Truman (167 page)

He was in steady demand now, with two to three hundred speaking invitations a month. At home he seemed to radiate good feeling. “He’s so damn happy,” said a friend, “that it makes me happy just being around him.”

Tom Evans had asked him to join a regular group for noontime bourbon, lunch, and poker at the Kansas City Club, an exclusive gathering known as the 822 Club, for the suite it occupied. Though Truman had been an honorary member of the Kansas City Club since he was elected to the Senate, he had never felt particularly welcome by its members, most of whom were Republicans. The Kansas City Club had never been exactly his crowd. He had been looked down upon as both a Democrat and a politician, not the sort one would want to know personally. But in no time he had become the most popular member of the group, the pride of the 822 Club, an “elevating influence,” as was said. “It was just terrific. He really bowled them over,” Evans told
Life
writer John Osborne for an article titled “Happy Days for Harry.” Osborne was struck by Truman’s “phenomenal vigor,” the pleasure of his company to others. “Why, goddamnit, Mr. President, I’m going to raise you,” he heard exclaimed over the poker table at the 822 Club.

The “major achievement of his latter years,” wrote Osborne, was “a rare one of its kind, and it has a place in the story of our times…. At the age of 74, in the bright winter of his life, Harry Truman is a genuinely happy man.”

At a benefit performance of the Kansas City Philharmonic, Truman in white tie and tails conducted the orchestra in Sousa’s
Stars and Stripes Forever.
Soon he and Bess were off again for another summer sojourn in Europe, a more private, quiet tour this time, through the South of France accompanied by Sam and Dorothy Rosenman.

That fall, in the 1958 congressional campaign, Truman was back on the trail again, delivering some twenty-five speeches in twenty different states. Lecturing at Columbia University the next year, he referred to himself as “an old stiff,” but few people in the busiest part of their lives were as active as he.

Truman, reported Cabell Phillips, was getting a bigger kick out of life than ever before. In an article for
The New York Times Magazine
on the former President as he turned seventy-five, Phillips quoted a Kansas City friend saying, “Harry feels that he’s square with the world, that he gave it his best, and got its best in return. Now he’s enjoying the dividends….”

“I found him looking pink and fit, with the same crisp smile and sparkling eyes and the same firm handshake which I remembered from earlier years,” wrote Phillips. And increasing numbers of writers, reporters, and well-wishers made the pilgrimage to see him at the Truman Library, to try to divine what the magic was.

To Dean Acheson, Truman’s salient quality was his vitality. Here was “a man overflowing with life force, with incurable curiosity…no brooding image in a history book…[but] vigorous, powerful…full of the zest of life.”

Margaret had told her father that he talked too much. “She says I am just like my two year old grandson,” Truman cheerfully related to a reporter from out of town. “She says that he runs all the time, never walks, and talks all the time and never says anything.”

Showing visitors “the layout” of “my library,” he would move briskly down the halls talking a steady stream, pausing frequently to greet groups of visitors and especially if they were students. The library proper—the actual collection of presidential papers—would not be open to researchers until May of 1959, but for now there was the museum to see, with displays of photographs, gifts to the President, everything from an ear of Iowa corn to a jewel-encrusted sword from Ibn Saud; there was a small auditorium and a replica of the Oval Office, which though slightly reduced in scale, was furnished as it had been during his years in the White House.

“I want this to be a place where young people can come and learn what the office of the President is, what a great office it is no matter who happens to be in it at the time.” He did not “care a damn” about all the attention on himself. “They said it was necessary to put me all over the place just to show how one particular President worked.” But clearly the focus on his life and achievements pleased him very much indeed.

He loved his office, a bright, spacious room with books and sliding glass panels that opened onto a private patio and garden. His desk was the same big mahogany desk he had used in the upstairs study at the White House. He was there nearly every day, Sunday included, except when he was traveling. As was often said, the most interesting item on display at the Truman Library was Truman himself.

He was always on the job early. Some mornings, at his desk before the staff arrived, he would answer the phone himself, telling callers what the library hours were, or, in reply to further questions, saying he knew because it was
his
library. “This is the old man himself.”

About noon, if not going into town to the 822 Club, he would go home for lunch. Bess remarked privately that if she never saw another sardine or peanut butter sandwich, she would be very happy.

Having the library gave purpose to his days. The most satisfactory part of the whole effort of creating the library, said David Lloyd, a former White House aide who had taken the leading part in the fund raising and organization of the project, was that it provided Truman with a base, “where he can sit happily among his beloved books, conducting his tremendous correspondence, saying what he thinks and doing as he pleases…able to carry on his old fashioned American occupation of being himself.”

He was there in total six and a half days a week for nine years, longer than his two terms in the White House. And as at the White House, the staff adored him. “Mr. Truman was one of the most thoughtful persons we have known,” remembered Dr. Philip C. Brooks, the first director.

David Lloyd and the Archivist of the United States, Wayne Grover, had convinced Truman that there ought to be a mural in the main lobby, to enliven the space and strike an appropriate historic theme for visitors as they entered the building. When Lloyd and Grover recommended the Missouri painter Thomas Hart Benton, whose great-uncle and namesake had been one of Missouri’s first two U.S. senators, as the perfect artist to undertake the work, Truman bluntly said no. He thought Benton had made a mockery of Tom Pendergast in a mural at the Capitol in Jefferson City done in 1936. Further, he did not care for Benton’s style. Shown a Benton painting called
The Kentuckian,
Truman recalled that both of his grandfathers were from Kentucky and neither looked like “that long-necked monstrosity.”

Nevertheless, a meeting was arranged by Lloyd and Grover who were sure that Truman and Benton would like each other if given the chance to discover how much they had in common. Benton, gruff, opinionated, outspoken to a fault, often profane and extremely vital, had been born, like Truman, in southwestern Missouri, in little Neosho in 1889, and had grown up with politics. His father had served several terms in Congress. Truman went with Lloyd and Grover to visit Benton at his studio in Kansas City in the spring of 1957. As predicted, the two men quickly became fast friends. A contract was signed in 1958; and with the mural under way, Truman took obvious pleasure in Benton’s company, pride in Benton’s friendship, and at one point, at Benton’s urging, climbed up the scaffold to help him paint a corner of the sky.

The first day Truman offered Benton a drink in his office, pulling a bottle of bourbon from his desk and saying, “I hear you like this,” Benton took it as a calculated provocation by Truman, a way to test him.

“This performance on the part of a president of the United States embarrassed me,” Benton remembered. “There is no good reason why it should have, because it was a common act of human hospitality, but there was still about Harry Truman an aura of power….”

Later, as the bourbon ritual became more established, and Benton would ask for a second drink, Truman would tell him no. “Tom, you’re driving a car. You can’t have another because you’ve got some work to do around here and I’m not going to take any risks with you.”

“I was now, in effect, his man,” Benton wrote, “and he was going to protect me. And he did.”

The theme for the mural was arrived at only after considerable discussion. Truman had first thought it should be about Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, with the emphasis on Jefferson’s foresight. Benton had said there was no way he could paint foresight. “Well, what the hell is it you can paint?” Truman said. Benton suggested that the mural be about Independence and its importance in the opening of the West, and so it was agreed.

“I thought at first that the President would also want to be included in the mural,” Benton later told an interviewer, “but he very emphatically turned that down.”

Benton’s fee was $60,000. The work took him two years. Completed in 1961 and titled
Independence and the Opening of the West,
the mural included no specific events of written history nor any identifiable personages. The theme was expressed with symbolic figures, the great human stream that had passed through—with Plains Indians, trappers, hunters, French
voyageurs
giving way to a tide of settlers and their black slaves. It was robust, colorful, romantic, and as literal as a magazine illustration, with two additional lower panels showing the Missouri River landing and Independence Square in the 1840s, the time when Truman’s grandparents arrived. Truman thought it was wonderful. Showing visitors about the library, he rarely failed to stop in front of the mural, to praise it and explain the history portrayed. His friend Tom Benton, he now liked to say, was the “best damn painter in America.”

Attendance at the library was up to more than 150,000 people a year, a figure that delighted him. In May 1960, Margaret had a second child, another boy, William Wallace Daniel. Meantime, Truman was finishing up another book to be called
Mr. Citizen,
a collection of essays on life and the world at large written originally for
The American Weekly,
the Sunday supplement owned by Hearst, Truman’s past nemesis. He had liked particularly being paid and publicized by Hearst. There was no praise sweeter, he said, than the praise of old enemies.

As Acheson observed, Truman was no brooding image in a history book. He expressly disliked the term “elder statesman” as applied to him. “When a good politician dies he becomes a statesman,” he would say. “I want to continue as a politician for a long time.” It had become a standard line. “I like being a nose buster and an ass kicker much better,” he told Acheson privately.

To mark his seventy-fifth birthday on May 8, the Democratic National Committee staged a nationwide celebration, a star-spangled television broadcast that included appearances by Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack Benny, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, H. V. Kaltenborn, and such old personal friends as Monsignor Curtis Tiernan, in a series of spoken and musical tributes, much of the broadcast originating at a $100-a-plate dinner for Truman at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. A few days earlier in Washington, he had said he had no favorite candidate for 1960 as yet, only that he wanted to see the party nominate a man who could win and he had every intention of taking part. “What do you think? How are you going to keep me home?”

In October 1959, George Marshall had died, and for Truman it was another and the heaviest of a succession of personal blows, as slowly but steadily close friends and favorite members of his former official family began to pass from the scene. Fred Vinson had died in 1953, Eddie Jacobson in 1955, Alben Barkley in 1956, Admiral Leahy in July 1959. Hearing that Marshall was dying, Truman had telephoned Marshall’s wife in North Carolina to say he was on his way by plane. But she told him not to come because the general would not know him. “She and I spent most of my call weeping,” Truman wrote to Acheson.

“Do you suppose any President of the United States ever had two such men with him as you and the General?” he would say in another letter.

At a brief Episcopal funeral service for Marshall in the chapel at Fort Myer, Virginia, Truman and Eisenhower sat side by side in the same pew at the front, their common grief partly easing the strain between them.

A new generation of politicians was bidding to take power. With Eisenhower retiring from office and Richard Nixon the probable choice for a Republican nominee, the chance of a Democratic victory looked promising. Of those Democrats in the running, Truman’s favorites were Stuart Symington and Lyndon Johnson, neither of whom had much of a chance. Truman refused to consider Stevenson for a third try. Nor was he enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy, whom he considered too young and inexperienced. He did not want a Catholic—it was not that he was against Catholics, only that he was against losing. Remembering what had happened to Al Smith, he did not think a Catholic could be elected. He also thought Kennedy had been too approving of Joe McCarthy and he disliked Kennedy’s father quite as much as ever. Joe Kennedy had spent over $4 million to buy the nomination for his son, Truman told Margaret. To others he quipped, “It’s not the pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop.”

John Kennedy had called on Truman at the Mayflower Hotel in January 1960, during one of Truman’s visits to Washington. According to Kennedy’s own notes on the meeting, he urged Truman not to announce his support for any candidate until he, Kennedy, had had a chance to come to Independence and “give him all the facts as I saw them.” If, at the convention, the contest became a deadlock, then, Kennedy suggested, Truman could intervene in the name of party unity. But until then it was important, Kennedy said, to let the primary process run its course. Truman expressed warm regard for both Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, the other leading contender, and ended the meeting by telling Kennedy he would do nothing to hurt him.