Harry Truman Read Free Page A

become, that someone as normally loyal and dependable as Biffle would try to double-cross the President of the United States.
    The following day, my father was back at work, quietly taking control of the party:
    I called Barkley and smoothed him down again. Tried to call him last night after his good speech but can’t get him.
    Call McGrath and tell him I’m coming up tomorrow on the train and accept.
    He is not very happy over it.
    Talked to Hannegan, Ed Flynn and Frank Walker. All disgruntled as has-beens always are with a new chairman. It means not one thing. The result is what counts.
    Platform fight this afternoon, postponed until tomorrow. But they have a good fight on credentials. A Negro alternate from St. Louis makes a minority report suggesting the unseating of Mississippi delegation. Vaughn is his name. He’s overruled. . . . Congressman Dawson of Chicago, another Negro, makes an excellent talk on civil rights. These two colored men are the only speakers to date who seem to be for me wholeheartedly.
    Snyder calls and says Jimmy R., Leon Henderson and Wilson Wyatt are running Barkley for President. Maybe so, but Barkley is an honorable man. He won’t give me the double cross, I’m sure.
    Bob Hannegan, Ed Flynn, and Frank Walker were all former Democratic national chairmen. As Dad said, like most ex-office-holders, they had nothing to offer but criticism. Snyder is John Snyder, Dad’s Secretary of the Treasury, and one of his closest friends. Thanks to him and other Truman loyalists, my father knew exactly what was happening at the convention, from the inside.
    On Wednesday, July 14, Dad continued making notes on the convention, as he saw it:
    Take the train for Philadelphia at 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, arrive in the rain at 9:15. Television sets at both ends of trip. No privacy sure enough now.
    Hear Alabama & Mississippi walk out of the convention. Hear Gov. Donnelly nominate me. Both on the radio. Hard to hear. My daughter & my staff try to keep me from listening. Think maybe I’ll be upset. I won’t be. . . .
    Philadelphia on that night of July 14 seemed to be wrapped in a huge suffocating blanket of heat and humidity. Mother and Dad and I were led to a small airless room beneath the platform, used as a dressing room when actors were performing at Convention Hall. We had to sit there for four long hours while the convention recovered from the civil rights wrangle and got down to the business of nominating my father for President and Alben Barkley for vice president.
    Once Dad had deflated his presidential boomlet, Barkley had passed the word that he was available for the vice presidency. He had been doing this at nearly every convention since 1928, and now, at the age of seventy, he was rather touchy on the subject. “It will have to come quick,” he told his friends. “I don’t want it passed around so long it is like a cold biscuit.” Dad admired Alben’s abilities as a speaker and respected his long career in the Senate, where he had served as majority leader for both him and President Roosevelt. So he promptly passed the word that the senator had his support and telephoned him in Philadelphia. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to run, Alben?” Dad said. “That’s all you had to do.”
    Never have I seen so much smoke without a fire as I saw that humid night in Philadelphia. I thought sure I was going to expire. Oxygen was my only thought. Dad, apparently bothered neither by the heat nor the pollution, went right on politicking. He sat in a nearby room, greeting delegates, congressmen, senators, and assorted Democrats who streamed in to shake hands and assure him of their backing. He had a particularly pleasant visit with Senator Barkley.
    Occasionally, in the rare moments when he was not being besieged by visitors, Dad stepped out on a little balcony and looked down on Philadelphia, where the nation’s political history began. He thought about the task to which he was committing