Harry Truman (72 page)

They weren’t on the road more than an hour, when Mother asked, “What does the speedometer say?”

“Fifty-five.”

“Do you think I’m losing my eyesight? Slow down.”

They slowed down. Other cars began passing them. Soon they heard people shouting, “Hi, Harry - Hey, wasn’t that Harry Truman? Where are you going, Harry?”

“Well,” Dad said, “there goes our incognito - and I don’t mean a part of the car.”

Everywhere they stopped along their route, Dad was instantly recognized by motel owners or filling station attendants. Local reporters were notified, and police chiefs rushed to escort or guard them. The trip became almost as well publicized as a whistle-stop campaign.

Dad likeds to take trips. During their first liberated years, he and Mother did quite a bit of traveling. I joined them for a wonderful month-long vacation in Hawaii, in March of 1953. In 1956, they went to England and had a delightful time. They visited Winston Churchill, and Dad received a degree from Oxford. For this ceremony, he wore a red coat and a Henry VIII type hat, which made him laugh every time he looked in the mirror.

My father could have made a great deal of money in the years immediately after he left the White House. An astonishing number of jobs were offered to him. A clothing store chain, a sewing machine company, a motion picture company offered him executive titles with six-figure salaries. One offer guaranteed him a half million dollars if he signed an eight-year contract that would have required only an hour’s work. But he saw through these proposals instantly: “They were not interested in hiring Harry Truman the person. It was the former President of the United States they wanted. I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the Presidency.” So he contented himself with the modest sums he earned from his memoirs and from writing comments on the political scene for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Among Dad’s favorite part-time occupations was lecturing at universities. He enjoyed meeting young men and women of another generation and sharing his wisdom and experience with them.

Invariably, in these discussions, someone would ask Dad if he ever had any second thoughts about dropping the atomic bomb. Dad replied in words similar to this answer which he gave during a lecture in 1965:

During these lectures, Dad never forgot the awesome powers of the presidency which clung to him no matter where he went. One day a young man stood up to ask him what he thought of the state’s governor. He referred to the governor as “our local yokel.” Dad responded sharply. He told the boy he should be ashamed of himself for his lack of respect for the high office of governor.

The boy turned pale and sat down. After the lecture was over, Dad rushed into the audience, found the young man, shook his hand, and told him there were no hard feelings, he understood he was just speaking in an offhand way and intended no disrespect. Dad’s sensitivity to what he had done did not stop there. He asked the boy’s dean to send him regular reports on the young man’s progress in school, and he continued to correspond with him after he left college.

“I realized after I spoke that way,” Dad explained to me, “that I had unintentionally humiliated that young man. I was afraid that the memory of my harsh tone might scar his whole life and ruin his reputation among his friends and acquaintances.”

Politically, Dad remained intensely interested in the future of the Democratic Party. Here he was severely disappointed by the way Adlai Stevenson resumed his Hamlet’s role and declined to accept the responsibility which Dad felt he should assume. “His failure to pick up the reins of leadership brought about a period of confusion and drift and factionalism within our party,” Dad said. In July 1955, the two men conferred in Chicago, and Dad bluntly urged Stevenson: “Why don’t you announce yourself now as a Presidential candidate, so that we can get a head start? Now is the time to do the necessary advance work that we were prevented from doing in 1952 when you held off until the last moment.”

Stevenson declined to take Dad’s advice, and Dad therefore decided to back Averell Harriman for the nomination in 1956. Stevenson won the nomination, in spite of Dad’s prediction - which proved unfortunately accurate - that he would carry fewer states than he did in 1952. Dad campaigned vigorously for him, in spite of his doubts. Later, whenever anyone mentioned Adlai Stevenson’s name, Dad would only shake his head and say he was a great Democratic Party spokesman but a poor candidate.

In one of their last intimate conversations, Stevenson said to Dad, “What am I doing wrong?” Dad walked over to the window of their hotel and pointed to a man standing in the entrance of a hotel across the street. “The thing you have got to do is to learn how to reach that man.” He was telling him he had to learn how to communicate with the man in the street. Unfortunately for him and the Democratic Party, Stevenson never mastered this difficult art. Eventually, Dad decided it was just as well he never won election as President. His indecisiveness might have been a disastrous handicap in the White House.

Politics was not, of course, Dad’s only preoccupation during these years. There were some family matters that also interested him. I spent Christmas and New Year’s in Independence in 1955 and received a number of rather mysterious telegrams from a man named Clifton Daniel. I had met him at a party in November. I made the mistake of going out to Independence without giving Clifton my phone number, and it was, of course, unlisted and unavailable, even to one of the top editors of
The New York Times.
He worked off his frustration by sending me silly telegrams, which asked questions like “Are you sure it’s not Independence, Kansas?” Then he sent me flowers. Mother’s eyebrows raised, and she asked, “Who is this?”

“A man I met,” I said, proving I could be as laconic as any other member of the Truman family.

In January, Clifton proposed and I accepted. I called Dad and informed him he was going to have a newspaperman for a son-in-law. Contrary to the rumors, it did not bother him in the least. But his friends thought it was very funny and kidded the life out of him.

Clifton’s first meeting with Dad, about a month later, was almost a disaster. He had come back from Russia the previous fall with a bad case of ulcers - the result of living under the terrific tension which the cold war inflicted on correspondents behind the Iron Curtain. All he could drink was milk. He came by around cocktail time to meet Mother and Dad, and I served drinks to the Trumans and milk to Daniel. Dad’s face fell down to his shoes. I could see him thinking: A newspaperman and he drinks milk! I thought it was funny, and in the best Truman practical joker tradition, absolutely refused to explain it. We did explain eventually, of course, but I let Dad spend a good hour doing mental contortions, first.

Dad tried to be good natured while the preparations for my wedding swept around him in our house in Independence. He was shunted from one room of the house to another while the women of the family, the neighbors, and assorted house guests, in the usual feminine frenzy, endeavored to prepare the downstairs rooms for the reception after the ceremony. Finally, his native stubbornness acted up. One ritual he did not propose to give up was reading his
New York Times.
He settled down in his chair in the library and began turning the pages.

“Harry, why don’t you just go on upstairs,” my mother called from the dining room, where she was working on the table. “Vietta has to vacuum the carpet.”

“She can sweep around me,” Dad announced without looking up from the editorial page, and he wouldn’t budge.

As in most families, the son-in-law rapidly achieved more influence with Mother and Dad than the daughter ever had. Particularly with Mother, who could be persuaded to change her mind by Clifton, where I could talk myself blue in the face for a year with no results. There was only one point on which Dad and Clifton disagreed. That was on how the news is presented in our papers. Dad insisted it is sometimes slanted by the way pictures are used and by the way stories and pictures are juxtaposed. Clifton insisted there is no intentional slanting on the vast majority of our newspapers. Dad remained unconvinced. I remained studiously neutral.

The next major family event was the birth of our first son. He came very suddenly in June 1957. I went into labor in the afternoon and headed for the hospital. Clifton telephoned Independence and got Dad. Mother was at her bridge club. Dad took the news very calmly, it seemed to me, for a man who had been saying in the public prints for years that all he wanted was a grandchild (to my frequently expressed annoyance). He did not even bother to telephone Mother at her bridge club. He simply met her on the back porch when she came home and said: “Margaret’s in the hospital.”

Later in the day, I developed some problems, and the doctor decided to perform a Caesarean. Clifton again telephoned Independence and this time got Mother, who was perfectly calm, and even relieved, to hear this news. Where was the grandfather-to-be? Where else - asleep in his bed. Would a man who slept through the night of his own election to the presidency stay awake for a mere grandson?

Clifton Truman Daniel finally arrived just after midnight on June 5. The following day, Dad and Mother were on a train heading east. Every place the train stopped, reporters and well-wishers swarmed aboard to congratulate Dad, as if he were the father. At the hospital, after he saw me and the baby, Dad departed with Clifton, who advised him to wait at the entrance while he captured a taxi. When Clifton returned, he was astonished to discover his father-in-law holding a press conference.

There was a marvelous picture in the
Daily News
of Clifton standing on the outskirts of the crowd, trying in vain to tell Dad their taxi was waiting. I’ve often said it was a good thing Clifton was a working newspaperman and understood the ways of the press. Otherwise, I think he might have developed a giant inferiority complex as an ex-President’s son-in-law.

In the course of rhapsodizing about his grandson, Dad told the reporters he had a full head of red hair. The baby had a full head of hair all right, but it was black. For all his emphasis on getting the facts while he was in the White House, the ex-President saw only what he wanted to see when he looked at his grandson. Red hair runs in the Truman family, and he blithely presumed Truman blood had won its tussle with Daniel blood.

I clashed with reporters while still in my hospital bed. They wanted a picture of the child, and I refused to cooperate. I had made up my mind my children would not endure the glare of publicity I had known. I accepted it because I was the President’s daughter. But I did not feel the obligation extended to the grandchildren. Clifton finally worked out a compromise by taking a picture of Mother and Dad looking through the window at the baby and sending it to
The New York Times
for processing and distribution.

While I was in the hospital, Dad dashed up to Brandeis University to make a speech and came back with sweatshirts for his grandson, all of them big enough for a six-year-old. He also had about a dozen bibs saying, “I’m a little owl from Brandeis.”

A few days later I came home. I was the typical nervous mother of a first child. Everything was suspected of being infested with germs. With the second, third, and fourth, such worries were of course abandoned. When we got in the house, Dad asked if he could hold his grandchild.

“You’ll have to take off your jacket first,” I said sternly. “It may be dirty.”

He gave me a very exasperated look, took it off, and sat down in a chair. “Do you know how to hold him?” I asked.

“I think I remember,” he said sarcastically.

I surrendered my precious bundle to him. Dad sat there for a long time, rocking him back and forth. Although normally Clifton was a screamer, he didn’t utter a peep.

“Would you like to give him his bottle?” I asked.

You have never seen any man give a baby back faster in your life. “No,” he said, “I won’t deprive you of that pleasure.”

Obviously, Mr. Ex-President had no intentions of going into the babysitting, diaper-changing, bib-and-burping business.

The only time I inveigled either him or Mother into doing anything in this line was about a year after the birth of our second son, William. Clifton and I went to Europe on business. Our trip took us all the way across the continent to Russia. We were gone nine weeks. I had a nurse and a housekeeper staying with the children, but I persuaded Mother and Dad to spend two or three weeks in our apartment to be sure the boys did not get too lonely. Dad had a marvelous time with both of them. They were very active as small boys are, and more than once, they almost wore him out.

One small incident occurred during this visit which showed that even in the canyons of Manhattan, Harry Truman did not forget the lessons he had learned on his Missouri farm. Three-year-old Clifton had a hobbyhorse which he was very fond of riding too vigorously. One morning at breakfast, the horse tipped over and Kif, as we call him, went sprawling. Mother and the nurse both jumped up and rushed toward him. The sight of this feminine consolation immediately started him whimpering.

Dad took charge. “Leave him alone,” he said. Then in a very ungrandfatherly voice he said, “Get up. Pick up the horse and get back on.” Kif was so startled, he forgot all about crying and obeyed the presidential order. It was a pretty big and heavy hobbyhorse, but he rolled it over and got back on.