Bess Truman (56 page)

The ex-president, now Grandfather Truman, had so much to say, one could easily have gotten the idea that he was the father. On the way out of the hospital after their first visit, he held an impromptu press conference while my husband went searching for a taxi. There was a marvelous picture in the New York
Daily News
of Clifton standing on the outskirts of the crowd of reporters, trying to tell Dad that the taxi was waiting. I have always been glad I married a newspaperman who understood the ways of the press (and of ex-presidents).

Proof, if any was needed, that Dad was practically gaga was the misinformation he gave the reporters about the child. He announced that the baby had a full head of red hair. This from the man who always talked about getting the facts straight. Dad saw what he wanted to see - that Truman blood had won its biological war with Daniel blood. Red hair runs in the Truman family. Unfortunately, the baby’s hair, which was full, was jet black.

When I came home with the baby, I thought Mother might be ready with a set of guidelines and instructions. But she scarcely offered me a word of advice. She said she had been out of the “baby business” too long to know what the experts were advising nowadays. Instead, she filled the mails with descriptions of the child for the benefit of Mary Paxton Keeley and others.

There was a new serenity in the Truman partnership as they approached their thirty-eighth anniversary on June 28, 1957. I think I can claim some of the credit for it, as the mother of Clifton Truman Daniel. Also, Dad had finished his memoirs, and his library was about to be dedicated. Time was already changing a lot of people’s opinion of Harry Truman’s place in history. The Eisenhower administration floundered into a second term with the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress. The Truman era began to look better and better to everyone.

On June 28, 1957, Dad wrote Mother the best anniversary letter of them all.

Growing old has its joys and its sorrows. Mother experienced one of her saddest moments not long after Dad wrote her that anniversary letter. In the fall of 1957, her brother Fred suffered a heart attack in Denver. She rushed to him and was with him when he died a few days later at the age of fifty-seven. Fred’s life had been a sad struggle against alcohol. He had tried to be a decent husband and father in spite of it. Mother had tried to give him some of her strength and found that life did not work that way. So she did what she could: She never stopped loving him and his family.

Before I wrote those words, I spent most of a day reading hundreds of pages of letters from Fred’s wife, Christine, to Mother. They never mention Fred’s drinking. The theme is gratitude to Mother for an endless stream of presents to Christine and Fred and the children, for visits and letters and calls that gave the family the feeling that Bess Wallace Truman was always there, reaching out to them with her love.

Like his father, Fred died penniless. Mother and Dad had to pay to ship his body back to Independence for burial. Thereafter, they sent Christine and her children a monthly check. This may not impress those who recall that
Life
magazine paid Dad $600,000 for his memoirs. But after he paid 67½ percent in taxes and finished paying the staff he had to hire to organize his papers and help him with the research, and incidentally handle the thousands of letters that kept arriving, he had exactly $37,000 left when the second volume was published in 1955. What rescued the Trumans from a lot of financial anxiety was the old bugaboo that kept them from marrying for the better part of ten years - the Truman farm.

Early in Dad’s presidency, a group of Jackson County friends had bought the farm, intending to preserve it as an historic site. In 1946, when Dad saw that his income as president was roughly equal to his outgo, he decided to purchase it from them. In part, it was an attempt to console his mother, who felt the loss of it keenly, although she never said a word of reproach or complaint about it. In the mid-fifties, Dad sold most of the 600 acres to a developer for a shopping center. He retained an acre or so around the house for history’s sake. The deal ended all financial worries for his brother Vivian and sister Mary, as well.

This affluence did not mean Mother stopped pinching pennies. She still scrutinized every bill that came into the house and frequently caught the adding machines off by a few dollars. But she now felt free to continue to indulge her favorite hobby, sending roses to friends on anniversaries and on other happy occasions, such as the day someone sailed to Europe. There are several letters from Louise Stewart, who was still struggling to cope with the loss of her son Bobby, thanking her for this testimony to their continuing friendship.

After another happy trip to Europe in 1958, Dad’s political worry machine started heating up again, as he got thinking about who was going to be the Democratic candidate in 1960. Mother was more interested in her grandson, if her letters to Mary Paxton Keeley are any indication. She reported on his weight and height -nineteen pounds and twenty-eight inches long - and one tooth. “Marg says he eats everything in sight,” she wrote, and then, like the veteran older sister that she was, added: “She doesn’t half know what that means!” (I didn’t.)

Sometime in 1958, Mother discovered a lump in her left breast. For reasons that remain baffling, she did nothing about it. Although it grew bigger and bigger, she continued to ignore it. She seems to have decided she was going to die and only wanted to live long enough to enjoy two major events of 1959, the Democratic Party’s salute to Dad’s seventy-fifth birthday on May 8 in New York and the birth of her second grandchild, scheduled for a few weeks after that date.

By this time, the tumor had become so large, Mother was stuffing handkerchiefs into the right side of the bodices of her dresses to keep people from noticing it. She did her utmost to get out of the trip to New York for the birthday jamboree. But Dad was adamant about her coming along. He wanted her to get her share of the credit for the partnership.

To keep out of the public eye as much as possible on their departure from Independence, she sent Dad ahead to the station, telling him she had some last minute repacking to do. Her brother George drove her to the station, and she sat in the car a block away while Dad talked with reporters and cut a birthday cake that local admirers had prepared for him. Only as the diesel whistled around the bend did she tell George to take her that last block, accept an orchid from the local well-wishers, and get on the train.

While they were dressing in the hotel room in New York, Dad noticed the tumor. He was tremendously alarmed and told me about it. At first the combined arguments of the two of us could not budge Mother. “I want to see my grandson born,” she said, perfectly calm while we whirled around her in a near frenzy.

We finally prevailed, and when she returned to Independence, she went almost directly to Research Hospital for surgery. The tumor was by this time the size of a grapefruit. It was not cancerous. But it had invaded the lymph nodes of both arms, and Dr. Graham decided to do a mastectomy and to remove all of the lymph nodes as well. True to her tradition of telling the press nothing, Mother ordered us to issue a statement omitting any mention of a mastectomy.

Dad was in a terrible state, worrying about Mother and me simultaneously. I relieved him of 50 percent of his worries by giving birth to William Wallace Daniel on May 19, 1959, the day after Mother’s operation.

It took Mother a long time to recover from her operation and from the inevitable psychological pain every woman feels after losing a breast. Dad’s letter to my husband, written almost two months after the surgery, gives us a glimpse of him as her combination nurse and guardian.

Dear Clif:

You do not know how very much I appreciated your letter of June 29th with the clipping about the meeting at the Astor Hotel where Margaret accepted the Page One Award [from the New York Newspaper Guild] for me. If the mirror should break I can always read the citation standing on my head.

I am very happy that Master Clifton Truman Daniel is learning about the birds and the bees. A fellow can’t start too young, in my opinion.

I am happy that you like your new country place. If I can just get Grandma to behave herself and follow the doctor’s instructions, maybe we can get there to see you before you move back to New York. Her progress is slow, but she is getting along as well as can be expected, after that terrific shock.

P.S. Tell Margie to make the kids - and their daddy - behave just as I
once did with her and her mother!

That fall, Mother and Dad came to New York to pronounce their approval of William Wallace Daniel, even though nature had contrived to make this bearer of the Wallace name look much more like a pure Truman. The Daniels, of course, never even got into the equation in the opinion of Grandma and Grandpa Truman. Mary Paxton Keeley was no better than her oldest friend. She was always sending Bess pictures of her grandchildren and asking Mother if she agreed that they were Paxtons. Invariably, Mother said yes. The feminists who claim marriage obliterates a woman’s identity would have some trouble fitting these two ladies into their theory.

Meanwhile, another spasm of politics was heading Bess’ way. Dad had journeyed to Washington early in 1959 to confer with other Democratic chieftains on the party’s nominee for 1960. Mother had declined to go with him. Part of the reason was the tumor in her breast, but her refusal was also a not so subtle negative vote against his participation. For a year, Dad had been pushing Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri as the Democratic nominee. He even went so far as to say that he would not mind being appointed senator in his place if he won the election. Mother made him retract that one, fast.

From Washington, Dad wrote her an emotional letter - the last - at least the last that has survived - of the 1,600 letters he wrote to Bess Wallace Truman. It sums up how highly he valued her as a political partner - while providing a fascinating glimpse of the Democrats’ disarray as they approached the 1960 election.

Bess’ reply to this call to arms was: horsefeathers. She refused to get excited about the Democratic Party and told Dad he was crazy if he went to another convention at the age of seventy-six. Let the next generation fight it out among themselves - that was her attitude.

He took her advice about not going to the convention in Los Angeles, but he remained intensely interested in what was happening there. The front-runner for the nomination, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, had come to Independence in the spring of 1960 seeking Dad’s endorsement.

He did not get it. Dad could not overcome his visceral dislike of Joe Kennedy, Jack’s father. He could not forget Mr. Kennedy’s isolationist past. He had been opposed to fighting Hitler in World War II and had issued a panicky call for a retreat from Korea, when the Chinese intervened.

Dad did not think Jack Kennedy was ready to be President of the United States. He also feared that Kennedy’s nomination would lead the Democrats into the same disaster that befell them when they nominated Al Smith in 1928. He thought there were still too many Protestants in the Democratic Party who could not accept a Catholic president.

When Lyndon Johnson asked him if he should accept Kennedy’s offer to run for vice president on his ticket, Dad advised him to say no. Mr. Johnson accepted the offer anyway and worked hard to change Dad’s mind about JFK. An unsent letter Dad wrote to Dean Acheson in late August 1960 shows that the Trumans’ enthusiasm for the nominee remained tepid.

Before the 1960 campaign was over, Dad was making speeches for the Democratic ticket. As it turned out, John F. Kennedy needed Harry Truman’s help, Lyndon Johnson’s help, and help from a lot of other Democrats to win. But win he did, even if it was by a whisker manufactured by Boss Daley of Chicago. For Dad and Mother, it was one of the most satisfying presidential victories in memory, because the man who went down to defeat was their least favorite Republican, Richard Nixon.

One aspect of this changing of the guard pleased Mother almost as much as the election of a Democratic president. “Who do you think called the other day?” she asked me in one of our telephone get-togethers.

“Khrushchev?” I suggested, not serious.

“No. Ike.”

It seems that ex-President Eisenhower wanted some advice on setting up his library and was wondering if ex-President Truman was ready to negotiate a truce. Mother urged Dad to say yes, and when Ike came to Kansas City to help rededicate the World War I Liberty Memorial on Armistice Day, 1961, he visited Dad in his office at the library and the two of them jointly agreed to bury their political hatchets. It was a good thing they did, because only a week later Sam Rayburn died, and they sat side by side in the front pew for the service.