The Buck Stops With Vinson - or Winston

Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.

– Philip Roth, The Plot Against America



As the 1944 election approached, the cardiologist treating FDR for congestive heart failure believed the crippled president had less than a year to live. While the prognosis remained a closely guarded secret, ordinary citizens could see the darkness beneath Roosevelt's eyes and how badly his hands shook, though with the war very much undecided, a majority still hoped to retain their commander in chief. Yet if Roosevelt was the favorite as he sought an unprecedented fourth term, the progressive politics of Vice President Henry Wallace had alienated too many voters for him to be invited back on the ticket for this crucial election. Over-correcting for this, Roosevelt's first choice for running mate was James Byrnes; he soon learned, however, that the South Carolinian's conservative views about race relations and organized labor, along with his "lapsed" Catholicism, were three liabilities too many.



At the Democratic Convention in Chicago, many delegates and backroom pols correctly assumed they were choosing two presidents – the incumbent and the man who would succeed him before the war ended. But who would it be? Comparing his second choice, Justice William O. Douglas, to the long-shot Harry S Truman, Roosevelt said, "I hardly know Truman. Douglas is a poker partner. He is good in a poker game and tells good stories." Roosevelt was evidently unaware that the Missouri senator loved telling stories and playing low-stakes poker with wild cards at least as much as Douglas did. Even so, in the interests of compromise and party unity, the president allowed a few big-city bosses to maneuver delegates into nominating Truman for the bottom half of the ticket. In November, that ticket handily outpolled Republicans Thomas Dewey and John Bricker. Roosevelt and Truman were sworn in on Jan. 20, 1945, the first wartime inauguration since Lincoln's in 1865. Eighty-two days later, Mrs. Roosevelt summoned Truman to the White House to tell him the president had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia. At 7:09 p.m. on Thursday, April 12, 1945, Truman became the 33rd president. In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels cried ecstatically, "Bring out our best champagne!" before phoning Hitler's bunker to crow that the demise of the Churchill-Roosevelt juggernaut was a turning point "written in the stars."



Meanwhile, as the Allies pushed deeper into Germany, Secretary of War Henry Stimson informed the fledgling commander in chief about a radically new type of weapon at his disposal. The nuclear bomb was the product of the highly classified Manhattan Project, which Albert Einstein and others had urged FDR to create three years earlier. Its goal was to counter Germany's nuclear program, which had discovered fission in 1938 and was close to producing its own bomb when Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, and every Nazi commander surrendered within a week. So much for Herr Goebbels' prediction.



The Manhattan Project, of course, had relied on the expertise of German and other European Jewish physicists – including Einstein, Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller – who had fled to the U.S. and Britain as the Third Reich's anti-Semitism became overtly genocidal. It can be plausibly argued that if Hitler hadn't so loathed the Jews, and if he'd managed to relax from time to time, as Roosevelt and Truman did in their poker games, the Axis powers might have won World War II.



Truman's poker buddies from the previous war were afraid he might stop playing now that he had been "promoted." They need not have worried. The new chief executive even requisitioned a set of chips embossed with the presidential seal for use in the White House, though he tried to avoid being photographed gambling on its premises, however tiny the stakes.

Truman had learned to play cards from his Aunt Ida and Uncle Harry on their Missouri farm back in the 1890s. In a letter he sent to Bess Wallace, the woman he was courting in February 1911, the sincere 26-year-old suitor painted an accurate picture of himself. Even though he was religious, he wrote, "I like to play cards and dance … and go to shows and do all the things [religious people] say I shouldn't, but I don't feel badly about it."



Arriving "Over There" in March 1918, Lt. Truman played about as much poker as Carl Grothaus, Herb Yardley, Bill Gill, Dwight Eisenhower, and a million other doughboys did while in Europe. Truman received further artillery training in Montigny-sur-Aube, though he also had time to play stud and tour the Burgundian countryside. Promoted to captain, he saw action with Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery in the Vosges Mountains. His horse was hit by an exploding German shell and rolled on top of its rider, who had toppled into the shell's crater. After being rescued by a burly lieutenant named Vic Householder, Capt. Truman shocked Householder and the rest of his battery by unleashing a cascade of creatively violent profanity at the Germans. His men, and probably Truman himself, hadn't known he had words like that in him. But they all served effectively in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which culminated in the biggest battle in history to that point, a gory Allied victory during which more firepower was expended in three hours than during the entire Civil War.



Waiting to sail home after the Armistice was signed in November, Truman and his comrades passed that autumn in the mud near Verdun. One of his friends from Missouri recalled: "To keep from going crazy we had an almost continuous poker game," a game that went on for decades after they were demobilized.



As a judge back home in Independence, Truman kept up with his Army buddies mainly around the poker table. Many sessions took place across the street from his courthouse in a third-floor room at 101 North Main Street. The 18 regulars dubbed themselves the Harpie Club, after the harmonicas played at a memorial ceremony, with Truman serving as their unofficial president. Played in the same convivial spirit as games in FDR's White House, Harpie Club action had a 10-cent limit with a three-raise cap, so very few pots amounted to more than a couple of dollars. Until Truman moved to Washington to become a senator in 1935, he seldom missed a session, though he never took the results very seriously. Fellow Harpie Bruce Lambert called him a "chump" who called too many bets with weak hands. "He wanted to see what your hole card was, and knew anyone got a kick out of winning from him and he accommodated … but if he could whip you he got a big kick out of it."



David McCullough's Truman (1992) teased out poker's role in its subject's development as an officer, haberdasher, judge, and politician. The 1,120-page biography makes wonderfully clear how playing the game helped define our most mainstream leader. Unlike nearly every 20th-century president, Truman "never learned to play golf or tennis, never belonged to a country club. Poker was his game," writes McCullough. "A little beer or bourbon was consumed, Prohibition notwithstanding, and the conversation usually turned to politics. Such was the social life of Judge Harry Truman in the early 1930s."



Truman's preference for poker over fussier country-club pastimes helps explain the temperament of "Give 'Em Hell Harry" during American labor disputes, hot wars with Japan and North Korea, and the Cold War with Russia. In August 1945, as he returned from Potsdam after dividing up control of Germany with Churchill and Stalin, Truman tried to relax in a weeklong stud game with journalists aboard the Augusta while awaiting news of the device he had ordered to be detonated above Hiroshima. Because Secretary of State James Byrnes differed with his boss about what to do next – and was not in the game – Merriman Smith, a UPI reporter who was, said that Truman "was running a straight stud filibuster against his own Secretary of State." Truman also may have used his tabletop rapport with "Smitty" and his colleagues to court their approval after describing "in great detail the development of the atomic bomb, and the forthcoming first drop on Hiroshima. Once this graphic secret was told to us for later publication, out came the cards and the chips."



After Japan surrendered, Truman and his poker cabinet often cruised the Potomac on weekends aboard the presidential yacht Williamsburg. "You know I'm almost like a kid," the commander in chief told his wife, Bess, before one such outing. "I can hardly wait to start." Regulars included Gen. Harry Vaughan, Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson, Adm. William Leahy, Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington, and Sen. Lyndon Johnson. Shipboard meals were leisurely, with plenty of time given to discussions of history and politics. But once the poker began, the stakes were exponentially higher than what Roosevelt's cabinet had played for. Truman's crew started with $500 in chips, with a one-time option to rebuy; 10 percent of each pot went into a "poverty bowl," to be distributed $100 at a time to players who'd lost their initial $1,000.



After Truman retired to Kansas City in '53, he joined a game hosted by Eddie Jacobson, his old haberdashery partner, and several of his other Jewish friends. One, the prudish A. J. Granoff, recalled that the ex-president would "lean over and look at my cards and say, 'I got you beat already.'" Truman also tried "to embarrass me by telling some off-color story, then claimed that I blushed. Maybe I did." When Jacobson joined in the teasing, Granoff would blush again, and Truman and Jacobson would both roar with laughter.



Another group of his Jewish friends played at the Oakwood Club. Randall Jessee, a television journalist, claimed that Truman gambled as loosely as ever. "Truman just couldn't bear to fold; he wanted to be in to the end. He had a special weapon, though," Jessee said, "which he used to improve the odds. It was called 'Vinson' after his favorite poker companion from presidential days. It's low ball, high ball, I never did understand. He was pretty good at [it], because nobody else understood what we were doing." Each time the deal rotated to Truman, he'd say, "Well, we're going to play Vinson now."



Throughout his 88 years, Truman loved poker for many of the reasons he was politically successful. His motto, "The buck stops here," refers to the dealer's button or placeholder, because during the 19th century, hunting knives with buckhorn handles often served that function. It was the president's folksy way of letting Americans know he was responsible for what happened on his watch – that he wouldn't "pass the buck" in tough situations. According to historian Raymond Geselbracht, Truman also loved the "vitality in the game that let him share in the lives of people he liked and see them as they really were, underneath whatever formalities they usually had to adopt when they dealt with a judge, senator, President, or former President. Poker also gave him a chance to make his friends happy in some small ways, which was very important to him."



That the game keeps competitors elbow to elbow all evening is one of the reasons it has endured for so long. For Truman and his predecessor, it was a chance to drop the formality of office and kibitz with friends old and new. The most famous example occurred on March 4, 1946, when Churchill joined Truman's game aboard FDR's old armored railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, for a trip from DC to Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill was to deliver his epoch-defining "Iron Curtain" speech. "Mr. President," he said, sitting down, "I think that when we are playing poker I will call you Harry."

"All right, Winston," said Truman.



Churchill had downed five Scotches before the action began, then pretended he hadn't the foggiest idea how to play. "Harry," he said at one point, "I think I'll risk a couple of shillings on a pair of knaves."



Reporter Charlie Ross wrote, "We played straight poker. The President and the rest of us would have liked to introduce some wild games, but the Prime Minister thought this would be too confusing."



Worried about the reputation of American players, Truman had encouraged them to bring their A-game. As the Magellan blasted through the heartland, Churchill lost steadily – so much, in fact, that when the great Brit left the table for a moment, Truman told his companions to let up a bit. "But, Boss, this guy's a pigeon," said Harry Vaughan. "If you want us to play our best poker for the nation's honor, we'll have this guy's pants before the evening is over." Whether or not they let up, Churchill mounted a brief comeback before quitting at 2:30 a.m. to get some sleep before giving his speech.



"The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power," he declared the next day. "It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with this primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future." Three paragraphs later he came to the crux: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." The West, he continued, must never show weakness or fear in the face of the "Soviet sphere." Truman told him the speech would "do nothing but good," though many Americans felt the old bulldog had poisoned the already difficult relationship we had with our other main ally. Eight days later, Stalin called the speech "a call to war," and the Cold War was officially under way.



Next: the ways in which American diplomatic and military strategy during that war were founded on poker tactics and game theory.