TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/82/82truman

Text File | 1990-10-10 | 4KB | 71 lines

Bess Truman:  1885-1982
A Lady in the White House

November 1, 1982

Her husband called her "the boss" and "my chief adviser."  But months
after Harry Truman became President in 1945, First Lady Bess went
shopping in Washington's big department stores and no one recognized
her.  That was the way she wanted it, and to a surprising extent that
was the way it stayed.

Bess Truman, who died last week at 97, went to Washington a Mid-
western housewife who had lived all her life under the same roof with
her mother.  She did not smoke or drink or swear.  She likes Charles
Dickens and Sir Walter Scott but thought modern novels "a waste of
time."  After her husband succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt in the
White House, Bess burned a stack of Harry's love letters.  "But think
of history," Harry protested.  "I have," she said.

The fifth generation of a prosperous family in Independence, Mo.,
Elizabeth Wallace Truman grew up a blue-eyed, blond-curled tomboy.
She could bat a ball as far as any boy in the neighborhood and was
better than any at mumblety-peg.  She met her future husband when he
was six and she was five, and he always said he fell in love at that
moment.  They did not marry until 29 years later, partly because her
mother opposed this boy of no "family" and sparse prospects.  Engaged
just before Harry left for World War I, they wed on his return in
1919.  The Trumans stayed married for 53 years, through a failed
business, shabby local politics and Harry's sudden rise to the
leadership of the postwar world, which Bess found the greatest burden
of all.

She always insisted that her husband's eminence had nothing to do
with her.  She did not give press conferences.  She refused to sit
for her official White House portrait, and it had to be done from a
photograph.  Only intimate friends were allowed into the family
quarters.  She preserved every protocol and precedent established
before her, not out of any instinctive formality but because she
would not rock the boat.

Mrs. Truman figured in two major controversies:  Harry's putting her
on his Senate payroll in 1941 at $4,500 a year, almost half his
Senate salary; and her acceptance while First Lady of a gift freezer
that was linked to an alleged influence-peddling scandal.  Neither
issue did her much harm.  During a Senate probe of the Democratic
freezer flag, the highly partisan Republican Joseph R. McCarthy
called her one of the "finest things about the White House" and
declared her above suspicion.

Stiff and shy in crowds, she could be slyly witty in private.  When
her husband was contemplating the propriety of their having dinner in
a Rome restaurant that was once the villa of Mussolini's mistress
Carla Petacci, Mrs. Truman settled the matter:  "Well, after all, she
won't be there."  Bess endured thousands of teas, receptions and
galas.  Mobbed by delegates and newsmen at the 1944 Democratic
Convention that nominated Truman for Vice President, she lamented,
"Are we going to have to go through this all the rest of our lives?"
Eight and a half years later, after a crowd of 15,000 greeted the
retired President and First Lady on their return to Independence, she
said to her husband, "If this is what you get for all those years of
hard work, I guess it was worth it."

She was always the lady.  When Harry said Texans who voted for
Richard Nixon could "go to hell," she telephoned and told him, "If
you can't talk politer than that in public, you come right home."
But she kept her views private.  When asked on national TV in 1955 if
she had anything to say about politics "specifically or in general,"
she shot back, "Not in either category, thank you."  Last and first,
a lady.

--William A. Henry III