Harry Truman
Page 65
“Don’t yell at them,” Mother would tell me.
“I will yell at people who do things like that,” I would tell her. “It’s disgraceful.”
Then there was a man who walked up to the front gate and insisted he had to see the President. One look and it was clear to us he was a nut. We called the police, and they responded promptly. At the station house, they discovered he had recently been discharged from a mental institution in Pennsylvania. He had written Dad several threatening letters and had a loaded .45 revolver in his pocket.
By way of consolation for these problems, there was the continued demonstration of tremendous affection from ordinary people. I should add that probably most of the curiosity seekers who came by our house - even those who drove into our backyard - were also moved by affection for Dad. But I found it hard to reciprocate when they made life miserable for us.
The mail Dad received in his first months out of office was unbelievable. In the first two weeks, more than 70,000 letters poured in. Almost all of them were favorable, but, of course, they had to be answered. Dad soon found himself running a sizable office in Kansas City. Even without the mail, he had two projects which were full-time jobs. The first was putting his papers in order, so he could begin to write his memoirs. The second was planning his presidential library.
Dad took his papers with him from the White House as have all Presidents since George Washington. The papers he regarded as confidential - only a small fraction of which have been used in this book - filled several dozen filing cabinets. The public papers, some 3.5 million documents, filled several thousand cabinets and boxes. Archivists published many thick volumes, each almost 1,000 pages long.
Some historians have criticized Dad because he refused to open his confidential files. But he was not acting out of selfish motives. From the day he left office he was conscious he still had heavy responsibilities as an ex-President. During his White House years, a President gets advice from hundreds of people. He wants it to be good advice. He wants men to say exactly what they think, to tell exactly what they know about a situation or a subject. A President can only get this kind of honesty if the man who is giving the advice knows what he says is absolutely confidential and will not be published for a reasonable number of years after the President leaves the White House.
The library was in some ways an even bigger job than putting his papers in order and writing his memoirs. Millions of dollars had to be raised, a site selected, an agreement reached with the government. At first, Dad hoped to establish the library on his family’s farm. He even had thoughts about rebuilding the farmhouse and living there in close proximity to the history of his presidential years. But the onward march of suburbia made this financially impossible. A builder offered to buy a large part of the farm for a shopping center, which has since become known as Truman Corners. Uncle Vivian was ready to retire from farming, and the sale of the land guaranteed him and Dad’s sister Mary financial security for the rest of their lives. The problem of a site was solved by the city of Independence, which offered Dad a handsome piece of land in the city’s public park, only about a mile from our house. Dad was so pleased, he went out on a speaking schedule to raise the final million dollars. The pace he set absolutely terrified me. It would have killed a man half his age.
The library, which was dedicated in 1957, was one of the great joys of Dad’s old age. He worked on the planning of every detail, down to the artwork on the walls. He even persuaded Thomas Hart Benton, the great Missouri painter, to contribute a striking mural. One room is an exact replica of Dad’s White House office as it was decorated during his presidency. Another room is dedicated to the World War I phase of Dad’s career, with many personal mementoes of Battery D. There is a wonderful collection of political cartoons of the two Truman Administrations. But the heart of the library is in the rooms Dad laid out, to teach young people (and a few of their elders) the six functions of the presidency. Walking through them is a real learning experience. There are exhibits which tell the story of the President as Chief Executive, as ceremonial Chief of State, as a legislative planner, as a political party leader, as director of the nation’s foreign policy, and as commander in chief of the Armed Forces. For scholars, almost every book published on the Truman era is on the shelves, and on microfilm are the papers of all the other Presidents.
On October 21, 1953, President Eisenhower visited Kansas City. He telephoned Dad, Dad telephoned him, but there was no meeting. Dad had no desire for one. He resented intensely the effort which the Eisenhower Administration was making to “get him” and other members of the Truman Administration. The Republicans combed the government files attempting to dredge up charges against everyone and anyone in Dad’s administration. They found nothing to justify their “mess in Washington” cry. Even worse was the attempt to implicate Dad in the Communists-in-government canard. The climax to this program came in the investigation of Harry Dexter White, a former government monetary expert who had been accused of Communist leanings. The House Un-American Activities Committee actually sent Dad a subpoena, summoning him to testify on the case. He rejected the summons with the scorn it deserved. “I have been accused, in effect,” he said on television, “of knowingly betraying the security of the United States. This charge is, of course, a falsehood.” For once, most of the newspapers were on Dad’s side.
In 1954, Dad had his first serious illness. It was a gall bladder attack, and it hit him while he was attending an open air production of Call Me Madam. Mother rushed him to the hospital, and they operated promptly. He survived the operation beautifully, but he was almost killed by a bad reaction to some antibiotics they gave him. He had what he called “hives inside and out” and could keep no food down. Then, in a marvelous replay of his mother’s reaction to illness, he woke up one morning and asked the nurse if he could have a soft-boiled egg in a white cup.
“Why do you want it in a white cup?”
“So that I’ll know it’s clean,” Dad said.
He ate the egg and kept it down. That was the beginning of his recovery. The doctors said it would take him at least a year to return to his normal routine. But within two months, he was back working six days a week, plus a few extra hours on Sunday. “I’ve never known hard work to hurt anybody,” Dad says. “It’s lack of work that kills people.”
A year or two after his gall bladder adventure, Dad departed from the house for his morning walk, without noticing the streets were a sheet of ice. Not far from the house, he slipped and cracked three or four ribs. He went home and called Dr. Graham, who put him in a harness. I came home for a visit three days later, and our conversation went like this:
“How do you feel?”
“It hurts.”
“What do you expect when you crack your ribs? Have you got that harness on Dr. Graham gave you?”
“No. I got tired of wearing that.”
“You mean you’re just sitting there letting the ribs heal by themselves with no help?”
“That’s right.”
Only one thing changed in Dad’s routine as a result of this misadventure. Mother issued an edict, forbidding him to go out for his morning walk when there was snow or ice on the ground. For once, he obeyed.
On another front, Dad drew on his political skills - and his knowledge of Mother - to win an argument. For days, Mother badgered him to cut the grass, which she insisted was disgracefully high. Dad kept insisting it looked perfectly all right to him. Finally, one Sunday morning, he got out the lawn mower and went to work. Numerous neighbors passed on the way to church, and he greeted them cheerfully. Within the hour, it was obvious to half of Independence that ex-President Truman was skipping church that morning.
Finally, Mother came out, en route to church.
“What do you think you are doing?” she asked, horrified.
“I’m doing what you asked me to do,” said Dad, with his most disarming smile.
The following day, Mother hired a man to mow the lawn.
“What do you think I’m planning?” snapped Dad. “I’m going to Disneyland!”
He went, and enjoyed himself thoroughly.
What pleased Dad most about his retirement was the warm reception he got from his fellow citizens in Independence and Kansas City. He wasn’t sure just how people would take living with an ex-President. Moreover, he was keenly aware the local papers had wasted a good deal of ink tearing him apart while he was in the White House. But his worries on this score proved utterly groundless. When he and Mother arrived in Independence on their trip home from Washington, there were at least 10,000 people waiting for them in the railroad station. The road that runs by our house was renamed Truman Road, and dozens of businesses adopted Dad’s first or last name. Dad did his best to put a stop to this trend, however. He had strong convictions that no living politician should have anything named after him. This includes retired politicians. He relented just a little on this rule and agreed to permit the new sports stadium being built in Kansas City to carry his name. I think Mother, the baseball fan of the family, had something to do with this decision.
Other aspects of Dad’s routine in the first year or so out of the White House gave him some problems. For instance, where does an ex-President eat lunch? He tried going to various restaurants in Kansas City with old friends, but a mob scene of autograph hunters invariably developed. Eating became an ordeal, and he began to wonder if he was going to spend the rest of his life lunching alone in his office. Then a friend recommended the Kansas City Club. Dad hesitated over this idea because the club was 95 percent Republican. He was an honorary member, along with President Eisenhower, General of the Armies Bradley, and a noted Kansas City judge. Dad finally decided to take the plunge and entered the reactionary sanctum. The results amazed him. Half the Kansas City Establishment stopped by to shake his hand. “There is no conversation so sweet as that of former political enemies,” Dad decided.
Traveling beyond his Kansas City-Independence stamping grounds was, Dad found, just as complicated. In the summer of 1953, he proposed a trip to Washington. He had bought a new car, and he wanted to give it “a real tryout.” Mother had doubts about driving with him, but he assured her he would obey the speed limits and convinced her they would have no difficulty traveling incognito.
They weren’t on the road more than an hour, when Mother asked, “What does the speedometer say?”
“Fifty-five.”
“Do you think I’m losing my eyesight? Slow down.”
They slowed down. Other cars began passing them. Soon they heard people shouting, “Hi, Harry - Hey, wasn’t that Harry Truman? Where are you going, Harry?”
“Well,” Dad said, “there goes our incognito - and I don’t mean a part of the car.”
Everywhere they stopped along their route, Dad was instantly recognized by motel owners or filling station attendants. Local reporters were notified, and police chiefs rushed to escort or guard them. The trip became almost as well publicized as a whistle-stop campaign.
Dad likeds to take trips. During their first liberated years, he and Mother did quite a bit of traveling. I joined them for a wonderful month-long vacation in Hawaii, in March of 1953. In 1956, they went to England and had a delightful time. They visited Winston Churchill, and Dad received a degree from Oxford. For this ceremony, he wore a red coat and a Henry VIII type hat, which made him laugh every time he looked in the mirror.
My father could have made a great deal of money in the years immediately after he left the White House. An astonishing number of jobs were offered to him. A clothing store chain, a sewing machine company, a motion picture company offered him executive titles with six-figure salaries. One offer guaranteed him a half million dollars if he signed an eight-year contract that would have required only an hour’s work. But he saw through these proposals instantly: “They were not interested in hiring Harry Truman the person. It was the former President of the United States they wanted. I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the Presidency.” So he contented himself with the modest sums he earned from his memoirs and from writing comments on the political scene for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
Among Dad’s favorite part-time occupations was lecturing at universities. He enjoyed meeting young men and women of another generation and sharing his wisdom and experience with them.
Invariably, in these discussions, someone would ask Dad if he ever had any second thoughts about dropping the atomic bomb. Dad replied in words similar to this answer which he gave during a lecture in 1965:
It was a question of saving hundreds of thousands of American lives. I don’t mind telling you that you don’t feel normal when you have to plan hundreds of thousands of complete final deaths of American boys who are alive and joking and having fun while you are doing your planning. You break your heart and your head trying to figure out a way to save one life.
The name given to our invasion plan was Olympic, but I saw nothing godly about the killing of all the people that would be necessary to make that invasion. The casualty estimates called for 750,000 Americans - 250,000 killed; 500,000 maimed for life.
I could not worry about what history would say about my personal morality. I made the only decision I ever knew how to make. I did what I thought was right.
During these lectures, Dad never forgot the awesome powers of the presidency which clung to him no matter where he went. One day a young man stood up to ask him what he thought of the state’s governor. He referred to the governor as “our local yokel.” Dad responded sharply. He told the boy he should be ashamed of himself for his lack of respect for the high office of governor.
The boy turned pale and sat down. After the lecture was over, Dad rushed into the audience, found the young man, shook his hand, and told him there were no hard feelings, he understood he was just speaking in an offhand way and intended no disrespect. Dad’s sensitivity to what he had done did not stop there. He asked the boy’s dean to send him regular reports on the young man’s progress in school, and he continued to correspond with him after he left college.
“I realized after I spoke that way,” Dad explained to me, “that I had unintentionally humiliated that young man. I was afraid that the memory of my harsh tone might scar his whole life and ruin his reputation among his friends and acquaintances.”
Politically, Dad remained intensely interested in the future of the Democratic Party. Here he was severely disappointed by the way Adlai Stevenson resumed his Hamlet’s role and declined to accept the responsibility which Dad felt he should assume. “His failure to pick up the reins of leadership brought about a period of confusion and drift and factionalism within our party,” Dad said. In July 1955, the two men conferred in Chicago, and Dad bluntly urged Stevenson: “Why don’t you announce yourself now as a Presidential candidate, so that we can get a head start? Now is the time to do the necessary advance work that we were prevented from doing in 1952 when you held off until the last moment.”
Stevenson declined to take Dad’s advice, and Dad therefore decided to back Averell Harriman for the nomination in 1956. Stevenson won the nomination, in spite of Dad’s prediction - which proved unfortunately accurate - that he would carry fewer states than he did in 1952. Dad campaigned vigorously for him, in spite of h
is doubts. Later, whenever anyone mentioned Adlai Stevenson’s name, Dad would only shake his head and say he was a great Democratic Party spokesman but a poor candidate.
In one of their last intimate conversations, Stevenson said to Dad, “What am I doing wrong?” Dad walked over to the window of their hotel and pointed to a man standing in the entrance of a hotel across the street. “The thing you have got to do is to learn how to reach that man.” He was telling him he had to learn how to communicate with the man in the street. Unfortunately for him and the Democratic Party, Stevenson never mastered this difficult art. Eventually, Dad decided it was just as well he never won election as President. His indecisiveness might have been a disastrous handicap in the White House.
Politics was not, of course, Dad’s only preoccupation during these years. There were some family matters that also interested him. I spent Christmas and New Year’s in Independence in 1955 and received a number of rather mysterious telegrams from a man named Clifton Daniel. I had met him at a party in November. I made the mistake of going out to Independence without giving Clifton my phone number, and it was, of course, unlisted and unavailable, even to one of the top editors of The New York Times. He worked off his frustration by sending me silly telegrams, which asked questions like “Are you sure it’s not Independence, Kansas?” Then he sent me flowers. Mother’s eyebrows raised, and she asked, “Who is this?”
“A man I met,” I said, proving I could be as laconic as any other member of the Truman family.
In January, Clifton proposed and I accepted. I called Dad and informed him he was going to have a newspaperman for a son-in-law. Contrary to the rumors, it did not bother him in the least. But his friends thought it was very funny and kidded the life out of him.
Clifton’s first meeting with Dad, about a month later, was almost a disaster. He had come back from Russia the previous fall with a bad case of ulcers - the result of living under the terrific tension which the cold war inflicted on correspondents behind the Iron Curtain. All he could drink was milk. He came by around cocktail time to meet Mother and Dad, and I served drinks to the Trumans and milk to Daniel. Dad’s face fell down to his shoes. I could see him thinking: A newspaperman and he drinks milk! I thought it was funny, and in the best Truman practical joker tradition, absolutely refused to explain it. We did explain eventually, of course, but I let Dad spend a good hour doing mental contortions, first.