Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Dad tried to be good natured while the preparations for my wedding swept around him in our house in Independence. He was shunted from one room of the house to another while the women of the family, the neighbors, and assorted house guests, in the usual feminine frenzy, endeavored to prepare the downstairs rooms for the reception after the ceremony. Finally, his native stubbornness acted up. One ritual he did not propose to give up was reading his New York Times. He settled down in his chair in the library and began turning the pages.

  “Harry, why don’t you just go on upstairs,” my mother called from the dining room, where she was working on the table. “Vietta has to vacuum the carpet.”

  “She can sweep around me,” Dad announced without looking up from the editorial page, and he wouldn’t budge.

  As in most families, the son-in-law rapidly achieved more influence with Mother and Dad than the daughter ever had. Particularly with Mother, who could be persuaded to change her mind by Clifton, where I could talk myself blue in the face for a year with no results. There was only one point on which Dad and Clifton disagreed. That was on how the news is presented in our papers. Dad insisted it is sometimes slanted by the way pictures are used and by the way stories and pictures are juxtaposed. Clifton insisted there is no intentional slanting on the vast majority of our newspapers. Dad remained unconvinced. I remained studiously neutral.

  The next major family event was the birth of our first son. He came very suddenly in June 1957. I went into labor in the afternoon and headed for the hospital. Clifton telephoned Independence and got Dad. Mother was at her bridge club. Dad took the news very calmly, it seemed to me, for a man who had been saying in the public prints for years that all he wanted was a grandchild (to my frequently expressed annoyance). He did not even bother to telephone Mother at her bridge club. He simply met her on the back porch when she came home and said: “Margaret’s in the hospital.”

  Later in the day, I developed some problems, and the doctor decided to perform a Caesarean. Clifton again telephoned Independence and this time got Mother, who was perfectly calm, and even relieved, to hear this news. Where was the grandfather-to-be? Where else - asleep in his bed. Would a man who slept through the night of his own election to the presidency stay awake for a mere grandson?

  Clifton Truman Daniel finally arrived just after midnight on June 5. The following day, Dad and Mother were on a train heading east. Every place the train stopped, reporters and well-wishers swarmed aboard to congratulate Dad, as if he were the father. At the hospital, after he saw me and the baby, Dad departed with Clifton, who advised him to wait at the entrance while he captured a taxi. When Clifton returned, he was astonished to discover his father-in-law holding a press conference.

  There was a marvelous picture in the Daily News of Clifton standing on the outskirts of the crowd, trying in vain to tell Dad their taxi was waiting. I’ve often said it was a good thing Clifton was a working newspaperman and understood the ways of the press. Otherwise, I think he might have developed a giant inferiority complex as an ex-President’s son-in-law.

  In the course of rhapsodizing about his grandson, Dad told the reporters he had a full head of red hair. The baby had a full head of hair all right, but it was black. For all his emphasis on getting the facts while he was in the White House, the ex-President saw only what he wanted to see when he looked at his grandson. Red hair runs in the Truman family, and he blithely presumed Truman blood had won its tussle with Daniel blood.

  I clashed with reporters while still in my hospital bed. They wanted a picture of the child, and I refused to cooperate. I had made up my mind my children would not endure the glare of publicity I had known. I accepted it because I was the President’s daughter. But I did not feel the obligation extended to the grandchildren. Clifton finally worked out a compromise by taking a picture of Mother and Dad looking through the window at the baby and sending it to The New York Times for processing and distribution.

  While I was in the hospital, Dad dashed up to Brandeis University to make a speech and came back with sweatshirts for his grandson, all of them big enough for a six-year-old. He also had about a dozen bibs saying, “I’m a little owl from Brandeis.”

  A few days later I came home. I was the typical nervous mother of a first child. Everything was suspected of being infested with germs. With the second, third, and fourth, such worries were of course abandoned. When we got in the house, Dad asked if he could hold his grandchild.

  “You’ll have to take off your jacket first,” I said sternly. “It may be dirty.”

  He gave me a very exasperated look, took it off, and sat down in a chair. “Do you know how to hold him?” I asked.

  “I think I remember,” he said sarcastically.

  I surrendered my precious bundle to him. Dad sat there for a long time, rocking him back and forth. Although normally Clifton was a screamer, he didn’t utter a peep.

  “Would you like to give him his bottle?” I asked.

  You have never seen any man give a baby back faster in your life. “No,” he said, “I won’t deprive you of that pleasure.”

  Obviously, Mr. Ex-President had no intentions of going into the babysitting, diaper-changing, bib-and-burping business.

  The only time I inveigled either him or Mother into doing anything in this line was about a year after the birth of our second son, William. Clifton and I went to Europe on business. Our trip took us all the way across the continent to Russia. We were gone nine weeks. I had a nurse and a housekeeper staying with the children, but I persuaded Mother and Dad to spend two or three weeks in our apartment to be sure the boys did not get too lonely. Dad had a marvelous time with both of them. They were very active as small boys are, and more than once, they almost wore him out.

  One small incident occurred during this visit which showed that even in the canyons of Manhattan, Harry Truman did not forget the lessons he had learned on his Missouri farm. Three-year-old Clifton had a hobbyhorse which he was very fond of riding too vigorously. One morning at breakfast, the horse tipped over and Kif, as we call him, went sprawling. Mother and the nurse both jumped up and rushed toward him. The sight of this feminine consolation immediately started him whimpering.

  Dad took charge. “Leave him alone,” he said. Then in a very ungrandfatherly voice he said, “Get up. Pick up the horse and get back on.” Kif was so startled, he forgot all about crying and obeyed the presidential order. It was a pretty big and heavy hobbyhorse, but he rolled it over and got back on.

  Whenever Dad and Mother, or Dad alone, came to New York, they stayed at the Carlyle Hotel. He followed his usual routine, arising at dawn, and taking a 6:00 a.m. stroll. If he was in town alone, he developed the habit of dropping in on me for breakfast. This created problems until I gave him his own key. My children inherited their grandfather’s habits and insisted on getting up by the dawn’s early light. The children’s schedule and Dad’s meshed beautifully. He would arrive at the apartment around seven, sit down in the same chair in the living room, known as Grandfather’s chair, and occupy himself with a book. They would creep downstairs and join him.

  One morning, I came downstairs and found Kif and Will sitting on the arms of Grandfather’s chair, while he read aloud to them.

  “Well, good morning,” Dad said, putting down the book and implying with one of his looks that I had wasted the better half of the day.

  “Hello,” I said, yawning and glancing at the title of the book he was reading.

  My two sons, whom I had thus far been unable to interest in anything weightier than comic books, had been listening enthralled to the Greek historian Thucydides.

  When President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy gave a dinner for my parents, the four of us - Mother, Dad, Clifton, and I - were invited to spend the weekend at the White House. This was very nice of Jack Kennedy, and we appreciated it very much. Dad had opposed his nomination in the 1960 convention, but he did it without rancor, simply arguing that JFK was not yet ready for the job. He campaigned
for him vigorously, once Jack was the nominee, acting as always on the conviction this kind of harmony was essential to our two-party system.

  Dad accepted the invitation but insisted we would stay in the White House only one night. He knew longer visits put a strain on the staff as well as on the busy hosts.

  For dinner, President Kennedy assembled a number of Dad’s Cabinet and other high officials in his administration. The President made some witty remarks about how many former Trumanites were working in the White House. They amounted to about 50 percent of the staff.

  We dined at the great horseshoe table, decked with the lovely centerpiece President Monroe had commissioned in France, the gold plate, and the gold flatware. The main course was grouse, and each of us was served a small bird of his own. Cheerfully conversing, we began to cut them up. I noticed after a few moments my knife was simply not penetrating. I pressed a little harder. Still no luck. I noticed Dad was working rather hard on his bird and also getting nowhere. President Kennedy, with true Irish determination, was fighting his to the finish. With a Herculean effort, he actually cut it in two pieces. But the idea of trying to chew, must less digest, such a rubberized item forced him to abandon his efforts there. He looked across the table at Jackie with a tense mixture of wrath and dismay. I turned to Bobby Kennedy and said, “These White House knives never could cut butter.” Bobby broke up.

  Mother and Dad, having met similar situations at numerous political banquets, did not so much as hint there was anything wrong. Eventually, the butlers came and took our uneaten grouse away.

  After dinner and a concert, we went upstairs with the Kennedys to the family quarters. President Kennedy asked Dad or me or both to play the piano. We said we would be glad to oblige, if we could find some music. A search of piano benches ensued. The only piece of sheet music turned up was “Once in Love with Mamie.”

  President Kennedy gave up his hopes of being entertained and told us he was going off to the executive wing to do a few hours’ work. He explained to Dad he was a night worker and late riser. Dad said he was a daytime worker and an early riser. President Kennedy very sensibly said that in that case they had better say goodbye.

  The next morning, Clifton and I knew we had to be packed and ready at eight for breakfast in the Lincoln Room. By superhuman effort, we made it, half asleep. Dad was already there, fresh as always.

  One of the butlers, who had belonged to the White House staff when we lived there, took care of us. “Nothing has changed, Ficklin,” I muttered to him. “I would like some black coffee, grapefruit, and a glass of ice water.”

  Dad ate his usual breakfast. By 8:45, we were in the car headed for the Mayflower Hotel, where Dad was to address the ladies of the press at another breakfast. I was faced with a second breakfast, though I have never felt food should be consumed before 10:00 a.m. Dad cheerfully ate again.

  When we finally got upstairs to our hotel room, my telephone was ringing wildly. It was Mrs. Kennedy. “Margaret, what happened?” she asked in genuine distress. “I rushed down at nine o’clock and you had all gone.”

  “Don’t give it another thought,” I told her. “My father is an early riser. He said goodbye last night.”

  “But I thought nine o’clock was early,” she said plaintively.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said, “but I’ve never been able to prove it to Dad.”

  About a year after we visited the White House, Dad had a chance to do President Kennedy a favor. As President, Dad had always striven for a balanced budget. President Kennedy became a convert to deficit spending, to pep up the economy. Dad disapproved of this, and he let the reporters know it, during one of his early morning strolls in New York. A plea came from the White House, asking him to soft-pedal such talk. Dad sent back the following polite reply. He still believed in a balanced budget but he was a good Democrat, and if the Democratic President of the United States wanted him to stop talking about it, he would shut up, forthwith. He did, too.

  Dad was deeply grieved by President Kennedy’s assassination. He felt fate had cut him down before he had a chance to really master the intricacies of the presidency. At the funeral Mass, the Trumans and the Eisenhowers sat in the same pew. Reporters and ex-president watchers immediately started buzzing. They seemed to have forgotten Ike had visited Dad at the Library in Independence in 1961, to get some pointers on how to set up the Eisenhower presidential library. At that time, there was a spate of “burying the hatchet” cartoons, and much talk about the supposed feud being over. On Dad’s part, there never had been a feud. He was simply incapable of holding a grudge long enough to turn it into a feud.

  Ike and Mamie offered to share their car with us for the ride to Arlington Cemetery. The two ex-Presidents chatted agreeably en route to that sad final farewell to John F. Kennedy. When I discovered the Eisenhowers were not planning to stay in Washington, I suggested they come back to Blair House with us and have something to eat before they went back to Gettysburg. While we were having coffee and sandwiches, a hubbub erupted on the front steps. A sizable tribe of reporters, scenting a story, were demanding to see either or both former chief executives. Neither Dad nor Ike was in the least inclined to oblige them, so guess-who got dispatched to deal with them. I scoffed at talk of hatchet burying and insisted it was simply a matter of civilized people being hospitable, on both sides.

  A year later, Dad flew to Greece at the request of President Johnson to represent the United States at the funeral of King Paul. The party included many old associates from his administration. Though the mission was melancholy, Dad enjoyed being with men he had known and worked with during his White House years. A poker game got going on the plane, and it lasted all night. My husband, Clifton, who was part of the entourage, became very worried. He feared Dad would overtax himself, especially in view of the time change between America and Greece.

  “Why didn’t you stop him?” I demanded. “After all, he is eighty years old.”

  “Who me?” Clifton asked, horrified. “Do you think I’m going to tell the former President of the United States, and my father-in-law to boot, to go to bed?”

  I had to concede it wouldn’t have done any good, even if Clifton had had the courage.

  Dad returned from Greece, flying the Atlantic twice in one week, on the eve of a trip to Florida. He got home at midnight and was up at six as usual and on his way again. His eightieth birthday came soon afterward, and he made a speech at every breakfast, lunch, dinner, and reception given in his honor. This included a visit to the U.S. Senate, where he became the first ex-President to address that body while it was in formal session. After a week of this, he said one night, “You know, I feel tired. I simply can’t understand it.”

  The following year, Dad was very pleased when President Lyndon Johnson flew to Independence and signed the Medicare Bill, seated beside him on the stage of the Truman Library auditorium. The bill, President Johnson pointed out, was the culmination of the long struggle for a national health policy which Dad had begun in 1945, as part of the twenty-one-point program that had stunned the complacent conservatives then dominating Congress.

  Dad was equally fond of our second set of boys, who came a little later in his grandfatherhood. They are Harrison and Thomas. But he inevitably felt a little closer to Kif and Will, because he spent more time with them. I did my best to maintain my standing rule against newspaper publicity, but I did not always succeed. One day, during a vacation in Florida, Will was photographed walking down a road behind Dad. He was imitating Dad’s stride. Moreover, the resemblance between him and Dad was striking. Kif tends more toward the Daniel side of the family. Actually, both Kif and Will were following Dad, but in the photograph the only part of Kif that was evident was his foot. Kif was not too happy about that, especially when Will was presented with a wooden plaque on which a photoengraving of the picture was superimposed.

  A few months later, Kif and Will were supposed to meet Dad and Mother at Kennedy Airport. On the arrival day
, Will came down with an earache and to his great dismay couldn’t go. Kif made a polite effort to restrain his enthusiasm at being the only youthful ambassador to meet his grandparents, but he was obviously pretty set up about it and took great pains with his appearance. By the time he departed with his father to meet the plane, he looked like an advertisement for Brooks Brothers. The day after the meeting, Kif’s picture with Dad and Mother and Clifton appeared in the paper. Very pleased with himself, he sauntered into the bedroom and said to Will, “Well, I made the Tribune this morning.”

  All the boys call Dad Grandpa. He never much liked nicknames, but he tolerated this one. Mother never liked nicknames either, but rejoiced in the name Gammy and had absolutely no objection to hearing herself called that in public. The mere sight of any one of the five men in my family reduced her to the consistency of a marshmallow.

  Dad was not the sort of grandfather who got down on the floor and roughhoused with the children. He treated them with dignity, as if they were men, and impressed them when he talked or read or told them stories. “My grandsons respect me,” he said. However, he was perfectly capable of taking their side against mine if there was any justice in it. It was a new experience for me to have Dad on somebody else’s side.

  During one of Mother and Dad’s visits, we were vacationing in the country. A stray kitten arrived on our doorstep. Kif and Will immediately fell in love with it and began to pester me to be allowed to keep it. A Bedlington terrier, which came with the house we had rented for the summer, disapproved of the new guest. Although I rarely agreed with the Bedlington, I was in her corner for once. Much to my dismay, Dad upheld Kif and Will. He petted the kitten and said the boys were right.