Herbert Hoover, the country’s one other surviving former President, was a man of wealth who lived in style at the Waldorf Towers in New York. Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, none of those who had faced the prospect of being a former President since the start of the century, had had worries about money; none but Calvin Coolidge who, downcast over the death of a son and in poor health, lived less than three years after leaving office. Theodore Roosevelt had gone storming off to Africa to hunt big game; Taft became a professor of law at Yale, then Chief Justice of the United States. Wilson with his wealthy second wife, retired in style to a twenty-two-room house on S Street in Washington and lived a few more years in semi-seclusion. For his part, Truman had neither wealth to sustain him nor any particular prospects at the moment, no plans for future employment. His only intention, as he said, was to do nothing—accept no position, lend his name to no organization or transaction—that would exploit or “commercialize” the prestige and dignity of the office of the President.
He had had a number of offers already from undisclosed organizations for jobs paying $100,000 a year or more, and calling for little commitment of his time. A letter from a Miami real estate developer inviting him to become “chairman, officer, or stockholder, at a figure of not less than $100,000” would turn up later in his files, but what the other propositions were is not clear, though none apparently was from a corporation or organization of particular renown. In any event, he had turned them all down and would continue to do so. His name was not for sale. He would take no fees for commercial endorsements or for lobbying or writing letters or making phone calls. He would accept no “consulting fees,” nor any gifts that might appear as a product endorsement on his part. Offered a new Toyota, by Toyota’s American public relations firm, as a demonstration of improved good feelings between Japan and America, he flatly refused. Moreover, he wrote in response, there was no possibility of his ever driving a foreign car of any make. He believed in driving cars made in America.
He liked to say he was just a plain American citizen again. It confirmed his democratic philosophy. It pleased people and pleased him. But the difficulties in practice were more than he had anticipated. “I still don’t feel like a completely private citizen and I don’t suppose I ever will,” he told a reporter. “It’s still almost impossible to do as other people do, even though I’ve tried. You can’t always be as you want to be after you’ve been under those bright lights.”
Further, he missed the bright lights. He missed the pace of the presidency, felt strange without the constant pressures. He missed the people terribly. In thanking Dean Acheson for the farewell luncheon, he wrote that he had never been to such a party “where everybody seemed to be having the best time they ever had.” Then he added, “I hope we will never lose contact.”
The cheering throng that welcomed the Trumans home at the Independence depot the night of their return exceeded all expectations. Perhaps ten thousand people were waiting in the cold when the train came round the bend at 9:03, an hour late because of other crowds at earlier stops across Missouri. Truman was astonished, overjoyed. “Well, Harry, this makes it all worth it,” Bess said to him.
They had arrived the night of Wednesday, January 21. The morning after, asked by NBC correspondent Ray Scherer what was the first thing he planned to do, Truman said he was going to “carry the grips up to the attic,” a remark that would become famous. (Scherer, like Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press, had accompanied Truman from Washington on the train, as had Roger Tubby.) But in another hour, Truman was on his way out the door, heading downtown to Kansas City in a state highway patrol car, riding up front with Sergeant Art Bell, a former Battery D “boy” who had been assigned by the governor as a temporary driver. Truman went to see his new offices, four corner rooms on the eleventh floor of the Federal Reserve Bank Building, at 10th and Grand. The faithful Rose Conway was already on duty sorting through several thousand letters, mostly expressions of praise and gratitude, all of which Truman felt obliged to answer.
There was no official welcome in Kansas City, but this seemed to bother him not at all. When, with Roger Tubby, he walked five blocks to the Muehlebach for lunch with his brother Vivian, and few passers-by took notice, Truman kept on smiling and talking as though all were perfectly fine.
The following day the weather turned foul, with a sudden drop in temperature—down to the 20s—accompanied by a biting north wind, sleet, and snow. Ignoring the weather, Truman set off for Grandview, to look over the site for the library he planned to build. Roger Tubby had arranged for some of the local press to join him and the group made a memorable picture, the old President, his collar up against the wind, tramping across the snow-covered fields, talking rapidly of his childhood and of his $1,500,000 project and what it would mean to the young students “who will take over the destiny of our country,” while a half-dozen reporters, his former White House press secretary, and one-time comrade-in-arms Sergeant Bell in his state police uniform, all tried their best to keep up and stay warm.
The library was the “big interest now.” Truman’s papers, for the time being, were stored at the county courthouse in Kansas City. Since the time of George Washington, it had been commonly understood that a President’s papers were his own personal property, and that he was free to do with them as he wished. The Franklin Roosevelt Library had been established at Hyde Park, New York, the first so-called “Presidential Library,” on the grounds of the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson, but Roosevelt had not lived to take part in the project. Truman, before leaving office, had sent George Elsey out from Washington to look over the farm with his brother Vivian and architect Edward Neild. Vivian had led them to the spot where he thought the library ought to go: a low-lying, swampy corner close to the railroad tracks. When Elsey and Neild pointed to a more attractive site on a high rise with views in all directions, Vivian objected. That was good land, Vivian said, and he saw no reason to waste good land on “any old dang library.”
Truman had already made some sketches. He wanted the building to look like his Grandfather Solomon Young’s house, the big house of his own childhood memories. Truman had made a rough drawing of the house as best he could remember it.
“A cold wind whipping around us,” Roger Tubby would record in his diary, “and he talks of the library. ‘This America of ours…we look out over the prairies, envision cities or universities and lo, they arise!’ ”
The former President, reported the Examiner, seemed to enjoy the brisk weather.
A few days later, on a Sunday, he set off early, before it was fully light, on his first walk through town, free of Sergeant Bell or bodyguards of any kind for the first time in more than seven years. He covered some fifteen blocks, rounding Jackson Square en route, and nothing he had done thus far, he later wrote, had given such a striking sense of being on his own at last. “More than any other single thing, this marked the abrupt change in my life.”
Speaking at a huge welcome-home banquet at the auditorium of the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, Truman said simply and from the heart, “There never is and never can be anything like coming back home.”
He bought Bess a new car, a four-door black Chrysler with white-wall tires, and started driving himself again. As sightseers and the curious kept coming around the house almost daily, he decided not to have the iron fence taken down. Often whole delegations—Girl Scouts, tourists—stood outside looking through the fence. “Is this where Truman lives?” a man called to him at seven one morning from a car at the curb.
He kept to the routine of the morning walks, kept up with the mail pouring into the office in Kansas City—72,000 pieces in the first two weeks alone. He refused to be idle. His name was painted in black block letters on the door marked 1107. He arrived regularly before nine each morning.
Nearly anyone who wished could come into the office to shake hands with him or visit. As he told a friend, “You don’t need an appointment to see me now.” Yet he was worse th
an alone, his friend Tom Evans would remember. “He was utterlylost. After all those years in the White House with somebody around to do everything for him, he didn’t know how to order a meal in a restaurant. He didn’t know when to tip. He didn’t even know how to call a cab and pay for it.” But as Evans also remembered, Truman never said a word of complaint.
At home the house seemed “quiet and too big,” with only Bess and Vietta Garr, who went to her own home after dinner. Every night, he and Bess would call Margaret in New York.
By early February, less than a month since the return, it began to look as though their financial worries were over. He was about to sign a book contract for a “fantastic sum,” Truman wrote to Acheson, and on February 12, the press reported that he had sold the exclusive worldwide rights to his memoirs to Life magazine for an undisclosed amount. In fact, the figure was $600,000—truly a fantastic sum in 1953—which, by a contract negotiated for him by Sam Rosenman, was to be paid in installments over five years.
At the end of March, he, Bess, and Margaret went off on a dream vacation trip to Hawaii, traveling first to San Francisco as the guests of Averell Harriman in his private railroad car. From San Francisco, they sailed on the President Cleveland, of the American Presidents Line, down the bay and out under the Golden Gate Bridge. Of the morning they arrived off Oahu, Truman wrote: “Diamond Head and then Honolulu with the Pali in the background, rainbows, clouds, sunshine and a beautiful city all in one scene.”
It was one of the most enchanting experiences of their lives. Hawaii was “Paradise,” and they stayed a month, as the guests of Ed Pauley at his estate on little Coconut Island, in Kaneohe Bay, on the windward side of Oahu. Long a champion of statehood for the islands, Truman was given an effusive Hawaiian welcome from the moment the ship landed. Government and military officials, the press, a dozen different reception committees rushed on board to escort him ashore. “[They] covered us with leis and smothered us with questions and flash bulbs.” He accepted an honorary degree at the University of Hawaii, toured Oahu, and on a flying visit to the big island of Hawaii in a Navy C-47, soared over the saddle between the snow-capped volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. When, on the return flight to Oahu, he spotted a school of whales off Maui, the Navy pilots told him it meant good luck. He swam, loafed, read, and thoroughly enjoyed “the wonderful people” of the islands…And then the month was over and he was home again at North Delaware Street, Where the house was still quiet and too big.
He bought another car, this one for himself, a two-tone green Dodge coupe, to drive to his office. He loved cars no less than ever and was as fussy as ever about their appearance.
“This morning at 7 A.M., I took off for my morning walk,” begins a diary entry from that spring.
I’d just had the Dodge car washed a day or so ago and it looked as if it had never been used.
The weather man said it would rain so I decided to put the washed car in the garage and use the black car which was already spotted and dusty. My sister-in-law, watching me make the change, which required some maneuvering due to the location of several cars in the driveway, wanted to know if I might be practicing for a job in a parking station!
He knew he must get started on his memoirs, but dreaded the prospect. Hawaii had made him “lazy as hell.” He wished he had never agreed to do the book.
On his walk that same spring morning he stopped to watch a construction project, the widening of Truman Road.
A shovel (automatic) and a drag line were working as well as some laboring men digging in the old fashioned way. The boss or the contractor was looking on and I asked him if he didn’t need a good strawboss. He took a look at me and then watched the work a while and then took another look and broke out in a broad smile and said, “Oh yes! You are out of a job aren’t you.”
He felt a constant need to be on the move. So in the heat of June, he and Bess started for Washington in the new Chrysler. He wanted to give the car “a real tryout,” he said. Bess was delighted. Friends and family tried to talk them out of going. He and Bess had not traveled on their own by automobile in nine years, not since their return from the Chicago convention in 1944. Yet off they went, making an early start, Truman at the wheel. Wasn’t it good to be on their own again, she said. They got as far as Hannibal before stopping for lunch at a roadside restaurant, only to find how difficult being on their own was going to be. As Truman later wrote to his old Army friend, Vic Householder, “Everything went well until a couple of old-time County Judges came in and saw me. They said, ‘Why there’s Judge Truman’—and then every waitress and all the customers had to shake hands and have autographs.”
At Decatur, Illinois, 150 miles later, Truman pulled into a Shell station where he had often stopped for gas in years past, traveling to and from Washington. An elderly attendant who kept studying him while filling the tank, finally inquired if he wasn’t Senator Truman.
I admitted the charge [Truman continued in his letter to Householder] and asked him if he could direct me to a good motel in town. We’d never stayed at one and wanted to try it out and see if we liked it. Well he directed us but he told everybody in town about it. The Chief of Police got worried about us and sent two plain clothes men and four uniformed police to look after us. They took us to dinner and to breakfast the next morning and escorted us out of town with a sigh of relief.
Bess insisted he keep to the 50-mile-an-hour speed limit. But going “so slowly,” as he said, meant others passing had a chance to look them over. “Hi, Harry!” people shouted as they went by. “There goes our incognito,” he told her. At the hotel where they stopped in Wheeling, West Virginia, the lobby was jammed with reporters and photographers.
But there was no doubt that he loved the attention. When, at Frederick, Maryland, he saw several familiar faces from the Washington press corps waiting in a car to escort him into the city, he greeted them like long-lost brothers. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he exclaimed. Pulling up at the Mayflower Hotel, he stepped from the car in his shirtsleeves to be immediately surrounded by a crowd of more reporters and photographers and hotel employees, all trying to shake his hand. He was there only to have a good time, he said, his face beaming in the late afternoon sunshine—“carefree as a schoolboy in summer,” according to the account in the Post the next morning. To all questions concerning Congress, the President, the Korean War, Truman said, “No comment, no comment, no comment.”
A steady stream of old friends, members of his Cabinet, Democratic senators, members of Congress came to call. It was “like a dream,” Truman later wrote. “The suite we stayed in at the Mayflower could have been the White House…. Everything seemed just as it used to be—the taxi drivers shouting hello along the line of my morning walks, the dinners at night with the men and women I had worked with for years, the conferences, the tension, the excitement, the feeling of things happening and going to happen….”
And the “good time” continued over the next weekend, when he and Bess drove on to New York and checked in at the Waldorf-Astoria. With Margaret they dined at the Twenty-one Club and saw Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town at the Winter Garden. As they came into the theater, the whole audience rose and applauded.
Cab drivers in New York did not just call to him, they pulled to the curb and jumped out to shake his hand. He was still their man, he was assured. “If you’d go again tomorrow, Harry, you’d win.”
Heading home for Missouri, “perking along” on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Truman was signaled to pull over by the police. According to what State Trooper Manly Stampler told reporters, “Mr. Truman” had twice cut in front of vehicles trying to pass him. “He was very nice about it and promised to be more careful.” But according to Truman, who had never had a traffic violation, the young man had only wanted to shake hands.
It was his last venture with Bess on their own by automobile. Thereafter, they would go by train, plane, or ship.
On March 5, in Moscow, after nearly three decades in power
, Joseph Stalin had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age seventy-three. Ten days later, Stalin’s successor, Georgi M. Malenkov, declared in a speech that there was no issue between Moscow and Washington that could not be resolved by peaceful means. Two weeks after Malenkov’s speech, the Communists in Korea suddenly agreed to an exchange of wounded prisoners and said that this should lead to a “peaceful settlement” of the entire prisoner issue. Then in the final week of July, as Truman, in the heat of high summer in Missouri, was beginning work on his memoirs, an armistice was signed at Panmunjom; the Korean War was over.
It was an armistice with voluntary repatriation, and the dividing line between North and South Korea was to remain the 38th parallel. So President Eisenhower had achieved essentially the very same settlement that had eluded Truman—a “no-win” agreement, as Truman’s Republican critics would have called it. As Senator Paul Douglas observed, Truman “would have been flayed from one end of Washington to the other if he had accepted the present agreement.”
Stalin’s death had unquestionably had an effect; so also had Eisenhower’s threats to use newly developed tactical nuclear weapons in Korea.
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