Truman (161 page)

At the end of March, he, Bess, and Margaret went off on a dream vacation trip to Hawaii, traveling first to San Francisco as the guests of Averell Harriman in his private railroad car. From San Francisco, they sailed on the
President Cleveland,
of the American Presidents Line, down the bay and out under the Golden Gate Bridge. Of the morning they arrived off Oahu, Truman wrote: “Diamond Head and then Honolulu with the Pali in the background, rainbows, clouds, sunshine and a beautiful city all in one scene.”

It was one of the most enchanting experiences of their lives. Hawaii was “Paradise,” and they stayed a month, as the guests of Ed Pauley at his estate on little Coconut Island, in Kaneohe Bay, on the windward side of Oahu. Long a champion of statehood for the islands, Truman was given an effusive Hawaiian welcome from the moment the ship landed. Government and military officials, the press, a dozen different reception committees rushed on board to escort him ashore. “[They] covered us with leis and smothered us with questions and flash bulbs.” He accepted an honorary degree at the University of Hawaii, toured Oahu, and on a flying visit to the big island of Hawaii in a Navy C-47, soared over the saddle between the snow-capped volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. When, on the return flight to Oahu, he spotted a school of whales off Maui, the Navy pilots told him it meant good luck. He swam, loafed, read, and thoroughly enjoyed “the wonderful people” of the islands…And then the month was over and he was home again at North Delaware Street, Where the house was still quiet and too big.

He bought another car, this one for himself, a two-tone green Dodge coupe, to drive to his office. He loved cars no less than ever and was as fussy as ever about their appearance.

“This morning at 7
A.M.
, I took off for my morning walk,” begins a diary entry from that spring.

He knew he must get started on his memoirs, but dreaded the prospect. Hawaii had made him “lazy as hell.” He wished he had never agreed to do the book.

On his walk that same spring morning he stopped to watch a construction project, the widening of Truman Road.

He felt a constant need to be on the move. So in the heat of June, he and Bess started for Washington in the new Chrysler. He wanted to give the car “a real tryout,” he said. Bess was delighted. Friends and family tried to talk them out of going. He and Bess had not traveled on their own by automobile in nine years, not since their return from the Chicago convention in 1944. Yet off they went, making an early start, Truman at the wheel. Wasn’t it good to be on their own again, she said. They got as far as Hannibal before stopping for lunch at a roadside restaurant, only to find how difficult being on their own was going to be. As Truman later wrote to his old Army friend, Vic Householder, “Everything went well until a couple of old-time County Judges came in and saw me. They said, ‘Why there’s Judge Truman’—and then every waitress and all the customers had to shake hands and have autographs.”

At Decatur, Illinois, 150 miles later, Truman pulled into a Shell station where he had often stopped for gas in years past, traveling to and from Washington. An elderly attendant who kept studying him while filling the tank, finally inquired if he wasn’t Senator Truman.

Bess insisted he keep to the 50-mile-an-hour speed limit. But going “so slowly,” as he said, meant others passing had a chance to look them over. “Hi, Harry!” people shouted as they went by. “There goes our incognito,” he told her. At the hotel where they stopped in Wheeling, West Virginia, the lobby was jammed with reporters and photographers.

But there was no doubt that he loved the attention. When, at Frederick, Maryland, he saw several familiar faces from the Washington press corps waiting in a car to escort him into the city, he greeted them like long-lost brothers. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he exclaimed. Pulling up at the Mayflower Hotel, he stepped from the car in his shirtsleeves to be immediately surrounded by a crowd of more reporters and photographers and hotel employees, all trying to shake his hand. He was there only to have a good time, he said, his face beaming in the late afternoon sunshine—“carefree as a schoolboy in summer,” according to the account in the
Post
the next morning. To all questions concerning Congress, the President, the Korean War, Truman said, “No comment, no comment, no comment.”

A steady stream of old friends, members of his Cabinet, Democratic senators, members of Congress came to call. It was “like a dream,” Truman later wrote. “The suite we stayed in at the Mayflower could have been the White House…. Everything seemed just as it used to be—the taxi drivers shouting hello along the line of my morning walks, the dinners at night with the men and women I had worked with for years, the conferences, the tension, the excitement, the feeling of things happening and going to happen….”

And the “good time” continued over the next weekend, when he and Bess drove on to New York and checked in at the Waldorf-Astoria. With Margaret they dined at the Twenty-one Club and saw Leonard Bernstein’s
Wonderful Town
at the Winter Garden. As they came into the theater, the whole audience rose and applauded.

Cab drivers in New York did not just call to him, they pulled to the curb and jumped out to shake his hand. He was still their man, he was assured. “If you’d go again tomorrow, Harry, you’d win.”

Heading home for Missouri, “perking along” on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Truman was signaled to pull over by the police. According to what State Trooper Manly Stampler told reporters, “Mr. Truman” had twice cut in front of vehicles trying to pass him. “He was very nice about it and promised to be more careful.” But according to Truman, who had never had a traffic violation, the young man had only wanted to shake hands.

It was his last venture with Bess on their own by automobile. Thereafter, they would go by train, plane, or ship.

On March 5, in Moscow, after nearly three decades in power, Joseph Stalin had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age seventy-three. Ten days later, Stalin’s successor, Georgi M. Malenkov, declared in a speech that there was no issue between Moscow and Washington that could not be resolved by peaceful means. Two weeks after Malenkov’s speech, the Communists in Korea suddenly agreed to an exchange of wounded prisoners and said that this should lead to a “peaceful settlement” of the entire prisoner issue. Then in the final week of July, as Truman, in the heat of high summer in Missouri, was beginning work on his memoirs, an armistice was signed at Panmunjom; the Korean War was over.

It was an armistice with voluntary repatriation, and the dividing line between North and South Korea was to remain the 38th parallel. So President Eisenhower had achieved essentially the very same settlement that had eluded Truman—a “no-win” agreement, as Truman’s Republican critics would have called it. As Senator Paul Douglas observed, Truman “would have been flayed from one end of Washington to the other if he had accepted the present agreement.”

Stalin’s death had unquestionably had an effect; so also had Eisenhower’s threats to use newly developed tactical nuclear weapons in Korea.

The war had caused terrible bloodshed and destruction—perhaps as many as 2 million civilian dead according to some estimates, 4 million casualties overall. The Americans killed in battle numbered 33,629 and another 20,617 Americans died of other causes.

To many Americans at home, it seemed the war had resolved nothing. But to Truman, as to a great many others, it was a major victory for the United States and the United Nations. Military aggression had been stopped. The Communist advance in Asia had been checked; South Korea and possibly Japan as well had been saved from what had seemed an inexorable “Red tide.” The United Nations had been shown to be something more than a world debating society. “As for the United States [wrote
The New York Times
], the action in Korea represented something of a regaining of our national soul and conscience. We did a difficult and costly thing because we thought it was right.”

Asked for his opinion about the armistice settlement, Eisenhower said simply, “The war is over, and I hope my son is coming home soon.” Truman said nothing for attribution. Though undoubtedly and understandably resentful that his successor had achieved what he himself had failed to attain, and without resulting political rancor, he kept silent. Privately he thanked God it was ended. “Of course I’m happy about the truce in Korea,” he wrote to a friend. “It doesn’t make any difference about the credit for holding back Soviet aggression. The fact that the shooting has stopped is a very satisfactory one.”

The following October, when Eisenhower came to Kansas City for a speech to the Future Farmers of America, and was staying at the Muehlebach, Truman tried to reach him at the hotel by phone, to say he would like to drop by to pay his respects, but was told by an aide that the President’s schedule was too full, a meeting would be impossible. Truman was shattered. In explanation, Eisenhower’s office later said that whoever answered the phone must have thought it was a crank call.

With the task of the memoirs that he had been putting off finally under way, and with his efforts to launch the library, Truman found himself more occupied than he had ever anticipated. “The book is doing fine but what a slave it’s made of me,” he would report to Dean Acheson in the fall.

Of all the presidents until then, only Herbert Hoover had written his own story in his lifetime. (“How much is lost to us because so few Presidents have told their own stories,” Truman was to say in the preface to his own work.) John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk had written extensively about their time in office, but in their private diaries. Ulysses S. Grant, dying of cancer, had spent his final days laboring heroically on his memoirs as a means to provide financial security for his family, but Grant chose not to include his shadowed years in the White House. Even Theodore Roosevelt, with his sense of history and of his own importance to history, was oddly superficial when describing his presidency in his popular autobiography. Nor had Herbert Hoover, in telling his story, been obliged to recount anything approaching the world-shaking tumult, the watershed history, of the Truman years. The closest thing to what Truman would be attempting was Winston Churchill’s magisterial history of World War II, which had also appeared first in
Life,
and against which, as Truman knew, whatever he produced was bound to be compared.

“I’m not a writer!” those working with him on the project were to hear him say many times. He was not after their sympathy, only stating what he saw as the heart of the problem. Before the task was finished a full dozen people would be involved.

The first called in to help were William Hillman and David Noyes, both of whom had served on the White House staff as speechwriters and whose loyalty to Truman verged on adoration. Hillman, a hulking veteran newspaper correspondent, had already published a eulogizing Truman portrait called
Mr. President,
a book of photographs with text compiled mainly from Truman quotes and selections from his private papers. Noyes was in advertising in California, a short, wiry, talkative man, who had worked on the 1948 campaign and was best known for initiating the controversial scheme to send Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow. His claim to have been one of Truman’s key advisers was greatly exaggerated.

Promising to “protect” Truman from the publisher, Hillman and Noyes set up a working procedure for the memoirs. They offered advice and they came and went, flying in and out of Kansas City, as need be, every month or so, while a paid staff of three was established in Room 1002, on the floor below Truman at the Federal Reserve Bank Building. The plan was for Truman to “talk” the book. For months, he talked to a recording machine supplied by
Life
—a device he hated—responding to questions put to him by the hour by a University of Southern California professor of journalism named Robert E. G. Harris. Meantime, two young research assistants checked all that Truman said against what was in the files. By late fall, more than 100,000 words had been transcribed, all beautifully typed and arranged in looseleaf notebooks. But there was very little in the way of an actual manuscript, and what Truman saw of this, he didn’t like. “Good God, what crap!” he scrawled across the top.