Authors: David McCullough
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Political, #Historical
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 revival 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.
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.
Alone at his office desk, Truman took up one of his $1.75 pens and wrote a two-page letter to Acheson. Their friendship, the great trust and mutual admiration, the enjoyment they found in exchanging news on life’s turns and human folly, everything that had made the seemingly incongruous bond between them so important during the presidency, had come to mean still more to Truman now. The truth was that the number one citizen of Independence, Missouri, the President who had come home to be “plain Mr. Truman” again, sorely missed the company and stimulation of just such people as the worldly Acheson. The letters to and fro between them would steadily increase, Truman speaking his mind—writing from the heart—as he had only, until now, to the women who were dear to him. He even told Acheson, as once he had told Bess Wallace, that he wrote sometimes just to get a letter in return. “When I hear from you I always feel better,” he would write. “Wish I could sit and talk with you for an hour or thirty minutes or even for five minutes. My morale would go up 100%.”
Unexpectedly and most happily, at this late date, Truman found his life enlarged by this close, if distant friend, a brother in spirit, a confidant—indeed a male friend such as he had never had before—and this as much as anything was to account for his great increased enjoyment of these years.
Now he addressed himself to the latest turn in his personal life. “Margie has put one over on me and got herself engaged to a news man!” he began, the words advancing steadily across the page, the bold certainty of every stroke looking no different from the handwriting in letters written to Bess Wallace from Grandview nearly fifty years before.
He strikes me as a very nice fellow and if Margaret wants him I’ll be satisfied. He seems to be very highly thought of in newspaper circles and particularly by
The New York Times
people.The young lady told us about it just a week or two before the announcement and swore us to secrecy. In fact, she made me hang up while she told her mother. Did your daughter do you that way? I was forbidden to tell my brother and sister. Like a couple of amateurs they went to North Carolina to see his mother and father (nice people by the way) and then had dinner with Jonathan Daniels, of all people, hoping to keep a secret! The next day they called Daddy and wanted to know what to do. Well Dad announced the engagement the next morning without a chance to tell his friends. Again did your daughter do that?
Well, we’ve had at least two thousand letters and telegrams and she’s had twice as many—serves her right. As every old man who had a daughter feels, I’m worried and hope things will work out all right. Can’t you give me some consolation?
Acheson replied at once:
Consolation is just what I can give. In the first place about Margaret’s choice. She has always had good judgment and has shown it again here. Alice and I had dinner with them here on her birthday—just a year before we celebrated it in Independence with you. I was completely captivated by Clifton Daniel. He has charm and sense and lots of ability. On the way home I told Alice that there was romance in the wind and that I was all for it. She somewhat acidly remarked that I had so monopolized Mr. Daniel that she hadn’t been able to get any idea of Margaret’s view of him, and that I was getting to be an old matchmaker. This only made my triumph all the sweeter when the announcement came. I stick by my guns and am sure that the man Margaret has chosen is first class and just the one for her. Marriage is the greatest of all gambles. But character helps and my bets are all on the success of this venture.
Now as to the behavior of daughters and the position of the father of the bride. Daughters, I have found, take this business of marriage into their own hands and do as they please. So do sons—or perhaps someone else’s daughter decides for them. I explained most lucidly to Mary and David that they should wait until the end of the war to get married. So they got married at once. All in all, the father of the bride is a pitiable creature. No one bothers with him at all. He is always in the way—a sort of backward child—humored but not participating in the big decisions. His only comforter is a bottle of good bourbon. Have you plenty on hand?
The wedding took place in Independence on Saturday, April 21, 1956, in little Trinity Episcopal Church on Liberty Street, where Bess Wallace and Harry Truman had been married in 1919. It was also followed by a small reception at the home of the bride that was not greatly different from the reception there in 1919—except the party this time was held indoors, out of view of the hundreds of reporters and photographers at the iron fence and the carloads of sightseers passing the house bumper to bumper. The temperature was in the 80s, the shaded lawn clipped and green, the spirea bushes by the porch in bloom. Margaret wore an ankle-length, full-skirted pale beige wedding dress, fashioned of two-hundred-year-old Venetian lace. At the church, when arriving by limousine with Margaret, and later during the ceremony, the father of the bride appeared “a pitiable creature” indeed, unhappy and unsmiling. Later at the reception he brightened noticeably—possibly by Acheson’s remedy.
Less than a month after, he and Bess departed on what was described as a honeymoon of their own, the finest trip of their lives, across Europe in grand style.
They were gone seven weeks, touring Europe by train—France, Italy, Austria, West Germany, France again, Brussels, the Netherlands, England. It rained a good part of the time—“rain, rain, rain, day after day, with sometimes a peep of sun,” he wrote in his diary—yet nothing seemed to lessen his spirits.
Bringing the suitcases down from the attic the morning they left home, Truman had slipped on the stairs and twisted his ankle, so that it swelled to the size of two, as he said. But he took a shiny black cane and carried on, covering whatever ground had to be covered the first few days only a little slower than usual. They departed from the independence depot at 7:15, the morning of May 8, his seventy-second birthday. A crowd of friends and family came to see them off. A birthday cake was cut and passed out—“a grand party”—and there were to be crowds everywhere from then on.
The reason given for the trip was a longstanding invitation to Truman to accept an honorary degree at Oxford, and the ceremony at Oxford on June 20 would prove the highlight. “I was so afraid I’d let you down at Oxford, but apparently I didn’t,” he told Acheson, who, like George Marshall, had already been honored there.
Former President Ulysses S. Grant, as part of a famous trip around the world, had spent months touring Europe where he was received as royalty, and in 1910, at the end of his African safari, former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a series of lectures across Europe and at Oxford, where he received an honorary degree. For Truman it was a third trip to Europe, but his first as a private citizen. (He was carrying his first passport.) He and Bess had long dreamed of a chance to travel abroad. For both it was the trip of a lifetime, and for Bess a first venture ever overseas. They would be two of the 500,000 American tourists in Europe that year.
Sailing from New York on the
United States,
accompanied by Stanley Woodward, who had been Truman’s chief of protocol, and his wife Sara, they landed at Le Havre. From there they went directly by train to Paris. By midday May 17, his first full day in Paris, Truman was sitting happily at a small outdoor table, sipping coffee at the venerable Café de la Paix, close to the Opéra, where only after a while did heads begin to turn and passers-by stop to stare. He had been there before, he explained, during World War I. At home the papers carried a wire-service photograph of the former President strolling the Place de 1’Opéra swinging his cane like a boulevardier.
Reporters dogged his steps wherever he went. Several hundred had been waiting at the Gare Saint-Lazare when he arrived in the city and there were scarcely ever less than a dozen at his side afterward. “Mr. Truman is as popular in Europe as he is in Missouri,” readers of the Independence
Examiner
learned in a United Press story from Paris. He was cheered and welcomed by people in the street. In Rome the welcome at the railroad station was tumultuous, with a crowd of hundreds shouting, “Viva Truman!” and even, in English, “Hi, Harry!” He and his party stayed at the Hassler Hotel at the head of the Spanish Steps.
For a conducted tour of Rome’s ancient monuments, Truman had as a guide, of all people, Henry Luce, who was filling in for his wife, Clare Booth Luce, the American ambassador to Italy, who had taken ill. The sight of Harry Truman and Henry Luce side by side speculating on the vanished empire of the Romans as they sat in the Colosseum was one not to be forgotten.
Scores of American tourists cheered Truman and followed along. On Rome’s Capitol Hill, in front of the giant equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, he started introducing himself and shaking hands.
“How are you? I’m Harry Truman.”
“I’m Paul Schultheiss of Rochester, New York,” responded the amazed tourist.
He and Bess had a rare Sunday audience with Pope Pius XII, that marked the first time an American President had been received at the Holy See since Woodrow Wilson’s formal visit on Pope Benedict XV in 1919. Bess wore black and a lace veil over her head, Truman a black cutaway coat, striped trousers, and a top hat. A “most happy visit indeed,” he said.