Bess Truman: 1885-1982
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 liked 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 flap, 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."