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Given Harry's belligerent reticence to share his alleged education, I
thought it might be appropriate to do a little digging about Harry S Truman and his VP nomination. It didn't take long to pull up a few credible snippets like this one fom the US Senate historical web site: http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/VP_Harry_Truman.htm --------------------------------- While it later seemed inevitable, there was nothing predictable about Truman's selection for vice president in 1944. Vice President Henry Wallace's unpopularity among party leaders had set off a monumental contest for the second spot at the Chicago convention. Senator Alben Barkley wanted the job, but his hot-tempered resignation and swift reelection as majority leader in protest over President Roosevelt's veto of a revenue bill in February 1944 eliminated him as an acceptable choice to the president. Barkley and "Assistant President" James Byrnes—a former senator and former Supreme Court Justice—each asked Truman to nominate him at the convention. Byrnes asked first, and Truman readily agreed. Senator Truman consistently told everyone—even his daughter Margaret—that he was not a candidate himself. The only race in his mind was for his reelection to the Senate in 1946. The pivotal person at the convention was Bob Hannegan, a St. Louis political leader serving as commissioner of internal revenue and tapped as the next Democratic National Committee chairman. During the heated Senate campaign of 1940, Hannegan had switched his support from Governor Stark to Truman as the better man, and he delivered enough St. Louis votes to help Truman win. Hannegan, Bronx boss Ed Flynn, Chicago mayor Ed Kelly, key labor leaders, and other party movers and shakers viewed Wallace as a liability for his leftist leanings. Byrnes was equally vulnerable for his segregationist record and his conversion from Catholicism. When these party leaders expressed their opposition to Wallace and Byrnes, Roosevelt suggested Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The group then countered with Harry Truman, whom Roosevelt agreed had been loyal and "wise to the ways of politics." After much discussion, Roosevelt turned to Hannegan and conceded, "Bob, I think you and everyone else here want Truman." Hating to disappoint and alienate any of the potential candidates, Roosevelt kept them all guessing. At lunch with Vice President Wallace, Roosevelt informed him that the professional politicians preferred Truman as "the only one who had no enemies and might add a little independent strength to the ticket." Roosevelt promised Wallace that he would not endorse another candidate, but would notify the convention that if he were a delegate he would vote for Wallace. At the same time, the president held out hope to Byrnes that he was "the best qualified man in the whole outfit," and urged him to stay in the race. "After all, Jimmy," you're close to me personally," Roosevelt said. "I hardly know Truman." (Roosevelt, whose own health was growing precarious, did not even know Truman's age—which was sixty. Despite encouraging Wallace and Byrnes, the president had written a letter for Hannegan to carry to the convention: 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. Meanwhile, Senator Truman continued to deny any interest in the vice-presidency. In an off-the-record interview, he explained to a reporter that if he ran for vice president the Republicans would raise charges of bossism against him. He did not want to subject his family to the attacks and negative publicity of a national campaign. Bess Truman was against it, and so was Truman's ninety-one-year-old mother, who told him to stay in the Senate. "The Vice President simply presides over the Senate and sits around hoping for a funeral," Truman protested. "It is a very high office which consists entirely of honor and I don't have any ambition to hold an office like that." His secret ambition, admitted on a visit to the Senate chamber twenty years later, was to occupy the front row seat of the majority leader. In an overheated hotel room, the politicians leaned heavily on Truman to run. They placed a call to Roosevelt, and as Truman sat nearby, Hannegan held the phone so that he could hear. "Bob, have you got that fellow lined up yet?" Roosevelt asked. "No. He is the contrariest Missouri mule I've ever dealt with," Hannegan replied. "Well, you tell him that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that's his responsibility," Roosevelt declared and hung up the phone. Stunned, Truman agreed to run, but added: "why the hell didn't he tell me in the first place?" Henry Wallace appeared personally at the convention to seek renomination, stimulating an enthusiastic reception from the galleries. On the first ballot, Wallace led Truman 429 to 319. But the party's leaders swung their delegations and put Truman over the top on the second ballot. In a speech that lasted less than a minute, Truman accepted the nomination. Democratic liberals bemoaned the choice, while Republicans mocked the "little man from Missouri." Newspapers charged him with being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, when in fact he had vigorously fought the Klan in Jackson County. Critics also noted that Truman had placed his wife on his Senate payroll, but Truman rejoined that hiring her had been legal and that she had earned every penny. (Truman's sister Mary Jane had also been on his Senate payroll since 1943.) None of these controversies mattered much. On election day, a majority of voters did not want to change leaders in wartime and cast their ballots for Roosevelt regardless of who ran with him. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had preferred Wallace and distrusted Byrnes, reflected the prevailing sentiment that the vice-presidential candidate had been a safe choice. She wrote that while she did not know Truman, "from all I hear, he is a good man." --------------------------------------------------------------------------- It appers that Truman's nomination was due in large part to the unpopularity of then Vice President, Henry Wallace. Digging a little deeper into the reasons, I unearthed the following from the senate web site: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- As an active secretary of agriculture and a committed New Dealer, Henry Wallace seemed the ideal person for the job. But Wallace's visionary social liberalism, his mysticism, his curiously shy and introspective personal demeanor, and his political insensitivity, all prevented him from gathering the support from congressional leaders that would have enabled him to sustain a successful political career in Washington. Because few senators came to know Wallace personally, they often judged his character on the basis of his poorly delivered speeches and unusual appearance. Journalist Allen Drury, who observed the vice president often from the Senate press gallery, described Wallace as follows: "A shock of silver-graying hair sweeps over to the right of his head in a great shaggy arc. He looks like a hayseed, talks like a prophet, and acts like an embarassed schoolboy." Drury recorded sympathetically in his diary that he found it difficult to "put into exact words the combination of feelings he arouses. The man's integrity and his idealism and his sainted other-worldliness are never in question; it's just the problem of translating them into everyday language and making them jibe with his shy, embarrassed, uncomfortable good-fellowship that is so difficult." Drury considered Henry Wallace doomed by fate. "No matter what he does, it is always going to seem faintly ridiculous, and no matter how he acts, it is always going to seem faintly pathetic—at least to the cold-eyed judgments of the Hill." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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