Transcript: Chapter 06

Narrator: Seven weeks after returning home, on June 28, 1919, a day so hot the flowers in the chapel wilted, Harry Truman married Bess Wallace at tiny Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence.

Harry was thirty-five. Twenty-nine years had passed since he had first seen Bess in Sunday School; eight years since he'd first proposed. He had never dated another woman.

One of Truman's men from Battery D wrote him, "I hope you have the same success in this new war as you had in the old." After a honeymoon on the Great Lakes, Harry moved all of his belongings into his mother-in-law's house.

ALONZO HAMBY: I think it was very important to Bess that he was willing to live with her obligations to Mrs. Wallace and absolutely live with Mrs. Wallace who was an awfully hard person to live with. Harry spent much of his adult life almost being a punching bag for her. He never talked back to her. He forced himself to think only the nicest thoughts about her, at least as far as anything that's ever been recorded.

NARRATOR: Although his new bride assured him the situation was temporary, Harry would live with Bess' family for the next 15 years.

In 1919, as America celebrated the end of World War I, Harry Truman was just another soldier in search of a job. Eddie Jacobson -- Harry's old army buddy -- was out of work too. Eddie suggested they go into business together in downtown Kansas City. Just before Christmas, they opened up a little haberdashery on 12th Street selling "gents furnishings". Kansas City had grown famous for its soul stirring jazz. Harry didn't take much to the music, never even learned to dance, but jazz made the downtown swing -- and that was good for business. Everybody seemed to have money to spend. "We sold shirts at 16 dollars," Eddie remembered.

RUTH GRUBER, Jacobson Family Friend: Harry was the salesman, and Eddie was the buyer. They really understood each other in the business.

There were no conflicts. And they were good buddies. They played poker every Saturday night. Truman called Eddie you bald-headed SOB. They were cut from the same Midwestern cloth ... except that the religious background was not the same.

NARRATOR: Eddie Jacobson was Jewish, born on New York City's Lower East Side. Although Harry and Eddie were friends, Harry couldn't bring Eddie home for dinner -- Bess' mother objected. Harry and Eddie made a good team.

They worked hard -- from eight in the morning to nine at night -- but the little haberdashery struggled. And in 1922, after just two years, caught in a post-war recession, it went under. Harry was 38 and deep in debt.

"Went into business all enthusiastic," he wrote. Lost all I had and all I could borrow." Feeling "fairly blue." Harry was facing failure once again, but his luck was finally about to change.

Old army pal Jim Pendergast thought Truman's war record would make him a good candidate for political office and put in a call to his uncle Tom.

NARRATOR: Tom Pendergast was a raw-boned, thick-necked, spat-wearing Irishman. Crass and colorful, Pendergast was a hard drinker and a reckless gambler. In time, he would lose, some said, six million dollars on the ponies. But he knew how to win at politics. A tough, backstage operator, he would build a political machine so strong and control it with such an iron grip that one day pundits would call Kansas City "Tom's Town."

Pendergast made money selling the county concrete and real estate -- monopolizing the market and lining his pockets with lucrative kickbacks.

But in Kansas City in the 20's there were many ways to get rich. Gambling, bootleg liquor, prostitution, narcotics -- Pendergast was into all of it.

He was deeply involved in the Kansas City rackets, and manipulated Jackson county politics.

In 1922, when Pendergast needed someone to stand for county commissioner, or judge as the position was called, Pendergast chose war hero, Harry Truman. Harry saw his chance, and without hesitation, grabbed it.

KEN HECHLER, White House Assistant: Pendergast turned to Truman to sort of perfume the Pendergast machine by getting a person who had integrity, who also had strong support among veterans of WWI.

NARRATOR: But Pendergast did not yet control all of Jackson county. Harry would have to campaign hard, and he was green. He counted on Pendergast, his war record, and the boys from Battery D.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: He was pathetic as a speaker. He could hardly express himself at all. And his pals from the army all went out and campaigned hard for him. And they would cheer at every rally and they would try and whip up excitement for their beloved Captain Harry. And at one point they decided it would be dramatic if Truman arrived by plane. So they got a World War I bi-plane, and one of the army pals flew the plane, Truman came sailing through the air, landed, climbed out of the plane, staggered across the field, violently ill, to a fence where he threw up in front of everybody, and that was sort of his first great entrance as a politician.

NARRATOR: His speeches were blunt, his voice flat, his style coarse, even crude. But he liked politicking with the people of Jackson County, - the talk, the jokes, the camaraderie. He was tireless and energetic -- and he won -- by just 279 votes. He would be elected two more times in the next 10 years.

After years of drift and failure, Harry Truman had finally settled into a career. County Commissioner was a big job. Harry was responsible for 700 employees and seven million dollars a year.

WALT BODINE, Journalist: He was famous, at that time for being a builder, and he built some great highways in Jackson County. That was at a time when they used to say of Missouri, "Stay out of Missouri and stay out of the mud."

NARRATOR: Truman loved the job -- the power, the prestige, the chance to do good things. He worked with Irish and Italian Catholics, and black community leaders, slowly moving away from small town prejudices. He earned a reputation for efficiency, honesty, won the respect of the newspapers.

But he could not win the praise of Bess' mother, who disapproved of politics. But Harry never complained. His life had at last found direction. In 1924, Margaret, his first and only child, was born. Harry was nearly 40, with a daughter he adored, a wife he dearly loved, and dozens of friends.

He joined the Elks, the Masons, the American Legion, the American Veterans of Foreign Wars, the International Acquaintance league, and spent every Monday night in a backroom over a bank playing poker.

But he was troubled: Brought up to honor the difference between right and wrong, Harry found it more and more difficult to deal with the man to whom he owed his job. By 1930, Tom Pendergast dominated Kansas City politics while his involvement in Kansas City racketeering had become even more unsavory. The ruthless gangster Johnny Lazia was his lieutenant. Kansas City became notorious for shoot-outs, arson, kidnappings. Harry had nothing to do with mobsters, but he turned his back while Pendergast skimmed millions in public money. Torn between loyalty to Pendergast and his own self-respect, he began suffering from acute headaches, dizziness, insomnia.

Pendergast demanded that Harry rig county contracts, Harry insisted on fair bidding. His honor, he said, was at stake. Pendergast told Harry his honor wasn't worth a pinch of snuff. Harry's anxiety grew so great that he quietly took a room at a hotel in downtown Kansas City, and poured out his troubles on pages he kept, but would never show anyone.

"Am I just a crook," he wrote, "to compromise in order to get the job done..."

"I wonder if I did right... [I saved $3,500,000] but I had to put a lot of no good sons of bitches on the payroll and pay other sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth in order to satisfy the political powers. I believe I did do right."

Harry refused to condemn Pendergast himself. "He owned a bawdy house, a saloon and gambling establishment," Harry wrote, "but he's all man."

Harry did agree to give county jobs to machine loyalists, relatives, and friends, but he resolved never to take a bribe or a kickback himself.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Truman accepted his association with the Pendergasts as the price he had to pay to be in politics - not unlike, one might say, accepting living with Madge Wallace and in his mother-in-law's house as the price he had to pay to marry Bess.

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