“Give ‘em hell, Harricum!” the students of Oxford called from their windows as he departed.
A still more dazzling white-tie dinner followed the next night in London, at the Savoy—the annual stag dinner of the Pilgrims, the leading Anglo-American society dedicated to maintaining close ties between the two nations. And again Truman was a triumph, Lord Halifax paying him what to most present was the ultimate compliment. “I think we in this room feel that you are the sort of chap with whom all of us would be quite happy to go tiger hunting.”
He had been getting along very well in England, Truman said, at the start of his remarks. So far, he had not needed an interpreter.
“A good many of the difficulties between our two countries,” he continued, “spring not from our differences but from the fact that we are so much alike…. Another problem we have…is that in election years we behave somewhat as primitive peoples do at the time of the full moon.” But the essence of his warning was that “a great, serene and peaceful future can slip from us quite as irrevocably by neglect, division and inaction, as by spectacular disaster.” He hoped that both nations would never become careless about “our strength and our unity.”
And—not least of all—let us escape from this modern idea of the mass psychologists that we should be guided not by what we honestly believe is wise and right, but by some supposed reflecting of what other people think of us. I am ready to give up the complexity of propaganda, with its mass psychology, in favor of Mark Twain’s simpler admonition:
“Always do right. It will please some people and astonish the rest.”
He was “most happy” to see London, Truman wrote in his diary. “Never been here. It is a wonderful city.”
Visiting the House of Commons on Home Affairs Day, he listened to the opposition ask questions “about everything from roads to bawdy houses and gangsters.” At the House of Lords he sat through a long-winded speech as “boresome” as any in the United States Senate.
England is prosperous, cordial and courteous [he recorded]. From Lords to taxi drivers and policemen they recognize and wave and bow to the former President. When they have a chance they show by word and deed that they still like us and appreciate our friendship. It is heart warming.
On June 24, at Chartwell, the Churchill family estate 40 miles south of London, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill, daughters Sarah and Mary and Mary’s husband, Christopher Soames, and Lord Beaverbrook were in the driveway waiting as the Trumans arrived for lunch in a chauffeur-driven Armstrong Siddeley. “This is just like old times,” Truman said, as he and Churchill greeted each other. Inside, a butler brought a tray of drinks, and before a bronze bust of Franklin Roosevelt the two men made what appeared to be a silent toast. Lunch finished, each swinging a walking stick, they strolled in the gardens.
“It was all over too soon,” Truman wrote in his diary.
The house faces a hill covered with rhododendrons, which were in full bloom. Behind the house is a beautiful garden and below that a valley containing a lake in the distance, a lovely view which Sir Winston called the Weald of Kent.
He showed me a large number of his paintings in the house and told me he had some 400 more in his studio in the valley below the house. We didn’t have time to visit the studio. It was a very pleasant visit and a happy one for me.
Churchill, Truman thought, seemed as alert mentally as ever. “But his physical condition shows his 82 years. He walks more slowly and he doesn’t hear well.”
He told me that he could do whatever had to be done as he always did but that he’d rather not do it. He walked around and up and down steps with no more effort than would be expected of a man his age. He remarked that it would be a great thing for the world if I should become President of the United States again. I told him there was no chance of that.
They said goodbye not knowing if they would ever see one another again, and they did not.
On June 26, as reported in the Independence Examiner, “Mr. and Mrs. Truman joined the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace” for lunch. On June 28, from Southampton, their grand tour over, the Trumans sailed for home.
During the visit at Chartwell, Lord Beaverbrook had told Truman that on his European trip he had made the greatest ambassador of goodwill America ever had. Now, the same refrain was heard repeatedly.
“Too bad he’s not campaigning for anything in this country,” an American reporter overheard an English spectator remark as Truman boarded the boat train in London. “He’d win any election.” The London Evening Standard headlined the visit as the “Truman Triumph.” The Daily Telegraph described him as the “living and kicking symbol of everything that everyone likes best about the United States.”
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.
Harry S. Truman had the Democratic party chewing its fingernails down to the cuticle today and he loved every second of it [wrote Russell Baker in The New York Times].
While the party’s other demi-gods fretted and stewed and guessed, Mr. Truman was as exhilarated as a small boy given free run of the circus.
At the height of the suspense, he blithely took off from the politicians and went down to the south side of town to lead a parade. There for Chicago’s vast Negro population, it was Bud Billiken Day. Bud Billiken is a mythical heroic godfather for the town’s Negro children. In the parade Mr. Truman drove 2½ miles to the enthusiastic cheers of 100,000 spectators.
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.
Mr. Truman, who has an abiding interest in our national history, has arranged for the preservation of his papers in this library in such manner that his administration will be one of the “clearest ages” of history. It is in compliance with his public-spirited generosity that I dedicate this building as a museum and a library to safeguard, exhibit, and facilitate the use of its valuable resources that the American people, and all the peoples of this earth, may gain by their wide and wise use understanding of ourselves and our times, and wisdom to choose the right paths in years that lie ahead.
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.
As you know, we passed a Bill which gave all five star Generals and Admirals three clerks, and all the emoluments that went with their office when they retired.
It seems rather peculiar that a fellow who spent eighteen years in government service and succeeded in getting all these things done for the people he commanded should have to go broke in order to tell the people the truth about what really happened. It seems to me in all justice a part of this tremendous overhead should be met by the public.
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. T
ruman 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:
Mr. Truman is deeply interest in and very good with the young. His point view is fresh, eager, confident. He has learned the hard way, but he has learned a lot. He believes in his fellow man and he believes that with will and courage (and some intelligence) the future is manageable.
This is good for undergraduates. He is easy, informal, pungent. He should not be asked to do lectures for publication. The pressures on him are too great, and it is not his field. It is not what he says but what he is which is important to young men and this gets communicated…I should want Mr. Truman to be received at Yale with honor, with simplicity—not as a show, not with controversy, not as a lecturer in a field which I do not believe is yet a discipline, “political theory or science”—but as one who could, if in some way we were wired for spirit, give our undergraduates more sense of what their lives are worth (how to spend them for value) than anyone I know.
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