With the library established and in operation in Independence, a large part of the Truman land at Grandview was sold to a Kansas City developer, B. F. Weinberg & Associates. The old farmhouse, its barn and immediate acres were kept in the family, but some 224 acres of the prime land where Solomon Young had long ago staked his claim, and where Truman had labored so many seasons, were now to give way to the advance of suburbia and become a shopping center. For Truman it meant the end of a heritage that had come to mean more and more to him, partly out of sentiment but also from a realization of how much his own makeup and attitudes derived from his rural background. He took particular pleasure—obvious pride—in describing himself as a retired farmer. “Hey there, farmer!” Sam Rayburn would greet him over the telephone, knowing how it pleased him.
“I sure hate to see the old place go,” he was quoted in the Kansas City Star.
But the sale, as he also said, meant financial security at last, for Truman, as for Vivian and Mary Jane. And while, with the transaction went a good deal of sadness, it affirmed the old faith that come what may, land was wealth to count on. It wasn’t Truman’s rise to political power or his world renown, his books or lectures or the legacy of his wife’s family that saw him through in the end, but the old farm at Grandview.
The sale was announced in January 1958. What the final figure was, what his share came to, are not known. However, a tallying up of all his bank balances a year and a half later, dated August 14, 1959, has survived and shows him with a total of $208,548.07. And this did not include what he had in government and municipal bonds and a few stocks.
The final financial returns on his Memoirs, after expenses and taxes, were turning out to be very much less than anticipated. Even with his payments from Life extended over five years, he had still to pay 67 percent federal and state income taxes, and this he found particularly discouraging, since in 1949 General Eisenhower had been permitted by the Internal Revenue authorities to treat his sale of Crusade in Europe for $635,000 as a capital gain, on the grounds that he was not a professional author; Eisenhower had paid a tax of only 25 percent. At the time the Eisenhower question was at issue, the White House had intervened; now the Eisenhower White House declined to become involved. Truman’s expenses for the Memoirs, for staff and office space, had amounted to $153,000, according to a letter he wrote to John McCormack. His net profit, over the five-year period, would end up, he figured, at about $37,000.
“Had it not been for the fact that I was able to sell some property that my brother, sister and I inherited from our mother I would practically be on relief, but with the sale of that property I am not financially embarrassed.”
He was not asking for a pension, he told McCormack. He wanted justice. He thought the least a former President merited was a government allowance covering perhaps 70 percent of the necessary office expenses and overheads to meet his responsibilities.
As you know, we passed a Bill which gave all five star Generals and Admirals three clerks, and all the emoluments that went with their office when they retired.
It seems rather peculiar that a fellow who spent eighteen years in government service and succeeded in getting all these things done for the people he commanded should have to go broke in order to tell the people the truth about what really happened. It seems to me in all justice a part of this tremendous overhead should be met by the public.
With the help of Charlie Murphy, he took his case to Speaker Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, with the result that in 1958 Congress passed a law providing former presidents with a $25,000 annual pension, money for staff, office space, and free mailing privileges.
For quiet some time, since even before Truman left the White House, Dean Acheson had been eager to arrange for him to come to Yale. Truman would be the recipient of what was known at Yale as a Chubb Fellowship, whereby he would be the honored guest of the university for several days, to lecture and to meet with students and faculty.
The prospect delighted Truman. He thought highly of Yale, out of regard for Acheson—and such other Yale graduates in his administration as Harriman, Lovett, and Roger Tubby—but also because Yale, as Truman said, was the kind of great university he wished he had been able to attend. What pleased him most was that Acheson wanted him to do it.
“I would be proud to appear anywhere with you from Yale to 1908 Main in Kansas City. (That’s the address of the Pendergast Club),” Truman had written in 1952, obviously enjoying the picture of his elegant Secretary of State hobnobbing with the “Boys” at 1908 Main—as he knew Acheson would, too.
Acheson, who was a member of the Yale Corporation, had set things in motion, and in a letter to Professor Thomas G. Bergin, who would be Truman’s host, Acheson provided what stands as one of the finest, most perceptive descriptions ever written of his friends the President:
Mr. Truman is deeply interest in and very good with the young. His point view is fresh, eager, confident. He has learned the hard way, but he has learned a lot. He believes in his fellow man and he believes that with will and courage (and some intelligence) the future is manageable.
This is good for undergraduates. He is easy, informal, pungent. He should not be asked to do lectures for publication. The pressures on him are too great, and it is not his field. It is not what he says but what he is which is important to young men and this gets communicated…I should want Mr. Truman to be received at Yale with honor, with simplicity—not as a show, not with controversy, not as a lecturer in a field which I do not believe is yet a discipline, “political theory or science”—but as one who could, if in some way we were wired for spirit, give our undergraduates more sense of what their lives are worth (how to spend them for value) than anyone I know.
As it was, Truman did not go to Yale until the spring of 1958. He stayed three days and was an immediate hit with students and faculty. Even the crusty Yale librarian, an arch-Republican who had openly stated his distaste for Truman, refusing at first to receive “that man” when Truman expressed interest in seeing the Franklin Papers, wound up wanting Truman to stay longer, so they might talk at greater length, and afterward told others he had had no idea how much the President knew or how far-ranging were his interests. On his early morning walks through campus, Truman was trailed by students and local reporters. There were dinners in his honor and repeated warm applause, and he loved it all. “I have never had a better time anywhere,” he wrote Acheson. “Yale still rings in my ears. What a time we had,” he said again, in another letter.
He was in steady demand now, with two to three hundred speaking invitations a month. At home he seemed to radiate good feeling. “He’s so damn happy,” said a friend, “that it makes me happy just being around him.”
Tom Evans had asked him to join a regular group for noontime bourbon, lunch, and poker at the Kansas City Club, an exclusive gathering known as the 822 Club, for the suite it occupied. Though Truman had been an honorary member of the Kansas City Club since he was elected to the Senate, he had never felt particularly welcome by its members, most of whom were Republicans. The Kansas City Club had never been exactly his crowd. He had been looked down upon as both a Democrat and a politician, not the sort one would want to know personally. But in no time he had become the most popular member of the group, the pride of the 822 Club, an “elevating influence,” as was said. “It was just terrific. He really bowled them over,” Evans told Life writer John Osborne for an article titled “Happy Days for Harry.” Osborne was struck by Truman’s “phenomenal vigor,” the pleasure of his company to others. “Why, goddamnit, Mr. President, I’m going to raise you,” he heard exclaimed over the poker table at the 822 Club.
The “major achievement of his latter years,” wrote Osborne, was “a rare one of its kind, and it has a place in the story of our times…. At the age of 74, in the bright winter of his life, Harry Truman is a genuinely happy man.”
At a benefit performance of the Kansas City Philharmonic, Truman in white tie and tails condu
cted the orchestra in Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. Soon he and Bess were off again for another summer sojourn in Europe, a more private, quiet tour this time, through the South of France accompanied by Sam and Dorothy Rosenman.
That fall, in the 1958 congressional campaign, Truman was back on the trail again, delivering some twenty-five speeches in twenty different states. Lecturing at Columbia University the next year, he referred to himself as “an old stiff,” but few people in the busiest part of their lives were as active as he.
Truman, reported Cabell Phillips, was getting a bigger kick out of life than ever before. In an article for The New York Times Magazine on the former President as he turned seventy-five, Phillips quoted a Kansas City friend saying, “Harry feels that he’s square with the world, that he gave it his best, and got its best in return. Now he’s enjoying the dividends….”
“I found him looking pink and fit, with the same crisp smile and sparkling eyes and the same firm handshake which I remembered from earlier years,” wrote Phillips. And increasing numbers of writers, reporters, and well-wishers made the pilgrimage to see him at the Truman Library, to try to divine what the magic was.
To Dean Acheson, Truman’s salient quality was his vitality. Here was “a man overflowing with life force, with incurable curiosity…no brooding image in a history book…[but] vigorous, powerful…full of the zest of life.”
Margaret had told her father that he talked too much. “She says I am just like my two year old grandson,” Truman cheerfully related to a reporter from out of town. “She says that he runs all the time, never walks, and talks all the time and never says anything.”
Showing visitors “the layout” of “my library,” he would move briskly down the halls talking a steady stream, pausing frequently to greet groups of visitors and especially if they were students. The library proper—the actual collection of presidential papers—would not be open to researchers until May of 1959, but for now there was the museum to see, with displays of photographs, gifts to the President, everything from an ear of Iowa corn to a jewel-encrusted sword from Ibn Saud; there was a small auditorium and a replica of the Oval Office, which though slightly reduced in scale, was furnished as it had been during his years in the White House.
“I want this to be a place where young people can come and learn what the office of the President is, what a great office it is no matter who happens to be in it at the time.” He did not “care a damn” about all the attention on himself. “They said it was necessary to put me all over the place just to show how one particular President worked.” But clearly the focus on his life and achievements pleased him very much indeed.
He loved his office, a bright, spacious room with books and sliding glass panels that opened onto a private patio and garden. His desk was the same big mahogany desk he had used in the upstairs study at the White House. He was there nearly every day, Sunday included, except when he was traveling. As was often said, the most interesting item on display at the Truman Library was Truman himself.
He was always on the job early. Some mornings, at his desk before the staff arrived, he would answer the phone himself, telling callers what the library hours were, or, in reply to further questions, saying he knew because it was his library. “This is the old man himself.”
About noon, if not going into town to the 822 Club, he would go home for lunch. Bess remarked privately that if she never saw another sardine or peanut butter sandwich, she would be very happy.
You know this five day week doesn’t work with me [he told Acheson]. I guess I’m old fashioned. I work every day and Sunday too even if Exodus 2–8.9.10 and 11 and Deuteronomy 5–13 and 14 say I shouldn’t. I think probably those admonitions were the first labor laws we know about…. But someone had to fix things so the rest can work five days—coffee breaks and all.
Having the library gave purpose to his days. The most satisfactory part of the whole effort of creating the library, said David Lloyd, a former White House aide who had taken the leading part in the fund raising and organization of the project, was that it provided Truman with a base, “where he can sit happily among his beloved books, conducting his tremendous correspondence, saying what he thinks and doing as he pleases…able to carry on his old fashioned American occupation of being himself.”
He was there in total six and a half days a week for nine years, longer than his two terms in the White House. And as at the White House, the staff adored him. “Mr. Truman was one of the most thoughtful persons we have known,” remembered Dr. Philip C. Brooks, the first director.
[He] had an optimistic outlook, and a conversation with him never failed to give one’s spirits a lift…. Many times people have written about Mr. Truman as having a temper and “shooting from the hip” in his remarks. We never saw the temper, though we saw plenty of candor…. He was rarely wrong….
David Lloyd and the Archivist of the United States, Wayne Grover, had convinced Truman that there ought to be a mural in the main lobby, to enliven the space and strike an appropriate historic theme for visitors as they entered the building. When Lloyd and Grover recommended the Missouri painter Thomas Hart Benton, whose great-uncle and namesake had been one of Missouri’s first two U.S. senators, as the perfect artist to undertake the work, Truman bluntly said no. He thought Benton had made a mockery of Tom Pendergast in a mural at the Capitol in Jefferson City done in 1936. Further, he did not care for Benton’s style. Shown a Benton painting called The Kentuckian, Truman recalled that both of his grandfathers were from Kentucky and neither looked like “that long-necked monstrosity.”
Nevertheless, a meeting was arranged by Lloyd and Grover who were sure that Truman and Benton would like each other if given the chance to discover how much they had in common. Benton, gruff, opinionated, outspoken to a fault, often profane and extremely vital, had been born, like Truman, in southwestern Missouri, in little Neosho in 1889, and had grown up with politics. His father had served several terms in Congress. Truman went with Lloyd and Grover to visit Benton at his studio in Kansas City in the spring of 1957. As predicted, the two men quickly became fast friends. A contract was signed in 1958; and with the mural under way, Truman took obvious pleasure in Benton’s company, pride in Benton’s friendship, and at one point, at Benton’s urging, climbed up the scaffold to help him paint a corner of the sky.
The first day Truman offered Benton a drink in his office, pulling a bottle of bourbon from his desk and saying, “I hear you like this,” Benton took it as a calculated provocation by Truman, a way to test him.
“This performance on the part of a president of the United States embarrassed me,” Benton remembered. “There is no good reason why it should have, because it was a common act of human hospitality, but there was still about Harry Truman an aura of power….”
Later, as the bourbon ritual became more established, and Benton would ask for a second drink, Truman would tell him no. “Tom, you’re driving a car. You can’t have another because you’ve got some work to do around here and I’m not going to take any risks with you.”
“I was now, in effect, his man,” Benton wrote, “and he was going to protect me. And he did.”
The theme for the mural was arrived at only after considerable discussion. Truman had first thought it should be about Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, with the emphasis on Jefferson’s foresight. Benton had said there was no way he could paint foresight. “Well, what the hell is it you can paint?” Truman said. Benton suggested that the mural be about Independence and its importance in the opening of the West, and so it was agreed.
“I thought at first that the President would also want to be included in the mural,” Benton later told an interviewer, “but he very emphatically turned that down.”
Benton’s fee was $60,000. The work took him two years. Completed in 1961 and titled Independence and the Opening of the West, the mural included no specific events of written history nor any identifiable personages. The theme was expressed with symbolic figure
s, the great human stream that had passed through—with Plains Indians, trappers, hunters, French voyageurs giving way to a tide of settlers and their black slaves. It was robust, colorful, romantic, and as literal as a magazine illustration, with two additional lower panels showing the Missouri River landing and Independence Square in the 1840s, the time when Truman’s grandparents arrived. Truman thought it was wonderful. Showing visitors about the library, he rarely failed to stop in front of the mural, to praise it and explain the history portrayed. His friend Tom Benton, he now liked to say, was the “best damn painter in America.”
Attendance at the library was up to more than 150,000 people a year, a figure that delighted him. In May 1960, Margaret had a second child, another boy, William Wallace Daniel. Meantime, Truman was finishing up another book to be called Mr. Citizen, a collection of essays on life and the world at large written originally for The American Weekly, the Sunday supplement owned by Hearst, Truman’s past nemesis. He had liked particularly being paid and publicized by Hearst. There was no praise sweeter, he said, than the praise of old enemies.
As Acheson observed, Truman was no brooding image in a history book. He expressly disliked the term “elder statesman” as applied to him. “When a good politician dies he becomes a statesman,” he would say. “I want to continue as a politician for a long time.” It had become a standard line. “I like being a nose buster and an ass kicker much better,” he told Acheson privately.
To mark his seventy-fifth birthday on May 8, the Democratic National Committee staged a nationwide celebration, a star-spangled television broadcast that included appearances by Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack Benny, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, H. V. Kaltenborn, and such old personal friends as Monsignor Curtis Tiernan, in a series of spoken and musical tributes, much of the broadcast originating at a $100-a-plate dinner for Truman at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. A few days earlier in Washington, he had said he had no favorite candidate for 1960 as yet, only that he wanted to see the party nominate a man who could win and he had every intention of taking part. “What do you think? How are you going to keep me home?”
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