Setting The Record Straight About Forefathers...
The whistle-stop routine seldom varied. As we pulled into the station bands would blare “Hail to the Chief” and the “Missouri Waltz.” Dad, usually accompanied by three or four local politicians, would step out on the back platform of the train, and they would present him with a gift-a basket of corn, a bucket of apples, or some item of local manufacture. Then one of the local politicians would introduce the President, and Dad would give a brief fighting speech, plugging the local candidate, and asking the people for their support. But the heart of these little talks was a local reference, sometimes supplied by Dad spontaneously, more often by careful advance research on the part of the staff.
Whenever possible, my father preferred to say something that he knew or felt personally. He told his listeners in Clarksburg: “I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for Clarksburg. I have been a student of the War Between the States, and I remember that Stonewall Jackson was born here in Clarksburg.” At Hammond, Indiana, where many of the tanks for our World War II armies were produced, he drew on his knowledge of our war effort, which he had scrutinized intensively, as head of the Truman Committee in the Senate. “Our armies all over the world were grateful for the high quality of work you turned out,” he told the crowd. This was authentic. It was not just something he was reading off a card. He knew and felt these things.
I have always believed that the great difference between Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 was Dad’s uninhibited refusal to be anyone but himself. At Dexter, Iowa, I think he won thousands of farm votes with an impromptu talk he gave after his formal speech. “I can plow a straight furrow,” he said, “a prejudiced witness said so — my mother.” He told his farmer audience how he used to “sow a 160 acre wheatfield without a skip place showing in it.” Then, bragging as only a Missourian can brag, he added that he did it all with only four mules and a gangplow. There were few tractors around during the eleven years before World War I, when he was a farmer.
After his whistle-stop talks, Dad would introduce first my mother and then me. Mother was introduced as “the boss,” and me as “the one who bosses the boss.” We never did get him to stop introducing us this way in spite of numerous demands. He was equally stubborn about other routines. Hitting hard at the Republican Congress’s failure to do something about the housing shortage, he often included himself in the problem. In Ogden, Utah, for instance, he suggested that if the voters did the right thing on the second of November, “That will keep me from suffering from a housing shortage on January 20th, 1949.” In Colorado Springs he told the crowd: “If you go out to the polls . . . and do your duty as you should, I won’t have to worry about moving out of the White House; and you won’t have to worry about what happens to the welfare of the West.”
Frantic memorandums and letters from White House staffers and friends in the sophisticated East warned that these housing remarks did not “help create a picture of strength and confidence.” My father ignored them. He knew that the people were delighted to find their President talking their language, on this and all other points.
By this time, even in formal speeches Dad was working with nothing more than an elaborate set of notes. At the beginning of his career even his best friends admitted he was a very mediocre speaker. Ted Marks, one of his old battery mates from World War I, often told the story about one of the first speeches my father ever made, when he was running for county judge in Missouri. “We were all sitting at the top of the hill when Captain Harry started to talk. By the time he finished, we had slid all the way to the bottom.”
In succeeding years, Dad taught himself to speak effectively in his own Missouri way. Whenever possible, he always preferred to speak off the cuff. That was when his natural dry wit came through, along with his sincerity. But during the first three years in the White House, he was so acutely conscious of the historical importance of what a President said, he hesitated to use anything but prepared texts. The result was continuous erosion of his public support. He read a speech badly, always seeming, as one man said, to be “rushing for the period.”
On April 17, 1948, a time when his statistical popularity had sunk to an all-time low-George Gallup said only 36 percent of the people approved of his performance as President-he gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington. His prepared address drew no more than a flicker of polite applause from the crowd. But instead of sitting down, he started telling this very important and influential group of men exactly what he thought of the national and international situation, in his own vigorous down-to-earth language. Charlie Ross, a man never given to overstatement, said, “The audience went wild.”
from Margaret Truman’s biography of her father,
Harry S. Truman