Truman (166 page)

In the tradition of homespun Benjamin Franklin, he had charmed Europe by being himself. “Never [said the United Press] has an ‘ordinary’ American been given such a red carpet treatment from the brass and such a warm welcome from the people as was accorded that jaunty traveler from Missouri.”

On reaching home, Truman never let up the pace. He was scarcely unpacked before plunging into election-year politics, in a determined and unsuccessful effort to see Averell Harriman, rather than Adlai Stevenson, win the Democratic nomination. Arriving in Chicago for the convention in August, Truman backed Harriman, who had been elected governor of New York two years earlier, because, as Truman said, he thought the country needed a President who wanted the job. Stevenson “lacks the kind of fighting spirit we need to win,” Truman charged at a jammed press conference at the Blackstone. (A few weeks earlier, while stopping at the Blackstone for a Truman Library dinner, Truman had talked privately with Stevenson, who asked what he was doing wrong. Truman had gone to the window and pointing to a man in the street below said, “The thing you have to do is learn how to reach that man.”) For a time it appeared Truman might turn things on end.

But in fact his efforts came to nothing. The nomination went easily to Stevenson, and to many it seemed Truman had succeeded only in making himself a contradictory, even pitiful figure who confused his popularity with real power. Truman, however, showed no signs of bitterness or regret, and immediately endorsed the nominee—Stevenson’s chances in November were “perfectly wonderful”—and pledged the full support of the “old man from Missouri.”

Besides, as he liked to say, he had had himself a time.

“When I arrived in Chicago,” he wrote to Acheson, “things were dead, no life, no nothing. I decided to wake them up…. I am going to do all I can to help win this election. How I wish I were ten years younger!”

He campaigned actively for the ticket, traveling to Milwaukee, Texas, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Gary, Indiana, and Pittsburgh, where he and Eisenhower were staying at the same hotel but never met.

A month after Stevenson’s defeat and Elsenhower’s reelection, Truman was writing to Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, “I have never wanted to pose as a prophet, nor do I intend to be one now, but I do want to keep the Democratic Party a party of the people. We can never win unless it is.”

Nineteen fifty-seven was a landmark year for Truman. On June 5, in New York, Margaret had a baby son, and both Trumans were on the train heading east the very next day. On June 7
The New York Times
carried a photograph of the proud grandparents at the hospital looking through the window at the baby, Clifton Truman Daniel. When, in another few days, Margaret and the baby came home to the Daniels’ New York apartment and her father asked if he might hold the baby, she insisted he first take off his jacket and be seated. “Dad sat there for a long time, rocking him back and forth.”

Less than a month later, Truman was moving out of the Federal Reserve Bank Building and into an all-new suite of offices at the new Truman Library. Formal dedication of the building took place on July 6. The two things he had said he wanted most after leaving the White House—to become a grandfather and to see his library established—had both come to pass.

Former President Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Speaker Sam Rayburn, four United States senators, nine governors (including Averell Harriman), Dean Acheson, John Snyder, some dozen or more from Truman’s White House staff, his family, neighbors, a crowd in all of five thousand people were present for the dedication, a fortunate few seated in the shade of the trees, the majority taking the full force of the Missouri summer sun. In the history of Independence there had been no occasion like it. (“I expect to be knee deep in ‘Big Shots’ July 6th and I want you and Alice to be here to help me out of what Huey Long would call a deep ‘More Ass!’ ” Truman had written excitedly to Acheson. “Be sure and come.”) The main speaker, addressing the crowd from the steps of the building, was the former governor of California and Republican candidate for Vice President, Earl Warren, now the Chief Justice of the United States, who acclaimed the library as a milestone in American history, and Harry S. Truman as a man of action, “tireless, fearless, and decisive,” adding that he himself had personally learned to appreciate the former President’s “dynamic, fighting qualities” in the fall of 1948.

The building was long and low, crescent-shaped and built of Indiana limestone in an architectural style that no one was quite able to categorize—“modern” seemed to apply, though the main entrance with its square columns also had a decidedly classic Egyptian look. It had been designed by a local architect, Alonzo H. Gentry, assisted by Edward Neild, who came up with a scheme quite unlike what Truman had been expecting but that he decided not to reject. Though only one story tall, the building, with its full basement, had a total of 70,000 square feet of floor space. Finished in two years, it had cost thus far $1,800,000. Two Truman Library dinners in. New York and Philadelphia in 1954 had raised $45,000 each. More than thirty different labor unions had contributed generously—$25,000 from Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, $10,000 from the American Federation of Musicians, $10,000 from John L. Lewis, $250,000 from the United Steel Workers. Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Ed Pauley, and William Clayton made substantial private donations. But in all, the money had come from some 17,000 contributions large and small, from every part of the country, and Truman acknowledged every gift, regardless of the amount.

The 3.5 million documents already in the library were only the beginning of the collection that was to be amassed as time went on, when other figures from the Truman administration such as Acheson contributed their own papers.

For Truman personally from this point on, the library was to be the focus of his life. If the immense effort devoted to the memoirs had proven something of a disappointment, his library was to be an unqualified success.

He was also successful in convincing Congress—working through Democratic Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts—that all existing presidential papers should be indexed and put on microfilm. As he said, this was something that should have been done generations earlier. Yet until he raised the issue, no one had bothered to make the effort—a point for which he deserved far more credit than he received.

With the library established and in operation in Independence, a large part of the Truman land at Grandview was sold to a Kansas City developer, B. F. Weinberg & Associates. The old farmhouse, its barn and immediate acres were kept in the family, but some 224 acres of the prime land where Solomon Young had long ago staked his claim, and where Truman had labored so many seasons, were now to give way to the advance of suburbia and become a shopping center. For Truman it meant the end of a heritage that had come to mean more and more to him, partly out of sentiment but also from a realization of how much his own makeup and attitudes derived from his rural background. He took particular pleasure—obvious pride—in describing himself as a retired farmer. “Hey there, farmer!” Sam Rayburn would greet him over the telephone, knowing how it pleased him.

“I sure hate to see the old place go,” he was quoted in the Kansas City
Star.

But the sale, as he also said, meant financial security at last, for Truman, as for Vivian and Mary Jane. And while, with the transaction went a good deal of sadness, it affirmed the old faith that come what may, land was wealth to count on. It wasn’t Truman’s rise to political power or his world renown, his books or lectures or the legacy of his wife’s family that saw him through in the end, but the old farm at Grandview.

The sale was announced in January 1958. What the final figure was, what his share came to, are not known. However, a tallying up of all his bank balances a year and a half later, dated August 14, 1959, has survived and shows him with a total of $208,548.07. And this did not include what he had in government and municipal bonds and a few stocks.

The final financial returns on his
Memoirs,
after expenses and taxes, were turning out to be very much less than anticipated. Even with his payments from
Life
extended over five years, he had still to pay 67 percent federal and state income taxes, and this he found particularly discouraging, since in 1949 General Eisenhower had been permitted by the Internal Revenue authorities to treat his sale of
Crusade in Europe
for $635,000 as a capital gain, on the grounds that he was not a professional author; Eisenhower had paid a tax of only 25 percent. At the time the Eisenhower question was at issue, the White House had intervened; now the Eisenhower White House declined to become involved. Truman’s expenses for the
Memoirs,
for staff and office space, had amounted to $153,000, according to a letter he wrote to John McCormack. His net profit, over the five-year period, would end up, he figured, at about $37,000.

“Had it not been for the fact that I was able to sell some property that my brother, sister and I inherited from our mother I would practically be on relief, but with the sale of that property I am not financially embarrassed.”

He was not asking for a pension, he told McCormack. He wanted justice. He thought the least a former President merited was a government allowance covering perhaps 70 percent of the necessary office expenses and overheads to meet his responsibilities.

With the help of Charlie Murphy, he took his case to Speaker Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, with the result that in 1958 Congress passed a law providing former presidents with a $25,000 annual pension, money for staff, office space, and free mailing privileges.

For quiet some time, since even before Truman left the White House, Dean Acheson had been eager to arrange for him to come to Yale. Truman would be the recipient of what was known at Yale as a Chubb Fellowship, whereby he would be the honored guest of the university for several days, to lecture and to meet with students and faculty.

The prospect delighted Truman. He thought highly of Yale, out of regard for Acheson—and such other Yale graduates in his administration as Harriman, Lovett, and Roger Tubby—but also because Yale, as Truman said, was the kind of great university he wished he had been able to attend. What pleased him most was that Acheson wanted him to do it.

“I would be proud to appear anywhere with you from Yale to 1908 Main in Kansas City. (That’s the address of the Pendergast Club),” Truman had written in 1952, obviously enjoying the picture of his elegant Secretary of State hobnobbing with the “Boys” at 1908 Main—as he knew Acheson would, too.

Acheson, who was a member of the Yale Corporation, had set things in motion, and in a letter to Professor Thomas G. Bergin, who would be Truman’s host, Acheson provided what stands as one of the finest, most perceptive descriptions ever written of his friends the President:

As it was, Truman did not go to Yale until the spring of 1958. He stayed three days and was an immediate hit with students and faculty. Even the crusty Yale librarian, an arch-Republican who had openly stated his distaste for Truman, refusing at first to receive “that man” when Truman expressed interest in seeing the Franklin Papers, wound up wanting Truman to stay longer, so they might talk at greater length, and afterward told others he had had no idea how much the President knew or how far-ranging were his interests. On his early morning walks through campus, Truman was trailed by students and local reporters. There were dinners in his honor and repeated warm applause, and he loved it all. “I have never had a better time anywhere,” he wrote Acheson. “Yale still rings in my ears. What a time we had,” he said again, in another letter.