The American Vice Presidency (59 page)

Barkley’s solid support of FDR had been unquestioned up to now, but when the president went ahead with his threatened veto, the majority leader became particularly incensed at the incendiary language Roosevelt used in rejecting the bill. He called it “a tax-relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy,” saying he had asked Congress for “a loaf of bread” and was handed instead “a small piece of crust” of “many extraneous and inedible matters.” Barkley wrote, “To me, $2.3 billion is no crust.”
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The next day Barkley took the Senate floor, angrily charging that the president’s message was “a calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every member of Congress,” adding, “I do not propose to take this unjustifiable assault lying down.” He charged that in reading the tax bill, Roosevelt “had gone forth with a searchlight and magnifying glass to find inconsequential faults.”
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He called a Democratic caucus and resigned his leadership, saying that if Congress had “any self-respect yet left it [would] override the veto.”
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His declaration was greeted on the Senate floor and in the galleries with wild applause, enhancing his esteem in the Senate.

On leaving the Senate Democratic caucus, Barkley was besieged by awaiting reporters seeking his comment. “Boys,” he told them in classic
Barkley style, “I’m afraid I’m like the Swede who proposed to his girl while driving. She said yes, and then they drove along for five miles in silence. Finally she asked him, ‘Why don’t you say something?’ The Swede replied, “Ay tank Ay say too much already!’ ”
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Surprised at the resignation, Roosevelt wrote Barkley another “Dear Alben” letter, urging him to reconsider and urging his fellow senators not to accept the resignation or to “immediately and unanimously” reelect him. Barkley was indeed reelected, and the House and Senate overwhelmingly overrode and killed the FDR veto. In his conciliatory letter, Roosevelt concluded, “Your differing with me does not affect my confidence in our leadership nor in any degree lessen my respect and affection for you personally.”
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But Barkley wrote later, “I am in no position to state with certainty that the episode revolving around Mr. Roosevelt and me over this tax bill affected my future political career. Nevertheless it is legitimate to reflect on what might have happened if this episode had not transpired.”
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Roosevelt’s selection of Truman over Barkley did not seem to sour the Senate leader’s relations with his old Senate colleague when Truman became president. They became an effective team in pushing further New Deal legislation, now labeled the Fair Deal under Truman. But when tough economic times returned and the Republicans took over control of the House and Senate for the first time since the Great Depression, Barkley was reduced to the Senate minority leadership. In the approach to the 1948 presidential election, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Truman would lose a bid for reelection to the Republican Tom Dewey, nominated a second time after his defeat by FDR in 1944. Therefore, it seemed also that the Democratic vice presidential nomination would be worth even less.

Prior to the convention, Truman’s aide Clark Clifford passed the word to insiders that the president had telephoned Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, bypassed by FDR in 1944 for Truman as his running mate, and sounded him out about taking the nomination this time around. Douglas wanted time to consider, but he finally said he wasn’t interested. An insulted Truman, mixing his metaphors, told a friend, “I stuck my neck all the way out for Douglas and he cut the limb out from under me.”
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At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Barkley again was chosen to deliver the keynote address, this time to a glum and
dispirited party anticipating the worst outcome. He rose to the occasion, firing up the delegates with a classic Barkley assault on the Republicans. Chiding the Republicans for attacking the New Deal, he asked, “What is this cankering, corroding, fungus growth which every Republican orator … denounced with unaccustomed rancor, then in their adopted platform hugged to their political bosom as if it were a child of their own loins? It was recovery. The new Roosevelt administration breathed into the nostrils of every worthy American enterprise a breath of new life, new hope and new determination.”
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The demonstration that followed Barkley’s stirring battle cry lasted so long that many said later he had talked himself into the vice presidential nomination. Farley said, “The convention made up the President’s mind for him” on his running mate.
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In any event, in light of the convention’s reaction, Truman phoned Barkley the next day, congratulating him on the speech and offering him the nomination. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to be Vice President?” he asked. “I didn’t know you wanted the nomination.” Later, Barkley wrote of his reply, which sounded a bit haughty: “Mr. President, you do not know it yet.” Truman responded, “Well, if I had known you wanted it, I certainly would have been agreeable”—hardly a ringing endorsement. Barkley replied that if it was the will of the convention he would accept but added that the nomination would have to come quickly. He explained rather petulantly, “I am not interested in any biscuits that have been passed around hot to other people and come to me cold.”
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According to his wishes, he was nominated unanimously.

In a fighting speech given at two in the morning, arousing the slumping delegates, Truman assured them, “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget it!” He assaulted “the worst Eightieth Congress” ever and announced he would be calling it back into a special session to act on an array of liberal bills, saying about the legislators, “They can do this job in fifteen days if they want to do it. They will still have time to go out and run for office” afterward.
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In the most dramatic whistle-stop presidential campaign up to this time, Truman rode the rails across the nation attacking the Republican “donothing Congress.” Barkley saw him off from Union Station with “Mow ’em down!” to which Truman replied, “I’ll mow ’em down, Alben, and I’ll
give ’em hell!” which became his campaign battle cry.
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At the same time, Barkley tirelessly introduced the prop-stop campaign, flying in a chartered DC-3 nicknamed
The Bluegrass
across thirty-six states in six weeks in support of the winning ticket in November.

As vice president, Barkley undertook presiding over the Senate he had for so long and so recently ruled as the Democratic leader. He had less influence in its deliberations than he had had as its majority leader, but his experience in the Senate made him a valuable aide to Truman, through his long personal friendships and associations. He attended Democratic committee meetings, sat in on Truman cabinet sessions, and was the first vice president to be made a member of the National Security Council under the 1947 act creating it.

During Barkley’s vice presidency, however, the Democratic majority had shrunk to only two seats, and his parliamentary rulings from the chair were sometimes challenged successfully. In 1949, when he ruled against a point of order by the segregationist Democratic senator Richard B. Russell in a civil rights debate, he was overridden by the Senate. But other senators lauded him for taking a principled stand to end the southern filibuster.
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In the summer of 1949, Barkley, a widower, suddenly electrified and entertained social Washington with a whirlwind courtship, after which he married a widow, Jane Rucker Hadley of St. Louis, thirty-four years his junior. They had met at a dinner party given by her friends Clark Clifford, the Truman counsel, and his wife, Marny. They became favored guests on the capital social circuit.

In 1950, Barkley was making a speech in Illinois when he was notified of the attempted assassination of Truman by Puerto Rican nationalists while he stayed temporarily at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. As a consequence, Truman ordered Secret Service protection for the vice president, and five agents were assigned. Barkley balked and got the squad reduced to two, playing games with them, once eluding their shadow by hopping on a Washington bus just to take a ride.
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During the Korean War, Truman left the congressional campaigning of 1950 to Barkley, and although the Democrats suffered some losses, they retained control of both the House and Senate. In 1952, before Truman said whether he would seek another term, which was possible under an
exemption in the Twenty-Second Amendment, Barkley actively pondered a presidential candidacy of his own. Truman expressed his affection for “Old Barkley” but noted that at seventy-four his age was a factor against him.

At the time, however, Truman apparently had two other men in mind for the Democratic presidential nomination. One was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Great Crusade in Europe, which had vanquished Nazi Germany. The other was a rising political star, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson II of Illinois, grandson of a previous vice president under Grover Cleveland and, as it happened, a distant cousin of Barkley. Eisenhower, courted by both major parties, finally decided to run for the presidency as a Republican. Stevenson, while having announced he would run for reelection as governor, was called to the White House by Truman to consider seeking it in the event that Truman decided not to run for another term. Afterward, Stevenson called Barkley, told the vice president of his visit to Truman, and sought his advice. Barkley quickly informed him that he was thinking of running for the presidency himself.

In late March of the presidential election year, Truman announced he would not run. The other leading Democrat was Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Barkley didn’t believe Kefauver could win and finally decided to announce that while he would not actively seek the nomination, he would accept it. About a week before the opening of the convention, Barkley got a call in Paducah to attend a “must” conference in Washington. The party chairman Frank McKinney opened the session, according to Barkley, by telling him, directly in the president’s presence, that Truman had decided to back him for the nomination. McKinney said the president would not make a public statement to that effect but would urge his Missouri delegation to support Barkley. At this point, Barkley wrote later, he asked, “What about Governor Stevenson?” He was told that it was certain he would not run.

In the end, Barkley met at the convention with sixteen top labor leaders, asking their support. They all turned him down, saying they still liked and admired him, but he was now too old for the job. That afternoon, he called Truman and told him he was withdrawing from the race.
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In the ensuing campaign Barkley backed the nomination of his distant cousin Stevenson and his running mate, Senator John J. Sparkman of Alabama, in their futile effort to beat the national hero Eisenhower and his ticket mate, Senator Richard M. Nixon of California. After the
inauguration of the Republicans, the Barkleys attended a reception at the home of the former secretary of state Dean Acheson. The gathering of the defeated Democrats occasioned Barkley to recall the story of the French husband whose wife had died and her paramour cried broken-heartedly at her funeral, at which the husband consoled, “Don’t take it so hard, my friend. I shall marry again.”
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Two years after retiring to Kentucky at age seventy-six, Barkley won back his old Senate seat from the incumbent Republican. His victory contributed to a one-seat Democratic majority that made Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas the majority leader. On April 30, 1956, Barkley delivered another keynote address with his customary gusto, this time to a mock convention at Washington and Lee University. He ended by saying that after all his years in the Senate, he had become a freshman again and was “glad to sit on the back row,” adding, “for I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty.” Thereupon, as the student audience heartily applauded, Alben W. Barkley collapsed on the spot and died of a massive heart attack at age seventy-nine.
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As “the Veep,” he may have been the most publicly beloved of all the men to serve in the office, but few would argue he was very influential. Barkley’s advanced age and inexperience in foreign policy left questions concerning the wisdom of Truman’s selection in terms of potential presidential succession, barely three years after he himself had experienced having “the moon, the stars, and all the planets” dropped on him.

RICHARD M. NIXON

OF CALIFORNIA

S
eldom was the selection of a vice presidential nominee less relevant to the outcome of an election than was that of the Republican Richard Milhous Nixon in 1952. The huge popularity of the party’s presidential nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, leader of the Great Crusade against Nazi Germany during 1941–45, assured a landslide victory for the Eisenhower-Nixon team.