less than three months, and that under a President little inclined
to delegate duties to his Vice-Presidents or to keep them abreast of
his cares of office--a President who, moreover, was in Washington
on fewer than thirty of the eighty-two days of his successor's vice-
presidency. Mr. Truman did, to be sure, attend Cabinet meetings;
but by reason of the President's absences they were few, and anyway
Mr. Roosevelt, according to his successor, "never discussed anything
important at his cabinet meetings." The two men saw comparatively
little of each other in private. The Roosevelt papers disclose appoint-
ments with the Vice-President only on March 8 and March 19, and
Mr. Truman computes that, as candidate, Vice-President-elect, and
Vice-President, he saw Roosevelt only eight times in the whole year
before Roosevelt's death.

He points out, too, that he took over the higher office uncoached
in the processes and the current problems of the administration, that
there was in the Cabinet no single member with a personal devotion
to him, and that he did not immediately know to whom he could
best turn for counsel. He has also testified that it was this blind and
unassisted aspect of his situation, not a sense of personal inadequacy,
that prompted his humbly prayerful declarations at the outset--
declarations that struck many persons in and out of government as
reassuring and many others as painfully self-conscious.

The enormous prestige of the dead leader would inevitably have
been a handicap to any man who followed him. For better or for
worse, Mr. Roosevelt had stamped himself into the consciousness of
the country as no other man had done since Theodore Roosevelt.
Idolaters, implacable enemies, and those who were neither were all
equally aware of him. His combination of political genius and jugglery
had held together for thirteen straight years of a working unity the
disparate, not to say motley, elements of the Democratic party--New
Dealers, Southerners, city bosses, organized labor. If the coalition
were to fall apart after his death--and so it was to do--few would
pause to ask if it had not been for some time threatening to crumble
or to wonder how much longer even a magician could have main-
tained it. As personage and as party leader, then, the man who had
four times swept the country was felt to be irreplaceable, and it was
a foregone conclusion that any possible successor must rise in eclipse.

Mr. Truman, moreover, had fallen somewhat short of the mission
contemplated for him when the Chicago convention of 1944 nomi-

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