Truman (165 page)

Then, in two weeks’ travels through Italy, they saw Mt. Vesuvius, the ruins of Pompeii, the ancient Greek temples of Paestum, near Salerno. They explored the green hills of Umbria where St. Francis once lived with the birds and animals; they shopped for leather goods on the centuries-old Ponte Vecchio over the Arno in Florence, gazed at the Botticellis in the Uffizi Gallery. In Venice, he and Bess, like every other tourist, strolled St. Mark’s Square and rode together in a gondola down the Grand Canal.

Between times Truman told reporters that the weather in Italy reminded him of Texas. He declared that victory for the Democrats in the presidential election in the fall was not probable but inevitable, and got himself in a good deal of hot water by saying that the bloody World War II battles of Salerno and Anzio had been unnecessary and the fault of “some squirrel-headed general.”

He was having a glorious time, enjoying immensely the setting of so much of the history he had loved since boyhood—and enjoying immensely the attention he received. At Naples, the crowds had tossed flowers in his path. “This is fantastic!” he said, openly astonished.

If the picture of Truman with Henry Luce amid the ruins of ancient Rome had seemed the unlikeliest of holiday vignettes, Truman succeeded in topping it at Florence, when he, Bess, and the Woodwards were the luncheon guests of Bernard Berenson at Berenson’s famous villa, I Tatti, overlooking the city. It was a luminous setting of incomparable paintings, sculpture, a library of 55,000 volumes, and the place where the legendary Berenson, “B.B.,” widely regarded as the consummate connoisseur, “the world’s last great aesthete,” held court. A Lithuanian Jew by birth, a graduate of Harvard, and a leading authority on Italian Renaissance art, he had made I Tatti his home—shrine, institution—since before World War I, when Truman was still on the farm. A tiny, frail, but godlike figure with a white beard, now nearly ninety-one, Berenson was still immensely vital and talkative. His flow of guests, of celebrated literary and theatrical figures, was unending—J. B. Priestley, Robert Lowell, Alberto Moravia, Laurence Olivier, Mary McCarthy. They came to listen—since customarily “B.B.” did most of the talking—and, of course, to be able to say they knew the great man.

“We just had to look him up. He was the best in his line,” Truman would later tell Merle Miller.

In his diary at the time, Truman said he found Berenson as “clear headed and mentally alert as a man of 35 or 40.”

Truman was greatly stimulated by Berenson’s company and delight in conversation, much as he had been years ago at the Sunday afternoon teas with Louis Brandeis. In a letter to Berenson later, recalling the pleasant visit, Truman wrote in a postscript: “I wish the Powers-that-be would listen, think, and mock at things as you have.”

But more remarkable was Berenson’s reaction to the former American President, which Berenson recorded in his own diary at the time:

At Salzburg, in Truman’s honor, the organist of Salzburg Cathedral played Mozart’s Ninth Sonata on a 250-year-old organ, and at Mozart’s birthplace, Truman himself played a Mozart sonata on Mozart’s own clavichord. (“I found that it was somewhat different from the modern piano but it makes beautiful music…. This Mozart town has certainly been a joy to me….”)

From Salzburg, the expedition moved on to Bonn, capital of the West German Republic that Truman had helped create, and during a brief rain-soaked stay he met with Konrad Adenauer for the first time. Swinging back through France again, the tourists kept to a steady schedule, stopping at Versailles, which Truman did not much enjoy (he kept thinking of how the money to build it had been “squeezed” from the people), Chartres Cathedral, which he loved despite the pouring rain, then Chenonceau, the lovely sixteenth-century château in the Loire Valley, which he had wanted particularly to see because of its connection to Catherine de Médicis, one of his favorite historic figures. (“Of course, there are all sorts of traditions and stories about the happenings of the days of Catherine,” he observed in his diary, “but she was a remarkable woman and a Medici, all of whom believed in government by deviation as set out in
The Prince
by Machiavelli. Catherine was the mother of ten children, three of whom became kings of France and two of whom became queens. Quite a record for a tough conspiratorial old woman.”)

Truman was tireless, determined to see everything, and fascinated by nearly all he saw. Bess tried valiantly to keep the pace, seldom smiling, at least in view of the photographers. The itinerary would have exhausted people half their age.

Their route in France, interestingly, included no return visits to the Vosges Mountains, the Argonne, or Verdun, Truman apparently having no wish to see any of those places ever again.

There were big crowds to cheer him at the train stations in Brussels, The Hague, and Amsterdam, where at the Dutch State Museum he and Bess saw the largest exhibit of Rembrandts ever held, and had lunch with Queen Juliana at the Royal Soestdikk Palace.

Then, on June 17, they were on their way to England, the part of the trip Truman had looked forward to most of all. “We crossed the Channel on the night boat,” he recorded, “and landed at the English side in beautiful sunshine….”

It may be fairly said that in his long, eventful life, in an extraordinary career with many surprising turns and times of great fulfillment, there were few occasions that meant so much to Truman as the ceremony that took place at Oxford on Wednesday, June 20, 1956. Wearing the traditional crimson robe and crushed black velour hat of Oxford, the man who had never been to college, nor ever made a pretense of erudition, walked at the head of the procession, beside the Public Orator, at one of the world’s oldest, most distinguished universities.

“Never, never in my life,” he had whispered to a reporter, “did I ever think I’d be a Yank at Oxford.”

The ceremony, called the
Encaenia
and conducted in Latin, was held in Oxford’s 300-year-old Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Christopher Wren. The audience numbered more than a thousand people. As Truman stood in the center facing the crimson-robed professors of Oxford, he heard the Public Orator present “
Harricum Truman,
” for an honorary degree of “
Doctoris in lure Civili
” (Doctor of Civil Law). Then the towering, ornately robed Earl of Halifax, chancellor of the university and former British ambassador to Washington, admitted Harricum Truman into the ancient fellowship of Oxford, lauding him, in Latin, as

The applause that followed went on for a full three minutes. Truman, moved to tears, searched beneath his academic gown for a handkerchief. An elderly professor told a reporter that he had attended many such convocations but had never heard such applause. “Mr. Truman is very popular in this country,” he said. Recovering himself, Truman smiled broadly.

That night he was honored at a white-tie dinner for four hundred returning graduates of Christ Church College. “Every person born in the twentieth century is entitled to the benefits of the twentieth century,” he said in his speech.

Every man and woman was entitled to the full benefit of the best in medicine, he added, striking an old theme. Every child was entitled to a first-rate education. There should be no economic worries for the elderly in their declining years.

“Give ‘em hell, Harricum!” the students of Oxford called from their windows as he departed.

A still more dazzling white-tie dinner followed the next night in London, at the Savoy—the annual stag dinner of the Pilgrims, the leading Anglo-American society dedicated to maintaining close ties between the two nations. And again Truman was a triumph, Lord Halifax paying him what to most present was the ultimate compliment. “I think we in this room feel that you are the sort of chap with whom all of us would be quite happy to go tiger hunting.”

He had been getting along very well in England, Truman said, at the start of his remarks. So far, he had not needed an interpreter.

“A good many of the difficulties between our two countries,” he continued, “spring not from our differences but from the fact that we are so much alike…. Another problem we have…is that in election years we behave somewhat as primitive peoples do at the time of the full moon.” But the essence of his warning was that “a great, serene and peaceful future can slip from us quite as irrevocably by neglect, division and inaction, as by spectacular disaster.” He hoped that both nations would never become careless about “our strength and our unity.”

He was “most happy” to see London, Truman wrote in his diary. “Never been here. It is a wonderful city.”

Visiting the House of Commons on Home Affairs Day, he listened to the opposition ask questions “about everything from roads to bawdy houses and gangsters.” At the House of Lords he sat through a long-winded speech as “boresome” as any in the United States Senate.

On June 24, at Chartwell, the Churchill family estate 40 miles south of London, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill, daughters Sarah and Mary and Mary’s husband, Christopher Soames, and Lord Beaverbrook were in the driveway waiting as the Trumans arrived for lunch in a chauffeur-driven Armstrong Siddeley. “This is just like old times,” Truman said, as he and Churchill greeted each other. Inside, a butler brought a tray of drinks, and before a bronze bust of Franklin Roosevelt the two men made what appeared to be a silent toast. Lunch finished, each swinging a walking stick, they strolled in the gardens.

“It was all over too soon,” Truman wrote in his diary.

Churchill, Truman thought, seemed as alert mentally as ever. “But his physical condition shows his 82 years. He walks more slowly and he doesn’t hear well.”

They said goodbye not knowing if they would ever see one another again, and they did not.

On June 26, as reported in the Independence
Examiner,
“Mr. and Mrs. Truman joined the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace” for lunch. On June 28, from Southampton, their grand tour over, the Trumans sailed for home.

During the visit at Chartwell, Lord Beaverbrook had told Truman that on his European trip he had made the greatest ambassador of goodwill America ever had. Now, the same refrain was heard repeatedly.

“Too bad he’s not campaigning for anything in this country,” an American reporter overheard an English spectator remark as Truman boarded the boat train in London. “He’d win any election.” The London
Evening Standard
headlined the visit as the “Truman Triumph.” The
Daily Telegraph
described him as the “living and kicking symbol of everything that everyone likes best about the United States.”