Yet on he went, taking his morning walks with Mike Westwood, or on occasion with Thomas Melton, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, who lived just across Truman Road—the pace a little slower each year, but Truman doing most of the talking, as Melton remembered. Passing an enormous gingko tree on Maple Street, one of the largest, most spectacular trees in town, Truman would customarily speak to it, too.
And what would the President say to the tree, Melton would be asked by a visitor years later. “He would say, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ ”
He and Bess became steady patrons of the Independence Public Library. In another new Chrysler, this a light green model, Mike Westwood would drive them, Truman riding in front, Bess in back. At the library she would go in and return with an armload of books.
The correspondence with Acheson also continued, Acheson writing at length to keep Truman posted on the Johnson presidency, as he knew Truman wanted. But Truman dictated his letters now and had less and less to say.
In the summer of 1965, Vivian Truman died at age seventy-nine. “His passing has meant a great loss to me,” Truman told Acheson. Within days Ted Marks, too, was dead and Truman attended both funerals.
When, on July 30, 1965, President Johnson came to Independence, to sign the new Medicare bill in Truman’s presence at the Truman Library, there was, in the words of one account, “sad amazement” expressed in the large Washington contingent over Truman’s pitifully frail appearance. His voice, however, remained firm and he talked of several projects he planned for the library.
Sitting at Johnson’s elbow, a cane in his lap, he watched the signing into law of legislation for health care for the aged such as he had proposed twenty years before.
“You have made me a very, very happy man,” Truman told the President.
Nellie Noland died, and Jim Pendergast. Among the private sorrows of Truman’s final years had been a falling out with his old friend Jim Pendergast. There had been a misunderstanding in 1958 over the endorsement of a local Democratic candidate, which left each of them convinced the other had betrayed their friendship. It was a sad, unfortunate impasse, and when Jim Pendergast, after a long battle with cancer, died in the spring of 1966, Truman, who attended the funeral, knew another chapter of his life was closed and not at all as he wished.
Attending funerals had become a part of his life. Thomas Melton, the Presbyterian pastor, would later recount an unforgettable graveside scene one grim winter day in Independence:
Quite often we have committals for people who are not from this area when they die. It was in February if I recall correctly and it was very cold and bitter, a lot of snow that year. And we were going to have a committal at the city cemetery. So I went to the appointed place…. There was no one there but the undertaker…no pallbearers. And we thought we’d wait until the appointed time [as announced] in the newspapers, in case anybody would come…. In came this green Chrysler and I recognized the car immediately. I knew it was Mr. Truman’s car. The Secret Service man got out and stood in his position and Mr. Truman walked over to the bier, and I was amazed. I went ahead with the committal. Snow was still in the air, cold…. After I had my benediction, I asked him, I said, “Mr. President, why are you here? It’s cold and bitter. Did you know this gentleman?” And he said, “Pastor, I never forget a friend.” And I was just speechless. This was the President of the United States.
Lyndon Johnson came to Independence several times again, hoping to enlist Truman’s endorsement of the war in Vietnam. But Truman, who as President had first pledged American support for the French against Ho Chi Minh, made no statement about the war. Privately, he had become more and more disillusioned with Johnson’s leadership.
In 1967, in his eighty-fourth year, Truman stopped coming to the library on a regular basis. Nothing was said in explanation; he just was not there much any more.
When, in early 1969, the new President, Richard Nixon, expressed a desire to come see Truman, he and Bess agreed. The President and First Lady called at 219 North Delaware on March 22. They were with the Trumans for half an hour, then drove to the library, where Truman, who was not having one of his best days, stood expressionless while Nixon, at a concert grand piano outside Truman’s office, played “The Missouri Waltz.” To many who were present, and who knew how much Truman disliked the song, it was a difficult moment. But when Nixon finished, Truman turned to Bess and asked what it was he had played.
Margaret and Clifton Daniel had had two more children by now—Harrison and Thomas—making a family of four sons. Twice with the Daniels, in late March 1968 and again the same time the next year, the Trumans returned to Key West, where, with the four boys, Grandpa would be seen walking the streets of the old town wearing a blue blazer and a baseball cap, enjoying the air and sunshine as in times past. These would be remembered as among the happiest weeks for all of them. He felt “damn good for an old man,” Truman told reporters.
But he had been hospitalized for the flu that winter and was beginning to feel like the last leaf on the tree. Adlai Stevenson, Churchill, Douglas MacArthur were all dead. During the stay at Key West came the news of the death of Eisenhower. Truman wrote a gracious tribute.
On June 28, 1969, the Trumans celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at home. There was no party. Only a few friends dropped by. As Bess explained to reporters, the President was not up to standing for a long time shaking hands.
Once, in 1913, writing from the farmhouse at Grandview, he had told her, “It seems a hollow week if I don’t arrive at 219 Delaware at least one day in it.” Now, there were few days that he did not spend there. His books became his life more and more. Cars passing on Truman Road, neighbors out for a walk in the evening, could see him in the window, sitting with a book under his reading lamp. What would her father’s idea of heaven have been, Margaret would be asked years later. “Oh,” she said, “to have a good comfortable chair, a good reading lamp, and lots of books around that he wanted to read.” Once in New York, when Ken McCormick of Doubleday had called on him early in the morning at his hotel, Truman had been sitting in a chair in the bedroom with several new books stacked on a table beside him. Did the President like to read himself to sleep at night, McCormick asked. “No, young man,” said Truman, “I like to read myself awake.”
Thomas Hart Benton came to the house to sketch the frail, old figure in his chair with his books, and the drawing Benton made was one few Americans would have recognized as Harry Truman. Benton thought there was more character in the face now.
“I was greatly pleased by your kind and generous letter on my eighty-seventh birthday,” Truman wrote to Acheson on May 14, 1971. “Coming from you, this carries a much deeper meaning for me.” The signature was still recognizable as his own, but just barely.
Ethel Noland died that summer. Then, on Tuesday, October 12, at his farm in Sandy Spring, Maryland, Acheson was found slumped over a desk in his study, dead of a heart attack at age seventy-eight. “Oh, no,” Bess Truman said when called by The New York Times. Mr. Truman, she said, would have no immediate comment, but added, “I know he’ll be very disturbed.”
The summer of 1972 Truman was hospitalized—first after another fall, then for two weeks with gastrointestinal troubles.
Late the afternoon of Tuesday, December 5, he was taken again to the hospital, leaving the house on North Delaware by ambulance for the last time. His condition, as given to reporters at Research Hospital by Wallace Graham that night, was “fair.” He was suffering from lung congestion.
On December 6, his condition listed as “critical,” bulletins were issued throughout the day. The doctors were trying to unclog his lung with antibiotics and oxygen, but were hampered because the former President was also suffering from bronchitis and because hardening of the arteries was causing his heart to race periodically.
Margaret, who was in Washington for a reception celebrating her new book about her father, Harry S. Truman, flew to Kansas City immediately in a White House jet p
rovided by President Nixon.
In another few days, Truman appeared to rally and was taken off the critical list. But as his battle went on, Wallace Graham could say only that his condition was “very serious.”
Bess and Margaret were with him daily in his room on the sixth floor. Mary Jane Truman dropped by. She too was a patient in the hospital, having injured herself in a fall several weeks before. Truman was reported awake and smiling. Asked how he was feeling, he answered, “Better.” There were Christmas decorations in his window, reporters were told. Mrs. Truman “remained in good spirits.” “He smiled at us and gave yes and no answers to our questions,” Margaret told the press on December 10. On the night of December 11, when asked how he felt, Truman reportedly said, “I feel all right.” Asked if he hurt anywhere, he said, “No.” On December 14, he was reported no longer able to talk.
The struggle went on for three weeks, during which Margaret returned to her family in New York. By now he was suffering from lung congestion, heart irregularity, kidney blockages, and a failing digestive system.
One of the special duty nurses who had been with him as his night nurse since he was first admitted on December 5, Mrs. Walter Killilae, described him later as “warm, sweet and most appreciative of anything you did for him.” On Sunday morning, December 24, her night duty ended, she leaned over to tell him she was to have the night off, Christmas Eve, and asked him if he would be there when she got back. “He squeezed my hand,” she later said, “which leads me to believe his mind was still responsive….”
On Christmas Eve, he grew progressively weaker. On Christmas morning he was reported in a deep coma and near death. Margaret arrived by plane from New York. A 2:00 P.M. bulletin reported his condition “unimproved” and the hospital’s chief of staff, Warren F. Wilhelm, called his chances of survival “very, very small.” Asked why Mr. Truman was being kept alive this long, Dr. Wilhelm replied, “It’s an ethical question. Who would decide? You can always hope that he will rally.”
Bess, who had been staying overnight in the hospital and was with her husband through most of every day, had reached a point of almost total exhaustion. Greatly concerned, Margaret persuaded her mother to go home with her to Independence that Christmas night. “Dad was in a coma and there was nothing we could do to help him.”
Truman died in Kansas City’s Research Hospital and Medical Center on Tuesday, December 26, 1972, at 7:50 A.M. Central Standard Time.
An elaborate, five-day state funeral had been planned years before, with everything to be conducted by the Fifth Army from Fort Sam Houston, Texas. “O Plan Missouri,” as it was called, ran to several hundred pages, with everything specified in elaborate detail. Originally, Truman’s body was to be flown to Washington to lie in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol, then returned to Missouri for burial. As it was, in the three weeks when he lay dying in the hospital, the Army’s aging “Black jack,” the horse that had become such a symbol of tragedy for the nation during the Kennedy state funeral, was taken up in a plane several times to prepare him for the flight to Missouri.
Truman had been shown the entire plan one day in his office at the library and approved nearly all of it, subject to changes his family might wish. He thought it sounded like a “fine show” and was sorry to have to miss it, he said. He objected only to lying in state in Washington. He wanted to be buried “out there,” he had said, turning in his chair to look into the courtyard. “I want to be out there so I can get up and walk into my office if I want to.”
But the funeral on December 27 was greatly reduced in scale, to be more what Bess wanted. “Keep it simple, keep it simple,” she told Margaret and Clifton Daniel. Even so, the military presence was to be substantial, as several thousand troops arrived in Independence to take part in the ceremonies.
After a private service for the family at Carson’s Funeral Home, the body was taken to lie in state in the lobby of the Truman Library, the hearse moving slowly through the streets of the town—along Lexington, River Boulevard, Maple, and North Delaware, all lined with soldiers. An honor guard was posted at the library steps. Six howitzers lined the front lawn.
President and Mrs. Nixon came to pay their respects and to place a wreath of red, white, and blue carnations on the casket. Lyndon Johnson was present with all of his family. Johnson, who looked gaunt and greatly aged, would himself die just three weeks later.
For the rest of the day and through the night and on into the morning, thousands of people—seventy-five thousand people, it would be estimated—passed by the closed casket in the lobby of the Truman Library in front of the Benton mural. The line stretched half a mile, to beyond the highway. “This whole town was a friend of Harry’s,” one man told a reporter.
That afternoon, Thursday, December 28, as he had wished, Truman was buried in the courtyard of the library. With space for the service in the library auditorium limited, only 250 people were invited. Among those present were Averell Harriman, Clark Clifford, Charlie Murphy, Rose Conway, Harry Vaughan, and Sam Rosenman.
Bess Truman, Margaret and Clifton and their four sons, sat behind a green curtain, screened from the others. It was an Episcopal service, as Bess wished, though a Masonic rite was included and a Baptist minister read a prayer. There was no eulogy, no hymns were sung.
Outside afterward, at the gravesite, it was cold and raw, and as the howitzers roared a twenty-one-gun salute and Taps was sounded, the day seemed to turn dramatically colder still. Later, there was snow in the air, and a few of the library staff would remember standing at a window looking out into the empty court and feeling great sympathy, as assuredly Truman would have too, for the men who were working in the cold and dark to fill in the grave.
V
“He was not a hero or a magician or a chess player, or an obsession. He was a certifiable member of the human race, direct, fallible, and unexpectedly wise when it counted,” wrote Mary McGrory in the Washington Star the next day, in one of hundreds of published tributes.
He did not require to be loved. He did not expect to be followed blindly. Congressional opposition never struck him as subversive, nor did he regard his critics as traitors. He never whined.
He walked around Washington every morning—it was safe then. He met reporters frequently as a matter of course, and did not blame them for his failures. He did not use the office as a club or a shield, or a hiding place. He worked at it…. He said he lived by the Bible and history. So armed, he proved that the ordinary American is capable of grandeur. And that a President can be a human being….
He was remembered in print and over the air waves, in the halls of Congress and in large parts of the world, as a figure of courage and principle. Even Time and The Wall Street Journal, publications that had often scorned him in years past, acclaimed him now as one of the great figures of the century.
The obituary in The New York Times ran seven pages. (When the writer, Alden Whitman of The Times, had been preparing it in advance years before and went to Independence to interview Truman himself, feeling extremely uneasy about the whole assignment, Truman greeted him with a smile, saying, “I know why you’re here and I want to help you all I can.”)
In a day of memorial tributes in the Senate chamber that he so loved, he was eulogized as the president who had faced the momentous decision of whether to use the atomic bomb, praised for the creation of the United Nations, for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the recognition of Israel, NATO; for committing American forces in Korea and for upholding the principle of civilian control over the military—“decisions many of us would pale before,” said Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.
He was remembered as the first president to recommend Medicare, remembered for the courage of his stand on civil rights at the risk of his political fortunes. The whistle-stop campaign was recalled as one of the affirming moments in the history of the American political system.
His lack of glamour, the “cronies” and loud Florida shirts, the angry
letters and the taint of the “Truman scandals,” seemed to fade in memory. The scandals, squalid as they were, would with time appear almost tame in contrast to the corrupt excesses of later administrations.
The frequently quoted view of Sam Rayburn that Truman was right on all the big decisions, wrong on all the little ones, was hardly accurate. His Loyalty Program, a very large decision, had been woefully wrong—as was the appointment of Louis Johnson, as was the high-handed seizure of the steel industry—while the restoration of Herbert Hoover to public service and public esteem was not only a right and generous “small” decision, but one that said much about Truman’s essential human quality.
That he would later be held accountable by some critics for the treacheries and overbearing influence of the CIA, as well as for the Vietnam War, was understandable but unjustified. He never intended the CIA to become what it did. His decisions concerning Vietnam by no means predetermined all that followed under later, very different presidents.
His insistence that the war in Korea be kept in bounds, kept from becoming a nuclear nightmare, would figure more and more clearly as time passed as one of his outstanding achievements. And rarely had a president surrounded himself with such able, admirable men as Stimson, Byrnes, Marshall, Forrestal, Leahy, Acheson, Lovett, Elsenhower, Bradley, Clifford, Lilienthal, Harriman, Bohlen, and Kennan—as time would also confirm. It was as distinguished a group as ever served the country, and importantly, he had supported them as they supported him.
Born in the Gilded age, the age of steam and gingerbread Gothic, Truman had lived to see a time of lost certainties and rocket trips to the moon. The arc of his life spanned more change in the world than in any prior period in history. A man of nineteenth-century background, he had had to face many of the most difficult decisions of the unimaginably different twentieth century. A son of rural, inland America, raised only a generation removed from the frontier and imbued with the old Jeffersonian ideal of a rural democracy, he had had to assume command of the most powerful industrial nation on earth at the very moment when that power, in combination with stunning advances in science and technology, had become an unparalleled force in the world. The responsibilities he bore were like those of no other president before him, and he more than met the test.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 543