Transcript: Chapter 03

NARRATOR: For a seventeen-year-old boy just starting out in life, Kansas City was brimming with possibilities.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: It's a big, rough, boisterous, overgrown cow town. It's got everything, including lots of opportunity for sin if that's what you wanted. Prostitution, gambling, and wide-open, all night hell-raising. To what extent Harry experienced any of that we'll never know. My suspicion is not at all. He was a good boy.

CHARLES BABCOCK: Harry was a nice guy. And his mother had raised him very well. I don't think he was about to get in trouble in Kansas City even though a lot of people did in those days, you know. Harry didn't have a lot of money so he worked all the time, so he couldn't get in very much trouble that way because his time was spent working.

NARRATOR: Mailroom boy for a newspaper, timekeeper for a railroad construction company, bank clerk -- Harry took what jobs came his way, and made the most of them. Kansas City, Harry reported, was a place with "things doing." He went to concerts, theater and vaudeville, saw the Four Cohans and Sara Bernhardt. Once he heard Theodore Roosevelt speak from the back of a railroad car. The president, Harry thought, appeared to be surprisingly short. He joined the National Guard and enjoyed the company of other young men. Women, though, were another matter. "I was always afraid of girls," he once wrote.

After four years, Harry was drawing a good salary as a bank clerk and finding new friends. He was 21 years old, just beginning to make a life for himself, when once again his father thwarted his ambitions.

Down on his luck, John Truman had been forced to sell his house, all his livestock, and had even taken a job as a night watchman. He saw his chance to get back on his feet when his wife's mother asked him to take over the family farm 15 miles south of Independence. But he knew he couldn't run the huge 600-acre farm without the help of both his sons. He told Harry to quit his job and come home. Again, without complaint, Harry did as he was told.

CHARLES BABCOCK: I don't think he was by nature a farmer. I think he liked people better. So it was tough on him. He didn't want to do it, I'm sure.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: It was hard work, hard, hard work, and blistering heat in the summer time in western Missouri. And cold, cold winters where the whole landscape turned to iron. And he'd never done this before, this was new to him. He'd grown up in town, he'd gone to work in the bank, he had clerks jobs, he looked like a clerk.

ALONZO HAMBY: He remembered in later years friends who told him he wouldn't last six months. And he'd be back at work at the bank.

NARRATOR: John Truman was a stern taskmaster. "If a crooked row, or a blank space showed in the cornfield or wheat," Harry remembered, "I'd hear about it for a year."

ALONZO HAMBY: He's working for his father, and working for John Truman wouldn't have been easy ... but he was determined to prove he could do it. I think he was still dissatisfied with his relationship with his father and thought that maybe this was his last opportunity to repair it.

NARRATOR: For nearly eight years, Harry worked at his father's side. "We were real partners," Harry remembered. "He thought I was about right. I knew he was."

"Dear Bessie, I've been sowing oats all week, and hauled about six tons of hay yesterday. ... You know the wind blew something fierce last Tuesday and Wednesday and the sun also had some effect. Between them I look like raw beef."

To escape the drudgery of his daily life, Harry stole time to write a young woman from his high school graduating class -- Elizabeth Wallace -- Bess.

SUE GENTRY, Editor, The Independence Examiner: The story he tells, they were in Sunday school together when they were six years old. There was a year's difference in their age. And from that moment on, he thought of no one else but that blue-eyed, golden haired little girl.

NARRATOR: It took five years, Harry said, before he could summon the courage even to talk to her. He would remain in awe of Bess for the rest of his life.

Bess was popular, outgoing and a great athlete, a superb tennis player, the best female fencer in town, and a terrific third baseman.

SUE GENTRY: She belonged to a special family in Independence. A family that was prominent and recognized. Of course Harry was from a farm family.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Bess Wallace and her family lived in one of the biggest houses in Independence. They had a servant to wait on the tables, there were lace curtains in the windows and Brussels carpets on the floor.

And you walked up those steps onto the Wallace front porch and you rang the doorbell and when you crossed the threshold into that house, if you were Harry Truman, you were stepping into a different world, where people didn't work with their hands, where to all that he knew at least, they had no such thing as debt or worry, or concern about weather and insects and all the- all the burdens of farm life. And he courted her with a determination that is very expressive of the kind of man he was. It was his first campaign. And he didn't give up.

NARRATOR: He wrote her letter after letter, day after day.

"Dear Bessie, I don't care what kind of paper you write on. I should be just as pleased to get a letter from you on wrapping paper as on the finest stationery."

... You certainly did write me one fine letter (put the emphasis on fine, not on one, because they're all fine)..."

"Dear Bess, I shall sure be glad to go to Salisbury's for dinner Sunday. But don't you think I am a terrible tightwad if we walk?"

Harry was in love, but Bess held herself aloof.

SUE GENTRY: She had lots of beaux. And her mother always thought, so I'm told, that Bess could do better than Harry, a farm boy.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: I once asked Mae Wallace, Harry Truman's sister-in-law, if it was true that Mrs. Wallace, her mother-in-law Madge Wallace, didn't think that Harry was good enough for Bess. And she said, "Oh, yes, that's right. She didn't think Harry was good enough for Bess, but she didn't think anyone was good enough for Bess."

NARRATOR: Madge Wallace would never think Harry was good enough. Once a beautiful girl from a much admired family, she had become a reclusive troubled woman, grown more and more dependent on her only daughter, ever since the tragic death of her husband.

ALONZO HAMBY: Precisely why David Wallace got up very early one morning, climbed into the family bath tub, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger we don't really know. Some accounts have it he was depressed because he was heavily in debt. But why would such a fine man do this?

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Bess' father was an extremely popular, charming man who often rode the horse at the head of political parades. But he was an alcoholic. And like the character in the poem Richard Cory he went home one night and put a bullet through his head. And his wife, Bess' mother, came apart. She never was able to cope again.

NARRATOR: Her husband's suicide scandalized the small town. Madge Wallace became, someone said, "a prisoner of shame."

ALONZO HAMBY: It cast a pall over the rest of her life. Mrs. Wallace gave Bess the impression that it was Bess' duty to take care of her. Her mother became very reliant on her.

NARRATOR: Bess was just 18. A neighbor remembered how, in the hours immediately following her father's suicide, "Bess was walking up and down in back of the house with clenched fists."

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