Harry Truman by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online Page B

world power. Then he told them what he was prepared to do to achieve world peace. Perhaps the most startling part of his plan was to persuade Joseph Stalin to come to the United States. There was much more to this speech - he spoke for almost half an hour - but to my everlasting regret, it has been lost to history. Jack Romagna, the White House shorthand reporter, who was usually on hand to take down all Dad’s off-the-cuff speeches, had not been told to come, and there were no reporters present. Not one word of that speech was preserved.
    There were two other high points in our tour of Texas. The first one was a reception arranged for us by Sam Rayburn and his people in Bonham. Governor Beauford Jester, who had not long before accused Dad of stabbing the South in the back, was on hand to take part in the festivities, but it was Sam who ran the show. Dad spoke first at an outdoor meeting, in bitter cold, and then we stood for hours on an indoor receiving line to greet what must have been a majority of the inhabitants of that part of Texas. It was an old-fashioned Southern house, with a central hall that ran from the front door to the back door. The handshakers streamed through the front door and out the rear door. Suddenly Sam exclaimed, “Shut the door, Beauford, they’re comin’ by twice.” But that didn’t discourage anybody. People just kept on streaming out the back door and in the front door again.
    On Sunday, September 26, we paid a “nonpolitical” visit to one of Dad’s favorite friends, John Nance Garner, FDR’s first vice president. Throughout the campaign, my father usually refused to make any speeches on Sunday, but there was no harm - and plenty of political value - in paying a visit to “Cactus Jack.” He was adored by the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in Texas. At 5:00 a.m., we were greeted by a high school band, at least 4,000 citizens, and an Angora goat wearing a gold blanket lettered DEWEY’S GOAT. Dad bounced off the train and posed for pictures with the beast, and then jovially declared, “I’m going to clip it and make a rug, then I’m going to let it graze on the White House lawn for the next four years.” He meant it, too, but he found out that one thing our campaign train was not equipped to carry was a goat.
    After this public greeting, former Vice President Garner sat us down to the most tremendous breakfast in the history of the Truman family, and, I suspect, in the history of any American family. There was white wing dove, bacon, ham, fried chicken, scrambled eggs, rice in gravy, hot biscuits, Uvalde honey, peach preserves, grape jelly, and coffee. Dad responded by giving Cactus Jack a present, carefully concealed in a small black satchel. It was, he solemnly told him, “medicine, only to be used in case of snakebites.” It was the same medicine that Senator Truman used to share with the vice president when he visited his Capitol “dog house” in the 1930s - some very good Kentucky bourbon.
    Outside, where the crowd was still waiting, Garner called Dad an “old and very good friend.” My father called him “Mr. President” explaining that was the term he used when he addressed him in the Senate. My mother was so moved by the vice president’s hospitality that she broke her usual public silence, and thanked everyone for coming out to greet us at the incredible hour of 5:00 a.m.
    Along with the pressures of the campaign and the sheer physical challenge of making as many as sixteen speeches in a single day, my father had to cope with the worsening international situation. The Berlin airlift went on, making it clear that he meant what he said when he declared, “We are in Berlin to stay.” His Secretary of State, General George Marshall, was in Paris, trying to negotiate the Berlin crisis through the United Nations. Meanwhile, Dad had to fend off demands from Secretary of Defense Forrestal to authorize the use of the atomic bomb. From the left Wallace hammered