Harry Truman (71 page)

I got off the train and stood beside Mrs. Fred Vinson as it pulled out. Everybody in the station started singing “Auld Lang Syne.” It was absolutely thunderous. Beside me, Mommy Vinson was weeping. But I didn’t feel in the least weepy now. This tremendous outpouring of affection for Dad was too wonderful. It made all those years in the Great White Jail almost worthwhile.

SHORTLY BEFORE WE left Washington, a reporter asked my father if he planned to take down the substantial iron fence which had been put around our house in Independence after he became President.

“No, you can’t,” Dad said. “When Herbert Hoover went back to his home in California after 1932, the souvenir hunters almost tore his house down, and he had to put a fence around it. We are going to leave that fence there, not because we like it, but it’s just the American way to take souvenirs. It was said in the First World War that the French fought for their country, the British fought for freedom of the seas, and the Americans fought for souvenirs.”

The fence, kept on Herbert Hoover’s advice, turned out to be our salvation. At the that time, the nation was quite indifferent to the fate of its ex-Presidents. At Union Station Dad’s Secret Service escort shook hands with him and said goodbye. He went home to Independence and began living at 219 North Delaware Street without any protection whatsoever. The local government of Independence did their best to help us, but they could not permanently station at the house a detail of police from their small force.

We were badly in need of some sort of protection. The house was already a tourist attraction. They had been selling picture postcards of it as the summer White House for years. In the first months, thousands of people came by to gawk. You will notice by my choice of words that I take a somewhat negative view of the American people’s attitude that Presidents and ex-Presidents are objects of curiosity. Dad often tried to explain patiently to me that it was a waste of time to get mad about it, that it was a tradition that went all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who was plagued by hordes of curiosity seekers when he retired to Monticello. I still kept getting mad. The people who regarded our house as public property were the ones who annoyed me most. Often they would drive down the long alley on the right of our house, into the backyard where our garages are. When I was there, I would march right out and say to them, “Get off here. You’re on private property, and you’re trespassing.”

“Don’t yell at them,” Mother would tell me.

“I will yell at people who do things like that,” I would tell her. “It’s disgraceful.”

Then there was a man who walked up to the front gate and insisted he had to see the President. One look and it was clear to us he was a nut. We called the police, and they responded promptly. At the station house, they discovered he had recently been discharged from a mental institution in Pennsylvania. He had written Dad several threatening letters and had a loaded .45 revolver in his pocket.

By way of consolation for these problems, there was the continued demonstration of tremendous affection from ordinary people. I should add that probably most of the curiosity seekers who came by our house - even those who drove into our backyard - were also moved by affection for Dad. But I found it hard to reciprocate when they made life miserable for us.

The mail Dad received in his first months out of office was unbelievable. In the first two weeks, more than 70,000 letters poured in. Almost all of them were favorable, but, of course, they had to be answered. Dad soon found himself running a sizable office in Kansas City. Even without the mail, he had two projects which were full-time jobs. The first was putting his papers in order, so he could begin to write his memoirs. The second was planning his presidential library.

Dad took his papers with him from the White House as have all Presidents since George Washington. The papers he regarded as confidential - only a small fraction of which have been used in this book - filled several dozen filing cabinets. The public papers, some 3.5 million documents, filled several thousand cabinets and boxes. Archivists published many thick volumes, each almost 1,000 pages long.

Some historians have criticized Dad because he refused to open his confidential files. But he was not acting out of selfish motives. From the day he left office he was conscious he still had heavy responsibilities as an ex-President. During his White House years, a President gets advice from hundreds of people. He wants it to be good advice. He wants men to say exactly what they think, to tell exactly what they know about a situation or a subject. A President can only get this kind of honesty if the man who is giving the advice knows what he says is absolutely confidential and will not be published for a reasonable number of years after the President leaves the White House.

The library was in some ways an even bigger job than putting his papers in order and writing his memoirs. Millions of dollars had to be raised, a site selected, an agreement reached with the government. At first, Dad hoped to establish the library on his family’s farm. He even had thoughts about rebuilding the farmhouse and living there in close proximity to the history of his presidential years. But the onward march of suburbia made this financially impossible. A builder offered to buy a large part of the farm for a shopping center, which has since become known as Truman Corners. Uncle Vivian was ready to retire from farming, and the sale of the land guaranteed him and Dad’s sister Mary financial security for the rest of their lives. The problem of a site was solved by the city of Independence, which offered Dad a handsome piece of land in the city’s public park, only about a mile from our house. Dad was so pleased, he went out on a speaking schedule to raise the final million dollars. The pace he set absolutely terrified me. It would have killed a man half his age.

The library, which was dedicated in 1957, was one of the great joys of Dad’s old age. He worked on the planning of every detail, down to the artwork on the walls. He even persuaded Thomas Hart Benton, the great Missouri painter, to contribute a striking mural. One room is an exact replica of Dad’s White House office as it was decorated during his presidency. Another room is dedicated to the World War I phase of Dad’s career, with many personal mementoes of Battery D. There is a wonderful collection of political cartoons of the two Truman Administrations. But the heart of the library is in the rooms Dad laid out, to teach young people (and a few of their elders) the six functions of the presidency. Walking through them is a real learning experience. There are exhibits which tell the story of the President as Chief Executive, as ceremonial Chief of State, as a legislative planner, as a political party leader, as director of the nation’s foreign policy, and as commander in chief of the Armed Forces. For scholars, almost every book published on the Truman era is on the shelves, and on microfilm are the papers of all the other Presidents.

On October 21, 1953, President Eisenhower visited Kansas City. He telephoned Dad, Dad telephoned him, but there was no meeting. Dad had no desire for one. He resented intensely the effort which the Eisenhower Administration was making to “get him” and other members of the Truman Administration. The Republicans combed the government files attempting to dredge up charges against everyone and anyone in Dad’s administration. They found nothing to justify their “mess in Washington” cry. Even worse was the attempt to implicate Dad in the Communists-in-government canard. The climax to this program came in the investigation of Harry Dexter White, a former government monetary expert who had been accused of Communist leanings. The House Un-American Activities Committee actually sent Dad a subpoena, summoning him to testify on the case. He rejected the summons with the scorn it deserved. “I have been accused, in effect,” he said on television, “of knowingly betraying the security of the United States. This charge is, of course, a falsehood.” For once, most of the newspapers were on Dad’s side.

In 1954, Dad had his first serious illness. It was a gall bladder attack, and it hit him while he was attending an open air production of
Call Me Madam.
Mother rushed him to the hospital, and they operated promptly. He survived the operation beautifully, but he was almost killed by a bad reaction to some antibiotics they gave him. He had what he called “hives inside and out” and could keep no food down. Then, in a marvelous replay of his mother’s reaction to illness, he woke up one morning and asked the nurse if he could have a soft-boiled egg in a white cup.

“Why do you want it in a white cup?”

“So that I’ll know it’s clean,” Dad said.

He ate the egg and kept it down. That was the beginning of his recovery. The doctors said it would take him at least a year to return to his normal routine. But within two months, he was back working six days a week, plus a few extra hours on Sunday. “I’ve never known hard work to hurt anybody,” Dad says. “It’s lack of work that kills people.”

A year or two after his gall bladder adventure, Dad departed from the house for his morning walk, without noticing the streets were a sheet of ice. Not far from the house, he slipped and cracked three or four ribs. He went home and called Dr. Graham, who put him in a harness. I came home for a visit three days later, and our conversation went like this:

“How do you feel?”

“It hurts.”

“What do you expect when you crack your ribs? Have you got that harness on Dr. Graham gave you?”

“No. I got tired of wearing that.”

“You mean you’re just sitting there letting the ribs heal by themselves with no help?”

“That’s right.”

Only one thing changed in Dad’s routine as a result of this misadventure. Mother issued an edict, forbidding him to go out for his morning walk when there was snow or ice on the ground. For once, he obeyed.

On another front, Dad drew on his political skills - and his knowledge of Mother - to win an argument. For days, Mother badgered him to cut the grass, which she insisted was disgracefully high. Dad kept insisting it looked perfectly all right to him. Finally, one Sunday morning, he got out the lawn mower and went to work. Numerous neighbors passed on the way to church, and he greeted them cheerfully. Within the hour, it was obvious to half of Independence that ex-President Truman was skipping church that morning.

Finally, Mother came out, en route to church.

“What do you think you are doing?” she asked, horrified.

“I’m doing what you asked me to do,” said Dad, with his most disarming smile.

The following day, Mother hired a man to mow the lawn.

Most of the time, Mother won those kinds of arguments. In the mid-1950s, when they visited California, Mother announced she wanted to visit Disneyland. The ex-President issued a fifteen-minute statement criticizing this idea. Disneyland was for children. No one was going to catch him riding roller coasters, etc., etc. Mother remained perfectly calm. She asked Charlie Murphy, who was accompanying them, if
he
would take her. Charlie, being a perfect Southern gentleman, of course, said yes. The next morning he presented himself at their hotel, ready to do his duty. There was Dad, dressed to the nines, obviously ready to go somewhere. “What are you planning for the day, Mr. President?” Charlie asked.

“What do you think I’m planning?” snapped Dad. “I’m going to Disneyland!”

He went, and enjoyed himself thoroughly.

What pleased Dad most about his retirement was the warm reception he got from his fellow citizens in Independence and Kansas City. He wasn’t sure just how people would take living with an ex-President. Moreover, he was keenly aware the local papers had wasted a good deal of ink tearing him apart while he was in the White House. But his worries on this score proved utterly groundless. When he and Mother arrived in Independence on their trip home from Washington, there were at least 10,000 people waiting for them in the railroad station. The road that runs by our house was renamed Truman Road, and dozens of businesses adopted Dad’s first or last name. Dad did his best to put a stop to this trend, however. He had strong convictions that no living politician should have anything named after him. This includes retired politicians. He relented just a little on this rule and agreed to permit the new sports stadium being built in Kansas City to carry his name. I think Mother, the baseball fan of the family, had something to do with this decision.

Other aspects of Dad’s routine in the first year or so out of the White House gave him some problems. For instance, where does an ex-President eat lunch? He tried going to various restaurants in Kansas City with old friends, but a mob scene of autograph hunters invariably developed. Eating became an ordeal, and he began to wonder if he was going to spend the rest of his life lunching alone in his office. Then a friend recommended the Kansas City Club. Dad hesitated over this idea because the club was 95 percent Republican. He was an honorary member, along with President Eisenhower, General of the Armies Bradley, and a noted Kansas City judge. Dad finally decided to take the plunge and entered the reactionary sanctum. The results amazed him. Half the Kansas City Establishment stopped by to shake his hand. “There is no conversation so sweet as that of former political enemies,” Dad decided.

Traveling beyond his Kansas City-Independence stamping grounds was, Dad found, just as complicated. In the summer of 1953, he proposed a trip to Washington. He had bought a new car, and he wanted to give it “a real tryout.” Mother had doubts about driving with him, but he assured her he would obey the speed limits and convinced her they would have no difficulty traveling incognito.