Truman, Pendergast, and the Protege Who Outlasted the Boss

Harry S. Truman got into politics as a Pendergast precinct captain in Jackson County in the nineteen twenties. He rose through the machine to county judge, then to the United States Senate in nineteen thirty-four. He was diligent, honest by machine standards in a time when honesty by machine standards was a low bar, and he was loyal to Tom Pendergast in a way that Pendergast's other associates were not always loyal to anyone but themselves.

Pendergast was convicted of federal income tax evasion and pleaded guilty in nineteen thirty-nine. He went to prison for fifteen months. When Pendergast was dying in January of nineteen forty-five, Truman was Vice President of the United States. He flew to Kansas City to visit him in the hospital. When Pendergast died, Truman attended the funeral. He was the only political figure of prominence who showed up. The press photographed him there. He did not explain himself. He owed the man his career and he showed up. That is the whole story.

Within months, Franklin Roosevelt was dead and Truman was President. He ordered the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. He desegregated the military by executive order in nineteen forty-eight. He won the election that the papers said he had lost. He served until January of nineteen fifty-three, returned to Independence, Missouri, and lived another twenty years in the house where he had always lived.

The Truman Library in Independence holds the record of all of it: the Pendergast letters, the senatorial years, the presidency, the post-presidency. It holds both the loyalty and what the loyalty produced. Historians have spent sixty years sorting out the relationship. Truman himself did not seem to find it complicated.