Needless to say, I was always respectful of him both as a father-in-law and a former President. In public I addressed him as “Mr. President” and in private, after our first son was born, as “Grandpa.” Before I avoided calling him anything whenever I could. It would have made us both uncomfortable for me to say “Dad,” and for his generation and mine “Harry” was unthinkable. I used “Sir” as much as possible.
In the summer of 1961, Truman had begun work on what was to be a series of television films about the presidency, but dealing primarily with his own years in the White House. It was still another effort, like the Memoirs and the Truman Library, intended to educate the country, and especially young. Americans. “I’m mostly interested in children,” he often said. The films were to be produced and financed by David Susskind and his company, Talent Associates. The writer and general “organizer” of the project was Merle Miller, a novelist and former reporter for Yank, who had been chosen not only to add a “creative spark,” but because it was felt that he and the former President had much in common. Miller, too, had grown up in the Midwest, a book-loving boy with eyeglasses and early dreams of glory. But more important and influential than the films that eventually resulted was the portrait that Miller would compile from recorded conversations with Truman in a book called Plain Speaking—a book that would not be published for another dozen years.
Ironically, because of his background, Miller had not expected to like Truman, imagining him to be far too much like people he had known growing up in Marshalltown, Iowa. “I had thought he was not what we want in a President,” Miller remembered. “I think we want in a President something somewhat regal….”
But here, he remembered, was
an extraordinarily intelligent, informed human being.
If I had a father who was smart, or if I had a father who read a book, if I had a father who knew how to get along with people…this was he…. How could you not like him! He was such a decent human being with concern, a genuine concern, for your welfare. “Well, how are you?” “How’s your hotel?” “How’s the food?”…He wanted to make you comfortable, and he did make you comfortable. I never had an uncomfortable moment with him except toward the end when it appeared that there was never going to be a show….
With Truman, Miller felt, “You could reach out and there was somebody there. There was a person there!…He was there for you.”
The producer assigned to the series, Robert Alan Aurthur, found Truman brisk, opinionated, and during one morning session, Aurthur thought, possibly more fortified with bourbon than ever the doctor ordered.
“Don’t try to make a play actor out of me!” Truman insisted to them. A day of shooting was arranged at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Truman was to sit with a selected group of officers and talk about Korea. Everyone had expected Truman to be at his best in such a setting, with nothing rehearsed. Instead, he was “terrible,” as Robert Aurthur remembered. Truman was told how good he had been, but clearly he knew better. “You’re trying to make a playactor out of me…and it won’t work.”
Using a tape recorder, Miller and Aurthur spent hours—eventually days—interviewing Truman. The stories, the pithy observations came pouring forth. Listening to him, Merle Miller thought Truman had been ill—served by those who had worked with him on the Memoirs. “I think there were people, Noyes and Hillman being foremost among them, who wanted to make him something he wasn’t, largely dull.”
Truman still told stories wonderfully and with an infectious enjoyment. He was also inclined to exaggerate, even invent. Miller was reminded of Huck Finn’s comment about Mark Twain, “He told the truth, mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”
Truman described the old Democratic picnics at Lone Jack and the oratorical mannerism of the old-time politicians, and particularly Colonel Crisp, who had said, “Goddamn an eyewitness, he always spoils a good story.” He described seeing William Jennings Bryan sitting at lunch in Kansas City with a bowl full of radishes and a plate of butter. “He’d just sit there buttering the radishes and eating them. Ate the whole bowl.”
When Miller asked if he ever “identified” with Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer when growing up, “No,” Truman said. “I wasn’t in that class, I was kind of a sissy when growing up.” Wearing glasses, he said, “makes a kid lonely and he has to fight for everything he wants. Oh, well, you had to be either intellectually above [the others] or do more work than they did…. Then you have to be careful not to lord it over those that you’ve defeated in that line.”
He talked of political bosses. (“The boss is not the boss unless he has the majority of the people with him.”) He talked of Franklin Roosevelt. (“He had something like Bryan had. He could make people believe what he wanted to do was right.”) He told the story of the Chicago convention of 1944, recounting how he had felt when he put down the telephone in Bob Hannegan’s room after talking to Roosevelt and described how the others in the room looked, waiting to hear what he would do. (“I walked around there for about five minutes and you should have seen the faces of those birds! They were just worried to beat hell.”) He described how, during the 1944 campaign, he had threatened to throw Joe Kennedy out the window of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, when Kennedy kept maligning Roosevelt. “I haven’t seen him since.” But then he warned Miller not to use the story, “because his son’s President of the United States and he’s a grand boy.”
An optimist was a person who thinks things can be done. No pessimist ever did anything for the world. Billy Graham said the end of the world was coming, but Truman didn’t believe it. Courtesy mattered greatly to him. He had heard a story of a gas attendant who refused to fill Tom Dewey’s tank, and Truman strongly disapproved. Later he would chide the press for calling the First Lady “Jackie.”
The great men of the Roman Republic were not military men, he said. Hadrian was the greatest; his own favorite, however, was Marcus Aurelius, who thought always of the welfare of his people.
Listened to long afterward the tapes would be extremely difficult to follow, full of static, full of the sound of other voices in Truman’s office, as people came and went. His own voice was strong, lower and more appealing than his platform voice. Often everyone would break into laughter. The mood was one of a good time, good fellowship, and clearly Truman delighted in it.
Unlike the day at Fort Leavenworth, some of the filming sessions went extremely well. His answers “came back rich with detail, and with all the sharp authority of the man who’d been there,” remembered Robert Aurthur of one particularly good session in New York. “Two or three times it was Mr. Truman who asked for another try, saying he could do better.” When, at one point, concern was voiced over whether the President was wearing the same necktie as he had during previous sessions in Independence, Truman asked if that really mattered. “Because if while I’m talking about Korea people are asking each other about my necktie it seems to me we’re in a great deal of trouble.”
To Miller and Aurthur, he seemed exceptionally alert and fit. His first impression, Miller remembered, was, “My God, he’s not old at all!” But in fact Truman had begun to slow down, even slip a little. To those who had worked with him at the White House, those who had known him from years past in Independence and Kansas City, he was noticeably different from the man he had been. He moved with less authority. He had become slightly hard of hearing. Responding to questions, he was often inclined to give a quick abrasive answer for effect, an old man’s wisecrack. He had been asked so many of the same questions so often in recent years that he had developed a set of pat answers that sounded no better than pat answers. Sometimes he talked as if quoting his own books or old speeches. Other times, and only in the company of men, he used more profanity than in days past. And while the famous smile, the cheerful, personable demeanor remained, his private disdain of certain people and trends of the moment was greater than ever before. He hated the fashion of long ha
ir on young men, and greatly disliked being called “senior citizen.” Asked if he thought there would ever be an expedition to the moon, he said probably, but he could not imagine why.
In private, every once in a while, he could revert still to old habits of the mouth as if he were not aware of what he was saying. “People in Independence haven’t changed a darned bit,” he remarked at one point. He had nothing against Mormons, he told Miller, they were exceedingly hardworking people. But a lot of old-timers in town “hate them just as bad as they ever did,” Truman said, and “for the same reason some people hate to eat at the same table with a nigger.” It was prejudice, he said.
He worried about the mounting national debt and “this poor broke government of ours,” He intensely disapproved of what he saw happening to politics because of television. “I don’t like counterfeits and the radio and television make counterfeits out of these politicians.”
He hated to see the town being swallowed up by tract houses, billboards, gas stations, and traffic. And ironically, sadly, it was the automobile and the highway, two of the loves of his life, causing the change. Most mornings now, he had to stop and pick up litter—beer cans and candy wrappers—thrown into his front yard.
His lingering anger over General MacArthur seemed excessive. “There were times,” Merle Miller remembered, “when you wanted to say to him, ‘Look, you know, you had the last word. Leave it lay and bask in your triumph.’ ”
Of Eisenhower, he could hardly say anything without resorting to profanity.
But then Kennedy, too, seemed nearly as misguided to him as had Elsenhower. Truman was utterly appalled by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as was Acheson.
There was an unfortunate preoccupation at the Kennedy White House with “image,” Acheson wrote to Truman.
This is a terrible weakness. It makes one look at oneself instead of at the problem. How will I look fielding this hot line drive to short stop? This is a good way to miss the ball altogether. I am amazed looking back to how far you were from this. I don’t remember a case where you stopped to think of the effect on your fortunes—or the party’s for that matter—of a decision in foreign policy.
“Keep writing,” Truman replied, “it keeps my morale up—if I have any.”
“You must remember our head of State is young, inexperienced and hopeful,” he told Acheson in another letter. “Let’s hope the hopeful works.”
Hearing that the Democratic Party, at Kennedy’s suggestion, was going to put on a $l,000-a-plate dinner, Truman was appalled. “If as and when that happens we’ll just quit being democrats with a little d.” Nobody had consulted him on the matter. “To hell with these millionaires at the head of things.”
Of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he said, “I just don’t like that boy, and I never will.” In May of 1960, Matt Connelly had begun serving a prison sentence for income tax evasion. Convinced of Connelly’s innocence, and like others, convinced that Connelly was being made the victim of a Republican vendetta, Truman had done all he could, including helping to raise money to defray Connelly’s legal expenses. In March 1961 he had written to Bobby Kennedy to urge a pardon for Connelly, who was by then out of prison on parole. But Kennedy had responded by saying only that he was studying the problem. In May, Truman wrote again, providing more detailed background information, and again Kennedy guaranteed his personal attention. But nothing happened, and by the start of 1962, a furious Truman wrote in longhand to the Attorney General:
Matt Connelly has been abused and mistreated as I told you in my original letter. I want him pardoned and his full rights restored. I’ve never spoken to your brother about this and I don’t intend to. But if you think that I enjoy mistreatment and injustice to one of my best employees, you are mistaken. So don’t smile at me any more unless you want to do justice to Matt Connelly, which is the right thing—a full pardon.
In November 1962, Connelly was pardoned by President Kennedy, and it was to the President that Truman sent his letter of gratitude.
Bess, who had been suffering increasingly with arthritis in her knees and hands, had discovered a lump in her breast. Although reported to be benign, it had invaded the lymph nodes and Wallace Graham performed a mastectomy.
The ordeal had been extremely distressing for Truman, who was also later hospitalized, in January 1963, to be operated on for an intestinal hernia—a “little butchering” as he said. In fact, it was an extremely serious operation for someone his age, and he was a long time recovering.
The man who had always loved clocks—who on restless nights had wound the clocks at the White House and kept eight or nine in the Oval Office, who had always wanted to be on time wherever he went—now saw time as the enemy, the pursuer. “That old lady ‘Anno Domini’ has been chasing me and I have to slow up a little bit,” he wrote to Acheson, “particularly since she has a partner in Mrs. Truman.” All three of Bess’s younger brothers, Frank, George, and Fred Wallace, were dead by now.
“At 79 you go to funeral after funeral of your friends, most of whom are younger than 79—and you sometimes wonder if the old man with the scythe isn’t after you,” Truman said in another letter in May 1963, following his birthday.
The murder of John F. Kennedy that fall left him feeling devastated. He had been having lunch at the Muehlebach when he heard the news that Kennedy had been shot, but it was not until later, in his car driving home, that he learned that Kennedy was dead.
“Having come so close to that fate himself,” wrote Margaret, “Dad was terribly shaken by it. For the first time in his life he was unable to face reporters.”
As I was preparing to fly to Washington [Truman later wrote in reply to a query from the author William Manchester] I received a call from President Johnson telling me that a plane was being sent for me and I was able to arrive the day before the funeral. I went directly to Blair House. Shortly after arriving there we rode over to the White House to call on Mrs. Kennedy. I found her as I expected, remarkably self possessed and poised, but to me the deep sadness in her eyes came through. She said to me her husband, the President, spoke of me often and with much feeling and understanding of what we tried to do, and I found myself choked up with emotion.
It is difficult for one who has lived through the Presidency and the trials and burdens that go with it, not to realize the enormity of the tragedy that had befallen the nation and the tragic blow that was visited on his family, and particularly the wife of the President.
Bess had been ill and unable to make the trip. Margaret and Clifton had come down from New York to stay with Truman at Blair House. Seeing her father, Margaret grew concerned. He looked dreadful. A doctor was sent for. Truman obediently went upstairs to his room and was served his dinner in bed. But he was back on his feet the next day to attend the funeral and graveside services, after which he returned to Blair House in the same car with the Eisenhowers. For about an hour in the front parlor at Blair House the two men sat talking. Then Eisenhower returned to his home in Gettysburg and Truman flew back to Missouri.
In the aftermath of the Kennedy tragedy, a bill was passed by Congress authorizing Secret Service protection for former presidents, and so a Secret Service detail arrived in Independence. But when one of the agents called at the Truman house to introduce himself, and told the President that he would no longer have a need for his own bodyguard, Mike Westwood, Truman told him, “Well, I no longer have a need for you, so get out of here.”
Neither of the Trumans had any wish for the Secret Service to return to their lives. Margaret described her mother reacting as if they had just told her she was going to have to spend four more years in the White House. Bess, too, refused to allow the agents on the property. But then President Johnson personally telephoned one evening and convinced Bess that the Secret Service should be reinstated and the Trumans agreed. They were to be watched over from then on, though Mike Westwood continued accompanying the President as before.
Celebrations of Truman’s eightieth birthday in May 196
4 went on for more than a week in Independence, Kansas City, and Washington. There was a huge lunch in his honor in Independence and another at the Muehlebach. In Washington on May 8, he celebrated with “characteristic verve and vinegar,” drawing cheers and praise wherever he went. Invited to address the Senate, he sat in a front seat, a rose in his lapel, and listened to glowing tributes from twenty-seven senators, including two of his favorites from his own years in the Senate, Republicans George Aiken and Leverett Saltonstall. It was an historic occasion, the first time the Senate was making use of a new rule, adopted the year before, whereby former presidents could be granted “the privilege of the floor”—a point that Truman felt so deeply that when he rose he was scarcely able to speak.
Thank you very much. I am so overcome that I cannot take advantage of this rule right now. It is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me in my whole lifetime.
It is unique. It is something that has never been done before. And between you, and me, and the gatepost, since I profit by it, I think it is a good rule.
“You can wish me many more happy birthdays, but I’ll never have another one like this,” he said as senators crowded about him to shake his hand.
Five months later, on October 13, 1964, Truman tripped on the sill going into the upstairs bathroom at 219 North Delaware. He fell, cracking his head against the washbasin, his glasses shattering and cutting him badly over the right eye. He then fell against the bathtub, fracturing two ribs. Though still conscious, he was unable to move.
The police were called and he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Two days later, Wallace Graham reported that his patient was “much improved,” his condition “very satisfactory.” But though Truman was soon home again and eventually returned to something like his old routine, he never fully recovered from the fall. He began losing weight, his face becoming drawn, the eyes behind the thick glasses appearing disproportionately large. “He doesn’t look a thing like he used to,” his sister Mary Jane said. “He always had a full face and always looked so well. He takes a miserable picture now, he is so thin. He’s always taken such a nice picture.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 542