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 provided 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, t
hough 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.
Ambitious by nature, he was never torn by ambition, never tried to appear as something he was not. He stood for common sense, common decency. He spoke the common tongue. As much as any president since Lincoln, he brought to the highest office the language and values of the common American people. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear. Yet he was not and had never been a simple, ordinary man. The homely attributes, the Missouri wit, the warmth of his friendship, the genuineness of Harry Truman, however appealing, were outweighed by the larger qualities that made him a figure of world stature, both a great and good man, and a great American president.
“Watch the President,” Admiral King had whispered to Lord Moran at Potsdam. “This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job….”
With his ability to “take it,” his inner iron, his bedrock faith in the democratic process, his trust in the American people, and his belief that history was the final, all-important judge of performance, he was truly exceptional. He never had a doubt about who he was, and that too was part of his strength, as well as the enjoyment of life he conveyed.
He was the kind of president the founding fathers had in mind for the country. He came directly from the people. He was America. In his time, in his experience, from small town to farm to World War in far-off France in 1918; from financial failure after the war to the world of big-city machine politics to the revolutionary years of the New Deal in Washington to the surge of American power during still another terrible World War, he had taken part in the great chronicle of American life as might have a character in a novel. There was something almost allegorical about it all: The Man of Independence and His Odyssey.
The “lesson” of Truman’s life, said Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III of Illinois, was a lesson about ourselves: “an object lesson in the vitality of popular government; an example of the ability of this society to yield up, from the most unremarkable origins, the most remarkable men.”
Dean Acheson had called him the Captain with the Mighty Heart; George Marshall, in 1948, had said it was “the integrity of the man” that would stand down the ages, more even than the courage of his decisions. Eric Sevareid, who observed at close range so much of the history of the era and its protagonists, would say nearly forty years later of Truman, “I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.”
He had lived eighty-eight years and not quite eight months. Bess Truman lived on at 219 North Delaware for another ten years. She died there on October 18, 1982, and was buried beside him in the courtyard of the Truman Library.
Acknowledgments
For a biographer, the great body of surviving letters, diaries, private
memoranda, and autobiographical sketches written by Harry S. Truman is a treasure beyond compare. There is really nothing like the Truman manuscript collection at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence. The letters he wrote between 1910 and 1959 to the idolized love of his life, Bess Wallace Truman, are thought to number 1,302—but no one really knows what the exact total may be—and there are thousands more in his own hand, to his mother, his sister, to his cousins Nellie and Ethel Noland, to old Army friends, Dean Acheson, fellow politicians, newspaper editors, friend, and foe, as well as long diary entries. Truman poured himself out on paper with vigor and candor all of his adult life. For a latter-day writer trying to understand him and tell his story in the context of his times, it is Truman himself, again and again, who makes it possible to go below the surface, to know what he felt, what he wanted, his worries, his anger, the exceptional and the commonplace details of his days. Few Americans of any era, irrespective of background or profession, have left such a vivid personal record, quite apart from the immense volume of his official papers, and it is almost certain that we will never again have a President who leaves so candid and revealing an account. Or one written in such a clear hand. In addition to all else that he did for his country, Harry Truman gave us a very large part of himself and his times in his own words, and in my efforts to write his life, during ten years of work on this book, there has been no one to whom I have felt more gratitude.
The staff archivists, librarians, and other specialists at the Harry S. Truman Library have been helpful in countless ways, instructive, patient, generous with their time, generous with ideas and advice, since the morning I first walked in the door one very cold winter day early in 1982. Though they are in no way responsible for any errors of fact or judgment in these pages, there is no part of the book in which they have not played a role, both in what they have helped to uncover in the library collection and in what they themselves know of Truman’s life from years of interest and study. In my experience, there is no more agreeable place in which to do research than the Truman Library. Nor has there been anyone on the staff who has not shown an interest in my work or failed to be helpful. I am grateful to them all. But for their particular help and friendship over the years I wish to express my utmost thanks to: Benedict K. Zobrist, director, and George Curtis, assistant director; archivists Philip D. Lagerquist, Erwin J. Mueller, and Dennis Bilger; photographic librarian Pauline Testerman; the very good-natured, resourceful Elizabeth Safly, research librarian and creator and keeper of the so-called vertical file, a mine of marvelous information; Vicky Alexander, Clay Bauske, Robin Burgess, Carol Briley, Millie Carol, John Curry, Patricia Dorsey; J. R. Fuchs, Ray Geselbracht, Anita Heavener, Jann Hoag, Niel Johnson, Earl Pennington, Warren Ohrvall, Ruth Springston, and Mark Beveridge, who knows more about World War I than anyone I know.
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