by Roy Jenkins
Churchill, in January 1953, responded by turning his full beam upon the outgoing President. Of course he saw Eisenhower, with whom he would need to work for several years in the future, but he did so almost unobtrusively in New York in Baruch’s apartment. In Washington his undiluted attention was reserved for the alive but dying administration. He paid Truman a measured and massive compliment. He confessed to his dismay at the succession when Roosevelt died. ‘I misjudged you badly,’ Churchill added. ‘Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.’14
Truman gave him a dinner at which Acheson, Lovett, Harriman, and Omar Bradley assisted, and which seems almost to have got out of hand. Great jollity was contrived, with imaginary juries of historic figures empanelled to try both President and Prime Minister before an infernal (or maybe heavenly) tribunal. Acheson at least enjoyed himself immensely by presaging his 1960 thrust at Britain and saying to Churchill, in response to his confident growl that, wherever it was, he expected to be tried in accordance with the principles of the English Common Law: ‘Is it altogether consistent with your respect for the creator of this and other universes to limit his imagination and judicial procedure to the accomplishment of a minute island, in a tiny world, in one of the smaller of the universes?’15
These festivities over, the Trumans were almost out of the White House. On January 15th the President made a farewell broadcast to the nation and—for almost the first time—was televised as well. He delivered what Robert Donovan well described as a ‘neighborly’ account of his stewardship. He thought that his presidency would be most remembered as the time when the cold war began to overshadow everyone’s life. ‘I have hardly had a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle … and always in the background there has been the atomic bomb.’ However, ‘starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable for rational men.’16
On the 16th he made his last (but not lasting—it was reversed by Congress with Eisenhower’s approval) significant decision: he declared that off-shore oil belonged to the nation and not to the states off whose shores it lay. On the morning of the 20th (another sparkling day, as in 1949) he wound up his office from 8.45 to 10.30 a.m., greeted the Cabinet and their wives in the Red Room before his final exit from the mansion for the drive to Capitol Hill with Eisenhower and the ceremony there, leading for him to the complete relinquishment of responsibility. So relieved, he drove with his wife and daughter to Dean Acheson’s house in Georgetown where there was a lunch for the outgoing Cabinet and a few other close associates. This was a highly successful occasion, with the ex-President on ebullient form ‘… an absolutely wonderful affair,’ it was described by Margaret Truman, ‘full of jokes and laughter and a few tears’. Then, typically, Truman slipped off to the apartment of a member of his White House staff‘for a nap’. Thus fortified he proceeded to Union Station, where a crowd of over 5,000 saw him off on his last journey in the presidential Pullman car. He made a little speech from the rear platform, and the train pulled out in the early evening to the swelling chorus of Auld Lang Syne.
It was 8.15 the next evening when (an hour late) they reached Independence. There had been small crowds at most of the stations along the route, even during the night, and big ones at St Louis and Independence itself. Typically again, he had got out and had a haircut at one of the Missouri stations. The journey over and the presidential car dismissed not merely to Washington but to near oblivion, for no subsequent president did much train travel, he drove to North Delaware Street. Here there was another crowd of 5,000. When asked subsequently what was the first thing he did when he got home, he was reported as saying: ‘I carried the grips up to the attic.’17 But he may have exaggerated his own matter of factness. Perhaps his diary entry captured his mood better. Commenting on this last great display of respect and affection and the cumulative effect of them all, he wrote: ‘Mrs T and I were overcome. It was the pay-off for thirty years of hell and hard work.’18
12
A QUIET END
Truman’s retirement was one of the longest in the twentieth-century history of the presidency: just three weeks short of twenty years. Only Hoover survived for longer—31½ years as an ex-president, and his retirement was by no means as complete; he undertook several important tasks on the fringes of government for the Truman administration.1 Truman’s own long and tranquil survival was the more remarkable as, at the time of leaving the White House, he was the oldest President but three ever to have exercised executive power,2
Throughout these twenty years Truman neither deluded himself with thoughts of a return to power nor greatly sought to make money. When Churchill agreeably told him in 1956 that ‘it would be a great thing for the world if [he] were to become President of the United States again,’ Truman realistically replied that there was no chance of that. Nor did he ever pursue his rather wild 1951 idea of trying to return to the Senate. He believed, with some force, that former Presidents should be given honorary Senate seats, but this was more a general constitutional reflection than any attempt at personal self-seeking. He spoke out, sometimes over-forthrightly, on internal Democratic Party affairs, but he was notably loath to step in and proffer his advice on matters of national security.
During his first year out of office he received a number of offers of lucrative employment involving only a very small commitment of time. None of them- was of very high quality. He was offered nothing comparable with Eisenhower’s Presidency of Columbia University, or with the sort of blue chip business appointment which many ex-Secretaries of the Treasury easily acquire. It must of course be remembered that he was aged 69 and pretty firmly Missouri-based. What was forthcoming, however, were manifestly attempts by second rank enterprises to buy his name rather than his wisdom. He rightly refused.
He was not greedy, he was not extravagant, and he was not by this stage without some modest resources of his own. His financial altruism, however, was modified by two considerations. First he was eager, partly for reasons of prestige, to do as well as he could out of his writings, and particularly his memoirs. Second he became resentful about the very considerable sums of personal money which, unless he was to ignore his correspondents and sit at home with nothing to do all day, he felt forced to spend on maintaining an office.
At first he received no support of any sort from the Federal Government: no pension, no secretarial or other assistance, no security protection. His Secret Service guards had been removed even before he left Washington. They simply said goodbye to him as he got aboard the train at Union Station. He had travelled home unprotected through the crowds across half the continent. He was equally unguarded from the sightseers who subsequently came in fairly substantial numbers to stare at 219, North Delaware Street. His only screen was the iron fence which in somewhat un-American fashion, but, he claimed, based on the experience of Thomas Jefferson and the advice of Herbert Hoover, he kept around the house. It was all remarkably different from today’s practice.
The fence at least was already there and did not cost money. But the office which he established in the Union Bank building in Kansas City did, although not on a huge scale. He wrote in 1957 that he had spent $153,000 on it over 3½ years. This, he said, he had been able to do only because the accident of the sale of his share of the Grandview farm land to the shopping centre developers had safeguarded him from financial embarrassment. The experience had converted him to the desirability of some government help for ex-Presidents, a proposition towards which he had earlier been austerely cool. ‘I don’t want a pension and do not expect one’, he wrote to John W. McCormack, the Democratic leader in the House, on January 10th, 1957, ‘but I do think 70% of the expenses or overhead should be paid by the Government—the 30% is what I would ordinarily have been out on my own hook if I hadn’t tried to meet the responsibilities of being a former President.’1
The work of the office was directed to answering a large volume of mostly friendly mail, sorting his presidential papers, writ
ing his memoirs, and bringing to fruition his plans for the building of a Truman Library and Museum. The memoirs were not a great success, either financially or of esteem. They were punctual, despite the fact that Truman had a fairly severe illness in 1954, and were published in two substantial volumes in 1955 and 1956. They gave a clear, narrative account of the main events with which he had been concerned. If they were undisfigured by his prejudices or outrageous remarks, they were equally unadorned by originality or penetration. They received the slightly bland reception which their slightly bland style deserved. Coming out at a time when his reputation still hovered a little uncertainly in the haze of the Eisenhower afternoon, they did not strengthen the market for his writing. And the direct return was disappointing. This however, appears to have been more due to the taxation arrangement than to the gross payment. The book was sold outright to the same publisher for the same sum of money that Eisenhower had received in 1948 for Crusade in Europe. Truman, however, claimed that, owing to a taxation change in the meantime, Eisenhower had been left with $437,000 net, whereas he was left, after tax and research and other expenses, with little more than $37,000. There emerges the strong feeling either that he was not comparing like with like or that he had a very bad accountant. In either case the contrast with Eisenhower’s ‘killing’ exacerbated his slight sense of disappointment.
It was however more than outweighed by the remarkable success of the Truman Library. It was planned, built and opened to the public within 4½ years of his leaving the White House. This was in spite of some initial hesitancy about the location. There was never any question of its being other than in the Kansas City area. He never contemplated a Washington memorial. He was at first attracted by the idea of building the Library on part of the old farm land at Grandview. However, the temptations of the developers, coinciding with a generous offer from the City of Independence of a good and substantial site adjacent to the public park, barely a mile from North Delaware Street, deflected him from Grandview. Money came in well, from both corporate and private donors. There were 17,000 separate subscriptions. The last million dollars was raised by Truman himself on an intensive lecture tour.
There was no embarrassment in his mind about seeking money for what was in effect a memorial to himself. He did not see it in vainglorious terms. He did not want a Washington obelisk, a Jefferson rotunda or a Lincoln temple. What he did want was a political science teaching workshop which would make vivid the nature of the office of President, admittedly by exhibiting the memorabilia of himself as local hero, in a part of the United States which had not previously participated in Federal history in a way that had Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio or Illinois.
He had a good deal of conceit and a certain vanity at this stage. But the vanity was essentially about the grandeur of the office which he had rather surprisingly managed successfully to occupy. He wanted the people—and particularly schoolchildren—in the mid-West and elsewhere to know about this greatest democratic office in the world and, as he saw it, the five facets of the President’s role. If the exploitation of this splendour through a library and museum devoted to his own tenure involved some self-aggrandisement, so be it. But that was genuinely not the primary purpose. He had a passionate desire to instruct about the presidency as an institution, and devoted much of his time to addressing quite small school and college audiences on the subject.
The Library was admirably constructed for such a purpose. It also had the unique attribute at that stage of a resident president. Just as the English National Trust rightly believes that an inhabited country house is more interesting to the public than a dead shell, so Independence had the advantage over Hyde Park or, still more obviously, Mount Vernon or Monticello, of having the man it commemorated on the premises. For the first nine or ten years he was quite liable to descend on any visiting party and give them a quick and vigorous tutorial.
Only after 1966 did the vigour and the immanence begin to recede. Until then the Library was his diurnal home. It solved the problems of the expensive and not very convenient Kansas City office. Once it had been built by private subscription its upkeep was taken over by the National Archives and Records Services, an offshoot of an agency of the Federal Government. This conduit of public money brought good practical office accommodation, separate from the replica of the Oval Office which was rather elaborately constructed in another wing, and other public support for Truman. Thereafter he had no problems on this account. Even the Secret Service men came back after the assassination of President Kennedy.
The Library was not only a most satisfactory convenience for Truman, which, in his daughter’s view, became ‘one of the great joys of [his] old age’. It was also a place for pilgrimages of reconciliation and tribute. Truman found it very difficult to resist the offer of a visit. What would he have done had MacArthur proposed himself? He received Eisenhower graciously in 1961 and the Nixons without wincing in 1969. (At a Museum dedicated to the institution of the presidency it would of course have been difficult to do otherwise with the incumbent President.) Kennedy, with whom a little intra-party reconciliation was desirable, came between his nomination and the election in 1960. Lyndon Johnson, with whom no reconciliation was necessary (he and Truman always got on fairly well) brought a great entourage for the symbolic signing there of the Medicare Bill in July 1965.
Until the mid-1960s, when he was over eighty, Truman remained active both politically and physically—although he always confined his exercise to brisk urban walks, sometimes interspersed with on the hoof political comment to attendant journalists. He did not think it necessary to show his mature statesmanship by becoming less anti-Republican, and he did not hesitate to express his preferences within the Democratic Party. In August 1969, he was writing in good uninhibited form to Acheson about ‘Tricky Dicky and Alibi Ike’.3 The Republican candidates were always satisfactorily unacceptable to him. The Democratic candidates were less satisfactorily acceptable. He never supported Stevenson after 1952. He wanted Harriman in 1956 and Symington in 1960. He several times referred to Kennedy as ‘this immature boy’ and believed that his father had bought him the nomination. However, as an old Democratic ‘pro’, he rallied to Stevenson in 1956 and to Kennedy in 1960 as soon as the campaigns got underway. Later he responded more strongly to Kennedy’s attentions, attended the 1961 inauguration and later went with his wife and daughter to stay a night in the White House. However, Johnson in 1964 was the first Democratic candidate who would have been his first choice. Humphrey in 1968 was probably more or less satisfactory to him unless his memory went back too powerfully to the young Mayor of Minneapolis’s support for Eisenhower in July 1948, but he played little part in that 1968 campaign. In 1972 he played no part, and it is not known what he thought of George McGovern or whether he was even able to vote for him. He had already faded far by that November, and was dead before Nixon’s second inauguration in January 1973.
In the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s he travelled a fair amount: Washington occasionally, although never to the White House while Eisenhower was there; a good deal of mostly unpaid speaking and lecturing about the country; frequent family visits to New York where his daughter, married in 1955 to Clifton Daniels, high in the hierarchy of the New York Times, produced four grandsons for him to treat with respect and enjoyment rather than excessive domestic intimacy (he mostly installed himself firmly in the Carlyle Hotel); and on three occasions to Europe, but never, except for Hawaii, not then a state, elsewhere outside his own country.
The first European visit in 1956 was something of a stately progress, and deservedly so. The Trumans were away for seven weeks, in Italy, Austria, France and the Netherlands. They finished in Britain, where Truman (at the age of 72) saw London for the first and last time, received, without opposition, an Oxford honorary degree3 and lunched with the Churchills at Chartwell. The second European journey was only two years later, but a much quieter, purely holiday visit to Italy and France. The third was to Athens in March
1964, where he represented President Johnson at the funeral of King Paul. He was alone (that is without Mrs Truman) on that trip and played poker all night on the aeroplane. Such a reversion to indiscipline showed no sign of exhausting him before his eightieth birthday celebrations, which came later that spring and included numerous luncheons, dinners and even breakfasts, as well as a speech to the Senate.
His reputation at that stage was strongly in the ascendant. In July 1962, for example, the New York Times magazine had amused itself by getting Arthur M. Schlesinger Snr to repeat the poll of seventy-five historians which he had first conducted in 1948. They were asked to arrange presidents in order of ‘greatness’ or ‘near-greatness’. The ‘greats’ came out as Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson and Jefferson. The ‘near-greats’, also in order, were Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Polk, Truman, John Adams, and Cleveland.4 It was a far cry from 1946 or even 1952. He reacted to this calmly but with pleasure. ‘I don’t know how they came to put me so high up on the list’, he wrote to a Congressman who had somewhat supererogatively sent him the article, ‘but I appreciate it nevertheless. If I had been arranging the first five in the row of the great, I would have put Washington first, Jefferson second, Woodrow Wilson third, Lincoln fourth and Franklin Roosevelt fifth. I, in all probability, would have moved Andrew Jackson into that row and made six of them, but I didn’t have anything to do with making it up.’4
