Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (30 page)

The Harry S. Truman Library was dedicated on July 6, 1957. It wasn’t built on the Truman family farm as Harry had hoped. His brother and sister had vetoed that idea. The land was too valuable. “Ain’t no use wastin’ good farmland on any old dang library,” said his brother Vivian. So instead the library was built on thirteen acres donated by the city of Independence, just a mile down the road from the Truman home on Delaware Street.

Sitting next to Truman on the dais at the library’s dedication was Herbert Hoover. The only two living ex-presidents had reconciled in 1955, when Harry invited Hoover to attend a fundraising dinner for the library in San Francisco. Hoover, who was raising funds for his own library in West Branch, Iowa, accepted the invitation. “I have a fellow feeling,” he wrote Truman, “for I have one of those burdens of my own.” Thereafter, Truman and Hoover corresponded regularly, and their mutual admiration, grudging at first, blossomed into genuine friendship. When Harry invited him to attend the library’s dedication, Hoover replied, “One of the important jobs of our very exclusive Trade Union is preserving libraries.” Harry returned the favor when he attended the dedication of Hoover’s library in 1962. “I feel sure that I am one of his closest friends and that’s the reason I am here,” Harry told the crowd.

Later that year, Hoover wrote Harry to thank him for sending him a copy of
Truman Speaks,
a compilation of lectures Harry had delivered at Columbia University. “This is an occasion when I should like to add something more,” Hoover wrote after the obligatory thank you, “because yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know…. When you came to the White House within a month you opened the door to me to the only profession I knew, public service, and you undid some disgraceful action that had been taken in the prior years. For all of this and your friendship, I am deeply grateful.” Coming from one as reserved as Hoover, it was an extraordinary letter, and it moved Truman deeply. He had it framed, and he displayed it in his office at the library.

Like a marble statue suddenly come to life, Truman delighted in surprising visitors to the library, especially schoolchildren, with whom he would hold impromptu question-and-answer sessions—with Harry asking as many questions of the children as they asked of him. He always pointed out that one of them could be president one day—after all, he had never expected to be president himself. Sometimes he would play the piano for them, too.

Truman kept an office at the library, which finally freed him of the financial burden of renting one in downtown Kansas City. However, other expenses, including postage, were still his responsibility, and his finances continued to trouble him. In January 1958, Truman and his brother and sister sold off the family farm in Grandview. It broke Harry’s heart, but he had no choice. If the farm hadn’t been sold, he wrote, “I would practically be on relief.” The land was purchased by a developer who turned it into a shopping center called Truman Corners. Only the family’s farmhouse was preserved. Today it sits within spitting distance of a McDonald’s, a Sam’s Club, an Applebee’s, and an IHOP.

Harry and Bess on the porch of their house in Independence on Valentine’s Day 1960. When a friend once offered to arrange a private screening of the movie
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
Harry declined. “Real gentlemen,” he said, “prefer gray hair.”

Ever more openly, Harry continued to lobby his friends in Congress for financial assistance. To his close friend House Speaker Sam Rayburn he bluntly confessed to needing assistance “to keep ahead of the hounds.” In the summer of 1958, Rayburn, working with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, finally got a presidential pension bill through Congress. House Majority Leader John McCormack said an outgoing president should not be expected to “engage in any business or occupation which would demean the office he once held.” Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps mindful of his own impending retirement, signed the Former Presidents Act into law on August 25. “The world’s richest nation has finally made sure that never again will an ex-president have to live off the charity of relatives,” began the UPI report on the new law, which entitled ex-presidents to “a monetary allowance” of twenty-five thousand dollars, as well as fifty thousand dollars for office expenses and unlimited franking privileges. (Since it is not a contributory pension, the “allowance” is taxed as if it were a salary.)

At long last, Harry Truman was financially secure.

Herbert Hoover, of course, didn’t need the money. He hadn’t even taken a salary as president. But he accepted the pension anyway, to spare his friend Harry any embarrassment.

On November 22, 1963, Truman was having lunch at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City when he was told that President Kennedy had been shot. In the car on his way home he heard on the radio that Kennedy had died.

Harry flew to Washington to attend Kennedy’s funeral. Eisenhower was there too, and the two old adversaries ended up sharing the same limousine to the graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery. Margaret Truman Daniel and Mamie Eisenhower rode with them. (Bess wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed home.) They discussed whether Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a conspiracy or a lone gunman. They agreed it was most likely the latter.

After the service, Margaret invited the Eisenhowers to join her and her father for lunch at the Blair House, where they were staying. Ike and Mamie accepted the invitation. Sandwiches were served, along with coffee and, perhaps, something stronger. For an hour, Harry and Ike chatted amiably, reminiscing about old battles, political and otherwise.

“I thought it would never end,” recalled Admiral Robert Dennison, a White House aide who was also there, “but it was really heartwarming … you’d think there had never been any differences between them…. It was really wonderful.”

When it was time for the Eisenhowers to go, Harry and Margaret walked them to their car. The two former presidents chatted some more. Then they shook hands, “a long, lingering, silent handshake,” according to one account. Margaret kissed Ike on the cheek. Mamie kissed Harry.

Harry and Ike had made peace, though they would never see each other again.

In 1965, in the wake of the assassination, Congress passed a law authorizing the Secret Service to protect former presidents and their wives. This did not please the Trumans. When an agent showed up at their house and told Harry that he no longer had a need for Mike Westwood, the Independence cop who’d been his part-time bodyguard for twelve years, Harry told the agent, “Well, I no longer have a need for you, so get out of here.” Bess was equally opposed to the return of the Secret Service. “Mother reacted as if they had just told her she was going to have to spend four more years in the White House,” Margaret wrote. “She refused to allow the Secret Service men on the property.” Harry read the new law carefully and discovered a provision allowing him and Bess to refuse the protection. On September 21, he wrote the Secret Service requesting that their detail be “discontinued.” (Ironically, less than three weeks earlier, he had received a letter threatening to have him “rubbed out” to avenge Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

Then one night, the phone in the hall rang. Bess answered.

“Bess,” purred a familiar voice, “this is Lyndon.” Perhaps the president mentioned Harry and Bess’s road trip in 1953, and how worried the Secret Service had been even back then. Perhaps he told her how helpful it would be to have the agents around now, how they could run errands or help around the house. And, of course, there was the matter of safety. Whatever he said, Johnson must have been at his persuasive best, for he convinced the stubborn couple to allow the Secret Service back into their lives.

But, at Harry’s insistence, Mike Westwood stayed.

Harry and Bess often returned to New York to visit Margaret, Clifton, and the grandchildren. They usually traveled by plane. Harry still took a walk most mornings, accompanied by a pack of reporters, including, now, television crews. But, as the years passed, his pace slowed, the walks grew shorter, and his famously acidulous observations occasionally gave way to simpleminded crotchetiness. Civil rights demonstrators were “busybodies,” antiwar protestors were “silly.”

He became something of a grumpy old man, yet the nation’s fondness for him only grew, perhaps because he represented a bygone era whose passing, given the tumultuous times, was bemoaned. He was humble, too, in a way his successors were not. Harry had become an elder statesman, though he hated the term. To him, a statesman was just a politician who was dead.

In 1969 Harry ranked seventh in the Gallup Poll’s annual list of America’s “Most Admired Men.” (For what it’s worth, Nixon ranked first.) More recently, a 2004 poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner found that 58 percent of Americans viewed Truman favorably.

Historians began to reassess Harry too. In 1962, Arthur Schlesinger polled seventy-five historians to rank the presidents. The top five were Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Wilson, and Jefferson. According to the historians, they were the “great” presidents. Harry—whom Walter Trohan had called “one of the most mediocre men ever to inherit power”—ranked ninth. He was one of the “near great” presidents. The results were published in the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
that July. On file at the Truman Library is a copy of the article with notations made in Harry’s characteristic slashing script. Harry’s top five were Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Wilson, and Jackson. Above the picture of John Adams, whom the historians ranked tenth, he scribbled, “Should be about 18.” Above the picture of himself he wrote, “Not to be considered.” It was Harry’s belief that a president should be dead “about thirty years” before his administration could be fairly assessed.

It is delightful to imagine the aging ex-president, pencil in hand, sitting on his porch on a sultry summer Sunday morning in Missouri, correcting the rankings.

On October 13, 1964, Harry slipped and fell in his second-floor bathroom. His head smashed against the sink, shattering his glasses and cutting his forehead. He fell against the bathtub, fracturing two ribs. The next day he received a telegram from Herbert Hoover:

Those were the last words Herbert Hoover is known to have written. Three days later he collapsed. Massive internal bleeding was the cause. He never regained consciousness and died on October 20. He was ninety. At 31 years and 231 days, Hoover’s is the longest ex-presidency in history. Truman, of course, was unable to attend the funeral. He sent a telegram to Hoover’s two sons. “He was my good friend and I was his,” he wrote.

Harry was back home in a few days, but he never fully recovered from the fall. His morning walks grew less frequent, and he went into his office at the library less often. He grew thin and frail, his face gaunt behind massive horn-rimmed glasses. The man who had found it impossible to travel incognito in 1953 was now unrecognizable, even to many of his neighbors in Independence.

In 1968 Richard Nixon, one of the two men in politics he truly hated, was elected president. It was a bitter pill for Harry to swallow. He had wanted Lyndon Johnson to run for reelection, to take his case directly to the people, just as Harry had twenty years before. Instead, Harry felt, LBJ had let the “silly” war protesters drive him from office.

But when the new president, quite unexpectedly, asked if he could visit the Trumans, Harry could hardly refuse. As Margaret put it, “That special bond which links the residents of the White House prevailed over old animosities.” On March 22, 1969, the Nixons came to Independence. They spent about twenty minutes at the house on Delaware Street. The two men chatted while Bess showed Pat Nixon around the house. Then they went to the library, where Nixon presented Harry with a Steinway piano that had been in the White House when the Trumans lived there. Nixon sat down and played “The Missouri Waltz.” Truman disliked the song, of course, but that didn’t matter. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be. When Nixon finished, Harry turned to Bess and asked her what song he’d played.

A week later, Dwight Eisenhower died. Truman could not attend the funeral, but his public statement was characteristically both candid and generous. “General Eisenhower and I became political opponents but before that we were comrades in arms, and I will not forget his service to his country and to Western civilization.”

On June 28, 1969, Harry and Bess celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, quietly as usual. By the end of that year, Harry had stopped going to his library altogether. The morning walks stopped too, as he retreated into 219 Delaware Street.

On the afternoon of December 5, 1972, Harry left the house for the last time. He was taken by ambulance to Research Hospital in Kansas City to be treated for lung congestion. His condition deteriorated.