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 a
t 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.
Then, in two weeks’ travels through Italy, they saw Mt. Vesuvius, the ruins of Pompeii, the ancient Greek temples of Paestum, near Salerno. They explored the green hills of Umbria where St. Francis once lived with the birds and animals; they shopped for leather goods on the centuries-old Ponte Vecchio over the Arno in Florence, gazed at the Botticellis in the Uffizi Gallery. In Venice, he and Bess, like every other tourist, strolled St. Mark’s Square and rode together in a gondola down the Grand Canal.
Between times Truman told reporters that the weather in Italy reminded him of Texas. He declared that victory for the Democrats in the presidential election in the fall was not probable but inevitable, and got himself in a good deal of hot water by saying that the bloody World War II battles of Salerno and Anzio had been unnecessary and the fault of “some squirrel-headed general.”
He was having a glorious time, enjoying immensely the setting of so much of the history he had loved since boyhood—and enjoying immensely the attention he received. At Naples, the crowds had tossed flowers in his path. “This is fantastic!” he said, openly astonished.
If the picture of Truman with Henry Luce amid the ruins of ancient Rome had seemed the unlikeliest of holiday vignettes, Truman succeeded in topping it at Florence, when he, Bess, and the Woodwards were the luncheon guests of Bernard Berenson at Berenson’s famous villa, I Tatti, overlooking the city. It was a luminous setting of incomparable paintings, sculpture, a library of 55,000 volumes, and the place where the legendary Berenson, “B.B.,” widely regarded as the consummate connoisseur, “the world’s last great aesthete,” held court. A Lithuanian Jew by birth, a graduate of Harvard, and a leading authority on Italian Renaissance art, he had made I Tatti his home—shrine, institution—since before World War I, when Truman was still on the farm. A tiny, frail, but godlike figure with a white beard, now nearly ninety-one, Berenson was still immensely vital and talkative. His flow of guests, of celebrated literary and theatrical figures, was unending—J. B. Priestley, Robert Lowell, Alberto Moravia, Laurence Olivier, Mary McCarthy. They came to listen—since customarily “B.B.” did most of the talking—and, of course, to be able to say they knew the great man.
“We just had to look him up. He was the best in his line,” Truman would later tell Merle Miller.
In his diary at the time, Truman said he found Berenson as “clear headed and mentally alert as a man of 35 or 40.”
He is considered the greatest authority on Renaissance Art and is noted for his epigrams, one of which struck me forcibly. We were discussing world affairs and he remarked that modern diplomacy had degenerated into “Open insults openly arrived at.” We discussed the causes of the first World War, the Austrian Prime Minister at that time, the Serbian situation and the whys and wherefores of the Austrian ultimatum which started the war.
Truman was greatly stimulated by Berenson’s company and delight in conversation, much as he had been years ago at the Sunday afternoon teas with Louis Brandeis. In a letter to Berenson later, recalling the pleasant visit, Truman wrote in a postscript: “I wish the Powers-that-be would listen, think, and mock at things as you have.”
But more remarkable was Berenson’s reaction to the former American President, which Berenson recorded in his own diary at the time:
[Harry] Truman and his wife lunched yesterday. Came at one and stayed till three. Both as natural, as unspoiled by high office as if he had got no further than alderman of Independence, Missouri. In my long life I have never met an individual with whom I felt so instantly at home. He talked as if he had always known me, openly, easily, with no reserve (so far as I could judge). Ready to touch on any subject, no matter how personal. I always felt what a solid and sensible basis there is in the British stock of the U.S.A. if it can produce a man like Truman. Now I feel more assured about America than in a long time. If the Truman miracle can still occur, we need not fear even the [Senator Joe] McCarthys. Truman captivated even Willy Mostyn-Owen, aged twenty-seven, ultra-critical, and like all Englishmen of today hard of hearing anything good about Americans, and disposed to be condescending to them—at best.
At Salzburg, in Truman’s honor, the organist of Salzburg Cathedral played Mozart’s Ninth Sonata on a 250-year-old organ, and at Mozart’s birthplace, Truman himself played a Mozart sonata on Mozart’s own clavichord. (“I found that it was somewhat different from the modern piano but it makes beautiful music…. This Mozart town has certainly been a joy to me….”)
From Salzburg, the expedition moved on to Bonn, capital of the West German Republic that Truman had helped create, and during a brief rain-soaked stay he met with Konrad Adenauer for the first time. Swinging back through France again, the tourists kept to a steady schedule, stopping at Versailles, which Truman did not much enjoy (he kept thinking of how the money to build it had been “squeezed” from the people), Chartres Cathedral, which he loved despite the pouring rain, then Chenonceau, the lovely sixteenth-century château in the Loire Valley, which he had wanted particularly to see because of its connection to Catherine de Médicis, one of his favorite historic figures. (“Of course, there are all sorts of traditions and stories about the happenings of the days of Catherine,” he observed in his diary, “but she was a remarkable woman and a Medici, all of whom believed in government by deviation as set out in The Prince by Machiavelli. Catherine was the mother of ten children, three of whom became kings of France and two of whom became queens. Quite a record for a tough conspiratorial old woman.”)
Truman was tireless, determined to see everything, and fascinated by nearly all he saw. Bess tried valiantly to keep the pace, seldom smiling, at least in view of the photographers. The itinerary would have exhausted people half their age.
Their route in France, interestingly, included no return visits to the Vosges Mountains, the Argonne, or Verdun, Truman apparently having no wish to see any of those places ever again.
There were big crowds to cheer him at the train stations in Brussels, The Hague, and Amsterdam, where at the Dutch State Museum he and Bess saw the largest exhibit of Rembrandts ever held, and had lunch with Queen Juliana at the Royal Soestdikk Palace.
Then, on June 17, they were on their way to England, the part of the trip Truman had looked forward to most of all. “We crossed the Channel on the night boat,” he recorded, “and landed at the English side in beautiful sunshine….”
It may be fairly said that in his long, eventful life, in an extraordinary career with many surprising turns and times of great fulfillment, there were few occasions that meant so much to Truman as the ceremony that took place at Oxford on Wednesday, June 20, 1956. Wearing the traditional crimson robe and crushed black velour hat of Oxford, the man who had never been to college, nor ever made a pretense of erudition, walked at the head of the procession, beside the Public Orator, at one of the world’s oldest, most distinguished universities.
“Never, never in my life,” he had whispered to a reporter,
“did I ever think I’d be a Yank at Oxford.”
The ceremony, called the Encaenia and conducted in Latin, was held in Oxford’s 300-year-old Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Christopher Wren. The audience numbered more than a thousand people. As Truman stood in the center facing the crimson-robed professors of Oxford, he heard the Public Orator present “Harricum Truman,” for an honorary degree of “Doctoris in lure Civili” (Doctor of Civil Law). Then the towering, ornately robed Earl of Halifax, chancellor of the university and former British ambassador to Washington, admitted Harricum Truman into the ancient fellowship of Oxford, lauding him, in Latin, as
Truest of allies, direct in your speech and in your writings and ever a pattern of simple courage…(sociorum firmissime, qui missis ambagibus et loqueris et commentaries scribis veraeque constantiae specimen semper dedisti).
The applause that followed went on for a full three minutes. Truman, moved to tears, searched beneath his academic gown for a handkerchief. An elderly professor told a reporter that he had attended many such convocations but had never heard such applause. “Mr. Truman is very popular in this country,” he said. Recovering himself, Truman smiled broadly.
That night he was honored at a white-tie dinner for four hundred returning graduates of Christ Church College. “Every person born in the twentieth century is entitled to the benefits of the twentieth century,” he said in his speech.
…we must declare in a new Magna Carta, in a new Declaration of Independence, that henceforth economic well being and security, that health and education and decent living standards, are among our inalienable rights.
Every man and woman was entitled to the full benefit of the best in medicine, he added, striking an old theme. Every child was entitled to a first-rate education. There should be no economic worries for the elderly in their declining years.
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