A President In Peril

Chapter Two I₁ N₁ C₃ O₁ M₃ P₃ E₁ T₁ E₁ N₁ C₃ E₁ (n) the quality or condition of being incompetent; lack of ability

I have no interest whatever in covering politics. A few years back, I was offered the chance of becoming an assistant to the paper’s political editor, but I opted to stay right where I remain to this day — Police Headquarters.

“Snap, it’s a great opportunity for you to move up,” the city editor told me at the time. “You’ll get a chance to travel with candidates on their trains and buses, stay in nice hotels, maybe even go to the political conventions. I did a little bit of it myself a few years back. That’s pretty exciting stuff, I can tell you. You’ll get a lot of bylines. And have a lot of fun, too.”

Thanks but no thanks. Over the years, I’ve been exposed to enough elected officials at various levels to know that the majority of them are insincere, incompetent, just plain crooked, or some combination of the above. I know that sounds like the ranting of a cynical old reporter, and maybe it is.

Even if you subtract my dim view of the moral fiber of local and national officeholders in both parties, there’s another factor in my aversion to political reporting: The Tribune’s own position.

I do vote, and I’ve cast ballots over the years for both Republicans and Democrats, mostly the latter. I’m essentially apolitical, with a tilt to the left, doubtless ingrained in me by my streetcar motorman father and his labor union background. My employer, however, is without question the most resolutely right-wing newspaper in all of America. All you have to do is peruse its news pages most days, to say nothing of the editorial cartoon that’s right there on the front page.

Everything written in the Trib about Thomas E. Dewey is framed in glowing terms, while everything about Harry Truman makes him seem like something between an incompetent and a traitor. And each day, the news columns have stories about some straw poll showing that Dewey and the Republicans have the election all wrapped up. If you believed everything you read in the Tribune, the November voting would indeed seem to be something of a formality, as Packy Farmer had suggested.

So how free would I be to cover some candidate — any candidate, no matter which party — with any degree of objectivity? I like to think that what I wrote would be objective, but heaven knows what it would be like once it went through the editing process and found its way onto the printed page.

If this weren’t enough to deter me from political reporting — and it is — I have the home front to consider. Catherine is far from apolitical, having been raised in a staunchly Democratic household heavily influenced by her own father, the late great police reporter ‘Steel Trap’ Bascomb, who toiled most of his career for the above-mentioned City News Bureau. ‘Steel Trap’ had been a Democrat since the days of Grover Cleveland, so Catherine told me, and he never saw any reason to change except for a vote for Teddy Roosevelt in 1904.

Catherine does read the Tribune, partly in deference to me, but she will not always refer to it by name. Sample: “I see that your paper continues to insist that Dewey will win the election in a landslide,” she said this very morning at the breakfast table.

When she’s upset with the Tribune, Catherine uses ‘your paper’ much as Republicans for years used ‘that man in the White House’ to refer to Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than deigning to let his name pass their lips. It should be noted that I don’t disagree with her most of the time, because I’m frequently, but not always, of the same opinion.

“Steve, as of right now, how do you really see the voting going?” Catherine asked as she poured me a second cup of coffee.

“We were kicking that around yesterday at work. Masters thinks Harry’s going to win, and I said I agreed, although both Farmer and O’Farrell think we’re crazy. Right now, though, I have to say I’m just not sure.”

“Oh? And just what changed your mind since yesterday?”

“Nothing specific, really. Maybe my own employer — your paper, as you like to call it — has me doubting myself. Every day, we’ve been running results of those polls from other newspapers in places like St. Louis and Pittsburgh and Boston and Salt Lake City, all of them showing that Dewey’s winning in their circulation areas. Seems hard to argue with.”

She sniffed. “Well, knowing your paper, I have to wonder just how thorough those straw polls really are. Are the editors picking only those polls that have Dewey ahead? It strikes me that the Tribune — see, there now, I just called it by its name — is trying to use the old bandwagon approach to stampede undecided readers into voting for their man. After all, a lot of people like to back a winner, don’t they?”

I grinned at her as I finished off the rest of my scrambled eggs and bacon. “I won’t argue the point. Besides, the Republicans and the Tribune haven’t won a presidential election since way back in the late ’20s, when Hoover beat Al Smith, the only Catholic who’s ever run for president. The G.O.P. is hungry, desperate for victory, and they’re licking their lips. They figure they’ve got old Harry on the run this time.”

“But do they, Steve? Do they really?”

I shrugged and ran a hand through my thinning, dusty-colored hair. “If it were just Truman and Dewey running, I’d say the president would probably win this thing with ease. But you’ve got these other two: Henry Wallace with his Socialists or Progressives or whatever they’re calling themselves; and this Thurmond guy from South Carolina with his segregationist Dixiecrats — the ‘States Rights’ party, to be formal. Both of ’em are going to pull votes away from Harry, that much is sure. They don’t figure to hurt Dewey.”

“Three against one. That really doesn’t seem fair,” Catherine said, folding her arms and looking like she wanted to pick a fight with somebody.

“Whoever said politics is fair, my love?” I responded, drinking the last of my coffee. “And to top it off, as you know from reading the papers, that crusty old head of the United Mine Workers John L. Lewis has called Truman ‘totally unfit for his position.’ Here’s a labor leader, who figured to be in Truman’s corner blasting away at him. Lewis is still sore because the president prosecuted some of his coal miners for striking.”

“And you think that will hurt?”

“Hell yes, it will hurt. Those men love Lewis and all he’s done for them. A lot of them may end up voting for Wallace. You’ve got to remember that they might be enough to swing the balance someplace like West Virginia or Kentucky, where coal is such a big part of the economy. All you have to do is win a state by a few votes and you get every damned one of its electoral votes. But at least all of us do have our recourse — the ballot box.”

“You’re darned right we do, Mr. Steven Malek. And to that end, I’m going door-to-door around this area of town today passing out fliers for Truman, Stevenson, and Douglas.” She was referring to Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas, the Democratic candidates for Illinois governor and senator respectively.

“Well, just be careful that some of our more conservative neighbors don’t throw dishwater or tomatoes at you, my dear. Or even, God forbid, boiling oil from a second-story window. These wide and shady Oak Park streets and avenues, bucolic as they may seem, are not what I would term Truman country.”

“Actually, you’d be surprised. There are a lot of Democrats around here now, far more than used to be the case. Everything changes over time,” Catherine answered with a raised eyebrow and a determined look. “And maybe, just maybe, I can help move that change along.”

“Maybe you can at that. After all, what do I know? I’m just a poor uneducated Bohemian kid from Pilsen who doesn’t have any idea about the political terrain around here. Perhaps you can indeed make changes, but please don’t hold your breath,” I said as I seized her around the waist in my best Clark Gable imitation, bent her back and kissed her passionately before walking out the door on my way to the Lake Street Elevated’s Ridgeland Avenue station and the trip Downtown.

As I rode the creaking El train east, I put down my Tribune, looked out over the rooftops of Chicago’s tree-shaded Austin neighborhood, and mused on the reactions Catherine would likely meet with as she went door to door stumping for the Democrats. Although I was a newcomer to Oak Park, I had assumed it to be solid Republican territory, filled with longtime residents who had never fully recovered from Herbert Hoover’s crushing defeat by FDR in ’32. And the Democrats had been in charge ever since — sixteen years.

Truman was an accidental president, of course, moving into the job on Roosevelt’s death in the spring of 1945. Most Americans outside of his home state probably had never even heard of the Missouri senator until he was nominated for the vice-presidency in ’44 after FDR had dumped his former number two man, Henry Wallace, who now was running for president himself.

It had been a rough three-plus years for citizen Harry Truman of Independence, Missouri, in the White House. According to Tribune reporters in Washington I later talked to, Roosevelt had met with his new vice-president only twice in the five months between the election and his death, and FDR had not discussed anything of significance with his running-mate. To top it off, poor out-of-touch Truman didn’t even know of the existence of the atomic bomb until he’d been president for almost two weeks. Enfeebled though he was in his last months, Roosevelt apparently thought he would live forever. In any event, he certainly — and unwisely — kept his vice-president in the dark on all matters of government. That’s what’s called arrogance.

I had occasion to meet briefly Truman myself in the summer of ’45. During my short stint as a Tribune foreign correspondent in the closing stages of the war, I covered the Potsdam Conference, which was held in a suburb of Berlin. It was there that Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met to decide how the battered countries of Central and Eastern Europe would get carved up in the aftermath of the war. Halfway through the meetings, Churchill got replaced by Clement Attlee, who had just defeated him in the British elections, to become prime minister.

Those of us covering the conference — it was said there were 200 reporters, and I believe it — were barred from the Cecilienhof Palace where the formal sessions took place. But I did get to meet Truman one night at a reception for the American press. We were told in advance, however, that we were not to ask the president anything about the meetings; it was strictly a social gathering.

He seemed tense to me when we were introduced by one of his aides. Why shouldn’t he be tense? Just months into the job he was in a summit meeting deciding the fate of millions. Of course Attlee himself was just days into the job of running a country and he probably was pretty damned tense as well, although on him it didn’t seem to show. Maybe it had to do with British reserve.

“Chicago Tribune, eh?” Truman said as he shook my hand with a firm grip. “Have to be honest with you, Mr. Malek; it’s not among my favorite newspapers.”

“I’m not altogether surprised to hear that, Mr. President,” I told him, smiling. “Just promise you won’t shoot the messenger.”

Truman gave a hearty laugh and took a swallow of his drink, eyes twinkling behind steel-rimmed glasses. “Well, next time you happen to run into that old Colonel McCormick of yours see if you can convince him that not every Democrat has horns and a tail, and carries the devil’s very own pitchfork.”

“I will do that, sir — if I ever get to see the Colonel myself. I’m just a lowly peon, one of the foot soldiers you might say. How do you like working with Mr. Attlee, now that he’s Britain’s man at the table?”

Truman smiled benignly. “I was told there would be no questions tonight about the meetings. This is strictly a social gathering, isn’t that right, Mr. Malek?” he said in his soft but not unpleasant Missouri twang. I was being admonished, but in a gentle way.

“Right, Mr. President,” I answered, coloring slightly as he smiled benignly again and pivoted to say hello to a New York Times reporter who had won one, or maybe even two, Pulitzer Prizes.

“Overheard your question to the president about Attlee just now, Tribune scribe,” a slurred voice said from behind me.

I turned and saw the grinning face and watery eyes of a guy who was some sort of minor public affairs functionary in the large Truman entourage.

“You know that questions like that are off limits, old fellow,” he said, shaking his head and waggling an index finger at me like a fourth-grade teacher reprimanding an underachieving student. “Bad form, don’t you know?”

“Can’t blame a chap for trying,” I said, grasping for his name.

“Course not, course not,” he slurred, taking a healthy swig of his highball. He motioned me toward the bar. “Once a reporter, always a reporter. In the blood and all that, right? Buy you one?” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder to steady himself.

I shrugged. “Why not?” As I stepped up to the bar in one corner of the high-ceilinged, ornate and chandeliered room, in what once had been a palace, I kept trying to recall my benefactor’s name but wasn’t sure I’d ever heard it in the days I’d been at Potsdam. Then I remembered that it was Mathieson or something like that.

“What’ll it be?” he asked with a lopsided grin showing nicotine-stained teeth.

I told him beer, and he pronounced the word in German to the blond youngster in a white waiter’s jacket behind the bar. The kid looked to be all of fifteen.

“German beer industry’s gone all to hell, like everything else in this miserable damned country,” Mathieson (if that indeed was his name) said with a belch, “although this is the genuine stuff, the real thing. Some of our boys liberated kegs of it on the push toward Berlin. Amazing they didn’t drink it all up before they got here.” He slid the full pilsner glass with just the right amount of foam along the bar to me.

It was the real stuff, all right. I took a sip and savored it as it went down.

“Your question about Attlee was very funny,” Mathieson said, leaning one elbow on the bar and ordering another drink for himself by gesturing at his empty glass to the young Teutonic bartender. “Very funny indeed.”

“Oh? And why is that? I assure you I wasn’t trying to be a comedian.”

“This is off the record, of course, but I overheard Harry talking to Byrnes yesterday about Attlee.” He was referring to James Byrnes, a confidant of Truman who had been a senator from South Carolina and later would become one of the president’s four secretaries of state.

“That so?” I grinned and let some more of that fine German beer trickle down my throat, wondering if Mathieson always referred to the president by his first name or only when he was loaded.

“Yeah, that’s so.” He chuckled, only it came out like a giggle.

“And...?”

“He called Attlee a sourpuss. And the same with Bevan, that fat Brit who took Eden’s place as foreign minister when Churchill left. Said both of them were sourpusses. You can’t use that, o’course.”

“Of course not.”

“Yeah, old Harry, he’s not one to mince words, no sir, not one to mince words at all. He sort of liked Churchill, even if he thought the guy could be something of a blowhard. Said he talked too much, you know?”

I nodded as if I knew.

“But he also said that for all his jawing and such, Winston was one damned interesting Limey, and damned smart to boot,” Mathieson continued. “Harry was sorry to see Churchill go, especially with dull droning Attlee as the replacement, him with his heavy three-piece tweed suits in the middle of the damn summer, for cripe’s sake. Isn’t that something?”

“Yeah, that’s something, all right.”

“Damned Attlee. Damned Bevan. Sourpusses, both of ’em. But you can’t use any of it, of course,” Mathieson admonished in fuzzy tones, wagging his finger again and gripping the bar as he ordered yet another drink.

And I didn’t use any of it, but I had a growing admiration for the man who some people were terming our ‘accidental president’.