Truman (32 page)

The Library was admirably constructed for such a purpose. It also had the unique attribute at that stage of a resident president. Just as the English National Trust rightly believes that an inhabited country house is more interesting to the public than a dead shell, so Independence had the advantage over Hyde Park or, still more obviously, Mount Vernon or Monticello, of having the man it commemorated on the premises. For the first nine or ten years he
was quite liable to descend on any visiting party and give them a quick and vigorous tutorial.

Only after 1966 did the vigour and the immanence begin to recede. Until then the Library was his diurnal home. It solved the problems of the expensive and not very convenient Kansas City office. Once it had been built by private subscription its upkeep was taken over by the National Archives and Records Services, an offshoot of an agency of the Federal Government. This conduit of public money brought good practical office accommodation, separate from the replica of the Oval Office which was rather elaborately constructed in another wing, and other public support for Truman. Thereafter he had no problems on this account. Even the Secret Service men came back after the assassination of President Kennedy.

The Library was not only a most satisfactory convenience for Truman, which, in his daughter's view, became ‘one of the great joys of [his] old age'. It was also a place for pilgrimages of reconciliation and tribute. Truman found it very difficult to resist the offer of a visit. What would he have done had MacArthur proposed himself? He received Eisenhower graciously in 1961 and the Nixons without wincing in 1969. (At a Museum dedicated to the institution of the presidency it would of course have been difficult to do otherwise with the incumbent President.) Kennedy, with whom a little intra-party reconciliation was desirable, came between his nomination and the election in 1960. Lyndon Johnson, with whom no reconciliation was necessary (he and Truman always got on fairly well) brought a great entourage for the symbolic signing there of the Medicare Bill in July 1965.

Until the mid-1960s, when he was over eighty, Truman remained active both politically and physically—although he always confined his exercise to brisk urban walks, sometimes interspersed with on the hoof political comment to attendant journalists. He did not think it necessary to show his mature statesmanship by becoming less anti-Republican, and he did not hesitate to express his preferences within the Democratic Party. In August 1969, he was writing in good uninhibited form to Acheson about ‘Tricky Dicky and Alibi Ike'.
³
The Republican candidates were always satisfactorily unacceptable to him. The Democratic candidates were less satisfactorily acceptable. He never supported Stevenson after 1952. He wanted Harriman in 1956 and Symington in 1960.
He several times referred to Kennedy as ‘this immature boy' and believed that his father had bought him the nomination. However, as an old Democratic ‘pro', he rallied to Stevenson in 1956 and to Kennedy in 1960 as soon as the campaigns got underway. Later he responded more strongly to Kennedy's attentions, attended the 1961 inauguration and later went with his wife and daughter to stay a night in the White House. However, Johnson in 1964 was the first Democratic candidate who would have been his first choice. Humphrey in 1968 was probably more or less satisfactory to him unless his memory went back too powerfully to the young Mayor of Minneapolis's support for Eisenhower in July 1948, but he played little part in that 1968 campaign. In 1972 he played no part, and it is not known what he thought of George McGovern or whether he was even able to vote for him. He had already faded far by that November, and was dead before Nixon's second inauguration in January 1973.

In the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s he travelled a fair amount: Washington occasionally, although never to the White House while Eisenhower was there; a good deal of mostly unpaid speaking and lecturing about the country; frequent family visits to New York where his daughter, married in 1955 to Clifton Daniels, high in the hierarchy of the
New York Times,
produced four grandsons for him to treat with respect and enjoyment rather than excessive domestic intimacy (he mostly installed himself firmly in the Carlyle Hotel); and on three occasions to Europe, but never, except for Hawaii, not then a state, elsewhere outside his own country.

The first European visit in 1956 was something of a stately progress, and deservedly so. The Trumans were away for seven weeks, in Italy, Austria, France and the Netherlands. They finished in Britain, where Truman (at the age of 72) saw London for the first and last time, received, without opposition, an Oxford honorary degree
³
and lunched with the Churchills at Chartwell. The second European journey was only two years later, but a much quieter, purely holiday visit to Italy and France. The third was to Athens in March 1964, where he represented President
Johnson at the funeral of King Paul. He was alone (that is without Mrs Truman) on that trip and played poker all night on the aeroplane. Such a reversion to indiscipline showed no sign of exhausting him before his eightieth birthday celebrations, which came later that spring and included numerous luncheons, dinners and even breakfasts, as well as a speech to the Senate.

His reputation at that stage was strongly in the ascendant. In July 1962, for example, the
New York Times
magazine had amused itself by getting Arthur M. Schlesinger Snr to repeat the poll of seventy-five historians which he had first conducted in 1948. They were asked to arrange presidents in order of ‘greatness' or ‘near-greatness'. The ‘greats' came out as Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson and Jefferson. The ‘near-greats', also in order, were Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Polk, Truman, John Adams, and Cleveland.
⁴
It was a far cry from 1946 or even 1952. He reacted to this calmly but with pleasure. ‘I don't know how they came to put me so high up on the list', he wrote to a Congressman who had somewhat supererogatively sent him the article, ‘but I appreciate it nevertheless. If I had been arranging the first five in the row of the great, I would have put Washington first, Jefferson second, Woodrow Wilson third, Lincoln fourth and Franklin Roosevelt fifth. I, in all probability, would have moved Andrew Jackson into that row and made six of them, but I didn't have anything to do with making it up.'
⁴

In his early eighties his powers, not so much of mind as of body, began noticeably to fail. He had a bad bathroom fall in the autumn of 1964. He lost a lot of weight and became a very emaciated old man. He also lost his mobility and for his last six or seven years was more or less confined to his house. Suddenly, over a weekend in the summer of 1966, he ceased to go regularly to the Library (the Nixon visit was a rare subsequent exception) and ceased also to walk briskly about the town in the early mornings, or at any other time of day. When a prominent Independence citizen who was the ex-President's lawyer was asked by an interviewer what Truman thought of some major developments which took place in the town square around 1970 he in effect replied that he had few thoughts about them because he never saw them. Bess Truman,
who had never taxed herself very heavily, remained much more active, and even after 29 years of courtship and 53 years of marriage still managed 10 years of widowhood before dying at the age of 97.

Truman's agility, although non-athletic, was an essential part of his personality. When it went a good part of his mental zest went with it. His daughter insists that he continued to read two newspapers a day and to keep abreast of events well into the last year of his life. But he lost his desire to comment upon these events or to communicate outside the small family circle. After 1970 his life, which had already gone into a lower gear in 1966, quietly subsided. He died in a Kansas City hospital on December 26th, 1972. He was buried in the courtyard of the Library.

The commemorative stone, while not elaborate, is neither eloquent nor sparse. It lists with equal prominence each office which he had held, from Eastern Judge to President of the United States. This flatness was in a sense appropriate, for he had treated all the offices with equal respect, and behaved in each of them with equal determination to do his best, and equal equanimity about the comments of most others when he had done it. It so happened that the first offices led to the building of some good roads and the last to the building of a Western world which enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and freedom from major war for a generation. In each case he built well, honestly, and without pretension.

The reference sources most frequently quoted are referred to by title as listed below.

Sketches from Life
by Dean Acheson (New York: Harper & Row, 1961; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961)

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
by Dean Acheson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970). Extracts reprinted by permission of Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

Roosevelt, the Soldier of Freedom
by James Macgregor Burns (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971)

The Man of Independence
by Jonathan Daniels (New York:J. P. Lip-pincott, 1950)

Conflict and Crisis
by Robert Donovan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977). Extracts reprinted by permission of the Sterling Lord Agency. Copyright © 1977 by Robert Donovan.

Tumultuous Years
by Robert Donovan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1982). Extracts reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton Company, Inc.

Plain Speaking, an Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman
by Merle Miller (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1973; London: Victor Gollancz, 1974)

Off the Record, The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman
edited by Robert H. Ferrell (New York: Harper & Row, 1980)

Dear Bess: the Letters of Harry to Bess Truman 1910-1959
edited by Robert H. Ferrell (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1983). Extracts reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton Company, Inc.

Harry S. Truman
by Margaret Truman (New York: William Morrow, 1973; London Hamish Hamilton, 1973). Extracts reprinted by permission of Hamish Hamilton Ltd and William Morrow & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1972 by Margaret Truman Daniels.

1.
Off the Record, p. 16

2.
Plain Speaking
from ‘A preparatory note on the Language'

3.
ibid,
p. 34

1.
Plain Speaking,
p. 67 and
Dear Bess, passim

2.
Dear Bess,
p. 293

3.
The Man of Independence,
p. 147

4.
Plain Speaking,
p. 137

5.
Harry S. Truman;
p. 82

1.
Dear Bess,
p. 396

2.
Dear Bess,
p. 376

3.
ibid,
p. 420

4.
ibid,
p. 414

5.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 117

6.
Charles Robbins,
Last of his Kind
(Morrow, 1979), p. 111n

7.
Dear Bess,
p. 39

8.
ibid,
p. 441

9.
The Man of Independence,
p. 211

10.
Dear Bess,
pp. 445-6

11.
Plain Speaking,
p. 158

12.
ibid,
p. 169

13.
Dear Bess,
p. 495

1.
Joseph Alsop,
The Life and Times of Franklin D. Roosevelt
(Thames & Hudson, 1982), p. 250

2.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 167

3.
ibid,
p. 168

4.
Roosevelt, the Soldier of Freedom,
p. 505

5.
The Man of Independence,
pp. 248-9

6.
Roosevelt, the Soldier of Freedom,
p. 505

7.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 177

8.
ibid,
p. 186

9.
ibid,
p. 199

1.
Off the Record,
pp. 31-2

2.
ibid,
p. 49

3.
Dear Bess,
p. 522

4.
Off the Record,
p. 55

5.
Dear Bess,
p. 517

6.
Off the Record,
p. 59

7.
ibid, p. 51

8.
Dear Bess,
p. 522

9.
Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War
(Cassell, 1953), Vol. VI, p. 553

10.
Off the Record,
p. 60

11.
ibid,
p. 56

12.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 97

1.
Dear Bess,
p. 523

2.
Conflict and Crisis,
pp. 134-5

3.
ibid, p. 135

4.
Off
Record,
p. 73 (in a letter to his cousin, Miss Nellie Noland)

5.
Dear Bess,
p. 526

6.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 122

7.
Off
Record,
p. 64

8.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 236

9.
Off
the Record,
p. 104

10.
ibid,
p. 83

11.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 236

12.
ibid, p. 212

13.
ibid,
pp. 216-17 (quoted in)

14.
Diaries of Harold L. Ickes
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955).

15.
Dear Bess,
p. 523