candidacy in 1952 wasn’t really true,” Krock’s colleague on the Times, C. L. Sulzberger, recorded after an evening with Eisenhower in Paris.

He told me this twice—before dinner and after dinner. When he first met Truman on this trip, they winked at each other and by mutual agreement said right away there was one subject they weren’t going to talk about, and that was the closest they ever came to politics.

When Vinson arrived at Key West, Truman told him the nomination was his if he would accept. Vinson was tentative, saying he needed time to discuss the matter with his wife. Later, in Washington, Vinson told Truman he did not think the Supreme Court should be seen as a stepping stone to the White House. When Truman countered with the example of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who as the Republican candidate in 1916 nearly defeated Woodrow Wilson, Vinson declined for reasons of health, and apparently to Truman’s great surprise. But Vinson, who had always looked sallow, was indeed in poor health. He would die two years later, in September 1953, at age sixty-one.

As the year ended, Truman seems to have been in something of a quandary, even about his own intentions, as implied in a longhand letter to Eisenhower dated December 18, 1951:

Dear Ike:

The columnists, the slick magazines and all the political people who like to speculate are saying many things about what is to happen in 1952.

As I told you in 1948 and at our luncheon in 1951, do what you think best for the country. My own position is in the balance. If I do what I want to do I’ll go back to Missouri and maybe run for the Senate. If you decide to finish the European job (and I don’t know who else can) I must keep the isolationists out of the White House. I wish you would let me know what you intend to do. It will be between us and no one else.

I have the utmost confidence in your judgment and your patriotism.

He, too, would like to live a semi-retired life with his family, Eisenhower wrote in reply to Truman. “But just as you have decided that circumstances may not permit you to do exactly as you please, so I’ve found that fervent desire may sometimes have to give way to conviction of duty.” He would not seek the presidency, Eisenhower said. Further, “you know, far better than I, that the possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible.”

Eisenhower’s letter was dated New Year’s Day, 1952. Five days later, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge announced in Washington the formation of an Eisenhower-for-President campaign, and the following day in Paris, January 7, Eisenhower announced he was prepared to accept the Republican nomination.

Asked at his next press conference what he thought of the announcement, Truman had only praise for Eisenhower. He was “a grand man,” Truman said. “I am just as fond of General Eisenhower as I can be. I think he is one of the great men produced by World War II…. I don’t want to stand in his way at all, because I think very highly of him, and if he wants to get out and have all the mud and rotten eggs thrown at him, that’s his business….”

As the Eisenhower boom gathered force, Truman would remark to his staff, an edge of sadness in his voice, “I’m sorry to see these fellows get Ike into this business. They’re showing him gates of gold and silver which will turn out copper and tin.”

With Vinson no longer a possibility for the Democratic nomination, Truman decided the best choice would be Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. Alben Barkley, at seventy-four, was too old. The presidency would kill Barkley in three months, Truman thought. (“It takes him five minutes to sign his name,” Truman noted sadly in his diary.) Averell Harriman, whom Truman judged “the ablest of them all,” had never run for office and would be severely handicapped by his Wall Street background. (“Can we elect a Wall Street banker and railroad tycoon President of the United States on a Democratic ticket?”) Senator Estes Kefauver, a possibility, was a man Truman instinctively disliked and distrusted, a feeling shared by most of the party regulars. Privately, Truman referred to him as “Cowfever.”

Adlai Stevenson, by contrast, was comparatively young at fifty-one. He was able, progressive, the governor of a major industrial state, a champion of honest government, and a new face. Stevenson had carried Illinois in 1948 by an overwhelming 570,000 votes, in his first campaign for any office, a point that greatly impressed Truman. “He proved in that contest,” Truman would write, “that he possessed a knowledge and ‘feel’ for politics, that he understood that politics at its best was the business and art of government, and that he had learned that a knowledge of politics is necessary to carry out the function of our form of free government.”

That Truman should turn to Stevenson was greatly to Truman’s credit, for not only was Stevenson still a political unknown nationally, but a man altogether unlike Truman. A graduate of Princeton, well born, a prosperous lawyer, eloquent, witty, urbane—and divorced—Stevenson could hardly have been more different from Truman, or from most political figures of the day. Further, Truman hardly knew him. But Truman had read Stevenson’s speeches; he liked what he heard, admired Stevenson’s political philosophy, his Midwest background, his political heritage—the fact that Stevenson’s grandfather, the first Adlai E. Stevenson, had been a Democratic congressman and Vice President under Grover Cleveland. (“He comes of a political family,” Truman noted approvingly.) Also, several of the younger aides at the White House were keenly interested in Stevenson, seeing in him qualities of the kind needed to revitalize the Democratic Party.

Dispensing with any pretense of round-about overtures, Truman asked the governor to come see him, and for an hour or more, the evening of Tuesday, January 22, 1952, they met alone in the seclusion of Blair House—once Stevenson had talked his way past the guards outside who had never heard of him.

As Truman later recounted the conversation, he spoke to Stevenson at length about the office of the presidency, then asked him to take it, saying he need only agree and the nomination was his. He could count on Truman’s unqualified endorsement. “I told him I would not run for President again,” Truman recorded in notes made afterward, “and that it was my opinion he was best fitted for the place.”

He was, overcome…. [I] offered to have him nominated by the Democratic Convention in July. I had to explain to him that any President can control his party’s convention. Then I cited Jackson, Hayes, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and myself at Philadelphia in 1948. I reminded him that Washington picked John Adams, that Jefferson did the same with Madison and Monroe before conventions were used…I told him I could get him nominated whether he wanted to be or not. Then I asked what he’d do in that case. He was very much worried and said that no patriot could say no to such a condition.

But that night Stevenson said no. “He apparently was flabbergasted,” concluded Truman, who refused to give up.

Stevenson, according to a close friend, came away filled with admiration for Truman, who had been sitting by the fire reading the Bible when Stevenson arrived.

Stevenson was impressed with this self-contained, internally secure man that Truman was [remembered Carl McGowan]. A simple man of great strength. Stevenson, with his own churning around, was impressed with the calm, serenity, self-contained quality.

As Stevenson later confided to James Reston, Truman had said Stevenson was the man to defeat Eisenhower, who would most likely be the Republican candidate. Eisenhower’s intentions were good, Truman had said, but he was inexperienced in politics and bound to become the captive of Taft and so destroy Truman’s foreign and domestic programs. It was therefore essential that a Democratic administration be continued in the White House. The President wanted him to save the world from Dwight Eisenhower, Stevenson told Reston, highly agitated.

According to another Stevenson friend, George Ball, who had driven Stevenson to and from Blair House that night, Truman had also observed at one point, “Adlai, if a knucklehead like me can be President and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the job.”

But Stevenson had said no to Truman. Not only did he wish to remain governor of Illinois, he was less than certain that a change in Washington, a Republican administration, would be a bad thing for the country. Privately he wondered if the Democrats had been in power too long. And, in any event, he did not feel that being Truman’s handpicked candidate would be necessarily an advantage, given the woeful state of Truman’s popularity. If Eisenhower were the Republican candidate, Stevenson told George Ball, nobody could beat him.

On March 4, Truman and Stevenson met again at Blair House, this time at Stevenson’s request.

[He] came to tell me that he had made a commitment to run for reelection in Illinois [Truman wrote] and that he did not think he could go back on that commitment honorably. I appreciate his view point…. He is an honorable man. Wish I could have talked with him before his announcement. He is a modest man too. He seems to think that I am something of a superman which isn’t true of course…he argued that only I can beat any Republican be he Taft, Eisenhower or Warren, or anyone else! My wife and daughter had said the same thing to me an hour before. What the hell am I to do? I’ll know when the time comes because I am sure God Almighty will guide me.

For several weeks Truman toyed with the prospect of running again. Some of the staff felt sure he had changed his mind and was about to announce his candidacy.

On March 11, Estes Kefauver won a stunning victory in the New Hampshire primary, having stumped the state wearing his trademark coonskin cap and accusing the administration of doing too little to get rid of corruption. Truman had allowed his name to be entered, but did not campaign. He thought primaries were a lot of “eye-wash.” Still, Kefauver had challenged a President and won handily.

At a small private dinner at Blair House for a few close advisers, including the new Democratic chairman, Frank McKinney, Truman polled the table. Should he become a candidate to succeed himself? The answer, put as tactfully as possible, was no.

Truman left for Key West and on March 22 called Clark Clifford and asked him to come down. The following day, they sat alone in the garden behind the Little White House. Clifford told the President he hoped he would not run again. Truman expressed concern over the effect his withdrawal might have on the war in Korea. Clifford answered that the course of the war had long been established.

The same day from Key West, March 23, a White House aide named David Lloyd, who had once worked with Stevenson when Stevenson was with the State Department, wrote to the governor without Truman’s knowledge, urging him to reconsider, and in large part because of Truman:

Anybody who works closely with that man loves him, so I am prejudiced, and think, like the others, that he ought to have what he wants. Because of all he has put into the job, because of the way he has given himself to it, because of the things he has done for us all, I feel that if he wants to quit, and wants you to take the job, he ought to have his way. This may sound a little rough on you. But there is more to it than my personal feelings about him. We have to support him because of the things he represents, which are the things we believe in. If we don’t support him, then we signify to the world that we aren’t really taking seriously the things we talk about and work for, and the world will cease to take us seriously….

On their way to the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, the huge, annual $100-a-plate black-tie gathering of Democrats held the evening of March 29 in the National Armory, Alice Acheson asked her husband if he thought the President might disclose his political future in his after-dinner speech. “Not at all,” said the Secretary of State in what, as she subsequently told him, was a notably superior manner. It would be too early for the President to announce an intention not to run again, Acheson explained, and too disappointing to many at the dinner were he to announce the contrary.

Truman appeared at the podium looking tanned and uplifted by the occasion. At the end of a lively, righting speech, having duly assaulted the Republicans and championed his own record, he put aside his prepared text and gave his answer:

“I shall not be a candidate for re-election. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.”

It was said without buildup, almost matter-of-factly, and for a few seconds the immense audience sat silent and confused. Then followed a strange mixture of automatic applause and shouted cries of “No,” even from some of those who had hoped he would step down. “I found myself shouting ‘No’ with vigor,” recalled Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had tried to stop Truman’s nomination in 1948. “Then I wondered why the hell I was shouting ‘No,’ since this is what I had been hoping would happen for months. Still the shouts of ‘No’ seemed the least due to the President for a noble and courageous renunciation.”

Truman left the hall quickly, smiling, waving, yet looking somewhat tense, though the First Lady had a very different expression. “When you made your announcement,” Harry Vaughan later told the President, “Mrs. Truman looked the way you do when you draw four aces.”

At the White House, as the President and First Lady arrived, many of the household staff who stood waiting at the door were crying.

Did he plan to run for the Senate, Truman was asked a few days later, at his next press conference. No, he said. (Mrs. Truman did not want him to, he had told his staff.) Did he favor Governor Stevenson for the nomination? No comment.

From Springfield, Stevenson had written:

I was stunned by your announcement Saturday night after that superb speech. I can only accept your judgment that the decision was right, although I had hoped long and prayerfully that it might be otherwise. As for myself, I shall make no effort to express the depth of my gratitude for your confidence. I hope you don’t feel that I am insensitive to either that confidence or the honor you have done me.

Replying immediately, Truman said he appreciated Stevenson’s letter “most highly.” The need was for a man who would “carry on the Foreign Policy of the United States as it was established in 1938 by President Roosevelt and carried through by me, to the best of my ability…. We must also have a President who believes in the domestic policies which have made the Foreign Policy possible,” for the one was not possible without the other. “I sincerely hope you will not take yourself completely out of the picture.”

Characteristically, whatever his frustrations with Stevenson, Truman would keep trying.

IV

How the President got through the first weeks of April, wrote Roger Tubby, was a testimony to his amazing stamina. Tubby himself, as he wrote, felt more dead than alive.

On April 3, Truman fired Attorney General McGrath, who for months had appeared to be obstructing the investigations Truman ordered into corruption in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Feeling he had been “sold down the river” by people whom he trusted, Truman had turned the “cleanup job” over to McGrath in January 1952, which raised charges of an attempted whitewash, since McGrath was a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. McGrath had then named a respected New York lawyer, a Republican, Newbold Morris, to head the investigation. But Morris had soon quarreled with McGrath and annoyed Congress. When Morris issued a long, intricate questionnaire to be filled out by all federal employees, including the Cabinet, listing all assets and sources of income, McGrath exploded, calling the questionnaire an invasion of privacy and a violation of individual rights. McGrath refused to fill out the questionnaire, and after reading a copy, Truman, too, decided it should not be used.

Truman despaired over McGrath’s “inability to get on top” of his job. He liked McGrath—“I don’t think there was the slightest thing wrong with Howard personally at all,” he would later say—but found his performance frustrating. When, on April 3, McGrath announced he had fired Newbold Morris, and apparently with the idea that this was what Truman wanted, Truman fired McGrath.

With this farcical denouement, as Cabell Phillips would write, the administration’s housecleaning effort seemed to have blown to pieces. “It had been a miserable performance from start to finish, almost a burlesque of executive management, and the net result was to underline ‘the mess in Washington’ as a good deal more than a gloating Republican catchphrase.” Truman felt wretched about it all. In his Memoirs he would say nothing of the episode, but shortly afterward he wrote to McGrath, “I want you to know that my fondness for you has not changed one bit. Political situations sometimes cause one much pain.”

And by then, Truman was caught up in telephone and telegraph strikes, land the threat of another nationwide steel strike. He was showing the strain as those close to him had seldom seen. He looked stern in repose, his face deeply lined. After one morning staff meeting, when William Hopkins put the usual stack of papers in front of him to sign, Truman begged off until later, “when I’m not so shaky.” He was tired, terribly tired, he admitted. At the White House the evening before, he had fallen asleep in his chair, something he almost never did.

He seemed overburdened by his duties and decisions in a way he had never been before. It was as if the decision not to run again, the prospect of not being President, had taken something from him.

In his diary, Roger Tubby wrote:

McGrath, Korean truce talks perhaps heading up to a settlement, the steel, telegraph and telephone strikes, and his decision not to run again have been among the recent events draining on his emotional reserves…we were urging him to take a weekend off, to cut down on his afternoon appointments. He brightened, said he thought [it] a good idea to go down river on the Williamsburg…. But Matt reminded him he could not get away, there was a wreath laying ceremony Sunday at the Jefferson Memorial. “God, what a three weeks,” he said with feeling.

His appointment schedule for Tuesday, April 8, the crucial day, was typical and did not even include what was to be the most important event of the day.

As it turned out, he did not speak at the Shoreham as scheduled—the Secretary of State took his place—for it was that night, in a nationwide radio and television broadcast from the White House, that he announced he was seizing the steel mills.

It was one of the boldest, most controversial decisions of his presidency, and like so much else, the seriousness of the crisis was compounded by Korea, the war that had come to overshadow his whole second term and that was rarely ever out of his thoughts. “These are not normal times,” he would stress in his broadcast. “I have to think of our soldiers in Korea…the weapons and ammunition they need….” Also, it being an election year, with, as he saw it, his whole domestic and foreign program at issue, he had no wish to alienate labor.

From his reading of history, Truman was convinced his action fell within his powers as President and Commander in Chief. In a state of national emergency, Lincoln had suspended the right to habeas corpus, he would point out. Tom Clark, now on the Supreme Court, had once, as Attorney General, advised him that a President, faced with a calamitous strike, had the “inherent” power to prevent a paralysis of the national economy.

Truman’s legal advisers supported his views. And so, significantly, did Fred Vinson. According to later comments by John Snyder, the Chief Justice had confidentially advised the President that, on legal grounds, he could go ahead and seize the mills. Such counsel clearly violated the division between branches of government and was particularly improper in this instance, since a seizure of the steel industry was bound to be challenged in the courts and thus Vinson himself, very likely, would wind up having to weigh the case. But out of friendship and loyalty, Vinson offered advice that was taken quite to heart.

The path was clear, Truman told the ever cautious Snyder, who opposed seizing the mills. “The President has the power to keep the country from going to hell,” Truman would assure his staff.

A steel crisis had been a long time coming. Driven by the demands of the war, the mills were producing record tonnage. Profits, too, were on the rise. Yet steel workers, unlike workers in the auto and electrical industries, had had no pay raise since 1950. In November 1951, the 650,000 United Steel Workers, who were part of the CIO and headed by Phil Murray, called for a boost in wages of 35 cents an hour. Management refused to negotiate. The union gave notice that it would strike when its contract expired on December 31. On December 22, Truman referred the dispute to his Wage Stabilization Board recommended an hourly raise of 26 cents, and the union quickly agreed, the companies denounced the proposal as unreasonable, unless they could add a hefty increase of $12 a ton to the price of steel.

Negotiations continued, only to end in deadlock. With the April deadline approaching, the country, as said in the press, was caught “squarely on the griddle.” To Truman, the pay increase proposed by the Wage Stabilization Board seemed both “fair and reasonable,” and the most direct way to prevent a strike that would not only be a national emergency but would critically impair the flow of munitions to Korea and to the buildup of NATO forces in Europe, which he saw as crucial.

Secretary of Defense Lovett [Truman later wrote] said emphatically that any stoppage of steel production, for even a short time, would increase the risk we had taken in the “stretch-out” of the armament program. He also pointed out that our entire combat technique in all three services depended on the fullest use of our industrial facilities. Stressing the situation in Korea, he said that “we are holding the line with ammunition, and not with the lives of our troops.” Any curtailment of steel production, he warned, would endanger the lives of our fighting men.

Truman refused to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act—by which the government could enjoin a strike for eighty days pending an impartial study—because he saw no sense in delaying a settlement still further and felt the facts were already well known. Also, the steel workers had remained on the job voluntarily for nearly three months as it was. For them to continue thus another eighty days with no change in pay seemed to him unfair. Nor did the prospect of resorting to a law he disliked, and that labor despised, have any appeal.

But it was Truman’s fundamental feeling about the giants of the steel industry, the old distrust of big corporations that he had voiced with such passion during his years in the Senate, that moved him now, more than sympathy for the position of the steel workers. He considered the industry’s proposed price increase little better than profiteering, and saw the steel companies, with U.S. Steel in the lead, attempting to force a compromise that would ultimately play havoc with his anti-inflation policies and raise the cost of the war. “The attitude of the companies seemed wrong to me, since under the accelerated defense program the government was by far the biggest customer for steel and steel products. To hike prices at this time meant charging the government more for the tools of defense.”

While conceding that a modest ($4.50) increase in steel prices might be tolerated, Truman stubbornly rejected industry demands out of hand and went over the head of his own director of defense mobilization, Charles E. Wilson, who saw validity in the industry position. As a result Wilson resigned, a turn of events that Truman regretted and that brought down still more criticism on him.

To Truman, seizure of the mills was a temporary last resort. On Tuesday, April 8, only hours before the mills were scheduled to be struck, he made his move, signing Executive Order No. 10340.

“The plain fact of the matter is that the steel companies are recklessly forcing a shutdown,” he told the country when he went on the air at 10:30 that night.

They are trying to get special, preferred treatment…. And they are apparently willing to stop steel production to get it. As President of the United States it is my plain duty to keep this from happening…. At midnight the Government will take over the steel plants….

The broadcast over, on his way to his room, Truman looked so exhausted Joe Short thought he might collapse.

In some ways it was as though, in the last act of his presidency, with less than a year to go, he had reverted to the man he had been in the spring of 1946, after less than a year in office, when, faced by the great railroad impasse, he had tried to draft the striking workers into the Army.

At some eighty-eight steel mills across the country, the morning of April 9, 1952, things appeared the same as usual. The morning shifts arrived, production continued, the mills worked by the same men and managed by the same officials. The one clearly visible sign of change were the American flags that flew over the mills. In Washington, the Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer, had assumed legal command of the industry.

But Truman had brought on an additional crisis, a constitutional crisis, just as he would have in 1946 had the railroad unions not agreed at the last minute to settle the strike. The outcry now was instantaneous and as scathing nearly as what he had faced after the firing of MacArthur. He was called a Caesar, a Hitler, a bully and lawbreaker. In reporting his action to Congress, in a special message delivered to the Hill immediately that same day, April 9, he stressed that his action had been taken with utmost reluctance: “The idea of government operation of the steel mills is thoroughly distasteful to me and I want to see it ended as soon as possible.” He acknowledged the power of Congress to supersede his policy and act on its own to pass a new law enabling the government to operate the mills as an emergency measure. Such legislation, he said, might be “very desirable.” But Congress did not choose to grant him such power. Instead, there were calls for congressional investigations, calls for his impeachment.

The President’s “evil deed” had no precedent in history, said the head of Inland Steel, Clarence Randall, in a radio and television broadcast. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, all attacked Truman. The “Truman talent for trouble,” said Newsweek, gave him and the nation no rest. The New York Times accused him of acting on “almost inconceivably bad advice.” The Washington Post predicted his seizure of the mills would probably go down in history as one of the most high-handed acts ever committed by an American President. Truman, said the Post, had grossly usurped the power of Congress, and in a constitutional democracy there was no more serious offense against good government. “Nothing in the Constitution can be reasonably interpreted as giving to the Commander in Chief all the power that may be necessary for building up our defenses or even for carrying on a war.”

If he could seize the steel mills under his inherent powers, could he therefore, Truman was asked at a press conference, also seize the newspapers and radio stations?

“Under similar circumstances, the President of the United States has to act for whatever is best for the country,” he answered abruptly and imprudently, stirring speculation that he was indeed planning to seize the press, an idea that had never occurred to him and that he couldn’t imagine happening.

The steel industry sued to get its property back. Swiftly, a federal district judge, David A. Pine, determined that seizure of the steel industry was illegal and the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case.

“I believe,” wrote Judge Pine in a 4,500-word opinion, “that the contemplated strike, if it came, with all its awful results, would be less injurious to the public than the injury which would flow from a timorous judicial recognition that there is some basis for this claim to unlimited and unrestrained Executive power….”

He had read the Pine opinion, Truman told his staff—“read it, read it and read it”—and still could not understand why he had been judged wrong. To Secretary of Commerce Sawyer, he confided that he would be “terribly shocked, disappointed and disturbed,” should the Supreme Court, too, decide against him.

The President was depressed, recorded Roger Tubby after a morning staff meeting.

[I] had never seen him so quiet and down. Occasionally there seemed to be…[an] effort by him to laugh at our sallies, but the laughs were brief, his countenance mostly serious…. Of course the steel wrangle has troubled him, the touch-and-go situation in Korea, the Democratic Party uncertainties—and he’s been terribly tired.

He would, of course, abide by the Court’s ruling, Truman told reporters. He had no ambition to be a, dictator. He just wanted to keep the country running.

The case against the President was argued in the Supreme Court by the attorney for the U.S. Steel Corporation, white-haired John W. Davis, who had been the Democratic candidate for President in 1924 when he lost to Calvin Coolidge, and who in a distinguished career had argued more than a hundred cases before the Court. Defending the President was Solicitor General Perlman, whom Truman would later describe as an “outstanding” lawyer who presented the government’s case ably and forcefully.

On Monday, June 2, the Court declared the President’s action unconstitutional by a crushing majority of 6 to 3. Those in the majority were Hugo L. Black, who delivered the official opinion, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, and, as infuriated Truman, Tom Clark.

“We cannot with faithfulness to our constitutional system hold that the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces has the ultimate power as such to take possession of private property in order to keep labor disputes from stopping production,” Justice Black read slowly and calmly. “This is a job for the Nation’s lawmakers, not for its military authorities.”

“Today,” wrote Justice Douglas, in a concurring opinion, “a kindly President uses the seizure power to effect a wage increase and to keep the steel furnaces in production. Yet tomorrow another President might use the same power to prevent a wage increase, to curb trade unionists, to regiment labor as oppressively as industry thinks it has been regimented by this seizure.”

The Chief Justice, who strongly upheld the President, arguing that he had acted entirely within his constitutional responsibilities, was joined in the minority by Justices Stanley F. Reed and Sherman Minton. Any man worthy of the office of the presidency, Vinson argued, should be “free to take at least interim action necessary to execute legislative programs essential to survival of the nation.” Nor was there any question that “the possession [of the steel industry] was other than temporary in character and subject to Congressional approval, disapproval,” or regulation of “the manner in which the mills were to be administered and returned to the owners.”

For Truman it was a humiliating defeat, and at the hands of old friends and fellow spirits. It was a liberal Court. Hugo Black had been an ardent New Dealer. All nine justices had been appointed either by Truman or Roosevelt. That Tom Clark had gone against him would anger Truman for years. Putting that “damn fool from Texas” on the Supreme Court, he would one day tell the author Merle Miller, was the biggest mistake he made as President, though this, like others of his observations to Miller, was more harsh than he meant or than he indicated at the time.

As a gesture of friendship and goodwill, Hugo Black invited the President and the justices to a party at his beautiful home across the river in Old Town Alexandria. At the start of the evening, Truman, though polite, seemed “a bit testy,” remembered William O. Douglas. “But after the bourbon and canapes were passed, he turned to Hugo and said, ‘Hugo, I don’t much care for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good.’ ”

The steel strike that began after the Court decision of June 2 dragged on for seven weeks, until midsummer 1952, making it the longest, most costly steel strike in the nation’s history. Losses in production, losses in wages were unprecedented—21 million tons of steel and $400 million in wages, as 600,000 steel workers and 1,400,000 others in related industries were idle. The military output scheduled for 1952 was cut by a third. “No enemy nation could have so crippled our production as has this work stoppage,” said Robert Lovett bitterly. “The weird and tragic thing is that we have done this to ourselves.”

The settlement called for a 21 cent an hour raise for the workers and a steel price increase of $5.20 a ton, which was the same as the $4.50 offered by the government months earlier, plus 70 cents for increased freight rates.

In the long weeks of the strike, Truman had grown increasingly distressed over congressional inaction. Congress declined to do anything more than request—rather than direct—him to use the Taft-Hartley Act, thus sending the problem—and responsibility for the decision—right back to him. And whether steel production would resume, were he to invoke Taft-Hartley, was highly debatable.

“The Court and Congress got us into the fix we’re now in,” he told his staff. “Let Congress do something about getting us out.”

Discouraged that so few Democrats on the Hill had come to his support, discouraged that practically no Democrats “up there” were fighting for his foreign aid bill, he grumbled that maybe it might be good for the Democrats to be out of power for a while.

For the first time since taking office, he felt ill. At the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital, years earlier, a special Presidential Suite had been set up on the third floor, in the event that he needed medical attention, but it had never once been used. Truman had never been sick until the morning of July 16, when he awoke feeling “poorly” and Wallace Graham found he was running a low fever. Two days later, with what Graham called a mild virus, he was driven to Walter Reed. He stayed three days, during which he was gone over by some eight different specialists. He ate well, slept well, signed more than two hundred bills, and, as he later told his staff, spent a lot of time thinking about what he would say at the Democratic Convention. He delivered his speech to the bedpost, Truman said. “If the doctor had come in then he would have found my temperature up two degrees and might have thought me off my trolley.” He wanted to talk not only about his record, “but about the future and what we can make of it.”

What could be done about the steel strike, Joe Short asked him his first morning back at the Oval Office, July 21, when Truman still looked pale and subdued. He didn’t know, Truman said.

“It’s a lockout, that’s what it is. U.S. Steel is against the little fellows, want to take them over, and of course they’re against labor and against me.”

Three days later, on July 24, he summoned Phil Murray and the head of U.S. Steel, Benjamin Fairless, to his office, demanded a settlement, and got it. “This should lead to a speedy resumption of steel production,” he said in a brief formal announcement that the strike was over.

The following day, he left for Chicago and the convention that was already under way.

V

Truman’s distress over the choice of a Democratic standardbearer had grown extreme. Firm in his belief that any red-blooded Democrat ought to be ready and willing to run against any Republican, he had become increasingly annoyed with Adlai Stevenson, whose reluctance to commit himself had begun to strike Truman as not only tiresome but perhaps something of an act.

As the press was saying, nearly all the old Democratic bosses were gone now. Jim Farley was long past his prime. Tom Pendergast and Bob Hannegan were dead. Ed Flynn was ill. Frank Hague no longer ruled in New Jersey, and Kefauver, with his primary campaigns, had eclipsed Ed Crump of Tennessee. “There was no one to supply party-wide leadership except the President,” reported Newsweek, and he was “under tremendous pressure to name his preference for the nomination….”

Truman continued to wait, holding out for Stevenson. It was only a week before the convention, his patience gone and resolved to do almost anything to stop Kefauver, that he at last suggested that Barkley would be a good choice—and then wished he hadn’t because Averell Harriman, having declared himself a candidate, was proving a spirited champion of the whole New Deal—Fair Deal program in a way that made Truman glow.

When someone raised the point that Harriman had never run for public office, and so might not be up to a sustained campaign, Truman remarked, “You never know what’s in you until you have to do it.”

The Republicans opened their convention in Chicago on July 7. Taft had the largest number of committed delegates. Attacking what he called the “me-too” Republicanism of the party’s eastern liberals—the Dewey people who were backing Eisenhower this time—Taft said it was time to give the American people a clear choice. The floor fight before the balloting turned bitter. “We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat,” declared Senator Everett Dirksen from the podium, shaking his finger at the New York delegation, where Dewey sat. “And don’t do this to us again.” But such were the tactical skills of the Eisenhower managers, combined with the glamour of the Eisenhower bandwagon, that the general swept to victory on the first ballot—as no doubt he would have done at the Democratic Convention, too, had he been willing.

Of the Democratic candidates, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Kefauver was far in the lead, claiming 257 delegates, or nearly half what was needed for the nomination. Richard Russell, running as the candidate of the South, had 161, Harriman 112, Stevenson a mere 41 while Truman, it was believed, could swing at least 400 votes to whomever he chose. As Time reported, Truman’s hold on Democratic leaders continued remarkably strong because they saw him as the smartest practical politician around. “If Harry Truman turns out to have an enormous influence on the convention, it will not be a case of delegates doing his bidding, but of their following his highly respected judgment.”

A Barkley boom began and gathered surprising force, only to be abruptly terminated when the leaders of organized labor met with Barkley and told him the blunt truth. It was not that they objected to him on issues, as they had with Jimmy Byrnes in 1944, he was just too old.

Barkley called Truman to say he was withdrawing, and on the afternoon of July 24, the day of the steel strike settlement at the White House, Stevenson telephoned from Illinois to ask Truman if it would embarrass him were he, Stevenson, to allow his name to be placed in nomination. Truman, as he later said, chose some “rather vigorous” words. “I have been trying since January to get you to say that,” he told the governor. “Why would it embarrass me?” Stevenson could count on his full support. As far as Truman was concerned, Stevenson was as good as nominated.

On the floor of the immense international amphitheater at the Chicago Stock Yards, a headlong Stevenson boom was already under way, as a result of the governor’s own brilliant welcoming address to the convention. James Reston in The New York Times called Stevenson “a leaf on a rising stream.” When, during the first ballot the next afternoon, Friday, the 25th, the Missouri delegation was polled, the President’s own alternate, an old Pendergast stalwart named Tom Gavin, was seen voting for Stevenson just as the President and First Lady were leaving from Washington on the Independence. On television the two events were shown simultaneously on a split screen.

Heading west, Truman watched the convention on television “all the way” in flight, something no President had done before. He saw the results of the first ballot—Kefauver 340, Stevenson 273, Russell 268, Harriman 123—and the start of the second. By the end of the second ballot, at 6:00 P.M. Chicago time, with Stevenson gaining but still no decision, Truman was at the Blackstone working on his speech in Room 709, the same corner suite where he had taken the fateful call from Franklin Roosevelt eight years before. To others in the presidential entourage, he appeared in high gear.

With the convention in recess until nine o’clock, Truman went by motorcade and booming motorcycle escort to the Stockyards Inn and dinner in a private dining room with Jake Arvey, Sam Rayburn, and Democratic Chairman Frank McKinney. From there, he also sent word to the governors of Massachusetts and Arkansas, as well as to Averell Harriman, to release their delegates to Stevenson. Charlie Murphy was the messenger sent to see Harriman, who, as it happens, had already decided on his own to withdraw in favor of Stevenson.

The convention’s dramatic turn to Stevenson came on the third ballot, with the release of the Harriman delegates. But it was past midnight before the vote was made unanimous, and not until 1:45 in the morning, as late nearly as four years before, when the nominee and the President entered the hall arm in arm, down the floodlit runway to the rostrum, Truman exuberant, a spring to his step, Stevenson, a short, rather dumpy figure, looking slightly uncertain.

They had picked a winner, Truman assured the crowd. “I am going to take my coat off and do everything I can to help him win.”

Stevenson spoke briefly and eloquently. “The people are wise,” he said, “wiser than the Republicans think. And the Democratic Party is the people’s party, not the party of labor, not the farmer’s party—it is the party of no one because it is the party of everyone.” The ordeal of the twentieth century was far from over. “Sacrifice, patience, understanding and implacable purpose may be our lot for years to come. Let’s talk sense to the American people….”

Later, Stevenson, Truman, Rayburn, McKinney, and four or five others met backstage. Stevenson asked for advice on a running mate. The Republicans had chosen Senator Richard Nixon as their vice-presidential candidate. Stevenson mentioned Kefauver, but when Truman vigorously objected, Rayburn and McKinney backed him. Barkley and Russell were also mentioned and rejected. Finally, the choice was Senator John Sparkman of Alabama. “Stevenson made his decision with Harry Truman’s help,” one of those present explained afterward to a reporter.

In his room that morning at 6:40, Saturday, July 26, having slept perhaps an hour, if at all, Truman wrote a warm letter to the nominee on a sheet of Blackstone Hotel stationery; a letter such as he himself had never received from Franklin Roosevelt.

Dear Governor:

Last night was one of the most remarkable I’ve spent in all my sixty-eight years. When thousands of people—delegates and visitors—are willing to sit and listen to a set speech and introduction by me, and then listen to a most wonderful acceptance speech by you, at two o’clock in the morning, there is no doubt that we are on the right track, in the public interest.

You are a brave man. You are assuming the responsibility of the most important office in the history of the world.

You have the ancestral, political and educational background to do a most wonderful job. If it is worth anything, you have my wholehearted support and cooperation.

When the noise and shouting are over, I hope you may be able to come to Washington for a discussion of what is before you.

But though Stevenson sent a gracious reply and would eventually meet with Truman at the White House, he was no less determined than before not to be seen as Truman’s candidate. “He was affronted by the indifferent morality and untidiness of the Truman Administration and was frantic to distance himself from Truman,” his friend George Ball would remember. In quick succession, Stevenson replaced Truman’s party chairman, McKinney, with a Chicago friend, Stephen A. Mitchell, an attorney with little political experience, and announced that Democratic headquarters henceforth would be in Springfield, Illinois, not Washington—decisions certain to offend Truman. Nor did he make any effort to solicit Truman’s advice on plans for the campaign.

Stevenson’s attitude toward him was a “mystery,” Truman would write in his Memoirs. But in a letter he never sent, Truman told the nominee, “I have come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner…. Therefore I shall remain silent and stay in Washington until Nov. 4.” He did not like being treated as a liability. Frank McKinney, he wrote, had been the best party chairman in his memory. “I can’t stand snub after snub by you….”

In August, to make matters worse, Stevenson carelessly signed a letter prepared by an assistant in answer to a question from the Oregon Journal. “Can Stevenson really clean up the mess in Washington?” the editor of the Portland paper had asked. “As to whether I can clean up the mess in Washington,” read the Stevenson reply, “I would bespeak the careful scrutiny of what I inherited in Illinois and what has been accomplished in three years.” The Republicans quickly made the most of the letter, as confirmation by Stevenson himself that there was truly a mess in Washington, and Truman, in another letter he never mailed, said Stevenson had now made the whole campaign “ridiculous.”

I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can. Cowfever could not have treated me any more shabbily than have you.

At a later point, Stevenson sent Chairman Mitchell to tell Truman that it would greatly help the campaign if Dean Acheson were to announce his plan to retire as Secretary of State once the election was over—an idea Truman bluntly rejected.

But as his daughter Margaret would recall, Truman was more sad than angry. “Oh, Stevenson will get straightened out,” he told his staff. “The campaign hasn’t really started.” And in time to come, he would write that Stevenson conducted himself magnificently in the campaign:

His eloquence was real because his words gave definition and meaning to the major issues of our time. He was particularly effective in expressing this nation’s foreign policy. He made no demagogic statements…. While some felt he may have talked over the heads of some people, he was uncompromising in being himself. His was a great campaign and did credit to the party and the nation. He did not appeal to the weakness but to the strength of the people. He did not trade principles for votes. What he said in the South he would say in the North, and what he said in the East he would say in the West. It will be to his credit that, although given provocation by the opposition, he stayed away from personalities and accusations…. I hold him in the highest regard for his intellectual courage.

On August 12, Stevenson came to the White House at Truman’s invitation to have lunch with the Cabinet and be briefed at length on the state of the Union. In the course of three hours of discussion, Truman said more than once that he wanted to do everything possible to be of help. He did not wish to direct or dominate the campaign in any way. Stevenson was the boss, Truman stressed. “I think the President wants to win this campaign more than I do,” Stevenson remarked. “As much as you do,” interrupted Truman, who appeared to be greatly enjoying himself, until the meeting ended and he and Stevenson stepped outside to talk to the press.

Truman came out the door first, as customary, only now the photographers shouted to him, “Wait for the Governor, Mr. President.” A new order had clearly begun. “That’s your point of contact right there, Governor,” Truman said, gesturing to the microphones.

Stevenson joked about the size of the lunch he had just enjoyed, saying if he had another he would be too fat to campaign. Truman, usually the first to laugh at such banter, barely smiled, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. “There was just a hint of tension in the atmosphere,” wrote Andrew Tully of The New York Times, “and of sadness—as Harry Truman watched this man taking over….” When Stevenson finished, Truman did not linger, but turned and walked back to his office, “slowly, head erect.”

Several of the White House staff watched in pain. Secret Service Agent Floyd Boring turned to Roger Tubby and remarked, pointing to the President, “There’s a man of granite. And him [pointing to Stevenson], he looks like a sponge.”

With the campaign under way in September, Truman quickly forgot any injured pride he felt and joined the fray with all his old zest. Though not the candidate, he saw the election as a referendum on his presidency. Nor, constituted as he was, could he possibly have stayed out once the fight was on. “We didn’t have to ask Mr. Truman to get into the campaign,” remembered the new party chairman, Stephen Mitchell. “He was raring to go…and he put on a great show.”

He took to the rails, crisscrossing the country again in the Ferdinand Magellan. Stevenson traveled by plane and they kept entirely different schedules, never appearing on the same platform. Stevenson was eloquent as no presidential candidate had been in more than a generation. Truman was the fighter, the believer. “When you vote the Democratic ticket…you are voting for your interests because the Democrats look after the interests of the everyday man and the common people,” he said, sounding very like the candidate of 1948. He praised Stevenson. He evoked the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, heaped scorn on the Republican Party, stoutly championed his own Fair Deal programs. Toward the Republican candidate He was unexpectedly gentle at first. It was Taft he attacked.

He liked Ike, too, Truman would say, seeing Eisenhower buttons or signs in a crowd. But he liked him as a general in the Army. As it was, Ike didn’t seem to know what he was doing. “I think Bob Taft and all the Republican reactionaries are whispering in his ear, and pulling his leg,” he told the people of Whitefish, Montana. “If you like Ike as much as I do, you will vote with me to send him back to the Army, where he belongs.”

The truth was he did still like Ike. Even when Eisenhower refused Truman’s invitation to the same kind of briefing as he had given Stevenson, Truman had written to Eisenhower privately to express his friendship as much as his distaste for those now advising the general:

What I’ve always had in mind was and is a continuing foreign policy. You know that is a fact, because you had a part in outlining it.

Partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the United States. I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us….

May God guide you and give you light.

From a man who has always been your friend and who always wanted to be!

In conversation on board his train, Truman could swing from premonitions of Eisenhower as a dangerous President, “a modern Cromwell,” to open expressions of sympathy. “You know, I still feel sorry for Ike. He never should have gotten into this.” When it was revealed in mid-September that Eisenhower’s running mate, Nixon, had been subsidized by a secret fund subscribed by California millionaires, and others traveling with Truman were cheered by the news, he commented only, “This will help us, but I’m sorry to see it happen, for it lowers public opinion of politics.”

As so often before, the grueling business of a campaign seemed to restore and enliven him. He would be remembered rolling along at night in the dining room of the Ferdinand Magellan, eating fried chicken with his fingers, enjoying stories and “matching wits” with his staff, while every now and then in the darkness outside a lonely light flashed by. He would be remembered washing his socks in the bathroom sink in California and after a day of eight speeches from Ohio to upstate New York, sitting in a hotel in Buffalo playing the piano at 1:30 in the morning.

The pace and heat of the contest picked up rapidly.

The Republicans, campaigning under the slogan “Time for a Change,” had no intention of repeating Dewey’s bland glide to defeat. Much of what was said by both sides became very unpleasant. “I nearly choked to hear him,” Truman remarked privately after Eisenhower, stepping up the attack, assaulted the foreign policy that, as Truman saw it, Eisenhower himself, as Chief of Staff and head of NATO, had helped shape and implement. Eisenhower, Truman now charged, had become “a stooge of Wall Street.” He was “owned body and soul by the money boys.” Eisenhower, because of his career in the Army, knew little of the realities of life, didn’t “know the score and shouldn’t be educated at public expense.”

Eisenhower, for his part, deplored the “top-to-bottom mess” in Washington, “the crooks and cronies,” while Nixon hammered at what became known as “K_1C_2”—“Korea, Communism and corruption.” When Nixon accused Truman, Stevenson, and Dean Acheson of being “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe,” Truman understood this to mean Nixon had called him a traitor, and he would not forget it.

There was no Charlie Ross to help this time, no Clark Clifford. Press Secretary Joe Short had recently been hospitalized for what was thought to have been a mild heart condition. When Truman received word that Joe Short was dead, he took it very badly, feeling acutely, personally responsible. “I feel as if I killed them,” he said, remembering Ross as well.

Stevenson “has the most wonderful command of the language and he is delighting audiences wherever he goes,” recorded Roger Tubby, who took over in Short’s place.

[Stevenson’s] humor, his gift of satire and the devastating barb are irrepressible and so, thank God, the nation is being treated as it has not in some time, perhaps not since Lincoln…. Nevertheless some observers wonder whether S[tevenson] is “getting across” to the people, and compare his style unfavorably with the President’s, which is simple, declarative sentences, blunt and hard-hitting. Ike meanwhile goes blundering along, often badly tangled in his thoughts and words, but sticking persistently to a couple of simple themes: get rid of corruption, throw the rascals out….

Most newspapers backed Eisenhower. The Republicans were also out-spending the Democrats by more than two to one. But Truman’s crowds at times were as large and friendly as in 1948. In West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, across New England, his crowds were often bigger than those that turned out for Eisenhower.

The searing moment of the campaign for Truman came in early October, when Eisenhower went into Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy’s home state, where McCarthy in a drive for his own reelection continued to vilify George Marshall. Many of Eisenhower’s backers, many of his own aides, were confident he would eventually repudiate McCarthy and speak up for Marshall, and as he crossed Illinois, heading for Wisconsin, Eisenhower decided now would be the time, “right in McCarthy’s backyard.” A personal tribute to Marshall was prepared for a speech at Milwaukee. But then Eisenhower’s political advisers adamantly objected. McCarthy himself flew to Peoria, Illinois, and crossed into Wisconsin on board the general’s train. Reportedly, when McCarthy argued against any mention of Marshall, Eisenhower reacted with “red-hot anger.” Still, in a speech at Green Bay, Eisenhower expressed his gratitude to the senator for meeting him in Illinois and told his audience it was only in methods, not objectives, that he and McCarthy differed. Then in the speech at Milwaukee, with McCarthy seated behind him on stage, Eisenhower declared that a national tolerance of communism had “poisoned two whole decades of our national life,” thus creating “a government by men whose very brains were confused by the opiate of this deceit.” The fall of China, he charged, the “surrender of whole nations” in Eastern Europe could be attributed to the Reds in Washington. There was no mention of Marshall; the tribute had been cut. But because Eisenhower’s aides had been telling reporters all day about the Marshall tribute they would hear, its removal made more news than the rest of the speech. Even staunch Eisenhower supporters were appalled.

“Do I need to tell you that I am sick at heart?” Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, wired Eisenhower’s personal campaign manager, Sherman Adams.

To Truman, with his devotion to George Marshall, Eisenhower had committed an act of unpardonable betrayal. Truman tried to contain his fury. The spectacle of the Republican candidate campaigning against his own record, his own better nature and principles, was “very sad and pathetic,” Truman said in Oakland, California.

And I wish for the sake of history, and for the sake of future generations who will read about him in the schoolbooks, that he had not so tarnished his own bright reputation as a commander of men. And I mean that with all my heart.

Heading east, Truman remarked to his staff that probably he should “lay off Ike for a while…got to be very careful we don’t overdo the attacks.” But the outrage within seemed to gather force by the day, the more he thought about Marshall, the more he thought about Eisenhower and McCarthy, the more Eisenhower attacked his foreign policy and handling of the Korean War.

“The general whose words I read, whose speeches I hear, is not the general I once knew. Something, my friends, has happened to him,” he told the crowd at Colorado Springs. “I thought he might make a good President,” he said at Muncie, Indiana, “but that was a mistake. In this campaign he has betrayed almost everything I thought he stood for.”

Finally, in a rear platform speech at Utica, New York, Truman lashed out full force. Eisenhower, he said, had betrayed his principles, deserted his friends.

He knew—and he knows today—that General Marshall’s patriotism is above question…[he] knows, or he ought to know, how completely dishonest Joe McCarthy is. He ought to despise McCarthy, just as I expected him to-and just as I do.

Now, in his bid for votes, he has endorsed Joe McCarthy for reelection—and humbly thanked him for riding on his train.

I can’t understand it. I had never thought the man who is now the Republican candidate would stoop so low. I have thought about this a great deal. I don’t think I shall ever understand it….

And he never did, never really got over Eisenhower’s ingratitude to the man who had made him. For years to come Truman would harbor intense anger. “Why, General Marshall was responsible for his whole career,” he would say. “When Roosevelt jumped him from lieutenant colonel to general, it was Marshall’s recommendation. Three different times Marshall got him pushed upstairs, and in return…Eisenhower sold him out. It was just a shameful thing.”

Eisenhower, stunned by Truman’s attack, was enraged. “Just how low can you get?” He would never ride down Pennsylvania Avenue with Truman on inauguration day, he vowed.

The polls showed Eisenhower well in the lead. The polls also showed that the stalemate in Korea was what worried most voters. The election had become a referendum on Korea, and Eisenhower stepped up the attack on the administration’s handling of the war. On October 24 at Detroit, in a blistering speech broadcast on national television he called Korea “the burial ground for twenty-thousand American dead,” and promised to end the war. If elected, Eisenhower declared dramatically, “I shall go to Korea.”

Truman issued a statement stressing that the general had been in agreement with administration policy concerning Korea from the start. To a crowd at Winona, Minnesota, Truman warned, “No professional general has ever made a good President. The art of war is too different from the art of civilian government’’

If Eisenhower had a way of ending the war in Korea, he should tell him now, Truman said. “Let’s save a lot of lives and not wait…. If he can do it after he is elected, we can do it now.” Such “demagoguery used in connection with this tragic situation is almost beneath contempt,” he would write to Stevenson. No man, Truman thought, had less right than Eisenhower to use Korea for political advantage.

At the Pentagon, Eisenhower’s old friends among the Joint Chiefs were hardly less furious than the President. “Ike was well informed on all aspects of the Korean War and the delicacy of the armistice negotiations,” recalled Omar Bradley. “He knew very well that he could achieve nothing by going to Korea.”

In the final days of the campaign, Truman was still going strong. A local reporter in Iowa noted that the President “never looked more fit or pleased with the rigorous job of ‘giving ‘em hell.’ ”

But with his dramatic promise to go to Korea, Eisenhower had decided the election, as Truman seemed to know. “Roger, we may be up against more than we can control,” he told his press secretary.

The Eisenhower victory was overwhelming—he carried all but nine of forty-eight states, including Stevenson’s Illinois and Truman’s Missouri, his percentage of the popular vote was bigger than any Democratic victory since Roosevelt in 1936—and the issue that cut deepest was Korea. But with his radiant smile, the unequaled place he held in the affections of the people, Eisenhower had also proven an exceptional candidate. His popularity had made him all but impregnable. And prevalent as the feeling may have been that a change was due in Washington after so long a Democratic reign, it was clearly an Eisenhower, not a Republican, triumph. In Congress the Republicans barely gained control. Their margin in the Senate was one seat.

As Truman would comment privately, probably no one could have beaten Eisenhower in 1952. That some observers, including the Kansas City Star, were saying that he, Truman, had done Stevenson more harm than good left him feeling deeply hurt.

He sent Eisenhower his congratulations and offered him use of the Independence to fly to Korea, but not without adding, “if you still desire to go to Korea,” a final partisan jab that not surprisingly infuriated Eisenhower, who declined the offer.

Eisenhower flew to Korea by military plane and under greatest security at the end of November. For three days he toured the front lines, then flew home having concluded only that the situation was intolerable.

“I sincerely wish he didn’t have to make the trip,” Truman had written in his diary on November 15. “It is an awful risk. If he should fail to come back I wonder what would happen. May God protect him.”

With no hesitation or the least sign of bitterness, Truman immediately invited Eisenhower to the White House to discuss the turnover of power. He was determined, as he wrote to the general, to guarantee “an orderly transfer of the business of the executive branch.” The gesture was unprecedented, and to those around Truman a vivid example of his ability to separate his personal feelings from the larger responsibilities of his office. He would do all he could to help the new President. He only wished someone had done as much for him.

Eisenhower arrived at the White House just before two o’clock, the afternoon of Tuesday, November 18, for a meeting first with Truman in his office, then an extended briefing in the Cabinet Room by Truman, his Cabinet and staff. All went very formally and without incident, though Eisenhower remained unsmiling and wary—“taciturn to the point of surliness,” thought Acheson. To Truman, Eisenhower was a man with a chip on his shoulder. He would remember Eisenhower’s “frozen grimness throughout.”

When Truman offered to give Eisenhower the big globe that Eisenhower had given him years before, and that for Truman had come to symbolize so much of the weight of his responsibilities, Eisenhower accepted it, though “not very graciously,” in Truman’s view. Nor from Eisenhower’s reactions during the briefing in the Cabinet Room did Truman feel the general truly comprehended the extent or complexity of the task that faced him. “I think all this went into one ear and out the other,” Truman recorded. Later, at his desk, talking with some of the staff, he would remark, “He’ll sit right here and he’ll say do this, do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

VI

Upstairs at the White House a death watch had begun. In the bedroom across from Truman’s study, ninety-year-old Madge Gates Wallace lay in a coma.

“The White House is quiet as a church,” Truman wrote in his diary at five in the morning, November 24. “I can hear the planes at the airport warming up. As always there is a traffic roar—sounds like wind and rain through the magnolias.

“Bess’s mother is dying across the hallway….”

She had never been an easy person to get along with. Even as a resident of the White House she had let it be known in small ways to some of the servants and staff that she still thought Harry Truman not quite good enough for her Bess. But Truman, who had never been known to say anything critical about her, even by inference, was greatly saddened. “Since last September Mother Wallace has been dying…but we’ve kept doctors and nurses with her day and night and have kept her alive. We had hoped—and still hope—she’ll survive until Christmas. Our last as President.” When she died, on December 5, he wrote, “She was a grand lady. When I hear these mother-in-law jokes I don’t laugh.”

For a while the mood overall seemed one of a death watch over his own presidency. New poll results showed that only 32 percent of the people approved of the way he was handling his job; and 43 percent thought it had been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Korea. But polls meant no more to him now than ever before. “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?” he wrote Privately, in an undated memo to himself. “What would Jesus Christ have preached if he’d taken a poll in Israel?…It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It’s right and wrong.”

To Ethel Noland, he wrote that no one knew what responsibilities the job entailed, except from experience—“It bears down on a country boy.” The people had never been better off, yet they wanted a change. He felt “repudiated.” The people were fine about supporting the President in time of crisis, he told his staff, recalling the first weeks of the Korean War, “but when there is a long row of corn to shuck, they want an easy way out.”

A new census report confirmed that gains in income, standards of living, education, and housing since Truman took office were unparalleled in American history. As Truman would report in his final State of the Union message to Congress, on January 7, 1953, 62 million Americans had jobs, which was a gain of 11 million jobs in seven years. Unemployment had all but disappeared. Farm income, corporate income, and dividends were at an all—time high. There had not been a failure of an insured bank in nearly nine years. His most important accomplishments, he knew, were in world affairs. Yet he could rightly point with pride to the fact that the postwar economic collapse that everyone expected never happened, that through government support (the GI Bill) 8 million veterans had been to college, that Social Security benefits had been doubled, the minimum wage increased. There had been progress in slum clearance, millions of homes built through government financing. Prices were higher, but incomes, for the most part, had risen even more. Real living standards were considerably higher than seven years earlier.

Truman had failed to do as much as he wanted for public housing, education, failed to establish the medical insurance program he knew the nation needed, but he had battled hard for these programs, set goals for the future. He had achieved less in civil rights than he had hoped, but he had created the epoch-making Commission on Civil Rights, ordered the desegregation of the armed services and the federal Civil Service, done more than any President since Lincoln to awaken American conscience to the issues of civil rights. Until the onset of the Korean War, he had also kept the budget in line, actually reduced the national debt.

With the establishment of a unified Defense Department, the National Security Council, and the CIA, he had changed the structure of power in Washington in ways surpassing even the sweeping measures of FDR. With the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission, he had kept the control of nuclear power in civilian hands.

Reminiscing with his staff, and occasionally with reporters, he talked of the accomplishments he was most proud of-aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Point Four (which, if not a massive program, had also set a goal for the future), the Berlin Airlift. And Korea, “the supreme test,” as he called it. The nation’s military power had been restored, the nation’s prestige was high.

In an extraordinary article in Look magazine the summer before, the historian Henry Steele Commager had written that by all normal measures the Truman administration had been one of almost uninterrupted, unparalleled success—a view that not only conflicted with popular opinion at the moment but with which the editors of the magazine specifically expressed their own disagreement.

“We cannot know what verdict history will pronounce upon it [the Truman record], but we can make a pretty good guess,” wrote Commager.

It will perhaps record the curious paradox that a man charged with being “soft” on communism has done more than any other leader in the Western world, with the exception of Churchill, to contain communism; that a man charged with mediocrity has launched a whole series of far-sighted plans for world reconstruction; that a man accused of being an enemy to private enterprise has been head of the Government during the greatest period of greatest prosperity for private enterprise; that a man accused of betraying the New Deal has fought one Congress after another for progressive legislation.

Reviewing the record—for his message to Congress, for his farewell broadcast—improved Truman’s spirits. He was in “high good humor,” “vigorous, hearty,” obviously happy as he worked to wind things up properly. He insisted on writing his farewell speech himself, and at the big table in the Cabinet Room one evening, the staff gathered, he read it aloud, stopping at the end of each page for their comments. Recounting the decision on Korea, he described how he had flown from Independence to Washington, the fateful Sunday in June 1950. “Flying back over the flatlands of the Middle West,” he read, “I had a lot of time to think.” Roger Tubby suggested he make it “rich flatlands”—““rich flatlands” would sound better, Tubby said. “The parts of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio that I flew over are not rich, Roger,” Truman replied. Plain “flatlands” it remained.

Pictures came down from his office walls. His desk was cleared of knickknacks, clocks, everything personal. Packing boxes lined the halls of the West Wing, as painters moved from room to room. Already he was making plans for his presidential library. Some four hundred steel file cabinets filled with his private and presidential papers had been shipped to Missouri. When his old friend Senator Kilgore came by for a last visit, Truman told him that if he had known there would be so much work in leaving, he would have run again.

Questioned whether he wanted to live in Washington, Truman said no. Asked about his future plans, he said he had none as yet.

He was “full of bounce” at his last press conference—his 324th—and applauded lustily at the end by some three hundred reporters. There were farewell letters to write. “You have been my good right hand,” he wrote to Dean Acheson.

Certainly no man is more responsible than you for pulling together the people of the free world, and strengthening their will and their determination to be strong and free.

I would place you among the very greatest of the Secretaries of State this country has had. Neither Jefferson nor Seward showed more cool courage and steadfast judgment.

There was a last meeting with the Cabinet, a final session with his staff, a round of farewell dinners. The closer inauguration day drew, the happier Truman became. “Why, you’d have thought the President won the election the way he acts,” the White House valet, Arthur Prettyman, told a reporter for the Washington Post.

Bennett Clark, Louis Johnson, Clark Clifford, and Senator—elect John F. Kennedy, among others, came to say goodbye. A select few reporters and writers were given the chance for a final, private interview. He felt much as he had when he was heading home from France after World War I, not knowing what the future held in store for him, Truman told Tony Leviero of The New York Times.

The critic and author John Mason Brown, who came and went several times, was surprised to find Truman looking “anything but old” and in “the most benevolent of valedictory moods,” gentle, self-possessed.

“In personality, conversation, and manner he bore no resemblance, even coincidental, to the quick-to-anger or the “pour-it-on Harry” of the whistle-stop tours….

Whenever I saw him, Truman was unfailingly equable and considerate of everyone on every level who worked with him or came to see him. The dreadful responsibilities he still bore, the appalling daily schedule which continued to be his, the abuse that had been heaped upon him, the annoyances of moving, the pangs of farewell, the drastically changed life that would soon face him, the uncertainties of his own future, and the verdict of history-none of these disturbed him.

The President’s physical and mental “resilience,” wrote Brown, was incredible. In fact, Truman, at sixty-eight, was leaving office in better health than when he came in in 1945 and better than any departing President, since Theodore Roosevelt left the White House at age fifty in 1909.

Churchill arrived for a farewell call at the West Wing and to host a dinner for “Harry” at the British Embassy. Considerably more spry than on his last visit, Churchill was in “rollicking form” and Truman hugely enjoyed his company.

From Pennsylvania Avenue now, the White House was all but obscured behind the wooden grandstands set up for Eisenhower’s inauguration.

Truman’s farewell address was delivered from his desk in the Oval Office by radio and television the night of Thursday, January 15, 1953, at 10:30 Washington time. It was a speech without rhetorical flourishes or memorable epigrams and it was superb, Truman at his best. In what it forecast concerning the Cold War, it was more extraordinary than could possibly have been understood at the time. He was clear, simple, often personal, but conveying overall a profound sense of the momentous history of the times, the panoramic changes reshaping the world, and the part that he, inevitably, had had to play since that desolate day when he was summoned to the White House and told of Roosevelt’s death. It was not a nostalgic farewell. He hated to think he was writing a valedictory, he had said privately beforehand. “I’m not through. I’m just starting.”

“Next Tuesday,” he began, “General Eisenhower will be inaugurated as President of the United States. A short time after the new President takes office, I will be on the train going back home to Independence, Missouri. I will once again be a plain, private citizen of this great Republic. That is as it should be….”

Four years earlier, in his inaugural address, his emphasis had been on the world—democracy looking outward to the world. Now, reviewing his full time as President, he again struck the same theme. His very first decision as President, he reminded his audience, had been to go forward with the United Nations. He recalled the German surrender, his meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, the first atomic explosion in the New Mexico desert, his decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan—all this, as he said, within a little more than four months. He did not say, as he could have, that no President in history had had to face so many important problems in so brief a time, or found it necessary to make so many momentous decisions so quickly or with such little preparation. What he said was that the greatest part of a President’s responsibilities was making decisions. A President had to decide. “That’s his job.”

Yet it was not for the decisions of his first months in office that he would be remembered, Truman speculated.

I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the Cold War began to overshadow our lives.

I have had hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle…. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb.

But when history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can win it….

The decision to go into Korea, he said, was the most important of his time in office. Korea was the turning point of the Cold War. Whereas free nations had failed to meet the test before—failed to stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the Nazi takeover in Austria and Czechoslovakia—“this time we met the test.” Yet the horrific potential of modern war had not been allowed to get out of hand. That was what was so important to understand. The issue was world peace in the nuclear age.

In his State of the Union message of the week before, which he had sent to Congress rather than delivering personally before a joint session, Truman had reported that in recent thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok Island in the Pacific, “we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy,” which was correctly understood to mean that the age of the H-bomb had arrived. The President who had ushered in the atomic bomb in 1945 was departing in 1953 at the start of a new era of destructive power “dwarfing,” as he reported to Congress, “the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

His intent in Korea, he now said, was to prevent World War III. “Starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable….”

How then would the Cold War end, he asked. How and when?

He offered a simple forecast, a long-range prediction that, at heart, was a statement of faith. His whole life Truman had been moved primarily by faith. Now in this last chance to talk to the country, in his attempt to read the history of the future, he trusted again to an unwavering faith. To millions who listened then, it seemed a striking expression of the best instincts of America. Read many years later, in the light of what happened at the end of the Cold War, it would seem utterly extraordinary in its prescience. He appeared to know even then the essence of what in fact would transpire, and, more importantly, why.

As the free world grows stronger, more united, more attractive to men on both sides of the Iron Curtain—and as the Soviet hopes for easy expansion are blocked—then there will have to come a time of change in the Soviet world. Nobody can say for sure when that is going to be, or exactly how it will come about, whether by revolution, or trouble in the satellite states, or by a change inside the Kremlin.

Whether the Communist rulers shift their policies of their own free will—or whether the change comes about in some other way—I have not a doubt in the world that a change will occur.

I have a deep and abiding faith in the destiny of free men. With patience and courage, we shall some day move on into a new era….

He was “glad the whole world will have a chance to see how simply and how peacefully our American system transfers the vast power of the Presidency….” Looking back at his time in office, he said, he had no regrets, and he thanked the people for their support.

When Franklin Roosevelt died, I felt there must be a million men better qualified than I, to take up the Presidential task. But the work was mine to do, and I had to do it. And I have tried to give it everything that was in me….

Good night and God bless you all.

The speech, indeed Truman’s whole handling of his departure, was praised on all sides. The speech was the finest of his presidency, it was said; he had finished strong. Walter Lippmann, who had been so consistently critical for years, wrote that

in the manner of his going Mr. Truman has been every inch the President, conscious of the great office and worthy of it.

His farewell messages are those of the man of whom it can fairly be said that he had many opponents and few enemies, that he had many more who wished him well and liked him than he had political supporters. He was often enough angry himself, and it was not hard to become angry with him. But neither he nor his critics and opponents were able to keep on being angry. For when he lost his temper, it was a good temper that he was losing. He has the good nature of a good man, and with his wife and daughter who are universally respected and liked, there is no bitter after-taste as the Truman family leave the White House.

Inauguration day was as sunny as it had been four years earlier, only warmer, with blue skies and again tremendous crowds. The ceremonies for Dwight David Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth President of the United States and the first Republican to hold the office in twenty years, went smoothly.

Up early, Truman spent an hour or so winding up odds and ends in his office and saying goodbye to the secretarial staff and Secret Service agents. Relaxed, exuding good cheer, he popped in and out of the other offices. “Looks mighty bare in here,” he said. He was wearing the formal gray-striped trousers and Oxford gray coat that had been decided on as the inaugural attire. Many of the staff had brought their children to see him and say goodbye. At 10:30 there was a small reception for the Cabinet and their wives in the Red Room, as Truman waited for the President-elect to arrive.

The papers had been making much of a presidential hat crisis. Without consulting Truman, Eisenhower had announced he would be wearing a homburg, instead of the traditional top hat. So what would Truman wear, it was wondered? He had no wish to have his last quarrel over a hat, Truman told his staff. He would wear a homburg.

Further speculation had followed over whether the Eisenhowers would call on the President and First Lady before Inauguration Day, as was customary. Truman’s hopes, it was said, “remained touchingly, almost boyishly high” that the tradition would be honored, and when the Eisenhowers declined an invitation to lunch, he felt insulted. Reportedly the general did not wish to enter the house until he was President. When, at 11:30, the Eisenhowers arrived at the North Portico, to start the drive to the Capitol, they refused to come in for a cup of coffee, but sat in the car waiting. Only when the Trumans appeared did they step out of the car to greet them.

“It was a shocking moment,” recalled CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid, who was on the porch close by. “Truman was gracious and he had just been snubbed. He showed his superiority by what he did.”

From the way the two men looked as they drove off in the big Open Lincoln, J. B. West remembered, “I was glad I wasn’t in that car.”

“I ride with Ike in car No. 1 along with Joe Martin and Styles Bridges. Bess and Margie ride with Mrs. Ike,” Truman recorded in his diary. “Conversation is general—on the crowd, the pleasant day, the orderly turnover, etc.”

Later accounts of what was said would differ, but both Truman and Eisenhower would recall an exchange over the presence of Eisenhower’s only son, Major John Eisenhower, at the inaugural ceremonies. Eisenhower asked Truman who had ordered John back from Korea, and according to Eisenhower, Truman said simply, “I did.” But according to Truman what he said was, “The President thought it was right and proper for your son to witness the swearing-in of his father to the Presidency.” In any event, three days later, Eisenhower would send Truman a gracious letter thanking him for “the very many courtesies you extended to me and mine during the final stages of your Administration…I especially want to thank you for your thoughtfulness in ordering my son home from Korea…and even more especially for not allowing either him or me to know that you had done so.”

Truman had been President for seven years, nine months, for 2,841 days, and at noon it was over. He tried to pay attention to Eisenhower’s inaugural address, he later wrote, but his mind was on other things.

Less than half an hour later, he was being driven in a closed limousine back from the Capitol toward Georgetown when at 7th and D streets the driver stopped for a red light. It was the first time that a car in which Truman was riding had had to stop for a traffic light since 1945.

A farewell luncheon for the Trumans, before their train, had been arranged at the Achesons’ home. It was to be a small, private party for the Cabinet, White House aides, and a few close friends, but as the car swung into P Street a crowd of several hundred people, massed in front of the red-brick house, set up a cheer. Truman was astonished. “The street in front of Dean’s house,” he wrote, “was full of people who cheered as if I were coming in instead of going out.”

Swallowing hard, he told them, “I appreciate this more than any enthusiastic meeting I attended as President, Vice President and Senator. I’m just plain Mr. Truman now, a private citizen.”

Elsewhere in the city, as the Eisenhower inaugural parade filled Pennsylvania Avenue, others were telephoning friends to say that perhaps, even with the city tied up in traffic, they ought to try to get down to Union Station so that at least someone would be there to see the Trumans off.

Margaret would describe the lunch at the Achesons’ as “an absolutely wonderful affair full of jokes and laughter and a few tears.” By the time the party broke up, the crowd in P Street reached the length of the block. Traffic was backed up far beyond. When the Trumans went for their train, thousands were at the station to see him, wave to him, cheer and call, “So long, Harry!” “Good luck, Harry!” People pressed forward reaching for his hand.

The Ferdinand Magellan, provided as a courtesy by the new President, had been attached to a regular B&O train bound for Missouri. The police formed a flying wedge to get the Trumans through the crowd.

Old friends, Democratic senators, Supreme Court justices, members of the Cabinet, generals and ambassadors, piled aboard to shake Truman’s hand one more time. “There’s the best friend in the world,” Acheson said above the noise, when a reporter tapped him on the arm. “There’s nothing like that man.”

He kept smiling, waving. Bess looked radiant.

“I can’t adequately express my appreciation for what you are doing. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred,” Truman said from the rear platform. Then, chopping his hands in the air with the familiar gesture, he said with a grin, “And that’s just what I intend to do!”

At 6:30, with the crowd singing “Auld Lang Syne,” the train began pulling slowly out of the station, until it was beyond the lighted platform. It had been a long road from Independence to the White House, and now Truman was going home.

“Crowd at Harper’s Ferry…and it was reported to me at every stop all night long,” he recorded. “Same way across Indiana and Illinois.”

Part Six

Back Home

18

Citizen Truman

Been going over a book on what former Presidents did in times past. Maybe I can get some ideas.

—TRUMAN TO DEAN ACHESON, APRIL 1953

I

For as far back nearly as he could remember, Truman had held to the ideal of the mythical Roman hero Cincinnatus, the patriot farmer who assumes command in his country’s hour of peril, then returns to the plow. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be like Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday,” the farmer from Grandview had written long ago to Bessie Wallace. It was an ideal upon which the nation had been founded. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, in their inaugural procession through the Rotunda of the Capitol, had passed by John Trumbull’s immense painting of George Washington as Cincinnatus—Washington resigning his commission to the Congress as commander-in-chief of the Army, Washington, farmer and hero, turning away from power in 1783. Now, in 1953, having become considerably more than constable, having turned by his own choice from the most power ever vested in a single human being in all history until then, Truman would note in his diary that Cincinnatus knew not only when but how to lay down power.

It was the common belief in America, Truman wrote, that anyone could become President, and then, when the time was up, go back to being “just anybody again.” Recalling his years in the White House, he would say, “I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I would go back to.” In actual practice, however, it was not so simple. A cartoon in the Saturday Review showed a small boy with glasses and a book under his arm, a boy very like Truman had been, walking beside a friend who said, “O.K., so you grow up to be President, and you even get reelected, that’s still only eight years. What do you do with the rest of your life?” With his pen, Truman scrawled boldly across the bottom, “God only knows!!!”

He had traveled home from Washington unprotected by Secret Service agents and there were to be none watching over him. He had come home without salary or pension. He had no income or support of any kind from the federal government other than his Army pension of $112.56 a month. He was provided with no government funds for secretarial help or office space, not a penny of expense money, and while he and Bess had managed to put aside part of his $100,000-a-year salary as President during his second term, primarily in government bonds, it was in all probability a modest amount. Estimates at the time ranged as high as a quarter of a million dollars, but there was no evidence to support such a figure, or any sum. In fact, it is known that Truman had been forced to take out a loan at the National Bank in Washington in his last weeks as President, to tide him over, though the amount was never disclosed.

With his brother and sister, he had inherited Martha Ellen Truman’s farm land at Grandview, and while official disposition of the old house at 219 North Delaware had yet to be made, he and Bess would soon become joint owners. Certainly, as things were, there could be no extravagant living. In effect they were land-rich only. The estate of the supposedly well-to-do Madge Wallace, not including the house, totaled all of $33,543.60, which after being divided four ways among Bess and her brothers, left Bess with a cash inheritance of $8,385.90. Indeed, among the reasons why they had come back to Independence and the old house was that financially they had little other choice.

The town buzzed with speculation over where the Trumans might live now, whether they would stay on in “the old Wallace place,” which to many seemed unlikely for someone who had been President of the United States. “Rumors have it that they will buy a fine home and live in Kansas City,” wrote Sue Gentry in the Examiner. “Other rumors predict they will build a home on farm land Mr. Truman owns at Grandview, a part of his old home place.” A local attorney and old friend of the family, Rufus Burrus, had picked out an elegant house in a new section of town that he thought perfect, much more suitable for a former President. But all such talk was beside the point, finances notwithstanding. The Trumans had no intention of living anywhere else, no interest in living somewhere warmer or less expensive or more glamorous.

Herbert Hoover, the country’s one other surviving former President, was a man of wealth who lived in style at the Waldorf Towers in New York. Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, none of those who had faced the prospect of being a former President since the start of the century, had had worries about money; none but Calvin Coolidge who, downcast over the death of a son and in poor health, lived less than three years after leaving office. Theodore Roosevelt had gone storming off to Africa to hunt big game; Taft became a professor of law at Yale, then Chief Justice of the United States. Wilson with his wealthy second wife, retired in style to a twenty-two-room house on S Street in Washington and lived a few more years in semi-seclusion. For his part, Truman had neither wealth to sustain him nor any particular prospects at the moment, no plans for future employment. His only intention, as he said, was to do nothing—accept no position, lend his name to no organization or transaction—that would exploit or “commercialize” the prestige and dignity of the office of the President.

He had had a number of offers already from undisclosed organizations for jobs paying $100,000 a year or more, and calling for little commitment of his time. A letter from a Miami real estate developer inviting him to become “chairman, officer, or stockholder, at a figure of not less than $100,000” would turn up later in his files, but what the other propositions were is not clear, though none apparently was from a corporation or organization of particular renown. In any event, he had turned them all down and would continue to do so. His name was not for sale. He would take no fees for commercial endorsements or for lobbying or writing letters or making phone calls. He would accept no “consulting fees,” nor any gifts that might appear as a product endorsement on his part. Offered a new Toyota, by Toyota’s American public relations firm, as a demonstration of improved good feelings between Japan and America, he flatly refused. Moreover, he wrote in response, there was no possibility of his ever driving a foreign car of any make. He believed in driving cars made in America.

He liked to say he was just a plain American citizen again. It confirmed his democratic philosophy. It pleased people and pleased him. But the difficulties in practice were more than he had anticipated. “I still don’t feel like a completely private citizen and I don’t suppose I ever will,” he told a reporter. “It’s still almost impossible to do as other people do, even though I’ve tried. You can’t always be as you want to be after you’ve been under those bright lights.”

Further, he missed the bright lights. He missed the pace of the presidency, felt strange without the constant pressures. He missed the people terribly. In thanking Dean Acheson for the farewell luncheon, he wrote that he had never been to such a party “where everybody seemed to be having the best time they ever had.” Then he added, “I hope we will never lose contact.”

The cheering throng that welcomed the Trumans home at the Independence depot the night of their return exceeded all expectations. Perhaps ten thousand people were waiting in the cold when the train came round the bend at 9:03, an hour late because of other crowds at earlier stops across Missouri. Truman was astonished, overjoyed. “Well, Harry, this makes it all worth it,” Bess said to him.

They had arrived the night of Wednesday, January 21. The morning after, asked by NBC correspondent Ray Scherer what was the first thing he planned to do, Truman said he was going to “carry the grips up to the attic,” a remark that would become famous. (Scherer, like Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press, had accompanied Truman from Washington on the train, as had Roger Tubby.) But in another hour, Truman was on his way out the door, heading downtown to Kansas City in a state highway patrol car, riding up front with Sergeant Art Bell, a former Battery D “boy” who had been assigned by the governor as a temporary driver. Truman went to see his new offices, four corner rooms on the eleventh floor of the Federal Reserve Bank Building, at 10th and Grand. The faithful Rose Conway was already on duty sorting through several thousand letters, mostly expressions of praise and gratitude, all of which Truman felt obliged to answer.

There was no official welcome in Kansas City, but this seemed to bother him not at all. When, with Roger Tubby, he walked five blocks to the Muehlebach for lunch with his brother Vivian, and few passers-by took notice, Truman kept on smiling and talking as though all were perfectly fine.

The following day the weather turned foul, with a sudden drop in temperature—down to the 20s—accompanied by a biting north wind, sleet, and snow. Ignoring the weather, Truman set off for Grandview, to look over the site for the library he planned to build. Roger Tubby had arranged for some of the local press to join him and the group made a memorable picture, the old President, his collar up against the wind, tramping across the snow-covered fields, talking rapidly of his childhood and of his $1,500,000 project and what it would mean to the young students “who will take over the destiny of our country,” while a half-dozen reporters, his former White House press secretary, and one-time comrade-in-arms Sergeant Bell in his state police uniform, all tried their best to keep up and stay warm.

The library was the “big interest now.” Truman’s papers, for the time being, were stored at the county courthouse in Kansas City. Since the time of George Washington, it had been commonly understood that a President’s papers were his own personal property, and that he was free to do with them as he wished. The Franklin Roosevelt Library had been established at Hyde Park, New York, the first so-called “Presidential Library,” on the grounds of the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson, but Roosevelt had not lived to take part in the project. Truman, before leaving office, had sent George Elsey out from Washington to look over the farm with his brother Vivian and architect Edward Neild. Vivian had led them to the spot where he thought the library ought to go: a low-lying, swampy corner close to the railroad tracks. When Elsey and Neild pointed to a more attractive site on a high rise with views in all directions, Vivian objected. That was good land, Vivian said, and he saw no reason to waste good land on “any old dang library.”

Truman had already made some sketches. He wanted the building to look like his Grandfather Solomon Young’s house, the big house of his own childhood memories. Truman had made a rough drawing of the house as best he could remember it.

“A cold wind whipping around us,” Roger Tubby would record in his diary, “and he talks of the library. ‘This America of ours…we look out over the prairies, envision cities or universities and lo, they arise!’ ”

The former President, reported the Examiner, seemed to enjoy the brisk weather.

A few days later, on a Sunday, he set off early, before it was fully light, on his first walk through town, free of Sergeant Bell or bodyguards of any kind for the first time in more than seven years. He covered some fifteen blocks, rounding Jackson Square en route, and nothing he had done thus far, he later wrote, had given such a striking sense of being on his own at last. “More than any other single thing, this marked the abrupt change in my life.”

Speaking at a huge welcome-home banquet at the auditorium of the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, Truman said simply and from the heart, “There never is and never can be anything like coming back home.”

He bought Bess a new car, a four-door black Chrysler with white-wall tires, and started driving himself again. As sightseers and the curious kept coming around the house almost daily, he decided not to have the iron fence taken down. Often whole delegations—Girl Scouts, tourists—stood outside looking through the fence. “Is this where Truman lives?” a man called to him at seven one morning from a car at the curb.

He kept to the routine of the morning walks, kept up with the mail pouring into the office in Kansas City—72,000 pieces in the first two weeks alone. He refused to be idle. His name was painted in black block letters on the door marked 1107. He arrived regularly before nine each morning.

Nearly anyone who wished could come into the office to shake hands with him or visit. As he told a friend, “You don’t need an appointment to see me now.” Yet he was worse than alone, his friend Tom Evans would remember. “He was utterlylost. After all those years in the White House with somebody around to do everything for him, he didn’t know how to order a meal in a restaurant. He didn’t know when to tip. He didn’t even know how to call a cab and pay for it.” But as Evans also remembered, Truman never said a word of complaint.

At home the house seemed “quiet and too big,” with only Bess and Vietta Garr, who went to her own home after dinner. Every night, he and Bess would call Margaret in New York.

By early February, less than a month since the return, it began to look as though their financial worries were over. He was about to sign a book contract for a “fantastic sum,” Truman wrote to Acheson, and on February 12, the press reported that he had sold the exclusive worldwide rights to his memoirs to Life magazine for an undisclosed amount. In fact, the figure was $600,000—truly a fantastic sum in 1953—which, by a contract negotiated for him by Sam Rosenman, was to be paid in installments over five years.

At the end of March, he, Bess, and Margaret went off on a dream vacation trip to Hawaii, traveling first to San Francisco as the guests of Averell Harriman in his private railroad car. From San Francisco, they sailed on the President Cleveland, of the American Presidents Line, down the bay and out under the Golden Gate Bridge. Of the morning they arrived off Oahu, Truman wrote: “Diamond Head and then Honolulu with the Pali in the background, rainbows, clouds, sunshine and a beautiful city all in one scene.”

It was one of the most enchanting experiences of their lives. Hawaii was “Paradise,” and they stayed a month, as the guests of Ed Pauley at his estate on little Coconut Island, in Kaneohe Bay, on the windward side of Oahu. Long a champion of statehood for the islands, Truman was given an effusive Hawaiian welcome from the moment the ship landed. Government and military officials, the press, a dozen different reception committees rushed on board to escort him ashore. “[They] covered us with leis and smothered us with questions and flash bulbs.” He accepted an honorary degree at the University of Hawaii, toured Oahu, and on a flying visit to the big island of Hawaii in a Navy C-47, soared over the saddle between the snow-capped volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. When, on the return flight to Oahu, he spotted a school of whales off Maui, the Navy pilots told him it meant good luck. He swam, loafed, read, and thoroughly enjoyed “the wonderful people” of the islands…And then the month was over and he was home again at North Delaware Street, Where the house was still quiet and too big.

He bought another car, this one for himself, a two-tone green Dodge coupe, to drive to his office. He loved cars no less than ever and was as fussy as ever about their appearance.

“This morning at 7 A.M., I took off for my morning walk,” begins a diary entry from that spring.

I’d just had the Dodge car washed a day or so ago and it looked as if it had never been used.

The weather man said it would rain so I decided to put the washed car in the garage and use the black car which was already spotted and dusty. My sister-in-law, watching me make the change, which required some maneuvering due to the location of several cars in the driveway, wanted to know if I might be practicing for a job in a parking station!

He knew he must get started on his memoirs, but dreaded the prospect. Hawaii had made him “lazy as hell.” He wished he had never agreed to do the book.

On his walk that same spring morning he stopped to watch a construction project, the widening of Truman Road.

A shovel (automatic) and a drag line were working as well as some laboring men digging in the old fashioned way. The boss or the contractor was looking on and I asked him if he didn’t need a good strawboss. He took a look at me and then watched the work a while and then took another look and broke out in a broad smile and said, “Oh yes! You are out of a job aren’t you.”

He felt a constant need to be on the move. So in the heat of June, he and Bess started for Washington in the new Chrysler. He wanted to give the car “a real tryout,” he said. Bess was delighted. Friends and family tried to talk them out of going. He and Bess had not traveled on their own by automobile in nine years, not since their return from the Chicago convention in 1944. Yet off they went, making an early start, Truman at the wheel. Wasn’t it good to be on their own again, she said. They got as far as Hannibal before stopping for lunch at a roadside restaurant, only to find how difficult being on their own was going to be. As Truman later wrote to his old Army friend, Vic Householder, “Everything went well until a couple of old-time County Judges came in and saw me. They said, ‘Why there’s Judge Truman’—and then every waitress and all the customers had to shake hands and have autographs.”

At Decatur, Illinois, 150 miles later, Truman pulled into a Shell station where he had often stopped for gas in years past, traveling to and from Washington. An elderly attendant who kept studying him while filling the tank, finally inquired if he wasn’t Senator Truman.

I admitted the charge [Truman continued in his letter to Householder] and asked him if he could direct me to a good motel in town. We’d never stayed at one and wanted to try it out and see if we liked it. Well he directed us but he told everybody in town about it. The Chief of Police got worried about us and sent two plain clothes men and four uniformed police to look after us. They took us to dinner and to breakfast the next morning and escorted us out of town with a sigh of relief.

Bess insisted he keep to the 50-mile-an-hour speed limit. But going “so slowly,” as he said, meant others passing had a chance to look them over. “Hi, Harry!” people shouted as they went by. “There goes our incognito,” he told her. At the hotel where they stopped in Wheeling, West Virginia, the lobby was jammed with reporters and photographers.

But there was no doubt that he loved the attention. When, at Frederick, Maryland, he saw several familiar faces from the Washington press corps waiting in a car to escort him into the city, he greeted them like long-lost brothers. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he exclaimed. Pulling up at the Mayflower Hotel, he stepped from the car in his shirtsleeves to be immediately surrounded by a crowd of more reporters and photographers and hotel employees, all trying to shake his hand. He was there only to have a good time, he said, his face beaming in the late afternoon sunshine—“carefree as a schoolboy in summer,” according to the account in the Post the next morning. To all questions concerning Congress, the President, the Korean War, Truman said, “No comment, no comment, no comment.”

A steady stream of old friends, members of his Cabinet, Democratic senators, members of Congress came to call. It was “like a dream,” Truman later wrote. “The suite we stayed in at the Mayflower could have been the White House…. Everything seemed just as it used to be—the taxi drivers shouting hello along the line of my morning walks, the dinners at night with the men and women I had worked with for years, the conferences, the tension, the excitement, the feeling of things happening and going to happen….”

And the “good time” continued over the next weekend, when he and Bess drove on to New York and checked in at the Waldorf-Astoria. With Margaret they dined at the Twenty-one Club and saw Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town at the Winter Garden. As they came into the theater, the whole audience rose and applauded.

Cab drivers in New York did not just call to him, they pulled to the curb and jumped out to shake his hand. He was still their man, he was assured. “If you’d go again tomorrow, Harry, you’d win.”

Heading home for Missouri, “perking along” on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Truman was signaled to pull over by the police. According to what State Trooper Manly Stampler told reporters, “Mr. Truman” had twice cut in front of vehicles trying to pass him. “He was very nice about it and promised to be more careful.” But according to Truman, who had never had a traffic violation, the young man had only wanted to shake hands.

It was his last venture with Bess on their own by automobile. Thereafter, they would go by train, plane, or ship.

On March 5, in Moscow, after nearly three decades in power, Joseph Stalin had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age seventy-three. Ten days later, Stalin’s successor, Georgi M. Malenkov, declared in a speech that there was no issue between Moscow and Washington that could not be resolved by peaceful means. Two weeks after Malenkov’s speech, the Communists in Korea suddenly agreed to an exchange of wounded prisoners and said that this should lead to a “peaceful settlement” of the entire prisoner issue. Then in the final week of July, as Truman, in the heat of high summer in Missouri, was beginning work on his memoirs, an armistice was signed at Panmunjom; the Korean War was over.

It was an armistice with voluntary repatriation, and the dividing line between North and South Korea was to remain the 38th parallel. So President Eisenhower had achieved essentially the very same settlement that had eluded Truman—a “no-win” agreement, as Truman’s Republican critics would have called it. As Senator Paul Douglas observed, Truman “would have been flayed from one end of Washington to the other if he had accepted the present agreement.”

Stalin’s death had unquestionably had an effect; so also had Eisenhower’s threats to use newly developed tactical nuclear weapons in Korea.

The war had caused terrible bloodshed and destruction—perhaps as many as 2 million civilian dead according to some estimates, 4 million casualties overall. The Americans killed in battle numbered 33,629 and another 20,617 Americans died of other causes.

To many Americans at home, it seemed the war had resolved nothing. But to Truman, as to a great many others, it was a major victory for the United States and the United Nations. Military aggression had been stopped. The Communist advance in Asia had been checked; South Korea and possibly Japan as well had been saved from what had seemed an inexorable “Red tide.” The United Nations had been shown to be something more than a world debating society. “As for the United States [wrote The New York Times], the action in Korea represented something of a regaining of our national soul and conscience. We did a difficult and costly thing because we thought it was right.”

Asked for his opinion about the armistice settlement, Eisenhower said simply, “The war is over, and I hope my son is coming home soon.” Truman said nothing for attribution. Though undoubtedly and understandably resentful that his successor had achieved what he himself had failed to attain, and without resulting political rancor, he kept silent. Privately he thanked God it was ended. “Of course I’m happy about the truce in Korea,” he wrote to a friend. “It doesn’t make any difference about the credit for holding back Soviet aggression. The fact that the shooting has stopped is a very satisfactory one.”

The following October, when Eisenhower came to Kansas City for a speech to the Future Farmers of America, and was staying at the Muehlebach, Truman tried to reach him at the hotel by phone, to say he would like to drop by to pay his respects, but was told by an aide that the President’s schedule was too full, a meeting would be impossible. Truman was shattered. In explanation, Eisenhower’s office later said that whoever answered the phone must have thought it was a crank call.

II

With the task of the memoirs that he had been putting off finally under way, and with his efforts to launch the library, Truman found himself more occupied than he had ever anticipated. “The book is doing fine but what a slave it’s made of me,” he would report to Dean Acheson in the fall.

Of all the presidents until then, only Herbert Hoover had written his own story in his lifetime. (“How much is lost to us because so few Presidents have told their own stories,” Truman was to say in the preface to his own work.) John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk had written extensively about their time in office, but in their private diaries. Ulysses S. Grant, dying of cancer, had spent his final days laboring heroically on his memoirs as a means to provide financial security for his family, but Grant chose not to include his shadowed years in the White House. Even Theodore Roosevelt, with his sense of history and of his own importance to history, was oddly superficial when describing his presidency in his popular autobiography. Nor had Herbert Hoover, in telling his story, been obliged to recount anything approaching the world-shaking tumult, the watershed history, of the Truman years. The closest thing to what Truman would be attempting was Winston Churchill’s magisterial history of World War II, which had also appeared first in Life, and against which, as Truman knew, whatever he produced was bound to be compared.

“I’m not a writer!” those working with him on the project were to hear him say many times. He was not after their sympathy, only stating what he saw as the heart of the problem. Before the task was finished a full dozen people would be involved.

The first called in to help were William Hillman and David Noyes, both of whom had served on the White House staff as speechwriters and whose loyalty to Truman verged on adoration. Hillman, a hulking veteran newspaper correspondent, had already published a eulogizing Truman portrait called Mr. President, a book of photographs with text compiled mainly from Truman quotes and selections from his private papers. Noyes was in advertising in California, a short, wiry, talkative man, who had worked on the 1948 campaign and was best known for initiating the controversial scheme to send Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow. His claim to have been one of Truman’s key advisers was greatly exaggerated.

Promising to “protect” Truman from the publisher, Hillman and Noyes set up a working procedure for the memoirs. They offered advice and they came and went, flying in and out of Kansas City, as need be, every month or so, while a paid staff of three was established in Room 1002, on the floor below Truman at the Federal Reserve Bank Building. The plan was for Truman to “talk” the book. For months, he talked to a recording machine supplied by Life—a device he hated—responding to questions put to him by the hour by a University of Southern California professor of journalism named Robert E. G. Harris. Meantime, two young research assistants checked all that Truman said against what was in the files. By late fall, more than 100,000 words had been transcribed, all beautifully typed and arranged in looseleaf notebooks. But there was very little in the way of an actual manuscript, and what Truman saw of this, he didn’t like. “Good God, what crap!” he scrawled across the top.

Professor Harris was dismissed, his place taken by another academic scholar, Morton Royce, a highly disorganized, excessively profane man, who continued on with the interviews, but ever so slowly, pressing Truman over and over for more complete and detailed answers, often returning to the same questions several times, and particularly about the atomic bomb. As a consequence, Truman grew extremely annoyed with Royce and the whole process.

The editor of Life, Ed Thompson, flew in from New York for a first look early in 1954. Truman had agreed to deliver 300,000 words by June 30, 1955. As it was, perhaps thirty-five pages of manuscript were ready. The raw material, Truman’s own recollections, Thompson thought “lively” and “honest.” But far greater progress was needed, and soon.

Morton Royce departed and two new writers were taken on, young Herbert Lee Williams, a doctoral candidate from the University of Missouri, and Francis H. Heller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas.

Williams would remember being astonished by the volume of official and private papers at hand:

The cream of the White House communications mix from 1945 to 1952 had been systematically ladled into 50 large metal file cabinets which now lined the walls of the eleventh-floor suite, Truman’s offices [upstairs]. In these were all of the personal and official correspondence of the President: transcripts of 2,003 public speeches and 324 press conferences; a multitude of inter-office memoranda and directives; minutes of countless executive sessions; copies of more than 31,000 dictated letters, plus handwritten notes to Mamma or sister Mary….

The first bundle of files I was given, to take down to 1002 where I was to digest the contents and regurgitate them in memoirs form, covered the entire lend-lease story, from the time that Truman inherited it from FDR….

Entering Truman’s office one morning in search of a reference book, Williams was also astonished to find the former President fixing himself a drink. (As Williams strongly disapproved of drinking, he would, as time went on, decline invitations to join Truman for lunch, which customarily began with “a little H_2O flavored with bourbon,” as Truman would say.)

As manuscript chapters began to emerge, they were reviewed page by page during lengthy sessions in Truman’s office, a good-sized room comfortably furnished with leather chairs, a flag, portraits of Jackson and Jefferson, and books across one wall. The windows faced west over a panoramic view of the city and the distant hills of Kansas. As someone on the staff read aloud, Truman would sit listening intently. “His approval or criticism was solicited almost paragraph by paragraph. The whole idea was to jog the memory of the man who had been there, to add the auto to the biography,” Williams would recall in an article somewhat vainly and inaccurately titled, “I Was Truman’s Ghost.” In fact, he was only a minor ghost among the several enlisted, and his participation was to be relatively brief.

As time went on, various members of Truman’s White House staff, as well as Dean Acheson, John Snyder, General Bradley, and others of Truman’s Cabinet would come to Kansas City to take part in these review sessions.

The man who had been rising early and going off to work every morning most of his long life had by now settled again into the old pattern. At the house on North Delaware the lights started coming on well before dawn, usually at 5:30, at the sound of the courthouse clock. His morning paper, the Kansas City Times, arrived shortly afterward, tossed over the iron fence from a passing car, and he would unlatch the front door and come down the porch steps in his shirtsleeves to retrieve the paper from the front walk.

About seven he would emerge again from the front door, in suit jacket and hat now, a walking cane in hand. He would go out the front gate—in turn unlocking, closing, and checking to see it was secure—then start off on his walk, a half hour tour that took him through the same neighborhoods, over much the same ground in memory, that he was covering in the memoirs. Across the street still was the little Victorian Noland house, occupied still by his Noland cousins, Ethel and Nellie. Rounding the corner from North Delaware, left onto Maple and heading east, “uptown” to the Square, he would pass the red-brick First Presbyterian Church where he and Bess had met in Sunday School. (She had golden curls and has, to this day, the most beautiful eyes, he was saying in the memoirs.) At the Square, Clinton’s drugstore was now Helzberg Jewelers, but looked not greatly different from when he had worked there so diligently as a boy (…mopping the floors, sweeping the sidewalk, and having everything shipshape when Mr. Clinton came in).

The courthouse, the “new” courthouse as his generation still called it, his courthouse, held sway over the Square no less than ever, its white cupola catching the morning sun ahead of the rest of the town. Tourists would ask which was his office, which were his windows. (The judges of these Missouri county courts are not judges in the usual sense, since the court is an administrative, not a judicial body….)

The town had greatly changed in the two decades since he had first gone to Washington. The town was still changing, growing. New sections of new houses seemed to spring up overnight. Traffic was heavier. The population was now past 40,000, more than five times what it had been when he was a boy. More and more, Independence was becoming a suburb of Kansas City. Yet the old part of town, the Square, the neighborhoods of his boyhood looked much like they always had, and he felt great affection for all of it.

Others who were up and about early often made an effort to say hello, to introduce themselves and shake his hand as he came down the sidewalk at his steady clip. “I always try to be as pleasant as I can,” he wrote in his diary. “They, of course, don’t know that I walk early to get a chance to think over things and get ready for work of the day.” If he didn’t know them, he usually knew something about someone they were related to or descended from, and these recollections always pleased him.

“Well, I went to Maple Ave., turned left ‘toward town’ and spoke to several people, turned south on Pleasant Street,” continues the diary account of one such morning.

After I’d passed the light at Lexington I met a young man, Frank A. Reynolds, who introduced himself as John Strother’s son-in-law. We talked a few minutes and I thought of the Strother family—one of the best old families in the County.

John was Democratic Committeeman from Blue Township (Independence) from the time I was road overseer in Washington Township until I went to Washington as U.S. Senator from Missouri. He was a grand man—but wouldn’t tell his age! He was my father’s generation and he always wanted to be young with the young men. He was a good lawyer and an honest one too.

Just as I started to leave Mr. Strother’s son-in-law—and there were other great Strothers: Sam, who was a pillar of the Democratic Party in Kansas City; a second generation Judge, Duvall, and many others—as I say, just as I started to walk again a car stopped across the street and the man jumped out and came over to shake hands and said, “I’m sure you can’t remember me—it’s been so long since you’ve seen me.” I did though. I told him whose son he is and who his grandfather was! Some feat for a man who has met millions of people.

He belonged to the Pugh family. His grandfather, Noah E. Pugh, was one fine man. He came out to Missouri in 1894 or 1895 and settled on my mother’s part of her father’s estate, 160 acres south east of the farm about three miles. Mr. Pugh had several sons and daughters older and younger than I. Conley Pugh was a few years older than I and was married to a nice Grandview girl when they were very young. It was a happy marriage and the man who stopped me is Conley’s oldest boy. He told me he had four children. It is remarkable indeed how time flies and makes you an old man whether you want to be or not.

His mother had never looked back, always forward, he liked to remind himself. It was part of her strength. With the work on his memoirs, and these daily tours through the old neighborhoods now after so many years, he was thinking more than ever of both parents.

He varied his route one day to another, but it hardly mattered. Whichever way he went was a walk through the past. The boyhood home at River and Waldo was still standing, as was the old house on South Crysler, near the depot. (When we moved to Independence in December 1890, my father bought a big house on South Crysler Street with several acres of land….)

There was to be only one chapter about his early life, taking him from boyhood to his return from France in 1919. But it was a part of the story only he could tell, for which there were no file drawers to search, and the words would be his.

(In the fall of 1892 Grover Cleveland was re-elected over Benjamin Harrison, who had defeated him in 1888. My father was very much elated by Cleveland’s victory. He rode a beautiful gray horse in the torchlight parade and decorated the weather vane on the tower at the north-east corner of the house with a flag and bunting. The weather vane was a beautiful gilded rooster.)

Once at the White House, a magazine writer had remarked to him that his father had been a failure. How could he be called a failure, he had answered, if his son became President of the United States.

During the half hour or so that he was gone from the house, at about 7:15, Vietta Garr would arrive by taxi at the side gate to begin fixing breakfast. The schedule rarely varied. He would return through the front gate at 7:30, not to reemerge until roughly 8:15, but from the back porch this time and carrying an aluminum briefcase, with the manuscript pages he had brought home the night before. He would head for the garage. Then the two-tone green Dodge would be seen backing cautiously out the driveway and off he would go, west down Truman Road, the Kansas City skyline dead ahead and on sunny mornings shining like an artist’s picture of America on the rise.

His regular parking space was in an open lot a block from the office. He would pay a dollar in advance and walk to the bank building. Entering in the lobby, he would tip his hat to the elevator operator, Kay Walker, and greet her by name. By 8:45, he was at his desk.

“I have been working on the opening chapter of my purported memoirs,” Truman wrote to Dean Acheson from the office on January 28, 1954, trying to get to the bottom of why he found the task so very difficult.

I have tried to place myself back into the position I was on April 12, 1945. I have read letters to my mother and sister, to my brother and cousins. I have read telegrams to and from Churchill and Roosevelt, to and from Stalin and Roosevelt. I’ve read memos I made of visits to the White House from April 12th back to July 1944. I’ve read Ike’s, Leahy’s, Churchill’s, Grew’s, Cordell Hull’s books. Memos from Hopkins, Stimson, Assist. and Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson; reports from Marshall, Eisenhower, King, Bradley. Communiqués of Teheran, Cairo, Casablanca, Quebec, Yalta, Byrnes’ book on it, etc., etc. ad lib and still I am living today….

So you see the past has always interested me for use in the present and I am bored to death with what I did and didn’t do nine years ago.

But Andrew Johnson, James Madison, even old Rutherford B. Hayes I’m extremely interested in as I am [in] King Henry IV of France, Margaret of Navarre, Charles V and Philip II of Spain and Charlie’s Aunt Margaret.

Wish to goodness I’d decided to spend my so called retirement putting Louis XIII, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu and five tubs of gold together instead of writing about me and my mistakes….

On St. Patrick’s Day, he wrote again to tell Acheson he was thinking still about the relationship between history and government. “Our tribal instinct has not been eliminated by science and invention. We, as individuals, haven’t caught up physically or ethically with the atomic age. Will we?”

Perhaps their grandchildren would do better, though, he added, in his case this remained a hypothetical statement. (Margaret as yet had shown no signs of getting married.)

He sensed a change in how the country regarded him and was heartened by it. “The tone of my mail has changed completely. It still comes in by the bushel but there’s hardly a mean one in two hundred….”

The increase in interest and appreciation at home in Independence was even more striking. Automobiles and sightseeing buses now cruised slowly by on North Delaware nearly all day. When Bess sent some of his clothes to her church rummage sale, word spread that one item, an overcoat, had been worn at Potsdam—a silly claim since the meeting at Potsdam had taken place in midsummer, but the coat brought a big price just the same. A sign at the depot now proclaimed: “Independence, the Home of Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States”—a sign that annoyed Truman, who, with his concern for historical accuracy, insisted he was the thirty-second president since Cleveland served twice.

Some people in town, mainly among Republicans, thought no better of him than they had before. But they were a decided minority. By strong consensus the town thought it wonderful that the Trumans were home to stay. People liked the way they had both stepped modestly back into the life of the town, and especially the way “Mr. Truman” conducted himself, as a fellow citizen. They were as proud of him for his lack of side, his fundamental small-town genuineness after all, as they were of anything about him. “I used to say that Harry Truman lived around the corner from me,” his old friend and ardent Republican, Henry Bundschu, told a magazine writer from the East, “now there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t tell myself that you live around the corner from Harry Truman and don’t you forget it.”

Largest and most generous of the town’s gestures, and much the most appreciated by Truman, was the donation of a town park north of the Square as a site for his library. He could not have been more pleased. Independence would be a far more appropriate location than Grandview and more accessible. Slover Park, a quiet, picturesque 13-acre knoll, was just beyond U.S. Highway 24. To have turned over a comparable portion of the Grandview farm, furthermore, would have meant a major financial sacrifice not only for Truman, but Vivian and Mary Jane, for the land at Grandview was becoming more valuable all the time. Also, the Independence site was only a mile from 219 North Delaware, nothing at all for a good walker.

“All partisanship and selfishness were left behind months ago and this home city of this world-famous statesman is the most logical place to establish such a national Shrine as the Harry S. Truman Library,” wrote the Kansas City Times.

Besides the work on the memoirs, Truman threw himself into raising money for the library, attending dinners, making speeches around the country, and writing thouands of letters. A fund-raising auction for the library at the National Guard Armory in Independence went on for seven hours. The government in Washington was to contribute nothing to the cost of creating the library. He would raise all the money himself. It was another campaign for him, and in a year and a half he would build a fund of more than $1 million. “The pace he set absolutely terrified me,” Margaret would remember.

Past the age of seventy, Truman often said, one was living on borrowed time. Yet in the spring of 1954, turning seventy, he gave no sign of exerting or enjoying himself any less than ever. He was putting in seventeen hours a day on the book, the mail, and seeing the “customers” who came by the office, he reported to Acheson on May 28, Nor was that all on his mind:

I’m worried about our world situation. We are losing all our friends, the smart but inexperienced boys at the White House are upsetting NATO and throwing our military strength away. Yet they seem to want to intervene in Indo-China….

In June, when the Irving Berlin hit musical Call Me Madam, about Perle Mesta, came to Kansas City’s outdoor theater, Truman happily agreed to make a surprise appearance in the last act, playing the part of himself. Waiting backstage, the night of June 18, he was suddenly ill with violent pains in his stomach. Bess rushed him home and the lights were on at the house all night. On June 20, in an emergency operation at Research Hospital, he had his gallbladder and appendix removed by Wallace Graham, who, since leaving the White House, had resettled in Kansas City to practice surgery. Infection set in. Graham grimly reported that, due to an “unusual hypersensitivity” to modern drugs, the former President was in serious condition. For several days there was extreme concern. It was “a hell of a time,” Truman later said. “They gave me about five or ten gallons of antibiotics by sticking needles in veins. But they just couldn’t kill me.”

But the crisis passed and Truman, improving rapidly, was the model patient. Nothing seemed to bother him. Western Missouri was in the grip of a fierce heat wave. By midday thermometers outside the hospital windows ranged between 110 and 114 degrees and the hospital had no air conditioning. Nevertheless, he was content. When the director of the hospital insisted on putting an air conditioner in his room, he refused. He wanted no special treatment. It was only after Tom Evans pointed out that Bess, who had been sitting with him day after day, was suffering from heat if he wasn’t, that Truman sent for the director and had the air conditioning installed immediately.

“When the papers tell us that you had a gangrenous gall bladder,” wrote Acheson, “I was at once prepared to tell Doc Graham how you got it. It comes from reading the newspapers. No one can escape some malady from this cause. With me it has taken the form of an attack of gout….”

For Truman’s convalescence, Acheson sent a copy of The Reason Why, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s account of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade. “When you get acquainted with Lords Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan you will be reminded of a certain General we know,” Acheson said, meaning MacArthur.

To Bess, Acheson wrote, “It is touching the way so many people—elevator boys, our cook, taxi drivers, people on the street—keep asking me about the President. He is deeply loved—even by the press.”

More than a hundred thousand cards and letters poured in to Truman, wishing him a speedy recovery, and enough flowers, as he said, “to supply every customer” in the hospital.

From his hospital room on July 6, he pledged to do “everything possible” to get his library started and finished as soon as possible. Once released from the hospital, he was immediately back at work.

Ed Thompson flew in from New York in November to find that the “raw material” of the memoirs had grown beyond limits, yet the manuscript was still far from ready. Tactfully he proposed to the former President that one of Life’s best staff writers, Ernest Havemann, be sent in to do some reshaping and polishing. But Truman declined. “More important to me,” he wrote to Thompson, “especially at this stage, than style or organization of the material are the facts…so that the record of the years of my Presidency may be correct. Until this part of the job is completed I would like you to hold up sending Mr. Havemann; or anyone else….”

Havemann’s turn came three or four weeks later, and for the first time, Truman had an experienced writer working with him. Francis Heller would recall how much he himself learned from Havemann—though Havemann did no actual writing—and how hard everyone worked, six, sometimes seven days a week, “going great guns,” as Truman said. “The damned thing is turning out much better than I thought it would,” he reported to Acheson. But apparently Havemann found the former President a difficult collaborator, and the staff even more troublesome to work with. After a month, he asked to be relieved.

Another writer, Hawthorne Daniel, was recruited, now at the request of Doubleday, the publisher that would be bringing out the book, once Life had launched its installments. Eventually, too, Doubleday’s editor-in-chief Ken McCormick would take part in the cutting and refining, and both Dean Acheson and Sam Rosenman would be asked by Truman to go over the whole “accumulation.” Acheson’s comments were to be of particular value.

The material is more interesting and gripping when you are talking about your own life and your own ideas than it is when you are giving lists of callers at the White House and the activities of the Truman Committee which do not reveal much about you as a man [Acheson advised in one extended critique].

Page 114, line 3. You use the cliché, “striped pants boys in the State Department.” I should like to see you change this to “people in the State Department,” not merely because the phrase is tiresome, but because it gives quite a wrong impression of the tremendous support which you gave to the career service and for which they will be forever grateful.

In places, as he told Truman, Acheson found the manuscript brusque, didactic, and superficial, “quite contrary to what you are.”

Acheson’s lengthy, single-space typed comments, running to many pages, would be gone over closely by the staff, who, in turn, would give Truman their own lengthy comments on Acheson’s comments.

Ken McCormick sensed that Bess Truman was also playing more of a role than met the eye, since Truman seemed to make better decisions about the manuscript, seemed to improve in his judgments, after having talked with her at home in the evenings. “She was his true North, I think,” McCormick said years later, remembering how the work had gone.

The financial burden of all this for Truman was mounting, for as yet he had received no money. The first payment of his $600,000 from Life was not due until June 30, when he was supposed to deliver the finished manuscript.

By early 1955, the manuscript had grown to approximately 2 million words, whereas the contract had called for only 300,000. After some negotiations, Life agreed to accept 580,000 words, but still the project was behind schedule. Hillman and Noyes now spent more time in Kansas City, cutting and trimming.

Doubleday, faced with the size of the manuscript, decided to bring the memoirs out in two volumes, and so through the first six months of 1955, all concentration was on finishing up Volume One—dealing with only the first sixteen months of the presidency, plus the one chapter on his early life and two others covering the political career prior to Roosevelt’s death.

Things were moving fast. And things were changing. Acheson and his wife Alice arrived—Acheson to help with the manuscript—and were overnight guests at 219 North Delaware, an event that had the whole town talking, both because there had never before been a former Secretary of State in residence in Independence and because there had never before been “house guests” at 219 North Delaware, as far as anyone could recall.

On May 8, Truman’s seventy-first birthday, with some two thousand people gathering in Slover Park, he turned the first spade of earth at an old-fashioned home-style groundbreaking ceremony for his library, complete with band music. Then, as they had also never done before, he and Bess hosted a buffet dinner at home for some 150 people. It was a sight, wrote Margaret, that she never thought she would see. There was her mother standing at the door of her “sanctuary,” welcoming each guest.

Flying to San Francisco on June 24, to attend a tenth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Truman looked out over Wyoming and the Rockies from the vantage point of 14,000 feet, and as he wrote in his room that night in the Fairmont Hotel, he couldn’t help but think of Solomon Young.

We’d left home at 7 A.M. and at 11 A.M. were all past the high mountains. Grandpa would have left home at what is now Grandview at four A.M. and in all probability would have been ten or twelve miles west of the Missouri line. What an age we live and have our being in! We had a mountain lake trout lunch and before we realized it were descending into the Great Salt Lake Valley….

With the deadline pressure on in the offices at the Federal Reserve Bank Building, the work hours grew longer. In the final days of June, some of the staff were working round the clock.

Truman handed over a 500,000-word manuscript to Ed Thompson in Kansas City on July 4, 1955, and told him, “I never really appreciated before what is involved in trying to write a book.”

His first check was for $110,000, and with it came five promissory notes for the rest of the $600,000, the last installment not to be paid until January 1960.

The opening installment of the Memoirs, titled “The Most Momentous First 18 Days,” appeared in the September 25 issue of Life, with a cover photograph of the former President and First Lady standing in front of their Independence home. Doubleday’s publication of Volume One, called Year of Decisions, followed five weeks later, with an author’s autographing party in the grand ballroom of the Muehlebach, on Tuesday, November 2, 1955.

To the delight of the publisher, Truman had agreed to sign books for all who came. “I expect to use, probably, a couple of $1.75 fountain pens that I bought at the Twenty-five Cent Store, along with a half dozen others that I happen to have, and I don’t want to be in any advertising stunt [for the pens] whatever,” Truman had written to Samuel Vaughan, Doubleday’s advertising manager. “I will go along with any party arrangements which you make for Doubleday, but don’t get me into any advertising for pens, cakes or anything, because I won’t do it.”

Arriving in Kansas City a few days in advance to make arrangements, Vaughan was distressed to hear people asking why they would want to come to such an occasion for Truman, “when we see him all the time anyway.” Greatly concerned, Vaughan worked to line up Battery D veterans, the Boy Scouts, anyone he could think of, to be sure there was a crowd. But he need not have bothered. More than three hundred people were already in line waiting before the party began.

“Hand Firm to the End” was the headline in the next morning’s paper.

It was almost unbelievable. “I had no idea it would be anything like this,” Truman said as he saw the crowds grow, the people still coming, hour after hour. His hand fairly flew as he signed books, until he was doing six to eight autographs a minute. If ever there was a demonstration of his extraordinary vitality, this was it. He kept going hour after hour, not only signing his name but greeting people. “There, that one’s all slicked up,” he would say with satisfaction, finishing his signature and handing over the book.

By the end of the first session, he had signed over a thousand copies In all, incredibly, he turned out four thousand autographs in just five and a half hours. Reporters on hand, his publishers, watched in amazement. Earlier, when Ken McCormick of Doubleday had suggested to Truman that perhaps he might prefer to have the autographs done by a machine Truman had replied, “I will autograph as many as I can. I am not an expert with a machine, and I would rather do it by hand.”

Reviewers rightly treated the book as a major event. “The first volume of Harry Truman’s Memoirs (Doubleday) provides a more detailed report on life at the summit of American politics than a President has given since the early days of the Republic,” wrote Richard Rovere in The New Yorker. Truman was commended for his contribution to history, his understanding of presidential power, his clarity, attention to detail, “his appealing mixture of modesty and confidence,” as the historian Allan Nevins wrote on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. There was too little autobiography, it was thought, too much that read like an official paper worked over by many hands. (In the preface, Truman freely acknowledged the help he had been given.) Richard Rovere, having covered Truman for years, missed the characteristic pungent manner of expression, Truman in his own words, and wished there were more of what was to be found in Truman’s letters to his mother, eighteen of which were included in the book, providing, as Rovere said, not only relief from the state-paper style but “wonderful insights” into Truman’s style as a human being.

As the reviewers implied, too many people had been involved in the task. Truman had been homogenized. He had been made at times even tedious. Acheson’s warnings should have been taken more to heart. Truman himself—the vitality, the vividness of his letters, his own way of expressing himself—was missing through great portions of the book. But to a large degree, of course, Truman himself had been responsible for this, by agreeing to the process by which the work was produced. Also, from the start, he seems to have seen the task more as one of recording history than telling his own story. Francis Heller, for example, would never recall Truman speaking of the work in progress as “memoirs,” only as “my history.”

The inevitable comparisons with Churchill’s history of the war were made, though not so unfavorably as might have been supposed. As a literary performance, said Allan Nevins, Truman’s book did not rank among the best memoirs of the era. Nevertheless, Nevins emphasized, this was a “volume of distinction.” His praise exceeded his criticism and the review, like others, became as much a judgment of the author as of the book. If not one of the landmark memoirs of the century, it was nonetheless an admirable work by one of the most important figures of the century.

Altogether, it well expressed one of the most conscientious, dynamic and (within his horizons) clearsighted Presidents we have ever had [wrote Nevins]…. His penetrating shrewdness has been underrated…. We are equally impressed by his exceptionally high conception of the Presidency and his determination to live up to it…. In ordinary affairs he seemed commonplace, and in small matters he could make curious blunders. But he grew in his office as few Presidents have ever done; and he was sustained by an unusual knowledge of American history and a firm grasp of our best traditions. To the major crisis he brought statesmanlike insight, energy, and courage. There was greatness in the man….

The large effect of the book and the series in Life—and Volume Two, which appeared the next spring—was to create renewed interest in Truman and a reconsideration of his presidency. And while his account of events also stirred controversy—protests and rebuttals by such major protagonists as Jimmy Byrnes and Henry Wallace—publication of the Memoirs marked the beginning of what was to be a steady revival of Truman’s reputation, and the beginning of an exceptionally happy time for him. Indeed, it may be said that publication of the Memoirs marked the opening of one of the happiest passages in his long life.

III

Truman had always wanted a son. It was why he had called Margaret “Skinny” as she grew up, he recently explained in a letter to Acheson. “But I wouldn’t trade her for a houseful of boys although I always wanted a couple and another girl.”

In mid-March 1956, at a press conference at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, Margaret announced she was engaged to be married to Elbert Clifton Daniel, Jr., who was an assistant foreign news editor of The New York Times and at forty-two, ten years older than his fiancée. The news was a surprise. Though her parents had known for several weeks, Margaret had succeeded in keeping her romance private.

Margaret and Clifton, as he was called, had known each other for more than a year. He was of slightly less than medium height, slim, handsome well dressed, and spoke with a trace of a British accent, acquired, it was said, from ten years as a foreign correspondent in England. He appeared very polished and sophisticated, but as the country soon learned, he, like Margaret, had grown up in a small town, Zebulon, North Carolina, where his father, Elbert Clifton Daniel, Sr., had a drugstore.

Alone at his office desk, Truman took up one of his $1.75 pens and wrote a two-page letter to Acheson. Their friendship, the great trust and mutual admiration, the enjoyment they found in exchanging news on life’s turns and human folly, everything that had made the seemingly incongruous bond between them so important during the presidency, had come to mean still more to Truman now. The truth was that the number one citizen of Independence, Missouri, the President who had come home to be “plain Mr. Truman” again, sorely missed the company and stimulation of just such people as the worldly Acheson. The letters to and fro between them would steadily increase, Truman speaking his mind—writing from the heart—as he had only, until now, to the women who were dear to him. He even told Acheson, as once he had told Bess Wallace, that he wrote sometimes just to get a letter in return. “When I hear from you I always feel better,” he would write. “Wish I could sit and talk with you for an hour or thirty minutes or even for five minutes. My morale would go up 100%.”

Unexpectedly and most happily, at this late date, Truman found his life enlarged by this close, if distant friend, a brother in spirit, a confidant—indeed a male friend such as he had never had before—and this as much as anything was to account for his great increased enjoyment of these years.

Now he addressed himself to the latest turn in his personal life. “Margie has put one over on me and got herself engaged to a news man!” he began, the words advancing steadily across the page, the bold certainty of every stroke looking no different from the handwriting in letters written to Bess Wallace from Grandview nearly fifty years before.

He strikes me as a very nice fellow and if Margaret wants him I’ll be satisfied. He seems to be very highly thought of in newspaper circles and particularly by The New York Times people.

The young lady told us about it just a week or two before the announcement and swore us to secrecy. In fact, she made me hang up while she told her mother. Did your daughter do you that way? I was forbidden to tell my brother and sister. Like a couple of amateurs they went to North Carolina to see his mother and father (nice people by the way) and then had dinner with Jonathan Daniels, of all people, hoping to keep a secret! The next day they called Daddy and wanted to know what to do. Well Dad announced the engagement the next morning without a chance to tell his friends. Again did your daughter do that?

Well, we’ve had at least two thousand letters and telegrams and she’s had twice as many—serves her right. As every old man who had a daughter feels, I’m worried and hope things will work out all right. Can’t you give me some consolation?

Acheson replied at once:

Consolation is just what I can give. In the first place about Margaret’s choice. She has always had good judgment and has shown it again here. Alice and I had dinner with them here on her birthday—just a year before we celebrated it in Independence with you. I was completely captivated by Clifton Daniel. He has charm and sense and lots of ability. On the way home I told Alice that there was romance in the wind and that I was all for it. She somewhat acidly remarked that I had so monopolized Mr. Daniel that she hadn’t been able to get any idea of Margaret’s view of him, and that I was getting to be an old matchmaker. This only made my triumph all the sweeter when the announcement came. I stick by my guns and am sure that the man Margaret has chosen is first class and just the one for her. Marriage is the greatest of all gambles. But character helps and my bets are all on the success of this venture.

Now as to the behavior of daughters and the position of the father of the bride. Daughters, I have found, take this business of marriage into their own hands and do as they please. So do sons—or perhaps someone else’s daughter decides for them. I explained most lucidly to Mary and David that they should wait until the end of the war to get married. So they got married at once. All in all, the father of the bride is a pitiable creature. No one bothers with him at all. He is always in the way—a sort of backward child—humored but not participating in the big decisions. His only comforter is a bottle of good bourbon. Have you plenty on hand?

The wedding took place in Independence on Saturday, April 21, 1956, in little Trinity Episcopal Church on Liberty Street, where Bess Wallace and Harry Truman had been married in 1919. It was also followed by a small reception at the home of the bride that was not greatly different from the reception there in 1919—except the party this time was held indoors, out of view of the hundreds of reporters and photographers at the iron fence and the carloads of sightseers passing the house bumper to bumper. The temperature was in the 80s, the shaded lawn clipped and green, the spirea bushes by the porch in bloom. Margaret wore an ankle-length, full-skirted pale beige wedding dress, fashioned of two-hundred-year-old Venetian lace. At the church, when arriving by limousine with Margaret, and later during the ceremony, the father of the bride appeared “a pitiable creature” indeed, unhappy and unsmiling. Later at the reception he brightened noticeably—possibly by Acheson’s remedy.

Less than a month after, he and Bess departed on what was described as a honeymoon of their own, the finest trip of their lives, across Europe in grand style.

They were gone seven weeks, touring Europe by train—France, Italy, Austria, West Germany, France again, Brussels, the Netherlands, England. It rained a good part of the time—“rain, rain, rain, day after day, with sometimes a peep of sun,” he wrote in his diary—yet nothing seemed to lessen his spirits.

Bringing the suitcases down from the attic the morning they left home, Truman had slipped on the stairs and twisted his ankle, so that it swelled to the size of two, as he said. But he took a shiny black cane and carried on, covering whatever ground had to be covered the first few days only a little slower than usual. They departed from the independence depot at 7:15, the morning of May 8, his seventy-second birthday. A crowd of friends and family came to see them off. A birthday cake was cut and passed out—“a grand party”—and there were to be crowds everywhere from then on.

The reason given for the trip was a longstanding invitation to Truman to accept an honorary degree at Oxford, and the ceremony at Oxford on June 20 would prove the highlight. “I was so afraid I’d let you down at Oxford, but apparently I didn’t,” he told Acheson, who, like George Marshall, had already been honored there.

Former President Ulysses S. Grant, as part of a famous trip around the world, had spent months touring Europe where he was received as royalty, and in 1910, at the end of his African safari, former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a series of lectures across Europe and at Oxford, where he received an honorary degree. For Truman it was a third trip to Europe, but his first as a private citizen. (He was carrying his first passport.) He and Bess had long dreamed of a chance to travel abroad. For both it was the trip of a lifetime, and for Bess a first venture ever overseas. They would be two of the 500,000 American tourists in Europe that year.

Sailing from New York on the United States, accompanied by Stanley Woodward, who had been Truman’s chief of protocol, and his wife Sara, they landed at Le Havre. From there they went directly by train to Paris. By midday May 17, his first full day in Paris, Truman was sitting happily at a small outdoor table, sipping coffee at the venerable Café de la Paix, close to the Opéra, where only after a while did heads begin to turn and passers-by stop to stare. He had been there before, he explained, during World War I. At home the papers carried a wire-service photograph of the former President strolling the Place de 1’Opéra swinging his cane like a boulevardier.

Reporters dogged his steps wherever he went. Several hundred had been waiting at the Gare Saint-Lazare when he arrived in the city and there were scarcely ever less than a dozen at his side afterward. “Mr. Truman is as popular in Europe as he is in Missouri,” readers of the Independence Examiner learned in a United Press story from Paris. He was cheered and welcomed by people in the street. In Rome the welcome at the railroad station was tumultuous, with a crowd of hundreds shouting, “Viva Truman!” and even, in English, “Hi, Harry!” He and his party stayed at the Hassler Hotel at the head of the Spanish Steps.

For a conducted tour of Rome’s ancient monuments, Truman had as a guide, of all people, Henry Luce, who was filling in for his wife, Clare Booth Luce, the American ambassador to Italy, who had taken ill. The sight of Harry Truman and Henry Luce side by side speculating on the vanished empire of the Romans as they sat in the Colosseum was one not to be forgotten.

Scores of American tourists cheered Truman and followed along. On Rome’s Capitol Hill, in front of the giant equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, he started introducing himself and shaking hands.

“How are you? I’m Harry Truman.”

“I’m Paul Schultheiss of Rochester, New York,” responded the amazed tourist.

He and Bess had a rare Sunday audience with Pope Pius XII, that marked the first time an American President had been received at the Holy See since Woodrow Wilson’s formal visit on Pope Benedict XV in 1919. Bess wore black and a lace veil over her head, Truman a black cutaway coat, striped trousers, and a top hat. A “most happy visit indeed,” he said.

Then, in two weeks’ travels through Italy, they saw Mt. Vesuvius, the ruins of Pompeii, the ancient Greek temples of Paestum, near Salerno. They explored the green hills of Umbria where St. Francis once lived with the birds and animals; they shopped for leather goods on the centuries-old Ponte Vecchio over the Arno in Florence, gazed at the Botticellis in the Uffizi Gallery. In Venice, he and Bess, like every other tourist, strolled St. Mark’s Square and rode together in a gondola down the Grand Canal.

Between times Truman told reporters that the weather in Italy reminded him of Texas. He declared that victory for the Democrats in the presidential election in the fall was not probable but inevitable, and got himself in a good deal of hot water by saying that the bloody World War II battles of Salerno and Anzio had been unnecessary and the fault of “some squirrel-headed general.”

He was having a glorious time, enjoying immensely the setting of so much of the history he had loved since boyhood—and enjoying immensely the attention he received. At Naples, the crowds had tossed flowers in his path. “This is fantastic!” he said, openly astonished.

If the picture of Truman with Henry Luce amid the ruins of ancient Rome had seemed the unlikeliest of holiday vignettes, Truman succeeded in topping it at Florence, when he, Bess, and the Woodwards were the luncheon guests of Bernard Berenson at Berenson’s famous villa, I Tatti, overlooking the city. It was a luminous setting of incomparable paintings, sculpture, a library of 55,000 volumes, and the place where the legendary Berenson, “B.B.,” widely regarded as the consummate connoisseur, “the world’s last great aesthete,” held court. A Lithuanian Jew by birth, a graduate of Harvard, and a leading authority on Italian Renaissance art, he had made I Tatti his home—shrine, institution—since before World War I, when Truman was still on the farm. A tiny, frail, but godlike figure with a white beard, now nearly ninety-one, Berenson was still immensely vital and talkative. His flow of guests, of celebrated literary and theatrical figures, was unending—J. B. Priestley, Robert Lowell, Alberto Moravia, Laurence Olivier, Mary McCarthy. They came to listen—since customarily “B.B.” did most of the talking—and, of course, to be able to say they knew the great man.

“We just had to look him up. He was the best in his line,” Truman would later tell Merle Miller.

In his diary at the time, Truman said he found Berenson as “clear headed and mentally alert as a man of 35 or 40.”

He is considered the greatest authority on Renaissance Art and is noted for his epigrams, one of which struck me forcibly. We were discussing world affairs and he remarked that modern diplomacy had degenerated into “Open insults openly arrived at.” We discussed the causes of the first World War, the Austrian Prime Minister at that time, the Serbian situation and the whys and wherefores of the Austrian ultimatum which started the war.

Truman was greatly stimulated by Berenson’s company and delight in conversation, much as he had been years ago at the Sunday afternoon teas with Louis Brandeis. In a letter to Berenson later, recalling the pleasant visit, Truman wrote in a postscript: “I wish the Powers-that-be would listen, think, and mock at things as you have.”

But more remarkable was Berenson’s reaction to the former American President, which Berenson recorded in his own diary at the time:

[Harry] Truman and his wife lunched yesterday. Came at one and stayed till three. Both as natural, as unspoiled by high office as if he had got no further than alderman of Independence, Missouri. In my long life I have never met an individual with whom I felt so instantly at home. He talked as if he had always known me, openly, easily, with no reserve (so far as I could judge). Ready to touch on any subject, no matter how personal. I always felt what a solid and sensible basis there is in the British stock of the U.S.A. if it can produce a man like Truman. Now I feel more assured about America than in a long time. If the Truman miracle can still occur, we need not fear even the [Senator Joe] McCarthys. Truman captivated even Willy Mostyn-Owen, aged twenty-seven, ultra-critical, and like all Englishmen of today hard of hearing anything good about Americans, and disposed to be condescending to them—at best.

At Salzburg, in Truman’s honor, the organist of Salzburg Cathedral played Mozart’s Ninth Sonata on a 250-year-old organ, and at Mozart’s birthplace, Truman himself played a Mozart sonata on Mozart’s own clavichord. (“I found that it was somewhat different from the modern piano but it makes beautiful music…. This Mozart town has certainly been a joy to me….”)

From Salzburg, the expedition moved on to Bonn, capital of the West German Republic that Truman had helped create, and during a brief rain-soaked stay he met with Konrad Adenauer for the first time. Swinging back through France again, the tourists kept to a steady schedule, stopping at Versailles, which Truman did not much enjoy (he kept thinking of how the money to build it had been “squeezed” from the people), Chartres Cathedral, which he loved despite the pouring rain, then Chenonceau, the lovely sixteenth-century château in the Loire Valley, which he had wanted particularly to see because of its connection to Catherine de Médicis, one of his favorite historic figures. (“Of course, there are all sorts of traditions and stories about the happenings of the days of Catherine,” he observed in his diary, “but she was a remarkable woman and a Medici, all of whom believed in government by deviation as set out in The Prince by Machiavelli. Catherine was the mother of ten children, three of whom became kings of France and two of whom became queens. Quite a record for a tough conspiratorial old woman.”)

Truman was tireless, determined to see everything, and fascinated by nearly all he saw. Bess tried valiantly to keep the pace, seldom smiling, at least in view of the photographers. The itinerary would have exhausted people half their age.

Their route in France, interestingly, included no return visits to the Vosges Mountains, the Argonne, or Verdun, Truman apparently having no wish to see any of those places ever again.

There were big crowds to cheer him at the train stations in Brussels, The Hague, and Amsterdam, where at the Dutch State Museum he and Bess saw the largest exhibit of Rembrandts ever held, and had lunch with Queen Juliana at the Royal Soestdikk Palace.

Then, on June 17, they were on their way to England, the part of the trip Truman had looked forward to most of all. “We crossed the Channel on the night boat,” he recorded, “and landed at the English side in beautiful sunshine….”

It may be fairly said that in his long, eventful life, in an extraordinary career with many surprising turns and times of great fulfillment, there were few occasions that meant so much to Truman as the ceremony that took place at Oxford on Wednesday, June 20, 1956. Wearing the traditional crimson robe and crushed black velour hat of Oxford, the man who had never been to college, nor ever made a pretense of erudition, walked at the head of the procession, beside the Public Orator, at one of the world’s oldest, most distinguished universities.

“Never, never in my life,” he had whispered to a reporter, “did I ever think I’d be a Yank at Oxford.”

The ceremony, called the Encaenia and conducted in Latin, was held in Oxford’s 300-year-old Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Christopher Wren. The audience numbered more than a thousand people. As Truman stood in the center facing the crimson-robed professors of Oxford, he heard the Public Orator present “Harricum Truman,” for an honorary degree of “Doctoris in lure Civili” (Doctor of Civil Law). Then the towering, ornately robed Earl of Halifax, chancellor of the university and former British ambassador to Washington, admitted Harricum Truman into the ancient fellowship of Oxford, lauding him, in Latin, as

Truest of allies, direct in your speech and in your writings and ever a pattern of simple courage…(sociorum firmissime, qui missis ambagibus et loqueris et commentaries scribis veraeque constantiae specimen semper dedisti).

The applause that followed went on for a full three minutes. Truman, moved to tears, searched beneath his academic gown for a handkerchief. An elderly professor told a reporter that he had attended many such convocations but had never heard such applause. “Mr. Truman is very popular in this country,” he said. Recovering himself, Truman smiled broadly.

That night he was honored at a white-tie dinner for four hundred returning graduates of Christ Church College. “Every person born in the twentieth century is entitled to the benefits of the twentieth century,” he said in his speech.

…we must declare in a new Magna Carta, in a new Declaration of Independence, that henceforth economic well being and security, that health and education and decent living standards, are among our inalienable rights.

Every man and woman was entitled to the full benefit of the best in medicine, he added, striking an old theme. Every child was entitled to a first-rate education. There should be no economic worries for the elderly in their declining years.

“Give ‘em hell, Harricum!” the students of Oxford called from their windows as he departed.

A still more dazzling white-tie dinner followed the next night in London, at the Savoy—the annual stag dinner of the Pilgrims, the leading Anglo-American society dedicated to maintaining close ties between the two nations. And again Truman was a triumph, Lord Halifax paying him what to most present was the ultimate compliment. “I think we in this room feel that you are the sort of chap with whom all of us would be quite happy to go tiger hunting.”

He had been getting along very well in England, Truman said, at the start of his remarks. So far, he had not needed an interpreter.

“A good many of the difficulties between our two countries,” he continued, “spring not from our differences but from the fact that we are so much alike…. Another problem we have…is that in election years we behave somewhat as primitive peoples do at the time of the full moon.” But the essence of his warning was that “a great, serene and peaceful future can slip from us quite as irrevocably by neglect, division and inaction, as by spectacular disaster.” He hoped that both nations would never become careless about “our strength and our unity.”

And—not least of all—let us escape from this modern idea of the mass psychologists that we should be guided not by what we honestly believe is wise and right, but by some supposed reflecting of what other people think of us. I am ready to give up the complexity of propaganda, with its mass psychology, in favor of Mark Twain’s simpler admonition:

“Always do right. It will please some people and astonish the rest.”

He was “most happy” to see London, Truman wrote in his diary. “Never been here. It is a wonderful city.”

Visiting the House of Commons on Home Affairs Day, he listened to the opposition ask questions “about everything from roads to bawdy houses and gangsters.” At the House of Lords he sat through a long-winded speech as “boresome” as any in the United States Senate.

England is prosperous, cordial and courteous [he recorded]. From Lords to taxi drivers and policemen they recognize and wave and bow to the former President. When they have a chance they show by word and deed that they still like us and appreciate our friendship. It is heart warming.

On June 24, at Chartwell, the Churchill family estate 40 miles south of London, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill, daughters Sarah and Mary and Mary’s husband, Christopher Soames, and Lord Beaverbrook were in the driveway waiting as the Trumans arrived for lunch in a chauffeur-driven Armstrong Siddeley. “This is just like old times,” Truman said, as he and Churchill greeted each other. Inside, a butler brought a tray of drinks, and before a bronze bust of Franklin Roosevelt the two men made what appeared to be a silent toast. Lunch finished, each swinging a walking stick, they strolled in the gardens.

“It was all over too soon,” Truman wrote in his diary.

The house faces a hill covered with rhododendrons, which were in full bloom. Behind the house is a beautiful garden and below that a valley containing a lake in the distance, a lovely view which Sir Winston called the Weald of Kent.

He showed me a large number of his paintings in the house and told me he had some 400 more in his studio in the valley below the house. We didn’t have time to visit the studio. It was a very pleasant visit and a happy one for me.

Churchill, Truman thought, seemed as alert mentally as ever. “But his physical condition shows his 82 years. He walks more slowly and he doesn’t hear well.”

He told me that he could do whatever had to be done as he always did but that he’d rather not do it. He walked around and up and down steps with no more effort than would be expected of a man his age. He remarked that it would be a great thing for the world if I should become President of the United States again. I told him there was no chance of that.

They said goodbye not knowing if they would ever see one another again, and they did not.

On June 26, as reported in the Independence Examiner, “Mr. and Mrs. Truman joined the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace” for lunch. On June 28, from Southampton, their grand tour over, the Trumans sailed for home.

During the visit at Chartwell, Lord Beaverbrook had told Truman that on his European trip he had made the greatest ambassador of goodwill America ever had. Now, the same refrain was heard repeatedly.

“Too bad he’s not campaigning for anything in this country,” an American reporter overheard an English spectator remark as Truman boarded the boat train in London. “He’d win any election.” The London Evening Standard headlined the visit as the “Truman Triumph.” The Daily Telegraph described him as the “living and kicking symbol of everything that everyone likes best about the United States.”

In the tradition of homespun Benjamin Franklin, he had charmed Europe by being himself. “Never [said the United Press] has an ‘ordinary’ American been given such a red carpet treatment from the brass and such a warm welcome from the people as was accorded that jaunty traveler from Missouri.”

On reaching home, Truman never let up the pace. He was scarcely unpacked before plunging into election-year politics, in a determined and unsuccessful effort to see Averell Harriman, rather than Adlai Stevenson, win the Democratic nomination. Arriving in Chicago for the convention in August, Truman backed Harriman, who had been elected governor of New York two years earlier, because, as Truman said, he thought the country needed a President who wanted the job. Stevenson “lacks the kind of fighting spirit we need to win,” Truman charged at a jammed press conference at the Blackstone. (A few weeks earlier, while stopping at the Blackstone for a Truman Library dinner, Truman had talked privately with Stevenson, who asked what he was doing wrong. Truman had gone to the window and pointing to a man in the street below said, “The thing you have to do is learn how to reach that man.”) For a time it appeared Truman might turn things on end.

Harry S. Truman had the Democratic party chewing its fingernails down to the cuticle today and he loved every second of it [wrote Russell Baker in The New York Times].

While the party’s other demi-gods fretted and stewed and guessed, Mr. Truman was as exhilarated as a small boy given free run of the circus.

At the height of the suspense, he blithely took off from the politicians and went down to the south side of town to lead a parade. There for Chicago’s vast Negro population, it was Bud Billiken Day. Bud Billiken is a mythical heroic godfather for the town’s Negro children. In the parade Mr. Truman drove 2½ miles to the enthusiastic cheers of 100,000 spectators.

But in fact his efforts came to nothing. The nomination went easily to Stevenson, and to many it seemed Truman had succeeded only in making himself a contradictory, even pitiful figure who confused his popularity with real power. Truman, however, showed no signs of bitterness or regret, and immediately endorsed the nominee—Stevenson’s chances in November were “perfectly wonderful”—and pledged the full support of the “old man from Missouri.”

Besides, as he liked to say, he had had himself a time.

“When I arrived in Chicago,” he wrote to Acheson, “things were dead, no life, no nothing. I decided to wake them up…. I am going to do all I can to help win this election. How I wish I were ten years younger!”

He campaigned actively for the ticket, traveling to Milwaukee, Texas, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Gary, Indiana, and Pittsburgh, where he and Eisenhower were staying at the same hotel but never met.

A month after Stevenson’s defeat and Elsenhower’s reelection, Truman was writing to Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, “I have never wanted to pose as a prophet, nor do I intend to be one now, but I do want to keep the Democratic Party a party of the people. We can never win unless it is.”

Nineteen fifty-seven was a landmark year for Truman. On June 5, in New York, Margaret had a baby son, and both Trumans were on the train heading east the very next day. On June 7 The New York Times carried a photograph of the proud grandparents at the hospital looking through the window at the baby, Clifton Truman Daniel. When, in another few days, Margaret and the baby came home to the Daniels’ New York apartment and her father asked if he might hold the baby, she insisted he first take off his jacket and be seated. “Dad sat there for a long time, rocking him back and forth.”

Less than a month later, Truman was moving out of the Federal Reserve Bank Building and into an all-new suite of offices at the new Truman Library. Formal dedication of the building took place on July 6. The two things he had said he wanted most after leaving the White House—to become a grandfather and to see his library established—had both come to pass.

Former President Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Speaker Sam Rayburn, four United States senators, nine governors (including Averell Harriman), Dean Acheson, John Snyder, some dozen or more from Truman’s White House staff, his family, neighbors, a crowd in all of five thousand people were present for the dedication, a fortunate few seated in the shade of the trees, the majority taking the full force of the Missouri summer sun. In the history of Independence there had been no occasion like it. (“I expect to be knee deep in ‘Big Shots’ July 6th and I want you and Alice to be here to help me out of what Huey Long would call a deep ‘More Ass!’ ” Truman had written excitedly to Acheson. “Be sure and come.”) The main speaker, addressing the crowd from the steps of the building, was the former governor of California and Republican candidate for Vice President, Earl Warren, now the Chief Justice of the United States, who acclaimed the library as a milestone in American history, and Harry S. Truman as a man of action, “tireless, fearless, and decisive,” adding that he himself had personally learned to appreciate the former President’s “dynamic, fighting qualities” in the fall of 1948.

Mr. Truman, who has an abiding interest in our national history, has arranged for the preservation of his papers in this library in such manner that his administration will be one of the “clearest ages” of history. It is in compliance with his public-spirited generosity that I dedicate this building as a museum and a library to safeguard, exhibit, and facilitate the use of its valuable resources that the American people, and all the peoples of this earth, may gain by their wide and wise use understanding of ourselves and our times, and wisdom to choose the right paths in years that lie ahead.

The building was long and low, crescent-shaped and built of Indiana limestone in an architectural style that no one was quite able to categorize—“modern” seemed to apply, though the main entrance with its square columns also had a decidedly classic Egyptian look. It had been designed by a local architect, Alonzo H. Gentry, assisted by Edward Neild, who came up with a scheme quite unlike what Truman had been expecting but that he decided not to reject. Though only one story tall, the building, with its full basement, had a total of 70,000 square feet of floor space. Finished in two years, it had cost thus far $1,800,000. Two Truman Library dinners in. New York and Philadelphia in 1954 had raised $45,000 each. More than thirty different labor unions had contributed generously—$25,000 from Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, $10,000 from the American Federation of Musicians, $10,000 from John L. Lewis, $250,000 from the United Steel Workers. Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Ed Pauley, and William Clayton made substantial private donations. But in all, the money had come from some 17,000 contributions large and small, from every part of the country, and Truman acknowledged every gift, regardless of the amount.

The 3.5 million documents already in the library were only the beginning of the collection that was to be amassed as time went on, when other figures from the Truman administration such as Acheson contributed their own papers.

For Truman personally from this point on, the library was to be the focus of his life. If the immense effort devoted to the memoirs had proven something of a disappointment, his library was to be an unqualified success.

He was also successful in convincing Congress—working through Democratic Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts—that all existing presidential papers should be indexed and put on microfilm. As he said, this was something that should have been done generations earlier. Yet until he raised the issue, no one had bothered to make the effort—a point for which he deserved far more credit than he received.

With the library established and in operation in Independence, a large part of the Truman land at Grandview was sold to a Kansas City developer, B. F. Weinberg & Associates. The old farmhouse, its barn and immediate acres were kept in the family, but some 224 acres of the prime land where Solomon Young had long ago staked his claim, and where Truman had labored so many seasons, were now to give way to the advance of suburbia and become a shopping center. For Truman it meant the end of a heritage that had come to mean more and more to him, partly out of sentiment but also from a realization of how much his own makeup and attitudes derived from his rural background. He took particular pleasure—obvious pride—in describing himself as a retired farmer. “Hey there, farmer!” Sam Rayburn would greet him over the telephone, knowing how it pleased him.

“I sure hate to see the old place go,” he was quoted in the Kansas City Star.

But the sale, as he also said, meant financial security at last, for Truman, as for Vivian and Mary Jane. And while, with the transaction went a good deal of sadness, it affirmed the old faith that come what may, land was wealth to count on. It wasn’t Truman’s rise to political power or his world renown, his books or lectures or the legacy of his wife’s family that saw him through in the end, but the old farm at Grandview.

The sale was announced in January 1958. What the final figure was, what his share came to, are not known. However, a tallying up of all his bank balances a year and a half later, dated August 14, 1959, has survived and shows him with a total of $208,548.07. And this did not include what he had in government and municipal bonds and a few stocks.

The final financial returns on his Memoirs, after expenses and taxes, were turning out to be very much less than anticipated. Even with his payments from Life extended over five years, he had still to pay 67 percent federal and state income taxes, and this he found particularly discouraging, since in 1949 General Eisenhower had been permitted by the Internal Revenue authorities to treat his sale of Crusade in Europe for $635,000 as a capital gain, on the grounds that he was not a professional author; Eisenhower had paid a tax of only 25 percent. At the time the Eisenhower question was at issue, the White House had intervened; now the Eisenhower White House declined to become involved. Truman’s expenses for the Memoirs, for staff and office space, had amounted to $153,000, according to a letter he wrote to John McCormack. His net profit, over the five-year period, would end up, he figured, at about $37,000.

“Had it not been for the fact that I was able to sell some property that my brother, sister and I inherited from our mother I would practically be on relief, but with the sale of that property I am not financially embarrassed.”

He was not asking for a pension, he told McCormack. He wanted justice. He thought the least a former President merited was a government allowance covering perhaps 70 percent of the necessary office expenses and overheads to meet his responsibilities.

As you know, we passed a Bill which gave all five star Generals and Admirals three clerks, and all the emoluments that went with their office when they retired.

It seems rather peculiar that a fellow who spent eighteen years in government service and succeeded in getting all these things done for the people he commanded should have to go broke in order to tell the people the truth about what really happened. It seems to me in all justice a part of this tremendous overhead should be met by the public.

With the help of Charlie Murphy, he took his case to Speaker Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, with the result that in 1958 Congress passed a law providing former presidents with a $25,000 annual pension, money for staff, office space, and free mailing privileges.

For quiet some time, since even before Truman left the White House, Dean Acheson had been eager to arrange for him to come to Yale. Truman would be the recipient of what was known at Yale as a Chubb Fellowship, whereby he would be the honored guest of the university for several days, to lecture and to meet with students and faculty.

The prospect delighted Truman. He thought highly of Yale, out of regard for Acheson—and such other Yale graduates in his administration as Harriman, Lovett, and Roger Tubby—but also because Yale, as Truman said, was the kind of great university he wished he had been able to attend. What pleased him most was that Acheson wanted him to do it.

“I would be proud to appear anywhere with you from Yale to 1908 Main in Kansas City. (That’s the address of the Pendergast Club),” Truman had written in 1952, obviously enjoying the picture of his elegant Secretary of State hobnobbing with the “Boys” at 1908 Main—as he knew Acheson would, too.

Acheson, who was a member of the Yale Corporation, had set things in motion, and in a letter to Professor Thomas G. Bergin, who would be Truman’s host, Acheson provided what stands as one of the finest, most perceptive descriptions ever written of his friends the President:

Mr. Truman is deeply interest in and very good with the young. His point view is fresh, eager, confident. He has learned the hard way, but he has learned a lot. He believes in his fellow man and he believes that with will and courage (and some intelligence) the future is manageable.

This is good for undergraduates. He is easy, informal, pungent. He should not be asked to do lectures for publication. The pressures on him are too great, and it is not his field. It is not what he says but what he is which is important to young men and this gets communicated…I should want Mr. Truman to be received at Yale with honor, with simplicity—not as a show, not with controversy, not as a lecturer in a field which I do not believe is yet a discipline, “political theory or science”—but as one who could, if in some way we were wired for spirit, give our undergraduates more sense of what their lives are worth (how to spend them for value) than anyone I know.

As it was, Truman did not go to Yale until the spring of 1958. He stayed three days and was an immediate hit with students and faculty. Even the crusty Yale librarian, an arch-Republican who had openly stated his distaste for Truman, refusing at first to receive “that man” when Truman expressed interest in seeing the Franklin Papers, wound up wanting Truman to stay longer, so they might talk at greater length, and afterward told others he had had no idea how much the President knew or how far-ranging were his interests. On his early morning walks through campus, Truman was trailed by students and local reporters. There were dinners in his honor and repeated warm applause, and he loved it all. “I have never had a better time anywhere,” he wrote Acheson. “Yale still rings in my ears. What a time we had,” he said again, in another letter.

He was in steady demand now, with two to three hundred speaking invitations a month. At home he seemed to radiate good feeling. “He’s so damn happy,” said a friend, “that it makes me happy just being around him.”

Tom Evans had asked him to join a regular group for noontime bourbon, lunch, and poker at the Kansas City Club, an exclusive gathering known as the 822 Club, for the suite it occupied. Though Truman had been an honorary member of the Kansas City Club since he was elected to the Senate, he had never felt particularly welcome by its members, most of whom were Republicans. The Kansas City Club had never been exactly his crowd. He had been looked down upon as both a Democrat and a politician, not the sort one would want to know personally. But in no time he had become the most popular member of the group, the pride of the 822 Club, an “elevating influence,” as was said. “It was just terrific. He really bowled them over,” Evans told Life writer John Osborne for an article titled “Happy Days for Harry.” Osborne was struck by Truman’s “phenomenal vigor,” the pleasure of his company to others. “Why, goddamnit, Mr. President, I’m going to raise you,” he heard exclaimed over the poker table at the 822 Club.

The “major achievement of his latter years,” wrote Osborne, was “a rare one of its kind, and it has a place in the story of our times…. At the age of 74, in the bright winter of his life, Harry Truman is a genuinely happy man.”

At a benefit performance of the Kansas City Philharmonic, Truman in white tie and tails conducted the orchestra in Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. Soon he and Bess were off again for another summer sojourn in Europe, a more private, quiet tour this time, through the South of France accompanied by Sam and Dorothy Rosenman.

That fall, in the 1958 congressional campaign, Truman was back on the trail again, delivering some twenty-five speeches in twenty different states. Lecturing at Columbia University the next year, he referred to himself as “an old stiff,” but few people in the busiest part of their lives were as active as he.

Truman, reported Cabell Phillips, was getting a bigger kick out of life than ever before. In an article for The New York Times Magazine on the former President as he turned seventy-five, Phillips quoted a Kansas City friend saying, “Harry feels that he’s square with the world, that he gave it his best, and got its best in return. Now he’s enjoying the dividends….”

“I found him looking pink and fit, with the same crisp smile and sparkling eyes and the same firm handshake which I remembered from earlier years,” wrote Phillips. And increasing numbers of writers, reporters, and well-wishers made the pilgrimage to see him at the Truman Library, to try to divine what the magic was.

To Dean Acheson, Truman’s salient quality was his vitality. Here was “a man overflowing with life force, with incurable curiosity…no brooding image in a history book…[but] vigorous, powerful…full of the zest of life.”

Margaret had told her father that he talked too much. “She says I am just like my two year old grandson,” Truman cheerfully related to a reporter from out of town. “She says that he runs all the time, never walks, and talks all the time and never says anything.”

Showing visitors “the layout” of “my library,” he would move briskly down the halls talking a steady stream, pausing frequently to greet groups of visitors and especially if they were students. The library proper—the actual collection of presidential papers—would not be open to researchers until May of 1959, but for now there was the museum to see, with displays of photographs, gifts to the President, everything from an ear of Iowa corn to a jewel-encrusted sword from Ibn Saud; there was a small auditorium and a replica of the Oval Office, which though slightly reduced in scale, was furnished as it had been during his years in the White House.

“I want this to be a place where young people can come and learn what the office of the President is, what a great office it is no matter who happens to be in it at the time.” He did not “care a damn” about all the attention on himself. “They said it was necessary to put me all over the place just to show how one particular President worked.” But clearly the focus on his life and achievements pleased him very much indeed.

He loved his office, a bright, spacious room with books and sliding glass panels that opened onto a private patio and garden. His desk was the same big mahogany desk he had used in the upstairs study at the White House. He was there nearly every day, Sunday included, except when he was traveling. As was often said, the most interesting item on display at the Truman Library was Truman himself.

He was always on the job early. Some mornings, at his desk before the staff arrived, he would answer the phone himself, telling callers what the library hours were, or, in reply to further questions, saying he knew because it was his library. “This is the old man himself.”

About noon, if not going into town to the 822 Club, he would go home for lunch. Bess remarked privately that if she never saw another sardine or peanut butter sandwich, she would be very happy.

You know this five day week doesn’t work with me [he told Acheson]. I guess I’m old fashioned. I work every day and Sunday too even if Exodus 2–8.9.10 and 11 and Deuteronomy 5–13 and 14 say I shouldn’t. I think probably those admonitions were the first labor laws we know about…. But someone had to fix things so the rest can work five days—coffee breaks and all.

Having the library gave purpose to his days. The most satisfactory part of the whole effort of creating the library, said David Lloyd, a former White House aide who had taken the leading part in the fund raising and organization of the project, was that it provided Truman with a base, “where he can sit happily among his beloved books, conducting his tremendous correspondence, saying what he thinks and doing as he pleases…able to carry on his old fashioned American occupation of being himself.”

He was there in total six and a half days a week for nine years, longer than his two terms in the White House. And as at the White House, the staff adored him. “Mr. Truman was one of the most thoughtful persons we have known,” remembered Dr. Philip C. Brooks, the first director.

[He] had an optimistic outlook, and a conversation with him never failed to give one’s spirits a lift…. Many times people have written about Mr. Truman as having a temper and “shooting from the hip” in his remarks. We never saw the temper, though we saw plenty of candor…. He was rarely wrong….

David Lloyd and the Archivist of the United States, Wayne Grover, had convinced Truman that there ought to be a mural in the main lobby, to enliven the space and strike an appropriate historic theme for visitors as they entered the building. When Lloyd and Grover recommended the Missouri painter Thomas Hart Benton, whose great-uncle and namesake had been one of Missouri’s first two U.S. senators, as the perfect artist to undertake the work, Truman bluntly said no. He thought Benton had made a mockery of Tom Pendergast in a mural at the Capitol in Jefferson City done in 1936. Further, he did not care for Benton’s style. Shown a Benton painting called The Kentuckian, Truman recalled that both of his grandfathers were from Kentucky and neither looked like “that long-necked monstrosity.”

Nevertheless, a meeting was arranged by Lloyd and Grover who were sure that Truman and Benton would like each other if given the chance to discover how much they had in common. Benton, gruff, opinionated, outspoken to a fault, often profane and extremely vital, had been born, like Truman, in southwestern Missouri, in little Neosho in 1889, and had grown up with politics. His father had served several terms in Congress. Truman went with Lloyd and Grover to visit Benton at his studio in Kansas City in the spring of 1957. As predicted, the two men quickly became fast friends. A contract was signed in 1958; and with the mural under way, Truman took obvious pleasure in Benton’s company, pride in Benton’s friendship, and at one point, at Benton’s urging, climbed up the scaffold to help him paint a corner of the sky.

The first day Truman offered Benton a drink in his office, pulling a bottle of bourbon from his desk and saying, “I hear you like this,” Benton took it as a calculated provocation by Truman, a way to test him.

“This performance on the part of a president of the United States embarrassed me,” Benton remembered. “There is no good reason why it should have, because it was a common act of human hospitality, but there was still about Harry Truman an aura of power….”

Later, as the bourbon ritual became more established, and Benton would ask for a second drink, Truman would tell him no. “Tom, you’re driving a car. You can’t have another because you’ve got some work to do around here and I’m not going to take any risks with you.”

“I was now, in effect, his man,” Benton wrote, “and he was going to protect me. And he did.”

The theme for the mural was arrived at only after considerable discussion. Truman had first thought it should be about Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, with the emphasis on Jefferson’s foresight. Benton had said there was no way he could paint foresight. “Well, what the hell is it you can paint?” Truman said. Benton suggested that the mural be about Independence and its importance in the opening of the West, and so it was agreed.

“I thought at first that the President would also want to be included in the mural,” Benton later told an interviewer, “but he very emphatically turned that down.”

Benton’s fee was $60,000. The work took him two years. Completed in 1961 and titled Independence and the Opening of the West, the mural included no specific events of written history nor any identifiable personages. The theme was expressed with symbolic figures, the great human stream that had passed through—with Plains Indians, trappers, hunters, French voyageurs giving way to a tide of settlers and their black slaves. It was robust, colorful, romantic, and as literal as a magazine illustration, with two additional lower panels showing the Missouri River landing and Independence Square in the 1840s, the time when Truman’s grandparents arrived. Truman thought it was wonderful. Showing visitors about the library, he rarely failed to stop in front of the mural, to praise it and explain the history portrayed. His friend Tom Benton, he now liked to say, was the “best damn painter in America.”

Attendance at the library was up to more than 150,000 people a year, a figure that delighted him. In May 1960, Margaret had a second child, another boy, William Wallace Daniel. Meantime, Truman was finishing up another book to be called Mr. Citizen, a collection of essays on life and the world at large written originally for The American Weekly, the Sunday supplement owned by Hearst, Truman’s past nemesis. He had liked particularly being paid and publicized by Hearst. There was no praise sweeter, he said, than the praise of old enemies.

As Acheson observed, Truman was no brooding image in a history book. He expressly disliked the term “elder statesman” as applied to him. “When a good politician dies he becomes a statesman,” he would say. “I want to continue as a politician for a long time.” It had become a standard line. “I like being a nose buster and an ass kicker much better,” he told Acheson privately.

To mark his seventy-fifth birthday on May 8, the Democratic National Committee staged a nationwide celebration, a star-spangled television broadcast that included appearances by Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack Benny, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, H. V. Kaltenborn, and such old personal friends as Monsignor Curtis Tiernan, in a series of spoken and musical tributes, much of the broadcast originating at a $100-a-plate dinner for Truman at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. A few days earlier in Washington, he had said he had no favorite candidate for 1960 as yet, only that he wanted to see the party nominate a man who could win and he had every intention of taking part. “What do you think? How are you going to keep me home?”

In October 1959, George Marshall had died, and for Truman it was another and the heaviest of a succession of personal blows, as slowly but steadily close friends and favorite members of his former official family began to pass from the scene. Fred Vinson had died in 1953, Eddie Jacobson in 1955, Alben Barkley in 1956, Admiral Leahy in July 1959. Hearing that Marshall was dying, Truman had telephoned Marshall’s wife in North Carolina to say he was on his way by plane. But she told him not to come because the general would not know him. “She and I spent most of my call weeping,” Truman wrote to Acheson.

“Do you suppose any President of the United States ever had two such men with him as you and the General?” he would say in another letter.

At a brief Episcopal funeral service for Marshall in the chapel at Fort Myer, Virginia, Truman and Eisenhower sat side by side in the same pew at the front, their common grief partly easing the strain between them.

A new generation of politicians was bidding to take power. With Eisenhower retiring from office and Richard Nixon the probable choice for a Republican nominee, the chance of a Democratic victory looked promising. Of those Democrats in the running, Truman’s favorites were Stuart Symington and Lyndon Johnson, neither of whom had much of a chance. Truman refused to consider Stevenson for a third try. Nor was he enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy, whom he considered too young and inexperienced. He did not want a Catholic—it was not that he was against Catholics, only that he was against losing. Remembering what had happened to Al Smith, he did not think a Catholic could be elected. He also thought Kennedy had been too approving of Joe McCarthy and he disliked Kennedy’s father quite as much as ever. Joe Kennedy had spent over $4 million to buy the nomination for his son, Truman told Margaret. To others he quipped, “It’s not the pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop.”

John Kennedy had called on Truman at the Mayflower Hotel in January 1960, during one of Truman’s visits to Washington. According to Kennedy’s own notes on the meeting, he urged Truman not to announce his support for any candidate until he, Kennedy, had had a chance to come to Independence and “give him all the facts as I saw them.” If, at the convention, the contest became a deadlock, then, Kennedy suggested, Truman could intervene in the name of party unity. But until then it was important, Kennedy said, to let the primary process run its course. Truman expressed warm regard for both Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, the other leading contender, and ended the meeting by telling Kennedy he would do nothing to hurt him.

Bess Truman was advising her husband to stay out of the whole affair. “She refused to get excited about the Democratic party and told Dad he was crazy if he went to another convention at the age of seventy-six,” remembered Margaret. “Let the next generation fight it out among themselves—that was her attitude.” But like John Strother, the man he had recalled when meeting the son-in-law on his morning walk—“the grand old man” who wouldn’t tell his age—Truman, too, wanted “to be young with the young men.”

He sometimes felt forgotten. On Capitol Hill in Washington late one evening, a young Senate aide answered the phone. The operator said she had a long-distance, person-to-person call for Senator Symington. When the aide said the senator had gone for the day and asked if he might know who was calling, he heard a familiar, clipped voice come on the line. “Just tell him Harry S. Truman called. Used to be President of the United States.”

In April, Acheson wrote to tell Truman that if Kennedy were to “stub his toe” in the West Virginia primary, then probably the nomination would go to Stevenson. “I hate to say this but I think the only possible alternative is Stu and I doubt very much, though I am for him, that he can make it. He just doesn’t seem to catch hold. Maybe we should all give Jack a run for his money—or rather for Joe’s.”

In May, with Kennedy out in front after an upset victory over Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia, Truman announced his support for Missouri’s own Symington, calling him “without doubt” the best qualified for the presidency. Asked what objections he had to Kennedy, Truman said, “None whatever. He’s a fine young man and I know and like him. The only thing is, he lives in Massachusetts.”

Acheson grew greatly concerned that Truman might now go on the attack against Kennedy and say things that could cause long-lasting harm, not only about Kennedy but about civil rights. For lately Truman had been expressing views that left many feeling chagrined and disappointed, and especially those who knew how committed he was to equality before the law. Truman strongly disapproved of the methods of the civil rights movement, the sit-ins and marches. The leaders of the movement, it seemed to him, were flouting the law, resorting to mob rule, which was not his idea of the right way to bring about progress. He also appeared to take seriously the view of J. Edgar Hoover that much of the movement was Communist-inspired.

On June 27, his greatest admirer and most devoted friend, Dean Acheson, wrote to set him straight in no uncertain terms and to ask him to agree to a few specific “don’ts” concerning the weeks ahead. It was a remarkable letter, attesting not only to Acheson’s exceptional skill and value as an adviser, but to the confidence he had in the strength of their friendship:

Dear Boss:

As the Convention approaches we partisans are likely to become, shall we say, emphatic in our statements to the press. Could we make a treaty on what we shall not say?

On the positive side we can, and doubtless will, say that our candidate—yours and mine—has all the virtues of the Greats from Pericles through Churchill. St. Peter and Pee-pul forgive this innocent though improbable hyperbole. But there are some things that no one should, and few will, forgive.

These fall into several groups, but the common denominator is the harm that comes from allowing the intensity of the personal view to dim a proper concern for the common cause. The list of the “It’s not dones,” as I see it, goes like this:—

- I. About other Democratic Candidates:

- (a) Never say that any of them is not qualified to be President

- (b) Never say that any of them can’t win.

- (c) Never suggest that any of them is the tool of any group or interest, or is not a true blue liberal, or has (or has used) more money than another.

The reason: At this point public argument is too late—Deals may still be possible. I just don’t know. But sounding off is sure to be wrong. If our candidate is going anywhere—which I doubt—it will not be because of public attacks on other candidates. And such attacks can do a lot of harm when they are quoted in the election campaign.

- II. About the Negro sit-in Strikes:

- (a) Do not say that they are communist inspired. The evidence is all the other way, despite alleged views of J. Edgar Hoover, whom you should trust as much as you would a rattlesnake with the silencer on its rattle.

- (b) Do not say that you disapprove of them. Whatever you think you are under no compulsion to broadcast it. Free speech is a restraint on government; not an incitement to the citizen.

The reason: Your views, as reported, are wholly out of keeping with your public record. The discussion does not convince anyone of anything. If you want to discuss the sociological, moral and legal interests involved, you should give much more time and thought to them.

- III. About Foreign Policy:

- (a) For the next four months do not say that in foreign policy we must support the President.

The reason: This cliché has become a menace. It misrepresents by creating the false belief that in the recent disasters the President has had a policy or position to support.

This just isn’t true. One might as well say “Support the President,” if he falls off the end of a dock. That isn’t a policy. But to urge support for him makes his predicament appear to be a policy to people who don’t know what a dock is.

So, please, for just four months let his apologists come to his aid.

We have got to beat Nixon. We shall probably have to do it with Kennedy. Why make it any harder than it has to be. Now, if ever, our vocal cords ought to be played on the keyboard of our minds. This is so hard for me that I have stopped using my cords at all. By August they will be ready to play “My Rosary.” So I offer you a treaty on “don’ts.” Will you agree?

In reply, Truman wrote, “You’ll never know how very much I appreciated your call and your good letter. I tried my best to profit by both…thanks to a real friend and a real standby.”

When it appeared that Kennedy already had the nomination in hand, Truman kept insisting it would be an open convention and, by inference, one he would influence if not control. “A bandwagon only begins to roll after the third or fourth ballot,” he told reporters. He was greatly looking forward to the convention. “I am going to Los Angeles and make the best fight I can,” he wrote to Agnes Meyer, wife of the owner of the Washington Post. “I am not a pessimist and always fight until the last dog dies….”

In reality, Kennedy had all but settled the matter, as Truman’s ever devoted advisers Hillman and Noyes reported to him from Los Angeles. The game was over. “Your coming here is considered routine and not calculated to make any significant change. This is the judgment of even those who are partial to you.” But they urged him to say nothing about the convention being “rigged—or you will be charged with November defeat—a prospect that seems all but certain.”

But Truman—angry, bitter—would speak his mind. On July 2, at a dramatic televised press conference at the Truman Library, he lashed out at Kennedy in a way certain to infuriate a great many Democrats, exactly as Acheson had urged him never to do. He not only announced he would not attend the convention as a delegate, because the Kennedy forces had it “rigged,” but, facing the television cameras, leveled his remarks directly at Kennedy: “Senator, are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or that the country is ready for you in the role of President in January 1961?” He had no doubt, Truman said, about the political heights to which Kennedy was destined to rise.

But I am deeply concerned and troubled about the situation we are up against in the world now and in the immediate future. That is why I hope that someone with the greatest possible maturity and experience would be available at this time. May I urge you to be patient?

Kennedy responded quickly and smoothly. If fourteen years in major elective office was insufficient experience, he said, then that would have ruled out all but a handful of presidents, including Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman.

No one applauded Truman for what he had done. Acheson wrote to him after the convention:

I listened to your press conference and regretted that you felt impelled to say anything, though what you said was better than what you first told me that you intended to say. It seemed quite inevitable that Jack’s nomination would occur and that all you and Lyndon said you would both have to eat—as indeed you have.

Poor Lyndon came off much worse, since he is now in the crate on the way to the county fair and destined to be a younger and more garrulous—if that is possible—Alben Barkley. It is possible that being a smart operator in the Senate is a special brand of smartness which doesn’t carry over into the larger field…Jack and his team were the only “pros” in Los Angeles, so far as I could see….

Well, we’re off to the races…. I hope it is still true that the Lord looks benignly after children, drunks and-the U.S.A….

Again as in 1956, Truman was ready to join forces and do his part. When Kennedy called him from Hyannis Port on August 2, he said at once that he was ready to help. “He could not have been kinder to me,” Kennedy remarked privately.

Truman’s own disappointment and anger had to be put aside. He was “blue as indigo” over what had happened at Los Angeles, he wrote in a letter to Acheson that he decided not to send. The choice of Kennedy or Nixon was a bleak prospect. “You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So—I’m taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible. So, there we are.”

Accompanied by Stuart Symington, Kennedy came to the Truman Library, where Truman, who was old enough to be Kennedy’s father, met him at the door. “Come right on in here, young man. I want to talk to you.”

Two days later Truman wrote to Sam Rosenman, “Don’t get discouraged. The boy is learning—I hope.”

To the surprise of no one who knew him, Truman joined the campaign. The Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960 was to be his “last hurrah,” as assuredly he knew, and he pitched in for all he was worth.

“Now you are in for it,” wrote Acheson. “Just don’t exhaust yourself through sheer nonsense.”

Traveling by plane, train, and automobile, Truman covered nine states, delivered 13 speeches. He rode in parades, held press conferences, shook hands, waved, smiled, kept everyone with him on the run, and as always thrived on it. The one thing he insisted on was his midday nap. “A nap after lunch is imperative and cannot be missed under any consideration,” his aide, David Stowe, was instructed.

Only in overcrowded rooms, when people began pushing and shoving to meet him, did he show the strain.

Although he moves into and through situations with the same good humor and smiles [wrote Stowe in his notes], apparently this problem bothers him to some extent because it became a frequent topic of conversation. Conceivably, it is a warning to those who work with him to be on our toes to avoid in our planning any large gatherings in which he can be mauled and shoved around. After all he is 76.

“The campaign is ended and we have a Catholic for President,” Truman wrote to Acheson on November 21.

It makes no difference, in my opinion, what church a man belongs to, if he believes in the oath he takes to support and defend the Constitution….

If our new President works on the job, he’ll have no trouble. You know, I wish I’d been young enough to go back to the White House and make Alibi Ike wear a top hat!

The day after Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, Truman was welcomed back to the White House and the Oval Office for the first time in eight years, for which, as he wrote the President, he was extremely grateful. The following November, the Trumans and Margaret and Clifton Daniel were guests at the White House for a white-tie dinner in Truman’s honor and for an overnight visit. The grouse served at dinner was so tough as to be nearly inedible, but with many of his old Cabinet assembled for the occasion, and with the hospitality shown by the President and First Lady, Truman was radiant. For the after-dinner entertainment, in the East Room, the Kennedys had arranged a piano concert of Truman’s favorites—Mozart and Chopin—played by Eugene List, who had first performed for Truman at Potsdam. When, at one point, List invited the former President to take a turn at the big Steinway, Truman obliged, looking as pleased as a man could possibly be.

IV

With the passing of time, old political wounds began to fade. Truman made amends, restored friendship with one former adversary or critic after another—Henry Wallace, Joe Martin, Joe Alsop, Drew Pearson, even Paul Hume, the Washington Post music critic who came to Kansas City to review a concert of Maria Callas and decided to drive out to the Truman Library. As Hume later recounted, he and Truman had a “wonderful visit,” Truman taking an hour to talk and show him about the library. “I’ve had a lot of fun out of you and General MacArthur over the years,” Truman said as Hume was leaving. “I hope you don’t mind.”

At the concert that night, Hume found himself sitting across the aisle from the Trumans. When he went over to say hello, Truman turned to Bess and said, “See, I told you that Paul Hume was in my office today.”

(Following the performance, Truman went backstage to meet Maria Callas and later, catching up with friends walking to their cars in the garage across the street, Truman, looking tremendously pleased, said, “You know, she remembered me!”)

Only three remained for whom he had little or nothing good to say: Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Richard Nixon. The man he had hated most, Joe McCarthy, was dead, of acute alcoholism at age forty-eight in 1957.

In November 1961, at Sam Rayburn’s funeral in Bonham, Texas, with twenty thousand people standing in the cold outside the packed church, Truman was seated with both Kennedy and Eisenhower, all three in the same front pew, Truman and Eisenhower looking—as the nation saw on television—like very elder statesmen indeed, next to the young President. For Truman, with his fond memories of Rayburn, it was a particularly painful ceremony; but like the Marshall funeral, it was another step in what was becoming a slow but steady reconciliation with Eisenhower.

For eight years, Truman had hoped Eisenhower would sometime call on him for advice or ask him to take on a project, as Truman had asked Herbert Hoover, but it had never happened. Nor did it now with Kennedy, and Truman felt terribly let down. “You are making a contribution,” he told Acheson, who was being called on by Kennedy for advice. “I am not. Wish I could.”

The morning walks continued, though he went accompanied now by a bodyguard, a big, solid-looking Independence police officer in plain clothes named Mike Westwood, who was being paid by the town and would stay at Truman’s side in all seasons.

His chief pleasures remained constant—his books, his library, his correspondence with Acheson, his family. To Clifton Daniel, he was the ideal father-in-law, “just great,” never interfering, always considerate. “ ‘Give-’em-hell Harry’ didn’t give anybody hell at home,” Daniel would remember.

Needless to say, I was always respectful of him both as a father-in-law and a former President. In public I addressed him as “Mr. President” and in private, after our first son was born, as “Grandpa.” Before I avoided calling him anything whenever I could. It would have made us both uncomfortable for me to say “Dad,” and for his generation and mine “Harry” was unthinkable. I used “Sir” as much as possible.

In the summer of 1961, Truman had begun work on what was to be a series of television films about the presidency, but dealing primarily with his own years in the White House. It was still another effort, like the Memoirs and the Truman Library, intended to educate the country, and especially young. Americans. “I’m mostly interested in children,” he often said. The films were to be produced and financed by David Susskind and his company, Talent Associates. The writer and general “organizer” of the project was Merle Miller, a novelist and former reporter for Yank, who had been chosen not only to add a “creative spark,” but because it was felt that he and the former President had much in common. Miller, too, had grown up in the Midwest, a book-loving boy with eyeglasses and early dreams of glory. But more important and influential than the films that eventually resulted was the portrait that Miller would compile from recorded conversations with Truman in a book called Plain Speaking—a book that would not be published for another dozen years.

Ironically, because of his background, Miller had not expected to like Truman, imagining him to be far too much like people he had known growing up in Marshalltown, Iowa. “I had thought he was not what we want in a President,” Miller remembered. “I think we want in a President something somewhat regal….”

But here, he remembered, was

an extraordinarily intelligent, informed human being.

If I had a father who was smart, or if I had a father who read a book, if I had a father who knew how to get along with people…this was he…. How could you not like him! He was such a decent human being with concern, a genuine concern, for your welfare. “Well, how are you?” “How’s your hotel?” “How’s the food?”…He wanted to make you comfortable, and he did make you comfortable. I never had an uncomfortable moment with him except toward the end when it appeared that there was never going to be a show….

With Truman, Miller felt, “You could reach out and there was somebody there. There was a person there!…He was there for you.”

The producer assigned to the series, Robert Alan Aurthur, found Truman brisk, opinionated, and during one morning session, Aurthur thought, possibly more fortified with bourbon than ever the doctor ordered.

“Don’t try to make a play actor out of me!” Truman insisted to them. A day of shooting was arranged at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Truman was to sit with a selected group of officers and talk about Korea. Everyone had expected Truman to be at his best in such a setting, with nothing rehearsed. Instead, he was “terrible,” as Robert Aurthur remembered. Truman was told how good he had been, but clearly he knew better. “You’re trying to make a playactor out of me…and it won’t work.”

Using a tape recorder, Miller and Aurthur spent hours—eventually days—interviewing Truman. The stories, the pithy observations came pouring forth. Listening to him, Merle Miller thought Truman had been ill—served by those who had worked with him on the Memoirs. “I think there were people, Noyes and Hillman being foremost among them, who wanted to make him something he wasn’t, largely dull.”

Truman still told stories wonderfully and with an infectious enjoyment. He was also inclined to exaggerate, even invent. Miller was reminded of Huck Finn’s comment about Mark Twain, “He told the truth, mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

Truman described the old Democratic picnics at Lone Jack and the oratorical mannerism of the old-time politicians, and particularly Colonel Crisp, who had said, “Goddamn an eyewitness, he always spoils a good story.” He described seeing William Jennings Bryan sitting at lunch in Kansas City with a bowl full of radishes and a plate of butter. “He’d just sit there buttering the radishes and eating them. Ate the whole bowl.”

When Miller asked if he ever “identified” with Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer when growing up, “No,” Truman said. “I wasn’t in that class, I was kind of a sissy when growing up.” Wearing glasses, he said, “makes a kid lonely and he has to fight for everything he wants. Oh, well, you had to be either intellectually above [the others] or do more work than they did…. Then you have to be careful not to lord it over those that you’ve defeated in that line.”

He talked of political bosses. (“The boss is not the boss unless he has the majority of the people with him.”) He talked of Franklin Roosevelt. (“He had something like Bryan had. He could make people believe what he wanted to do was right.”) He told the story of the Chicago convention of 1944, recounting how he had felt when he put down the telephone in Bob Hannegan’s room after talking to Roosevelt and described how the others in the room looked, waiting to hear what he would do. (“I walked around there for about five minutes and you should have seen the faces of those birds! They were just worried to beat hell.”) He described how, during the 1944 campaign, he had threatened to throw Joe Kennedy out the window of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, when Kennedy kept maligning Roosevelt. “I haven’t seen him since.” But then he warned Miller not to use the story, “because his son’s President of the United States and he’s a grand boy.”

An optimist was a person who thinks things can be done. No pessimist ever did anything for the world. Billy Graham said the end of the world was coming, but Truman didn’t believe it. Courtesy mattered greatly to him. He had heard a story of a gas attendant who refused to fill Tom Dewey’s tank, and Truman strongly disapproved. Later he would chide the press for calling the First Lady “Jackie.”

The great men of the Roman Republic were not military men, he said. Hadrian was the greatest; his own favorite, however, was Marcus Aurelius, who thought always of the welfare of his people.

Listened to long afterward the tapes would be extremely difficult to follow, full of static, full of the sound of other voices in Truman’s office, as people came and went. His own voice was strong, lower and more appealing than his platform voice. Often everyone would break into laughter. The mood was one of a good time, good fellowship, and clearly Truman delighted in it.

Unlike the day at Fort Leavenworth, some of the filming sessions went extremely well. His answers “came back rich with detail, and with all the sharp authority of the man who’d been there,” remembered Robert Aurthur of one particularly good session in New York. “Two or three times it was Mr. Truman who asked for another try, saying he could do better.” When, at one point, concern was voiced over whether the President was wearing the same necktie as he had during previous sessions in Independence, Truman asked if that really mattered. “Because if while I’m talking about Korea people are asking each other about my necktie it seems to me we’re in a great deal of trouble.”

To Miller and Aurthur, he seemed exceptionally alert and fit. His first impression, Miller remembered, was, “My God, he’s not old at all!” But in fact Truman had begun to slow down, even slip a little. To those who had worked with him at the White House, those who had known him from years past in Independence and Kansas City, he was noticeably different from the man he had been. He moved with less authority. He had become slightly hard of hearing. Responding to questions, he was often inclined to give a quick abrasive answer for effect, an old man’s wisecrack. He had been asked so many of the same questions so often in recent years that he had developed a set of pat answers that sounded no better than pat answers. Sometimes he talked as if quoting his own books or old speeches. Other times, and only in the company of men, he used more profanity than in days past. And while the famous smile, the cheerful, personable demeanor remained, his private disdain of certain people and trends of the moment was greater than ever before. He hated the fashion of long hair on young men, and greatly disliked being called “senior citizen.” Asked if he thought there would ever be an expedition to the moon, he said probably, but he could not imagine why.

In private, every once in a while, he could revert still to old habits of the mouth as if he were not aware of what he was saying. “People in Independence haven’t changed a darned bit,” he remarked at one point. He had nothing against Mormons, he told Miller, they were exceedingly hardworking people. But a lot of old-timers in town “hate them just as bad as they ever did,” Truman said, and “for the same reason some people hate to eat at the same table with a nigger.” It was prejudice, he said.

He worried about the mounting national debt and “this poor broke government of ours,” He intensely disapproved of what he saw happening to politics because of television. “I don’t like counterfeits and the radio and television make counterfeits out of these politicians.”

He hated to see the town being swallowed up by tract houses, billboards, gas stations, and traffic. And ironically, sadly, it was the automobile and the highway, two of the loves of his life, causing the change. Most mornings now, he had to stop and pick up litter—beer cans and candy wrappers—thrown into his front yard.

His lingering anger over General MacArthur seemed excessive. “There were times,” Merle Miller remembered, “when you wanted to say to him, ‘Look, you know, you had the last word. Leave it lay and bask in your triumph.’ ”

Of Eisenhower, he could hardly say anything without resorting to profanity.

But then Kennedy, too, seemed nearly as misguided to him as had Elsenhower. Truman was utterly appalled by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as was Acheson.

There was an unfortunate preoccupation at the Kennedy White House with “image,” Acheson wrote to Truman.

This is a terrible weakness. It makes one look at oneself instead of at the problem. How will I look fielding this hot line drive to short stop? This is a good way to miss the ball altogether. I am amazed looking back to how far you were from this. I don’t remember a case where you stopped to think of the effect on your fortunes—or the party’s for that matter—of a decision in foreign policy.

“Keep writing,” Truman replied, “it keeps my morale up—if I have any.”

“You must remember our head of State is young, inexperienced and hopeful,” he told Acheson in another letter. “Let’s hope the hopeful works.”

Hearing that the Democratic Party, at Kennedy’s suggestion, was going to put on a $l,000-a-plate dinner, Truman was appalled. “If as and when that happens we’ll just quit being democrats with a little d.” Nobody had consulted him on the matter. “To hell with these millionaires at the head of things.”

Of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he said, “I just don’t like that boy, and I never will.” In May of 1960, Matt Connelly had begun serving a prison sentence for income tax evasion. Convinced of Connelly’s innocence, and like others, convinced that Connelly was being made the victim of a Republican vendetta, Truman had done all he could, including helping to raise money to defray Connelly’s legal expenses. In March 1961 he had written to Bobby Kennedy to urge a pardon for Connelly, who was by then out of prison on parole. But Kennedy had responded by saying only that he was studying the problem. In May, Truman wrote again, providing more detailed background information, and again Kennedy guaranteed his personal attention. But nothing happened, and by the start of 1962, a furious Truman wrote in longhand to the Attorney General:

Matt Connelly has been abused and mistreated as I told you in my original letter. I want him pardoned and his full rights restored. I’ve never spoken to your brother about this and I don’t intend to. But if you think that I enjoy mistreatment and injustice to one of my best employees, you are mistaken. So don’t smile at me any more unless you want to do justice to Matt Connelly, which is the right thing—a full pardon.

In November 1962, Connelly was pardoned by President Kennedy, and it was to the President that Truman sent his letter of gratitude.

Bess, who had been suffering increasingly with arthritis in her knees and hands, had discovered a lump in her breast. Although reported to be benign, it had invaded the lymph nodes and Wallace Graham performed a mastectomy.

The ordeal had been extremely distressing for Truman, who was also later hospitalized, in January 1963, to be operated on for an intestinal hernia—a “little butchering” as he said. In fact, it was an extremely serious operation for someone his age, and he was a long time recovering.

The man who had always loved clocks—who on restless nights had wound the clocks at the White House and kept eight or nine in the Oval Office, who had always wanted to be on time wherever he went—now saw time as the enemy, the pursuer. “That old lady ‘Anno Domini’ has been chasing me and I have to slow up a little bit,” he wrote to Acheson, “particularly since she has a partner in Mrs. Truman.” All three of Bess’s younger brothers, Frank, George, and Fred Wallace, were dead by now.

“At 79 you go to funeral after funeral of your friends, most of whom are younger than 79—and you sometimes wonder if the old man with the scythe isn’t after you,” Truman said in another letter in May 1963, following his birthday.

The murder of John F. Kennedy that fall left him feeling devastated. He had been having lunch at the Muehlebach when he heard the news that Kennedy had been shot, but it was not until later, in his car driving home, that he learned that Kennedy was dead.

“Having come so close to that fate himself,” wrote Margaret, “Dad was terribly shaken by it. For the first time in his life he was unable to face reporters.”

As I was preparing to fly to Washington [Truman later wrote in reply to a query from the author William Manchester] I received a call from President Johnson telling me that a plane was being sent for me and I was able to arrive the day before the funeral. I went directly to Blair House. Shortly after arriving there we rode over to the White House to call on Mrs. Kennedy. I found her as I expected, remarkably self possessed and poised, but to me the deep sadness in her eyes came through. She said to me her husband, the President, spoke of me often and with much feeling and understanding of what we tried to do, and I found myself choked up with emotion.

It is difficult for one who has lived through the Presidency and the trials and burdens that go with it, not to realize the enormity of the tragedy that had befallen the nation and the tragic blow that was visited on his family, and particularly the wife of the President.

Bess had been ill and unable to make the trip. Margaret and Clifton had come down from New York to stay with Truman at Blair House. Seeing her father, Margaret grew concerned. He looked dreadful. A doctor was sent for. Truman obediently went upstairs to his room and was served his dinner in bed. But he was back on his feet the next day to attend the funeral and graveside services, after which he returned to Blair House in the same car with the Eisenhowers. For about an hour in the front parlor at Blair House the two men sat talking. Then Eisenhower returned to his home in Gettysburg and Truman flew back to Missouri.

In the aftermath of the Kennedy tragedy, a bill was passed by Congress authorizing Secret Service protection for former presidents, and so a Secret Service detail arrived in Independence. But when one of the agents called at the Truman house to introduce himself, and told the President that he would no longer have a need for his own bodyguard, Mike Westwood, Truman told him, “Well, I no longer have a need for you, so get out of here.”

Neither of the Trumans had any wish for the Secret Service to return to their lives. Margaret described her mother reacting as if they had just told her she was going to have to spend four more years in the White House. Bess, too, refused to allow the agents on the property. But then President Johnson personally telephoned one evening and convinced Bess that the Secret Service should be reinstated and the Trumans agreed. They were to be watched over from then on, though Mike Westwood continued accompanying the President as before.

Celebrations of Truman’s eightieth birthday in May 1964 went on for more than a week in Independence, Kansas City, and Washington. There was a huge lunch in his honor in Independence and another at the Muehlebach. In Washington on May 8, he celebrated with “characteristic verve and vinegar,” drawing cheers and praise wherever he went. Invited to address the Senate, he sat in a front seat, a rose in his lapel, and listened to glowing tributes from twenty-seven senators, including two of his favorites from his own years in the Senate, Republicans George Aiken and Leverett Saltonstall. It was an historic occasion, the first time the Senate was making use of a new rule, adopted the year before, whereby former presidents could be granted “the privilege of the floor”—a point that Truman felt so deeply that when he rose he was scarcely able to speak.

Thank you very much. I am so overcome that I cannot take advantage of this rule right now. It is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me in my whole lifetime.

It is unique. It is something that has never been done before. And between you, and me, and the gatepost, since I profit by it, I think it is a good rule.

“You can wish me many more happy birthdays, but I’ll never have another one like this,” he said as senators crowded about him to shake his hand.

Five months later, on October 13, 1964, Truman tripped on the sill going into the upstairs bathroom at 219 North Delaware. He fell, cracking his head against the washbasin, his glasses shattering and cutting him badly over the right eye. He then fell against the bathtub, fracturing two ribs. Though still conscious, he was unable to move.

The police were called and he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Two days later, Wallace Graham reported that his patient was “much improved,” his condition “very satisfactory.” But though Truman was soon home again and eventually returned to something like his old routine, he never fully recovered from the fall. He began losing weight, his face becoming drawn, the eyes behind the thick glasses appearing disproportionately large. “He doesn’t look a thing like he used to,” his sister Mary Jane said. “He always had a full face and always looked so well. He takes a miserable picture now, he is so thin. He’s always taken such a nice picture.”

Yet on he went, taking his morning walks with Mike Westwood, or on occasion with Thomas Melton, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, who lived just across Truman Road—the pace a little slower each year, but Truman doing most of the talking, as Melton remembered. Passing an enormous gingko tree on Maple Street, one of the largest, most spectacular trees in town, Truman would customarily speak to it, too.

And what would the President say to the tree, Melton would be asked by a visitor years later. “He would say, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ ”

He and Bess became steady patrons of the Independence Public Library. In another new Chrysler, this a light green model, Mike Westwood would drive them, Truman riding in front, Bess in back. At the library she would go in and return with an armload of books.

The correspondence with Acheson also continued, Acheson writing at length to keep Truman posted on the Johnson presidency, as he knew Truman wanted. But Truman dictated his letters now and had less and less to say.

In the summer of 1965, Vivian Truman died at age seventy-nine. “His passing has meant a great loss to me,” Truman told Acheson. Within days Ted Marks, too, was dead and Truman attended both funerals.

When, on July 30, 1965, President Johnson came to Independence, to sign the new Medicare bill in Truman’s presence at the Truman Library, there was, in the words of one account, “sad amazement” expressed in the large Washington contingent over Truman’s pitifully frail appearance. His voice, however, remained firm and he talked of several projects he planned for the library.

Sitting at Johnson’s elbow, a cane in his lap, he watched the signing into law of legislation for health care for the aged such as he had proposed twenty years before.

“You have made me a very, very happy man,” Truman told the President.

Nellie Noland died, and Jim Pendergast. Among the private sorrows of Truman’s final years had been a falling out with his old friend Jim Pendergast. There had been a misunderstanding in 1958 over the endorsement of a local Democratic candidate, which left each of them convinced the other had betrayed their friendship. It was a sad, unfortunate impasse, and when Jim Pendergast, after a long battle with cancer, died in the spring of 1966, Truman, who attended the funeral, knew another chapter of his life was closed and not at all as he wished.

Attending funerals had become a part of his life. Thomas Melton, the Presbyterian pastor, would later recount an unforgettable graveside scene one grim winter day in Independence:

Quite often we have committals for people who are not from this area when they die. It was in February if I recall correctly and it was very cold and bitter, a lot of snow that year. And we were going to have a committal at the city cemetery. So I went to the appointed place…. There was no one there but the undertaker…no pallbearers. And we thought we’d wait until the appointed time [as announced] in the newspapers, in case anybody would come…. In came this green Chrysler and I recognized the car immediately. I knew it was Mr. Truman’s car. The Secret Service man got out and stood in his position and Mr. Truman walked over to the bier, and I was amazed. I went ahead with the committal. Snow was still in the air, cold…. After I had my benediction, I asked him, I said, “Mr. President, why are you here? It’s cold and bitter. Did you know this gentleman?” And he said, “Pastor, I never forget a friend.” And I was just speechless. This was the President of the United States.

Lyndon Johnson came to Independence several times again, hoping to enlist Truman’s endorsement of the war in Vietnam. But Truman, who as President had first pledged American support for the French against Ho Chi Minh, made no statement about the war. Privately, he had become more and more disillusioned with Johnson’s leadership.

In 1967, in his eighty-fourth year, Truman stopped coming to the library on a regular basis. Nothing was said in explanation; he just was not there much any more.

When, in early 1969, the new President, Richard Nixon, expressed a desire to come see Truman, he and Bess agreed. The President and First Lady called at 219 North Delaware on March 22. They were with the Trumans for half an hour, then drove to the library, where Truman, who was not having one of his best days, stood expressionless while Nixon, at a concert grand piano outside Truman’s office, played “The Missouri Waltz.” To many who were present, and who knew how much Truman disliked the song, it was a difficult moment. But when Nixon finished, Truman turned to Bess and asked what it was he had played.

Margaret and Clifton Daniel had had two more children by now—Harrison and Thomas—making a family of four sons. Twice with the Daniels, in late March 1968 and again the same time the next year, the Trumans returned to Key West, where, with the four boys, Grandpa would be seen walking the streets of the old town wearing a blue blazer and a baseball cap, enjoying the air and sunshine as in times past. These would be remembered as among the happiest weeks for all of them. He felt “damn good for an old man,” Truman told reporters.

But he had been hospitalized for the flu that winter and was beginning to feel like the last leaf on the tree. Adlai Stevenson, Churchill, Douglas MacArthur were all dead. During the stay at Key West came the news of the death of Eisenhower. Truman wrote a gracious tribute.

On June 28, 1969, the Trumans celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at home. There was no party. Only a few friends dropped by. As Bess explained to reporters, the President was not up to standing for a long time shaking hands.

Once, in 1913, writing from the farmhouse at Grandview, he had told her, “It seems a hollow week if I don’t arrive at 219 Delaware at least one day in it.” Now, there were few days that he did not spend there. His books became his life more and more. Cars passing on Truman Road, neighbors out for a walk in the evening, could see him in the window, sitting with a book under his reading lamp. What would her father’s idea of heaven have been, Margaret would be asked years later. “Oh,” she said, “to have a good comfortable chair, a good reading lamp, and lots of books around that he wanted to read.” Once in New York, when Ken McCormick of Doubleday had called on him early in the morning at his hotel, Truman had been sitting in a chair in the bedroom with several new books stacked on a table beside him. Did the President like to read himself to sleep at night, McCormick asked. “No, young man,” said Truman, “I like to read myself awake.”

Thomas Hart Benton came to the house to sketch the frail, old figure in his chair with his books, and the drawing Benton made was one few Americans would have recognized as Harry Truman. Benton thought there was more character in the face now.

“I was greatly pleased by your kind and generous letter on my eighty-seventh birthday,” Truman wrote to Acheson on May 14, 1971. “Coming from you, this carries a much deeper meaning for me.” The signature was still recognizable as his own, but just barely.

Ethel Noland died that summer. Then, on Tuesday, October 12, at his farm in Sandy Spring, Maryland, Acheson was found slumped over a desk in his study, dead of a heart attack at age seventy-eight. “Oh, no,” Bess Truman said when called by The New York Times. Mr. Truman, she said, would have no immediate comment, but added, “I know he’ll be very disturbed.”

The summer of 1972 Truman was hospitalized—first after another fall, then for two weeks with gastrointestinal troubles.

Late the afternoon of Tuesday, December 5, he was taken again to the hospital, leaving the house on North Delaware by ambulance for the last time. His condition, as given to reporters at Research Hospital by Wallace Graham that night, was “fair.” He was suffering from lung congestion.

On December 6, his condition listed as “critical,” bulletins were issued throughout the day. The doctors were trying to unclog his lung with antibiotics and oxygen, but were hampered because the former President was also suffering from bronchitis and because hardening of the arteries was causing his heart to race periodically.

Margaret, who was in Washington for a reception celebrating her new book about her father, Harry S. Truman, flew to Kansas City immediately in a White House jet provided by President Nixon.

In another few days, Truman appeared to rally and was taken off the critical list. But as his battle went on, Wallace Graham could say only that his condition was “very serious.”

Bess and Margaret were with him daily in his room on the sixth floor. Mary Jane Truman dropped by. She too was a patient in the hospital, having injured herself in a fall several weeks before. Truman was reported awake and smiling. Asked how he was feeling, he answered, “Better.” There were Christmas decorations in his window, reporters were told. Mrs. Truman “remained in good spirits.” “He smiled at us and gave yes and no answers to our questions,” Margaret told the press on December 10. On the night of December 11, when asked how he felt, Truman reportedly said, “I feel all right.” Asked if he hurt anywhere, he said, “No.” On December 14, he was reported no longer able to talk.

The struggle went on for three weeks, during which Margaret returned to her family in New York. By now he was suffering from lung congestion, heart irregularity, kidney blockages, and a failing digestive system.

One of the special duty nurses who had been with him as his night nurse since he was first admitted on December 5, Mrs. Walter Killilae, described him later as “warm, sweet and most appreciative of anything you did for him.” On Sunday morning, December 24, her night duty ended, she leaned over to tell him she was to have the night off, Christmas Eve, and asked him if he would be there when she got back. “He squeezed my hand,” she later said, “which leads me to believe his mind was still responsive….”

On Christmas Eve, he grew progressively weaker. On Christmas morning he was reported in a deep coma and near death. Margaret arrived by plane from New York. A 2:00 P.M. bulletin reported his condition “unimproved” and the hospital’s chief of staff, Warren F. Wilhelm, called his chances of survival “very, very small.” Asked why Mr. Truman was being kept alive this long, Dr. Wilhelm replied, “It’s an ethical question. Who would decide? You can always hope that he will rally.”

Bess, who had been staying overnight in the hospital and was with her husband through most of every day, had reached a point of almost total exhaustion. Greatly concerned, Margaret persuaded her mother to go home with her to Independence that Christmas night. “Dad was in a coma and there was nothing we could do to help him.”

Truman died in Kansas City’s Research Hospital and Medical Center on Tuesday, December 26, 1972, at 7:50 A.M. Central Standard Time.

An elaborate, five-day state funeral had been planned years before, with everything to be conducted by the Fifth Army from Fort Sam Houston, Texas. “O Plan Missouri,” as it was called, ran to several hundred pages, with everything specified in elaborate detail. Originally, Truman’s body was to be flown to Washington to lie in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol, then returned to Missouri for burial. As it was, in the three weeks when he lay dying in the hospital, the Army’s aging “Black jack,” the horse that had become such a symbol of tragedy for the nation during the Kennedy state funeral, was taken up in a plane several times to prepare him for the flight to Missouri.

Truman had been shown the entire plan one day in his office at the library and approved nearly all of it, subject to changes his family might wish. He thought it sounded like a “fine show” and was sorry to have to miss it, he said. He objected only to lying in state in Washington. He wanted to be buried “out there,” he had said, turning in his chair to look into the courtyard. “I want to be out there so I can get up and walk into my office if I want to.”

But the funeral on December 27 was greatly reduced in scale, to be more what Bess wanted. “Keep it simple, keep it simple,” she told Margaret and Clifton Daniel. Even so, the military presence was to be substantial, as several thousand troops arrived in Independence to take part in the ceremonies.

After a private service for the family at Carson’s Funeral Home, the body was taken to lie in state in the lobby of the Truman Library, the hearse moving slowly through the streets of the town—along Lexington, River Boulevard, Maple, and North Delaware, all lined with soldiers. An honor guard was posted at the library steps. Six howitzers lined the front lawn.

President and Mrs. Nixon came to pay their respects and to place a wreath of red, white, and blue carnations on the casket. Lyndon Johnson was present with all of his family. Johnson, who looked gaunt and greatly aged, would himself die just three weeks later.

For the rest of the day and through the night and on into the morning, thousands of people—seventy-five thousand people, it would be estimated—passed by the closed casket in the lobby of the Truman Library in front of the Benton mural. The line stretched half a mile, to beyond the highway. “This whole town was a friend of Harry’s,” one man told a reporter.

That afternoon, Thursday, December 28, as he had wished, Truman was buried in the courtyard of the library. With space for the service in the library auditorium limited, only 250 people were invited. Among those present were Averell Harriman, Clark Clifford, Charlie Murphy, Rose Conway, Harry Vaughan, and Sam Rosenman.

Bess Truman, Margaret and Clifton and their four sons, sat behind a green curtain, screened from the others. It was an Episcopal service, as Bess wished, though a Masonic rite was included and a Baptist minister read a prayer. There was no eulogy, no hymns were sung.

Outside afterward, at the gravesite, it was cold and raw, and as the howitzers roared a twenty-one-gun salute and Taps was sounded, the day seemed to turn dramatically colder still. Later, there was snow in the air, and a few of the library staff would remember standing at a window looking out into the empty court and feeling great sympathy, as assuredly Truman would have too, for the men who were working in the cold and dark to fill in the grave.

V

“He was not a hero or a magician or a chess player, or an obsession. He was a certifiable member of the human race, direct, fallible, and unexpectedly wise when it counted,” wrote Mary McGrory in the Washington Star the next day, in one of hundreds of published tributes.

He did not require to be loved. He did not expect to be followed blindly. Congressional opposition never struck him as subversive, nor did he regard his critics as traitors. He never whined.

He walked around Washington every morning—it was safe then. He met reporters frequently as a matter of course, and did not blame them for his failures. He did not use the office as a club or a shield, or a hiding place. He worked at it…. He said he lived by the Bible and history. So armed, he proved that the ordinary American is capable of grandeur. And that a President can be a human being….

He was remembered in print and over the air waves, in the halls of Congress and in large parts of the world, as a figure of courage and principle. Even Time and The Wall Street Journal, publications that had often scorned him in years past, acclaimed him now as one of the great figures of the century.

The obituary in The New York Times ran seven pages. (When the writer, Alden Whitman of The Times, had been preparing it in advance years before and went to Independence to interview Truman himself, feeling extremely uneasy about the whole assignment, Truman greeted him with a smile, saying, “I know why you’re here and I want to help you all I can.”)

In a day of memorial tributes in the Senate chamber that he so loved, he was eulogized as the president who had faced the momentous decision of whether to use the atomic bomb, praised for the creation of the United Nations, for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the recognition of Israel, NATO; for committing American forces in Korea and for upholding the principle of civilian control over the military—“decisions many of us would pale before,” said Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.

He was remembered as the first president to recommend Medicare, remembered for the courage of his stand on civil rights at the risk of his political fortunes. The whistle-stop campaign was recalled as one of the affirming moments in the history of the American political system.

His lack of glamour, the “cronies” and loud Florida shirts, the angry letters and the taint of the “Truman scandals,” seemed to fade in memory. The scandals, squalid as they were, would with time appear almost tame in contrast to the corrupt excesses of later administrations.

The frequently quoted view of Sam Rayburn that Truman was right on all the big decisions, wrong on all the little ones, was hardly accurate. His Loyalty Program, a very large decision, had been woefully wrong—as was the appointment of Louis Johnson, as was the high-handed seizure of the steel industry—while the restoration of Herbert Hoover to public service and public esteem was not only a right and generous “small” decision, but one that said much about Truman’s essential human quality.

That he would later be held accountable by some critics for the treacheries and overbearing influence of the CIA, as well as for the Vietnam War, was understandable but unjustified. He never intended the CIA to become what it did. His decisions concerning Vietnam by no means predetermined all that followed under later, very different presidents.

His insistence that the war in Korea be kept in bounds, kept from becoming a nuclear nightmare, would figure more and more clearly as time passed as one of his outstanding achievements. And rarely had a president surrounded himself with such able, admirable men as Stimson, Byrnes, Marshall, Forrestal, Leahy, Acheson, Lovett, Elsenhower, Bradley, Clifford, Lilienthal, Harriman, Bohlen, and Kennan—as time would also confirm. It was as distinguished a group as ever served the country, and importantly, he had supported them as they supported him.

Born in the Gilded age, the age of steam and gingerbread Gothic, Truman had lived to see a time of lost certainties and rocket trips to the moon. The arc of his life spanned more change in the world than in any prior period in history. A man of nineteenth-century background, he had had to face many of the most difficult decisions of the unimaginably different twentieth century. A son of rural, inland America, raised only a generation removed from the frontier and imbued with the old Jeffersonian ideal of a rural democracy, he had had to assume command of the most powerful industrial nation on earth at the very moment when that power, in combination with stunning advances in science and technology, had become an unparalleled force in the world. The responsibilities he bore were like those of no other president before him, and he more than met the test.

Ambitious by nature, he was never torn by ambition, never tried to appear as something he was not. He stood for common sense, common decency. He spoke the common tongue. As much as any president since Lincoln, he brought to the highest office the language and values of the common American people. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear. Yet he was not and had never been a simple, ordinary man. The homely attributes, the Missouri wit, the warmth of his friendship, the genuineness of Harry Truman, however appealing, were outweighed by the larger qualities that made him a figure of world stature, both a great and good man, and a great American president.

“Watch the President,” Admiral King had whispered to Lord Moran at Potsdam. “This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job….”

With his ability to “take it,” his inner iron, his bedrock faith in the democratic process, his trust in the American people, and his belief that history was the final, all-important judge of performance, he was truly exceptional. He never had a doubt about who he was, and that too was part of his strength, as well as the enjoyment of life he conveyed.

He was the kind of president the founding fathers had in mind for the country. He came directly from the people. He was America. In his time, in his experience, from small town to farm to World War in far-off France in 1918; from financial failure after the war to the world of big-city machine politics to the revolutionary years of the New Deal in Washington to the surge of American power during still another terrible World War, he had taken part in the great chronicle of American life as might have a character in a novel. There was something almost allegorical about it all: The Man of Independence and His Odyssey.

The “lesson” of Truman’s life, said Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III of Illinois, was a lesson about ourselves: “an object lesson in the vitality of popular government; an example of the ability of this society to yield up, from the most unremarkable origins, the most remarkable men.”

Dean Acheson had called him the Captain with the Mighty Heart; George Marshall, in 1948, had said it was “the integrity of the man” that would stand down the ages, more even than the courage of his decisions. Eric Sevareid, who observed at close range so much of the history of the era and its protagonists, would say nearly forty years later of Truman, “I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.”

He had lived eighty-eight years and not quite eight months. Bess Truman lived on at 219 North Delaware for another ten years. She died there on October 18, 1982, and was buried beside him in the courtyard of the Truman Library.

Acknowledgments

For a biographer, the great body of surviving letters, diaries, private memoranda, and autobiographical sketches written by Harry S. Truman is a treasure beyond compare. There is really nothing like the Truman manuscript collection at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence. The letters he wrote between 1910 and 1959 to the idolized love of his life, Bess Wallace Truman, are thought to number 1,302—but no one really knows what the exact total may be—and there are thousands more in his own hand, to his mother, his sister, to his cousins Nellie and Ethel Noland, to old Army friends, Dean Acheson, fellow politicians, newspaper editors, friend, and foe, as well as long diary entries. Truman poured himself out on paper with vigor and candor all of his adult life. For a latter-day writer trying to understand him and tell his story in the context of his times, it is Truman himself, again and again, who makes it possible to go below the surface, to know what he felt, what he wanted, his worries, his anger, the exceptional and the commonplace details of his days. Few Americans of any era, irrespective of background or profession, have left such a vivid personal record, quite apart from the immense volume of his official papers, and it is almost certain that we will never again have a President who leaves so candid and revealing an account. Or one written in such a clear hand. In addition to all else that he did for his country, Harry Truman gave us a very large part of himself and his times in his own words, and in my efforts to write his life, during ten years of work on this book, there has been no one to whom I have felt more gratitude.

The staff archivists, librarians, and other specialists at the Harry S. Truman Library have been helpful in countless ways, instructive, patient, generous with their time, generous with ideas and advice, since the morning I first walked in the door one very cold winter day early in 1982. Though they are in no way responsible for any errors of fact or judgment in these pages, there is no part of the book in which they have not played a role, both in what they have helped to uncover in the library collection and in what they themselves know of Truman’s life from years of interest and study. In my experience, there is no more agreeable place in which to do research than the Truman Library. Nor has there been anyone on the staff who has not shown an interest in my work or failed to be helpful. I am grateful to them all. But for their particular help and friendship over the years I wish to express my utmost thanks to: Benedict K. Zobrist, director, and George Curtis, assistant director; archivists Philip D. Lagerquist, Erwin J. Mueller, and Dennis Bilger; photographic librarian Pauline Testerman; the very good-natured, resourceful Elizabeth Safly, research librarian and creator and keeper of the so-called vertical file, a mine of marvelous information; Vicky Alexander, Clay Bauske, Robin Burgess, Carol Briley, Millie Carol, John Curry, Patricia Dorsey; J. R. Fuchs, Ray Geselbracht, Anita Heavener, Jann Hoag, Niel Johnson, Earl Pennington, Warren Ohrvall, Ruth Springston, and Mark Beveridge, who knows more about World War I than anyone I know.

I wish also to express my particular indebtedness to the following published works about Truman: his own two-volume Memoirs and Margaret Truman Daniel’s Harry S. Truman, a lively, often moving memoir by an adoring daughter; The Man of Independence by Jonathan Daniels, which though incomplete as a biography and anything but impartial (it was written while Truman was still President and Daniels served on Truman’s staff), nonetheless contains much on Truman’s early life not to be found elsewhere; Truman by Roy Jenkins, a too-brief survey of the Truman presidency, but very valuable for its insights; John Hersey’s Aspects of the Presidency, which includes his deft New Yorker profile of Truman, written after an unprecedented chance to follow the President through several crucial days during the second term; The Truman Presidency, The History of a Triumphant Succession by Cabell Phillips, who wrote from firsthand observation as a correspondent for The New York Times; and Plain Speaking, Merle Miller’s popular compilation of reminiscences by the elderly former President and others close to him. Though not altogether reliable as to fact, it has the vitality of its subject and contains much of value.

The three leading Truman scholars of our day are Alonzo L. Hamby, Robert J. Donovan, and Robert H. Ferrell, and I have benefited greatly from their work—from Professor Hamby’s many articles; from Robert Donovan’s comprehensive two-volume study of the Truman presidency, Conflict and Crisis and The Tumultuous Years, fine books by a writer who covered the Truman White House as a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune; and from Robert H. Ferrell for his advice, friendship, and a whole shelf of Truman books, including The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, a skillful stitching together of Truman’s own sketches about himself, and two collections of Truman letters and other writings, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman and Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910–1959. Everyone who writes about Truman is indebted to Professor Ferrell for these invaluable books.

My bibliography follows, with the principal sources of manuscript and published works, and includes the names of the more than 125 people who agreed to be interviewed for this book. I thank each and all many times over. A number of the interviews were done over several days, and at intervals of several years. Most of the longer interviews were taped, unless this was against the wishes of the interviewee. When a tape recorder was not used, I kept notes. And while all those who generously gave of their time contributed to my understanding of the subject—and including many who are not directly quoted in the book—I want to thank the following especially: Margaret Truman Daniel for three long interviews, including an all-day session in the Truman home at Independence done for the public television series Smithsonian World; Clifton Daniel, who talked for several hours over lunch in New York and during a thirty-block walk back uptown; Clark Clifford, who gave many hours of his time over a span of ten years and whose recollections and insights were of greatest possible value; George Elsey, who, like Clark Clifford, played a key role in the Truman administration and whose memory for details and sense of history has helped to give life and balance to my recounting of events in ways that would never have been possible otherwise; Rex Scouten, Curator of the White House, and Floyd Boring, both of whom were part of President Truman’s Secret Service detail and who not only spent hours recalling people and events, but took a Saturday afternoon to walk me through what happened at Blair House, inside and out, the day the Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill the President; James and Martha Ann Truman Swoyer of Oskaloosa, Kansas, who, in addition to talking with me at length about their Uncle Harry, let me see and make notes from his high school workbooks, wonderful, important documents that are quoted here for the first time; the late Merle Miller, who gave me one of the earliest, most interesting of the interviews, and granted me exclusive access to his recorded conversations with former President Truman which are on file at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library but closed to researchers at Miller’s request; the late Stephen Slaughter, who grew up next door to the Truman farm, who knew Harry Truman when he was a farmer, and whose superb book, History of a Missouri Farm Family, and personal recollections of life in Grandview helped immeasurably in recreating that vanished time and way of life; Joe Pruett of Kansas City, who helped track down former members of the Pendergast organization, who took me to 1908 Main, up the narrow stairs, to see where Tom Pendergast once ruled, and who, with his wife Catherine Pendergast Pruett, let me examine a wealth of Pendergast family letters, photographs, and memorabilia, and talked with great candor and understanding about the whole Pendergast era; and Sue Gentry, who began writing about life in Independence in the 1930s as a reporter for the Examiner and is still going strong, in her “Local Gentry” column in the paper. From the vantagepoint of her home on West Waldo, around the corner from the Truman house, she knows “the whole story.”

For their very valuable comments and suggestions on various portions of the manuscript, I thank Paul Horgan, Charlton Ogburn, Anna Loomis McCandless, John T. Galvin, John Zentay, Paul Nagel, George Elsey, Mark Beveridge, Liz Safly, Erwin Mueller, Lyman Field, the late John Oliver, Charles Guggenheim, and Richard Baker, Historian of the United States Senate.

Richard Baker also arranged for me to retrace the steps of Vice President Harry Truman at the Capitol the fateful evening of April 12, 1945, and with Capitol police officers William E. Uber and John D. Roach, we ran, as Truman did, from one end of the Capitol to the other, from what was Sam Rayburn’s hideaway back along the lower halls and corridors to the Vice President’s office. When I first inquired if it would be possible for me to make the run, Dr. Baker said, “Only if I can come too.”

Paul Nagel, Pat O’Brien, and Brent Schondelmeyer, three historians and authors who grew up in Independence and share a passion for Missouri history, gave me a wonderful day’s tour of Jackson County for which I will always be grateful. Lyman Field recalled his memorable experience with President Truman the morning after the 1948 election and introduced me to dozens of people in Kansas City who took an interest in my project.

I wish to thank also for their continuing help and interest: the staff of the Boston Athenaeum, and especially director Rodney Armstrong and research librarian Jan Malcheski; David Wigdor and others of the Manuscript Division, the Library of Congress; Carol Dage of the Liberty Memorial Library in Kansas City; the staff of the National Archives, and particularly Military Historian Edward Reese, who saved me many hours and much frustration in documenting the casualty estimates anticipated in an invasion of Japan in 1945; the staff of the Jackson County Historial Society; Norman J. Reigle and others of the National Park Service who do such an excellent job at the Truman home—the Harry S. Truman National Historic Site; Aurora Davis of the Kansas City Star Library; Ralph Graves, former Editor-in-Chief of Time, Inc., who arranged access to the Time-Life files; Harry Middleton and his staff at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library; Helen Bergen of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, Washington, D.C.; the Yale University Library; the West Tisbury Public Library; the Cornell University Library; the Smithsonian Institution.

To the following I am also indebted in many ways: Henry Adams; Clarence A. Barnes, Jr., Mary Margaret Bell of the Kentucky Historical Society; the late Walter H. Bieringer; Robert Blafield; Barrington Boardman; Walt Bodine; Daniel J. Boorstin; Charles Burke; Brian Burns; the late Martin Carr; Major General William A. Carter; Carl Charlson; Bernice J. Conley, County Clerk at the Kansas City Courthouse; Paul W. Cook, Jr.; L. P. Cookingham, Frances Cottingham and the Shelby County Historical Society; Annette Curtis; Albert A Eisele; Christa Fischer; Pauline Fowler; Andrew J. Glass; Neil Goodwin and Margot Barnes Street; Katherine Graham; William and Joyce Graves; Shannon Gregory; David Grubin; Janet Helm; Thomas Hill; William F. P. Hugonin; Oliver Jenson, who let me borrow his complete bound set of Life for the Truman years; Emerson and Matilee Johnson; Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.; Chester and Joan Kerr; James Ketchum; Richard Ketchum; Arthur M. Klebanof; Jill Kneerim; the late Kathleen Moore Knight; Professor Robert Knowles; Laurelle O’Leary; Mark Mazer; John Mayhew; Harry McPherson; Cynthia Miller; Richard Miller; Wilson D. Miscamble; James Mongello; James Morrison; Royall O’Brien; Pat O’Neill; Margaret K. Olwine; Harlene Stapf Palkuti; Arva Parks; Eleanor R. Piacenza; Monty B. Poen; Barbara J. Potts, former mayor of Independence; Henry Hope Reed; Donald Ritchie; Judge Howard Sachs; Professor William Sand; Francis N. Satterlee; Michael Shapiro of the St. Louis Art Museum; Al Silverman; Robert C. Smith; Raymond W. Smock, Historian of Congress; Richard Snow; Marie-Cecile and Alfred E. Street; Audrey Stubbart; the late Barbara Tuchman; Geoffrey Ward; Laura and Robert Wilson; Philip F. Ziedman; William Zinsser.

I am deeply grateful to: the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship grant that helped make possible an additional year of research; J. Gordon Kingsley, president of William Jewell College in Liberty, for the opportunity to learn about Missouri by living there, as writer-in-residence at William Jewell; Haroldine Helm, who provides welcome comforts of home for researchers at the Truman Library, even researchers and their families; the tireless, resourceful Mike Hill, research specialist, who helped through thick and thin; Shirley Mayhew, Sarah Mayhew, Lynn S. Worthington, Ed Wise, and Eric Moe, who, with Mike Hill, assisted with the source notes.

For the design and production of the book I gratefully acknowledge the work of three splendid people, Eve Metz, Frank Metz, and Sophie Sorkin of Simon & Schuster. I thank Wendell Minor for his stunning original portrait of Truman for the dust jacket. And for the immensely helpful contributions she has made as copy editor, I thank Ann Adelman.

To Richard Snyder and Peter Schwed of Simon & Schuster, for their initial enthusiasm for a Truman biography, my wholehearted appreciation. I thank especially my editor, Michael Korda. With his professional advice and good cheer, my friend and literary agent Morton L. Janklow has been a mainstay throughout, for which I am extremely grateful.

For all their efforts typing the manuscript, I thank Patricia Kendall and Kathryn Harcourt. I thank again my daughter. Melissa and her husband John McDonald, for a wealth of favors and interest; my son David, for his invaluable suggestions on the manuscript; my son Bill, for research assistance in Missouri and for traveling with me as driver, photographer, companion, and “interpreter” across France, following Captain Harry Truman through World War I; my son Geoffrey, for his help with research at the Library of Congress; and my daughter Dorie, who uncovered valuable material about the White House, who, when the end seemed near, warned, me not to let up, and to whom the book is happily, proudly dedicated.

And with all my heart I thank my wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, who took part every step of the way and always to the benefit of the work and the author.

—David McCullough

Washington, D.C.; Liberty, Missouri;

Ithaca, New York; West Tisbury, Massachusetts

January 11, 1992

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Source Notes

Part One

1. Blue River Country

“Lord, grant”: Gilbert, Westering Man, 21.

One side-wheel steamer: Blue Springs (Missouri) Examiner, April 26, 1989.

One traveler described: Waugh, “Desultory Wanderings…,” Missouri Historical Society, April 1950.

“The Missouri is constantly’: Parkman, Oregon Trail, 14.

in a letter from Missouri dated July 24, 1846: Nancy Tyler Holmes to Mary Jane Holmes, Harry S. Truman Library (cited hereafter as HSTL).

“As for myself’: Anderson Shipp Truman to Mary Truman, September 16, 1846, HSTL.

“grand prairie ocean”: Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 59.

“Mules, horses”: Parkman, Journals, Vol. 2, 419.

“To live in a region:” History of Jackson County, 73.

“rich and beautiful uplands’: Gregg, 163.

“without other warrant”: History of Jackson County, 255.

Mormons must leave or be “exterminated”: Ibid., 268.

a lone assassin: Ibid., 257.

“Awful cold”: Quoted in Slaughter, Missouri Farm Family, 45.

“a gun and an axe”: John W. Meador, Oral History, HSTL.

“She was a strong woman”: HST quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 62.

In 1850, his recorded wealth: U.S. Census, 1850.

at nearly $50,000: U.S. Census, 1860.

a man “who could do pretty much anything”: HST quoted in Miller, 62.

“The wagons were coupled”: Deseret News, August 15, 1860, 188.

In the spring of 1849: History of Jackson County, 96.

In 1851 cholera struck again: Ibid.

“Come on then, gentlemen”: Quoted in Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, 80.

“enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist”: Ibid., 89.

John Brown…come to “regulate matters”: Ibid., 130.

A Jackson County physician named Lee: History of Jackson County, 272.

“They asked me”: Ibid., 300.

Quantrill struck Kansas: Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, 286; Josephy, Civil War, 373.

Jim Crow Chiles: Sheley, “James Peacock and ‘Jim Crow’ Chiles,” Frontier Times, May 1963.

In the formal claim Harriet Louisa Young filed: U.S. House of Representatives, 59th Congress, 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. No. 901, June 19, 1906.

Recollection of Martha Ellen Young: Berger, “Mother Truman’s Life Not All Frontier Toil,” Kansas City Times, June 30, 1946 (reprinted from The New York Times).

“It is heartsickening to see”: Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy, 126-27.

“I hope you have not turned”: John Truman to Anderson Truman, October 8, 1861, HSTL.

the Red Legs had arrived: Daniels, Independence, 36.

Anderson loaded his five slaves: Ethel Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“They never bought one”: Ibid.

He was “universally hated”: Mary Paxton Keeley, Oral History, HSTL.

To black people he was a living terror: Donald R. Hale, “James Chiles—A Missouri Badman,” The West, October 1968.

“to see them jump”: Ibid.

the confrontation on the west side: Ibid.

it was said of John A. Truman: History of Jackson County, 986.

a three-drawer burl walnut dresser: Martha Ann Truman Swoyer, author’s interview.

The couple’s own first home: Kornitzer, “The Story of Truman and His Father,” Parents Magazine, March 1951.

Lamar Democrat: June 28, 1883.

a Baptist circuit rider: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 20.

“Baby is real sick now”: Letter of Mary Martha Truman, April 7, 1885, HSTL.

he was chasing a frog: Autobiography, 3.

his mother, for fun: Ibid.

2. Model Boy

the happiest childhood: Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (cited hereafter as Memoirs), Vol. I, 113.

The farm was “a wonderful place”: Ibid., 115.

“I became familiar with every sort of animal”: Ibid.

“there were peach butter”: Ibid., 114.

The child liked everybody: Ibid., 124.

“flat eyeballs”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 49.

Mamma taught that punishment followed: Autobiography, 33.

enough to “burn the hide off: HST quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 63.

John Truman acquired a house: Memoirs, Vol. I, 115.

“I do not remember a bad teacher”: Ibid., 118.

“When I was growing up”: Ibid., 124-25.

“He just smiled his way along”: Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, December 21, 1947.

diphtheria: Memoirs, Vol. I, 116-17.

“didn’t scare easy”: Daniels, 53.

“not once,” he said: Quoted in Miller, 48.

“It was just something you did”: Ibid., 52.

“Harry, do you remember”: Daniels, 57.

“It’s a very lonely thing”: Quoted in Miller, 277–78.

Caroline Simpson taught: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 24.

“To tell the truth”: Quoted in Miller, 32.

“They wanted to call him”: Henry P. Chiles, Oral History, HSTL.

“intended for a girl” anyway: HST to EW, April 8, 1912, in Ferrell, ed., Dear Bess (cited hereafter as Dear Bess), 80.

He patented a staple puller: Original patents, HSTL.

automatic railroad switch: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“A mighty good trader”: Ibid.

“fight like a buzz saw”: Quoted in Steinberg, 17.

“A fiery fellow”: Stephen Slaughter, author’s interview.

“No one could make remarks”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 124.

“He had no use for a coward”: Parents Magazine, March 1951,

“Our house became headquarters”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 117-18.

“Harry was always fun”: Ethel Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“If I succeeded in carrying”: “Pickwick Papers,” May 14, 1934, HSTL.

“No! No! Harry was a Baptist”: Mary Paxton Keeley, Oral History, HSTL.

men with their blazing torches: Paxton, Memoirs, 22.

cows to milk: Autobiography, 30.

“in regard to integrity”: An Illustrated Description of Independence, Missouri, ca. 1902.

“There was conversation”: Quoted in Miller, 32.

“No town in the west”: An Illustrated Description of Independence, Missouri.

“Harry always wanted to know”: Amanda Hardin Palmer, Oral History, HSTL.

“The community at large”: Independence (Missouri) Examiner, August 23, 1901.

“Never, never give up”: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“In those days”: Quoted in Miller, 62.

“Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God”: HST Diary, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record (cited hereafter as Off the Record, 188.

“There must have been a thousand”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 121.

“In a little closet”: Ibid., 122.

“the biggest thing that ever happened”: Ibid.

“I don’t know anybody”: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“He had a real feeling for history”: Quoted in Miller, 50.

“Reading history, to me”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 119.

“the salt of the earth”: Ibid., 118–19.

“It cultivates every faculty”: Course of Study and Rules and Regulations of the Independence Public Schools, March 15, 1909, HSTL.

HST composition books: Collection of James F. and Mary Ann Truman Swoyer.

“Mothers held him up as a model”: Leviero’, “Harry Truman, Musician and Music Lover,” The New York Times Magazine, June 18, 1950.

he genuinely adored the great classical works: Ibid.

“all right,” John Truman said: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

picnics every August at Lone Jack: Miller, 66–67.

HST at 1900 Democratic National Convention: Daniels, 58.

Caesar’s bridge: Miller, 33.

“over a good deal”: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“‘Progress’ is the cry”: The Gleam, Independence High School Annual, May 1901.

3. The Way of the Farmer

“I’m fine. And you?”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 12.

“plunged” into railroads: Ethel Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“He got the notion he could get rich”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 59.

“mud horse”: Ibid.

Tasker Taylor tragedy: Independence Sentinel, August 23, 1902.

“A very down-to-earth education”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 123.

“He’s all right”: Jonathan Daniels interview notes, July 28, 1949, HSTL.

“Are you good at figures?”: April 24, 1903, HSTL.

“He is an exceptionally bright young man”: A D. Flintom to C. H. Moore, April 14, 1904, HSTL.

“Trueman,” as Flintom spelled it: A. D. Flintom to C. H. Moore, July 27, 1904, HSTL.

“never so happy as when”: Autobiography, 20.

Wallace suicide: Jackson Examiner, June 19, 1903.

“an attractiveness about him”: Ibid.

“Why should such a man”: Ibid.

wedding of Madge Gates to David Wallace: Kansas City Journal, June 15, 1883.

“[Bessie] was walking up and down”: Mary Paxton Keeley, Oral History, HSTL.

“Ties Collar Cuffs Pins”: HST Expenses Diary, HSTL.

A note from “Horatio”: HST to EN, February 2, 1904, HSTL.

A performance by Richard Mansfield: Autobiography, 22.

“They wanted to see him grin”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 84.

“I was twenty-one”: Autobiography, 27.

dress uniform episode: Ibid., 28.

“when a bachelor”: Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh, 1.

Virgil Thomson, who was to become: Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 3.

“Harry and I had only a dollar a week”: Daniels, 70.

Trumans move back to Grandview: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 32.

His friends were sure: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“and woe to the loafer”: Autobiography, 36.

“Well, if you don’t work”: Robert Wyatt, Oral History, HSTL.

“The simple life was not always”: Stephen Slaughter, author’s interview.

“My father told me”: Quoted in Daniels, 76.

Yet John Truman was happier: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“Yes, and if you did a good job”: Gaylon Babcock, Oral History, HSTL.

A few days later: Renshaw, “President Truman. His Missouri Neighbors Tell of His Farm Years,” The Prairie Farmer, May 12, 1945.

Harry also kept the books: HST Account Books, HSTL.

“The coldest day in winter”: HST to EW, May 19, 1913, Dear Bess, 125.

“finest land you’d find”: Quoted in Miller, 89.

“always bustling around”: The Prairie Farmer, May 12, 1945.

“The ground was terribly hard”: Ibid.

“He was so down-to-earth”: Pansy Perkins, Oral History, HSTL.

“He always looked neat”: Slaughter, author’s interview.

“Harry was a very good lodge man”: Babcock, Oral History, HSTL.

“Frank Blair got Harry interested”: Slaughter, author’s interview.

“Papa buys me candy”: HST to EW, April 27, 1911, Dear Bess, 30.

“To be a good farmer in Missouri”: Vivian quoted in Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“You know as long as”: HST to EW, October 16, 1911, Dear Bess, 52.

“Well, I saw her”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 32.

“Isn’t she a caution?”: HST to EW, March 19, 1911, Dear Bess, 25.

“I’m always rattled”: HST to EW, postmark illegible, ibid., 134.

“Say, it sure is a grand thing”: HST to EW, February 13, 1912, ibid., 73.

“It is necessary to sit”: HST to EW, July 8, 1912, HSTL.

“This morning I was helping”: HST to EW, January 26, 1911, Dear Bess, 21.

“I have been to the lot”: HST to EW, April 1, 1912, ibid., 80.

“I’m horribly anxious for you”: HST to EW, April 8, 1912, ibid., 81.

“You know when people can get excited”: HST to EW, March 19, 1911, ibid., 25.

“you’ve no idea”: HST to EW, May 17, 1911, ibid., 33.

“I am by religion”: HST to EW, February 7, 1911, ibid., 22.

“Lent and such things”: HST to EW, March 19, 1911, ibid., 24.

“I have been reading David Copperfield”: HST to EW, May 3, 1911, ibid., 31.

“you know, were I an Italian”: HST to EW, June 22, 1911, ibid., 39.

“You know that you turned me down”: HST to EW, July 12, 1911, ibid, 40.

In August, he announced: HST to EW, August 27, 1911, ibid., 44; September 5, 1911, 45.

“I was reading Plato’s Republic”: HST to EW, November 6, 1912, ibid., 103.

“He had found he could get”: HST to EW, May 23, 1916, ibid., 200.

“girl mouth”: HST to EW, November 19, 1913, ibid., 145.

“so long as he’s honest”: HST to EW, June 22, 1911, ibid., 39.

“Did you ever sit”: HST to EW, November 1, 1911, ibid., 57.

“We never rated a person”: Slaughter, author’s interview.

“Just imagine how often”: HST to EW, November 1, 1911, Dear Bess, 57.

“hat-full of debts”: HST to EW, December 21, 1911, ibid., 64.

two reasons for wanting to be rich: HST to EW, January 25, 1912, ibid., 69.

“I really thought once I’d be”: HST to EW, May 23, 1911, ibid., 36.

“I am like Mark Twain”: HST to EW, May 17, 1911, ibid., 34.

“You know a man has to be”: HST to EW, July 12, 1911, ibid., 41.

“who knows, maybe I’ll be”: HST to EW, May 23, 1911, ibid., 36.

“Sucker! Sucker!”: HST to EW, October 22, 1911, ibid., 53.

three hundred bales of hay: HST to EW, August 12, 1912, ibid., 93.

“I have been working like Sam Hill”: HST to EW, September 30, 1913, ibid., 137.

father in a “terrible stew”: HST to EW, postmarked November 11, 1913, HSTL.

“Politics is all he ever advises me”: HST to EW, August 6, 1912, Dear Bess, 92.

“I don’t think we would have traded him for anybody”: Slaughter, author’s interview.

“I never understood”: Ibid.

“Politics sure is the ruination”: HST to EW, postmark illegible, Dear Bess, 132.

“I told him that was a very mild remark”: HST to EW, May 26, 1913, ibid., 126.

He was the one person: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

another try in an Indian land lottery: HST to EW, September 30, 1913, Dear Bess, 138.

“all puffed up”: HST to EW, November 4, 1913, ibid., 141–42.

“How does it feel to be engaged to a clodhopper”: HST to EW, November 10, 1913, ibid., 143.

“I know your last letter word for word”: HST to EW, November 19, 1913, ibid., 145.

“Oh please send me another like it”: Ibid.

“Mrs. Wallace wasn’t a bit in favor of Harry”: Ardis Haukenberry, author’s interview.

“We have moved around quite a bit”: HST to EW, February 16, 1911, Dear Bess, 24.

“Yes, it is true that Mrs. Wallace did not think”: May Wallace, author’s interview.

mother’s operation for a hernia: HST to EW, March 20, 1914, Dear Bess, 161.

“I hope she lives to be”: HST to EW, January 26, 1914, ibid., 157.

Mamma gave him the money for an automobile: HST to EW, May 12, 1914, ibid., 168.

“Harry didn’t like onions”: May Wallace, author’s interview.

“I started for Monegaw Springs”: HST to EW, no postmark. Dear Bess,183.

“Imagine working the roads”: HST to EW, August 8, 1914, ibid., 172.

“If anyone asks him how he’s feeling”: HST to EW, September 28, 1914, ibid., 176.

“good letters” helped “put that backbone into me”: HST to EW, September 17, 1914, ibid., 175.

his father, who refused to let the nurse: HST to EW, November 1914, ibid., 178.

“I remember the Sunday afternoon”: Slaughter, History of a Missouri Farm Family, 71.

“I was with him”: Daniels, 74.

“Harry and I often got up”: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“An Upright Citizen”: Independence Examiner, November 3, 1914.

“I have quite a job on my hands”: HST to EW, November 1914, Dear Bess, 178.

“quiet wheat-growing people”: Cather, One of Ours, 143.

“gave it everything he had”: Quoted in Miller, 90.

“I almost got done planting”: HST to EW, April 28, 1915, Dear Bess, 182.

“It’s right unhandy to chase”: HST to EW, Grandview, 1915, ibid., 181.

he traveled to Texas; HST to EW, February 16, 1916, ibid., 185.

“There’s no one wants to win”: HST to EW, February 19, 1916, ibid., 187.

“This place down here”: HST to EW, date illegible, ibid., 193.

“I don’t suppose”: HST to EW, June 3, 1916, ibid., 201.

“I can’t possibly lose forever”: HST to EW, April 24, 1916, ibid., 198.

“The mine has gone by the board”: HST to EW, May 19, 1916, ibid., 199.

He could “continue business”: HST to EW, May 23, 1916, ibid., 200.

“It’s about 111 degrees in the shade”: HST to EW, July 30, 1916, ibid., 206.

“Wish heavy for me to win”: HST to EW, July 28, 1916, ibid.

“Keep wishing me luck”: HST to EW, August 4, 1916, ibid., 207.

buying and selling oil leases: Steinberg, 39.

“signed also by Martha E. Truman”: Ibid, 39.

“came up every time with something else”: HST to EW, August 5, 1916, Dear Bess, 209.

“Truman was surrounded by people, people, people”: Daniels, 81.

“If this venture blows”: HST to EW, January 23, 1917, Dear Bess, 213.

“In the event this country”: Daniels, 83.

Teeter Pool discovered: Memoirs, Vol. I, 127.

He said $11,000 at the time: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 56.

If his part in his father’s debts: HST to EW, April 28, 1915, Dear Bess, 182.

he was never meant for a farmer: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“Riding one of these plows all day”: HST, “Autobiographical Sketch,” HSTL.

“It takes pride to run a farm”: HST to MET and MJT, September 18, 1946, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 96.

4. Soldier

“It is the great adventure”: HST to EW, September 15, 1918, Dear Bess, 271.

“we got through”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 93.

Some people thought her the best looking: Gaylon Babcock, Oral History, HSTL.

“It was quite a blow”: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 42.

She must not tie herself: HST to EW, July 14, 1917, Dear Bess, 225.

the reasons to go to war: HST to EW, January 18, 1918, HSTL.

there wasn’t a German bullet: HST to EW, February 1, 1918, Dear Bess, 242.

“Galahad after the Grail”: Autobiography, 41.

passes eye exam: U.S. Army Medical Records, August 9, 1917, HSTL.

On July 4, 1917, when Harry turned up: HST to EW, July 4, 1918, HSTL.

“It was sure enough cold”: HST to EW, October 9, 1917, HSTL.

“A tent fifty yards away”: HST to EW, October 18, 1917, Dear Bess, 231–32.

“all the Lillian Russells”: HST to EW, September 30, 1917, ibid., 228.

artillery terms: Lee, The Artillery Man, 326.

“I have been squads east”: HST to EW, February 3, 1918, Dear Bess, 242.

“I learned how to say Verdun”: HST to EW, October 27, 1918, HSTL.

“He made us feel”: HST to EW, January 27, 1918, Dear Bess, 241.

“one of our most effective officers”: Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 35.

“I have a Jew in charge”: HST to EW, October 28, 1917, Dear Bess, 233.

“Each day Harry would write a letter”: Mayerberg, “Edward Jacobson: President Truman’s Buddy,” Liberal Judaism, August 1945.

“I guess I should be very proud”: HST to EW, February 3, 1918, Dear Bess, 242.

“real good conversation”: HST to EW, February 23, 1918, ibid., 245–46.

“Jacobson says he’d go”: HST to EW, November 24, 1917, ibid., 238.

“I didn’t know how crazy”: HST to EW, January 10, 1918, ibid., 240.

Tiernan provides whiskey: HST to EW, October 23, 1917, ibid., 232.

“We elected Klemm”: Truman interview with Jonathan Daniels, November 12, 1949.

“He taught me more about handling men”: Autobiography, 44.

“You speak pretty good English”: Ted Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

“No man can be that good”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 128.

Berry would stalk up and down: Steinberg, 43.

“I suppose you will have to spend”: HST to EW, March 16, 1918, HSTL.

“I’d give anything in the world”: HST to EW, March 20, 1918, Dear Bess, 251.

“The phone’s yours”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 129.

“On leave in New York”: HST to EW, March 24 and March 26, 1918, Dear Bess, 252–53.

a “Kike town”: HST to EW, March 27, 1918, ibid, 254.

“Israelitist extraction”: HST to EN, ca. 1918, HSTL.

“I imagine his vision”: Harry Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“There we were watching”: Autobiography, 45.

He ached for home: HST to EW, April, 1918, Dear Bess, 256.

arrival at Brest: Autobiography, 45.

At the hotel in Brest: HST to EW, April 14, 1918, Dear Bess, 257.

The whole surrounding countryside: HST to EW, April 23, 1918, ibid, 260.

“The people generally treat us fine”: HST to EW, April 12, 1918, ibid, 259.

“I’m for the French more and more”: HST to EW, June 27, 1918, ibid, 264.

They also knew how to build: HST to EW, May 19, 1918, ibid, 262.

“They are the most sentimental people”: HST to EW, June 2, 1918, HSTL.

“Je ne comprends pas”: HST to EW, April 17, 1918, Dear Bess, 259.

determined to drink France dry: HST to EW, April 14, 1918, ibid, 258.

“Wandering through dark streets”: Quoted in Freidel, Over There, p. 80.

“Personally, I think Harry”: Edgar Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“Wish I could step in”: HST to EW, April 17, 1918, Dear Bess, 259.

the first-class coach: HST to EN, May 17, 1918, HSTL

account of château: HST to EW, April 28, 1918, Dear Bess, 260.

“You’d never think that a war”: HST to EN, May 1, 1918, HSTL.

“and then the clock on the Hôtel de Ville”: HST to EW, April 28, 1918, HSTL.

“I’ve studied more and worked harder”: HST to EW, May 26, 1918, HSTL.

“We had a maneuver yesterday”: HST to EW, May 26, 1918, HSTL.

Sundays at church: HST to EW, April 28, 1918, Dear Bess, 261.

“and I’m for helping them”: HST to EW, May 5, 1918, ibid.

discovered volumes of music: HST to EW, May 19, 1918, HSTL.

“He had maps”: Arthur Wilson, Oral History, HSTL.

“I just barely slipped through”: HST to EW, June 14, 1918, Dear Bess, 263.

“old rube” from Missouri: HST to EW, June 27, 1918, ibid, 263.

value of a university education: HST to EW, July 22, 1918, ibid, 267.

“No I haven’t seen any girls”: HST to EW, June 27, 1918, ibid, 264.

“I look like Siam’s King”: HST to EW, June 19, 1918, HSTL.

“That was one of the things”: Cather, One of Ours, 319.

“Dear Harry, May this photograph”: EW inscribed photograph, HSTL.

“They were a pretty wild bunch”: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“a sitting duck”: Eugene Donnelly quoted in Miller, 97.

“a stirring among the fellows”: Ibid, 96.

“a rather short fellow”: Vere Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“You could see that he was”: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“I could just see my hide”: Autobiography, 46.

“Never on the front”: “Pickwick Papers,” HSTL.

Ridge recollection: Miller, 96.

“He was so badly scared”: “Pickwick Papers,” HSTL.

“And then we gave Captain Truman”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“He didn’t hesitate at all”: Ibid.

“I didn’t come over here”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 95.

“Well, I would say”: Wilson, Oral History, HSTL.

“You soldier for me”: Ibid.

“soldier, soldier, all the time”: Lee, 33–34.

“Talk about your infantryman”: HST to EN, August 5, 1918, HSTL.

“You’ve no idea what an immense responsibility”: HST to EW, August 13, 1918, HSTL.

train passing close enough to Paris: War Diary of Captain Keith W. Dancy, Battery A, Liberty Memorial, Kansas City, Missouri.

“It was just a quiet sector”: Frederick J. Bowman, Oral History, HSTL.

“It was surely some steep hill”: HST to EW, November 23, 1918, HSTL.

“we were firing away”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“gasping like a catfish”: Columbus (Kansas) Daily Advocate, August 16, 1950.

“I led the parade!”: Walter Menefee, Oral History, HSTL.

“I got up and called them everything”: Daniels, 96.

“The men think I am not much”: HST to EW, September 8, 1918, HSTL.

“It was literally true”: Lee, 67.

Bennett Clark incident: Steinberg, 47.

“Well, I was scared green”: HST to EW, November 23, 1918, HSTL.

“September 10. Leave Coyviller”: HST War Diary, HSTL.

“Who can ever forget”: Lee, 75.

“So slow was our progress”: Ibid, 72.

“American drive begins”: HST War Diary, HSTL.

“The great adventure”: HST to EW, September 15, 1918, Dear Bess, 271.

“We were doing our best to finish”: HST to EW, September 15, 1918, HSTL.

“And there was an order out”: Floyd Ricketts, Oral History, HSTL.

“like a crazy man”: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

Tiernan’s coat: Ibid.

“The Colonel insults me shamefully”: HST War Diary, HSTL.

“The weather was bad”: Ricketts, Oral History, HSTL.

“the history of the world”: Miller, 101.

“If all priests were like him: Ibid, 103.

“I stripped the battery for action”: HST to EW, November 23, 1918, HSTL.

“Everything was now in readiness”: Lee, 93.

“Just a word to you”: Toland, No Man’s Land, 403.

Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who took off: Ibid, 432.

“That gun squad worked”: Harry E. Murphy, Oral History, HSTL.

“My guns were so hot”: HST to EW, November 23, 1918, HSTL.

“confusing in the extreme”: Marshall, Memoirs of My Services in the World War, 160.

At a crossroads near Cheppy: Truman, “The Military Career of a Missourian,” HSTL.

“Truman didn’t panic”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“Truman sent back the data”: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“You know…when you’re in the artillery”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“The artillery fire has been something”: Minder, This Man’s War, 328.

“Well, men,” Miles said: Lee, 167.

“The coolness, the steady courage”: Ibid., 168.

“It isn’t as bad as I thought”: HST to EW, October 8, 1918, Dear Bess, 274.

“He was the Captain”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“The most terrific experience”: HST to EW, October 8, 1918, Dear Bess, 274.

“all the comforts of home”: HST to EW, October 30, 1918’, ibid., 276.

consistently clean and dapper: Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“where every time a shell lights”: HST to EW, November 1, 1918, Dear Bess, 277–78.

“When the moon rises”: HST to EW, October 30, 1918, ibid., 276.

sends a poppy: HST to EN, November 1, 1918, HSTL.

“He handed me a piece”: Meisburger quoted in Peoria Journal-Star, May 6, 1970.

“My battery fired the assigned barrages”: Weintraub, A Stillness Heard Round the World, 169.

“When the firing ceased”: Ibid.

“People went so wild”: Ibid, 170.

“You’ve no idea”: HST to EN, December 18, 1918, HSTL.

“We were just—”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“what you’d expect at the Gaiety”: HST to EN, December 18, 1918, HSTL.

Paris tour: HST to EW, November 29, 1918, Dear Bess, 283.

“as wild as any place”: HST to EN, December 18, 1918, HSTL.

“a dandy place”: HST to EW, November 29, 1918, Dear Bess, 283.

“beautifully sung”: HST to EW, December 18, 1918, ibid., 284.

“To keep from going crazy”: Steinberg, 50.

“Every day nearly someone”: HST to EW, January 12, 1919, Dear Bess, 292.

“Would as leave lost a son”: HST War Diary, HSTL.

“It’s some trick to keep”: HST to EN, January 20, 1919, HSTL.

the possibility of running for political office: HST to EW, November 1, 1918, Dear Bess, 277.

“I can’t see what on earth”: HST to EW, December 19, 1918, ibid., 287.

“thirsted for a West Point education”: HST to EW, December 14, 1918, ibid., 286.

“back to God’s country again”: HST to EW, November 1, 1918, ibid., 277.

“Maybe have a little politics”: HST to EW, December 14, 1918, ibid., 285.

“We’ll be married anywhere”: HST to EW, February 18, 1919, ibid., 296.

“You may invite the entire 35th Division”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 77.

“As far as we’re concerned”: HST to EN, January 20, 1919, HSTL.

he bought a wedding ring: Truman, 78.

violently seasick nearly the whole way: HST to EW, April 24, 1919, Dear Bess, 297–98.

Part Two

5. Try, Try Again

“I’ve had a few setbacks”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 70.

nineteenth-century man: Ibid., 43.

“I want you to be happy”: HST to EWT, July 9, 1925, Dear Bess, 319.

“It was characteristic”: Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 83.

“I have always wondered”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 127.

answering letters from the mothers and fathers: Miller, 97.

“Well, I remember when he came back”: Ethel Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

last heated argument: HST to EWT, June 29, 1949, Dear Bess, 558.

Truman wedding: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 79–80.

“I hope you have the same success”: Unidentified letter from member of Battery D, Waco, Texas, to HST, July 15, 1919; HSTL.

“Well, Mrs. Truman, you’ve lost Harry”: Ted Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

Mary Jane had cooked noon dinner: Miller, 107.

“You’ve just never seen such a radiant”: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“a very, very difficult person”: Miller, 106.

“I didn’t know”: Quoted in Daniels, The Man of Independence, 100.

“Twelfth Street was in its heyday”: Ibid., 105–06.

“We’d all drop in”: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“But Harry seemed glad”: Miller, Harry S. Truman, 155.

“You can’t quit them”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 92.

“I see no reason”: Unidentified letter to HST, December 14, 1919, HSTL.

“Well, sir, don’t forget me”: Eugene Donnelly to HST, October 4, 1920, HSTL.

“We’d have done anything for him”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 97.

husband never worked as hard: Ibid., 112.

Battery D reunion: E. J. Becker to HST, March 22, 1921, HSTL.

“He would get out and go’: Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

Dr. A. Gloom Chaser: HSTL.

war memorial ceremonies: Kansas City Times, October 17, 1921.

“That was when we took”: Quoted in Daniels, 119.

“high jinks”: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

a sign of anti-Semitism: Miller, Plain Speaking, 106.

Eddie’s frayed suit: Daniels, 109.

“It was a nice store”: Edgar Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“There goes Harry”: Gaylon Babcock, Oral History, HSTL.

“a nice boy”: HST to EWT, September 20, 1921, Dear Bess, 312.

“I’ve got friends”: Quoted in Reddig, Tom’s Town, 28.

“There is no kinder hearted”: Kansas City Times, March 26, 1892.

“No deserving man”: Quoted in Dorsett, The Pendergast Machine, 21.

reputation of saloon keepers: Kansas City Star files, undated.

“I never needed a crooked”: Quoted in Reddig, 32.

“His support of any man”: Ibid., 72.

“Brother Tom will make”: Ibid.

Thomas Joseph Pendergast: Ibid., 33.

“Yes. Why not?”: O. K. Armstrong, “Crusade in Kansas City,” This Week, March 13, 1938.

“He was a master!”: Matt Devoe, author’s interview.

“that fellow could probably talk”: Conn Withers, author’s interview.

“Oh, he was a wonderful man”: Geraldine Ketchum, author’s interview.

“No, I never had a sense of evil”: Monsignor Arthur Tighe, author’s interview.

Tom kept to himself: Mason, Truman and the Pendergasts, 33.

“You can’t make a man good”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 12, 1937.

“We have the theory”: Ibid.

“Let the river take its course”: Mason, 25.

“Politics is a business”: Kansas City Star, March 31, 1966.

“When a man’s in need”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 12, 1937.

happy to be “repeaters”: Ketchum, author’s interview.

woman in the hospital laundry: Ibid.

“Oh, I knew it was illegal”: Ibid.

“When we come over the hill”: Reddig, 34.

“Stealing elections”: Quoted in Mason, 46.

Fifty-Fifty Agreement: Dorsett, 62–63.

“enforcer of loyalty”: Reddig, 97.

“tenacious fighting type”: Unidentified obituary of Pendergast, September 2, 1929.

Mike passed over because of temper: Robert Pendergast, author’s interview.

idea of running Harry: Joseph and Catherine Pruett, author’s interview.

If Captain Truman was all Jim said: Ibid., and Robert Pendergast, author’s interview.

“They are trying to run me” HST to Ernest Schmidt, February 4, 1922, HSTL.

“Now, I’m going to tell you” Quoted in Daniels, 114.

“Old Tom Pendergast wanted”: Harry Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“Went into business all enthusiastic”: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

“I loved him as I did my own daddy”: Ibid.

“feeling fairly blue”: Daniels, 109.

“Well, I’ve got to eat”: Ibid., 110–.

“mess up” his life with politics: Ibid., 110–.

“They always like to pick winners”: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

auditorium at Lee’s Summit: Lee’s Summit Journal, March 9, 1922.

“thoroughly rattled”: Quoted in Truman, Mr. Citizen, 156.

“I was scared worse”: HST Diary, September 23, 1952, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record 271.

“I knew Harry Truman”: Stephen Slaughter, author’s interview.

“the poorest effort of a speech”: Hinde Oral History, HSTL.

“If you’re going to be in politics”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 128.

“We’d do whatever was necessary”: Ibid.

sacks of cement: Memoirs, Vol. I, 137.

to arrive by airplane: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“I am now going to tell you”: Independence Examiner, July 18, 1922.

“I want men for road overseers”: Quoted in Daniels, 142.

“You have heard it said”: Ibid., 118.

Edgar Hinde urged Harry: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“They didn’t just hate Catholics”: Quoted in Reddig, 113.

“The smell of old ‘alky’ ” Independence Examiner, August 1, 1922.

Shannon henchmen: Ibid., August 2, 1922.

Gibson’s 45-caliber: Ibid.

Fifty-fifty was finished: Kansas City Times, September 2, 1929.

“We ran the county”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 137.

“When a road project” Independence Examiner, July 9, 1919.

suffered a second miscarriage: Truman, 88.

“I wish you would send me”: HST to Ralph Truman, February 23, 1923, HSTL.

“It is now 10:20”: Quoted in Truman, 90.

She would wait for hours: Ibid.

“You be a good girl”: HST to EWT, July 21, 1923, Dear Bess, 314.

Nurse Kinnaman’s account of baby’s birth: From reporter Champ Clark’s files dated February 1951, Time-Warner archives.

“He has the most magnetic personality”: Quoted in Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order, 376–77.

“He kept his feelings to himself” Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 127.

“The record of the county court”: Kansas City Star, July 17, 1924.

“To even talk about throwing” Independence Sentinel, undated, General Family Files, HSTL.

Klan rally: Daniels, 126.

“You did what your gang told you”: Henry P. Chiles, Oral History, HSTL.

Kansas City Automobile Club: Autobiography, 59.

“This is almost like campaigning”: HST to EWT, November 9, 1926, Dear Bess, 323.

“If one thing did not work”: Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

called the Citizens Security: Daniels, 134–35.

“kind of a cold bird”: Mary Salisbury Bostian, author’s interview

“Anybody who’s ever been a friend”: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“used me for his own ends”: Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

“a no-good bastard”: Jonathan Daniels interview notes, September 25, 1949, HSTL.

run for county collector: Memoirs, Vol. I, 139.

Collector’s job: Daniels, 138.

“No criticism or scandals”: Independence Examiner, July 27, 1928.

“Every subject of debate”: New Republic, April 30, 1945.

“We intend to operate”: Independence Examiner, January 3, 1927.

spinning about in Judge Truman’s swivel chair: Robert Pendergast, author’s interview.

nervous breakdown: Ibid.

“You Can’t do it”: Quoted in Daniels, 145.

“I told the voters”: Ibid., 146.

“Here were hundreds of square miles”: Results of County Planning, 7, 9.

Farm on Blue Ridge Boulevard: Ibid., 97.

“Oh! If I were only John D. Rockefeller”: Pickwick Papers, HSTL.

“a loudmouthed, profane, vulgar”: FOIPA No. 297,745, FBI.

“What the hell do you do”: Ibid.

The facts about Canfil: Ibid.

“Fred’s a little rough” Quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri., 257.

“Character excellent”: FOIPA No. 297,745, FBI.

an equestrain bronze of Andrew Jackson: Steinberg,95.

“I wanted a real man”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 139.

“that I either had to run away”: HST to EWT, February 12, 1931, Dear Bess, 343.

“and every person I’ve ever had”: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

exceptionally fit: U.S. Army Personnel Records, 1925, 1936, HSTL.

“I haven’t had a headache”: HST to EWT, July 13, 1927, Dear Bess, 329.

“We didn’t have any equipment”: Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“I’ve been around Legion conventions”: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“Three things ruin a man”: Quoted in New York Post December 29, 1972.

“I never wanted power”: Ibid.

Truman buying seat covers: Kansas City Star, November 14, 1990.

attempt to kidnap Margaret: From reporter Champ Clark’s file dated February 1951, Time-Warner archives.

“While it looks good”: HST to EWT, August 27, 1933, Dear Bess, 358.

“Politics should make a thief”: HST to EWT, May 7, 1933, ibid., 353.

“The Boss wanted me”: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

Meeting with Pendergast: Daniels, 146–47.

Harry’s later account: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

“Didn’t I tell you boys”: Daniels, 147.

“And That’s God’s truth”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 137.

“He, in times past”: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

“Loved the ladies”: Ibid.

“Since childhood at my mother’s”: Ibid.

“This sweet associate of mine” Ibid.

Pendergast lecturing: Ibid.

To little Sue Ogden: Sue Ogden Bailey, author’s interview.

“And this was a disaster!”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

Sue Ogden’s memories: Bailey, author’s interview.

“I never heard a squabble’: Vietta Garr quoted in Kansas City Star, April 18, 1945.

“I was an only child”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“I could twist him”: Ibid.

“My manners were expected”: Truman, 109.

“Her presence”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“Yes, I spoiled him”; Kansas City Star April 18, 1945.

“She liked Mamma Truman”: Truman, 109.

Once when she offered food: J.C. Truman, author’s interview.

189The Capture of the Clever One: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“I want her to do everything”: HST to EWT, July 17, 1929, Dear Bess, 338.

“The car was washed” Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“Straight, absolutely straight”: Ibid.

“He read all the weather maps”: Ibid.

“How does Harry put up”: Mary Shaw Branton, author’s interview.

“It was very hard”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

picked Number 369: Sue Gentry in Independence Examiner, April 25, 1979.

Harpie Club: Daniels, 152.

“He liked his walk”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

the town directory: Independence City Directory, 1934.

“Just think of all those wasted years”: HST to EWT, July 22, 1930, Dear Bess, 339.

“Have you practiced your music?”: HST to EWT and MT, July 10, 1932, ibid., 347.

“You may yet be the first lady”: Daniel, 117.

over lunch with…Eric Sevareid: Sevareid, “A Truly Great Man,” McCall’s, March 1973.

“He loved politics”: Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

hadn’t he been a late bloomer: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“There, he struck his gait”: Ibid.

6. The Senator from Pendergast

“Friends don’t count”: Autobiography, 74.

Francis M. Wilson: Kansas City Star, February 2, 1982.

“It was my big day”: Autobiography, 71.

Excelsior Springs seclusion: Ibid.

“It will be much better”: HST to Robert Ragland, January 17, 1923, HSTL.

“long as the Big Boss”: HST to EWT, April 14, 1933, Dear Bess, 348.

“understood political situations”: Autobiography, 83.

Big Boss began letting votes go: Dorsett, The Pendergast Machine, 106–07.

“I had a fine talk”: HST to EWT, April 23, 1933, Dear Bess, 350.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: Kansas City Star, July 4, 1976.

McElroy would later claim: Art Brisbane, “Kansas City Needs an Honest Boss Tom,” Kansas City Star, May 3, 1982.

Pendergast would listen attentively: Kansas City Times, April 21, 1986.

“Why shouldn’t they be?”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 12, 1937.

“The machine did small favors”: Dorothy Davis Johnson, author’s interview.

“the most efficient city government”: Reddig, Tom’s Town, 128.

“kind of gentleness”: Monsignor Arthur Tighe, author’s interview.

“See…there just wasn’t any law”: John Doohan, author’s interview.

“The clubs stayed open all night”: Ibid.

Kidnapping of McElroy’s daughter: Reddig, 255–56.

“Now Jim”: Congressional Record, February 20, 1934.

“Union Station massacre”: Reddig, 257-59.

new county courthouse: Independence Examiner, September 7, 1933.

“During the six and one half years”: Ibid.

“During these years of strenuous service”: Ibid.

“maneuvered out”: Quoted in Memoirs, Vol. I, 141.

Truman meeting with Jim Pendergast and Aylward: James Aylward, Oral History, HSTL; correspondence in the collection of Joe and Catherine Pruett.

Pendergast offer to Joe Shannon: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 167.

“A very pleasant sort of fellow”: Quoted in Helm, Harry Truman, 32–33.

“Tomorrow, today, rather”: “Pickwick Papers,” HSTL.

“It was 104 yesterday”: Letter from Jim Pendergast to Kathleen Pendergast, postmarked July 4, 1934, Pruett Collection.

opening Truman rally: Kansas City Star, July 7, 1934.

“a congressman’s congressman”: Quoted in Childs, I Write from Washington, 96–97.

“wheels-with-wheels”: Ibid.

“It will be remembered that”: News-Press, July 6, 1934, Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Johnny Lazia killing: Kansas City Journal-Post, July 10, 1934.

“tell him I love him”: Ibid.

“There were at least ten thousand”: Jim Pendergast letter to Kathleen Pendergast, undated, Pruett Collection.

“It seems my old friend”: Kansas City Star, July 11, 1934.

a huge picnic in Clay County: News-Press, July 16, 1934, Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“For this bellhop of Pendergast’s”: Kansas City Star, July 29, 1934.

“Judge Truman is unobtrusive”: St. Louis Globe-Democrat (undated), Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“mendacity and imbecility”: El Dorado Springs (Missouri) Gazette, July 23, 1934.

“Why, Senator Clark is”: United Press, July 30, 1934, Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Since 1930, more than eighteen thousand: Missouri Historical Review, Vol. 29, July 1935.

“such as to make any human”: Kansas City Star, July 31, 1934.

“Fact is, I like roads”: Hersey, Aspects of the Presidency, 37.

Canfil would check out room: HST to EWT, October 25, 1942, Dear Bess, 491.

scrapbook of the campaign: Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“why, if Harry ever goes”: Kansas City Times, August 1, 1934.

On the day of the primary: Autobiography, 67.

“without significance”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 8, 1934.

a “push-over”: Autobiography, 68.

“skinny and all one color”: Mary Shaw Branton, author’s interview.

Fred Canfil descriptions: FOIPA No. 297,745, FBI.

“green as grass”: Quoted in Helm, 7.

Hatch and Schwellenbach friendly: Ibid., 70.

“He took the trouble”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 144.

“Harry, don’t start out with”: Ibid.

the Senator from Pendergast: Miller, Plain Speaking, 158.

“Here was a guy”: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri. 125.

“doglike devotion”: Quoted in Helm, 13.

“It was quite an event”: Steinberg, 130.

“He came to the Senate”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 15, 1945.

“He was a better man”: Ibid.

his own passkey: Kansas City Journal-Post (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, 1933–41, HSTL.

“By the time his colleagues”: Ibid.

“If you will send us”: HST to L.T. Slayton, February 5, 1935, HSTL.

“political monster”: Congressional Record, February 30, 1935, 2352–59.

Thereafter Long refused to speak: Memoirs, Vol. I, 146.

“He sits in the back row”: Kansas City Journal-Post (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, 1933–41, HSTL.

“He speaks rarely”: Ibid.

“I’m going to be better informed”: HST to EWT, December 11, 1935, Dear Bess, 382.

“I’ll take all the dinners”: HST to EW, December 6, 1937, ibid., 408.

He burned them all: Memoirs, Vol. I, 157.

“I was a New Dealer from the start”: Ibid., 149.

“As the old political saying goes”: Quoted in Barkley, That Reminds Me, 155.

“I liked Harry”: Claude Pepper, author’s interview.

“a hot wave”: HST to EWT, August 15, 1935, Dear Bess, 377.

read Southall Freeman: HST to EWT, July 9, 1955, ibid., 369.

“No one has done more”: HST to EWT, August 19, 1935, ibid., 378.

“a grand big house”: HST to EWT, June 29, 1935, ibid., 366.

“Found a rather nice place”: HST to EWT, July 17, 1935, ibid., 372.

bus fare and bathing suit: HST to EWT, July 3, 1935, ibid., 367.

“big enough for two”: HST to EWT, December 5, 1937, ibid., 407.

“I am hoping to make”: HST to EWT, June 28, 1935, ibid., 365.

“Pendergast was as pleased”: HST to EWT, July 29, 1935, ibid., 374.

“as pleased to see me”: HST to EWT, August 11, 1935, ibid., 376.

“Pendergast and the very blond”: Childs, 111.

“Confidentially, I had a fine visit”: Lloyd C. Stark to HST, March 22, 1935, HSTL.

Pendergast at Wilson’s funeral: Kansas City Star archives.

“He won’t do”: Jonathan Daniels interview notes, November 12, 1949, HSTL; Daniels, The Man of Independence, 181.

“The old man had better judgment”: Quoted in Daniels, 181.

“the most grateful man”: Autobiography, 73.

“Kind of hard on Bennett”: HST to EWT, June 22, 1935, Dear Bess, 365.

“And while I heard”: Quoted in Helm, 10.

“The vast expenditures”: Childs, 110.

Pendergast ill: Kansas City Times, January 27, 1945.

“We all found Truman”: Quoted in Louchheim, ed., The Making of the New Deal, 243.

“But he showed no signs”: Ibid.

“When the Senator from Missouri”: Quoted in Steinberg, 127.

“He was always going out of his way”: Ibid., 126.

“Never in all the years”: Mildred Dryden, Oral History, HSTL.

liked Harry Truman “instinctively”: Barkley, 155.

“H. is worn out”: EWT to EN, undated, HSTL.

“tell” Harry how to vote: Helm, 51.

“Jim Aylward phoned me”: Ibid.

By going to Pendergast: Daniels, 180.

tired of being “pushed around”: Helm, 53.

“The pressure on me”: HST quoted in Barkley, 155–56.

“I always admired him”: Ibid.

“I just can’t stand it”: HST to EWT, January 5, 1935, Dear Bess, 391.

he “played hooky”: HST to EWT, February 11, 1937, ibid., 397.

“This so-called committee work”: HST to EWT, November 7, 1937, ibid., 403.

“Not once did I ever see him”: Quoted in Helm, 11.

“a sense of continually being tired”: U.S. Army Medical Records, September 13, 1937, HSTL.

“They are charming people”: HST to Marvin Mclntyre, October 11, 1936, FDRL.

“That son-of-a-bitch”: Steinberg, 167.

“A couple of kids”: HST to EWT, October 29, 1937, Dear Bess, 402.

“Today is my father’s birthday”: HST to EWT, December 5, 1937, ibid., 407.

Brandeis teas: Daniels, 185–86.

“slightly awesome institution”: Childs, 43.

not accustomed to meeting such people: Daniels, 186.

Brandeis had spent more time: HST to EWT, December 13, 1937, Dear Bess, 409.

“It was a rather exclusive”: HST to EWT, December 13, 1937, ibid., 100.

“certainly in agreement on the dangers”: HST quoted in Miller, 151.

December 20, 1937, speech: Congressional Record, December 20, 1937, 2482–95.

“It probably will catalogue me”: HST to EWT, December 12, 1937, Dear Bess, 409.

The speech was front-page news: The New York Times, December 21, 1937.

Max Lowenthal comments about pressure: Daniels, 185.

“an innate part of his personality”: Gosnell, Truman’s Crises, 129.

“We must not close our eyes”: Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Pendergast betting: Reddig, 278; Kansas City Star, December 27, 1974.

“Don’t ever take any money”: Quoted in Kansas City Star, March 1, 1984.

Truman speech on February 15, 1938: Congressional Record, February 15, 1938, 1962–64.

“The manner in which the juries”: John Oliver, author’s interview.

“in view of my speech”: Kansas City Star, September 15, 1978.

“They figure they’ll need”: HST to EWT, November 17, 1938, Dear Bess, 412.

“If it is true”: Reddig, 303–04.

“Please help Sam Finklestein”: T.J. Pendergast to HST, undated, HSTL.

“I am sure he had”: Helm, 47.

“I am very sorry”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, undated, Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“The terrible things”: HST to EWT, October 1, 1939, HSTL.

“He was broke”: Edgar Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“Looks like everybody got rich”: HST to EWT, October 27, 1939, Dear Bess, 426.

“I believe if I did know him”: Kansas City Star, May 22, 1939.

“At no time”: Quoted in Daniels, 196.

“He has earned the high estimate”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 12, 1939.

“If Governor Stark runs”: Associated Press (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“I do not think”: HST to EWT, August 8, 1939, Dear Bess, 418.

“Tell them to go to hell”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 130.

“the wise boys”: Quoted in Drew Pearson column (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Washington premiere: HST to EWT, October 18, 1939, Dear Bess, 426.

mortgage on the farm: Daniels, 192.

“mighty blue”: HST to EWT, September 22, 1939, Dear Bess, 419.

“I am of the opinion”: Miscamble, “The Evolution of an Internationalist,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, August 1977.

“You know it makes some of us”: HST to EW, November 11, 1939, Dear Bess, 428.

“a pleasure trip”: HST to EWT, November 16, 1939, ibid., 430.

“a regular fellow”: HST to EWT, November 22, 1939, ibid., 431.

“This, you know”: HST to EWT, December 1, 1939, ibid., 432.

“I guess I’m not built”: HST to EWT, December 1, 1939, ibid.

“Harry, I don’t think”: Quoted in Daniels, 198.

“if he gets only two votes”: Quoted in Helm, 126.

reelection announcement: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 5, 1940.

opposed to FDR third term: Ibid.

“There is no indispensable man”: Hassett, “The President Was My Boss,” Saturday Evening Post, November 28, 1953.

“We borrowed clerks”: John Snyder, Oral History, HSTL.

“A United States Senator…sleeping”: Quoted in Miller, 166.

“At sixteen”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 139.

“While the President is unreliable”: HST to EWT, September 24, 1939, Dear Bess, 420.

Bernard Baruch contribution: Byrnes, All in One Lifetime, 101.

America “ought to sell”: Miscamble, “Evolution of an Internationalist.”

Tom Evans, who was twelve years: Evans, Oral History, HSTL.

“Cut your speech”: Quoted in Daniels, 202.

“I just wanted to come down”: Ibid.

“I believe in”: HST quoted in Helm, 137.

“When we are honest enough”: Speech before National Colored Democratic Association Convention, July 14, 1940, HSTL.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch cartoon: March 29, 1940.

“enough errors to give me”: Quoted in Daniels, 205

“The decent, honest”: St. Louis Globe-Democrat (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Truman urged to release letter: Daniels, 205.

Stark’s chauffeur: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 141.

“Lloyd’s ambitions”: Ibid., 132–33.

foreclosure on farm: Kansas City Star, July 17, 1940, Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

thought he was having a heart attack: HST to EWT, November 15, 1941, Dear Bess, 468.

the shame she would feel: HST to EWT, August 13, 1940, ibid., 442.

“I’m thinking August 6”: HST to EWT, June 23, 1940, ibid., 440.

“Will call you from Sedalia”: Ibid.

“Anyway we found out”: HST to EWT, August 9, 1940, ibid., 441.

“He finally ended up”: Daniels, 209.

Bob Hannegan: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 24, 1944.

“Well…I guess”: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

it was Bess who answered: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 145.

“the machine vote”: Lloyd C. Stark to FDR, August 9, 1940, FDRL.

“I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes”: HST to EWT, August 10, 1940, Dear Bess, 441.

“Has my certification of election”: Edwin A. Halsey, telegram to HST, December 13, 1940, HSTL.

7. Patriot

“War has many faces”: Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream, 164.

“Locksley Hall” poem in wallet: Hillman, ed., Mr. President, 206.

“As I watched those white fires”: Quoted in Flower and Reeves, eds., The Taste of Courage, 135.

“We have everything to lose”: Kansas City Times, May 2, 1941.

Clark was destroying himself: HST to EWT, October 3, 1941, Dear Bess, 466.

“My relief of mind”: Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope, 59.

Marshall told him he was too old: HST “Autobiographical Sketch,” HSTL.

Washington a different city: Green, Washington, 466–73; Brinkley, Washington Goes to War.

“a little investigation”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 165.

automobile odysseys: Ibid.

“getting ruined…And there were men”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 175.

“There’s too much that is wrong”: Helm, Harry Truman, 151.

“It is a considerable sin”: Schlesinger and Bruns, Congress Investigates. A Documented History, 1792–1974, 3121.

it “must be assumed that”: Pogue, 108.

Nye Committee: Baruch, Public Years, 269.

“The thing to do”: Time, March 8, 1943.

Byrnes $10,000 committee funding: Memoirs, Vol. I, 166.

“Looks like I’ll get something”: HST to EWT, March 19, 1941, Dear Bess, 456.

“The political situation”: HST to EWT, August 1, 1939, ibid., 416.

Hugh Fulton: Memoirs, Vol. I, 167.

departure of Messall: Tom Evans, Oral History, HSTL.

“What are you fishing for?” Executive Session, June 8, 1942, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA.

“You give a good leader”: Papers of George C. Marshall, Vol. 2, 483.

“There was no attempt”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 171.

saved the government $250 million: Riddle, The Truman Committee, 147.

gallbladder attack: U.S. Army Medical Records, 1941, HSTL; Truman, Bess W. Truman, 200–01.

“My standing in the Senate”: HST to EWT, June 19, 1941, Dear Bess, 457.

“If we see that Germany”: The New York Times, June 24, 1941.

“Last year he ran”: U.S. Army Medical Records, 1941, HSTL.

pressed by Vandenberg: Schlesinger and Bruns, 3127.

“Well I spent yesterday”: HST to EWT, August 21, 1941, Dear Bess, 461–62.

“studious avoidance of dramatics”: Salter, ed., Public Men In and Out of Office, 12.

“’Slightly built, bespectacled”: Tri-County News, Long City, Missouri (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“Mr. Lewis, you are not seriously”: John L. Lewis testimony, March 26, 1943, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA, 55.

“Standard Oil” and I. G. Farben: HST Broadcast, “Rubber in America,” Blue Network, June 15, 1942, printed copy, HSTL.

“First of all”: Truman before Senate, October 29. Congressional Record, 77th Congress, 1st Sess., 1941, Vol. XXCVII, 8303.

The record of the OPM: January 15, 1942, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, 77th Congress, 2nd Sess., 6.

Lilienthal on war with Japan: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. I, 408.

“No matter what happens”: Boardman, From Harding to Hiroshima, 250.

“We have fought to get you”: Schlesinger and Bruns, 3131.

“Well at last I am sitting”: HST to EN, December 14, 1941, HSTL.

“Harry Truman was one of the”: Riedel, Halls of the Mighty, 173–75.

it would “impair our activity”: Gosnell, Truman’s Crises, 161.

unanimous reports: McCune and Beal, “The Job That Made Truman President,” Harper’s, June 1945.

“so close that a chorus girl”: Sevareid, 213.

“the return of Ceres”: HST to EWT, April 26, 1942, Dear Bess, 473.

Still he couldn’t sleep: HST to EWT, April 30, 1942, ibid., 474.

he called for a second front: Miscamble, “Evolution of an Internationalist,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, August 1977.

“If I were the executive”: Closed Hearing on Wright Aeronautical Corporation, May 24, 1943, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA, 13.

Glenn Martin Company: Memoirs, 184.

Carnegie-Illinois Steel hearing: March 23, 1943, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA, 820.

Stewart testimony: Ibid., 817.

“He cheated more than he was supposed”: Ibid., 833.

McGarrity testimony: Ibid., 837.

Irwin Works investigation: Ibid., 843–74.

“I don’t know anything about”: Ibid., 886.

Benjamin Fairless testimony: Ibid., 896–97.

asked by a reporter for his personal comment: Washington Post, March 24, 1943.

Canol Project: Testimony of General Brehon Somervell, December 20, 1943, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA.

“The committee damns it up and down”: Drury, A Senate Journal, 29.

“all the desperate assertions”: Ibid.

reading Shakespeare and Plutarch: HST to EWT, June 18, 1942, Dear Bess, 477.

as if he had just stepped: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“One day in a typical”: Riedel, 174.

“I went up to the front desk”: The New Yorker, November 23, 1987.

“I am more surprised every day”: HST to EWT, August 21, 1942, Dear Bess, 487.

“The man from Missouri”: Pepper, with Gorey, Pepper, 129.

never heard him even try: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“One time, one Christmas”: Ardis Haukenberry, author’s interview.

“You have a good mind”: HST to MT, March 13, 1942, Truman, Letters from Father, 40.

“Tell my baby”: HST to EWT, July 22, 1942, Dear Bess, 480–81.

to “only just drop in”: HST to EWT, April 30, 1942, ibid., 474.

“Well this is the day”: HST to EWT, June 28, 1942, ibid., 480.

“one of the most useful”: Helm, 228.

Truman and his committee known nationwide: Washington Star (undated), HSTL.

that “often a threat”: Business Week, June 26, 1943.

The whole country was greatly indebted: The Nation, January 24, 1942.

“objectivity at the total expense”: Krock, Memoirs, 220.

286Look poll: May 16, 1944.

He spoke at a huge rally: Chicago Daily News, April 15, 1943.

“hotels, filling stations”: HST to EWT, December 21, 1939, Dear Bess, 436.

merely talking about the Four Freedoms: Chicago Daily News, April 15, 1943.

Summer 1943 speaking tour: Miscamble, “The Evolution of an Internationalist.”

“History has bestowed”: Ibid.,

“We want aluminum”: Schlesinger and Bruns, 3129.

saved…as much as $15 billion: Memoirs, Vol. I, 186.

“He seems to be a generally”: Drury, 29.

“There are a number of times”: Ibid, 106.

“Now that’s a matter”: Telephone conversation between HST and Stimson, June 17, 1943, HSTL

“I know something about”: HST to Lewis Schwellenbach, July 15, 1943, HSTL.

“In my humble opinion”: Memorandum to Mildred Dryden, December 3, 1943, HST Senate Papers, HSTL.

“I have sent an investigator”: HST to Senator Thomas, November 30, 1943, HST Senate Papers, HSTL.

“COLONEL MATHIAS”: Fred Canfil to HST, December 7, 1943, HSTL.

“Whenever he finds out”: HST to EWT, October 25, 1942, Dear Bess, 491.

“The United States was engaged”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 100–01.

“He threatened me with dire consequences”: Stimson Diary, Yale University.

8. Numbered Days

being talked of as candidate: HST to EW, May 7, 1943, HSTL.

“Leadership is what we Americans”: Truman, “We Can Lose the War,” American Magazine, November 1942.

key man in the “conspiracy”: Quoted in HST memorandum to Jonathan Daniels, HSTL.

Flynn admires Wallace: The New Yorker, September 8, 1945.

First meeting with FDR: Flynn, You’re the Boss; Allen, Presidents Who Have Known Me.

“I felt that he would never”: Flynn, 179.

Secretly, he was under: Bishop, FDR’s Last Year, 94.

Hannegan on Wallace: Brown, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, A Remembrance (manuscript), 255–56.

Byrnes influence on FDR: Ibid., 259.

“I did conclude”: Quoted in Byrnes, All in One Lifetime, 221.

“Now, partner”: Quoted in Brown, 258.

somebody else “we have got”: Quoted in Daniels, The Man from Missouri, 243.

Loss of New York: Flynn, 180.

“The Negro has not only”: Quoted in Brown, 264–66.

When they went through the list: Flynn, 181.

“His record as head”: Ibid.

FDR asked a favor: Anna Rosenberg, author’s interview.

smuggle in jars of caviar: Ibid.

“I don’t want to be”: Quoted in Helm, Harry Truman, 220.

the word from “informed sources”: Drury, A Senate Journal, 215–16.

“The Madam doesn’t want”: Max Lowenthal, Oral History, HSTL.

“It is funny”: HST to MT, July 9, 1944, Margaret Truman, Letters from Father, 55.

“opened up on politics”: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 361.

“Mr. President, if you can find”: Ibid., 362.

“Think of the catcalls”: Ibid.

“It was as though”: Drury, 216.

“Jimmy Byrnes”: Quoted in Brown, 269.

the decisive meeting: Allen, 128–29.

“I gathered that he felt”: Ickes Diary, July 16, 1944, LC.

“the only one who had”: Wallace, 366.

a new Gallup Poll: Allen, 130.

“Well, I am looking”: Wallace, 367.

“Look at the expressions”: Quoted in Brown, 276.

“Mr. President, all I have heard”: Ibid.

“You are the best qualified”: Quoted in Byrnes, 222.

“I don’t understand it”: Ibid., 223.

“I told them so”: Ibid, 224–25.

“We have to be”: Ibid.

Byrnes went directly down: Ibid.

Truman accepted at once: Ibid., 226.

Truman to nominate Barkley: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 189.

As Alben Barkley would write: Ibid., 190.

Arthur Krock: The New York Times, July 16, 1944.

“Roosevelt could, of course”: Allen, 130.

“The train stood”: Tully, F.D.R., My Boss, 276.

“Dear Bob”: Robert Hannegan to FDR, July 14, 1944, HSTL.

“By naming Truman”: Tully, 276.

“The President has given”: Quoted in Byrnes, 226.

“Well, you know Jimmy”: Ibid., 226–27.

Hannegan showing note to no one: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 21, 1944.

He was determined to stay out: Salter, ed., Public Men In and Out of Office. 4–5.

“Hell, I don’t want”: Ibid.

“I don’t want that”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 183.

“I’m satisfied”: Tom Evans, Oral History, HSTL.

Writing years later, Margaret: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 227.

they “got Truman”: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“I’m sure he wanted”: Quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 203.

it wasn’t so much: John Snyder, author’s interview.

“that miserable time”: HST to Mrs. Emmy Southern, May 13, 1945, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 23.

“scared to death”: Childs, “He Didn’t Want the Job,” Liberty, September 23, 1944.

“I have been associated”: Washington Post, July 18, 1944.

“the coolest and cruelest”: Drury, 218.

“already soaring campaign stock”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 18, 1944.

“It was generally regarded”: Claude Pepper, author’s interview.

Hannegan’s corner suite: Life, July 31, 1944.

“Do you want to see it?”: Washington Post, July 28, 1944.

“Clear it with Sidney”: Quoted in Byrnes, 227.

Sidney Hillman: Time, July 24, 1944.

Hillman’s support: HST “Autobiographical Sketch,” HSTL.

“It’s Byrnes!”: Quoted in Flynn, 182.

“I browbeat the committee”: Ibid.

200,000 Negro votes: Byrnes, 228.

“Bob, it’s Truman”: Steinberg, 213.

An hour or so later: Byrnes, 229.

Turner Catledge account: The New York Times, July 19, 1944.

“If I were you”: Quoted in Barkley, 190.

“Feel sorry for me”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 19, 1944.

secret caucus: Time, July 31, 1944.

“the stage manager”: Barkley, 191.

“Whenever Roosevelt”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 192.

“Oh, shit”: George Elsey, Notes, Ayers Papers, HSTL.

“Well, if that’s the situation”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 193.

“Ye gods!”: Truman, Souvenir, 66.

“In a political”: Wallace, 368; Time, July 31, 1944.

“What is the job”: Quoted in Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 507.

“I sat there”: Claude Pepper, author’s interview.

“And then when I got”: Ibid.

“So I called Bob”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 194.

Martha Ellen Truman: Ibid., 149.

Interviewed by reporters: Washington Star, July 20, 1944.

Bennett Clark…pulled himself together: Miller, 194.

“a good deal of pressure”: The New York Times, July 22, 1944.

Truman and hot dog: Truman, Souvenir, 67.

“Christ Almighty”: Time, July 31, 1944.

he accepted “with all humility”: The New York Times, July 22, 1944.

“Now, give me a chance”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 22, 1944.

“the Missouri Compromise”: Life, July 31, 1944.

“the Common Denominator”: Kansas City Star, July 22, 1944.

“I don’t object to Truman”: Baruch, The Public Years, 339.

one of the weakest candidates: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 23, 1944,

“the mousy little man”: Time, July 31, 1944.

“Poor Harry Truman”: New Republic, July 31, 1944.

“unusual capacity”: Kansas City Star, July 22, 1944.

“He has known the dust”: The New York Times, July 22, 1944.

an excellent choice: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 22, 1944.

Even Richard Strout: New Republic, July 31, 1944.

“On the credit side”: Drury, 220.

“Are we going to have to”: Quoted in Truman, Bess W. Truman, 231.

“Dad tried to be cheerful”: Ibid., 233.

Margaret learns of grandfather’s suicide: Ibid., 234.

“He seized my arm”: Ibid.

“I wish I could tell you”: Ibid., 235.

looking over the old gray Victorian house: Life, August 21, 1944.

“I had hoped”: Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War, 20–21.

the critical part played by Ed Flynn: The New Yorker, September 8, 1945.

“People seemed to think”: Daniels, 259.

his father’s “irritability”: Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R., 351–52.

FDR seizure: Ibid.

FDR lunch with Truman: There has been speculation that at this lunch Roosevelt told Truman about the atomic bomb. The source is an interview with Truman’s friend Tom Evans made many years later as part of the Truman Library’s oral history program. There is no possibility that it is correct, since the President’s daughter, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, was also present at the lunch, as were a half dozen or so photographers, cameramen, and servants. Nor would Roosevelt have brought up the matter on such an occasion in any event.

“I wonder why we are made”: HST to EWT, December 28, 1945, Off the Record, 75.

“I am not a deep thinker”: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 373.

“smarter by far”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 176.

FDR told Truman not to travel: Memoirs, Vol. I, 5.

FDR’s hand shook: Truman, Harry S. Truman, p. 203.

“You should have seen”: Ibid., 201.

He was greatly concerned: Harry Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

Ed McKim and Truman: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“Harry is a fine man”: Hatch, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 376.

“There never was a greater”: HST to EWT, June 15, 1946, Dear Bess, 526.

“He’s so damn afraid”: HST to EWT, December 21, 1941, ibid., 470.

“You know how it is”: Drury, 327.

“he lies”: Ickes Diary, December 16, 1944, LC.

“Harry, what the hell”: Quoted in Miller, 199; also Miller Tapes, LBJL.

“You can’t afford”: Audio Collection, HSTL.

Recruitment of Matt Connelly: Matt Connelly, Oral History, HSTL.

“I’m glad to see you, Harry”: Steinberg, 225.

it was “the farmer-neighborliness”: McNaughton and Hehmeyer, This Man Truman, 182.

Truman dream about FDR: Pearson, “The Man Who Didn’t Want to Be President,” Vertical file, HSTL, April 16, 1945.

A rumor spread: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 204.

Klan story: Hearst papers, October 26, 1944.

Curley speech: Connelly, Oral History, HSTL.

Chicago Tribune attacks: October 17, 1944.

“hotter than a depot stove”: HST to EWT, July 25, 1945, Dear Bess, 521.

Teamsters appearance: Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 523.

“He improved visibly”: Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 825.

“I was shocked”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 240.

“And he knew”: Harry Easley, Oral History, HSTL.

“I still think”: Quoted in Hassett, Off the Record with F.D.R., 294.

only if it was “absolutely urgent”: Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR, 6.

“The amiable Missourian”: Time, February 5, 1945.

“He circulated around”: Gunther, Procession, 256–57.

Truman answered, “People”: Ibid., 260.

“the most natural thing”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 15, 1945.

“Harry looks better than he has”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 247.

“I used to get down here”: HST to MET and MJT, April 11, 1945, Off the Record, 13.

“Truman says simply”: Frank McNaughton Papers, December 14, 1944, HSTL.

Pendergast’s death: Washington Post, January 27, 1945.

Pendergast funeral: Miller, 210.

“I was just a kid”: Lauren Bacall, author’s interview.

“Anything can happen”: Washington Post, February 11, 1945.

Bess was furious: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 245.

“I saw the President”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 3.

April 12 Pendergast letter: T.J. Pendergast to HST, April 7, 1945, HSTL.

“We will see”: Ibid.

“It’s wonderful, this Senate”: Drury, 410.

Senator Hawkes: Congressional Record, April 12, 1945, 3284.

Senator Reed: Ibid, 3285.

“I have a Missouri”: Remarks by Former President Harry S. Truman, 88th Congress, 2nd Sess, Sen. Doc. No. 88, May 8, 1964.

remarked…that Roosevelt was fortunate: Drury, 410.

“Truman doesn’t know”: Ibid.

“Dear Mamma and Mary”: HST to MET and MJT, April 12, 1945, HSTL.

Tells Harry Vaughan: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

“Steve Early wants you”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 4.

as “quickly and as quietly”: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

“I ran all the way”: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

“Harry, the President is dead”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 5.

“Is there anything we”: Ibid.

Part Three

9. The Moon, the Stars, and All the Planets

“So ended an era”: Drury, A Senate Journal, 412.

“Yes, it’s true”: Quoted in Yank, 122.

“The armies and fleets”: The New York Times, April 13, 1945.

Stettinius…with tears streaming: Memoirs, Vol. I, 6.

“It was a very somber”: Stimson Diary, April 12, 1945, Yale University.

Margaret feeling as if under anesthesia: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 229.

Truman would later tell his mother: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

first decision as President: HST Diary, April 12, 1945, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 15–16.

brief remarks to the Cabinet: Memoirs, Vol. I, 9–10.

a matter of utmost urgency: Ibid., 10.

had conducted himself admirably: Stimson Diary, April 12, 1945.

“I guess the party’s off’: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

immediately to sleep: Miller, Plain Speaking, 215.

“What a great, great tragedy”: Lilienthal, Journals, April 14, 1945, Vol. I, 693.

“From a distance”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 429.

“It seems very unfortunate”: Ibid.

Eisenhower shaken: Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, 763–64.

Lester Atwell: Quoted in Flower and Reeves, eds., The Taste of Courage, 996.

“He’s got the stuff’: Quoted in McNaughton Papers, April 13, 1945, HSTL

“a grand person”: Vandenberg, ed., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, April 13, 1945, 167.

“Oh, I felt good”: John J. McCloy, author’s interview.

He was straightforward: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 104.

“I hate to confess it”: Stone, The War Years 1939–1945, 274.

“GET IN THERE”: Telegram from Jim Pendergast to HST, April 12, 1945, HSTL.

“I can’t really be glad”: Quoted in Off the Record, 17.

“a jewel”: HST Diary, April 15, 1945, ibid., 19.

“There have been few men”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 13.

Truman later wrote: Ibid., 29.

“It seemed still”: Quoted in Daniels, The Man of Independence, 27.

“Eddie, I’m sorry”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 234.

“everything from Teheran”: HST Diary, April 13, 1945, Off the Record, 17.

“What a test”: Kansas City Star, April 15, 1945.

Truman left the White House: Drury, 412.

“Isn’t this nice”: Quoted in ibid., 413.

“Boys, if you ever pray”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 19.

“For just a moment”: Drury, 413.

“executive contempt for Congress”: Vandenberg, April 13, 1945, 167.

Stettinius report: Quoted in Memoirs, Vol. I, 15.

“never did talk”: Truman, Letters from Father, March 3, 1948, 106.

“It is needless”: Washington Post, April 13, 1945.

“I’m President Truman”: Paul Horgan, Oral History, HSTL.

“I still can’t call”: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 448.

“He’s the only one”: HST to Eleanor Roosevelt, September 1, 1945, Off the Record, 63.

“Have confidence”: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 197.

“I have come down here”: Quoted in Hardeman and Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography, 311–12.

“No…He just made it”: HST Diary, April 14, 1945, Off the Record, 18.

not on trial: Bishop, FDR’S Last Year, 646.

“But after all”: Morgenthau, Diaries, Vol. III, 423.

“Terrible”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 31.

“Mr. President”: Ibid, 42.

“With great humility”: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Harry S. Truman…(cited hereafter as PP, HST), April 16, 1945, 2.

“bond of friendship”: Washington Star, April 17, 1945.

“At this moment”: PP, HST, April 16, 1945, 3.

“He’s one of us”: McNaughton Papers, April 14, 1945, HSTL.

“your ability to discharge”: Henry Luce to HST, April 17, 1945, HSTL.

“May I say”: Archibald John Brier to HST, April 17, 1945.

“Good luck, Harry”: Quoted in Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 19.

“Well, I have had”: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

First press conference: PP, HST, April 17, 1945, 8–13.

“direct” performance: Leahy, I Was There, 349.

lived five lifetimes: Memoirs, Vol. I, 53.

Three days later: PP, HST, April 20, 1945, 16–19.

“naturally smart boy”: Newsweek, August 15, 1949.

“He made first-class citizens”: George Tames, author’s interview.

“Stick with me”: Quoted in Smith, ed., Merriman Smith’s Book of Presidents: A White House Memoir, 56.

“He was alert”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“See, with President Roosevelt”: Floyd Boring, author’s interview.

“tragically inadequate”: Daniels, 27.

“To the White House this morning”: Hassett, “The President Was My Boss,” Saturday Evening Post, November 28, 1953.

“Missourians are most in evidence”: Ayers Diary, April 17, 1945, HSTL.

“the lounge of the Lion’s Club”: Quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 13.

McKim was “weird”: Jonathan Daniels, Oral History, HSTL.

Prohibition gangster: Ayers Diary, April 17, 1945, HSTL.

“We were all a strange lot”: Rosenman, “Harry S. Truman: Man from Independence,” American Heritage (unpublished), 70.

“Well, he was a sergeant”: Matt Connelly, Oral History, HSTL.

“The fact is”: Ayers Diary, May 14, 1945, HSTL.

“balance and tact”: Ibid.

“Tell them I don’t authorize”: Harry Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“Hoover’s hatred”: Sullivan, The Bureau, 38.

“We want no Gestapo”: HST Memorandum, May 12, 1945, Off the Record, 22.

“honest and friendly”: Quoted in Churchill, The Second World War. Vol. VI: Triumph and Tragedy, 484.

“He’ll make enemies”: Drury, 418.

“I don’t think you know”: Samuel Rosenman, Oral History, HSTL.

“It was a wonderful relief’: Stimson Diary, April 18, 1945.

“Changes in the battle situation”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 51.

Leahy was struck: Leahy, 348.

“to get on the inside”: Rigdon, with Derieux, White House Sailor, 183.

“I pray you believe”: Quoted in Snyder, The War, 520.

“a keen appreciation”: Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, 233.

“And anyway the Russians”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 70–71.

“I can testify”: Quoted in Halle, The Cold War as History, 38.

“Averell is right”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 255.

“It would be one”: Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 437.

“We must not permit”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 437.

“Russia will emerge”: OSS File, April 2, 1945, HSTL.

April 6 cable: Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 201.

not a man of his word: Morgan, F.D.R., A Biography, 762.

“minor misunderstandings”: Harriman and Abel, 439–40.

“I would minimize”: Ibid.

“barbarian invasion”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 73.

happy with 85 percent: Gaddis, 203.

“The White House upstairs”: Quoted in Truman, Bess W. Truman, 260.

like a ghost house: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 58.

“go to hell”: Quoted in Forrestal Diaries, 50.

“for fear we are rushing”: Stimson Diary, April 23, 1945.

Forrestal strongly disagreed: Forrestal Diaries, 50.

no intention of issuing: Memoirs, Vol. I, 78.

“until we have done”: Ibid., 79.

“I am very sorry”: Stimson Diary, April 23, 1945.

“I have never been talked to”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 82.

Bohlen’s account: Bohlen, Witness to History, 213.

“a little taken aback”: Harriman and Abel, 453.

the best news he had heard: Vandenberg, 176.

“I think it is very important”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 85.

“Mr. President, I don’t like”: Quoted in Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, 609.

“a real man”: HST to Jonathan Daniels, February 26, 1950, unsent, Off the Record, 174.

“Within four months”: Stimson Diary, April 25, 1945.

“The President took”: Ibid.

Truman told him to go ahead: Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, 616.

“The President did not show”: Quoted in Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 293.

“This is a big project”: Quoted in Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 625.

“It might perhaps”: Quoted in Sherwin, 284.

Truman measurements: Paul Shinkman to Eben Ayers, May 10, 1945, HSTL.

“It’s a tough job”: Stone, The War Years. 1939–1945, 281–82.

“He ought to surrender it”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 91.

“at a brisk trot”: West, with Kotz, 61.

“We have received so much mail”: MJT to HST, April 24, 1945, HSTL.

“I do hope”: MJT to HST, May 1, 1945, HSTL.

“I arrived home”: MJT to HST, May 7, 1945, HSTL.

“You both have done”: HST to MET and MJT, April 21, 1945, HSTL.

“This is a solemn”: PP, HST, May 8, 1945, 44.

“straight one-two to the jaw”: Sherwin, 172.

“like people from across”: Wallace, 450–51.

“His sincerity”: Ayers Diary, May 26, 1945, HSTL.

“show them how much”: Churchill, 437.

“it is my present intention”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 216.

“Mr. President, in these next two months”: Churchill, 497.

May 12 Churchill telegram: Gilbert, Winston Churchill. Never Despair, 6.

“It is a very, very hard position”: HST to Mrs. Emmy Southern, May 13, 1945, Off the Record, 23.

“air of quiet confidence”: Eden, Memoirs, 621.

“To have a reasonably”: HST Diary, May 22, 1945, Off the Record, 35.

Martha Ellen Truman’s visit: The New York Times, May 12, 1945.

prefer to sleep on the floor: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 266.

“Oh, you couldn’t help but”: Floyd Boring, author’s interview.

“My bedroom is pink”: Truman, Souvenir, 98.

story of the old-fashioneds: West, with Kotz, 75.

“stand no fakers”: Fields, My 21 Years at the White House, 122.

“correct but not formal”: West, 58.

“He knew when a stenographer’s”: Smith, 60.

“this was the first time”: Fields, 120.

“Not built right”: HST to EW, March 19, 1941, Dear Bess, 455.

“The President seemed relieved”: Quoted in Donovan, 28.

“And that was about all”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. I, 698.

“Saw Herbert Hoover”: HST Diary, June 1, 1945, Off the Record, 40.

“I can’t understand it”: HST Diary, May 27, 1945, ibid., 38.

“push ahead as fast”: Quoted in Rhodes, 646.

“visual effect of an atomic bombing”: Quoted in Sherwin, 208.

“with reluctance”: Quoted in Wyden, Day One, 163.

“a remarkable document”: Ibid., 154.

“The idea of”: Yale University Atomic Bomb File, HSTL.

“Have been going through”: HST Diary, June 1, 1945, Off the Record, 39.

“as a new weapon”: Stimson Diary, May 31, 1945.

June 6 Stimson meeting: Stimson Diary, June 1 and 6, 1945.

“What a puny effort”: C. L. Sulzberger, World War II, 114.

“outdoing Hitler”: Stimson Diary, June 6, 1945.

“the earliest possible date”: Quoted in Morison, 621.

“The ultimate responsibility”: Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, 617.

“straight military objective”: Cray, General of the Army, 538.

“We must offset”: Quoted in Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman 1945–1959, 17.

“The opinions of our scientific”: Quoted in Bundy, Danger and Survival, 71.

“shock value”: Stimson, On Active Service, 617.

“We regarded the matter”: Quoted in Mosley, Marshall, 337–38.

“only by men”: Quoted in Rhodes, 637.

“His general demeanor”: Quoted in Wyden, 143.

“render the Russians”: Ibid., 142.

“Oppenheimer didn’t share”: Ibid., 143.

“the damn thing”: Quoted in Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 54.

“We are on our way”: Quoted in Truman, Souvenir, 109.

“I hope—sincerely hope”: HST Diary, June 1, 1945, Off the Record, 40.

“Don’t think over six”: Ibid.

“Just two months ago”: HST to EWT, June 12, 1945, Dear Bess, 515–16.

“He’s a nice fellow”: HST to EWT, June 19, 1945, Ibid., 516.

“I’m always so lonesome”: HST Diary, June 1, 1945, Off the Record, 40.

A Gallup Poll: Donovan, 21.

“And as usual”: Ayers Diary, June 18, 1945, HSTL.

“Nothing really important”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. I, 92.

“always been our friends”: HST Diary, June 7, 1945, Off the Record, 44.

First time Hopkins thanked: Miller, 225.

“Mr. Prima Donna”: HST Diary, June 17, 1945, Off the Record, 47.

“He wants an estimate”: Quoted in Sherwin, 336.

“I have to decide”: HST Diary, June 17, 1945, Off the Record, 47.

June 18, 1945, meeting: Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, 10.

“We were beginning”: John J. McCloy, author’s interview.

June 26, 1945, speech: PP, HST, June 26, 1945.

“Dad loved”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 266.

“I shall attempt”: HST, Speech Files, June 27, 1945, HSTL.

“I am anxious”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 279–280.

July 2, 1945, speech: PP, HST, July 2, 1945, 153–55.

no buzzer: Woolf, “President Truman Talks About His Job,” The New York Times Magazine, July 15, 1945.

he would “soon go under”: Ibid.

“Punish her war criminals”: Stimson Diary, May 16, 1945.

Morgenthau meeting: Morgenthau, 466.

Morgenthau didn’t know: Jonathan Daniels interview with HST, November 12, 1949, HSTL.

“I am getting ready”: HST to MET and MJT, July 3, 1945, HSTL.

“How I hate”: HST Diary, July 7, 1945, Off the Record, 49.

10. Summer of Decision

“Today’s prime fact”: Stimson quoted in Compton, Atomic Quest, 219.

“like a moving circus”: HST to MET and MJT, January 27, 1947, HSTL.

“It seems to take two warships”: HST to MT, July 14, 1945, HSTL.

“You who have not seen”: Film Collection, HSTL.

Truman on Fred Canfil: Hersey, Aspects of the Presidency, 39.

“At the end of the war”: O. Müller Grote to HST, February 10, 1956, HSTL.

a “nightmare of a house”: The New York Times, August 3, 1945.

“They erected a couple of”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 50.

“wholly inadequate”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 9.

“He comes from Owensborough”: HST to MET and MJT, January 27, 1947, HSTL.

Bohlen, too, was struck: Bohlen, Witness to History, 226.

“astonishingly well prepared”: Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 485.

“Mr. Russia” and “Mr. Great Britain”: HST Diary, July 7, 1945, Off the Record, 49.

“half so badly”: HST to EWT, February 19, 1916, Dear Bess, 187.

“I’ve studied more”: HST to EWT, May 26, 1918, HSTL.

“Haven’t you ever been”: Woolf, “President Truman Talks About His Job,” The New York Times Magazine, July 15, 1945.

Prime Minister padding down the hall: Wilroy and Prinz, Inside the Blair House, 7–8.

Eleanor Roosevelt had written: Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 29.

“I must confess, sir”: See note for page 874, Chap. 17.

“He says he is sure”: Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. Never Despair, 61.

“We had a most pleasant”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, Off the Record, 51.

“Very Secret, Urgent”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. I, 876.

Sato responded: Ibid., 883.

“good soldiers and millions”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, Off the Record, 52.

“It is a terrible thing”: The New York Times, July 17, 1945.

“I never saw such destruction”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 341.

“absolute ruin”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, Off the Record, 52.

modern war…“brought home”: Leahy, I Was There, 396.

“I thought of Carthage”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, Off the Record, 52.

He kept thinking: HST to EWT, July 20, 1945, Dear Bess, 520.

“This is what would have happened”: Gilbert, 61.

Anne O’Hare McCormick column: The New York Times, July 18, 1945.

“Operated on this morning”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1360.

“Promptly a few minutes”: HST Diary, July 17, 1945, Off the Record, 53.

The truth was: Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 499.

As Stalin got out of the car: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“I got to my feet”: HST Diary, July 17, 1945, Off the Record, 53.

“A little bit of a squirt”: Film Collection, HSTL.

Stalin sure Hitler was alive and in hiding: Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 68.

“as agreed at Yalta”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1586.

“You could if you wanted to”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 541.

“and I felt hopeful”: Ibid., 342.

“The truth is he is a very likeable person”: Byrnes, 45.

“honest—but smart as hell”: HST Diary, July 17, 1945, Off the Record, 53.

“He’ll be in the Jap War”: Ibid.

Time magazine on Stalin: Time, February 5, 1945.

“There was little in Stalin’s demeanor”: Bohlen, 340.

“When one man dies”: Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of Tyranny, 278.

“I was impressed”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 340–42.

“Since the Yalta Conference”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 643.

“Churchill said he should like”: Ibid, p. 54.

“So tomorrow we will have prepared”: Ibid., 61.

“Let’s divide it”: Ibid, p. 59.

“woolly and verbose”: Gilbert, 65.

HST took as act of disloyalty: HST to MT, July 29, 1945, HSTL.

“The boys say”: HST to EWT, July 18, 1945, Dear Bess, 519.

“Churchill talks all the time”: HST to MET and MJT, July 18, 1945, HSTL.

“Doctor had just returned”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1360–61.

HST appeared extremely pleased: Churchill, 554.

“at any rate they had something”: Ehrman, Grand Strategy, 302–03.

“lull the Japanese”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1588.

Stalin’s disclosure: Bohlen, 236.

The Generalissimo must visit: HST Diary, July 18, 1945, Off the Record, 54.

“We cannot get away”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 96.

“I’m not going to stay”: HST Diary, July 18, 1945, Off the Record, 54.

To Bess, earlier in the day: HST to EWT, July 18, 1945, Dear Bess, 519.

“Believe Japs”: HST Diary, July 18, 1945, Off the Record, 54.

“sick of the whole business”: HST to EWT, July 20, 1945, Dear Bess, 520.

“A young Army captain”: The New York Times, August 14, 1945.

“The old man loves music”: HST to EWT, July 20, 1945, Dear Bess, 520.

“He was direct, unpretentious”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 444.

Eisenhower opposed use of the bomb: Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 443.

Eisenhower would concede: Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, 692.

truly believed that “Manhattan”: HST Diary, July 18, 1945, Off the Record, 54.

“But all of us wanted”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 316.

“We are here today”: PP, HST, July 20, 1945, 195.

“of lasting inspiration”: Clay, Decision in Germany, 44–45.

“General, there is nothing”: Bradley and Blair, 444–45.

“Uncle Joe looked”: HST Diary, July 20, 1945, Off the Record, 55.

“immensely powerful document”: Stimson Diary, July 21, 1945.

“successful beyond the most optimistic”: Groves Memorandum, Foreign Policy of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1362.

HST and Byrnes both looked pleased: Stimson Diary, July 21, 1945.

“It was apparent”: Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, 273.

“We will not recognize”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 216.

the Russians had no intention: Leahy, 406.

“Started with caviar”: HST to MET and MJT, July 23, 1945, HSTL.

“He talked to me confidently”: HST to EWT, July 22, 1945, Dear Bess, 521.

“Watch the President”: Moran, Diaries, 303.

“There was no pretense”: Rigdon, with Derieux, White House Sailor, 183–84.

“swagly.” “He never came on”: Floyd Boring, author’s interview.

“I thought it was nice”: Emilio Collado, Oral History, HSTL.

“I’m going to mass”: HST to EWT, July 22, 1945, HSTL.

“Although it was a target”: Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, 625.

“prosecute the war against Japan”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 391.

“alone with his work”: Stimson Diary, July 24, 1945.

July 23, 1945, cable: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1374.

“said that was just what he wanted”: Stimson Diary, July 24, 1945.

HST wrote of a consensus: Memoirs, Vol. I, 415.

“I asked General Marshall”: HST to Professor F. Cate, undated letter, HSTL.

battle casualties during HST’s three months in office: Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II, Department of the Army.

“We had only too abundant”: Charlton Ogburn, Jr., author’s interview.

“The basic policy of the present”: Combined Intelligence Committee Report, July 8, 1945, HSTL.

conscription of Japanese people: The New York Times, August 5, 1985.

“the spirit of mercy”: Bohlen, 231.

“At no time, from 1941 to 1945”: Stimson and Bundy, 613.

“I know FDR”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 281.

“I’ll say that we’ll end”: HST to EWT, July 18, 1945, Dear Bess, 519.

“It is just the same as artillery”: The New York Times, May 3, 1959.

“We knew the Japanese were determined”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 198.

A petition drawn up: Wyden, Day One, 180.

“Are not the men”: Compton, 242.

“It is hard to imagine”: Evan J. Young of Clinton Laboratories to M.D. Whittaker, undated, HSTL.

“What a question”: Compton, 247.

“The historic fact”: Churchill, 553.

“Truman made no decision”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“The final decision”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 419.

HST later told Arthur Compton: Compton, 245.

“I casually mentioned to Stalin”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 416.

Stalin’s response offhand: Bohlen, 237.

“If he had had the slightest idea”: Churchill, 580.

“not grasped the importance”: Byrnes, 263.

“No one who played”: Ibid., 265.

“We have discovered”: HST Diary, July 25, 1945, Off the Record, 55.

“The idea of using the bomb”: Harriman and Abel, 490.

“We are asking for the reorganization”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 360.

“If a government”: Ibid.

an iron fence had descended: Ibid., 362.

“I do not want to fight”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 313.

“The question is not ripe”: Ibid., 373.

Churchill full of foreboding: Moran, 306.

“What a pity”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 389.

old order passing: HST Diary, July 30, 1945, Off the Record, 58.

It was too bad about Churchill: HST to MET and MJT, July 28, 1945, HSTL.

“enslaved as a race”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 392–93.

“kill it with silence”: Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 236.

“Mr. Attlee is not so keen”: HST to MET and MJT, July 29, 1945, HSTL.

“We shall see”: HST to EWT, July 29, 1945, Dear Bess, 522.

HST in an optimistic mood: Forrestal Diaries, 79.

“The time schedule on Groves’ ”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1374.

“Suggestion approved”: Declassified “Urgent—Top Secret Message,” Stimson to HST, July 30, 1945: HST’s handwritten message on back, HSTL.

“Everything seemed momentous”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“We have accomplished a very great deal”: HST to EWT, July 25, 1945, Dear Bess, 521.

“Pray for me”: HST to EWT, July 29, 1945, ibid., 522.

“We are at an impasse”: HST Diary, July 30, 1945, Off the Record, 58.

“It is a question of give and take”: PP, HST, August 9, 1945, 209.

foolishness in the extreme: Kennan, Memoirs, 259, 290.

“Marshal Stalin I have accepted”: Murphy, 278.

Stalin broke in: Ibid., 279.

HST called Russians pigheaded: HST to MET and MJT, July 31, 1945, HSTL.

“police government”: HST Diary, July 26, 1945, Off the Record, 57.

“They went away”: Donovan, 73.

“I like Stalin”: HST to EWT, July 29, 1945, Dear Bess, 522.

“The President seemed to have been”: Ayers Diary, August 7, 1945, HSTL.

Stalin was a fine man: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 490.

“Stalin is as near”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 23.

“an innocent idealist”: HST to Dean Acheson, March 15, 1957, unsent, Off the Record, 348–49.

“for operational purposes”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1321.

Discussion of Poland’s frontier: Ibid., 597–601.

Stalin on HST: Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 221.

“That will save two days”: HST to MET and MJT, July 31, 1945, HSTL.

HST found the King “very pleasant”: HST Diary, August 5, 1945, Off the Record, 59.

“Here was the greatest news story”: Smith, Thank You, Mr. President, 256.

“completely rested”: Official log of the Augusta, HSTL.

“Results clear-cut”: Memoirs, Vol. 1, 421.

“This is the greatest thing”: Smith, 257.

“Big bomb dropped”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 421.

“Please keep your seats”: The New York Times, August 7, 1945.

“He was not actually laughing”: Smith, 258.

“We were all excited”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“Sixteen hours ago”: PP, HST, August 6, 1945, 196–200.

“But even if my legs”: Kansas City Star, July 28, 1965.

“Some of our scientists”: Leahy Diary, August 8, 1945, LC.

“ultimatum to end all ultimatums”: The New York Times, August 8, 1945.

Stimson and Marshall worried: Mosley, Marshall. Hero for Our Times, 338.

“Additional bombs”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 420.

“For the second time”: L.A. Times, August 9, 1945.

Russell telegram to HST: Richard B. Russell to HST, undated, HSTL.

HST note to Russell: HST to Richard B. Russell, August 9, 1945, HSTL.

“I realize the tragic significance”: PP, HST, August 9, 1945, 212.

“Would it not be wondrous?”: Washington Times, August 6, 1985.

“Could we continue”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 428.

Stimson said the emperor: Ibid.

“we’d tell ’em how to keep him”: HST Diary, August 10, 1945, Off the Record, 61.

“subject to the Supreme Commander”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 429.

“all those kids”: Wallace, 474.

“Nearly every crisis seems to be”: HST to MET and MJT, August 12, 1945, HSTL.

“it began like the days”: Ayers Diary, August 14, 1945, HSTL.

“might get a story”: Sue Gentry, author’s interview.

“I have received this afternoon”: PP, HST, August 14, 1945, 216.

“I felt deeply moved”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 437.

“This is a great day”: The New York Times, August 15, 1945.

“The only thing new”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 69.

“Everyone had been going”: HST to MET and MJT, August 17, 1945, Off the Record, 62.

Part Four

11. The Buck Stops Here

“Everybody wants something”: HST to MET and MJT, September 22, 1945, HSTL.

more prima donnas per square foot: HST to MET and MJT, October 23, 1945, HSTL.

“You can’t do anything worthwhile”: PP, HST, October 7, 1945, 380.

“cut out the foolishness”: Ibid., October 10, 1945, 394.

“We must go on”: Ibid., September 6, 1945, 291.

Wallace’s estimate of drop in GNP: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 495.

“The Congress are balking”: HST to MET and MJT, October 23, 1945, HSTL.

“Anything else, Mr. President?”: PP, HST, September 18, 1945, 326.

“If anyone in the government”: HST to EWT, June 22, 1945, Dear Bess, 523.

“The pressure here”: HST to MET and MJT, October 13, 1945, HSTL.

“We can’t stand another global war”: PP, HST, October 7, 1945, 381.

“did everything…mouth of a cannon”: Quoted in Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 129.

“in the doldrums”: Ayers Diary, October 19, 1945, HSTL.

call for universal military training: PP, HST, October 23, 1945, 404, 413.

HST shows new presidential flag: Ibid., October 25, 1945, 415–417.

“It was disintegration”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 509.

“Tiny lines had grown”: Gunther, Procession, 260.

Encounter with Oppenheimer: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 118.

“See what a son-of-a-bitch”: Quoted in Wallace, 519.

Marshall ends call abruptly: Miller, Plain Speaking, 252.

“paid much less attention”: Samuel Rosenman, Oral History, HSTL.

“Mr. President, you should know”: Wallace, 530.

“wild accidents”: Quoted in Lerner, Actions and Passions, 219.

“one of the most hazardous”: Time, December 8, 1947.

“Well I’m here in the White House”: HST to EWT, December 28, 1945, Dear Bess, 523–24.

“able and conniving”: HST Diary, July 7, 1945, in Ferrell, ed, Off the Record, 49.

“I told him I did not like”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 550.

“a horse’s ass”: Clifford quoted in Jonathan Daniels interview notes, HSTL.

Acheson impressions of HST: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 136.

HST longhand letter for Byrnes: HST to James F. Byrnes, January 5, 1946, unsent, Off the Record, 79–80

“1946 is our year of decision”: PP, HST, January 3, 1946, 1.

“This is a disaster”: Quoted in Goulden, The Best Years 1945–1950, 113.

“I personally think there is”: PP, HST, January 24, 1946, 92.

The “blunt truth”: Time, January 14, 1946.

Chicago Tribune cartoon: Reprinted in Time, February 4, 1946.

“at best, undistinguished”: MacKaye, “Things Are Different in the White House,” Saturday Evening Post, April 20, 1946.

People were “befuddled”: HST to MET and MJT, January 23, 1946, HSTL.

“An oil man”: Ayers Diary, January 18, 1946, HSTL.

Ickes resignation: The New York Times, February 14, 1946.

a chronic “resigner”: Quoted in Miller, 226.

“There would have been no rest”: HST to MET and MJT, February 7, 1946, HSTL.

American Mercury article: Crawford, “Everyman in the White House,” February 1946.

“appears to consider it necessary”: Leahy Diary, February 21, 1946, LC.

Stalin statement on war: Donovan, 187.

Justice Douglas reaction: Ibid.

“I will call you Harry”: Ross Diary, March 7, 1946, HSTL.

“Harry, what does a sequence count?”: Quoted in Daniels, The Man of Independence, 279.

“He took a boy’s delight”: Ross Diary, March 7, 1946, HSTL.

Churchill wish to be born American: Gilbert, Winston Churchill. Never Despair, 146.

“You stop drinking”: Ibid., 147.

“do nothing but good”: Ibid.

HST and Churchill on eagle’s head: Ross Diary, March 9, 1946, HSTL.

“Iron curtain” speech: Quoted in Gilbert, 198.

HST denies knowing what Churchill would say: Wallace, 558.

HST pleads “no comment”: PP, HST, March 8, 1946, 145.

“the Long Telegram”: Donovan, 187–88.

“here and now”: Matt Connelly Papers, HSTL.

“He was in his study”: Ross Diary, March 23, 1946, HSTL.

Mary Jane’s reaction to HST press conference: Mary Jane Truman, Oral History, HSTL.

492Life article: Busch, “A Year of Truman,” April 8, 1946.

“Here is to be seen”: The New York Times Magazine, April 7, 1946.

494Time article: May 6, 1946.

“I can hold a Cabinet meeting”: PP, HST, May 2, 1946, 227.

“Big money has too much”: HST to MET and MJT, January 23, 1946, HSTL.

“I’m going to give you the gun”: Quoted in Daniels, 325.

“We have a society”: The New York Times, May 22, 1946.

“That’s the way he is”: Ibid., May 26, 1946.

a “complicated”: J. C. Truman, author’s interview.

“This was the fifth day”: Ayers Diary, May 23, 1946, HSTL.

HST meeting with veterans: Washington Star, May 24, 1946.

“There were poignant scenes”: Newsweek, June 3, 1946.

Telegrams flooding the White House: White House Correspondence File, HSTL.

“At home those of us”: HST speech draft, undelivered, Clifford Papers, HSTL.

“In the manner of Lincoln”: Phillips, 115.

“I’d never been in the White House”: Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

“Alone of all the Truman entourage”: Quoted in Allen and Shannon, The Truman Merry-Go-Round, 61.

“The President is intelligent”: Clifford, with Holbrooke, Counsel to the President, 274.

“I come before the American people”: PP, HST, May 24, 1946, 274.

“He said they had verbally agreed”: Clifford interview, Daniels notes, HSTL.

“For the past two days”: PP, HST, May 25, 1946, 277.

“Spotlights ablaze”: New Republic, June 3, 1946.

“he could be tough”: The New York Times, May 26, 1946.

“Draft men who strike”: New Republic, June 3, 1946.

“I was the servant”: Film Collection, HSTL.

“Nothing about the Wallace affair”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“If Mr. Slaughter is right”: PP, HST, July 18, 1946, 350.

HST’s health: Ross Diary, July 20, 1946, HSTL.

“Had the most awful day”: HST to MET and MJT, July 31, 1946, HSTL.

“She’s on the way out”: HST to EWT, August 9, 1946, Dear Bess, 530.

“Be good and be tough”: MT [Margaret Truman] to HST, June 14, 1946, Truman, Letters from Father, 142.

“I still have a number of bills”: HST to EWT, August 10, 1946, Dear Bess, 530.

“It’s just wonderful”: MacDonald, “President Truman’s Yacht,” Naval History, Winter 1990.

“See, he had no airs”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“He always plays a close hand”: Ted Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

“The Williamsburg”: MacDonald, “President Truman’s Yacht.”

“This is a paradise”: HST to MT, August 23, 1946, Truman, Letters from Father, 69.

“did all sorts of antics”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 366.

“The furniture was taking headers”: HST to EWT, September 2, 1946, Dear Bess, 534.

“Night before last”: HST to EWT, September 9, 1946, ibid., 535.

disliked living there: HST to EWT, September 3, 1946, ibid., 534.

“You better lock your door”: Truman, Letters from Father, 144.

“I’m in the middle”: HST to EWT, September 10, 1946, Dear Bess, 536.

HST press conference: PP, HST, September 12, 1946, 426–29.

“If the President”: Ross Diary, September 21, 1946, HSTL.

Wallace account: Wallace, 612–13.

tried to skim through it: HST Diary, September 17, 1946, Off the Record, 94.

Reston column: The New York Times, September 13, 1946.

“The criticism continued to mount”: Ross Diary, September 21, 1946, HSTL.

“I’m still having Henry Wallace trouble”: HST to MET and MJT, September 18, 1946, HSTL.

“Henry told me”: HST to EWT, September 20, 1946, Dear Bess, 539.

“Everything’s lovely”: Quoted in Acheson, 192.

“Henry is the most peculiar fellow”: HST to MET and MJT, September 20, 1946, HSTL.

“He wants to disband”: Quoted in Donovan, 227.

Byrnes telegram: Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 241–42.

“so nice about it”: HST to EWT, September 21, 1946, Dear Bess, 539.

“I would rather be anything”: HST to MET and MJT, September 20, 1946, HSTL.

“No man in his right mind”: HST to MT, September 9, 1946, Truman, Letters from Father, 71.

“a liar, double-crosser”: HST to MT, September 17, 1946, ibid., 75.

“Sept. 26, 1918”: HST Diary, September 26, 1946, Off the Record, 98.

Ickes called him “stupid”: Time, September 30, 1946.

32 percent poll results: Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, 604.

“Nothing on meat”: PP, HST, October 10, 1946, 447.

Truman continues electronic surveillance: Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 344.

“The shrill pitch of abuse”: Time, October 28, 1946.

he alone was formally dressed: Ibid.

“Here was a man”: Kilgore quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 288.

“never seemed to have a problem”: Fields, My 21 Years in the White House, 187.

“We went to the Waldorf: HST to MT, October 26; 1946, Truman, Letters from Father,81.

Jefferson City stop: Time, November 11, 1946.

“Probably no President”: Phillips, 161.

12. Turning Point

“This is a serious course”: PP, HST, March 12, 1947, 179.

Lippmann on HST: Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 455.

“My dear Harry”: WC to HST, May 12, 1947, quoted in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. Never Despair, 326.

Acheson alone…was waiting: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 200.

“The captain with the mighty heart”: Ibid., dedication page.

“so fast they were falling all over”: Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

Lilienthal in rain: Lilienthal Journals, Vol. I, 54.

“the kind of grim gaiety”: Ibid., 118.

“Oh, God, it was the chance”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“now a free man”: Quoted in Time, April 7, 1947.

“I’m doing as I damn please”: HST to EWT, November 18, 1946, Dear Bess, 540.

“How can there be immunity”: Goldman, The Crucial Decade—And After, 29.

“He told me that he would”: HST Diary, January 1, 1947, in Ferrell, ed, Off the Record, 107.

“Bob is not austere”: Time, January 20, 1947.

HST walks to Union Station: Ayers Diary, January 6, 1947, HSTL.

“your appointment as Secretary of State”: Mosley, Marshall: Hero for Our Times, 390.

“I thought that the continuing harping”: Cray, General of the Army, 17.

Marshall did not possess the intellectual brilliance: Halle, The Cold War as History, 113.

“It was a striking and commanding force”: Acheson, 140–41.

exit office backwards: Paul Horgan, author’s interview.

“He never made any speeches”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 251.

“Sometimes he would sit”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 112.

“He was a man you could count on”: Quoted in Miller, 250.

“On the one hand”: Pogue, George C. Marshall. Statesman, 141–42.

“He gave a sense of purpose”: Bohlen, Witness to History, 259.

“Gentlemen, don’t fight”: Quoted in Pogue, 148.

Acheson found working with the general: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 159.

“The more I see and talk”: HST appointment sheet, February 18, 1947, Off the Record, 109.

“Marshall is a tower”: HST Diary, May 7, 1948, ibid., 134.

“I am surely lucky”: HST appointment sheet, February 18, 1947, ibid., 109.

“He no longer moans”: Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War,1941–1947, 347.

“His eye is clear”: Quoted in Time, January 27, 1947.

48 percent poll rating: Time, February 10, 1947.

“They brought back all the pageantry”: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 91.

“The papers say today”: HST to MET and MJT, February 9, 1947, Off the Record, 108.

“I was somewhat nervous”: HST to MET and MJT, February 13, 1947, HSTL.

“despite all the denying”: West, 91.

Lilienthal nomination hearings: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 141–42.

“far from anger or temper”: Ibid., 141.

“I believe in”: Ibid., Appendix B, 646–48.

HST supports Lilienthal: Ibid., 144.

Taft opposes nomination: Time, February 24, 1947.

“Courage: What is it?”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 160.

“Now Mary, don’t you work too hard”: HST to MET and MJT, February 27, 1947, HSTL.

Lincoln McVeigh reported rumors: Memoirs, Vol. II, 99.

Greece a “ripe plum”: Ibid.

“little hope of independent survival”: Quoted in Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 277.

“the only one in Government”: Gaddis, 346, note.

“It is not alarmist”: Quoted in Pogue, 164.

“The Soviet Union was playing”: Acheson, 219.

Vandenberg told the President: Ibid.

“and I expressed my emphatic”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 103.

Mexico City visit: Newsweek, March 17, 1947.

Clifford memo: appears in full in Krock, Memoirs, Appendix, 419–82.

“The impact of having it all”: George Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“If we go in”: Matt Connelly Papers, HSTL.

most important of his career: Ayers Diary, March 8, 1947, HSTL.

“I believe it must be”: Clifford, Counsel to the President, 136.

“too much rhetoric”: Bohlen, 261.

“If you take his advice”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 163.

“I want no hedging”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 105.

Truman Doctrine speech: PP, HST, March 12, 1947, 176–80.

“Well, I told my wife”: Time, March 24, 1947.

“A vague global policy”: Quoted in Steel, 438–39.

a “universal pattern”: Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 61.

would “of course” act: Acheson, 225.

“I guess the do-gooders”: Newsweek, March 24, 1947.

“If Mr. L is a communist”: HST, draft unreleased statement, March 1947, Off the Record, 113.

“no part of a communist”: Vandenberg, ed., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, 355.

“the most important thing”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 166.

“[He is] very strongly anti-FBI”: Clark Clifford Papers, HSTL.

“The long tenure”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 163.

“I am not worried”: PP, HST, April 3, 1947, 190.

“It was a political problem”: Bernstein, Loyalties, 195–98.

“The Republicans are now taking”: Frank McNaughton Papers, March 28, 1948, HSTL.

“If I can prevent”: HST to EW, September 27, 1947, Dear Bess, 550.

“Yes, it was terrible”: Joseph Rauh quoted in Bernstein, 196.

“I think it’s one of the proudest”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“There was much to be done”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 104.

“You don’t sit down”: Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

Kennan leaves the room: Kennan, Memoirs, 328, note.

meeting with newspaper editors: PP, HST, April 7, 1947, 207–10.

“He was…an extremely thoughtful”: Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“When he went to lunch”: Quoted in Heller, The Truman White House, 46.

“Lots of times I would be”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“He spent virtually every waking”: Quoted in Heller, 119.

HST would like to have been history teacher: Ayers Diary, April 26, 1947, HSTL.

Clifford insists HST not be FDR: Markel, “Truman As the Crucial Third Year Opens.”

“In many ways President Truman”: Quoted in Heller, 120.

“It just has to be said”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“There is nothing in life”: Quoted in Farrar, Reluctant Servant, 195.

“priceless gift of vitality”: Acheson, 730.

the nation “again has leaders”: Hardeman and Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography, 328.

Marshall’s return of April 26, 1947: Memoirs, Vol. II, 112; Bohlen, 262–63; Kennan, 325.

The Soviets, it seemed: Marshall quoted in Pogue, 196.

“The patient is sinking”: Ibid., 200.

“Avoid trivia”: Kennan, 326.

Clayton memo: Pogue, 206.

Marshall speech: Mosley, 404–05.

“We grabbed the lifeline”: Quoted in Pogue, 217.

“play it straight”: Bohlen, 264.

part played by Acheson: Clark Clifford address, American Ditchley Foundation, April 5, 1984.

“anything that is sent up”: Clifford, author’s interview.

Halle’s comments on staff: Halle, 115–16.

“And you and I have both lived”: Quoted in Miller, 264.

“While he was responding”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 383.

“If she wants to be a warbler”: HST to MET and MJT, January 30, 1947, HSTL.

“She’s one nice girl”: HST to MET and MJT, February 19, 1947, HSTL.

Mrs. Thomas J. Strickler: Kansas City Star, April 18, 1946.

“Margaret went to New York”: HST to MET and MJT, January 30, 1947, HSTL. ’

“Here’s a little dough”: HST to MT, February 28, 1947, Truman, Letters from Father, 89.

Margaret Truman’s radio debut: Kansas City Star, March 7, 8, 9, and 17, 1947.

“Perhaps, sheer naivete”: Truman, Souvenir, 162.

“Wish I could go along”: HST to MT, May 14, 1947, Truman, Letters from Father, 92.

“Whenever she wakes up”: Time, June 2, 1947.

“When I say all Americans”: PP, HST, June 29, 1947, 311–13.

“I did not believe”: White, A Man Called White, 348.

“Almost without exception”: White, How Far the Promised Land, 74.

he meant “every word of it”: White, A Man Called White, 348.

“But I believe what I say”: HST to MJT, June 28, 1947, HSTL.

reminiscing to Bess: HST to EWT, July 26, 1947, Dear Bess, 549.

“Goodbye, Harry”: HST Diary, November 24, 1952, Off the Record, 275.

“Well, now she won’t have to suffer”: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 295.

“Everything had changed”: Truman, Souvenir, 174.

“I couldn’t hold a press conference”: PP, HST, August 5, 1948, 365.

“Someday you’ll be an orphan”: HST to MT, August 1, 1947, Truman, Letters from Father, 96.

“You should call your mamma”: HST to MT, December 3, 1947, Truman, Harry S. Truman, 404–05.

“I called up Daddy”: Truman, Souvenir, 191.

a hit as a vaudeville team: Daniels, “The Lady from Independence,” McCall’s, April 1949.

She would laugh so hard: Parks and Leighton, My Thirty Years Backstage at the White House, 28.

“She’s the only lady I know”: Randall Jessee quoted in the Dallas Morning News, February 9, 1976.

“Mrs. Truman came with great apologies”: Marquis Childs, author’s interview.

“the white gloves type”: Reathel Odum, author’s interview.

“They both had the gift”: Nixon, In the Arena, 231.

“one of the finest women”: Robert Lovett, Oral History, HSTL.

HST’s reliance on Bess: Quoted in Means, “What Three Presidents Say About Their Wives,” Good Housekeeping, August 1963.

Bess laughs at pretensions: Daniels, “The Lady from Independence.”

“And then…the minute the doors”: Lindy Boggs, author’s interview.

“Propriety was a much stronger influence”: Alice Acheson, author’s interview.

“Just keep on smiling”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 265.

“She didn’t want to discuss”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

Bess Truman questionnaire: Time, November 10, 1947.

“She seems to think Harry”: Asbury, “Meet Harry’s Boss, Bess,” Collier’s, February 2, 1949.

Bess interested in Monroe administration: Daniels, “The Lady from Independence.”

“Mrs, Truman was no fussier”: West, 83.

“might as well have been in Independence”: J. B. West, author’s interview.

“And he listened to her”: Ibid.

Bess’s emotional separation: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 272.

“Suppose Miss Lizzie”: HST to EN, June 22, 1949, Off the Record, 157.

“Marshall and Lovett”: HST to EWT, September 23, 1947, Dear Bess, 549–50.

“Yesterday was one of the most hectic”: HST to EW, September 30, 1947, ibid., 550–51.

“Twenty-nine years!”: HST to EWT, June 28, 1948, Dear Bess, 554.

Greta Kempton portrait: Greta Kempton, author’s interview; Kempton letter to the author, June 20, 1984; Kempton, “Painting the Truman Family,” Missouri Historical ’ Review, April 1973; “An Interview with Greta Kempton,” Whistlestop, Vol. 15, no. 2, 1987.

a handwritten note from Churchill: Gilbert, Winston Churchill. Never Despair, 351.

“In all the history of the world”: HST speech draft, undelivered, April 1948, Off the Record, 133.

13. The Heat in the Kitchen

Eisenhower again declined: Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 338.

“Mr. Truman was a realist”: Quoted in Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 197, note.

“give everything”: Ayers Diary, January 19, 1948, HSTL.

“Aside from the impossible”: HST to MET and MJT, November 14, 1947, HSTL.

“President Truman did not want to run”: Quoted in Donovan, 338.

“blessed with a tough hide”: Phillips, 140.

“The greatest ambition”: Quoted in Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 9.

“get into the fight”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 171–72.

“What I wanted to do personally”: Ibid., 174.

speech before Congress: PP, HST, January 7, 1948, 1.

message to Congress: Ibid., February 2, 1948, 121.

press conference on civil rights: Ibid., February 5, 1948.

black Democrats at rear table: Time, March 1, 1948.

“But my very stomach turned”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 429.

Privately could speak of “niggers”: Rex Scouten, author’s interview; Miller, Plain Speaking, 195.

“Harry is no more”: Jonathan Daniels interview with Mary Jane Truman, October 2, 1949, HSTL.

“The main difficulty”: HST to Ernest W. Roberts, August 18, 1948, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 146.

murder of four blacks: To Secure These Rights: Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 22.

“The wonderful, wonderful development”: Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

“strike for new high ground”: Quoted in Ross, 19.

Clifford on golf course: David Acheson, author’s interview.

Clifford decided not to tell HST: Clifford, author’s interview.

“This is, as you know”: James Rowe, Jr., to William Sand, July 8, 1971.

“In the Roosevelt and Truman years”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“The Politics of 1948”: Memorandum by James H. Rowe, Jr., Miscellaneous Historical Documents, HSTL.

“We were telling the President”: James H. Rowe, Jr., author’s interview.

HST kept memo in bottom drawer: Ibid.

“To a politician of Harry Truman’s”: Washington Post, undated, Vertical Files, HSTL.

Hill and Sparkman call for HST’s resignation: Ayers Diary, March 23, 1948, HSTL.

instant disapproval: Washington Star, May 25, 1965.

“Back Porch Harry”: Time, January 26, 1948.

Jefferson himself: PP, HST, April 15, 1948, 217–18.

Washington Star: Donovan, 351.

“The awnings you will remember”: HST to MJT, January 30, 1948, HSTL.

“Had to be renewed”: HST to George Rothwell Brown, January 20, 1948, HSTL.

danger of second floor falling: Ayers Diary, March 6, 1948, HSTL.

Ross “terrifically upset”: Ibid., February 6, 1948, HSTL.

“You can guard yourself: Ibid., December 30, 1947, HSTL.

his most difficult dilemma: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 416.

“humanly possible”: Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1948.

“could not be allowed to continue”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 138.

“definitely and preeminently”: Harrison quoted in Eban, An Autobiography, 59.

“would they be welcomed”: Ibid.

Niles sensed HST’s sympathy with Jews: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 304.

“I’m a man of no importance”: Steinberg, “Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man,” Saturday Evening Post, December 24, 1949.

“just politics”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“And his own reading”: Weisberger, interview with Clark Clifford, American Heritage, December 28, 1976.

justice not oil: HST quoted in Wallace, The Price of Vision, 607.

no wish to send American troops: PP, HST, August 6, 1945, 228.

“What I am trying to do”: HST to Joseph H. Ball, November 24, 1945, unsent, HSTL.

“The action of some of our American Zionists”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 420.

he wished more people: Donovan, 319

“I am not a New Yorker”: Quoted in Wallace, 605

“Terror and Silver”: HST Memorandum to David Niles, May 13, 1947, HSTL.

“Jesus Christ couldn’t please them”: Quoted in Wallace, 607.

“I’m so tired”: HST to MJT, February 11, 1948, HSTL.

not a great many Arab constituents: Donovan, 322.

Forrestal thought less of HST: Forrestal Diaries, 309, 363.

“Kaplan sells shirts”: Quoted in Donovan, 317.

“And when the day came”: Washington Star and Daily News, December 31, 1972.

“carelessly pro-Zionist”: Jenkins, Truman, 116.

Kennan on Palestine: Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman. 356.

Henderson worried about consequences: The New York Times, March 26, 1986.

“Some White House men”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 317.

“Look here, Loy”: Loy Henderson, Oral History, HSTL.

“conflicting objectives”: Rusk, As I Saw It, 147–48.

“I know how Marshall feels”: Quoted in Daniels, 318.

“We went for it”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949.

Eddie Jacobson account: Washington Post, May 6, 1973.

“he [Truman] and he alone”: Ibid.

Jewish delegation swept up: The New York Times, November 30, 1947.

“There were Jews in tears”: Eban, 99.

“a triumphant vindication”: The New York Times, November 30, 1947.

turning point in history: New York Herald-Tribune, November 30, 1947.

“one of the few great acts”: Ibid., December 1, 1947.

“push the Jews”: Weisberger interview with Clark Clifford, American Heritage, December 28, 1976.

Forrestal report to HST: Forrestal Diaries, March 4, 1948, 386.

“Things look black”: HST to MT, March 3, 1948, Truman, Letters from Father, 108.

“a new tenseness”: Forrestal Diaries, 387.

“lifted me right out”: Smith, Lucius D. Clay, 466–67.

to move atomic bombs: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. I, 302.

“The Jewish pressure”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 160.

Niles grew so emotional: Letter from Joseph Alsop to Martin Sommers, June 1, 1948, LC.

either “give in”: Ibid.

“So I called him ‘Cham’ ”: Film Collection, HSTL.

They had met secretly: Memoirs, Vol. II, 161.

“You can bank on us”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 318.

“I was extremely happy”: Weizmann, Trial and Error, 459.

Kennan’s paper: Donovan, 370.

“playing with fire”: Forrestal Diaries, 373.

“the political situation”: Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 127.

no “bending”: Pogue, 361.

“On five occasions”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949.

“pro-Arab”: Loy Henderson, Oral History, HSTL.

“I pointed out that the views”: Ibid.

“Oh, hell, I’m leaving”: Ibid.

Frank Goldman call to Jacobson: Kansas City Times, May 13, 1965.

Connelly warned Jacobson: Adler, Roots in a Moving Stream, 210.

“always had a brother’s interest”: Kansas City Times, May 13, 1965.

HST suddenly tense: Ibid.

“In all the years of our friendship”: “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948,” American Jewish Archives, April 1968.

“disrespectful and mean”: Ibid.

“Harry, all your life”: Ibid.

HST reaction to Jacobson: Ibid.

Jacobson has drink: Kansas City Times, May 13, 1965.

“It is the most serious situation”: HST to Eleanor Roosevelt, March 16, 1948, Off the Record, 126.

“It was better to do that”: Ayers Diary, March 16, 1948, HSTL.

Joint Session speech: PP, HST, March 17, 1948, 182–86.

“And when he left my office”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 161.

HST and Weizmann reached “understanding”: Ibid.

“A land of milk and honey”: The New York Times, March 21, 1948.

“whimsical and cynical action”: Letter from Tucson Jewish Community Council, undated, White House Correspondence File, HSTL.

“vacillating”: Letter from Democratic Council, undated, Whittier, California, White House Correspondence File, HSTL.

“This change can mean”: Judge P. Tinley to HST, March 25, 1948, HSTL.

“Oh, how could you stoop”: Samuel A. Sloan to HST, March 19, 1948, HSTL.

“Black Friday”: “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948.”

“There wasn’t one”: Ibid.

Weizmann certain what HST had meant: Adler, 211.

Jacobson must not forget: “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948.”

“This morning I find”: HST Diary, March 20, 1948, Off the Record, 127.

“the striped pants boys”: HST to MJT, March 21, 1948, HSTL.

“Truman was in his office”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949; Daniels interview notes, HSTL.

“The President’s statement”: Ayers Diary, March 20, 1948, HSTL.

“the wisest course”: The News York Times, March 21, 1948.

“This gets us nowhere”: Quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 307.

“Send final draft”: Foreign Relations of the United States. Vol. V: The Far East, South Asia and Africa, 645.

“striped pants conspirators”: HST to MJT, March 21, 1948, HSTL.

“prejudice the character”: PP, HST, March 25, 1948, 190, 192.

Eleanor Roosevelt resignation: Lash, 130.

“The choice for our people”: Weizmann, 474.

“very strongly”: “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948.”

“the President looked worn”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 320.

“It is a scream”: HST to MJT, April 8, 1948, HSTL.

Gallup Poll: Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–71, 727.

“When he [Truman] vetoed”: The New York Times, April 4, 1948.

“You will be addressing all of us”: Weisberger interview with Clifford.

“I want you to know”: George C. Marshall to HST, May 8, 1948, HSTL.

Marshall speech: As reported in Frank McNaughton Papers, December 18, 1948, HSTL.

May 12, 1948, meeting: Clay, General of the Army, 658, 661.

“As I talked”: Address by Clark Clifford, American Ditchley Foundation, April, 5, 1984; Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

“This is just straight politics”: Ibid.

“General, he is here”: Ibid.

“I had really prepared!”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“everything this country should represent”: Ibid.

“Behold, I have set the land”: Clifford, letter to the author.

“No matter what the State Department”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949, HSTL.

“the sharpest rebuke ever”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“the great one of the age”: HST appointment sheet, February 18, 1947, Off the Record, 109.

“That brought the meeting”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“righteous goddamn Baptist”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949, HSTL.

“didn’t know his ass”: Ibid.

“That was rough as a cob”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“I will cross that bridge”: PP, HST, May 13, 1948, 253.

“Marshall was the greatest asset”: Clifford, author’s interview.

Lovett would have to persuade: Ibid.

Marshall called HST: Ibid.

“That is all we need”: Ibid.

“This is very unusual”: Ibid.

name of new country left blank: Ibid.

reaction of American delegation: The New York Times, May 16, 1948.

“temporary, unofficial ambassador”: Adler, 212.

“There is a great deal to be said”: Washington Star, May 16, 1948.

“The difficulty with many career”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 165.

“God put you in your mother’s womb”: Quoted in Steinberg, 308.

“In my opinion”: Henderson, Oral History, HSTL.

Marshall never spoke to Clifford again: Pogue, 377.

“I told him that it was”: Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 433,

Crestline, Ohio: PP, HST, June 4, 1948, 284.

Omaha stop: Ayers Diary, June 7, 1948, HSTL.

“I don’t give a damn”: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“President Truman was at his best”: Omaha Morning World-Herald, June 8, 1948.

“walled-in”: Krock, Memoirs, 242.

“It almost overwhelms me”: PP, HST, June 6, 1948, 288.

“My goodness!”: Ibid., June 8, 1948, 303.

Butte, Montana, stop: Idaho Daily Statesman, June 9, 1948.

“I am sorry I had gone to bed”: New York Sun, June 9, 1948.

“down to Berkeley”: Donovan, 400.

“They told me at a little town”: HST to MJT, June 8, 1948, HSTL.

Carey Airport gaffe: Montana Standard, June 9, 1948.

“I have been in politics”: PP, HST, June 8, 1948, 301.

a many-versed song: Kansas City Star, March 23, 1969.

“a spectacle of himself”: Steinberg, 312.

Eugene, Oregon, stop: PP, HST, June 11, 1948, 329.

“about two acres of people”: Ibid., June 14, 1948, 348.

“You know, this Congress”: Ibid., June 10, 1948, 314.

“blackguarding Congress”: Redding, Inside the Democratic Party, 178.

telegrams to mayors: Ibid.

Berkeley-commencement address: PP, HST, June 12, 1948, 336–40,

“Our policy will continue”: Ibid., 340.

“they clung to the roofs”: Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1948.

HST jabbed his forefinger: Donovan, 401.

June 18 return to Washington: Time, June 28, 1948.

a “gone goose”: Ibid.

Dewey acceptance speech: Time, July 5, 1948.

“We stay in Berlin”: Forrestal Diaries, 454–55.

“We stay in Berlin”: Pogue, 301.

“we were nose to nose”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 481.

“had no direct role whatever”: George Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“A ball game or two”: HST Diary, June 18, 1948, Off the Record, 140.

“I am not a quitter”: Krock, 241.

“You have the choice”: Ickes quoted in Donovan, 389.

decided it was time for Eisenhower: Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 186.

Eisenhower did not want nomination: Steinberg, 309–10.

Jimmy Roosevelt wired: Goulden, The Best Years, 1945–1950, 381.

“a hard and possibly losing fight”: Ross, 113.

“I am simply aghast”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 378–79.

“All right, let him go”: Ayers Diary, July 6, 1948, HSTL.

“double-crossers all”: HST Diary, July 6, 1948, Off the Record, 141.

“I don’t think he would be a candidate”: HST to James W. Gerard, April 27, 1948, HSTL.

Krock story: Krock, Memoirs, 242.

Pepper proposing Eisenhower draft: Newsweek, July 19, 1948.

“I wanted to tell you”: Krock, 243.

“In a telephone conference”: Ibid.

“final and complete”: Newsweek, July 19, 1948.

“Truman, Harry Truman”: Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After, 83.

“no time for politics as usual”: Ross, 115.

“None of us”: Phillips, 218.

’We got the wrong rigs”: The New York Times, July 12, 1948.

“You could cut the gloom”: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 200.

Douglas wished to stay on Court: HST Diary, July 12, 1948, Off the Record, 141.

“I stuck my neck”: Ayers Diary, July 13, 1948, HSTL.

“But if memory does not betray”: Redding, 188–89.

If Barkley was what convention wanted: Newsweek, July 26, 1948.

Barkley gone to bed: HST Diary, July 13, 1948, Off the Record, 142.

Barkley never told HST he wanted to be VP: Ross, 119.

“I don’t want it passed”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 12.

“Talking about the vice-presidency”: Ayers Diary, July 13, 1948, HSTL.

“A Negro alternate from St. Louis”: HST Diary, July 13, 1948, Off the Record, 142.

“sellout” to states’ rights: Ross, 121.

“We were inherently stronger”: Douglas, In the Fullness of Time, 137.

“Young man, that’s just what”: Goulden, 385.

“There are those who say”: Ross, 125.

southern “walkout” would destroy: Hardeman and Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography,337.

as “crackpots”: HST Diary, July 14, 1948, Off the Record, 143.

“No privacy sure enough”: Ibid.

“Hard to hear”: Ibid.

“a very agreeable visit”: Barkley, 203.

“an interesting and instructive evening”: HST Diary, July 14, 1948, Off the Record, 143.

“hot, horrible night”: Tom Evans, Oral History, HSTL.

“They did what you do”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“Harry Truman’s a goddamn liar”: Hardeman and Bacon, 338.

“Senator Barkley and I”: PP, HST, July 15, 1948, 406.

“Our task is to fill”: Smith, 500,

“Now it is time for us”: PP, HST, July 15, 1948, 406.

“Everybody knows that I recommended”: Ibid., 408.

“He walked out there”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“They sensed”: Lerner, Actions and Passions, 233.

“Of course, it was politics”: Daniels, 356.

“devilishly astute”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 178.

“Arrived in Washington”: HST Diary, July 15, 1948, Off the Record, 144.

“to reduce us to the status”: Ross, 131.

“the segregation of the races”: Ibid.

“but Truman really means it”: Steinberg, 315.

“on the basis of interest”: Ross, 158.

“We stand against the kings”: Time, August 2, 1948.

Forrestal and atomic bomb: HST to EWT, July 23, 1948, Dear Bess, 555.

“It is hot and humid”: HST Diary, July 19, 1948, Off the Record, 145.

“We’ll stay in Berlin”: Ibid.

“If we wished to remain”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 124.

a “very big operation”: Davidson, The Berlin Blockade, 105.

“We were proud of our Air Force”: Quoted in Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, 167.

“But every expert knows”: Quoted in Davidson, 125.

“My muttonhead Secretary”: HST to EWT, July 23, 1948, Dear Bess, 555.

“There is considerable political”: Memorandum by James H. Rowe, Jr., Miscellaneous Historical Documents, HSTL.

“I am going through a terrible”: HST to WC, July 10, 1948, Truman, Letters from Father, 110.

“The President greeted us rather solemnly”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 388–89.

“This is no time”: Ibid., 391.

“If what worried the President”: Ibid.

Truman held Forrestal: Forrestal Diaries, 461.

seemed lately unable to “take hold”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 386.

“I went down the river”: HST to MJT, July 26, 1948, HSTL.

“No, we’re not going to give”: Quoted in Donovan, 411.

“They sure are in a stew”: HST to EWT, July 23, 1948, Dear Bess, 66.

“For a number of years”: Phillips, 369.

“a ‘red herring’ “: PP, HST, August 5, 1948, 433.

“Entirely”: Ibid., August 12, 1948, 438.

floor of Margaret’s room: HST to MJT, August 10, 1948, HSTL.

“Can you imagine?”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 329.

“Margaret’s sitting room”: HST to MJT, August 10, 1948, HSTL.

“old Abe’s bed”: Ibid.

14. Fighting Chance

“It will be the greatest”: HST to MJT, October 5, 1948, HSTL.

“There were no deep-hid schemes”: Ross, “How Truman Did It,” Collier’s, December 24, 1948.

“It’s going to be tough”: Ibid.

“I have a terrible feeling”: HST Diary, September 13, 1948, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 149.

“Every grade crossing”: The New Yorker, October 9, 1948.

“I’m going to give ’em hell”: Time, September 27, 1948.

Gallup Poll: Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, 757.

“My whole inclination”: Time, September 13, 1948.

“Cadillac Square”: Matt Connelly, Oral History, HSTL.

“You remember the big boom”: PP, HST, September 18, 1948, 504.

plow the straightest furrows: Ibid., 506.

“You stayed at home in 1946”: Ibid., 501.

“Understand me, when I speak”: Ibid., September 20, 1948, 518.

“Selfish men have always”: Ibid., September 21, 1948, 531.

“sharp speeches”: Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 425.

These “little speeches”: Ross, “How Truman Did It.”

“Oh, I wish my grandfather”: PP, HST, September 21, 1948, 531.

“They tell me [he said at Mojave]”: Ibid., September 23, 1948, 554.

“I’m here on a serious mission”: Ibid., September 22, 1948, 544.

“In 1946, you know”: Ibid., September 20, 1948, 512, 514.

“Give ’em hell”: Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

“I never gave anybody hell”: The New York Times, December 27, 1972.

“It will be a picture”: The New Yorker, October 9, 1948.

Los Angeles speech: PP, HST, September 24, 1948, 559.

“We are not quite holding our own”: Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, 235.

“That’s good”: Ross, “How Truman Did It.”

a “Research Division”: George Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“He gives every appearance”: Clifford, author’s interview.

the “evil forces”: Time, October 11, 1948.

HST never mentioned Dewey: Clifford, author’s interview.

“If you wanted anything”: The New Yorker, October 16, 1948.

“sort of rube reputation”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 358.

Description of Dewey campaign: The New Yorker, October 16, 1948.

“Tonight we enter upon a campaign”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 193.

“We cannot win without”: Quoted in Donovan, 420.

“Smile, governor”: Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, 26.

“You have to know Mr. Dewey well”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 32.

“like a man who has been”: The New Yorker, October 16, 1948.

“It is written in the stars”: Smith, 17.

carnal relations: Ibid., 34.

“When you’re leading”: Ibid., 30.

“We always asked them”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 166.

“How long is Dewey”: Life, October 25, 1948.

“get down in the gutter”: Quoted in Smith, 515.

“Isn’t it harder in politics?”: New Republic, November 1, 1948.

“We resurrected the president’s”: Sullivan, The Bureau, 44.

“The tragic fact is”: Time, October 4, 1948.

“We’ll have no thought police”: Quoted in Smith, 508.

“We hit Salt Lake City”: Quoted in Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 207.

“Then we went into Texas”: PP, HST, September 29, 1948, 629.

“He is good on the back”: Quoted in Hardeman and Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography, 340.

“they’d shoot Truman”: Quoted in Steinberg, 325.

“an eloquence close to”: Daniels, 362.

“Our government is made up”: PP, HST, September 26, 1948, 210.

“I am going over to Bonham”: Ibid., September 27, 1948, 591.

“So in making their speeches”: Ibid., 589.

“Some things are worth fighting for”: Ibid., 593, 595.

“They came in droves”: Truman, Souvenir, 231.

“I know every man, woman, and child”: Hardeman and Bacon, 341.

“Shut the door, Beauford”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 37.

“A great many honors”: Baruch, The Public Years, 399.

“one jump ahead of the sheriff’: Ross, “How Truman Did It.”

“There is nothing like that”: PP, HST, September 30, 1948, 650.

“Now, whatever you do”: Ibid., October 1, 1948, 664.

“The early morning haze”: Quoted in Goulden, The Best Years 1945–1950, 399.

“We made about a hundred and forty”: HST to MJT, October 5, 1948, HSTL.

“classic unities of politics”: Redding, Inside the Democratic Party, 202.

“Another hell of a day”: HST Diary, September 14, 1948, Off the Record, 149.

selections from Dewey speeches: Goulden, 400.

HST campaign movie: Redding, 254.

“He paused dramatically”: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 204.

“If we could only get Stalin”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 215.

“every possible precaution”: Ibid., 216.

“There is much confusion”: Ayers Diary, October 6–7, 1948, HSTL.

“He got up and went out”: Daniels, 29.

“If Harry Truman would just”: Goulden, 414.

Dewey with blind drawn: Smith, 536.

“I grew up on a farm”: PP, HST, October 11, 1948, 737.

If HST called Bess the Boss; Truman, Bess W. Truman, 330.

“If you don’t want to go”: PP, HST, October 11, 1948, 736–37.

Willard, Ohio, stop: Willard Times; Joseph Dush, author’s interview; materials supplied by Harlene Staptf Palkuti.

“I have had the most wonderful”: PP, HST, October 11, 1948, 740.

“I have lived a long time”: Ibid., 743, 747.

“And there it was!”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“So I walked in”: Ibid.

“I was with Truman”: Douglas, In the Fullness of Time, 138.

“I just wonder tonight”: PP, HST, October 12, 1948, 760.

“Now, I call on all liberals”: Ibid., October 13, 1948, 774.

“a lot of surprised pollsters”: Time, October 25, 1948.

“I think he’s doing pretty well”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 215.

“The only way to handle Truman”: Patterson, Mr. Republican. A Biography of Robert A. Taft, 424–25.

“That’s the first lunatic”: Time, October 25, 1948.

Boston Post editorial: October 27, 1948.

“If you’re winning”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“Strain seemed to make him”: Daniels, 361.

“He was not putting on”: Elsey, author’s interview, and Oral History, HSTL.

“For years afterward”: Clifford, Oral History, HSTL.

“We’ve got them on the run”: HST to MJT, October 20, 1948, HSTL.

“The airlift will be continued”: Tusa, 245.

“Say you don’t look so good!”: PP, HST, October 23, 1948, 839.

“The newspapers had convinced them”: Douglas, 138.

attack on Dewey: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 235.

“An element of desperation”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“They have scattered reckless abuse”: Smith, 536.

“The confetti, ticker-tape”: The New York Times, October 29, 1948.

“There is one place”: Quoted in Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 237.

“Such a weak and vacillating”: Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 153.

“There never has been a campaign”: The New York Times, November 1, 1948.

“I became President”: PP, HST, October 30, 1948, 934.

“pullet poll”: Life, November 15, 1948.

“Were it not for all”: Ayers Diary, November 1, 1948, HSTL.

“We all, of course, stayed awake”: Gerard McAnn, author’s interview.

Maloney and his men: Smith, 40.

“We waited and waited”: Sue Gentry, author’s interview.

“We couldn’t believe it”: Ibid.

“What a night”: Truman, Souvenir, 242.

“And all of a sudden”: Jim Rowley, author’s interview.

“his first case of nerves”: Letter from Jerome K. Walsh to Morris J. Ernst, undated, HSTL.

“He just seemed the same old”: Lyman Field, author’s interview.

“He displayed neither tension”: Letter from Jerome K. Walsh to Morris J. Ernst, undated, HSTL.

“Thank you, thank you”: Time, November 8, 1948.

Bankhead telegram: Goulden, 421.

“I think the mistake was”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“shook the bones”: Baltimore Sun, November 7, 1948.

“The farm vote switched”: Thomas Dewey to Henry Luce, undated, L. C.

“You’ve got to give the little man”: Vandenberg, Private Papers, 460.

Taft comment: Steinberg, 332.

Republican Policy Committee Report: December 17, 1948, HSTL.

“Labor Did It”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 255.

“The bear got us”: Smith, 543.

“Far from costing Dewey”: Quoted in Phillips, 250–51.

“I couldn’t have been more wrong”: Life, November 15, 1948.

“What’s the matter with that fellow”: The New York Times, November 28, 1948.

“I kept reading”: Goldman, The Crucial Decade, 87.

“But when voting time came”: Ibid.

“the common man’s man”: Life, November 15, 1948.

“It seemed to have been”: Donovan, 438.

“There was personal humiliation”: New Republic, November 15, 1948.

“There has been a danger”: Ayers Diary, November 4, 1948, HSTL.

Luce memo: November 11, 1948, Time-Warner archives.

“His personality was against him”: Henry Luce memorandum, November 5, 1948, Ibid.

“I think the press”: T. S. Matthews memorandum to Henry Luce, November 4, 1948, Ibid.

“Of course, we did not intentionally”: J. J. Thorndike, Jr., memorandum to Henry Luce, November 5, 1948, Ibid.

90 percent of the credit: Hardeman and Bacon, 342.

“You have put over”: George C. Marshall to HST, November 4, 1948, HSTL.

“I think that Harry Truman grew”: Ross, “How Truman Did It.”

“I think Dewey’s whole campaign”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“no desire to crow”: HST to the Washington Post, November 6, 1948, HSTL.

Part Five

15. Iron Man

“Clearly he was conscious”: Washington Evening Star, January 20, 1949.

“his day of days”: Truman, Souvenir, 255.

“It is the President’s desire”: Seale, The President’s House, Vol. II, 1027.

“I have the job”: Washington Post, January 20, 1949; Time, January 31, 1949.

State of the Union message: PP, HST, January 5, 1949, 1.

H. V. Kaltenborn impersonation: Ibid., January 19, 1949, 110.

“I was not in any way elated”: Ibid.

“Wonderful, wonderful”: Washington Post, January 21, 1949.

Battery D reunion: Washington Evening Star, January 20, 1949.

prayer service: Washington Post, January 21, 1949.

inaugural address: PP, HST, January 20, 1949, 112–16.

“How strange”: Washington Evening Star, January 20, 1949.

“The clear sunlight”: The New York Times, January 21, 1949.

“At the reviewing stand”: J. B. West, author’s interview.

“There never was a country”: Payne, Report on America, p. 3.

“The parade was the most fun”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 448.

“the fellow who was having”: Washington Post, January 22, 1949.

“It can almost be stated”: Bohlen, Witness to History, 284.

“fifty percent better”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 527.

“He looks more relaxed”: Ibid., 463–64.

“He was great down in Key West!”: James Rowley, Jr., author’s interview.

“The President is as close to being”: Time, May 16, 1949.

“He won’t take hold”: Lilienthal Journals, Vol. II, 386.

“No commentator”: Time, March 7, 1949.

HST fair with Forrestal: Forrestal Diaries, 551.

“The best boss I have ever known”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 345.

“a man who, while he reflects”: Forrestal Diaries, 529.

“the mess we are in”: Eisenhower Diaries, 152–53.

his “baffled” look: Washington Post, January 21, 1949.

Forrestal was insane: Pearson, Diaries, 1949–1959, 42.

“a very sick man”: Krock, Memoirs, 253–57.

Secret Service Report: March 31, 1949, HSTL.

“out of his mind”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 506.

Bess was “terribly shaken”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 346.

25,000 Pentagon employees: Time, June 6, 1949.

“Unwittingly”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 503.

“in high good humor”: Time, April 25, 1949.

Cardinal Spellman: Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After, 130–31.

“Hysteria finally died down”: PP, HST, June 16, 1949, 294.

“The military situation”: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 305.

morning press conference: PP, HST, August 4, 1949, 408.

“The unfortunate but inescapable”: Acheson, 303.

“his general’s stars”: Time, August 22, 1949.

“I do these people a courtesy”: Dunar, The Truman Scandals and the Politics of Morality, 70.

“an expression of friendship”: Time, September 12, 1949.

Was it true, asked McCarthy: Ibid.

“Ross and I”: Ayers Diary, August 12, 1949, HSTL.

“After all I am”: Abel, The Truman Scandals, 42–43.

“I think that Mr. Truman”: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 212.

When Vaughan offered to resign: Dunar, 64.

“a whole box of trouble”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 569.

“as if I frequently found him”: Ibid.

“The President was reading a copy”: Ibid., 570–71.

“I believe the American people”: PP, HST, September 23, 1949, 485.

“We keep saying”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 577.

“this grim thing”: Ibid., 584.

“We can never tell”: HST to EWT, June 29, 1949, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 158.

“Never in my wildest dreams”: HST to EN, September 8, 1949, ibid., 163–64.

rats in the White House: Floyd Boring and Rex Scouten, author’s interviews.

“Very discreet”: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 111.

“Had dinner by myself”: HST Diary, November 1, 1949, Off the Record, 168–69.

“a fine man”: HST to Jonathan Daniels, February 26, 1950, unsent, ibid., 174.

“It was a great thing”: Dean Acheson, Oral History, HSTL.

Acheson descriptions: Time, February 28, 1949; The New Yorker, November 12 and 19, 1949; The New York Times, October 13, 1971; Clark Clifford and George Elsey, author’s interviews.

“You owe it to Truman”: Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 547.

“a peculiar organization”: HST to David H. Morgan, January 28, 1952, Off the Record, 235.

“At lunch at the Capitol”: Acheson, 107.

“You know all of us”: HST to EN, September 24, 1950, Off the Record, 194.

“deeply loving and tender nature”: Sevareid, Conversations with Eric Sevareid, 73.

“Well, this is the kind of person”: Ibid.

“It was good of you to see us off”: HST to Dean Acheson, November 28, 1949, HSTL.

“And then he was so fair”: Sevareid, 74.

“He was not afraid of the competition”: Acheson, 732–33.

“not pretending to be better”: McLellan, Dean Acheson, 19.

“Today you hear much talk”: Ibid., 173–74.

“Acheson is a gentleman”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 565.

“I told Kennan”: McLellan, 176.

“How can you persuade”: Isaacson and Thomas, 487.

“The day will come”: Time, January 23, 1950.

“Today, by the grace of God”: PP, HST, January 4, 1950, 3.

“I should like to make it clear”: Acheson, 360.

“I think anyone who has known”: Ibid.

“This newspaper has felt”: New York Herald-Tribune, January 27, 1950.

“wonderful about it”: Acheson, 360.

“I look at that fellow”: Quoted in Goldman, 125.

“blow them off the face of the earth”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 585.

“Like a patient”: Time, January 30, 1950.

an “atmosphere of excitement”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 628–29.

“eloquently and forcefully”: Acheson, 349.

“We must protect the President”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 630.

he felt he must express: Ibid., 632.

“Can the Russians?”: Quoted in Donovan, Tumultuous Years, 156.

“It is part of my responsibility”: PP, HST, January 31, 1950, 138.

“I hope I was wrong”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 633–34.

“General annihiliation beckons”: Quoted in Goldman, 137.

“How much are we going”: Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, 507.

“The air was so charged”: Block, The Herblock Book, 144.

205 “known communists”: Reeves, Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, 224, 237.

“When this pompous diplomat”: Bernstein and Matusow, eds., The Truman Administration, 407.

“I will not turn my back”: Washington Post, June 25, 1950.

“keep talking and if one case”: Reeves, 263.

“top Russian espionage agent”: Time, April 3, 1950.

“In an age of atomic energy”: Krock, In the Nation: 1932–1966, 145–46.

“One of the happiest sessions”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 635.

“You see everybody”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 351.

“What has made me so jittery”: Ibid.

“a ballyhoo artist”: Donovan, 166.

plunged to 37 percent: Time, April 24, 1950.

Little White House press conference: PP, HST, March 30, 1950, 232–38.

Federal Bar Association speech: Ibid, April 24, 1950, 269.

“I think our friend”: Quoted in Donovan, 170.

Maragaret Chase Smith: Acheson, 365.

the “lure in power”: HST Diary, April 16, 1950, Off the Record, 177.

“I am not a candidate”: Ibid.

NSC-68: Acheson, 374.

“bludgeon the mass mind”: Ibid.

“with us for a long, long time”: PP, HST, May 9, 1950, 335.

“a grand visit”: HST to Stanley Woodward, June 24, 1950, Off the Record, 184.

“We would not build”: PP, HST, June 24, 1950.

nation’s worst air disaster: The New York Times, June 25, 1950.

“There are lots of places”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 25, 1950.

Dean Acheson call: Memoirs, Vol. II, 332.

“My first reaction”: Ibid.

“It would appear”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 334.

“Dad took it”: Truman, Souvenir, 275.

departure so swift: Memoirs, Vol. II, 332.

Bess looking as she had the night FDR died: The New York Times, June 26, 1950.

“By God, I am going to”: Quoted in Donovan, 197.

“I remembered how”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 332–33

Rusk had seen no likelihood of war: Rusk, As I Saw It, 161.

Blair House meeting: Memoirs, Vol. II, 333.

dinner meeting: Smith, “Why We Went to War in Korea,” Saturday Evening Post, November 11, 1950.

a “darkening report”: Acheson, 406.

“a dagger pointed at the heart”: Rusk, 162.

“We must draw the line”: Bradley and Blair, 534–35.

“Underlying these discussions”: Ibid., 535.

“He pulled all the conferees together”: The New York Times, June 28, 1950.

“I thought we were still holding”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 335.

“the complete, almost unspoken”: Ibid., 334.

“so as not to give him too much”: Bradley and Blair, 536.

“It was our idea”: Donovan, 199.

“as Hermann Goering”: Jenkins, Truman, 164.

“Our estimate is that a complete collapse”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 337.

adding “not yet”: Department of State Memorandum for the Secretary, June 30, 1950, HSTL.

“We had no war plan”: Bradley and Blair, 539.

“Everything I have done”: Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 289.

“Too little, too late”: Washington Post, June 27, 1950.

“The attack upon Korea”: PP, HST, June 27, 1950, 492.

“Although the President”: Alsop, “Why Has Washington Gone Crazy?”, Saturday Evening Post, July 29, 1950.

“These are days”: Washington Post, June 28, 1950.

“We’ll have a dozen Koreas”: Eisenhower Diaries, 175.

“You may be a whiskey guzzling poker playing”: Harry Abel to HST, June 27, 1950, HSTL.

“I have lived and worked”: Time, July 10, 1950.

“We are not at war”: PP, HST, June 29, 1950, 504.

“The only assurance for holding”: MacArthur, Reminiscences, 334.

“Must be careful not to cause”: HST Diary, June 30, 1950, Off the Record, 185.

“Now, your job as President”: Sevareid, 74.

“Memo to Dean Acheson”: Acheson, 415.

16. Commander in Chief

“There was nothing passive”: Elsey, “Memoir: Some White House Recollections, 1942–1953,” Diplomatic History, Summer 1988.

“This is the Greece”: Quoted in Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 297.

“walk with the weary man’s”: Time, July 10, 1950.

Bradley meeting with HST: Time, August 21, 1950.

“The size of the attack”: PP, HST, July 19, 1950, 538.

as if a few troops of Boy Scouts: Ridgway, The Korean War, 17.

“Guys, sweat soaked”: Knox, The Korean War, Pusan to Chosin, 71.

“What a place to die”: New York Herald-Tribune, July 6, 1950.

Acheson, however, disagreed: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 414.

“Later when Robert Taft”: Heller, The Truman White House, 13.

HST said he would “back out”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 340.

her father’s anguish: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 357.

telegrams and letters to White House: White House Correspondence File, HSTL.

“The influence of Louis Johnson”: Joseph Alsop, author’s interview.

July 14 meeting: Acheson, 421.

July 19 message to Congress: PP, HST, July 19, 1950, 527–37.

press conference: Ibid., July 27, 1950, 560–64.

“He would have saved himself”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 542.

“an inordinate egotistical desire”: HST Diary, September 14, 1950, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 192.

a “pathological condition”: Bradley and Blair, 542.

HST confiding Harriman’s story: Ayers Diary, July 3, 1950, HSTL.

“A most interesting morning”: HST Diary, September 14, 1950, Off the Record, 192.

“Mr. Prima Donna”: HST Diary, June 17, 1945, ibid., 47.

“little regard or respect”: Ayers Diary, July 1, 1950, HSTL.

Dulles advised HST: Ibid.

HST’s little regard for generals: HST memorandum, April 24, 1954, Off the Record, 303.

“likes horses with blinders on”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 220.

“fluid but improving”: Ayers Diary, August 12, 1950, HSTL.

HST’s uppermost concern: Memoirs, Vol. II, 351.

“catch him alone”: Quoted in Heller, 14.

MacArthur assured HST: Memoirs, Vol. II, 351.

“with all his dramatic eloquence”: Bradley and Blair, 546.

the riskiest military proposal: Ibid., 544.

“I made it clear to the President”: Quoted in Heller, 14.

“as fast as you can”: Bradley and Blair, 546.

“This means not the usual”: Osborne, Life and Time, August 21, 1950.

“the wildest kind”: Bradley and Blair, 556.

“the gravest misgivings”: Ibid., 547.

“Nothing could be more fallacious”: Manchester, American Caesar, 568.

“his lips white”: Bradley and Blair, 551.

rank insubordination: Ibid.

“the height of arrogance”: Ibid.

HST rejects idea of relieving MacArthur: Memoirs, Vol. II, 355–56.

HST asks Johnson to have MacArthur’s statement withdrawn: Bradley and Blair, 551.

“The JCS inclined toward postponing”: Ibid., 547.

“a failure could be a national”: Ibid., 545.

“It was a daring strategic conception”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 358.

“Hell and high water”: HST to EWT, September 7, 1950, Off the Record, 189.

“I’ll do it”: Ibid.

“Can you think of anyone?”: Ibid.

Johnson told he must quit: HST Diary, September 14, 1950, ibid., 193.

a “military miracle”: Ridgway, 44.

“I salute you all”: Quoted in Phillips, 313.

“Troops could not be expected”: Acheson, 445.

to “feel unhampered”: Ridgway, 45.

“an almost superstitious awe”: Ibid., 61.

warnings a bluff: Spanier, The Truman-MacArthur Controversy and the Korean War, 87.

“and I did not feel”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 368.

“the perfect answer”: Wiltz, “Truman and MacArthur: The Wake Island Meeting,” Military Affairs, December 1978.

“good election year stuff”: Donovan, Tumultuous Years,284.

“While General MacArthur”: Acheson, 456.

“I’ve a whale of a job”: HST to Nellie Noland, October 13, 1950, Off the Record, 196.

“Two men can sometimes learn”: Time, October 23, 1950.

“I don’t care what they say”: Ibid.

MacArthur had arrived the night before: Ibid.

Harriman exchange with MacArthur: Bradley and Blair, 573.

“grave responsibility”: Ibid.

MacArthur greeting: New York Herald-Tribune, October 15, 1950.

“I have been worried”: Quoted in Donovan, 285.

MacArthur assured him victory was won: Memoirs, Vol. II, 365.

“seemed genuinely pleased”: Ibid.

“I had been warned”: MacArthur, Reminiscences, 361.

Vernice Anderson incident: Jessup, “Research Note/The Record of Wake Island—A Correction,” The Journal of American History, March 1981.

when MacArthur received transcript: Bradley and Blair, 575.

“He was the most persuasive fellow”: Quoted in Manchester, 592.

“the formal resistance”: Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference on October 15, 1950, compiled by General Omar Bradley, declassified, 1, HSTL.

By January: Ibid.

Dean Rusk concerned: Rusk, As I Saw It, 169.

“Hell no!”: Ibid.

“They are the happiest”: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950. Vol. VII: Korea, 953

the French couldn’t “clean it up”: Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference, 17.

MacArthur declined lunch: Ibid.

“Whether intended or not”: Bradley and Blair, 576.

“The communiqué should be submitted”: Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference, 23.

MacArthur asked the President: MacArthur, Reminiscences, 362.

“Eisenhower doesn’t know the first thing”: Ibid., 363.

“the very complete unanimity of view”: PP, HST, October 15, 1950, 672.

“his vision, his judgment”: Donovan, 288.

a “glorious new page”: PP, HST, October 17, 1950, 674.

“On this one”: Rusk, 169.

“Come up to Pyongyang”: Newsweek, October 23, 1950.

“Goodbye, sir”: Time, October 23, 1950.

“I like them more”: Truman, Letters from Father, 97.

“He would treat us”: Rex Scouten, author’s interview.

Floyd Boring’s wife: Floyd Boring, author’s interview.

“The house was so quiet”: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 116.

“I’d come out more or less”: Boring, author’s interview.

mistaken for divinity students: Life: November 13, 1950.

assassination attempt: Boring, author’s interview; Scouten, author’s interview; Life, November 13, 1950; The New York Times, November 2, 1950; Time, November 12, 1950; Whistle Stop, Fall 1979.

“Why, of course”: Time, November 12, 1950.

“It is important”: PP, HST, November 1, 1950, 693.

“But Truman was…just a symbol”: Kansas City Times, September 11, 1979.

“A President has to expect”: The New York Times, November 2, 1950.

HST insisted he was in no danger: PP, HST, November 2, 1950, 696.

so “unnecessary”: HST to Dean Acheson, November 2, 1950, HSTL.

“[Leaving the airport)”: HST Diary, November 5, 1950, Off the Record, 198.

“really a prisoner now”: HST to EN, November 17, 1950, ibid.

“The Korean death trap”: Donovan, 295.

“All the piety”: Ibid., 297.

Bess had seldom seen HST so downhearted: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 363–64.

“Some Republicans interpret”: PP, HST, November 16, 1950, 714.

“Then there were those”: Ridgway, 61.

“If this operation is successful”: Manchester, 606.

“a terrible message”: Ibid., 608.

“We’ve got a terrific”: Hersey, Aspects of the Presidency, 27.

“The Chinese have come in”: Ibid.

“alone and inescapably”: Ibid., 28.

seven thousand letters: Heller, 47.

“We can blame the liars”: Ibid., 30.

“His mouth drew tight”: Ibid., 28.

“We have got to meet this thing”: Ibid., 30;

“We face an entirely new war”: Quoted in Acheson, 469.

November 28, 1950, meeting: Ibid., 469, 471.

“There was no doubt”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 378.

“We can’t defeat the Chinese”: Acheson, 471.

the “imperative step”: Ibid.

“The threat of a larger war”: Bradley and Blair, 599.

“hordes of Chinese Reds”: Washington Star, November 28, 1950.

“A lot of hard work”: Memoirs Vol. II, 388.

“Remember, photographers are”: Truman, Letters from Father, 99.

“He ‘used’ the press”: Phillips, The New York Times, December 31, 1972.

“a fat no good can of lard”: HST to MJT, July 25, 1947, Off the Record, 115.

“the Sop Sisters”: HST to EWT, June 11, 1950, Ibid., 179 and 41, note.

“The prostitutes of the mind”: Poen, Strictly Personal and Confidential, 24.

“You might tell the gentleman”: HST to Joseph J. McGee, November 22, 1950, Off the Record, 199.

November 30, 1950, press conference: PP, HST, 724–728.

“No, it doesn’t mean”: Ibid., 727.

the “wildest days” ever: Ayers Diary, November 30, 1950, HSTL.

“the use of any weapon”: PP, HST, November 30, 1950, 727.

HST ill-advised: Bradley and Blair, 604.

in a crucial few days: Acheson, 466.

“I have the unhappy conviction”: Ibid.

“well remember”: Ridgway, 61.

“someone expressed what everyone”: Acheson, 475.

“You can relieve any commander”: Ridgway, 62.

Rusk proposes relieving MacArthur: Acheson, 476.

“I should have relieved”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 384.

“We must get him out”: HST Diary, December 2, 1950, Off the Record, 202.

“It looks very bad”: Ibid.

“Mr. President, the Chinese”: Rusk, 170.

“I’ve had conference after conference”: HST Diary, December 9, 1950, Off the Record, 204.

“[The President] thought that if”: Quoted in Donovan, 317.

He would not use the bomb: Ibid., 318.

“Charlie seemed in good form”: Ayers Diary, December 5, 1950, HSTL.

Death of Charlie Ross: Washington Post, December 6, 1950.

“The friend of my youth”: PP, HST, December 5, 1950, 737.

“Ah, hell”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 545–46.

previous Ross heart attacks: Washington Post, December 6, 1950.

HST keeps Ross death from Margaret: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 546.

“Afterward, Dad was effusive”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 366.

“really pretty bad that night”: John Hersey, author’s interview.

Hume review: Washington Post, December 6, 1950.

“That’s exactly what I want”: Traubel, St. Louis Woman, 211.

“longhand spasm”: HST to Dean Acheson, April 8, 1957, HSTL.

“Charlie Ross would never have”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“Mr. Hume: I’ve just read”: HST to Paul Hume, December 7, 1950.

“In the first place”: Time, December 18, 1950.

To Margaret he said: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 547.

“When he would write”: Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“a propaganda machine”: Time, September 18, 1950.

“I can only say”: Time, December 18, 1950.

letters and telegrams to White House: General Correspondence File, HSTL.

letter from the Bannings: HSTL.

“The Eighth Army is yours”: Ridgway, 83.

“never uttered wiser words”: Acheson, 512.

“brilliant, driving”: Bradley and Blair, 608.

“The troops are tired”: Ibid., 619.

“Under the extraordinary”: Quoted in Donovan, 346.

to recognize the “state of war”: Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 550.

atomic bombs: Schaller, Douglas MacArthur, 225.

“go down that trail”: Rusk, 170.

“infinite patience”: Acheson, 515.

“steps which might in themselves”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 438, 436.

“We were at our lowest”: Bradley and Blair, 620.

“Eighth Army in good shape”: Ibid., 623.

“rolling forward”: Ridgway, The Korean War, 106.

to look “beyond MacArthur”: Bradley and Blair, 623.

Ridgway thought HST a great and courageous man: Ridgway, author’s interview.

“mainly a prima donna”: Bradley and Blair, 623.

“While General MacArthur was fighting”: Acheson, 517.

“the really terrifying strength”: Ridgway, 111.

“tired and depressed: Goulden, Korea, 453.

“just ordered a resumption”: Ridgway, 109.

“not only his nerves”: MacArthur, Reminiscences, 393.

“snapped his brilliant”: Bradley and Blair, 626.

“The enemy, therefore”: MacArthur, 388.

his “pronunciamento”: Acheson, The Korean War, 101.

“unforgiveable and irretrievable act”: Bradley and Blair, 627.

“Whom the gods would destroy”: Acheson, Korean War, 100.

“I couldn’t send a message”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 559.

“This was a most extraordinary”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 441–42.

“disbelief with controlled fury”: Acheson, Korean War, 102.

“Gallup Poll: The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, 970.

“If you are going to get on”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 443–45.

“What are we in Korea for”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 203.

“Mr. President, this man is not”: Roger Tubby Diary, April 5, 1951.

“I did not know”: Bradley and Blair, 629.

“The situation could be resolved”: Acheson, Korean War, 104.

“If you relieve MacArthur”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 447.

“I don’t express any opinion”: HST Diary, April 5, 1951, Off the Record, 211.

“at the apex of a situation”: MacArthur, 394.

“The wind died down”: Martin, 207.

because they knew the kind of abuse: Bradley and Blair, 633.

MacArthur firing would provoke: Ibid.

“There was no question”: Phillips, 346–47.

He told Bradley to prepare: Memoirs, Vol. II, 448.

Speculation about MacArthur: Washington Post, April 10, 1951.

“So you won’t have to read about it”: Tubby Diary, April 12, 1951.

a supposed “major resignation”: Bradley and Blair, 636.

“There was a degree of panic”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“He’s not going to be allowed”: Phillips, 343.

“Discussed the situation”: HST Diary, April, 9, 1951, Off the Record, 211.

“Well, the little man”: Rusk, 172.

would have retired “without difficulty”: Schaller, 239.

HST’s “mental instability”: Donovan, 360; Goulden, 495.

“Our only choice”: Washington Post, April 12, 1951.

Tom Connally reminded: Ibid.

Chicago Tribune editorial: April 12, 1951.

“This is the biggest windfall”: Washington Post, April 18 1951.

“In the days ahead”: Letter from W. O. Douglas to HST, April 11, 1951, HSTL.

“It makes not the slightest”: The President vs. the General,” Sermon by Dr. Duncan E. Littlefield, April 15, 1951, Fountain Street Baptist Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, HSTL.

“The most obvious fact”: New York Herald-Tribune, April 13, 1951.

“bourbon and Benedictine”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 14, 1951.

Gallup Poll: Goldman, The Crucial Decade, 203.

HST booed at Griffith Stadium: Washington Post, April 21, 1951.

April 11, 1951, broadcast: PP, HST, April 11, 1951, 223–27.

“The only politics I have”: Time, April 30, 1951.

“I was sorry to have to reach”: HST to Eisenhower, April 13, 1951, HSTL.

mock “Schedule for Welcoming…”: HSTL.

“I address you”: New York Herald-Tribune, April 20, 1951.

“When I joined the Army”: MacArthur, 405.

“The hopes and dreams”: Quoted in Manchester, 661.

“We heard God speak”: Ibid.

“I honestly felt that if the speech”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 563.

“a bunch of damn bullshit”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 337.

“After I looked at that wreckage”: Time, May 14, 1951.

“a very distressing necessity”: Ibid.

“Having made this courageous decision”: Bradley and Blair, 637.

“Courage didn’t have anything”: Quoted in Phillips, 350.

“Truman’s conflict with MacArthur”: Rusk, 172.

MacArthur to Samuel Eliot Morison: Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, 1072.

May 18 dinner: PP, HST, May 18, 1951, 292–93.

Tullahoma, Tennessee, speech: Ibid., June 25, 1951, 357–63.

17. Final Days

“I have tried to give it”: PP, HST, January 15, 1953, 1202.

“I walk two miles”: HST Diary, January 3, 1952, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 226.

“Mr. President, this is my first”: PP, HST, July 12, 1951, 387.

HST served bowl of milk toast: Tubby Diary, May 21, 1951.

“You constantly tell me to relax”: Ibid., April 13, 1952.

a framed verse: Hersey, Aspects of the Presidency, 108.

it was all worth the effort: Tubby Diary, October 15, 1951.

“I know what a soldier goes through”: PP, HST, January 15, 1953, 1200.

Sergeant John Rice: The New York Times, August 29, 1951.

“mysterious, powerful” conspiracy: Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, 372.

a “pithy and bitter” summary: Hersey, 137–38.

“Three pungent comments”: Ibid.

HST announces Marshall stepping down: PP, HST, September 12, 1951, 516.

Hassett would bring him funny items: Tubby Diary, June 24, 1951.

Hassett an alcoholic: Ibid., September 18, 1951.

the “chiselers” within: Ibid., early June, 1951.

“He tended to live”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“an overeducated S.O.B.”: Douglas, In the Fullness of Time, 222.

he had “gone too far”: Ibid., 223.

“real crooks and influence peddlers”: Ibid.

“You have been loyal to friends”: Ibid., 224.

“You bastards”: Quoted in Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After, 196.

“With staggering impact”: Ibid., 198–99.

HST and Army football scandal: Tubby Diary, August 3 and 8, 1951.

“I did nothing improper”: Douglas, 224.

He liked people: Tubby Diary, August 3, 1951.

“He was dressed in flashy”: Ibid., September 13, 1951.

“Ah, me. I wonder”: Ibid., early June, 1951,

like Warren G. Harding: Ibid., September 13, 1951.

“Poker, poker”: Ibid., April 2, 1951.

“Truman has to take strong action”: Ibid., early June, 1951.

“He does not like to dwell”: Ibid., October 15, 1951.

Boyle background: Kansas City Star, August 31, 1951.

“I like people who can”: HST to MT, December 3, 1944, Truman, Letters from Father, 60.

Charles Binnagio: The New York Times, April 7, 1950; Life, April 17, 1950.

“So Boyle is not only stupid”: Tubby Diary, early June, 1951.

“It’s all right”: Ibid.

“I have the utmost confidence”: PP, HST, August 9, 1951, 454.

Murphy memorandum: Charles S. Murphy to HST, August 9, 1951, HSTL.

Gabrielson revelations: Time, October 15, 1951.

Elsey report: Dunar, The Truman Scandals, 128.

“Let’s say continue”: PP, HST, December 13, 1951, 641.

“Boss, you’re going to have to run”: Tubby Diary, October 15, 1951.

“Once I’m outa the White House”: Ibid.

Gallup Poll: The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–71, 1032.

“From that day forward”: Tubby Diary, January 16, 1952.

“Dealing with Communist Governments”: HST, private longhand note, January 27, 1952, HSTL.

Churchill trip to Washington: Gilbert, Winston Churchill, Never Despair, 675.

“What Churchill did was great”: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 595.

Churchill acknowledged American nuclear power: Tubby Diary, January 16, 1952.

HST’s “great decision”: Gilbert, 676.

“The last time you and I sat”: This often repeated tribute appears to have been recorded by Joe Short, who was on board the Williamsburg. It is paraphrased in Roger Tubby’s diary and would later appear in Margaret Truman Daniel’s book about her father and in several obituaries at the time of Truman’s death.

“the great white jail”: HST to EWT, September 13, 1946, Dear Bess, 536.

Hersey tour of White House: Hersey, 88.

“It is the President’s desire”: Winslow Diary, January 14 1949, OCWH (Office of the Curator, White House).

Congressional Commission established: Scale, The President’s House, Vol. II, 1029.

“The character and extent”: The White House Report of the Commission of Public Buildings, 91.

“The decision between these plans”: Ibid., 48.

Rabaut argued for dismantling: Renovation Commission Hearing Minutes, July 19, 1949, HSTL.

“They took the insides all out”: HST Diary, March 2, 1952, Off the Record, 243.

for proper underpinning: Seale, Vol. II, 1034.

“faithful reproductions”: The White House Report of the Commission of Public Buildings, 93.

“The President has authorized”: Seale, Vol. II, 1039.

description of bomb shelter: Tubby Diary, July 26, 1951.

for “morale reasons”: Ibid.

False radar report: Ibid.

“He considered it his project”: Rex Scouten, author’s interview.

“It is absolutely essential”: HST to Les Larson, June 12, 1951, HSTL.

HST forced into politics: Hersey, 88.

communing with White House spirits: Seale, Vol. II, 1047.

Winslow memo to HST: H. G. Grim to Lorenze S. Winslow, September 13, 1951, HSTL.

“I want it distinctly”: HST to William Adams Delano, August 25, 1950, HSTL.

“moving at the double quick”: The New York Times, March 15, 1952.

“Bess and I looked over”: HST Diary, March 27, 1952, Off the Record, 246.

“The President was an inexhaustible”: The New York Times, May 4, 1952.

“the most logical and qualified”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 489.

Eisenhower lunch with HST: Krock, Memoirs, 267-68.

“You can’t join a party”: Ambrose, Eisenhower, Soldier and President, 259-60.

“He told me Arthur Krock’s story”: Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles, 693.

“Dear Ike: The Columnists”: HST to Dwight D. Eisenhower, December 18, 1951, Off the Record, 220.

“a grand man”: PP, HST, January 10, 1952, 21, 22.

“I’m sorry to see these fellows”: Tubby Diary, April 13, 1952.

“Can we elect?”: HST Diary, July 6, 1952, Off the Record, 261.

“He proved in that contest”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 491.

“He comes of a political family”: Ibid.

Stevenson talked his way past the guards: Martin, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, 523.

“I told him I would not run”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 491.

“He was overcome”: HST Diary, March 4, 1952, Off the Record, 245.

“He apparently was flabbergasted”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 492.

“full of admiration”: Quoted in Martin, 523.

“Stevenson was impressed”: Ibid., 524.

“Adlai, if a knucklehead like me”: McKeever, Adlai Stevenson, His Life and Legacy, 179.

“If Eisenhower were the Republican”: Ibid., 178.

“[He] came to tell me”: HST Diary, March 4, 1952, Off the Record, 245.

Clifford advice to HST: Clifford, with Holbrooke, Counsel to the President, 283.

“Anybody who works closely”: Quoted in Martin, 544-45.

“Not at all”: Acheson, 632.

“I shall not be a candidate”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 492.

“I found myself shouting”: Quoted in Martin, 547.

“When you made your announcement”: Tubby Diary, April 3, 1952.

Did he plan to run: PP, HST, April 3, 1952, 233-34.

“I was stunned by”: Quoted in Martin, 553.

HST response to Stevenson: Ibid.

his amazing stamina: Tubby Diary, April 13, 1952.

“inability to get on top”: Dunar, 119.

with this farcical denouement: Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 413.

“I want you to know”: Dunar, 119.

“when I’m not so shaky”: Tubby Diary, April 13, 1952.

“McGrath, Korean truce talks”: Ibid.

HST appointment schedule: HSTL.

“These are not normal times”: PP, HST, April 8, 1952, 246.

“The President has the power”: Tubby Diary, April 6, 1952.

“Secretary of Defense Lovett”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 469.

“The attitude of the companies”: Ibid., 468.

“The plain fact of the matter”: PP, HST, April 8, 1952, 249.

HST looked so exhausted: Tubby Diary, April 13, 1952.

“very desirable”: PP, HST, April 9, 1952, 251.

one of the most high-handed acts: Washington Post, April 10, 1952.

“Nothing in the Constitution”: Ibid.

“Under similar circumstances”: PP, HST, April 17, 1952, 273.

“I believe that the contemplated strike”: Time, May 12, 1952.

“read it, read it”: Tubby Diary, May 3, 1952.

“[I] had never seen him”: Ibid.

an “outstanding” lawyer: Memoirs, Vol. II, 475.

“We cannot with faithfulness”: Donovan, “Truman Seizes Steel,” Constitution, Fall 1990.

“Today a kindly President”: Ibid.

“damn fool from Texas”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 242.

“a bit testy”: Donovan, “Truman Seizes Steel.”

“No enemy nation could”: Newsweek, August 4, 1952.

“The Court and Congress got us”: Tubby Diary, May 30–June 1, 1952.

“If the doctor had come in”: Ibid, July 21, 1952.

“It’s a lockout”: Ibid.

“This should lead to”: PP, HST, July 24, 1952, 501.

any red-blooded Democrat: Time, July 7, 1952.

“You never know what’s in you”: Tubby Diary, July 2, 1952.

“We followed you before”: Time, July 21, 1952.

“If Harry Truman turns out”: Ibid., July 7, 1952.

“I have been trying”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 496.

“I am going to take my coat off: Ibid., 497.

“The people are wise”: Time, August 4, 1952.

“Sacrifice, patience”: Quoted in McKeever, 201.

“Stevenson made his decision”: Time, August 4, 1952.

“Dear Governor: Last night”: HST to Adlai Stevenson, July 26, 1952, Off the Recora 263.

“He was affronted by”: Quoted in McKeever, 198.

“I have come to the conclusion”: HST to Adlai Stevenson, early August 1951, Off the Record, 266.

“Can Stevenson really clean up”: Martin, 644.

“rather ridiculous”: HST to Adlai Stevenson late August 1952, unsent, Off the Record, 268.

“Oh, Stevenson will get”: Tubby Diary, August 21, 1952.

“His eloquence was real”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 497.

HST would do everything possible: Tubby Diary, August 13, 1952.

“There’s a man of granite”: Ibid.

“When you vote the Democratic ticket”: PP, HST, September 29, 1952, 621.

“What I’ve always had in mind”: HST to Dwight Eisenhower, August 16, 1952, Off the Record, 263-64.

“a modern Cromwell”: Tubby Diary, September 17, 1952.

“This will help us”: Ibid., September 22, 1952.

“I nearly choked to hear him”: Ibid., September 14, 1952.

“I feel as if I killed them”: Ibid., September 22, 1952.

“red-hot anger”: Reeves, 439.

“Do I need to tell you”: Ibid., 440.

“very sad and pathetic”: PP, HST, October 4, 1952, 711.

“lay off Ike for a while”: Tubby Diary, early October, 1952.

“The general whose words”: PP, HST, October 7, 1952, 738.

“betrayed his principles”: Ibid., October 10, 1952, 784.

“Why, General Marshall was responsible”: Quoted in Miller, 370.

“Just how low”: Quoted in Donovan, 401.

“Ike was well informed”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 650.

no one could have beaten Eisenhower: HST memorandum, December 22, 1952, Off the Record, 282.

“if you still desire”: Donovan, 402.

“I sincerely wish”: HST Diary, November 15, 1952, Off the Record, 273.

“an orderly transfer”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 505.

he wished someone had done: Tubby Diary, November 24, 1952.

“not very graciously”: HST Diary, November 20, 1952, Off the Record, 274.

“He’ll sit right here”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 603.

“The White House is quiet”: HST Diary, November 24, 1952, Off the Record, 275.

“Since last September Mother Wallace”: Ibid.

“She was a grand lady”: HST Diary, December 6, 1952, ibid., 279.

32 percent: Gallup, 1102.

43 percent: Ibid.

“I wonder how far Moses”: HST Memorandum, 1954(?), Off the Record, 310.

“It bears down on a country boy”: HST to EN, January 2, 1952, Off the Record, 287.

felt “repudiated”: Tubby Diary, February 1, 1953.

reminiscences with staff: Ibid, February 2, 1953.

916Look magazine article: Commager, “A Few Kind Words for Harry Truman,” Look, August 1951.

“Flying back over the flatlands”: Tubby Diary, February 3, 1953.

“Certainly no man”: PP, HST, January 16, 1953, 1203.

“In personality, conversation”: Brown, Through These Men, 41.

farewell address: PP, HST, January 15, 1953, 1197-1202.

“in the manner of his going”: New York Herald-Tribune, January 19, 1953.

Inauguration day: HST Diary, January 20, 1953, Off the Record, 287.

“I was glad I wasn’t”: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 126.

“I ride with Ike”: HST Diary, January 20, 1953, Off the Record, 257.

“the very many courtesies”: Ambrose, 296.

“It was a shocking moment”: Eric Sevareid, author’s interview.

“The street in front of Dean’s house”: HST Diary, January 20, 1953, Off the Record, 288.

“an absolutely wonderful affair”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 610.

“There’s the best friend”: Washington Post, January 21, 1953.

“I’m just Mr. Truman”: The New York Times, January 21, 1953.

“Crowd at Harper’s Ferry”: HST Diary, January 20, 1953, Off the Record, 288.

Part Six

18. Citizen Truman

“Been going over”: HST to Dean Acheson, April 18, 1953, HSTL.

“Who knows”: HST to EW, May 23, 1911, Dear Bess, 36.

“I tried never to forget”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 10.

“Rumors have it”: Independence Examiner, January 22, 1953.

Burrus had picked out house: Rufus Burrus, author’s interview.

exploit or “commercialize”: Associated Press, January 23, 1953.

a Miami real estate developer: Samuel Q. Goldman to HST, October 7, 1952, HSTL.

Toyota offer: HST to Paul Butler, March 3, 1959, HSTL.

“I still don’t feel”: Quoted in Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency, 153.

“where everybody seemed”: HST to Dean Acheson, February 7, 1953, HSTL.

“take the grips up”: Ray Scherer, author’s interview.

HST set off for Grandview: Tubby Diary, February 5, 1953; Independence Examiner, January 23, 1953.

That was good land: George Elsey, Oral History, HSTL; author’s interview.

“A cold wind whipping”: Tubby Diary, February 5, 1953.

“More than any other single”: Harry S. Truman, Mr. Citizen, 25.

“He was utterly lost”: Osborne, “Happy Days for Harry,” Life, July 7, 1958.

“Diamond Head”: HST Diary, April 1953, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 290.

“This morning at 7 A.M.”: HST Diary, May 20, 1953, Ibid., 292.

“A shovel (automatic)”: Ibid.

“a real tryout”: Truman, 64.

“Everything went well”: HST to Vic H. Housholder, November 29, 1953, Off the Record, 298.

“I admitted the charge”: Ibid.

“There goes our incognito”: Truman, 65.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes”: The New York Times, June 22, 1953.

“like a dream”: Truman, 67.

“If you’d go again”: The New York Times, June 29, 1953.

“He was very nice”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 6, 1953.

“The book is doing fine”: HST to Acheson, November 5, 1953, HSTL.

Paul Douglas observation: Quoted in Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 663.

“As for the United States”: July 27, 1953.

“The war is over”: Manchester, 663.

“Of course I’m happy”: HST to Bela Kornitzer, August 7, 1953, HSTL.

“I’m not a writer!”: Francis Heller, author’s interview.

Hillman and Noyes: Miller, 20.

Promising to “protect” HST: Heller, author’s interview.

recording machine: Heller, “The Writing of the Truman Memoirs,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Winter 1983.

Royce highly disorganized: Heller, author’s interview.

HST annoyed: Heller, “The Writing of the Truman Memoirs.”

“lively” and “honest”: Elston, The World of Time Inc., 299.

“The cream of the White House”: Williams, “I Was Truman’s Ghost,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

“His approval or criticism”: Ibid.

HST begins his day: Erskine, “Truman in Retirement,” Collier’s, February 4, 1955.

“She had golden curls”: Memoirs, Vol. 1, 116.

“I always try to be”: HST Diary, July 8, 1953, Off the Record, 293.

“After I’d passed”: Ibid.

“When we moved”: Memoirs, Vol. 1, 115.

“In the fall of 1892”: Ibid., 116.

How could father be called failure: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 15.

“I have been working on”: HST to Acheson, January 28, 1954, HSTL.

“Our tribal instinct”: HST to Acheson, St. Patrick’s Day, 1954, HSTL.

“I used to say”: Osborne, “Happy Days for Harry.”

auction at the Armory: Independence Examiner, November 19, 1954.

“I’m worried about our world”: HST to Acheson, May 28, 1954, HSTL.

Truman stricken at Call Me Madam: Kansas City Star, June 19, 1954.

gall bladder operation: The New York Times, June 21, 1954.

“a hell of a time”: HST to Acheson, October 14, 1954, HSTL.

“When the papers tell us”: Acheson to HST, June 21, 1954, HSTL.

“When you get acquainted”: Ibid.

“It is touching”: Acheson to EWT, June 30, 1954, HSTL.

“going great guns”: HST to Acheson, January 11, 1955, HSTL.

“The material is more interesting”: Acheson to HST, June 21, 1955, HSTL.

“Page 114, line 3”: Ibid.

“She was his true”: Ken McCormick, author’s interview.

“We’d left home”: HST Diary, June 24, 1955, Off the Record, 317.

“I never really appreciated”: Elston, 299.

“I expect to use, probably”: HST to Samuel S. Vaughan, October 22, 1955, HSTL.

“when we see him”: Samuel S. Vaughan, author’s interview.

“I had no idea”: Ibid.

“There, that one’s all slicked up”: Paul Horgan, author’s interview.

“I will autograph”: HST to Ken McCormick, July 1, 1955, Off the Record, 319.

only as “my history”: Heller, author’s interview.

“Altogether, it well”: The New York Times Book Review, November 6, 1955.

called Margaret “skinny”: HST to Acheson, January 11, 1955, HSTL.

“When I hear”: HST to Acheson, January 25, 1955, HSTL.

“Margie has put one over”: HST to Acheson, March 26, 1956, HSTL.

“He strikes me as a very nice”: HST to Acheson, March 26, 1956, HSTL.

“Consolation is just what”: Acheson to HST, March 27, 1956, HSTL.

“rain, rain, rain”: HST Diary, June 21 (?), 1956, Off the Record, 336.

“I was so afraid”: HST to Acheson, July 20, 1956, HSTL.

welcome in Rome: Time, May 28, 1956.

Henry Luce tour: The New York Times, May 20, 1956.

Paul Schultheiss: Independence Examiner, May 19, 1956.

“He is considered the greatest”: HST Diary, May 27–29, 1956, Off the Record, 329.

“[Harry] Truman and his wife lunched”: Berenson, Sunset and Twilight, 436.

“I found that it was somewhat”: HST Diary, June 4, 1956, Off the Record, 332.

“squeezed” from the people: HST Diary, June 1956, ibid., 333.

“We crossed the Channel”: HST Diary, June 21 (?), 1956, ibid., 336.

“Never, never in my life”: Kansas City Times, June 20, 1956.

“Truest of allies”: The New York Times, June 21, 1956.

“Mr. Truman is very popular”: Kansas City Times, June 20, 1956.

“Every person born”: Ibid., June 21, 1956.

“Give ’em, hell, Harricum!”: Ibid.

“I think we in this room”: The New York Times, June 22, 1956.

“A good many of the difficulties”: The Times (London), June 22, 1956.

“And—not least of all”: Ibid.

visit to London: HST Diary, June 21 (?), 1956, Off the Record, 336.

“England is prosperous”: Ibid., 337.

“It was all over too soon”: HST Diary, June 24, 1956, ibid., 338.

“He told me that he could do”: Ibid.

“Too bad he’s not campaigning”: Kansas City Times, June 29, 1956.

“Never [said the United Press]”: Independence Examiner, June 28, 1956.

“lacks the kind of fighting spirit”: McKeever, Adlai Stevenson, 376.

“Harry S. Truman had the Democratic”: The New York Times, August 12, 1956.

“When I arrived in Chicago”: HST to Acheson, August 29, 1956, HSTL.

“I have never wanted to pose”: HST to LBJ, December 11, 1956, LBJL.

“Dad sat there for a long time”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 621.

“I expect to be knee deep”: HST to Acheson, June 7, 1957, HSTL.

“Mr. Truman, who has abiding”: The New York Times, July 7, 1957.

labor union contributions: “Contributions of Labor Unions to Harry S. Truman Library, Inc.,” HSTL.

“Hey there, farmer!” HST telephone conversation with Sam Rayburn, July 15, 1958, Off the Record, 364.

net profit: Kirkendall, ed., The Harry S. Truman Encyclopedia, 129.

“Had it not been”: HST to John W. McCormack, January 10, 1957, Off the Record, 346.

“As you know, we passed”: Ibid.

“I would be proud”: HST to Acheson, October 15, 1952, HSTL.

“Mr. Truman is deeply”: Acheson to Thomas Bergin, July 12, 1954, HSTL.

HST and Yale librarian: Chester Kerr, author’s interview.

“I have never had a better time”: HST to Acheson, April 16, 1958, HSTL.

“Yale still rings”: HST to Acheson, May 15, 1958, HSTL.

“He’s so damn happy”: Osborne, “Happy Days for Harry.”

getting a bigger kick: Phillips, “Truman at 75,” The New York Times Magazine, May 3, 1959.

“a man overflowing with life”: Ibid.

“She says I am just like”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 10, 1959.

“You know this five day week”: HST to Acheson, April 10, 1968, HSTL.

“where he can sit”: Unidentified article, February 3, 1960, Vertical Files, HSTL.

“Mr. Truman was one of the most thoughtful”: Essay by Phillip C. Brooks, February 16, 1971, HSTL.

HST and Benton’s drinking: Kansas City Star, March 14, 1989.

“Well, what the hell”: Benton, An Artist in America, 351.

“When a good politician”: Kansas City Star, April 27, 1959.

“I like being a nose buster”: HST to Acheson, April 20, 1955, HSTL.

“She and I spent”: HST to Acheson, February 19, 1959, HSTL.

“Do you suppose any President”: HST to Acheson, November 24, 1959, HSTL.

“It’s not the pope”: Miller Tapes, LBJL.

Kennedy’s notes: “Interview with Truman,” Dictated to Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, 12:00 Noon, January 10, 1959, HSTL.

“Just tell him it was Harry Truman”: John Zentay, author’s interview.

“stub his toe”: Acheson to HST, April 14, 1960, HSTL.

“I hate to say this”: Ibid.

“without doubt”: Kansas City Star, May 13, 1960.

Acheson letter: Acheson to HST, June 27, 1960, HSTL.

“You’ll never know”: HST to Acheson, July 9, 1960, HSTL.

“I am going to Los Angeles”: HST to Agnes E. Meyer, June 25, 1960, Off the Record, 386.

“Your coming here is considered”: Memorandum from Hillman and Noyes to HST, undated, Post-Presidential Files, HSTL.

“rigged—or you will be charged”: Ibid.

HST press conference: The New York Times, July 3, 1961.

“I listened to your press”: Acheson to HST, July 17, 1960, HSTL.

“He could not have been”: Notes from Conversation of United Press Newsman with JFK, undated, HSTL.

“blue as indigo”: HST to Acheson, August 26, 1960, unsent, Off the Record, 390.

“Don’t get discouraged”: HST to Samuel Rosenman, August 22, 1960, HSTL.

“Now you are in for it”: Acheson to HST, August 12, 1960, HSTL.

“A nap after lunch”: “Memo on Mr. Truman’s Trips,” David Stowe Papers, HSTL.

“Although he moves into and through”: “Notes on Truman Trips During 1960 Presidential Campaign,” David Stowe Papers, HSTL.

“The campaign is ended”: HST to Acheson, November 21, 1960, HSTL.

“I’ve had a lot of fun”: HSTL research staff phone conversation with Paul Hume, December 21, 1979, HSTL.

“See, I told you”: Ibid.

“You know, she remembered”: Peggy Scott, author’s interview.

“You are making a contribution”: HST to Acheson, July 7, 1961, Off the Record, 395.

“Needless to say”: Ibid.

“I had thought he was not”: Merle Miller, author’s interview.

“Don’t try to make a play actor”: Aurthur, “The Wit and Sass of Harry S. Truman,” Esquire, August 1971.

“I think there were people”: Miller, author’s interview.

inclined to exaggerate: Miller, 13.

“Goddamn an eyewitness”: Miller Tapes, LBJL.

“He had something like Bryan”: Ibid.

“I haven’t seen him”: Ibid.

“He was a good man”: Ibid.

“came back rich with detail”: Aurthur, “Harry Truman Chuckles Dryly,” Esquire, September 1971.

“Because if while I’m talking”: Ibid.

“My God, he’s not old”: Miller, author’s interview.

hated long hair: Byron Stewart, Jr., author’s interview; Miller, 456.

“People in Independence”: Miller Tapes, LBJL.

“There were times”: Miller, author’s interview.

HST appalled by Bay of Pigs: HST to Acheson, May 3, 1961, HSTL.

“This is a terrible weakness”: Acheson to HST, July 14, 1961, HSTL.

“Keep writing”: HST to Acheson, July 18, 1961, HSTL.

“You must remember”: HST to Acheson, September 25, 1961, Off the Record, 397.

“If and when that happens”: HST to Acheson, December 20, 1962, HSTL.

“I just don’t like”: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 230.

“Matt Connelly has been”: HST to RFK, January 24, 1962, HSTL.

HST sends letter of gratitude: HST to JFK, December 3, 1962, HSTL.

“That old lady”: HST to Acheson, May 14, 1963, Off the Record, 407.

“Having come so close”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 418.

HST put to bed at Blair House: Wilroy and Prinz, Inside Blair House, 117.

Secret Service protection: Robert Lockwood, author’s interview.

“Thank you very much”: Remarks by Former President Harry S. Truman, Being the Occasion of Mr. Truman’s 80th Birthday, May 8, 1964, 88th Congress, 2nd Sess., Sen. Doc. No. 88.

HST falls: HST to Acheson, January 12, 1965.

“He doesn’t look a thing”: Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency, 159.

“He would say ‘You’re doing…’ “: Thomas Melton, author’s interview.

“sad amazement” at HST’s appearance: Merriman Smith, UPI, July 31, 1965.

“Quite often we have”: Melton, author’s interview.

Nixon visit: Independence Examiner, March 21, 1969.

asked what he had played: Elizabeth Safly, author’s interview.

HST with grandchildren in baseball cap: Photo Archives, HSTL.

“Oh, to have a good comfortable”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“No, young man”: Ken McCormick, author’s interview.

December 5 illness: Research Hospital and Medical Center, press release, December 5, 1972, HSTL.

December 6 “critical”: Ibid., December 6, 1972, 10:23 P.M. CST, HSTL.

“very serious”: Ibid, December 14, 1972, 9:00 A.M., CST, HSTL.

he answered, “Better”: Ibid., December 10, 1972, 2:00 P.M., HSTL.

“warm, sweet and most appreciative”: Quoted in Belton (Missouri) Star-Herald, December 28, 1972.

“He squeezed my hand”: Ibid.

“very, very small”: The New York Times, December 26, 1972.

Bess almost exhausted: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 421.

“Keep it simple”: Ibid., 422.

“This whole town”: Time, January 8, 1973.

staff watching grave filled in: Safly, author’s interview.

“He was not a hero”: Washington Star, December 29, 1972.

Alden Whitman interview: Whitman, Come to Judgment, xvii.

“I’m not sure”: Eric Sevareid, author’s interview.

Bibliography

AUTHOR’S INTERVIEWS

Alice Acheson, Washington, D.C. • David Acheson, Washington, D.C. • Pat Acheson, Washington, D.C. • Joseph Alsop, Washington, D.C. • James P. Aylward, Jr., Kansas City, Missouri • Lauren Bacall, Washington, D.C. • Sue Bailey, Lincoln, Nebraska • Lindy Boggs, Washington, D.C. • Richard Bolling, Crumpton, Maryland • Floyd Boring, Washington, D.C. • Mary Salisbury Bostian, Independence, Missouri • Bernard Brannon, Kansas City, Missouri • Mary Shaw Branton, Kansas City, Missouri • Ellsworth Bunker, Washington, D.C. • Rufus Burrus, Independence, Missouri • Hilary Bush, Kansas City, Missouri • Jack Capps, West Point, New York • Liz Carpenter, Austin, Texas • Jimmy Carter, Atlanta, Georgia • Marquis Childs, Washington, D.C. • Clark Clifford, Washington, D.C. • Wilbur Cohen, Austin, Texas • John Sherman Cooper, Washington, D.C. • Bill Crotty, Kansas City, Missouri • Clifton Daniel, New York City • Margaret Truman Daniel, New York City • Matt Devoe, Kansas City, Missouri • John Doohan, Kansas City, Missouri • Peggy Dow, Copenhagen, Denmark • Joseph Dush, Willard, Ohio • Alfred Eisenstaedt, Menemsha, Massachusetts • George Elsey, Washington, D.C. • Lyman Field, Kansas City, Missouri • Stanley Fike, Washington, D.C. • Francis Fitzgerald, Kansas City, Missouri • Gerald Ford, New York City • Polly Fowler, Independence, Missouri • Clayton Fritchey, West Tisbury, Massachusetts • Virginia Geier, Kansas City, Missouri • Sue Gentry, Independence, Missouri • Rosalind Gibson, Independence, Missouri • D. W. Gilmore, Kansas City, Missouri • T. Sterling Goddard, Grandview, Missouri • Wallace Graham, Kansas City, Missouri • John Hahn, Washington, D.C. • Elliott Harris, Kansas City, Missouri • Steve Harrison, Independence, Missouri • Ardis Haukenberry, Independence, Missouri • Ken Hechler, Boston, Massachusetts • John Hersey, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts • Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, Bedford, New York • Bernard Hoffman, Kansas City, Missouri • Robert Hopkins, Washington, D.C. • Paul Horgan, Middletown, Connecticut • Dorothy Davis Johnson, Kansas City, Missouri • Lady Bird Johnson, Austin, Texas • J. Walter J. Jones, Kansas City, Missouri • Greta Kempton, New York City • Chester Kerr, New Haven, Connecticut • Geraldine Ketchum, Kansas City, Missouri • Kathleen Moore Knight, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts • Philip Lagerquist, Independence, Missouri • Johanna Laughlin, Kansas City, Missouri • Tom Leathers, Kansas City, Missouri • Sol Linowitz, Washington, D.C. • Robert B. Lockwood, Independence, Missouri • Eugene McCarthy, Woodville, Virginia • Gerrard McCann, Norfolk, Virginia • John J. McCloy, New York City • Ken McCormick, New York City • Harry McPherson, Washington, D.C. • David Melton, Independence, Missouri • Thomas Melton, Independence, Missouri • Merle Miller, Brewster, New York • Grace Minor, Independence, Missouri • Gerald Mitchell, Kansas City, Missouri • Paul Nagel, Independence, Missouri • Terence O’Brien, Kansas City, Missouri • Reathel Odum, Charleston, South Carolina • Charlton Ogburn, Beaufort, South Carolina • Gertrude Field Oliver, Kansas City, Missouri • John W. Oliver, Kansas City, Missouri • Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Chilmark, Massachusetts • Frank Pace, Jr., Boston, Massachusetts • Beverly Pendergast, Kansas City, Missouri • Robert Pendergast, Kansas City, Missouri • Claude D. Pepper, Washington, D.C. • Catherine Pruett, Kansas City, Missouri • Joseph Pruett, Kansas City, Missouri • Jennings Randolph, Washington, D.C. • Ronald Reagan, Washington, D.C. • James Reston, Washington, D.C. • Richard Rhodes, Kansas City, Missouri • Abe Ribicoff, New York City • Matthew Ridgway, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Chautauqua, New York • James H. Rowe, Jr., Washington, D.C. • James Rowley, Washington, D.C. • Liz Safly, Independence, Missouri • Harrison Salisbury, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts • Dwight Salmon, Chilmark, Massachusetts • Frank Sayre, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts • Ray Scherer, Washington, D.C. • Peggy Scott, Chilmark, Massachusetts • Rex Scouten, Washington, D.C. • Eric Sevareid, Washington, D.C. • Robert Sherrod, Washington, D.C. • Stephen Slaughter, Grandview, Missouri • John Snyder, Charleston, South Carolina • John Steele, Washington, D.C. • Byron Stewart, Jr., Independence, Missouri • Charlotte Stewart, Independence, Missouri • Nathan Stinnette, Crescent City, Florida • Chris J. Stolfa, Kansas City, Missouri • David Stowe, Washington, D.C. • Richard L. Strout, Boston, Massachusetts • James Swoyer, Oskaloosa, Kansas • Martha Ann Truman Swoyer, Oskaloosa, Kansas • James Symington, Washington, D.C. • George Tames, Washington, D.C. • Arthur Tighe, Kansas City, Missouri • J. C. Truman, Independence, Missouri • Roger Tubby, Washington, D.C. • Regna Vanatta, Grandview, Missouri • Sam Vaughan, New York City • May Wallace, Independence, Missouri • J. B. West, Falls Church, Virginia • David Wheeler, Kansas City, Missouri • Conn Withers, Liberty, Missouri • John Zentay, Washington, D.C. • Benedict K. Zobrist, Independence, Missouri

UNPUBLISHED SOURCES

MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS CONSULTED AT THE HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY, INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI

Papers of Harry S. Truman

Papers of: Dean Acheson • Eben A. Ayers • James P. Aylward • Jordan Bentley • Henry A. Bundschu • Fred Canfil • Oscar L. Chapman • Tom C. Clark • Will L. Clayton • Clark M. Clifford • Matthew J. Connelly • Clifton Daniel and Margaret Truman Daniel • Jonathan Daniels • Robert L. Dennison • Harry Easley • George M. Elsey • Tom L. Evans • Alonzo Fields • Hugh Fulton • Harold F. Gosnell • William D. Hassett • Lou E. Holland • Edward Jacobson • Joseph M. Jones • Mary Paxton Keeley • Edward B. Lockett • J. Howard McGrath • Frank McNaughton • Edward P. Meisburger • Victor R. Messall • Charles S. Murphy • Philleo Nash • David K. Niles • Mary Ethel Noland • Frank Pace, Jr. • William M. Rigdon • Samuel I. Rosenman • Charles G. Ross • John W. Snyder • L. Curtis Tiernan • Jerome K. Walsh

OTHER ARCHIVAL PAPERS

Congressional Quarterly Library • Democratic National Committee • Miscellaneous Historical Documents • President’s Committee on Civil Rights • Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program • U.S. Army 35th Division Records • White House Daily Schedule Logs • White House General Correspondence • White House Reconstruction Commission • White House Social Office • White House Telephone Office

ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPTS

Dean Acheson • Eben A. Ayers • Gaylon Babcock • Thomas Hart Benton • Frederick J. Bowman • Welbern Bowman • Oscar L. Chapman • Henry P. Chiles • Tom C. Clark • Lucius D. Clay • Clark M. Clifford • Emilio G. Collado • Matthew J. Connelly • Clifton Daniel • Jonathan Daniels • Donald S. Dawson • Mildred Lee Dryden • Harry Easley • George M. Elsey • Tom L. Evans • Stanley R. Fike • Edward T. Folliard • Sue Gentry • Esther M. Grube • William D. Hassett • Loy W. Henderson • Edgar G. Hinde • Johannes U. Hoeber • William J. Hopkins • Mary Paxton Keeley • Leon H. Keyserling • Vere C. Leigh • Katie Louchheim • Robert A. Lovett • Max Lowenthal • Ted Marks • Edward D. McKim • George Meader • John Meador • Walter B. Menefee • Charles T. Morrissey • John H. Muccio • Charles S. Murphy • Harry E. Murphy • Robert G. Nixon • Mary Ethel Noland • Edwin G. Nourse • Frank Pace, Jr. • Amanda Hardin Palmer • Pansy Perkins • Floyd T. Ricketts • Samuel I. Rosenman • Pauline Sims • John W. Snyder • John J. Strode • Richard L. Strout • George Tames • Mary Jane Truman • Roger Tubby • Regna Vanatta • Harry H. Vaughan •, Fred M. Vinson • Margaret Weddle • Arthur W. Wilson • John Woodhouse • Robert B. Wyatt

DISSERTATIONS

Heed, Thomas J. Prelude to Whistlestop: Harry S. Truman the Apprentice Campaigner. Ed. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1975

Schmidtlein, Eugene F. Truman the Senator. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1962

AUDIO-VISUAL ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Audio Collection • Newsreel, Film and Motion Picture Collection • Photographic Collection

OTHER LIBRARY AND ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library • Independence Examiner files ‘Jackson County Historical Society “Joint Collections of the University Of Missouri Western Historical Manuscript Collection and the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri • Kansas City Star Archives • Liberty Memorial Research Archives

Library of Congress Manuscript Division—Papers of Joseph Alsop • William O. Douglas • Philip C. Jessup • Kathleen S. Louchheim • Robert A. Taft

Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library

National Archives, Washington, D.C.—Genealogy Division • Military Reference Branch’•

Records of the Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion • Time-Warner Incorporated—Time Magazine Archives • U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation • Yale University Library—Papers of Henry L. Stimson

OTHER UNPUBLISHED MATERIALS

American Heritage, eds. Harry S. Truman. Man from Independence. Narrative text by Louis Koenig • Brown, Walter, J. James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. A Remembrance. Manuscript. • Chiles, Mary Sue. “A Brief History of the Six Mile Territory,” Joint Collection of the University of Missouri Western Historical Manuscript Collection and the State Historical Collection of Missouri Manuscripts, Columbia, Missouri • Sherrod, Robert. Transcript of interview with Harry S. Truman, April 9, 1964. • Tubby, Roger, Journal—1950–1951.

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Ballou, M. E. Official Report on the Resources and Opportunities of Jackson, County, Missouri. 1926.

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Budget Fiscal Year, 1934. Jackson County, Missouri.

Congressional Record, Washington, D.C.

Course of Study and Rules and Regulations of the Independence Public Schools. March 15, 1909.

Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers. The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference) 1945. Vols. I and II. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960.

Foreign Relations of the United States 1948. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa. Vol. V. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976.

Gallup Political Almanac for 1948. Compiled by the American Institute of Public Opinion, Princeton, New Jersey. Manchester, New Hampshire: Clarke Press, 1948.

Guide to Research Collections of Former United States Senators 1789–1982. Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, United States Senate, 1983.

Harry S. Truman National Historic Site, Independence, Missouri. Cultural Landscape Report. United States National Park Service, 1989.

Harry S. Truman National Historic Site, Independence, Missouri. Historic Structures Report. Restoration Associates, 1987.

Harry S. Truman National Historic Site, Independence, Missouri. Historic Structures Report: History and Significance. United States National Park Service, Midwest Regional Office, 1984.

Hearings Before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives on H. Res. 505. Losses of Thirty-fifth Division During the Argonne Battle. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Historic Furnishings Report. Harry S. Truman Home, National Historic Site, Independence, Missouri. United States National Park Service, 1986.

History of United States Senate Roof and Chamber Improvements and Related Historical Data (Sen. Doc. 20, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess.). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1951.

Interim Report of Special Committee to investigate the National Defense Program—Supplementary Remarks. Congressional Record. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, January 19, 1942.

Kansas City. A Place in Time. Landmarks Commission of Kansas City, Missouri, 1977.

Letter from the Assistant Clerk of the Court of Claims Transmitting a Copy of the Findings Filed by the Court in the Case of Harriet L. Young, Administratrix of Solomon Young, Deceased, Against the United States (Sen. Doc. No. 901, 59th Cong., 1st Sess.). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906.

Memorial Services in the Congress of the United States and Tributes in Eulogy of Harry S Truman. Late President of the United States. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973.

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Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Resulting in the Re-nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York for President and the Nomination of Harry S. Truman of Missouri for Vice-President, Chicago, July 19 and July 21, 1944.

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BOOKS

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——. Morning and Noon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

——. Present at the Creation. My Years in the State Department, New York: Norton, 1969.

——. Sketches from a Life. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

——. The Korean War. New York: Norton, 1971.

Adler, Frank J. Roots in a Moving Stream: The Centennial History of Congregation B’nai Jehudah of Kansas City, 1870–1970. Kansas City, Missouri. Published by the Congregation: 1972.

Alexander, Robert. Memories of the World War, 1917–1918. New York: Macmillan, 1931.

Alinsky, Saul D. John L. Lewis, an Unauthorized Biography. New York: Putnam, 1949.

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——. The Big Change. America Transforms Itself 1900–1950. New York: Harper, 1952.

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——. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper, 1947.

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——, and Harvard Sitkoff, eds. A History of Our Time. Readings on Postwar America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

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ARTICLES

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Acheson, Dean. “The Greatness of Harry Truman,” Esquire, September 1969.

Alexander, Jack. “Stormy New Boss of the Pentagon,” Saturday Evening Post, July 30, 1949.

Alsop, Joseph and Stewart. “Candidate Truman’s Magic Brew,” Saturday Evening Post, December 31, 1949.

——. “How Our Foreign Policy Is Made,” Saturday Evening Post, April 30, 1949.

——. “If Russia Grabs Europe,” Saturday Evening Post, December 20, 1947.

——. “If War Comes,” Saturday Evening Post, September 11, 1948.

——. “The Lesson of Korea,” Saturday Evening Post, September 2, 1950.

——. “What Kind of President Will Dewey Make?” Saturday Evening Post, October 16, 1948.

——. “Why Has Washington Gone Crazy?” Saturday Evening Post, July 29, 1950.

Alsop, Stewart, and Dr. Ralph Lapp. “The Inside Story of Our First Hydrogen Bomb,” Saturday Evening Post, October 25, 1952.

“An Interview with Greta Kempton,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 15, no. 2, 1987.

Armstrong, O. K. “Crusade in Kansas City,” This Week, March 13, 1938.

Asbury, Edith. “Meet Harry’s Boss, Bess,” Collier’s, February 12, 1949.

Aurthur, Robert Alan. “Harry Truman Chuckles Dryly,” Esquire, September 1971.

——. “The Wit and Sass of Harry S. Truman,” Esquire, August 1971.

Baldwin, Hanson W. “The Atomic Weapon,” The New York Times, August 7, 1945.

Bender, James F. “The Truman Voice—‘General American,’ ” The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 1945.

Bendiner, Robert. “The Undramatic Man of Drama,” The New York Times Magazine, March 11, 1951.

Bennett, Charles. “Truman, the Bomb and Today’s Peril,” The New York Times, July 5, 1985.

Berger, Meyer. “Mother Truman’s Life Not All Frontier Toil,” Kansas City Times, June 30, 1946 (reprinted from The New York Times).

Bernstein, Barton J. “The Myth of Lives Saved by A-Bombs,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1985.

Blumenthal, Sidney. “The Essential Clark Clifford,” The Washington Post Magazine, February 5, 1989.

Boyer, Paul. “The Day You First Heard the News,” The New York Times, August 4, 1985.

Bradley, Lenore K. “Building Jackson County,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 13, no. 2, 1985.

Brant, Leroy V. “Music’s Significant Place in Modern Life,” Etude, October 1946.

Brinkley, Alan. “Minister Without Portfolio,” Harper’s, February 1983.

Broad, William J. “40 Years Ago, the Bomb: The Questions Came Later,” The New York Times, July 16, 1985.

Brooks, Alex. “McCarran’s Iron Curtain,” The Nation, March 29, 1952.

Burrus, Rufus. “Colonel Harry S. Truman as I Knew Him,” Speech in Kansas City, Missouri, January 11, 1973.

Busch, Noel. “A Year of Truman,” Life, April 8, 1946.

Byrd, Senator Robert C. “James F. Byrnes: The ‘Insider,’ ” Congressional Record, September 7, 1984. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Carlton, John T. “Truman: The Last Real Friend,” The Retired Officer, June 1984.

Chamberlain, John. “Washington in June,” Life, June 1, 1945.

Clifford, Clark. “Recognizing Israel,” American Heritage, Vol. XXVIII, no. 3, April 1977.

Clymer, Floyd. “An Interview with Harry S. Truman,” Floyd Clymer’s Historical Motor Scrapbook, no. 7 (no date).

Cole, David. “McCarran-Walter,” Constitution, Winter 1990.

Commager, Henry Steele. “A Few Kind Words for Harry Truman,” Look, August 1951.

Cool, Margaret. “HST’S Dreadful Devil Wagon,” Kansas City. Vol 1, no. 7, July 1976.

Crawford, Kenneth G. “Everyman in the White House,” American Mercury, February 1946.

Creel, George. “Independence Makes a President,” Collier’s, August 18, 1945.

Curry, John T. “‘They’ve Killed the President.’ The Attempted Assassination of President Truman,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 7, no. 4, Fall 1979.

Dains, Mary K. “Fulton’s Distinguished Visitors: Truman and Churchill, 1946,” Missouri Historical Review, April 1984.

Daniel, Margaret Truman. “Bess,” Parade, March 30, 1986.

Daniels, Jonathan. “How Truman Writes Those Letters,” Collier’s, February 24, 1951.

——. “The Lady from Independence,” McCall’s, April 1949.

Davies, Richard O. “Whistle-Stopping Through Ohio,” Ohio History, July 1962.

Davis, Elsie Spry. “Forebears of Solomon Young,” 1980.

Divine, Robert A. “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” Journal of American History(1972).

Donovan, Hedley. “The Presidency: Job Specs for the Oval Office,” Time, December 13, 1982.

Donovan, Robert. “Truman Seizes Steel,” Constitution, Fall 1990.

Dorsett, Lyle Wesley. “Alderman Jim Pendergast,” Missouri Historical Bulletin, October 1964.

Elsey, George M. “Memoir: Some White House Recollections, 1942–1953,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 12, no. 3, Summer 1988.

Erskine, Helen Worden. “The Riddle of Mrs. Truman,” Collier’s, February 9, 1952.

——. “Truman in Retirement,” Collier’s, February 4, 1955.

Essary, Helen. “Bess Truman: The President’s Boss,” Vertical File, HSTL.

Everett, Glenn D, “Wow! Did Truman Ever Fool the Farmers!” Saturday Evening Post, August 16, 1952.

Farrar, Ronald. “Ross Tops as Newsman; Truman Press Secretary,” Journalism Alumni News, May 1966.

Ferrell, Robert, ed. “A Visitor to the White House, 1947: The Diary of Vic H. Householder,” Missouri Historical Review.

Fischer, John. “Mr. Truman Reorganizes,” Harper’s, January 1946.

——. “Mr. Truman’s Politico,” Harper’s, June 1951.

Fitzmaurice, Walter. “President Truman’s Campaign Special,” Trains, March 1949.

Fitzsimmons, Tom. “The Nation Talks Back to McCarran,” The New Republic, January 12, 1953.

Frank, Reuven. “1948: Live…From Philadelphia…It’s the National Conventions,” The New York Times Magazine, April 17, 1988.

Franklin, Jay. “Inside Strategy of the Campaign,” Life, November 15, 1948.

Furman, Bess. “Independent Lady from Independence,” The New York Times Magazine, June 9, 1946.

Gentry, Sue. “What Was the City Like in ‘09? A Peek into the Past Reveals an Answer,” Independence Examiner, July 6, 1971.

Gervasi, Frank. “A President Grows Up,” Collier’s, May 24, 1947.

——. “The Truth About Truman,” Collier’s, January 22, 1949.

Giglio, James. “Harry S. Truman and the Multifarious Ex-Presidency.” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

Gilmer, Carol Lynn. “Missouri’s One-Family Newspaper,” Harper’s, October 1954.

“The Gold Coast Railroad Museum’s Famous U.S. Presidential Car No. 1 Ferdinand Magellan. A National Historic Landmark” (brochure).

Grant, Philip A. “The Election of Harry S. Truman to the United States Senate,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 36 (1980).

Graybar, Lloyd J. “The Atomic Bomb Tests: Atomic Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?” The Journal of American History, March 1986.

Griffith, Robert. “Harry S. Truman and the Burden of Modernity,” Reviews in American History, September 1981.

Grose, Peter. “The Partition of Palestine 35 Years Ago,” The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1982.

Grothaus, Larry. “Kansas City Blacks, Harry Truman and the Pendergast Machine,” Missouri Historical Review, October 1974.

Guard, Samuel R. “From Plowboy to President,” Breeder’s Gazette, June 1945.

Hale, Donald R. “James Chiles—A Missouri Badman,” The West, October 1968.

Hall, Norman S. “Five Red Days,” Liberty, May 14, 1927.

Hamburger, Philip. “Profiles: Mr. Secretary” (Dean Acheson), The New Yorker, November 12, 1949; November 19, 1949.

Hamby, Alonzo L. “An American Democrat: A Reevaluation of the Personality of Harry S. Truman,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 106, no. 1, 1991.

——. “Harry Truman, Small-Town American,” History Today, December 1989.

——. “One Hundred Years of Harry Truman,” The American Spectator, July 1984.

——. “‘The Great Drive Has Taken Place and I had a Part in It’: Truman, Battery D, and the Meuse-Argonne Campaign,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 15, no. 4, 1987.

——. “Truman vs. Dewey: The 1948 Election,” The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1988.

Hart, Scott. “Truman and Ross: America’s No. 1 Team,” Coronet, January 1946.

Hassett, William D. “The President Was My Boss,” Saturday Evening Post, October 10, November 28, 1953.

Hatch, Alden. “The New Truman,” Liberty, July 5, 1947.

Heaster, Brenda L. “Who’s on Second: The 1944 Democratic Presidential Nomination,” Missouri Historical Review, January 1986.

Hehmeyer, Walter. “The President Keeps Himself Fit,” Parade, May 25, 1947.

Heller, Francis. “The Writing of the Truman Memoirs,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Winter 1983.

Henry, Frank. “Artilleryman Truman in the First World War,” The Baltimore Sun Sunday Magazine, May 13, 1945.

Hoy, P. R. Journal of an Exploration of Western Missouri in 1854. Under the Auspices of the Smithsonian Institution.

Hughes, Emmet John. “Our Presidents, Heroes or Nobodies: They All Had Their Own Style,” Smithsonian, March 1972.

Huie, William Bradford. “How to Think About Truman,” American Mercury, August 1951.

Hume, Paul. “The Music Critic and the President: The Second Time Around,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 16, no. 2, 1988.

“I.H.S. Class of ’01. Forty-one Boys and Girls Receive High School Diplomas—Commencement Exercises,” Jackson Examiner, May 31, 1901.

Isaacson, Walter. “Essay: Why Did We Drop the Bomb?” Time, August 19, 1985.

Jacobson, Edward “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948,” American Jewish Archives, April 1968.

Jessup, Philip C. “Research Note/The Record of Wake. Island—A Correction,” The Journal of American History, March 1981.

Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, School of Advanced International Studies. “Dean Acheson and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Washington, D.C., April 6, 1989.

Karp, Walter. “Truman vs. MacArthur,” American Heritage, April/May 1984.

Kempton, Greta. Interview in Whistle Stop, Vol. 15, no. 2, 1987.

——. “Painting the Truman Family,” Missouri Historical Review, April 1973.

Kirdendall, Richard S. “Harry S. Truman, a Missouri Farmer in the Golden Age,” Agricultural History, 1974.

——. “Truman and Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review, LXXXI, January 1987.

Knebel, Fletcher. “We Shall All Miss Him. President, Newspaperman, and Sigs Mourn Passing of Charles G. Ross,” The Sigma Chi, March 1951.

Kornitzer, Bela. “Harry Truman, Musician and Critic,” Pathfinder, January 9, 1952.

——. “The Story of Truman and His Father,” Parents Magazine, March 1951.

La Cossitt, Henry. “He Takes the President on Tour,” Saturday Evening Post, June 16, 1951.

Lahey, Edwin A. “Good-bye, Mr. Truman!” Extension, December 1952.

Larkin, Lew. “The Other Side of Tom Pendergast,” Missouri Life, April 11, 1978.

Laurence, William L. “The Truth About the Hydrogen Bomb,” Saturday Evening Post, June 24, 1950.

Lee, R. Alton. “Rebuilding the White House.” American History Illustrated, February 1978.

Lehman, Milton. “The White House Shudders,” Collier’s, November 13, 1948.

Leuchtenburg, William E. “Give ‘Em Harry,” The New Republic, May 21, 1984.

Leviero, Anthony. “Harry Truman: Musician and Music Lover,” The New York Times Magazine, june 18, 1950.

Lewis, Anthony. “Shadow on the Stone,” The New York Times, August 5, 1985.

Littlefield, Dr. Duncan E. “The President Versus the General” (sermon delivered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on April 15, 1951).

Lubell, Samuel. “What You Don’t Know About Truman,” Saturday Evening Post, March 15, 1952.

——. “Who Really Elected Truman?” Saturday Evening Post, January 22, 1949.

Macdonald, Rear Admiral Donald J., U.S. Navy (Retired). “President Truman’s Yacht,” Naval History, Winter 1990.

MacKaye, Milton. “He’ll Sink or Swim with Harry,” Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1948.

——. “Things Are Different in the White House,” Saturday Evening Post, April 20, 1946.

Markel, Lester. “After Four Years: Portrait of Harry Truman,” The New York Times Magazine, April 10, 1949.

——_. “Truman as the Crucial Third Year Opens,” The New York Times Magazine, March 16, 1947.

Mayerberg, Samuel S. “Edward Jacobson: President Truman’s Buddy.” Liberal Judaism, August 1945.

McCarthy, Joe. “A Walk Through History with Harry Truman.” Holiday, November/December 1963.

McCormick, Anne O’Hare. “Abroad: The Promethean Role of the United States,” The New York Times, August 8, 1945.

McCoy, Donald R. “Harry S. Truman: Personality, Politics and Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

McCune, Wesley, and John R. Beal. “The Job That Made Truman President,” Harper’s, June 1945.

Means, Marianne. “What Three Presidents Say About Their Wives,” Good Housekeeping, August 1963.

Michener, James. “A Tough Man for a Tough Job,” Life, May 12, 1952.

Miles, Rufus E., Jr., “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved,” International Security, Fall 1985.

Miller, M. F. “A Century of Missouri Agriculture,” University of Missouri Bulletin, May 1958.

Miller, Merle. “Mr. Truman’s Hometown,” Holiday, May 1970.

Miner, Paul V. “Boss Tom Pendergast’s Wide Open Town,” Kansas City Star Magazine, July 4, 1976.

Miscamble, Wilson D. “Anthony Eden and the Truman-Molotov Conversations, April 1945,” Diplomatic History, Spring 1978.

——. “Harry S Truman, The Berlin Blockade and the 1948 Election,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Summer 1980.

——. “The Evolution of an Internationalist: Harry S. Truman and American Foreign Policy,” The Australian Journal of Politics and History, August 1977.

Mixson, James M., D.M.D. “The Two Crises That Faced President Truman: Korean and Dental,” Bulletin of the History of Dentistry, October 1988.

Mumford, F. B. “A Century of Missouri Agriculture,” Missouri Historical Review January 1921.

Nelson, Anna Kasten. “President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council,” The Journal of American History. September 1985.

Oberdorfer, Don. “Ex-Democrat, Ex-Dixiecrat, Today’s Nixiecrat,” The New York Times Magazine. October 6, 1968.

O’Brien, Pat. “Old Rail Depots in Independence Represent Important Era of History.” Jackson County Historical Society, April–June 1982.

“Original Landowner Map of the City of Grandview,” Jackson County Advocate November 6, 1975.

Osborne, John. “Happy Days for Harry,” Life, July 7, 1958.

Pearson, Drew. “The Man Who Didn’t Want to Be President,” April 16, 1945.

Perry, George Sessions. “Independence, Missouri,” Saturday Evening Post, September 2, 1950.

Phillips, Cabell. “How the President Does His Job.” The New York Times Magazine, January 4, 1948.

——. “Truman at 75,” The New York Times Magazine, May 3, 1959.

——. “Truman Likes These,” The New York Times Magazine, June 17, 1951.

——. “Truman’s Home Town Is ‘Smalltown, U.S.A.’ ” The New York Times Magazine July 1, 1945.

Potts, Edward W. “The President’s Mother: Martha Ellen Truman,” The Christian Advocate (n.d.).

Renshaw, Bill. “President Truman. His Missouri Neighbors Tell of His Farm Years,” The Prairie Farmer, May 12, 1945.

Reston, James. “Dawn of the Atom Era Perplexes Washington,” The New York Times, August 12, 1945.

Rigdon, Commander William, U.S.N. “We Kept Truman’s Big Secret,” Collier’s, July 4, 1953.

Robbins, Jhan and June. “Six Great Turning Points of American History,” This Week, February 22, 1959.

Roper, Elmo, and Louis Harris. “The Press and the Great Debate,” The Saturday Review of Literature, July 14, 1951.

Rosenberg, David Alan. “The U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945–1950,” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May 1982.

Rosenberg, J. Philip. “The Belief System of Harry S. Truman and Its Effect on Foreign Policy Decision-Making During His Administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

Ross, Charles G. “How Truman Did It,” Collier’s, December 25, 1948.

Rothe, Albert J., as told to Beverly Smith. “Pst! Truman’s Got a Cowlick,” Saturday Evening Post, November 12, 1949.

Rovere, Richard H. “Letter from the Campaign Train,” The New Yorker, October 9, 1948.

——. “Letter from the Campaign Train,” The New Yorker, October 16, 1948.

——. “Letter from Washington,” The New Yorker, July 28, 1975.

——. “President Harry,” Harper’s, July 1948.

——. “Profiles: Nothing Much to It,” The New Yorker, September 8, 1945.

——. “The Last Days of Joe McCarthy,” Encounter, December 1958.

——. “The Most Gifted and Successful Demagogue This Country Has Ever Known,” The New York Times Magazine, April 1967.

Safly, Elizabeth. “Truman’s Books. The Post-Presidential Years,” Whistle Stop, Winter 1979.

——. “Truman’s Books. Part II,” Whistle Stop, Spring 1979.

Schnell, J. Christopher, Richard J. Collings, and David W. Dillard. “The Political Impact of the Depression on Missouri, 1929–1940,” Missouri Historical Review, January 1991.

Schumach, Murray. “The Education of Matthew Ridgway,” The New York Times Magazine, May 4, 1952.

Sevareid, Eric. “A Truly Great Man,” McCall’s, March 1973.

——. “The Human Truman,” Vertical file, HSTL

Severo, Richard, and Lewis Milford. “Sweet Wine at Last,” Military History Quarterly, Winter 1989.

Sheley, O.C. “James Peacock and ‘Jim Crow’ Chiles,” Frontier Times, May 1963.

Shogan, Robert. “1948 Election,” American Heritage, June 1968.

Slichter, Sumner H. “The Past Year and the Next in Our Economy,” The New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1951.

Slomovitz, Philip. “Harry S. Truman: The Modern Cyrus,” The American Jewish Outlook, January 23, 1953.

Smith, Beverly. “The Curious Case of the President’s Bathtub,” Saturday Evening Post, August 23, 1952.

——. “Washington’s Greatest Storyteller,” Saturday Evening Post, July 2, 1949.

——. “What a Spanking He Gave Truman!” Saturday Evening Post, August 2, 1952.

——. “Why We Went to War in Korea,” Saturday Evening Post, November 11, 1951.

Smith, Gaddis. “The Acheson Papers,” Whistle Stop, Spring 1973.

Smith, H. Allen. “A Friend of Ours Named Harry,” This Week, April 5, 1964.

Snyder, John W. “Unforgettable Harry Truman,” Reader’s Digest, November 1980.

Staley, J. W. “Eyes Across the DMZ,” Army Digest, October 1969.

Steinberg, Alfred. “How Harry Truman Does His Job,” Saturday Evening Post, March 3, 10, 1951.

——. “Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man,” Saturday Evening Post, December 24, 1949.

Sutton, Horace. “Key West, The Living End,” Saturday Review, January 7, 1978.

Tammeus, William D. “He Plowed a Straight Furrow,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 12, no. 4, 1984.

Thierman, Sue McClelland. “A Church with Roots in History.” Louisville Courier-Journal, June 3, 1945.

Truman, Harry S. “My First Eighty Years,” Saturday Evening Post, June 13, 1964.

——. “The Most Mistreated of Presidents,” The North Carolina Historical Review, April 1959.

Truman, Margaret. “Memories of a Cherished Home,” The New York Times, April 22, 1984.

Tucker, Captain Frank C. III, USAR. “Reserve Duty Means Adventure for HST,” The Officer, May 1984.

“Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948,” American Jewish Archives, April 1968.

Vaccaro, Ernest B. “Harry Truman and the Press,” The Quill, February 1973.

Waugh, Alfred S. “Desultory Wanderings in the Years 1845–46,” edited by John Francis McDermott. Missouri Historical Society, April and October 1950.

White, Hollis L. “Champ Clark, The ‘Leather-Bound’ Orator,” Missouri Historical Review, October 1961–July 1962.

White, Theodore H. “‘Wise Man’ in Quest of Security,” The New York Times Magazine, March 16, 1952.

Whitman, Walter. “Take a Tip from Harry Truman. ‘Wake Up and Walk!’ ” This Week, June 4, 1961.

Williams, Herbert Lee. “I Was Truman’s Ghost,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

Wills, Garry. “I’m Not Wild About Harry,” Esquire, January 1976.

Wilson, Richard. “Truman Brings Back Boss Pendergast,” Look, October 29, 1946.

Wiltz, John Edward. “Truman and MacArthur: The Wake Island Meeting,” Military Affairs, December 1978.

Woolf, S. J. “President Truman Talks About His Job,” The New York Times Magazine, July 15, 1945.

Wyden, Peter. “The Sudden Dawn,” The Washingtonian, July 1985.

Yancey, Noel. “The Day Truman Dropped In,” Spectator, August 1, 1985.

Yergin, Daniel. “Harry Truman—Revived and Revised.” The New York Times Magazine, October 24, 1976..

REFERENCE SOURCES

American Heritage, eds. The American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents of the United States. Vols. 1 and 2. New York: American Heritage Publ. Co., 1968.

Bartlett’s Quotations. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.

Boorstin, Daniel J., and Brooks Mather Kelley, with Ruth Frankel Boorstin. A History of the United States. Lexington, Massachusetts: Ginn and Co., 1981.

Britannica Book of the Year 1949. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1949.

Britannica Book of the Year 1951. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1951.

Britannica Book of the Year 1952. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.

Britannica Book of the Year 1953. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1953.

Cohen, J. M. and M. J. The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations. New York: Penguin Books, 1978.

Conrad, Howard L., ed. Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri. A Compendium of History and Biography for Ready Reference. Vol. III, Vol. VI. New York: Southern History, 1901.

Current Biography

Daniel, Clifton, ed. Chronicle of the 20th Century. Mount Kisco, New York: Chronicle Publications, 1987.

Foner, Eric and John A. Garraty, eds. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Gordon, Lois, and Alan Gordon. American Chronicle. Six Decades in American Life 1920–1980. New York: Atheneum, 1987.

Information Please Almanac 1949. New York: Farrar, Straus. 1949.

Irvine, E. Eastman, ed. The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1945. New York: New York World-Telegram, 1945.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg. Concise History of the American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Palmer, Alan. The Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth Century History 1900–1978. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.

Presidents. New York: New England Publishing Associates, 1988.

Schoenebaum, Eleanora W., ed. Political Profiles: The Truman Years. New York: Facts on File, 1978.

Taylor, Tim. The Book of Presidents. New York: Arno Press, 1972.

Time Magazine, eds. The American Presidents. Special Report. New York: Time, Inc., 1976.

White House Historical Association. The White House. An Historic Guide. Revised Edition. Washington White House Historical Association with the cooperation of the National Geographic Society, 1979.

Young, Brigadier Peter, ed. The World Almanac Book of World War II. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1981.

MAGAZINES AND JOURNALS CONSULTED

American Heritage • American History Illustrated • American Jewish Outlook • American Mercury • American Spectator • Bulletin of Atomic Scientists • Collier’s • Coronet • Esquire • Etude • Fortune • Harper’s • History Today • Liberty • Life • Look • McCall’s • Military History Quarterly • Missouri Life • Nation • New Republic • New Yorker • New York Times Magazine • Newsweek • Parade • Parents Magazine • Reader’s Digest • Saturday Evening Post • Saturday Review • Smithsonian • This Week • Time • Wallace’s Farmer • Washingtonian • Whistle Stop.

NEWSPAPERS CONSULTED

Albuquerque (New Mexico) Journal • American Observer • Arizona Republic • Atlanta Journal • Baltimore Sun • Belton (Missouri) Star-Herald • Blue Springs (Missouri) Examiner • Boston Daily Globe • Boston Globe • Boston Post • Catholic Herald Citizen • Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette • Chicago Daily News • Chicago Sun • Chicago Sun-Times • Chicago Tribune • Christian Science Monitor • Cincinnati Enquirer • Cleveland Plain Dealer • Columbus (Ohio) Evening Dispatch • Daily Oklahoman • Dallas Morning News • Denver Post • Deseret News (Utah) • Des Moines Register • Detroit Free Press • Detroit News • Emporia (Kansas) Daily Gazette • Hartford Courant • Idaho Daily Statesman • Illinois State Register • Independence (Missouri) Examiner • Independence (Missouri) Sentinel • Indianapolis Star • Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News • Jackson County (Missouri) Advocate • Jackson County (Missouri) Examiner • Kansas City Jewish Chronicle • Kansas City Business Journal • Kansas City Journal-Post • Kansas City Star • Kansas City Times • Kansas City Weekly Enterprise • Knoxville (Tennessee) News-Sentinel • Lamar (Missouri) Democrat • Lansing (Michigan) Star Journal • Liberty (Missouri) Tribune • Long Island (New York) Press • Louisville Courier-Journal • Memphis Commercial Appeal • Miami Herald • Montana Standard • Morning World Herald (Omaha, Nebraska) • New Bedford (Massachusetts) Standard Times • New York Herald-Tribune • New York Times • New York World-Telegram • Philadelphia Inquirer • Pittsburgh Courier • Pittsburgh Post-Gazette • Portland (Oregon) Journal • Prairie Farmer • Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle • Salt Lake City Tribune • San Antonio Express • San Francisco Chronicle • Seattle Times • Shelby (Kentucky) Sentinel News • Skaneateles (New York) Press • South Bend (Indiana) Tribune • St. Louis (Missouri) Globe-Democrat • St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch • St. Louis (Missouri) Star-Times • St. Paul Pioneer Press • Syracuse Post Standard • Times (London) • Toledo Blade • Tucson Daily Citizen • Wall Street Journal • Washington (D.C.) Daily News • Washington (D.C.) Post • Washington (D.C.) Star • Washington (D.C.) Times Herald • Willard (Ohio) Times

PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Harry S. Truman Library • Jackson County Historical Society • Joseph C. Pruett • Kansas City Star • Library of Congress • National Archives • United States Senate Historical Office • Washington Star

Index

Acheson, Alice

Acheson, Dean

atomic bomb and

attacks on

background of

China and

Churchill and

death of

defense spending and

Europe and

farewell luncheon for Trumans given by

Greece and

Hiss and

on HST

HST’s correspondence with

HST’s library and

HST’s memoirs and

and HST’s remarks on Kennedy and civil rights

HST’s retirement and

HST’s Yale visit and

influence of

Kennedy and

Korean War and

MacArthur and

McCarthy’s attacks on

on Marshall

Marshall Plan and

NATO and

Nixon’s attack on

NSC-68 report and

physical appearance of

as Secretary of State

Truman Doctrine and

as Under Secretary of State

on Z Committee

Acheson, Mary

ADA (Americans for Democratic Action)

Adam, John

Adams, Abigail

Adams, John

Adams, John Quincy

Adams, Sherman

Adenauer, Konrad

Adonis, Joe

AEC, see Atomic Energy Commission, U.S.

Age of Jackson, The (Schlesinger)

Agricultural Adjustment Act (1938)

Aiken, George

aircraft production

Air Force, U.S.

Alamogordo, atomic tests at

Alaska

Albright, Robert C.

Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America)

Alemán, Miguel

Allen, Charlie

Allen, Fred

Allen, George E.

Allen, Robert S.

Alsop, Joseph

Alsop, Stewart

Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa)

aluminum production

Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

America First movement

American Federation of Labor

American Jewish Congress

American Legion

American Lithofold Corporation

American Magazine

American Mercury

“American Relations with the Soviet Union” (Clifford and Elsey)

Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)

American Weekly

American Zionist Emergency Council

Anami, Korechika

Anderson, “Bloody Bill,”

Anderson, Clinton

Anderson, Reuben

Anderson, Vernice

Andrew Jackson (James)

Andrews, Bert

anti-trust laws

Arabs, Palestinian

armed forces, see military

Armory Show of 1913

Army contracts, see defense spending

Arnold, Henry H. “Hap,”

art, HST’s views on

Arthur, Chester A.

Arvey, Jake

Atlanta Constitution

Atlanta Journal

Atlantic Charter

atomic bomb, atomic energy

Acheson and

Alamogordo test of

in attacks on Japan

Bikini tests of

Forrestal and

hydrogen, see hydrogen bomb

Interim Committee on

Korean War and

Manhattan Project and

military vs. civilian custody of

morality of

as nonmilitary weapon

Soviet Union and

Atomic Energy Commission, U.N.

Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), U.S.

Lilienthal as head of

superbomb and

Attlee, Clement

Atwell, Lester

Audubon, John James

Aurthur, Robert Alan

Austin, Warren

Australia

Austria

automobile industry

auto workers’ strike (1946)

Axtell, Enos

Ayers, Eben

Vaughan and

Aylward, James P.

Azerbaijan

B-26 bomber

B-29 bomber:

in Berlin Airlift

in fire bombing of Japan

Babcock, Gaylon

Bacall, Lauren

Baker, Russell

Baldwin, Hanson

Balfour, Arthur, Lord

Balfour Declaration

Balkan states

Ball, George

Ball, Joseph H.

Baltic provinces

Baltimore Sun

B. Altman & Company

Bankhead, Tallulah

Bankhead, William B.

Banning, Mr. and Mrs. William

“Barbara Frietchie” (Whittier)

Bard, Ralph A.

Barkley, Alben

death of

HST as seen by

HST’s Senate reelection and

as majority leader

prop-stop campaign of

as vice-presidential candidate (1944)

as vice-presidential candidate (1948)

Barnes, James M.

Barr, David

Barr, Robert

Barry, Frank

Barrymore, Ethel

Bartky, Walter

Baruch, Bernard

Bataan

Battery D (2nd Battalion, 129th Field Artillery)

Battle, Lucius

Battle of Britain

Baughman, U.E.

Baydur, Huseyin Ragip

Bay of Pigs

Bean, Louis

Beatty, Earl David

Beaverbrook, William Aitken, Lord

Bechtel, Stephen

Belair, Felix, Jr.

Bell, Art

Bell, Elliott

Bell, Jasper

Benedict XV, Pope

Bennett, David A.

Benny, Jack

Bentley, Elizabeth

Benton, Thomas Hart (artist)

Benton, Thomas Hart (senator)

Berenson, Bernard

Berenstein, David

Bergen, Edgar

Berger, Meyer

Bergheim, Myrtle

Bergin, Thomas G.

Beria, Lavrenti

Berlin

Berlin, Irving

Berlin crisis

airlift in

turn of tide in

Vinson mission and

Bernadotte, Folke

Bernstein, Carl

Bernstein, Leonard

Berry, Lucian D.

Best Years of Our Lives, The

Bevin, Ernest

Bidault, Georges

Biddle, Francis

Biffle, Les

Bikini

Bingham, George Caleb

Binnagio, Charles

Birdzell, Donald

Black, Hugo L

Blackmore, Dwight

blacks

Byrnes and

murders of

Roosevelt and

as voters

see also civil rights; racial prejudice

Blair, Frank

Blair House

Blandy, William

Blaustein, Jacob

Blitz, Samuel

Block, Herb

Boeing

Boettiger, Anna Roosevelt

Boettiger, John

Bogart, Humphrey

Boggs, Lilburn W.

Boggs, Lindy

Bohlen, Charles “Chip,”

on Marshall

at Potsdam

Bolich, Daniel A.

Bonesteel, Charles

Boone, Daniel

Boone, Daniel Morgan

Borah, William E.

Border War

Boring, Floyd M.

Boston Globe

Boston Post

Bourgholtzer, Frank

Bowles, Chester

Bowman, Frederick

Boyd, William

Boyle, Clara

Boyle, William

accusations against

background and character of

resignation of

Bradley, John H.

Bradley, Omar

atomic bomb and

Berlin crisis and

Korean War and

MacArthur and

Brandeis, Louis D.

Brandeis, Mrs. Louis D.

Brandt, Raymond

Brewster, O. C

Brewster, Owen

Brian, Donald

Brice, George

Bricker, John W.

Bridges, Styles

Brooks, Curley

Brooks, Philip C

Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Brotherhood

Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen

Browder, Earl

Brown, John

Brown, John Mason

Brown, Matilda D. “Tillie,”

Brownell, Herbert, Jr.

Bryan, William Jennings

Bryant, Paul

Buchenwald

Buck, Pearl S.

Bud Billiken Day

budget, national

Bulgaria

Bulger, Miles

Bundschu, Henry

Bunnelle, Robert

Burke, Ken

Burns, James MacGregor

Burrus, Florence

Burrus, Rufus

Burton, Harold H.

Busch, Noel F.

Bush, Vannevar

Business Week

Butler, Hugh

Butterfield, Roger

Buxton, Ethel Lee

Byrd, Harry Flood

Byrnes, James

atomic bomb and

blacks and

defense spending and

HST’s difficulties with

HST’s Senate reelection and

on Interim Committee on S-1

Japan and

at Potsdam

railway strike and

resignation of

Resolution 71 and

as Secretary of State

Soviet Union and

On Stalin

Truman Committee and

as vice-presidential candidate

Wallace’s New York speech and

Cadogan, Alexander

Cahn, Albert

California, University of

California, University of, at Berkeley

California and Oregon Trail, The (Parkman)

Callas, Maria

Call Me Madam

Campbell, William J.

Canfil, Fred

at Potsdam

Canin, Stuart

Cannon, Pat

Canol Project

Capehart, Homer

Capone, Al

Capra, Frank

Carnegie-Illinois Steel

Carpenter, Donald F.

Carr, Albert Z.

Carter, Jimmy

Carter, John Franklin

Carthage Hydrocel, Inc.

Casablanca Conference (1943)

Cather, Willa

Catholics

Catledge, Turner

Caudle, T. Lamar

CCC (Commodity Credit Corporation)

Celler, Emanuel

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Central Intelligence Group

“Certain Aspects of the European Recovery Problem from the United States Standpoint” (Kennan Report)

Chambers, Whittaker

Changing Times

Chapman, Oscar

Charles, Prince of Wales

Chase, Salmon P.

Chavez, Dennis

Chiang Kai-shek

MacArthur and

Chiang Kai-shek, Madame

Chicago Sun

Chicago Sun-Times

Chicago Tribune

child care

Childs, Marquis

Chiles, Elijah

Chiles, Henry

Chiles, James J. “Jim Crow” (uncle)

Chiles, Morton, Jr.

Chiles, Sarah Ann “Sallie” Young (aunt)

Chiles, Sol (cousin)

China

civil war in

Marshall and

Soviet Union and

see also Formosa; Manchuria

China, People’s Republic of:

inauguration of

Korean War and

China Lobby

China White Paper

Chinese Communists

see also China, People’s Republic of

Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang)

see also Chiang Kai-shek; China; Formosa

“Chorus from Ajax” (Sophocles)

Chou En-lai

Christian Science Monitor

Christina’s World (Wyeth)

Chrysler

Churchill, Clementine

Churchill, Jenny Jerome

Churchill, Mary

Churchill, Sarah

Churchill, Winston

Acheson and

background of

Berlin tour of

death of

election defeat of

HST as seen by

HST on initial meeting with

HST’s admiration of

HST’s Berlin crisis letter to

“iron curtain” speech of

map room of

on Marshall

at Potsdam

in return to office

Roosevelt and

Stalin and

World War II history written by

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

see Mormons

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)

Cieplinski, Michel

Cincinnatus

Citizens Security

Civil Aeronautics Act (1938)

civil rights

anti-lynching legislation and

black vote and

HST’s Harlem speech on

HST’s Lincoln Memorial address on

HST’s private vs. public views on

HST’s senatorial reelection campaign and

sit-ins and marches for

southern Democrats and

“Turnip” congressional session and

Civil Rights Commission

civil service

Civil Service Commission

Civil War, U.S.

Lincoln’s problems with McClellan in

Clark, Bennett Champ

HST attacked by

as HST’s choice for President

Milligan supported by

in World War I

Clark, Champ

Clark, John L

Clark, Tom

Clay, Lucius D.

Clayton, William L.

Cleveland, Grover

Clevenger, Cliff

Clifford, Clark

background of

on Bess Truman

character and appearance of

coal strike and

government post left by

on HST

as HST’s legal counsel

HST’s presidential reelection campaign and

on loyalty issue

Marshall Plan and

as naval aide

Palestine issue and

preparation in work of

report on U.S.-Soviet relations by Elsey and

Clifton, Chester

Clinton, J. H.

coal mines

coal strike (1946)

Coates, Willa

Cochran, John J. “Jack,”

Coffelt, Leslie

coffinmakers’ strike (1946)

Cohen, Ben

Cold War:

Acheson’s view of

Berlin Airlift and

Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech and

Clifford-Elsey Report and

containment policy and

end of

HST’s view of

Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and

as 1948 election issue

origins of

Truman Doctrine and, see Truman Doctrine

U.S. atomic bomb monopoly ended in

in Wallace’s campaign

see also Soviet Union

Cold War, The (Lippmann)

Colgan, Emma Truman (aunt)

Collado, Emilio

Collazo, Oscar

Collier’s

Collins, Joe

Collins, Lawton

Combs, Freda

Commager, Henry Steele

Commerce of the Prairies (Gregg)

Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC)

Communists, communism

in China

civil rights movement and

Eisenhower on

fear of infiltration by

Forrestal and

in Greece

HST on democracy vs.

HST’s Loyalty Program and

J. Edgar Hoover’s warnings about

in Korea see also Korean War

McCarthy’s charges and

Marshall’s speech and

Nazism compared with

Progressive Party and

Taft-Hartley Act and

see also House Un-American Activities Committee

Community Savings and Loan Association of Independence

Compton, Arthur H.

Compton, James V.

Compton, Karl T.

Conant, James Bryant

Confederate Army

Congress, U.S.:

aid to Turkey and Greece approved by

civil rights messages delivered to

“do-nothing” description of

farm support and

House committees of, see House Un-American Activities Committee; House Ways and Means Committee

HST’s presidential “honeymoon” with

Joint Committee on Atomic Energy

Korean War and

Lilienthal confirmation and

Marshall confirmation and

national health insurance proposals and

1946 Republican electoral victories and

1950 Republican electoral victories and

postwar domestic program and

presidential papers and

presidential pensions and

Senate committees of, see Senate, U.S.

southern Democrats in

special “Turnip” session of

Truman Doctrine speech delivered to

Congressional Record,

Conkling, Roscoe

Connally, Tom

Connelly, Matthew J

Constitution, Twenty-second Amendment to

consumer credit

containment policy

Conway, Rose

Cooke, Alistair

Coolidge, Calvin

Cooper, Gary

Cooper, James Fenimore

Copeland, Royal

Corcoran, Thomas “Tommy the Cork,”

Costello, Frank

Council of Foreign Ministers

Cowherd, William S

Cox, Eugene

Cox, James

Crawford, Kenneth G

Crim, Howell

Crisp, Colonel

Cronkite, Walter

Crump, E. H. “Boss Ed,”

Crusade in Europe (Eisenhower)

Cuba

Culbertson, Jerry

Curley, James Michael

Curtiss-Wright

Cutting, Bronson

Czechoslovakia

coup in

Dahlberg, Edward

Dailey, David

Daily Telegraph (London)

Danford, Robert M

Daniel, Clifton Truman (grandson)

Daniel, Elbert Clifton, Jr. (son-in-law)

Daniel, Elbert Clifton, Sr

Daniel, Harrison (grandson)

Daniel, Hawthorne

Daniel, Mary Margaret “Margie” Truman (daughter)

attempted kidnapping of

birth of

character and appearance of

childhood of

children of

Constitution Hall concert of

diary of

engagement and marriage of

first full-length concert appearance of

health of

on her grandmother

at Hollywood Bowl

HST’s biography written by

HST’s death and

Daniel, Mary Margaret “Margie” Truman (daughter)

HST’s letters to

HST’s presidency and

HST’s reelection campaign and

HST’s relationship with

Hume’s review of

Independence summers of

piano of

plays put on by

radio debut of

Roosevelt’s death and

singing career of

White House quarters of

Daniel, Thomas (grandson)

Daniel, William Wallace (grandson)

Daniell, Raymond

Daniels, Jonathan

Daniels, Josephus

Daughters of the American Revolution

David, Daniel H

David Copperfield (Dickens)

Davidson, Joseph

Davies, Joseph E

Davis, James J

Davis, John W

Davis, Manvel

Dawson, Donald

Dean, William F

Deane, John R

“deep freezers,”

Defense Department, U.S.

see also War Department, U.S.

Defense Plants Corporation (DPC)

defense spending

Byrnes and

contracts in see also Truman Committee

Forrestal and

Korean War and

Delaney, Denis W

Delano, Laura

democracy, HST on communism vs

Democratic National Committee

Democratic National Conventions:

of 1944

of 1948

of 1952

of 1956

of 1960

Democratic Party

Dixiecrat split in

Jewish votes and

Progressive Party and

southern faction of

see also election of 1948; elections; specific individuals

Denver Post,

Depression, Great

Deschler, Lewis

Des Moines Register,

Des Moines Register and Tribune,

Detroit Free Press,

Detroit Symphony

Detroit Times,

Dewey, Frances

Dewey, John

Dewey, Thomas E

background of

character and appearance of

as district attorney

film on

as governor

HST compared with

Lippmann and

presidential campaign of (1944)

presidential campaign of (1948)

as presidential candidate

presidential election defeat of (1948)

speeches of

train incident and

Dewey, Tom, Jr.

Diaz, Armando

Dickens, Charles

Dieterich, William H.

Dill, John

Dillard, Harrison

Dillinger, John

Dirksen, Everett

Displaced Persons Act (1948)

Dixiecrats

Dixon, Frank M.

Doherty, Jim

dollar-a-year men

Doniphan, Alexander

Donnelly, Eugene

Donnelly, Nell

Donovan, Robert

Don Quixote (Cervantes)

Doohan, John

Doubleday

Dougherty, Charles, Sr

Douglas, Helen Gahagan

Douglas, Paul

Douglas, William O

Downs, Joseph

DPC (Defense Plants Corporation)

draft, military

railway strike and

Drescher, George

Drury, Allen

Dryden, Mildred

Dubinsky, David

Duchamp, Marcel

Dulles, John Foster

Dun, Angus

Duncan, Dick

Dunham, Walter L

Dunn, James

DuPont Company

dust storms

Eagles

Earle, George

Early, Steve

Easley, Harry

Eaton, Charles

Eban, Abba

economy

Eden, Anthony

Edgar Thomson Works

Edgerton, Glen E

education

Einstein, Albert

Eisenhower, Arthur

Eisenhower, Dwight David

death of

Forrestal and

HST and

inauguration of

Korean War and

McCarthy and

Marshall and

as NATO commander

as presidential candidate

reelection of

retirement of

on Stalin

vice-presidential candidacy declined by

Eisenhower, John

Eisenhower, Mamie

election of 1948:

Barkley as vice-presidential candidate in

Clifford’s role in

Democratic Convention and

Dewey’s campaign in

Dewey’s candidacy in

Dewey’s defeat in

Eisenhower considered in

HST’s campaign funds for

HST’s campaign in

HST’s election in

Republican Convention in

Ross’s role in

Thurmond and Dixiecrats in

Wallace’s candidacy in

elections:

of 1910

of 1912

of 1924

of 1932

of 1934

of 1936

of 1940

of 1944

of 1946

of 1948, see election of 1948

of 1950

of 1952

of 1956

of 1960

see also specific candidates

electrical workers’ strike (1946)

Elks

Elsey, George M

on HST

HST’s reelection campaign and

at Potsdam

report on U.S.-Soviet relations by Clifford and

employment

Employment Act (1946)

England, Clarence

Eniwetok Island

Epstein, Elihu

Equal Rights amendment

Ethridge, Mark

Etzenhouser, Madeline

European Recovery Program (ERP), see Marshall Plan

Evans, Tom

Evening Standard (London)

“Everyman in the White House” (Crawford)

Ewing, Thomas

excess profits tax

Fair Deal

Fair Employment Practices Committee

Fairless, Benjamin F

Farley, James A

farmers, federal support for

Farm Tenancy Act (1937)

Farrell, Thomas F

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Dewey campaign aided by

HST’s distrust of

see also Hoover, J. Edgar

Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program

Ferdinand Magellan,

see also Whistle-stop Campaign

Ferguson, Homer

Fermi, Enrico

Field, Lyman

Fields, Alonzo

Fields, W. C

Fillmore, Millard

Finklestein, Paula

Finklestein, Sam

Finklestein, Siegfried

Finland

Finletter, Thomas K

Finnegan, James P

Fired On (Remington)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Fitzpatrick, Daniel

five percenters

Flanner, Janet

Flavin, John

Flintom, A. D

Floyd, “Pretty Boy,”

Flynn, Edward Joseph

Foch, Ferdinand

Folliard, Edward T

Forde, Margaret Ann

Ford Motor Company

Foreign Affairs,

foreign policy, see specific countries, individuals, and issues

Formosa:

MacArthur’s views on

U.S. defense of

see also China; Chinese Nationalists

Formosa Strait

Forrestal, James

atomic bomb and

Berlin crisis and

criticism of

Dewey and

resignation of

as Secretary of Defense

suicide of

Fort Leonard Wood

Fortune

France

Lend-Lease and

Franco, Francisco

Frankfurter, Felix

Franklin Roosevelt Library

Franks, Oliver

Freeman, Douglas Southall

Free-Soilers

Frémont, John Charles

Freud, Sigmund

Friendly, Alfred

Froman, Jane

Fuchs, Klaus

Fulbright, J. William

Fulton, Hugh

Fussell, Paul

Gabrielson, Guy George

Gagnon, René

Gallup, George

Gandhi, Mohandas K. “Mahatma,”

Garfield James A

Garner, John Nance “Cactus Jack,”

Garr, Vietta

Garrett, Will

Gates, George Porterfield

Gates, Madge, see Wallace, Madge Gates

Gates, Marvin

Gates, Mrs. George Porterfield

Gavin, Tom

Gearhart, Bertrand W

General Electric

General Motors

General Order No

Gentry, Alonzo H

Gentry, Sue

George, Todd

George VI, King of England

German Federated Republic (West Germany)

Germany, Nazi

atomic bomb and

defeat of

Soviet pact with

surrender of

U.S. business agreements with companies in

war criminals of

Germany, occupied

division of navy of

Gestapo

GI Bill

Gibson, Charles Dana

Gibson, John W

Girl from Utah, The

Glass, Carter

glass workers’ strike (1946)

Gleam, The

Glenn Martin Company

Gnefkow, Bernard

Goebbels, Joseph

Goering, Hermann

Goldman, Frank

Goldwyn, Sam

Goodman, Benny

Gore, Albert

Gould, Jack

Graham, Billy

Graham, Frank

Graham, James H

Graham, Wallace H

Grant, Ulysses S

Great Britain

atomic bomb and

decline of

Greece and Turkey aided by

Korean War and

Lend-Lease and

Palestine and

Soviet Union and

U.S. relations with

Wallace’s New York speech on

Great Depression, see Depression, Great

Greater Kansas City Plan Association

Great Men and Famous Women

Greece

British aid to

Soviet Union and

U.S. aid to

Greenglass, David

Gregg, Josiah

Gregg, William

Grew, Joseph C

Gromyko, Andrei

Grover, Wayne

Groves, Leslie R.

Guffey, Joe

Gunther, John

Hadrian, Emperor of Rome

Hagan, John

Hagerty, James C

Hague, Frank

Haig, Douglas

Haight, Charles T

Halifax, Edward Wood, Lord

Halle, Louis J

Halleck, Charles

Halsey, Edwin

Hampton, Lionel

Handy, Thomas T

Hannegan, Robert E

background of

HST’s Senate reelection campaign and

vice-presidential nomination (1944) and

Harber, W. Elmer

Hardin, Ardelia

Harding, Warren G

Harpie Club (Independence Harmonicon Society)

Harriman, E. H

Harriman, W. Averell

as ambassador to Great Britain

background of

character and appearance of

as HST campaign contributor

Johnson and

Korea and

MacArthur and

Moscow post quit by

at Potsdam Conference

as presidential candidate

as Secretary of Commerce

Harris, Robert E. G

Harrison, Benjamin

Harrison, Earl G

Harrison, George L

Harrison, Pat

Harrison, William Henry

Harry S. Truman (M. Truman)

Harry S. Truman Library

Harry Truman shirts

Harsch, Joseph

Hartley, Fred Allan, Jr

Harty, Tom

Harvard University

Harvey, Julian

Hassett, Bill

Hatch, Alden

Hatch, Carl

Hauser, Virginia Hill

Havemann, Ernest

Hawaii:

statehood of

Truman family’s vacation in

Hawkes, Albert Wahl

Hayden, Carl

Hayes, Elihu

Hayes, Ira

Hayford, James

H-bomb, see hydrogen bomb

health care and insurance

Healy, George P. A

Heillman, Lee

Helis, William

Heller, Francis H

Helm, Edith

Helm, William

Henderson, Loy W

Hennings, Thomas Carey, Jr

Henry M. Frost Advertising Agency

Henry V (Shakespeare)

Hepburn, Katharine

Hersey, John

Herzog, Isaac Halevi

Hickerson, John

Higgins, Marguerite

Higgins landing craft

Hill, Lister

Hillman, Sidney

Hillman, William

Himmler, Heinrich

Hinde, Edgar

Hirohito, Emperor of Japan

Hiroshima, bombing of

Hirth, William

Hiss, Alger

Hiss, Donald

Hitler, Adolf

Stalin’s pact with

see also Germany, Nazi

Hoban, James

Ho Chi Minh

Hoey, Clyde R

Hoey Committee

Hollywood Bowl

Hollywood Ten

Holmes, Nancy Tyler (great-grandmother)

Holt, Rush

Hoover, Herbert

Hoover, J. Edgar

civil rights movement and

on Communist danger

Dewey aided by

Vaughan’s relationship with

Hopkins, Harry

Hopkins, William J

Home, Lena

Houchens, B. M

Houchens, Fielding

House, Edward

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC):

Dewey campaign and

Hiss case and

Hollywood Ten and

Loyalty Program as response to

House Ways and Means Committee

Householder, Vic

housing

Howard, Roy

How to Predict Elections (Bean)

Huber, Brownie

Hughes, Charles Evans

Hughes, Thomas

Hull, Cordell

Hume, Paul

Humphrey, Hubert H

Humphrey, Muriel

Hungary

Hunt, James V

Hurley, Patrick J

hydrogen bomb (H-bomb; superbomb)

debate on

testing of

Ickes, Harold L

resignation of

I. G. Farben

Igoe-Dickmann organization

Independence, Mo.

blacks in

Depression in

Mormons in

Independence and the Opening of the West (Benton)

Independence Examiner

Independence Harmonicon Society (Harpie Club)

Indianapolis

Indochina

inflation

influenza epidemic (1918-19)

Inland Steel

Interim Committee on S-1

Internal Revenue Bureau

International Acquaintance League

International News Service

Interstate Commerce Commission

Inverchapel, Lord

Investor Pays, The (Lowenthal)

Iran

Ireland, David B., Jr.

Irgun

“iron curtain,”

Israel

see also Palestine

Italy

Iwo Jima

I Write from Washington (Childs)

Jackson, Andrew

statue of

Jackson, Robert H

Jackson, Samuel

Jackson, Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall,”

Jackson County, Mo.

Goat vs. Rabbit Democrats in

HST as eastern judge of

HST as presiding judge of

Mormons in

slavery in

Jacobson, Bluma Rosenbaum

Jacobson, Edward

death of

as HST’s business partner

Palestine issue and

Jacques, Baron

James, Frank

James, Jesse

James, Marquis

Japan

atomic bombing of

atrocities committed by

China bombed by

fire bombing of

Korea and

Pearl Harbor attacked by, see Pearl Harbor attack

Potsdam Conference and

proposed invasion of

Soviet Union and

surrender of

Japanese-Americans

Jayhawkers

Jazz Age

Jefferson, Thomas

Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners

Jefferson Memorial

Jenner, William E

Jennison, “Doc,”

Jessup, Philip

Jester, Beauford

Jewish Agency

Jews

as voters

see also Israel; Palestine; Zionists

John McShain, Inc

Johnson, Alexis

Johnson, Andrew

Johnson, Edwin

Johnson, Louis A

controversy of

HST’s problems with

resignation of

as Secretary of Defense

on Z Committee

Johnson, Lyndon B

Johnston, Alvanley

Johnston, Olin

Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy

Jones, Jesse

Jones, Joseph M

Jones, Thomas E

Judd, Walter

Justice Department, U.S.

Kaiser, Henry J

Kaltenborn, H.V.

kamikazes

Kansas

Kansas City, Mo

building boom in

“home rule” in

HST’s first presidential visit to

Union Station Massacre in

“wide-open” era in

Kansas City Athletic Club

Kansas City Automobile Club

Kansas City Club

Kansas City Journal-Post,

Kansas City Star

Kansas City Times

Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)

Kaplan, Charles

Katyn Forest Massacre

Keck, Charles L.

Keenan, Sergeant

Kefauver, Estes

Kefauver Committee

Kelley, Harry

Kelly, Edward J.

Kelly, Gene

Kem, James P.

Kemper, William T.

Kempton, Greta

Kennan, George F.

atomic bomb and

“Long Telegram” of

on Marshall

Marshall Plan role of

Palestine issue and

Policy Planning Staff of

Kennan Report

Kennedy, Jacqueline

Kennedy, John F.

assassination of

Kennedy, Joseph, Jr.

Kennedy, Joseph Patrick

Kennedy, Robert F.

Kent, Frank

Kentuckian, The (Benton)

Kentucky

Kern, Jerome

Kerr, Robert

Khrushchev, Nikita

Kilgore, Harley

Killilae, Mrs. Walter

Kim Il-sung

King, Cecil Rhodes

King, Ernest J.

King David Hotel, bombing of

Kinnaman, Edna

Kinsey, Alfred

Kirkpatrick, Helen

Kistiakowsky, Dr.

Klemm, Karl D.

Knebel, Fletcher

Knowland, William

Knox, Frank

Knudsen, William S

Knutson, Harold

Konoye, Prince Fumimaro

Korea

Korean War

atomic bomb and

Battle of Taejon in

casualties in

cease-fire proposal in

Chinese intervention in

Congress and

Eisenhower and

end of

fighting conditions in

Inchon landing in

MacArthur in

North Korean prisoners in

as “police action,”

press conference on

Ridgway in

Soviet Union and

steel crisis and

38th parallel in

as U.N. action

U.S. responsibility in

U.S. troops committed to

Krimminger, Charles E.

Krock, Arthur

Kronheim, Milton S., Sr.

Krueger, Karl

Krug, Julius

Ku Klux Klan

Kuomintang, see Chinese Nationalists

Kurchatov, Igor V.

Kyoto

labor, labor unions

Taft-Hartley Act and

see also strikes

Labor Department, U.S.

LaCapra, Michael James “Jimmy Needles,”

LaGuardia, Fiorello

Lane, James Henry

Langer, William

Lascelles, Alan

Lasker, Morris

Latta, Maurice C.

Lattimore, Owen J.

Lausche, Frank

Lawrence, David

Lawrence, Ernest O.

Lawrence, William

Lawrence Massacre

Lazia, Johnny

League of Nations

Leahy, William

death of

at Potsdam

Lee, Dr.

Lee, Jay

Lee, Robert E.

Lee’s Summit Journal

Leigh, Vere

Lelyveld, Arthur J.

Lend-lease’ Act (1941)

Lenin, V.I.

Leningrad

Lerner, Max

LeRoy (White House leaf-raker)

Leschetizky, Theodore

Lesseps, Ferdinand de

Leviero, Tony

Lewis, J. Hamilton “Ham,”

Lewis, John L

Truman Committee appearance of

Lewis, Sinclair

Lhévinne, Josef

Liberty

Lie, Trygve

Life

Churchill’s book in

HST’s memoirs in

Lilienthal, David E.

atomic bomb and

on Atomic Energy Commission

communism and

on Z Committee

Lima News

Lincoln, Abraham

Gettysburg Address of

McClellan and

Lindbergh, Charles

Lindbergh kidnapping

Lippmann, Walter

List, Eugene

Littlefair, Duncan E.

Lloyd, David

“Locksley Hall” (Tennyson)

Lockwood, Paul

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr.

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Sr.

Long, Earl

Long, Huey

Long, Tania

“Long Telegram,”

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

Look

Los Alamos

Los Angeles Times

“Lost Battalion,”

Louisville Courier-Journal

Lovett, Robert A

Lowe, Frank

Lowenthal, Max

Loyalty Program

Lubell, Samuel

Lucas, Scott

Luce, Clare Boothe

Luce, Henry R

Ludendorff, Erich

Lykins, Johnston

lynchings

McAdams, Clark

MacArthur, Douglas

Chiang and

death of

divided-forces tactic of

end-the-war offensive of

farewell speech of

heroic standing of

HST’s firing of

HST’s opinion of

HST’s Wake Island meeting with

Inchon victory of

insubordination of

in Korean War

letter to Martin from

Reminiscences of

Senate investigation on firing of

speaking tour of

VFW statement of

McCann, Gerard

McCarran, Pat

McCarthy, Joseph R.

death of

Eisenhower and

Marshall attacked by

McCarthyism

McClellan, George B.

McClintock, Robert

McCloy, John J.

McCluer, Franc L.

McCormack, James

McCormack, John

McCormick, Anne O’Hare

McCormick, Ken

McCormick, Robert “Bertie,”

MacDonald, Donald J.

MacDonald, Jeanette

McElroy, Henry

McElroy, Mary

Macfadden, Bernarr

McFarland, Ernest

McGarrity, W. F.

McGowan, Carl

McGrath, J. Howard

firing of

McGrory, Mary

McKellar, Kenneth “Old Mack,”

McKim, Charles

McKim, Edward

McKim, Mead, & White

McKinley, William

McKinney, Frank E.

McMahon, Alphonse

McMahon, Brien

McNaughton, Frank

MacVeigh, Lincoln

Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum

Madison, Dolley

Madison, James

magnesium production

Malenkov, Georgi M.

Malik, Jacob

Maloney, James J.

Manchester, William

Manchester Guardian

Manchuria:

Japan’s invasion of

in Korean War

Soviet Union and

Manhattan Project (S-1)

see also atomic bomb, atomic energy

Manila

Mann, Betsie

Mann, Christopher

Mansfield, Mike

Mao Tse-tung

Map Room

Maragon, “Mysterious” John

Marcantonio, Vito

Marcelle, Joseph P.

March, Fredric

“March of Time, The”

Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome

Marine Corps

maritime strike (1946)

Marks, Ted

Marshall, George C.

atomic bomb and

background of

Berlin crisis and

character and appearance of

China mission of

confidence and morale inspired by

death and funeral of

Eisenhower and

Europe and

Harvard commencement speech of

on HST

HST on

Japan and

Korean War and

MacArthur’s firing and

McCarthy’s attack on

Palestine issue and

at Potsdam

retirement of

as Secretary of Defense

as Secretary of State

Vinson mission and

in World War I

World War II and

Marshall, John

Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program; ERP)

authorship and naming of

conception of

congressional approval of

cost of

Harvard commencement speech on

Kennan’s role in

1948 campaign and

partition of Palestine and

Progressive Party’s denunciation of

Martin, Glenn

Martin, Joseph

background of

and firing of MacArthur

as presidential candidate

as Speaker of the House

Masaryk, Jan

Masons

HST’s membership in

Matheus, Elijah “Cap”

Mathias, Bob

Matthews, Francis P.

Matthews, T. S.

Mayerberg, Samuel S.

Mays, John

Mead, James

Meader, George

meatpackers’ strike (1946)

meat prices

meat shortages

medical care, see health care and insurance

Medicare

Médicis, Catherine de

Meisburger, Edward

Mellon, Andrew

Melton, Thomas

Memoirs (Truman)

Mencken, H. L.

Menefee, Walter

Menninger, William C.

Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare)

Merman, Ethel

Messall, Victor

Mesta, Perle

Meuse-Argonne offensive

Mexican-American War

Mexico:

HST’s visit to

water treaty with

Meyer, Agnes

Miami Daily News

Middle East

see also specific countries

Miles, John

military

civilian control of

discrimination in

NSC-68 report on

strength of

unification of forces in

universal training for

see also defense spending; draft, military

Miller, Merle

Miller, Verne

Milligan, Jacob L. “Tuck”

Milligan, Maurice

Milwaukee Journal

minimum wage

mink coats

Minton, Sherman

Mission to Moscow (Davies)

Missouri

congressional districts in

Depression in

General Order No. 11 and

migration to

slavery in

see also Jackson County, Mo.; specific cities and towns

Missouri Compromise

Missouri River

Mitchell, Richard

Mitchell, Samuel

Mitchell, Stephen A.

Molotov, Vyacheslav M.

Monroe, Elizabeth Kortright

Monroe, James

Monroe Doctrine

Monroney, A. S. Mike

Montgomery, Emmett

Moore, Charles H.

Moore, Elizabeth

Moran, Lord

Morgan, David

Morgan Oil and Refining Company

Morgenthau, Henry

Morison, Samuel Eliot

Mormons

Morris, Newbold

Mostyn-Owen, Willy

Mount Palomar

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

Mr. Citizen (Truman)

Mr. President (Hillman)

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Muccio, John

Müller-Grote, Gustav

Mundt, Karl Earl

Murphy, Charles

Murphy, Harry

Murphy, Robert

Murphy, Tom

Murray, Matthew S.

Murray, Phil

Murrow, Edward R.

Mussolini, Benito

Myers, Hank

Mylander, William

Nagasaki, bombing of

Nagoya, bombing of

Napoleon I, Emperor of France

Nash, Frank “Jelly”

Nation

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

National Bank of Commerce

National Conference of City Planning

National Defense Advisory Commission

National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB)

National Guard

National Old Trails Association

National Security Act (1947)

National Security Council (NSC)

Korea and

military strength report (NSC-68) of

Z Committee of

NATO, see North Atlantic Treaty Organization

natural resources

Navy, U.S.

contracts for, see defense spending

Navy Bureau of Ships

Nazis, see Germany, Nazi

NDMB (National Defense Mediation Board)

Nebraska

Neild, Edward F.

Nelson, Donald M.

Nesbitt, Henrietta

Neutrality Act (1936)

Nevins, Allan

New Deal

Communists and

Second Hundred Days of

New Republic

Newsweek

election poll in

New Yorker

New York Herald-Tribune

New York Post

New York Sun

New York Times

see also Krock, Arthur

New York Times Book Review

New York Times Magazine

Nicholson, Henry

Niles, David K.

Nimitz, Chester A.

Niños Héroes, Los

Nitze, Paul

Nixon, Pat

Nixon, Richard M.

Nixon, Robert

Noland, Ella Truman (aunt)

Noland, Ethel (cousin)

Noland, Joseph (uncle)

Noland, Nellie (cousin)

Noland House

Norman, Lloyd

Norris, George W.

Norstad, Lauris

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

North Attleboro Chronicle

Noyes, David M.

NSC, see National Security Council

NSC-68 report

nuclear weapons, see atomic bomb, atomic energy

Nude Descending a Staircase (Duchamp)

Nuremberg

Nye, Gerald P.

Nye Committee

Odlum, Floyd B.

Odum, Reathel

O’Dwyer, William

Office of Defense Mobilization

Office of Economic Stabilization

Office of Emergency Management (OEM)

Office of Facts and Figures

Office of Production Management (OPM)

Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion

Ogburn, Charlton, Jr.

Ogden, Betty

Ogden, Sue

O’Hara John

O’Hare, William

Ohrdruf-Nord

oil industry

Middle East and

Okinawa

Oliphant, Charles

Olympic Games (1948)

Omaha Morning World Herald

O’Malley, R. Emmett

OPM (Office of Production Management)

Oppenheimer, J. Robert

Order No. 11 (Bingham)

Oregon Journal

organized crime

Osborne, John

Osmeña, Sergio

Ott, Natalie

Oxford University

Pace, Frank, Jr.

PACs (Political Action Committees)

Paderewski, Ignace Jan

Palawan Massacre

Palestine

Arabs in

Forrestal and

Great Britain and

partitioning of

U.N. and

Zionists and

see also Israel

Palmer, Ardelia Hardin

Palmer, W. L. C.

Parent, Thomas

Park, Guy B.

Parkman, Francis

Parks, Lillian

Paterson, Newell

Patterson, Robert

Patterson, Roscoe Conkling

Patton, George S.

Patton, Melvin

Pauley, Ed

Pavlov, V.N.

Paxton, Mary

Payne, Robert

Peabody, Endicott

Peacock, James

Peale, Rembrandt

Pearl Harbor attack

Pearson, Drew

Forrestal and

Vaughan and

Pegler, Westbrook

Pendergast, James “Alderman Jim”

Pendergast, James M.

Pendergast, John

Pendergast, Kathleen

Pendergast, Michael

Pendergast, Mrs. Thomas

Pendergast, Robert

Pendergast, Thomas Joseph “T.J.,”

Benton and

character and appearance of

death of

downfall of

HST’s first meeting with

HST’s relationship with

HST’s Senate campaign and

illness of

Lazia and

Pendergast, T. J., Jr.

Pendergast political machine

as stigma on HST

Pentagon

see also Defense Department, U.S.

Pepper, Claude

Perkins, Frances

Perlman, Philip B.

Perón, Juan

Perry, J. Lester

Perching, John J.

Pétain, Henri Philippe

Peters, Mize

Petrillo, James C.

Petroleum Administration

Phelps, Margaret

Philadelphia Record

Philippines

Phillips, Cabell

photographers

Pierce, Franklin

Pilgrims

Pine, David A.

Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company

Pittsburgh Courier

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh Press

Pius XII, Pope

Plain Speaking (Miller)

Plunkett, J. P.

Plutarch

PM

Point Four Program

Poland

Potsdam Conference and

Soviet occupation of

Policy Planning Staff

Political Action Committees (PACs)

“Politics of 1948, The” (Rowe)

Polk, James Knox

poll taxes

Potsdam Conference (1945

atomic bomb and

central issues at

HST’s quarters at

results of

Potsdam Declaration

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr.

Powell, Hettie

Powell, Jane

Prague

Pravda

presidential flag and seal, redesigning of

President’s Economic Council

press conferences, SIS-819

press photographers

Prettyman, Arthur

Progressive Citizens of America

Prohibition

Proxmire, William

Pruden, Edward

Public Utility Holding Company Act (1935)

Puerto Rico

Pugh, Conley

Pugh, Noah E.

Purcell, E. T. “Buck,”

Pye, John

Quantrill, William

Rabaut, Louis C.

racial prejudice

HST and

in military

see also civil rights

Radford, Arthur

radio

Railway Labor Act (1934)

railway strike (1946)

Randall, Clarence

Rash, Bryson

Rayburn, Sam

funeral of

HST’s reelection campaign and

1948 Democratic Convention chaired by

Truman Doctrine supported by

as vice-presidential candidate

Reagan, Ronald

Reason Why, The (Woodham-Smith)

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC)

Reddig, William

Redding, Jack

Red Legs

Reece, Carroll

Reed, Clyde Martin

Reed, James A. “Fighting Jim,”

Reed, Nell Donnelly

Reed, Stanley F.

Regan, Phil

Remington, Frederic

Reminiscences (MacArthur)

rent control

Republican National Committee

Republican National Conventions:

of 1944

of 1948

of 1952

Republican Party

Jewish votes and

1946 congressional elections won by

1950 congressional elections won by

see also election of 1948; elections; specific individuals

Resolution

Reston, James

Results of County Planning

Reuben James

Reuther, Walter

Reynolds, Frank A.

RFC (Reconstruction Finance Corporation)

Rhee, Syngman

Rice, John

“Richard Cory” (Robinson)

Richardson, Seth

Richetti, Adam

Rickenbacker, Eddie

Ricketts, Floyd

Ridge, Albert

Ridgway, Matthew

in Korean War

Riedel, Richard

Rigdon, William

Roberts, Roy

Robeson, Paul

Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Robinson, Harold

Robinson, Joseph T.

Robinson, S. M.

Rockefeller, John D.

Rogers, Ginger

Rogers, Will

Romania

Roosevelt, Alice

Roosevelt, Eleanor

HST endorsed by

husband’s death and

Roosevelt, Elliott

Roosevelt, Franklin Jr.

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

“arsenal of democracy” speech of

background of

Barkley and

blacks and

bombing and

Byrnes and

Churchill and

Clark and

Congress and

Court-packing plan of

death of

declining health of

Dewey and

dog of

electronic surveillance and

Ferdinand Magellan and

Flynn’s influence on

Four Freedoms of

fourth term of

funeral of

Good Neighbor Policy of

health of

Herbert Hoover and

HST compared with

HST on

HST’s relationship with

“inspection tour” of

King and

Lend-Lease program of

Long and

loyalty issue and

MacArthur and

Map Room established by

Marshall and

New Deal of, see New Deal

1944 elections and

office of

OPM and

Palestine issue and

Pauley and

Secret Service and

seizure suffered by

Soviet Union and

Stalin and

Stark and

Truman Committee and

Wallace and

War Production Board established by

at Yalta

Roosevelt, James “Jimmy,”

Roosevelt, Theodore

Roper, Elmo

Rose, Billy

Rosenbaum, Bluma, see Jacobson, Bluma Rosenbaum

Rosenberg, Anna

Rosenman, Dorothy

Rosenman, Sam

Ross, Charlie

death of

on HST

as HST’s childhood friend

HST’s reelection campaign and

loyalty of

at Potsdam

press secretary appointment of

Vaughan and

Wallace’s New York speech and

Ross, Mike

Rovere, Richard

Rowe, James A., Jr.

Rowley, Jim

Royall, Kenneth C.

Royce, Morton

rubber production

Rummel, Henry

Rusk, Dean

Russell, Richard B., Jr.

S-1, see Manhattan Project

St. Louis Globe-Democrat

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

St. Louis Star-Times

Saint-Mihiel

Salisbury, Frank O.

Salisbury, Spencer

Saltonstall, Leverett

San Antonio Express

Sanderson, Julia

San Francisco Conference (1945)

San Francisco Examiner

Sargent, John Singer

Sato, Naotake

Saturday Evening Post

Saturday Review

Saudi Arabia

Sawyer, Aaron

Sawyer, Charles

Schenectady

Scherer, Ray

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr.

Schneider, Edward L.

Schoeneman, George J.

Schultheiss, Paul

Schwartz, Harry

Schwellenbach, Lewis

Scott, Hazel

Scouten, Rex

Seattle Times

Sebald, William

Secretary of Defense, creation of office of

Secret Service, U.S.

assassination attempt and

at Potsdam

Senate, U.S.:

Appropriations Committee

Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses of the Senate

District of Columbia Committee

Hoey Committee

HST’s career in

Interstate Commerce Committee

Kefauver Committee

Military Affairs Committee

Nye Committee

Printing Committee

Public Buildings and Grounds Committee

Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, see Truman Committee

Tydings Committee

see also Congress, U.S.

Sermon, Roger T.

Sevareid, Eric

Seward, William H.

Shakespeare, William

Shanghai

Shannon, Joseph B.

Shannon, William V.

Shaw, George W.

Shaw, Mary

Sherman, Forrest

Sherman, William Tecumseh

Shertok, Moshe

Sherwood, Robert

Short, Dewey

Short, Joe

Shostakovich, Dmitri

Siddeley, Armstrong

Siegel, Benjamin “Bugsy,”

Silver, Abba Hillel

Simpson, Caroline

Simpson, “Letch,”

Singapore

Slaughter, Elizabeth

Slaughter, O. V.

Slaughter, Roger C.

Slaughter, Stephen

slavery

Sloan, Samuel A.

Smith, Alfred E.

Smith, Ellison DuRant “Cotton Ed,”

Smith, Harold D.

Smith, Ira

Smith, Jabez

Smith, Joseph

Smith, Margaret Chase

Smith, Merriman

Smith, Walter Bedell

Smith-Connally Act (1943)

Smyth, James G.

Snyder, Drucie

Snyder, John

Snyder, Mrs. John

Soames, Christopher

Soames, Mary Churchill

Social Security

Social Security Act (1935)

Soldier’s Story, A (Bradley)

Somervell, Brehon B.

Somoza, Anastasio

Soong, T. V.

Sophocles

Souers, Sidney W.

Southern, William

Soviet Union

atomic bomb and

Berlin and

China and

Cold War with, see Cold War

expansionist policy of

Germany and

Great Britain and

Greece and

HST’s forecast for

Iran occupied by

Japan and

Korean War and

Lend-Lease and

Marshall Plan and

military strength of

Nazi pact with

Palestine and

Poland occupied by

Potsdam Conference and, see Potsdam Conference

Turkey and

U.S. relations with

Vinson mission and

Wallace’s New York speech on

in World War II

Yalta agreements and

see also Stalin, Joseph

Spaatz, Carl A

SPAB (Supplies Priorities and Allocations Board)

Spain

Sparkman, John

Spellman, Francis Joseph Cardinal

Spence, Brent

Spina, Frank

Spitalny, Phil

Stafford, Terry

Staley Milling Company

Stalin, Joseph

atomic bomb and

Berlin and

character and appearance of

Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech and

death of

Germany and

Marshall Plan and

at Potsdam

Roosevelt and

Vinson mission and

Stampler, Manly

Standard Oil of New Jersey

Stapf, Harlow A.

Stark, Lloyd C.

Stassen, Harold E.

State Department, U.S.

see also Acheson, Dean; Byrnes, James; Marshall, George C.; specific foreign policy issues

State of the Union

Stayton, E. M.

Steele, Jack

steel industry

crisis in

HST’s seizure of

Korean War and

Steelman, John R

steel strikes:

of 1946

of 1952

Steinfirst, Donald

Stern, Isaac

Stettinius, Edward

Stevenson, Adlai E.

background of

death of

as governor of Illinois

HST’s plea for candidacy of

as presidential candidate

Stevenson, Adlai E.

Stevenson, Adlai E. (Vice President)

Stevenson, Coke

Stewart, Murray

Stewart, Tom

Stimson, Henry L

atomic bomb and

on Germany

Marshall and

political career of

at Potsdam

retirement of

Stone, Harlan

Stone, I. F

Story of Harry Truman, The

Stout, Stuart

Stowe, David

Straight, Michael

Straus, Noel

Strauss, Lewis

Street, Charles

Strickler, Mrs. Thomas J.

strikes

auto workers’

coal

electrical workers’

railway

steel, see steel strikes

Taft-Hartley Act and

telegraph

telephone

Strother, John

Strother, Sam

Strout, Richard

Study of Reconstruction Finance Corporation: Favoritism and Influence

Styka, Tadé

Sullivan, John L.

Sullivan, William C.

Sulzberger, Arthur Hays

Sulzberger, C. L.

Summer, Grace

“Sunday Evening Hour,”

superbomb, see hydrogen bomb

Supplies Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB)

Supreme Court, U.S.

Roosevelt’s plan for

steel mill seizure and

Surplus Property Administration

Susskind, David

Suzuki, Kantaro

Swanson, Gloria

Swayze, John Cameron

Swope, Chrisman

Symington, Stuart

Szilard, Leo

Taber, John

Taft, Mrs. Robert A

Taft, Robert A

character and appearance of

Dewey and

on Lilienthal

as presidential candidate

Taft, William Howard

retirement of

Taft-Hartley Act (1947)

Taiwan, see Formosa

Talmadge, Herman

Tames, George

tax collection, corruption in

taxes

Taylor, “Fiddlin’ Bob,”

Taylor, Glen H.

Taylor, Tasker

Taylor, Telford

Teapot Dome scandal

Teasley, Walter “Cushionfoot,”

telegraph strike

telephone strikes:

of 1946

of 1952

television

films about presidency on

political conventions on

presidential inauguration on

White House tour on

Teller, Edward

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord

Thacker, Ralph

“They’ll Never Believe Me” (Kern)

Thomas, Elmer

Thomas, J. Parnell

Thomas, Lowell

Thompson, Dorothy

Thompson, Ed

Thompson, Llewellyn

Thomson, Virgil

Thorndike, Joseph J., Jr.

Thurman, Samuel

Thurmond, J. Strom

Tiernan, L. Curtis

Tighe, Arthur

Time

Times (London)

Times of India

Tinley, John P.

Tito, Marshal (Josip Broz)

Tobey, Charles

Togo, Shigenori

Tokyo

Torresola, Griselio

To Secure These Rights

Tracy, Spencer

Traubel, Helen

Triangle Club

Truitt, Mrs. Max

Truman, Anderson Shipp (Shippe) (grandfather)

Civil War and

slaves owned by

Truman, Elizabeth Wallace “Bess” (wife)

and assassination attempt on HST

character of

death of

European vacations of

farewell luncheon for HST and

father’s suicide and

as First Lady

Forrestal and

frugality of

HST’s Christmas visit and

HST’s courting of

HST’s engagement to

HST’s “final” argument with

HST’s hiring of

HST’s letters to

HST’s political career and

HST’s presidency resisted by

HST’s reelection campaign and

HST’s relationship with

HST’s war service and

HST’s wedding to

Independence summers of

as influence on HST

Margaret’s singing and

mastectomy of

miscarriages of

oil venture and

physical appearance of

privacy guarded by

Roosevelt’s death and

Ross’s post and

on Senate staff

Washington apartments of

White House and

Truman, Emma

Truman, Harry (nephew)

Truman, Harry S.:

aging of

ambition of

in American Legion

in Army reserve

at Army summer camp

artistic tastes of

assassination attempt on

automobile travels of

bank jobs of

Bible reading of

birthday parties for

birth of

“The Buck Stops Here” sign of

campaign style of

character and appearance of

childhood accidents of

childhood of

Chubb Fellowship given to

Citizens Security bank venture of

clubs joined by

as “common man” president

confidence of

congressional position sought by

construction timekeeper job of

corruption attributed to administration

courage of

cronyism ascribed to

death of

diary of

diligence of

drugstore job of

as eastern judge of Jackson County

Court

education of

energy of

European vacations of

eyeglasses and eyesight of

fairness of

falls of

farewell address of

farewell luncheon for

as farmer

as father

as federal reemployment service director

film on

first automobile of

first Cabinet appointments of

first congressional address of

first postwar message to Congress of

first presidential term of

first press conference of

friends hired by

funeral of

Gates residence of

“give-’em-hell-Harry” style of

as “go-along, get-along Harry,”

governor’s post desired by

growth and changes of

headaches of

health of

heroes of

history and

Independence homes of

as investigator see also Truman Committee

as Jeffersonian

jokes about

in Kansas City

Kansas City Automobile Club job of

land speculation trips of

last press conference of

last weeks of presidency of

as late bloomer

law school courses of

“longhand spasms” of

long-range objectives lacked by

as Mason

memoirs of, see Memoirs

memorial tributes to

men’s furnishing store of

morals and integrity of

name and middle initial of

in National Guard

as nineteenth-century man

“nonpolitical” cross-country tours of

in oil venture

as Pendergast man, see Pendergast political machine

piano playing of

politics as interest of

politics as life work of

politics as seen by

popularity of

portraits of

on presidency

presidency resisted by

presidential “honeymoon” of

presidential inauguration of

presidential reelection campaign funds for

presidential reelection campaign of

presidential reelection of

as presiding judge of Jackson County Court

press conferences of

reading of

religious views of

retirement announcement of

retirement financial situation of

retirement of

road overseer job of

salaries of

second presidential term of

Senate campaign of (1934)

Senate campaign of (1940)

Senate career of

on Senate committees; see also Truman committee

shirts of

speeches of

staff’s relationship with

in stage show

in television films

temper of

theater-going of

vacations of

values and beliefs of

vice-presidency resisted by

as Vice President

as vice-presidential candidate

Washington apartments of

West Point aspirations of

Whistle-stop Campaign of

World War I service of

at Young farm

zinc-mine venture of

Truman, J. C. (nephew)

Truman, John (great-uncle)

Truman, John Anderson (father)

businesses and jobs of

character and appearance of

as farmer

financial misfortunes of

houses and farms of

illness and death of

politics as interest of

Truman, John Vivian (brother)

birth of

death of

HST’s hiring of

marriage of

Truman, Lawrence

Truman, Luella Campbell (sister-in-law)

Truman, Margaret (aunt)

Truman, Margaret (daughter), see Daniel, Mary Margaret “Margie” Truman

Truman, Martha Ann (niece)

Truman, Martha Ellen “Mattie”; (mother)

accident of

character and appearance of

Chiles and

death of

eviction of

failing health of

farm mortgages of

hernia operation of

HST’s automobile and

HST’s buying back farm of

HST’s letters to

HST’s war service and

as influence on HST

Margaret’s singing and

marriage of

piano of

pneumonia of

stroke of

surgery of

Washington visit of

Truman, Mary (aunt)

Truman, Mary Jane (sister)

birth of

character and appearance of

farm run by

HST’s letters to

HST’s relationship with

HST’s war service and

letters from

Truman, Mary Jane Holmes (grandmother)

Truman, Mary Martha (aunt)

Truman, Ralph (cousin)

Truman, William (great-grandfather)

Truman, William (uncle)

Truman & Jacobson

Truman Balcony

Truman Committee (Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program)

appropriation for

atomic bomb and

camp construction investigated by

corporations investigated by

dollar-a-year men opposed by

Roosevelt and

staff of

steel plate production investigated by

Truman Doctrine

Acheson’s role in

aid to Greece and Turkey in

as continuation of historic U.S. policies

HST’s speech to Congress on

leadership demonstrated in

1948 campaign and

Progressive Party’s denunciation of

Truman Library, see Harry S. Truman Library

Truman Merry-Go-Round, The(Allen and Shannon)

Truman Story, The

Truman-Wheeler Bill

Trumbull, John

Tubby, Roger

Tully, Andrew

Tully, Grace

Tunney, Gene

Turkey

British aid to

Soviet Union and

U.S. aid to

Turner, Roy J.

Turnip congress

TVA, see Tennessee Valley Authority

Twain, Mark

Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution

Twyman, Dr.

Twyman, Elmer

Tydings, Millard

Tydings Committee

Tyler, John

unemployment

Union Army

Union National Bank

unions, see labor, labor unions

Union Station Massacre

United Mine Workers

United Nations (U.N.)

Atomic Energy Commission of

Charter of

Korean War as action of

Palestine issue and

San Francisco Conference on

Security Council of

United Nations Association

United Press

United States

United States Relations with China: With Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949

United Steel Workers

Urey, Harold

U.S. News and World Report

U.S. Steel Corporation

V-l rockets

Vaccaro, Tony

Vaile, Harvey

Vandenberg, Arthur

character and appearance of

as former isolationist

Lilienthal and

Vandenberg, Hoyt

Vardaman, James K. “Jake,” Jr.

Vaughan, Harry

character and appearance of

on HST’s eyeglasses

s HST’s military aide

J. Edgar Hoover and

pearson’s attack on

at Potsdam

self-importance of

Senate investigation of

senatorial staff position of

Vaughan, Samuel

Veatch, N. T., Jr.

Versailles Treaty (1919)

veterans:

aid to

black

garden parties for

GI Bill and

housing for

Veterans of Foreign Wars

Vietnam

Vietnam War

Vinson, Fred M.

special mission planned for

Vivian, John

Volkogonov, Dmitri

Vrooman, Howard

wages

Wage Stabilization Board

Waggoner, William

Wagner, Robert

Wagner Labor Relations Act (1935)

Wainwright, Jonathan M.

Wake Island Conference (1950)

Walker, Frank

Walker, Kay

Walker, Walton

Wallace, Carrie

Wallace, David, suicide of

Wallace, Frank

Wallace, Fred

Wallace, George

Wallace, Helen

Wallace, Henry A.

character of

China trip of

HST’s firing of

as presidential candidate

Progressive Party of

speech fiasco and

as Vice President

as vice-presidential candidate

Wallace, Madge Gates

death of

HST’s residence at house of

Margaret’s singing and

Wallace, May Southern

Wallace, Natalie Ott

Wallace, Natalie

Wallgren, Monrad C.

Wall Street Journal

Walsh, David I.

Walsh, Edmund A.

Walsh, Jerome

War Department, U.S.

see also Defense Department, U.S.

War Mobilization

War Powers and Stabilization Act (1942)

War Production Board

Warren, Earl

Washington, George

Washington Evening Star

Washington News

Washington Post

Washington Press Club

Washington Star

Washington Times-Herald

Wasson, Guy

Wasson, Yancey

waterways proposal

Watson, Edwin “Pa,”

Weathers, James

Webb, James

Weizmann, Chaim

Welch, Casimir

Wells, Louise

West, J. B.

West Germany (German Federated Republic)

Westminster College

West Point:

cheating scandal at

HST’s aspirations to

HST’s views of

Westwood, Mike

Wharton, Edith

Wheeler, Burton K.

Wherry, Kenneth Spicer

Whistle-stop Campaign

White, Grace

White, Wallace H.

White, Walter

White House

balcony added to

bomb shelter in

collapsing structure of

entertaining at

as haunted

Public tours of

renovation of

television tour of

Whitman, Alden

Whitney, A. F.

Whitney, Albert

Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt

Whitney, Courtney

Whittier, John Greenleaf

Wickard, Claude

Wiley, Alexander

Wilhelm, Warren F.

Wilkins, Fraser

Willa Coates Airport

Willard, Daniel

William Jewell College

Williams, Herbert Lee

Williamsburg

Willis, Raymond

Willkie, Wendell

Wilson, Arthur

Wilson, Charles E.

Wilson, Ellen

Wilson, Francis M.

Wilson, Ida

Wilson, R. P.

Wilson, Woodrow

Winant, John G.

Winchell, Walter

Winslow, Lorenzo

Wise, Stephen

Wolf, Agnes Strauss

women’s vote

Wonderful Town

Woodham-Smith, Cecil

Woodward, Isaac

Woodward, Sara

Woodward, Stanley

Wooldridge, Glen

Woolf, S.J.

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

World War I

HST’s service in

World War II:

aftermath of

aid to European Jews in

atomic bombing of Japan in

Battle of Britain in

Big Three conferences in see Potsdam Conference; Yalta Conference

Churchill’s history of

civilian control of military in

demobilization after

division of Korea in

end of

HST’s sudden responsibilities in

Manhattan Project in

mobilization for

Nazi attack on Soviets in

Nazi-Soviet Pact and

1944 presidential campaign and

Roosevelt’s death and

Senate probe of spending in, see Truman Committee

vice-presidential selection and

war agencies developed for

WPA (Works Progress Administration)

Wright, Fielding L.

Wyeth, Andrew

Xenophon

Yale University

Yalta Conference (1945)

Yalta Declaration

Yeager, Chuck

York, Alvin

Young, Ada (aunt)

Young, Brigham

Young, Ed

Young, E. Merl

Young, Elizabeth (aunt)

Young, Harriet Louisa Gregg (grandmother)

death of

Lane and

will written by

Young, Harrison “Harry” (uncle)

character and appearance of

death of

Lane and

Young, Hiram

Young, Jacob (great-grandfather)

Young, Laura Jane (aunt)

Young, Loretta (Mrs. E. Merl Young)

Young, Rachael Goodnight (great-grandmother)

Young, Sarah Ann, see Chiles, Sarah Ann “Sallie” Young

Young, Solomon (grandfather)

death of

farms of

Kansas City exile of

slaves owned by

wagon-train expeditions of

Young, Susan Mary (aunt)

Young, William (uncle)

Younger, Coleman

Younger, Henry

Yugoslavia

Z Committee

Zeisler, Fannie Bloomfield

Zemer, Leslie

Zhukov, Georgi

Zionist Organization of America

Zionists

see also Palestine

Photo Credits

SECTION 1

Harry S. Truman Library: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 32, 37, 39

Library of Congress: 8, 35

U.S. Army: 19

Joe Pruett Collection: 25, 27, 28

Kansas City Star: 29, 30, 31

AP/Wide World: 33

UPI/Bettmann: 34, 36

Chicago Sun-Times: 38

SECTION 2

Harry Goodwin, Washington Post: 1

Independence Examiner: 2

Abbie Rowe, U.S. National Park Service: 3, 11, 20

U.S. Army: 4, 6, 7, 8, 9

U.S. Navy: 5, 14

Harry S. Truman Library: 10

Photo World/ FPG/International: 12, 22

AP/Wide World: 13, 25, 27

UPI/Bettmann: 15, 17, 19, 21, 24

Copyright Washington Post; Reprinted by permission of D.C. Public Library: 16

Kansas City Star: 18

Courtesy Selby Kelly: 23

St. Louis Globe-Democrat: 26

SECTION 3

U.S. Overseas Mission: 1

Harry S. Truman Library: 2, 6, 14

Copyright Washington Post; Reprinted by permission of D.C. Public Library: 3, 5, 16

UPI/Bettmann: 4, 9, 11

AP/Wide World: 7, 12, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25

U.S. Navy: 8

Abbie Rowe, U.S. National Park Service: 10, 13, 15

Herblock/Washington Post: 18

U.S. Army: 17

Chicago Tribune: 21

Levi Photo: 22

Bradley Smith: 26, 27

Randall Jessee/Harry S. Truman Library: 28

By David McCullough

JOHN ADAMS

TRUMAN

BRAVE COMPANIONS

MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK

THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS

THE GREAT BRIDGE

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD

The

COURSE

of

HUMAN EVENTS

The 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

David McCullough

Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 2004 by David McCullough

All rights reserved,

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission from

W. W. Norton & Company to reprint material from

Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way.

Manufactured in the United States of America

1   3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4   2

ISBN 0-7432-6783-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-743-55038-3

eISBN-13: 978-1-439-19001-2

THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS

WASHINGTON, D.C.

MAY 15, 2003

Dr. Cole, ladies and gentlemen, to be honored as I am tonight in the capital of our country, in the presence of my family and many old friends, is for me almost an out-of-body experience. Had someone told me forty years ago, as I began work on my first book, trying to figure out how to go about it, that I would one day be standing here, the recipient of such recognition, I would, I think, have been stopped dead in my tracks.

I’ve loved the work, all the way along—the research, the writing, the rewriting, so much that I’ve learned about the history of the nation and about human nature. I love the great libraries and archives where I’ve been privileged to work, and I treasure the friendships I’ve made with the librarians and archivists who have been so immensely helpful. I’ve been extremely fortunate in my subjects, I feel. The reward of the work has always been the work itself, and more so the longer I’ve been at it. And I’ve kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I’ve come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don’t get to read other people’s mail.

I have also been extremely fortunate in the tributes that have come my way. But this singular honor, the Jefferson Lecture, is for me a high point, and my gratitude could not be greater.

AMONG THE DARKEST TIMES in living memory was the early part of 1942—when Hitler’s armies were nearly to Moscow; when German submarines were sinking our oil tankers off the coasts of Florida and New Jersey, within sight of the beaches, and there was not a thing we could do about it; when half our navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor. We had scarcely any air force. Army recruits were drilling with wooden rifles. And there was no guarantee that the Nazi war machine could be stopped.

It was then, in 1942, that the classical scholar Edith Hamilton issued an expanded edition of her book, The Greek Way, in which, in the preface, she wrote the following:

I have felt while writing these new chapters a fresh realization of the refuge and strength the past can be to us in the troubled present. . . . Religion is the great stronghold for the untroubled vision of the eternal, but there are others too. We have many silent sanctuaries in which we can find breathing space to free ourselves from the personal, to rise above our harassed and perplexed minds and catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous preoccupations can make waver, because they are the hard-won permanent possessions of humanity....

When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.

In the Rotunda of the Capitol hangs a large painting of forty-seven men in a room. The scene is as familiar, as hallowed a moment in our history as any we have.

John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence[shown on the cover of this book] has been a main attraction on Capitol tours for a very long time, since 1826. It draws crowds continuously, as it should, every day—from three to five million people a year. It’s probably been seen by more Americans than any painting ever—and the scene as portrayed never took place.

Trumbull said it was meant to represent July 4, 1776, and that’s the popular understanding. But the Declaration of Independence was not signed on July 4. The signing began on August 2, and continued through the year as absent delegates returned to Philadelphia. No formal signing ceremony ever took place.

The scene comes closer to portraying June 28, when Thomas Jefferson submitted his first draft of the Declaration. But then, too, there was no such dramatic gathering.

The room is wrong, the doors are in the wrong place. The chairs are wrong. (They were Windsor chairs of the plainest kind.) There were no heavy draperies at the windows. The decorative display of military trophies and banners on the back wall is purely Trumbull’s way of dressing the set.

Yet none of this really matters. What does matter greatly—particularly in our own dangerous, uncertain time—is the symbolic power of the painting, and where Trumbull put the emphasis.

The scene proclaims that in Philadelphia in the year 1776 a momentous, high-minded statement of far-reaching consequence was committed to paper. It was not the decree of a king or a sultan or emperor or czar, or something enacted by a far-distant parliament. It was a declaration of political faith and brave intent freely arrived at by an American congress. And that was something entirely new under the sun.

And there Trumbull has assembled them, men like other men, each, importantly, a specific, identifiable individual.

The accuracy is in the faces. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin were painted from life. Before he was finished, Trumbull painted or sketched thirty-six of the faces from life. It took him years, and he spared no expense, because he wanted it right. He wanted us to know who they were.

Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin stand front and center exactly as they did in the real drama of the Revolution.

A number who signed the Declaration are not shown. Several who did not sign are present.

Most conspicuous by his absence is George Washington, who had departed Congress the year before to take command of the army.

LORD BOLINGBROKE, the eighteenth-century political philosopher, said that “history is philosophy teaching by examples.” Thucydides is reported to have said much the same thing two thousand years earlier.

Jefferson saw history as largely a chronicle of mistakes to be avoided.

Daniel Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress, has wisely said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.

One might also say that history is not about the past. If you think about it, no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn’t walk about saying, “Isn’t this fascinating living in the past! Aren’t we picturesque in our funny clothes!” They lived in the present. The difference is it was their present, not ours. They were caught up in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how things would turn out than we have.

Nor were they gods. Indeed, to see them as gods or godlike is to do disservice to their memories. Gods, after all, don’t deserve a lot of credit because they can do whatever they wish.

Those we call the Founders were living men. None was perfect. Each had his human flaws and failings, his weaknesses. They made mistakes, let others down, let themselves down.

Washington could be foolhardy and ill-tempered. Adams could be vain, irritable; Jefferson evasive, at times duplicitous. And even in their day, many saw stunning hypocrisy in the cause of liberty being championed by slave masters.

They were imperfect mortals, human beings. Jefferson made the point in the very first line of the Declaration of Independence. “When in the course of human events . . .” The accent should be on the word human.

And of course their humanity is not evident only in their failings. It’s there in Adams’s heart-felt correspondence with his wife and children, in Jefferson’s love of gardening, his fascination, as he said, in every blade of grass that grows.

Washington had a passionate love of architecture and interior design. Everything about his home at Mt. Vernon was done to his ideas and plans. Only a year before the war, he began an ambitious expansion of the house, doubling its size. How extremely important this was to him, the extent of his esthetic sense, few people ever realized. He cared about every detail—wallpaper, paint color, hardware, ceiling ornaments—and hated to be away from the project even for a day.

The patriotism and courage of these all-important protagonists stand as perhaps the most conspicuous and enduring testaments to their humanity. When those who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged their “lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor,” that was no mere verbiage. They were putting their lives on the line. They were declaring themselves traitors to the King. If caught they would be hanged.

Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, who suffered from palsy, is said to have remarked as he signed his name, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

Hopkins was a grand old figure who had seen a lot of life. You can’t miss him in the Trumbull painting. He’s at the back with his broad-brimmed Quaker hat on. In after-hours he loved to drink rum and expound on his favorite writers. “He read Greek, Roman, and British history, and was familiar with English poetry,” John Adams wrote. “And the flow of his soul made his reading our own, and seemed to bring recollection in all we had ever read.”

We must never forget either how hard they worked. Nothing came easy. Nothing. Just getting through a day in the eighteenth century meant difficulties, discomforts, and effort of a kind we seldom ever think about.

But it is in their ideas about happiness, I believe, that we come close to the heart of their being and to their large view of the possibilities in their Glorious Cause.

In general, happiness was understood to mean being at peace with the world in the biblical sense, under one’s own “vine and fig tree.” But what did they, the Founders, mean by the expression “pursuit of happiness”?

It didn’t mean long vacations or material possessions or ease. As much as anything it meant the life of the mind and spirit. It meant education and the love of learning, the liberty to think for oneself.

Jefferson defined happiness as “tranquility and occupation.” For Jefferson, as we know, occupation meant mainly his intellectual pursuits.

Washington, though less inclined to speculate on such matters, considered education of surpassing value, in part because he had had so little. Once, when a friend came to say he hadn’t money enough to send his son to college, Washington agreed to help—providing a hundred pounds in all, a sizable sum then—and with the hope, as he wrote, that the boy’s education would “not only promote his own happiness, but the future welfare of others . . .” For Washington, happiness derived both from learning and employing the benefits of learning to further the welfare of others.

John Adams, in a letter to his son John Quincy when the boy was a student at the University of Leiden, stressed that he should carry a book with him wherever he went. And that while a knowledge of Greek and Latin were essential, he must never neglect the great works of literature in his own language, and particularly those of the English poets. It was his happiness that mattered, Adams told him. “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

The Revolution was another of the darkest, most uncertain of times and the longest war in American history, until the Vietnam War. It lasted eight and a half years, and Adams, because of his unstinting service to his country, was separated from his family nearly all that time, much to his and their distress. In a letter from France he tried to explain to them the reason for such commitment.

I must study politics and war [he wrote] that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

That was the upward climb envisioned for the good society in the burgeoning new American republic. And Adams was himself vivid proof of the transforming miracle of education. His father was a farmer, his mother almost certainly illiterate. But with the help of a scholarship, he was able to attend Harvard, where, as he said, he discovered books and “read forever.”

His Harvard studies over, Adams began teaching school at Worcester, then virtually the frontier. One crystal night, in 1756, twenty years before the Declaration of Independence, he stood beneath a sky full of stars, “thrown into a kind of transport.” He knew such wonders of the heavens to be the gifts of God, he wrote, but greatest of all was the gift of an inquiring mind.

But all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses . . . are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision, that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.

He had decided to study law. “It will be hard work,” he told a friend. “But the point is now determined, and I shall have the liberty to think for myself.”

Of all the sustaining themes in our story as a nation, as clear as any has been the importance put on education, one generation after another, beginning with the first village academies in New England and the establishment of Harvard and the College of William and Mary. The place of education in the values of the first presidents is unmistakable.

Washington contributed generously, some $20,000 in stock, to the founding of what would become Washington and Lee University in Virginia. His gift was the largest donation ever made to any educational institution in the nation until then and has since grown to a substantial part of the endowment.

Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. But then it may be fairly said that Jefferson was a university unto himself.

The oldest written constitution still in use in the world today is the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, drafted by John Adams in 1778, just two years after the Declaration of Independence and fully a decade before our national Constitution. In many respects it is a rough draft of our national Constitution. But it also contains a paragraph on education that was without precedent. Though Adams worried that it would be rejected as too radical, it was passed unanimously. Listen, please, to what it says:

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties. [Which is to say that there must be wisdom, knowledge, and virtue or all aspirations for the good society will come to nothing.] And as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people [that is, everyone], it shall be the duty [not something they might consider, but the duty] of legislatures and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests and literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them . . . public schools, and grammar schools in the towns.

And he goes on to define what he means by education. It is literature and the sciences, yes, but much more: agriculture, the arts, commerce, trades, manufacturers, “and a natural history of the country.” It shall be the duty, he continues,

to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty [we will teach honesty] . . . sincerity, [and, please note] good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

What a noble statement!

Years before, while still living under his father’s roof, Adams had written in his diary, “I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.”

They were nearly all young men in 1776, it should be remembered, young men who believed, as Thomas Paine proclaimed, that the birth of a new world was at hand.

Jefferson was thirty-three, Adams, forty, Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician, was all of thirty when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Rush, one of the most interesting of them all, was a leader in the antislavery movement, a leader in prescribing humane treatment for the insane, and the first to champion the elective system in higher education.

When George Washington took command of the army, he was forty-three. He had never led an army in battle before in his life, any more than the others had had prior experience as revolutionaries or nation builders.

And what of Franklin? Franklin, oldest and wisest, is for me a special case.

I MET MY FIRST revisionist historian when I was six.

His name was Amos and he was a mouse, an eighteenth-century church mouse to be exact, one of twenty-six children who with their mother and father lived in Old Christ Church in Philadelphia. I can never be in Old Christ Church without wondering if perhaps some of Amos’s line are still there, back behind the paneling.

Amos, who took up lodging in Benjamin Franklin’s fur hat, is the narrator of a little book called Ben and Me by Robert Lawson.

Most so-called historians have had Franklin all wrong, according to Amos. “Ben was undoubtedly a splendid fellow, a great man, a patriot and all that,” he writes, “but he was undeniably stupid at times and had it not been for me—well, here’s the true story . . .”

I was six, as I say, and I was hooked. I learned all about Philadelphia, printing presses, electricity, Franklin stoves, and the Palace of Versailles. I got to know Benjamin Franklin and, like Amos, relished his company.

And that was the start. I learned to love history by way of books. There was The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds; The Last of the Mohicans, with those haunting illustrations by N. C. Wyeth; the Revolutionary War novel Drums, by James Boyd, with still more Wyeth paintings.

That was in the day when children were put to bed when sick, and I remember lying there utterly, blissfully lost in those illustrations.

The first book I ever bought with my own money was a Modern Library edition of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. I was fifteen. In a bookshop in Pittsburgh, I picked up the book from a table, opened to the start of chapter 1, read the first sentence, and knew I had to have that book:

The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim, on her voyage from Boston, ’round Cape Horn, to the western coast of America.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, I had never seen the ocean or heard the cry of a seagull or smelled salt air.

I read Kenneth Roberts’s Oliver Wiswell, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, and A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord. I thank my lucky stars for Robert Abercrombie, who taught history my senior year in high school and made Morison and Commager’s The Growth of the American Republic required reading. In the college years, I must have read a half dozen novels on the Second World War, including Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions.

Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, a graduation present, started me reading more about the Civil War and started me thinking that maybe some day I might try writing something of the kind. I remember reading long passages of Margaret Leech’s splendid Reveille in Washington over and over, trying to see how she did it.

I loved all those books, and they’re all still in print, still being read, which is no mystery. They’re superbly well done, wonderfully well written.

There should be no hesitation ever about giving anyone a book to enjoy, at any age. There should be no hesitation about teaching future teachers with books they will enjoy. No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

WE ARE WHAT WE READ more than we know. And it was true no less in that distant founding time. Working on the life of John Adams, I tried to read not only what he and others of his day wrote, but what they read. And to take up and read again works of literature of the kind we all remember from high school or college English classes was not only a different kind of research, but pure delight.

I read Swift, Pope, Defoe, Sterne, Fielding, and Samuel Johnson again after forty years, and Tobias Smollett and Don Quixote for the first time.

I then began to find lines from these writers turning up in the letters of my American subjects, turning up without attribution, because the lines were part of them, part of who they were and how they thought and expressed themselves.

But we do the same, more often than we realize. Every time we “refuse to budge an inch,” or speak of “green-eyed jealousy,” or claim to be “tongue-tied,” we’re quoting Shakespeare. When we say “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” or “to err is human,” or observe sagely that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” we’re borrowing from Alexander Pope, just as when you “slept not a wink,” or “smell a rat,” or “turn over a new leaf,” or declare “mum’s the word,” you’re quoting Cervantes.

When young Nathan Hale was hanged by the British as a spy in New York in 1776, he famously said as his last words, “My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country.” That’s a line from the popular play of the eighteenth century, Cato, by Joseph Addison, a play they all knew. Washington, who loved the theater, is believed to have seen it half a dozen times.

Imagine how it must have been for Nathan Hale, about to be hanged. Who, in such a moment, could possibly think of something eloquent to say. I think he was throwing that line right back at those British officers. After all, Cato was their play.

I imagine him delivering the line, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

One needs to read the great political philosophers—Hume, Locke, Ferguson, Montesquieu—whose writings had such profound influence on the Founders. Yet there is hardly a more appealing description of the Enlightenment outlook on life and learning than a single sentence in a popular novel of the day, A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne.

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

THE STIMULATION, the motivation, the hard work and pleasures of writing history are mainly in the material. It’s the finding and figuring out that keep you in pursuit. And you never know . . . you never know where you will find something, see something that’s gone unnoticed, or make some unexpected connection that brings things into focus in a new or different way.

The truth of history is the objective always. But the truth isn’t just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

As the incomparable Francis Parkman wrote:

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or spectator of the action he describes.

“I hear all the notes, but I hear no music,” is the old piano teacher’s complaint. There has to be music. History at best has to be literature or it will go to dust.

The work of history—writing history, teaching history—calls for mind and heart. Empathy is essential. The late J. H. Plumb, the eminent British historian, said that what is needed is more “heart-wise” historians.

What happened? And why? Who were those people? What was it like to have been alive then, in their shoes, in their skins? Of what were they afraid? What didn’t they know?

Studying his face in the mirror, John Adams decided, “I am but an ordinary man. The times alone have destined me to fame.” He was fishing. He was anything but ordinary and it is not possible to understand what happened in that tumultuous, protean time without knowing and understanding him and the others.

There are, of course, great sweeping tides in history—plague, famine, financial panic, the calamities of nature and war. Yet time and again, more often than not history turns on individual personality, or character.

I am presently at work on a book about the Revolution, with the focus on Washington and the army in the year 1776, which in the last months was the nadir of the fortunes of the United States of America, when the army was down to little more than three thousand men. By December, by all signs, the war was over, and we had lost. Fortunately Washington did not see it that way. Had it not been for Washington and his little ragtag army, the Declaration of Independence and all it promised would have truly been “a skiff made of paper.”

There are no paintings or sketches of the soldiers done at the time. Most that we have are by Trumbull, himself a veteran of the war, but his were all painted afterward.

It’s in the surviving diaries, journals, letters, pension files, in descriptions posted for deserters that those in the ranks begin to emerge as flesh-and-blood individual men caught up in something far bigger than they knew.

There was Jabez Fitch, for example, a Connecticut farmer with eight children, who liked soldiering and kept a diary describing the war as he saw it day by day. There was young John Greenwood, a fifer boy, who at age sixteen walked all alone 150 miles from Maine to Boston to join up with Washington’s army. And Mathias Smith, a deserter, who was described as: “a small smart fellow, a saddler by trade, grey headed, has a younger look in his face, is apt to say, ‘I swear, I swear!’ And between his words will spit smart; had on a green coat, and an old red greatcoat; he is a right gamester, although he wears something of a sober look.”

“Greece,” wrote Edith Hamilton, “never lost sight of the individual.” And neither should we, ever.

They were hungry, starving some of them, and without warm clothes as winter set in. Not all were patriots. Not all were heroes. Not all came home. But they were once as alive as you and I.

“Posterity who are to reap the blessings,” wrote Abigail Adams, “will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”

HISTORY IS—or should be—a lesson in appreciation. History helps us keep a sense of proportion.

History teaches that there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman, that we are all shaped by the influences of others, including so many we’ve never seen because they are back there in history.

History teaches that nothing happens in isolation, or without cause and effect, and that nothing ever had to happen as it did.

History teaches tolerance, and the value of common sense, and as Voltaire (and who knows how many others) observed, common sense is anything but common.

History is about high achievement, glorious works of art, music, architecture, literature, philosophy, science and medicine—not just politics and the military—as the best of politicians and generals have readily attested. History is about leadership, and the power of ideas. History is about change, because the world has never not been changing, indeed because life itself is change.

History is the course of human events. And it must therefore be, if truthful, about failure, injustice, struggle, suffering, disappointment, and the humdrum. History demonstrates often in brutal fashion the evils of enforced ignorance and demagoguery. History is a source of strength, a constant reminder of the courage of others in times more trying and painful than our own. As Churchill reminded us, “We have not journeyed all this way . . . because we are made of sugar candy.”

History is filled with voices that reach out and lift the spirits, sometimes from the distance of centuries.

Is it possible to imagine not learning from the wisest, most thoughtful people who shaped the world, or to fail to take heart from manifest courage?

Is life not infinitely more interesting and enjoyable when one can stand in a great historic place, or walk historic ground, and know something of what happened there and in whose footsteps you walk?

For a free, self-governing people, something more than a vague familiarity with history is essential, if we are to hold on to and sustain our freedom.

But I don’t think history should ever be made to seem like some musty, unpleasant pill that has to be swallowed solely for our civic good. History, let us agree, can be an immense source of pleasure. For almost anyone with the normal human allotment of curiosity and an interest in people, it is a field day.

Why would anyone wish to be provincial in time, any more than being tied down to one place through life, when the whole reach of the human drama is there to experience in some of the greatest books ever written.

I guess if I had to boil it down to a few words, I would say history is a larger way of looking at life.

ONE OF OUR innumerable advantages as a nation and a society is that we have such a specific moment of origin as the year 1776. And that we know who the Founders were—indeed we know an immense amount about an immense number of those at all levels who in that revolutionary time brought the United States of America and the reality of freedom into being.

But while it is essential to remember them as individual mortal beings no more perfect than are we, and that they themselves knew this better than anyone, it is also essential to understand that they knew their own great achievements to be imperfect and incomplete.

The American experiment was from its start an unfulfilled promise. There was much work to be done. There were glaring flaws to correct, unfinished business to attend to, improvements and necessary adjustments to devise in order to keep pace with the onrush of growth and change and expanding opportunities.

Those brave, high-minded people of earlier times gave us stars to steer by—a government of laws not of men, equal justice before the law, the importance of the individual, the ideal of equality, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and expression, and the love of learning.

From them, in our own dangerous and promising present, we can take heart. As Edith Hamilton said of the Greeks, we can “catch sight of values that are stable because they are the hard-won possessions of humanity.”

Blessed we are. And duty bound, to continue the great cause of freedom, in their spirit and in their memory and for those who are to carry on next in their turn.

There is still much work to be done, still much to learn.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. . . .

On we go.