Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  He met Truman’s only child, Margaret, in November 1955, at a dinner party. Years later, Daniel would tell Talese, he still remembered the smallest details about Margaret Truman from that evening: “her wonderful complexion, never suggested in photographs, and the way she wore her hair, her shoes, the dark blue Fontana dress with the plunging neckline.” Daniel would tell a friend, “I looked down the neck of that dress and I haven’t looked back since.” By then, Margaret was a concert soprano and a bit of a TV personality. She was about to embark on her writing career.

  A month later, they were sufficiently interested in each other for Daniel to be invited to the Carlyle Hotel to meet her parents. Harry Truman seemed both pleased for his daughter and a little nervous about her future husband. “He strikes me as a very nice fellow and if Margaret wants him I’ll be satisfied,” he wrote. But then he confided to Dean Acheson, his former secretary of state, “As every old man who had a daughter feels, I’m worried and hope things will work out all right.”

  They were married on April 21, 1956, at the Trinity Episcopal Church, in Independence, Missouri, the same church where the president and Bess Truman were married thirty-seven years earlier. Margaret was thirty-two; Clifton was forty-three. Ten days later, a close-up photograph of the couple was on the cover of Life magazine, airbrushed into 1950s perfection.

  In the five years following his marriage to the president’s daughter, Clifton Daniel moved swiftly up the New York Times’ masthead. In 1957, he was named assistant to the managing editor, and two years later, the assistant managing editor. In September 1964, he was named the paper’s managing editor reporting to Turner Catledge, the executive editor. Despite his success at the paper—or maybe because of it—he was not necessarily beloved by the rank and file in the newsroom. Talese attributed this, among other things, to his ambition, his appearance, and his connections. He also blamed the “highly critical” memos of the staff that Daniel authored and sent along to Catledge. Talese told the story of what happened the rare time when Margaret Truman Daniel walked into the newsroom and was introduced to a reporter, who remarked how much he admired her father. “What about my husband?” she asked.

  “That,” he said, “I’ll have to think about.”

  * * *

  CLIFTON DANIEL AND MARGARET TRUMAN had four sons. “Having children is like shooting craps,” they once wrote. “When you roll the dice, you know what you want to come up, but often you don’t get it; sometimes, it’s better, sometimes worse.” In his 1995 memoir about his grandfather, Clif, Will’s older brother, recounted growing up in a famous family. He wrote that he did not even know his grandfather had been president of the United States until he was six, when someone at school happened to ask him about it. When he got home that afternoon he asked his mother, who was reading a book in the living room, whether Grandpa had been president. “Yes,” his mother told him. “But anybody’s grandfather can be president. You must remember that. You mustn’t let it go to your head.” He quickly put the matter out of his mind. “I had many other things to think about that year,” he wrote. “That was the year I got a pair of six-guns, a cowboy hat, and boots for my birthday, taught my younger brother, Will, to read, and was sent out of class at school for picking my nose.”

  Of course, when your grandfather had been president of the United States and your father was managing editor of the New York Times, there were perks. For instance, when President John F. Kennedy was in residence at the Carlyle Hotel during his frequent stays in New York City, the idling police motorcycles outside made such a racket it rattled the neighborhood. Most New Yorkers would just complain about it to one another, but Margaret Truman called over to the Carlyle and demanded to speak with Kennedy. The president took her call, and the noise soon stopped.

  * * *

  CLIFTON DANIEL REMEMBERED A SEMINAL incident on a family vacation that came to symbolize his and Will’s childhood. During a trip to Key West, former president Truman held a single press conference and Clif hoped to get in on the act, despite his mother insisting that he stay off to the side. He decided to climb a tree and sit down on a big limb. He succeeded in attracting a couple of reporters away from his grandfather’s press conference. Will decided to climb a nearby tree and then hang upside down from a limb by his knees. This stunt succeeded in attracting the attention of the entire press corps, which wrote a story about the cute presidential grandchildren. But their behavior infuriated their mother, who lit into them. She was furious. She told them never to do anything like it again. “I thought I told you to stay out of the way,” she erupted. “You’re not the important one here. Your grandfather is.”

  “That sort of summed it up for me,” Clif said. “She was always his daughter and we were sort of an adjunct. And it hurt. My parents, they provided very well for us. We lived in a nice apartment. We lived on Park Avenue. We had clothing, good food, and we went to the best schools they could find. In that regard, we were very well taken care of. And they were not physically abusive at all. And it wasn’t like this all the time, but you just had the sense that we were not the center of their universe. And I don’t know about Will. I know we both struggled with it.… For me, it’s just a constant feeling that I’m not going to measure up.”

  Of the two older Daniel sons, Will was always the quieter, more reflective one. As a young child, his bleach-blond hair and translucently white skin gave him a mesmerizing, almost albino appearance. He was an “old soul” even at a young age, his brother said. Clif remembered a story about Will that his mother loved to tell. When the two boys were younger—around five and three, respectively—she would ask them what they wanted for lunch. Every day, Clif would do the answering for both of them: He would have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and Will would have tuna fish. “This would go on day, after day, after day,” he said, until one day Clif went off to kindergarten and Will was home without him around. “Mom came in and she found only Will sitting there.… And she came in and she started to ask him what he wanted for lunch, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s right. You don’t talk.’ And Will looked at her and said, ‘Actually, I’d like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, please.’ It just floored her that not only could he talk, he talked better than I did. He was always a smart kid, but he was always very watchful, very quiet.”

  Clif picked on Will, in the fairly typical way that older brothers can torture their younger brothers. (Will, in turn, used to pick on Thomas, the youngest Daniel brother. Harrison, the third Daniel brother, was severely learning disabled.) Years later, when things hadn’t exactly worked out as planned for Will, Clif and Will had a conversation about growing up together and Will put some of the blame for the way things turned out on his older brother. “He caught me off guard,” Clif recalled. “So I said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’”

  The Daniel boys were essentially raised by their nannies, which was not terribly surprising given their social status, their mother’s career as a writer of mystery novels (although it turned out she often worked with a ghostwriter), and their father’s career at the New York Times. “They were good at what they did,” Clif said. “They were public figures. But when it came to talking to children, raising children, spending time with them, they didn’t have a lot of time for us. When we were on vacations together it was wonderful. Because nobody had work to distract them. Everybody was in a good mood. We loved going on trips to Florida with them because they just sort of relaxed.”

  Will and Clif attended the exclusive St. Bernard’s School, on 98th Street, just east of Fifth Avenue. In his class pictures from those years, Will looks like a towheaded choirboy, either in shorts with knee-high socks or with a blue blazer and a repp tie. In the rarefied crowd, the Truman grandchildren didn’t stick out. “We went to school with bankers’ kids, lawyers’ kids, doctors’ kids,” Clif explained. “People had bigger apartments, bigger houses, houses in the country. Walter Cronkite’s son, Chip, was in my class. We were just part of the pa
ck. In those days, our grandfather left office with the lowest approval rating of any US president. And his reputation came around about the time he died. But at the time, it wasn’t a bad thing to be Harry Truman’s grandson, but it also wasn’t a huge thing. You weren’t a Kennedy.”

  The Daniels made a point of renting different houses outside the city for the summer months. Clifton Daniel would commute back and forth into Manhattan, leaving his wife and their four sons to enjoy the bucolic Westchester County countryside. Once, in Tuxedo Park, New York, the two older Daniel brothers decided it would be great fun to splash their visiting grandfather, then around eighty years old, while he swam his laps in the oval pool. He used to swim the sidestroke so as to be able to keep his glasses dry while he was in the pool. Needless to say, Truman did not appreciate being splashed by his grandsons—he was not that kind of guy—and their mother told them he did not like to get his glasses wet. “Boy, he certainly did not,” Clif explained. “Grandpa swam to the edge of the pool for his towel and wiped his glasses dry. Then he turned, simply glared at us, and shoved off again.”

  * * *

  INEVITABLY, THE DANIEL BROTHERS’ carefree youth gave way to a more complicated adolescence. One of the first places their instinct for rebellion began to appear was in the length of their hair. During his years in the St. Bernard’s lower school in the early 1970s, the cherubic pictures of Will Daniel begin to change. In his seventh-grade class photo, circa 1972, Will has his blond locks parted in the middle, the genesis of the Gregg Allman look that became the hallmark of his high school and college years. The following year, in his eighth-grade picture, Will’s hair was longer and wilder, easily the longest among the sixteen adolescent boys in the picture.

  While the long-haired hippie look may have been tolerated on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it was not particularly welcomed on North Delaware Street in Independence, Missouri. “It was no secret what my grandfather thought of long hair,” Clif wrote. Toward the end of 1971, ages fourteen and twelve, respectively, Clif and Will brought themselves and their long hair to Independence. It did not go over well with the former president. He was then eighty-seven years old, spending many hours each day in his study, reading. Upon seeing two long-haired young men gallivanting around the narrow corridors of the house, he emerged from the room and asked his daughter, “Who are those two young men with the long hair?” She wasn’t sure to whom her father was referring but then it dawned on her that he meant Clif and Will. “Those are your two oldest grandsons,” she said. Margaret Truman then beckoned her two adolescent sons to give their grandfather a proper greeting. “Worried about being summoned to the inner sanctum, I followed Will downstairs,” Clif wrote, “through the dining room, and to the study where Grandpa was still standing, one hand on his cane, the other on the doorway. His dark gray suit seemed too big, his tie and collar loose around his neck. His face was gaunt, and his eyes looked huge behind his thick glasses. But there was something about him that made him seem anything but frail. As we approached, he didn’t say anything, just looked us up and down, his mouth set.”

  “‘Hello, Grandpa,’ Clif said.

  “‘What was that?’ Truman replied, as if he did not hear properly.

  “‘We just came to say hello,’ Clif said, in a louder voice.

  “His grandfather then assumed a presidential mien and replied, ‘Well, do it then.’”

  Soon enough, the boys’ rebelliousness extended beyond long hair to cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. The Park Avenue home was now the site of rambunctious adolescent partying, most likely without parental knowledge. Will’s classmate at St. Bernard’s and later at Andover, Richard Riker, said his older sister, who was at Brearley and then Andover, delighted in procuring marijuana for him and his St. Bernard’s friends when they were in eighth grade. “My sister got us stoned a bunch of times,” he said. Riker also remembered that Will lost his virginity in eighth grade, probably at his house with one of his sister’s friends.

  Riker recalled that one day on the Madison Avenue bus on the way to St. Bernard’s for eighth-grade classes, they started teasing each other. “I definitely was sassing him because I liked to sass,” he said. “I remember we were discussing it on the bus. I said, ‘Just because you’re the grandson of the president of the United States. Just because…’—I was saying this loud on the bus. He was banging me. He was really embarrassed. He’s like, ‘Shut up. Shut up.’” But Riker persisted. “Just because your father’s the managing editor of the New York Times, just because your mother’s Margaret Truman Daniel, that doesn’t mean you can…”

  Will was getting increasingly upset with the teasing. “He was elbowing me and telling me to stop,” Riker continued. “I could see he was uncomfortable. Of course, I was just teasing. Maybe any kid would be embarrassed, but it sticks in my mind.”

  Will also became irritated at the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon. On May 8, 1970—Harry Truman’s eighty-sixth birthday—Nixon held a press conference and was asked whether he was starting to feel isolated in the White House because of increasing criticism of his Vietnam policy, in particular his decision to bomb Cambodia. “People should have the right to speak out as they do in the House, in the Senate, in the media, and in the universities,” Nixon said. “The only difference is that, of all these people—and I refer particularly to some of my lively critics in the House and Senate—they have the luxury of criticism. I was once a Senator and a House Member; I thought back to this when I called Harry Truman today and wished him well on his eighty-sixth birthday, to some of the rather rugged criticisms that I directed in his direction. They have the luxury of criticism because they can criticize and if it doesn’t work out then they can gloat over it, or if it does work out, the criticism will be forgotten. I don’t have that luxury.” For whatever reason, the two oldest Daniel brothers were aware of Nixon’s reference to their grandfather. In a letter written that same day on the family’s 830 Park Avenue stationery, Will and Clif wrote Nixon: “We resent the use of our grandfather’s name in your television interview. If you have to lean on somebody, don’t lean on us.”

  * * *

  AFTER ST. BERNARD’S, CLIF WENT off to Milton Academy, in Milton, Massachusetts. By his own admission, he was not a very good student at St. Bernard’s. His only A came in handwriting. By contrast, Will was a very good student. His raw intelligence and good grades began to change the dynamic between the two brothers. Whereas when they were younger, Clif used to torment Will physically, by the time Clif headed off to Milton, Will had started to turn the tables on him. “I had been the older brother, the older, larger, meaner brother,” Clif said. “And Will just seemed to decide that he wasn’t going to take that crap anymore, and he began to treat me with disdain. And I don’t blame him. It really sort of flipped around. And he began to sort of take the upper hand mentally that way. I wasn’t inclined at that point to punch him or chase him around. We were too old. He was really smart. And that’s what he used. I wasn’t as bright as he was. And it showed. He got the grades.”

  In September 1972, Clifton Daniel, having been relieved of his managing editor duties sometime earlier, agreed to take over the management of the paper’s Washington bureau. Of course, in his new position, which did not start until the following year, the Daniels would have to move to Washington. “The Times had a devil of a time getting my mother to move back to Washington,” Clif wrote, “and wound up having to buy her a Mercedes as a bribe.”

  Around the same time, Will was starting to consider where he would go to high school. Milton seemed like a logical place for Will to consider. Will, though, did not want to go to high school with his brother. He had set his sights higher: on Andover. He had the grades and the pedigree to pull it off.

  On Christmas Day 1972 came word that Harry Truman was in a coma and was not expected to live much longer. When Margaret Truman came down the stairs of the Daniels’ apartment to tell her sons the news, she was crying. “This was only the th
ird time in my life I’d seen her cry,” Clif said. The first was after President Kennedy had been assassinated. The second time was a few years later, on April Fools’ Day, when Clif and Will played a joke on their mother by pretending Will had broken his arm.

  Truman died early the next morning, without regaining consciousness. He was eighty-eight years old. That afternoon, Clifton Daniel and his four sons flew to Kansas City, Missouri. From there, they were driven, in silence, to Independence.

  In the photo that appeared on the front page of the New York Times of the family walking behind the president’s casket at the funeral in Independence, what distinguished both Clif and Will was their long, unruly hair—Clif’s was dark; Will’s was blond.

  An offended reader sent the two boys the picture with their hair outlined in black marker, and in the margin he had scrawled the words, “To appear at your grandfather’s funeral with such God-awful hair is disrespectful, sick and sad. No wonder your grandmother stayed at home.” Clif later wrote, “Will and I pinned the scrawled clipping up on the bulletin board, showed it to visiting friends, and had a lot of good laughs over it.”

  Whereas once upon a time, being Harry Truman’s grandson was of little moment to most people, for a period of time after his death, there was no getting around it. “His popularity began to soar,” Clif wrote. “Books were published. There were television specials and magazine articles. People, often people I didn’t know, began to make the connection between my name and his.” Eventually, Clif made his peace with being the grandson of Harry Truman. In 1995, he wrote Growing Up with My Grandfather and published a book of his grandmother’s letters to his grandfather. He is honorary chairman of the board of trustees of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute and was the former head of public relations at Truman College, in Chicago. He has been working on a book about his grandfather’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.