Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [53]
Truman regarded both future presidents with some circumspection. He considered Johnson a trifle too ambitious. (Johnson was just twenty-eight when he was elected to the House in 1937. In 1955, at forty-two, he would become the youngest Senate majority leader in history.) Truman also thought Johnson a bit of a suck-up—and not an altogether accomplished one. When Truman’s mother died in 1947, then-Congressman Johnson obsequiously wrote the president, saying he would donate a book in memory of the “First Mother” to the Grandview Public Library. Truman wrote back and thanked Johnson, but added, “I regret to advise you that Grandview has no Public Library.” Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro said the relationship between the two men “would never be particularly warm,” and Margaret Truman said her father “never quite trusted” Johnson.
Toward Kennedy, however, Truman felt something approaching antipathy. Elected to Congress at twenty-nine, Kennedy was no less ambitious than Johnson. But at least Johnson had worked his way up from the hard-scrabble Texas Hill Country. Kennedy embodied the kind of elitist sense of entitlement that Truman despised. Furthermore, Truman never cared for Kennedy’s father, the haughty and overbearing Joe Kennedy, whom Truman had once threatened to throw out a hotel window for belittling FDR. When the younger Kennedy’s religion became an issue in the 1960 presidential campaign, Truman quipped, “It’s not the pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop.” Truman boycotted the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that year, claiming it had been “rigged” in Kennedy’s favor. But when Kennedy won the nomination, Truman, ever the dutiful Democrat, campaigned for him.
There is no record of what occurred inside that committee room during lunch that day. Surely Harry gave his standard pep talk. Jack Kennedy was undoubtedly distracted, maybe even a little nervous, for it was his last day as Washington’s most eligible bachelor. That night, he would announce his engagement to a twenty-three-year-old George Washington University graduate whose “Inquiring Camera Girl” column ran in the Washington Times-Herald. Her name was Jacqueline Lee Bouvier.
Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile, was probably gazing covetously at the ceiling of room S-211, on which was painted a magnificent fresco by the Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. When he became majority leader, Johnson made the room his new office.
After lunch, the Democratic senators invited Harry onto the Senate floor to visit his old desk. Protocol, however, demanded that he call on the president of the Senate first. So Harry walked across the hall to the office of Richard Nixon and paid what might be the most uncomfortable courtesy call in the annals of Congress. Nixon was one of only two politicians Truman is said to have truly hated. (The other was Lloyd Stark, the Missouri governor who unsuccessfully challenged Truman for his Senate seat in the 1940 Democratic primary.) As a representative and later a senator, Nixon was a constant thorn in Truman’s side. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he relentlessly pursued charges that communists had “infiltrated” the Truman administration.
But it was the 1952 presidential campaign that forever turned Truman against Nixon. Throughout that campaign, Nixon, the Republican vice presidential candidate, had excoriated the Truman administration for supposedly coddling communists. Nixon said “real Democrats” should have been “outraged by the Truman-Acheson-Stevenson gang’s toleration and defense of communism in high places.” Nixon went “down and around over the country and called me a traitor,” Truman bitterly recalled. He would never forgive Nixon. Privately he called him a “squirrel head,” a “son of a bitch”—or worse.
Harry and Vice President Richard Nixon pose outside Nixon’s office in the Capitol, June 24, 1953. Nixon