Truman led his soldiers on horseback into the Argonne Forest for the largest American military operation in history up to that time—the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Over twenty-six thousand American troops were killed. When the Axis powers surrendered and Truman’s Battery D had fired the last shots on November 11, 1918, he took enormous pride in the fact that his unit had not lost a single man. Before Truman left Europe, he received a letter from Bess Wallace back in Missouri. “You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to,” she wrote. “I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine.”
Truman returned to Independence, married Bess, and moved into the Wallace house at 219 North Delaware Street, which would be his home for the rest of his life, outside of his years in the White House. In 1920 he opened a business with a wartime buddy, “my Jewish friend” Eddie Jacobson, on Twelfth Street in nearby Kansas City. Truman & Jacobson was a haberdashery with twenty feet of storefront, big glass windows, and a sign at the top: SHIRTS, COLLARS, HOSIERY, GLOVES, BELTS, HATS. After just two years, the recession of 1921–22 put Truman & Jacobson out of business, and left Harry in dire financial straits. “I am still paying on those debts,” he would write in a diary, twelve years later.
At thirty-eight, he was lost and broke, living in his wife’s family home, where his in-laws looked down their noses at him. Once again, destiny intervened.
During one of his last days at Truman & Jacobson, Harry was in the store behind the counter when a local political figure named Mike Pendergast stepped in off the street. Truman had served in the army with Pendergast’s son Jim, and Mike had gotten to know Truman.
“How’d you like to be a county judge?” Mike Pendergast asked.
“I don’t know,” Truman said.
“If you would like, you can have it.”
Truman needed a job. In Jackson County, judges were county commissioners—elected officials rather than arbiters of jurisprudence. Truman had no political experience, but he did have the one thing he needed to win an election: the backing of the Pendergast family, most importantly Tom Pendergast (Mike’s brother), who controlled the Kansas City Democratic machine. Weighing over 250 pounds, Tom Pendergast was a legend in Missouri. He was a kingmaker—so powerful that he could pick candidates for political office and all but guarantee their victory. It was also well-known that, in Jackson County, Pendergast had his fingers in the rackets—gambling, liquor.
Truman won his first election in 1922 to become a Jackson County judge. From there, the “Big Boss” Tom Pendergast controlled his political career. As Truman’s war buddy Harry Vaughan later put it, “Old Tom Pendergast wanted to have some window dressing. And Truman was really window dressing for him because he could say, ‘Well, there’s my boy Truman. Nobody can ever say anything about Truman. Everybody thinks he’s okay.’”
In 1934 Pendergast was desperate for a Missouri candidate who could represent his political machine in the US Senate. When one of his underlings mentioned Truman’s name, Pendergast shrugged. “Nobody knows him,” he said. “He’s an ordinary county judge and not known outside Jackson County.” Then: “Do you mean seriously to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be nominated and elected to the United States Senate?”
Having run out of potential candidates, Pendergast flexed his muscle and won fifty-year-old Harry Truman a job in Washington. The Missouri press was outraged. Truman was “Boss Pendergast’s Errand Boy,” “the Senator from Pendergast.” Before leaving for Washington with his wife and daughter, Truman stopped in to see the Boss. Pendergast told him, “Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and answer your mail.”
“If you had seen Harry Truman . . . in the freshman row in the Senate, you would hardly have picked him as a future leader,” remembered the Washington Post’s Marquis Childs. “He seemed to be one of those inconspicuous political accidents—a nice fellow cast up by the workings of machine politics.” According to one Post story on freshman senators, Truman was “not considered brilliant, either as an orator or as a scholar.”
Truman stayed under the radar, voting consistently along party lines, supporting Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. Nearing the end of his first term, he came into work one morning in 1939 to learn that Tom Pendergast had been indicted on tax-evasion charges. On May 29 of that year Boss Pendergast landed at Leavenworth. The news was an extreme blow to Truman’s already shaky reputation. “The terrible things done by the high ups in K.C. will be a lead weight to me from now on,” he wrote his wife.
By the time Truman gathered his friends to discuss his reelection plans in 1940, the Nazis had invaded Poland and World War II had begun in Europe. The Missouri senator’s career was over, Truman’s friends agreed. The popular Democratic governor Lloyd Stark was running for Truman’s Senate seat. “We didn’t give him a chance,” recalled Truman’s friend A. J. Granoff, a Kansas City lawyer. “We expected him to be beaten badly.”
Truman dug in and ran one of the most storied campaigns in Missouri history. Along the way, the family finances grew so dire that a bank foreclosed on the home his mother and sister were living in, in Grandview. But once again, Truman’s life took an inexplicable turn. Against all odds, he defeated Governor Stark to win the Democratic primary in the closest election the state had seen in almost two decades, then went on to win in November.
No one could point a finger at Boss Pendergast. Harry had done it on his own.
As Truman began his second Senate term, news of Nazi triumphs shocked the world. Early in 1941 President Roosevelt received $10.5 billion in appropriations for emergency defense purposes. Truman took a road trip in his Dodge on his own dime to inspect the army construction sites that were consuming much of that
