With hardly a care on his mind, Harry Truman had left his spacious, picture-lined office in the Senate Office Building, walked over to visit Speaker Sam Rayburn in the Capitol. Others had already gathered in the Speaker's office: White House Assistant James M. Barnes and House Parliamentarian Lew Deschler. It was the kind of company Harry Truman liked. None of them was a policymaker from the high levels of the Roosevelt Administration. In his two and a half months as Vice President, Harry Truman had not been invited to sit in with the policymakers; he had continued to hobnob with his Congressional cronies. At the end of a working day, he liked especially to sit with Sam Rayburn's lively, politically wise group.
Sam Rayburn had just poured the Vice President a drink of bourbon and tap water when there was a call from the White House. Steve Early was on the wire. As he listened, Harry Truman's face turned pale. He left abruptly, saying not a word. But his sudden action spoke loudly enough. Every man in that room knew that Franklin Roosevelt's health had been swiftly declining. Said Sam Rayburn before the Vice President got to the door: "We'll all stand by you, Harry."
Harry Truman had been haunted for weeks by the prospect that he might one day soon be President. Only the day before, chatting with Senators and newsmen, he had said that he wished he could have remained just a Senator. "But they wanted me to be V.P.," he added ruefully.
For more than a month, he had had a secret service guard in case of the emergency that had now come. Speeding down Pennsylvania Avenue in a White House car, Harry Truman, hard-working product of small-town Missouri, had little time to think of the sudden turn of fate. He had dreaded the burden that might be laid on him. Now it was here.
At the White House, Steve Early took him to see Mrs. Roosevelt, and it was she who told him the solemn news.
First Steps. There was plenty to do, right away, and methodical Harry Truman went at it. He promptly: 1) summoned the Cabinet, and asked all its members to stay in office; 2) ordered no interruption in plans for the San Francisco conference. He also called Bess Wallace Truman, his wife.
Bess Truman, whom Harry had met in Sunday School at Independence, Mo. when he was seven and she six, and had married 28 years later, was at the Trumans' modest five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue. When she heard what her husband had to tell her, she wept. A few minutes later, with the Trumans' daughter (and only child), 21-year-old Mary Margaret, she left by a rear door. A White House car was waiting.