By JAMES MCMANUS
When Harry S. Truman was sworn in to office, his 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. The prudes of America would put up with only so much.
Truman had learned to play cards from his aunt Ida and uncle Harry on their Missouri farm back in the 1890s. In a letter to Bess Wallace, the woman he was courting, in February 1911, the sincere 26-year-old suitor 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."
In France seven years later, Lieutenant Truman played about as much poker as Carl Grothaus, Bill Gill, Herb Yardley, Dwight D. Eisenhower and a million other doughboys did while in Europe. Truman received further artillery training in Montigny-sur-Aube, mastering the specs and capabilities of a new French 75mm cannon called the "Devil Gun" by the Germans, though he also had time to play stud and tour the Burgundian countryside.
Waiting to sail home after the Armistice was signed in November, Truman and his comrades passed that autumn in the mud near Verdun, much of the time in poker games that went on for decades after they were demobilized. The collection of army gear preserved at the Truman Library includes three dog-eared poker decks.
As a judge back home in Independence, Mo., 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 they played at memorial ceremonies, with Truman serving as their unofficial president. Until Truman moved to Washington as a senator in 1935, he seldom missed a session.
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 and China.
Returning from Potsdam by sea, the commander in chief tried to relax in a week-long stud game with journalists aboard the battleship Augusta while awaiting news of the device he had ordered to be detonated above Hiroshima. Because Secretary of State James Byrnes bitterly differed with his boss about what to do next—and was not in the game—Merriman Smith, a UPI reporter who was, wrote that Truman "was running a straight stud filibuster against his own Secretary of State."
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," he told Bess before one such outing. "I can hardly wait to start." Shipboard meals were leisurely, with plenty of time for discussions of history and politics. But once the poker began, the stakes were dramatically higher than what Roosevelt's cabinet had played for. Truman's crew started with $500 in chips, with a one-time option to rebuy.
According to Robert G. Nixon, an International News Service war correspondent, the president "knew some of the wildest games that I have ever heard of. . . . . There was one that I'll never forget. It was a seven-card game called 'seven card, low hole card wild, high low.'"
Apparently, if you hold "a pair of deuces as low hole cards, nothing can undercut you. You are a very lucky man on that hand. If you have a pair of treys or a pair of anything else, and you have matching cards up, you may think that you have three or four wild cards, but the last card that's dealt down can turn out to be a deuce, undercutting the treys, and you're dead. Your hand is worthless." But Nixon emphasized that such games were all in good fun, that losers were encouraged to replenish their stacks from large pots, and that poker was the president's "only means of relaxation—that and walking. Never did anything else. He never wanted anybody to get hurt in a poker game."
Throughout his 88 years, Truman used poker as both a personal and political means of expression. 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 the game keeps friendly competitors elbow to elbow all evening is one of the reasons it has endured for so long. It was a chance to drop the formality of office and kibitz with friends. One of the most famous examples occurred on March 4, 1946, when Winston Churchill joined Truman's game aboard FDR's old armored railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, for a trip to Fulton, Mo., where Churchill was to deliver his era-defining "Iron Curtain" speech.
Churchill had downed five scotches before the action began, and now he pretended that he hadn't the foggiest idea how to play. That night 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 General 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."
Churchill was down $250 when he quit at 2:30 a.m. He needed to get some sleep before giving his speech.
The Cold War was just weeks away. The ability to read who was bluffing and who wasn't would be more important than ever.
—James McManus is the author of "Positively Fifth Street." This essay is adapted from "Cowboys Full," recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
