Largest and most generous of the town’s gestures, and much the most appreciated by Truman, was the donation of a town park north of the Square as a site for his library. He could not have been more pleased. Independence would be a far more appropriate location than Grandview and more accessible. Slover Park, a quiet, picturesque 13-acre knoll, was just beyond U.S. Highway 24. To have turned over a comparable portion of the Grandview farm, furthermore, would have meant a major financial sacrifice not only for Truman, but Vivian and Mary Jane, for the land at Grandview was becoming more valuable all the time. Also, the Independence site was only a mile from 219 North Delaware, nothing at all for a good walker.
“All partisanship and selfishness were left behind months ago and this home city of this world-famous statesman is the most logical place to establish such a national Shrine as the Harry S. Truman Library,” wrote the Kansas City Times.
Besides the work on the memoirs, Truman threw himself into raising money for the library, attending dinners, making speeches around the country, and writing thouands of letters. A fund-raising auction for the library at the National Guard Armory in Independence went on for seven hours. The government in Washington was to contribute nothing to the cost of creating the library. He would raise all the money himself. It was another campaign for him, and in a year and a half he would build a fund of more than $1 million. “The pace he set absolutely terrified me,” Margaret would remember.
Past the age of seventy, Truman often said, one was living on borrowed time. Yet in the spring of 1954, turning seventy, he gave no sign of exerting or enjoying himself any less than ever. He was putting in seventeen hours a day on the book, the mail, and seeing the “customers” who came by the office, he reported to Acheson on May 28, Nor was that all on his mind:
I’m worried about our world situation. We are losing all our friends, the smart but inexperienced boys at the White House are upsetting NATO and throwing our military strength away. Yet they seem to want to intervene in Indo-China….
In June, when the Irving Berlin hit musical Call Me Madam, about Perle Mesta, came to Kansas City’s outdoor theater, Truman happily agreed to make a surprise appearance in the last act, playing the part of himself. Waiting backstage, the night of June 18, he was suddenly ill with violent pains in his stomach. Bess rushed him home and the lights were on at the house all night. On June 20, in an emergency operation at Research Hospital, he had his gallbladder and appendix removed by Wallace Graham, who, since leaving the White House, had resettled in Kansas City to practice surgery. Infection set in. Graham grimly reported that, due to an “unusual hypersensitivity” to modern drugs, the former President was in serious condition. For several days there was extreme concern. It was “a hell of a time,” Truman later said. “They gave me about five or ten gallons of antibiotics by sticking needles in veins. But they just couldn’t kill me.”
But the crisis passed and Truman, improving rapidly, was the model patient. Nothing seemed to bother him. Western Missouri was in the grip of a fierce heat wave. By midday thermometers outside the hospital windows ranged between 110 and 114 degrees and the hospital had no air conditioning. Nevertheless, he was content. When the director of the hospital insisted on putting an air conditioner in his room, he refused. He wanted no special treatment. It was only after Tom Evans pointed out that Bess, who had been sitting with him day after day, was suffering from heat if he wasn’t, that Truman sent for the director and had the air conditioning installed immediately.
“When the papers tell us that you had a gangrenous gall bladder,” wrote Acheson, “I was at once prepared to tell Doc Graham how you got it. It comes from reading the newspapers. No one can escape some malady from this cause. With me it has taken the form of an attack of gout….”
For Truman’s convalescence, Acheson sent a copy of The Reason Why, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s account of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade. “When you get acquainted with Lords Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan you will be reminded of a certain General we know,” Acheson said, meaning MacArthur.
To Bess, Acheson wrote, “It is touching the way so many people—elevator boys, our cook, taxi drivers, people on the street—keep asking me about the President. He is deeply loved—even by the press.”
More than a hundred thousand cards and letters poured in to Truman, wishing him a speedy recovery, and enough flowers, as he said, “to supply every customer” in the hospital.
From his hospital room on July 6, he pledged to do “everything possible” to get his library started and finished as soon as possible. Once released from the hospital, he was immediately back at work.
Ed Thompson flew in from New York in November to find that the “raw material” of the memoirs had grown beyond limits, yet the manuscript was still far from ready. Tactfully he proposed to the former President that one of Life’s best staff writers, Ernest Havemann, be sent in to do some reshaping and polishing. But Truman declined. “More important to me,” he wrote to Thompson, “especially at this stage, than style or organization of the material are the facts…so that the record of the years of my Presidency may be correct. Until this part of the job is completed I would like you to hold up sending Mr. Havemann; or anyone else….”
Havemann’s turn came three or four weeks later, and for the first time, Truman had an experienced writer working with him. Francis Heller would recall how much he himself learned from Havemann—though Havemann did no actual writing—and how hard everyone worked, six, sometimes seven days a week, “going great guns,” as Truman said. “The damned thing is turning out much better than I thought it would,” he reported to Acheson. But apparently Havemann found the former President a difficult collaborator, and the staff even more troublesome to work with. After a month, he asked to be relieved.
Another writer, Hawthorne Daniel, was recruited, now at the request of Doubleday, the publisher that would be bringing out the book, once Life had launched its installments. Eventually, too, Doubleday’s editor-in-chief Ken McCormick would take part in the cutting and refining, and both Dean Acheson and Sam Rosenman would be asked by Truman to go over the whole “accumulation.” Acheson’s comments were to be of particular value.
The material is more interesting and gripping when you are talking about your own life and your own ideas than it is when you are giving lists of callers at the White House and the activities of the Truman Committee which do not reveal much about you as a man [Acheson advised in one extended critique].
Page 114, line 3. You use the cliché, “striped pants boys in the State Department.” I should like to see you change this to “people in the State Department,” not merely because the phrase is tiresome, but because it gives quite a wrong impression of the tremendous support which you gave to the career service and for which they will be forever grateful.
In places, as he told Truman, Acheson found the manuscript brusque, didactic, and superficial, “quite contrary to what you are.”
Acheson’s lengthy, single-space typed comments, running to many pages, would be gone over closely by the staff, who, in turn, would give Truman their own lengthy comments on Acheson’s comments.
Ken McCormick sensed that Bess Truman was also playing more of a role than met the eye, since Truman seemed to make better decisions about the manuscript, seemed to improve in his judgments, after having talked with her at home in the evenings. “She was his true North, I think,” McCormick said years later, remembering how the work had gone.
The financial burden of all this for Truman was mounting, for as yet he had received no money. The first payment of his $600,000 from Life was not due until June 30, when he was supposed to deliver the finished manuscript.
By early 1955, the manuscript had grown to approximately 2 million words, whereas the contract had called for only 300,000. After some negotiations, Life agreed to accept 580,000 words, but still the project was behind schedule. Hillman and Noyes now spent more time in Kansas City, cutting and trimming.
Doubleday, fac
ed with the size of the manuscript, decided to bring the memoirs out in two volumes, and so through the first six months of 1955, all concentration was on finishing up Volume One—dealing with only the first sixteen months of the presidency, plus the one chapter on his early life and two others covering the political career prior to Roosevelt’s death.
Things were moving fast. And things were changing. Acheson and his wife Alice arrived—Acheson to help with the manuscript—and were overnight guests at 219 North Delaware, an event that had the whole town talking, both because there had never before been a former Secretary of State in residence in Independence and because there had never before been “house guests” at 219 North Delaware, as far as anyone could recall.
On May 8, Truman’s seventy-first birthday, with some two thousand people gathering in Slover Park, he turned the first spade of earth at an old-fashioned home-style groundbreaking ceremony for his library, complete with band music. Then, as they had also never done before, he and Bess hosted a buffet dinner at home for some 150 people. It was a sight, wrote Margaret, that she never thought she would see. There was her mother standing at the door of her “sanctuary,” welcoming each guest.
Flying to San Francisco on June 24, to attend a tenth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Truman looked out over Wyoming and the Rockies from the vantage point of 14,000 feet, and as he wrote in his room that night in the Fairmont Hotel, he couldn’t help but think of Solomon Young.
We’d left home at 7 A.M. and at 11 A.M. were all past the high mountains. Grandpa would have left home at what is now Grandview at four A.M. and in all probability would have been ten or twelve miles west of the Missouri line. What an age we live and have our being in! We had a mountain lake trout lunch and before we realized it were descending into the Great Salt Lake Valley….
With the deadline pressure on in the offices at the Federal Reserve Bank Building, the work hours grew longer. In the final days of June, some of the staff were working round the clock.
Truman handed over a 500,000-word manuscript to Ed Thompson in Kansas City on July 4, 1955, and told him, “I never really appreciated before what is involved in trying to write a book.”
His first check was for $110,000, and with it came five promissory notes for the rest of the $600,000, the last installment not to be paid until January 1960.
The opening installment of the Memoirs, titled “The Most Momentous First 18 Days,” appeared in the September 25 issue of Life, with a cover photograph of the former President and First Lady standing in front of their Independence home. Doubleday’s publication of Volume One, called Year of Decisions, followed five weeks later, with an author’s autographing party in the grand ballroom of the Muehlebach, on Tuesday, November 2, 1955.
To the delight of the publisher, Truman had agreed to sign books for all who came. “I expect to use, probably, a couple of $1.75 fountain pens that I bought at the Twenty-five Cent Store, along with a half dozen others that I happen to have, and I don’t want to be in any advertising stunt [for the pens] whatever,” Truman had written to Samuel Vaughan, Doubleday’s advertising manager. “I will go along with any party arrangements which you make for Doubleday, but don’t get me into any advertising for pens, cakes or anything, because I won’t do it.”
Arriving in Kansas City a few days in advance to make arrangements, Vaughan was distressed to hear people asking why they would want to come to such an occasion for Truman, “when we see him all the time anyway.” Greatly concerned, Vaughan worked to line up Battery D veterans, the Boy Scouts, anyone he could think of, to be sure there was a crowd. But he need not have bothered. More than three hundred people were already in line waiting before the party began.
“Hand Firm to the End” was the headline in the next morning’s paper.
It was almost unbelievable. “I had no idea it would be anything like this,” Truman said as he saw the crowds grow, the people still coming, hour after hour. His hand fairly flew as he signed books, until he was doing six to eight autographs a minute. If ever there was a demonstration of his extraordinary vitality, this was it. He kept going hour after hour, not only signing his name but greeting people. “There, that one’s all slicked up,” he would say with satisfaction, finishing his signature and handing over the book.
By the end of the first session, he had signed over a thousand copies In all, incredibly, he turned out four thousand autographs in just five and a half hours. Reporters on hand, his publishers, watched in amazement. Earlier, when Ken McCormick of Doubleday had suggested to Truman that perhaps he might prefer to have the autographs done by a machine Truman had replied, “I will autograph as many as I can. I am not an expert with a machine, and I would rather do it by hand.”
Reviewers rightly treated the book as a major event. “The first volume of Harry Truman’s Memoirs (Doubleday) provides a more detailed report on life at the summit of American politics than a President has given since the early days of the Republic,” wrote Richard Rovere in The New Yorker. Truman was commended for his contribution to history, his understanding of presidential power, his clarity, attention to detail, “his appealing mixture of modesty and confidence,” as the historian Allan Nevins wrote on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. There was too little autobiography, it was thought, too much that read like an official paper worked over by many hands. (In the preface, Truman freely acknowledged the help he had been given.) Richard Rovere, having covered Truman for years, missed the characteristic pungent manner of expression, Truman in his own words, and wished there were more of what was to be found in Truman’s letters to his mother, eighteen of which were included in the book, providing, as Rovere said, not only relief from the state-paper style but “wonderful insights” into Truman’s style as a human being.
As the reviewers implied, too many people had been involved in the task. Truman had been homogenized. He had been made at times even tedious. Acheson’s warnings should have been taken more to heart. Truman himself—the vitality, the vividness of his letters, his own way of expressing himself—was missing through great portions of the book. But to a large degree, of course, Truman himself had been responsible for this, by agreeing to the process by which the work was produced. Also, from the start, he seems to have seen the task more as one of recording history than telling his own story. Francis Heller, for example, would never recall Truman speaking of the work in progress as “memoirs,” only as “my history.”
The inevitable comparisons with Churchill’s history of the war were made, though not so unfavorably as might have been supposed. As a literary performance, said Allan Nevins, Truman’s book did not rank among the best memoirs of the era. Nevertheless, Nevins emphasized, this was a “volume of distinction.” His praise exceeded his criticism and the review, like others, became as much a judgment of the author as of the book. If not one of the landmark memoirs of the century, it was nonetheless an admirable work by one of the most important figures of the century.
Altogether, it well expressed one of the most conscientious, dynamic and (within his horizons) clearsighted Presidents we have ever had [wrote Nevins]…. His penetrating shrewdness has been underrated…. We are equally impressed by his exceptionally high conception of the Presidency and his determination to live up to it…. In ordinary affairs he seemed commonplace, and in small matters he could make curious blunders. But he grew in his office as few Presidents have ever done; and he was sustained by an unusual knowledge of American history and a firm grasp of our best traditions. To the major crisis he brought statesmanlike insight, energy, and courage. There was greatness in the man….
The large effect of the book and the series in Life—and Volume Two, which appeared the next spring—was to create renewed interest in Truman and a reconsideration of his presidency. And while his account of events also stirred controversy—protests and rebuttals by such major protagonists as Jimmy Byrnes and Henry Wallace—publication of the Memoirs marked the beginning of what was to be a steady reviva
l of Truman’s reputation, and the beginning of an exceptionally happy time for him. Indeed, it may be said that publication of the Memoirs marked the opening of one of the happiest passages in his long life.
III
Truman had always wanted a son. It was why he had called Margaret “Skinny” as she grew up, he recently explained in a letter to Acheson. “But I wouldn’t trade her for a houseful of boys although I always wanted a couple and another girl.”
In mid-March 1956, at a press conference at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, Margaret announced she was engaged to be married to Elbert Clifton Daniel, Jr., who was an assistant foreign news editor of The New York Times and at forty-two, ten years older than his fiancée. The news was a surprise. Though her parents had known for several weeks, Margaret had succeeded in keeping her romance private.
Margaret and Clifton, as he was called, had known each other for more than a year. He was of slightly less than medium height, slim, handsome well dressed, and spoke with a trace of a British accent, acquired, it was said, from ten years as a foreign correspondent in England. He appeared very polished and sophisticated, but as the country soon learned, he, like Margaret, had grown up in a small town, Zebulon, North Carolina, where his father, Elbert Clifton Daniel, Sr., had a drugstore.