A scribbled signature followed. She read it again. No financial obligation. Yes, it still said the same thing. No, she hadn’t read it wrong. They weren’t going to pay. She only wished she were less surprised. Insurance companies were there for themselves first and you only later, if at all. They were very good at taking in premiums. Sending money the other way? That, they weren’t so happy about.
She knew what Bruce would say if she showed him the letter. He’d note the London address and offer to make a special bombing run for her. He couldn’t do it, but the offer would be nice. Unless the government did more for her and her townsfolk than it had so far, the offer would be all she got.
What the company said might be legal, but it hardly seemed fair. She’d just had her pub in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was that enough to ruin her for life? The insurance outfit thought so.
With sudden startling clarity, she realized letters like hers were how the Bolsheviks got started. When the ones above you didn’t give a damn about what happened to you, what did you do? You got rid of them. Good God! I’ve just turned Red myself, Daisy thought-proudly.
–
Harry Truman had eaten rubber chicken at more political dinners than he could remember, let alone count. Sometimes it was good rubber chicken. The fried drumsticks he’d had in Kentucky on his 1948 reelection campaign he did still remember, and fondly. The stuff he’d downed in Reno on that same campaign he also recalled, but not so happily. He’d had the trots for most of a week after that banquet.
What was on his plate here in Buffalo tonight wouldn’t go down in either of those columns. He could eat it. It wasn’t interesting. If it had been a baseball player, it would have been a backup infielder with a decent glove who hit .250 but had no power. Serviceable. Not memorable.
A local politico named Steven Pankow stood up to introduce him. Pankow aspired to be mayor of Buffalo after the next election. He might well make it. He had the self-confidence, the glibness, and the money he’d acquired from a successful career selling cars.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my great privilege to present to you the President of the United States, Mr. Harry S Truman,” he said from the lectern. He also had a slight Polish accent, which in this part of the country was in itself a political asset of sorts.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Pankow,” Truman said as he walked to the lectern. Then he said it again into the mike. He got a warm hand from the crowd of dignitaries and other prosperous upstate Democrats. Applause never went stale. He went on, “Thank you all for coming to the museum today to take a look at the dinosaur.”
That won him a laugh, maybe a bigger one than the joke deserved. But many a truth was spoken in jest. He’d volunteered for his own political extinction, but he would have been pushed if he hadn’t jumped.
“The cast always changes, but the show goes on,” he said. “It has to. We need to elect as many Democrats as we can in November, from the top of the ticket all the way down, to make sure the so-and-sos on the other side do as little damage as possible. The way things look, the Republicans seem to be running on the slogan ‘Throw the rascals in!’?”
He got another laugh for what looked like another jesting truth. The real problem, or what looked like the real problem to Truman and the rest of the pols in the room, was that the Republicans were all too likely to throw their rascals in and the ones who were Democrats out.
“We’ve held the White House and Congress for the past twenty years,” Truman went on. “Oh, the Republicans took Congress a few years ago, but they made such a do-nothing mess of it, the people made them give it back two years later.”
They blistered their palms clapping for that. Had the President been in the audience instead of giving the speech, he would have clapped, too. He’d won the tag Give ’Em Hell Harry not least by tearing into the Republican-led Congress when he was running for his own term in 1948. That had gone a long way toward giving him the election.
“They say we can’t win this upcoming Presidential race. They sure do say a lot of stupid things, don’t they?” Truman grinned out at the crowd. “I say they’re full of hooey. I’d say they were full of something else, something from the barnyard, but we have ladies present. I do want to remind you of a picture somebody took of me four years ago. I was holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune with a big old headline-DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. So tell me, folks, did Dewey defeat Truman?”
“No!” everybody shouted.
“That’s right. Dewey didn’t defeat Truman. If he had, you wouldn’t be here today putting up with my hot air,” Truman said. “And whoever gets our nomination this time around can win the same way I did. All he has to do is work hard, never give up, and remember he’s running for the little man, not for the fat cats. Fat cats always vote Republican. They’ve got other things wrong with ’em, too.”
They whooped and hollered. They liked him fine when he was laying into the GOP. When he had to talk about the war and the punishment America had taken and how things in Europe and Korea were going…No, he wasn’t so popular then. If he had been, he would have run again. So he steered clear of anything that had to do with foreign affairs as far as he could-which wasn’t far.
“We’ve got us a fine field of candidates,” he said. “The way it looks to me is, we’ve got a better field than they’ll run in the Kentucky Derby next week. This is the state Averell Harriman comes from, of course. He’s a fine man. Since he spent time in Moscow as a diplomat during the last war, he knows the Russians as well as any American is likely to. If I haven’t found peace by the time I leave office, I know he’ll make a good one.”
No, he couldn’t ignore the wider world, however much he wanted to. He won more applause, tentative at first but then growing. Everyone wanted a good peace. Finding terms both sides could accept was the hard part.
“Now, I wouldn’t mind if Mr. Harriman were to be the nominee, but I also wouldn’t mind if any of the other leading candidates got the nod.” Truman liked Harriman at least as well as any of the others, and better than most. But he wasn’t about to endorse him publicly. As near as he could tell, his endorsement would be the kiss of death for whoever was unlucky enough to get it.
“The most important thing is, whichever candidate wins the nomination, we all have to get behind him and work for him as hard as we can. No Dixiecrats this time around, please. No so-called Progressives. We’re all Democrats together, consarn it, and we’ve got to stick together as Donkeys against whichever jackass the Elephants run against us. Thanks very much, folks!”
He got a laugh and applause this time. It looked more and more as if the junior Senator from Wisconsin would bear the Republicans’ standard. Without the war, Truman would have bet on Eisenhower. But a general’s luster tarnished when men were fighting and dying all over again. Senator Taft kept trying to pretend Senator McCarthy didn’t exist. It wasn’t working.
Well, this bash cost twenty-five bucks a plate. Some good, solid cash would flow into the Democratic coffers from it. You needed ward-heelers to campaign for your candidates, not just the national ticket but the local men like Steven Pankow as well. You needed flyers and pamphlets and billboards. You needed more money for radio spots. And, in this modern world, you needed more money still for TV ads. Politics had never been cheap. These days, getting somebody elected was ridiculously expensive.
As the gathering started to break up, Truman pressed the flesh and chatted with his supporters. That was also part of the game. If they could imagine they knew you, they’d work harder on the campaign.