For Will, coming to grips with his family legacy would be much, much more difficult, and it cannot be said with certainty that he ever really did it.
* * *
ANDOVER WAS A PLACE WHERE the working assumption—however flawed—was that a minor celebrity (such as the grandson of a former president of the United States) could find a modicum of anonymity. St. Bernard’s sent four boys out of a class of twenty-five to Andover in September 1973, including Will and his friends Richard Riker and Will Iselin. As I’ve mentioned, Will Daniel, Will Iselin, and I lived together for our first year in Nathan Hale West. Will’s first-year written reports, from both Reverend Pease, our housemaster, and his teachers, hint at a multitude of mismatched priorities. In his December 1973 note home to Will’s parents, Pease observed that after his first trimester at the school, although Will had “worn well”—a wonderful old preppy expression that one can easily imagine George H. W. Bush saying about his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft—he could “sometimes be rather easily distracted, drifting off to Bruce [MacWilliams’s] or Jamie [Clark’s] or Will [Iselin’s] room”—no mention of what might be going on at these gatherings but the implication was clear enough—“or immersing himself in the full volume throb of his phonograph when perhaps there is more work to be done.” But, Pease noted, Will was “generally sensible about his obligations.”
There were some early signs, though, that Will was not necessarily going to meet other people’s expectations of him or how he should behave, either socially or academically. Jack Richards taught Will a social science class. They could not have been more different: Richards epitomized the hail fellow, well met quality of Andover during the Kemper and Sizer years; Will was a brash and gimlet-eyed New Yorker into flaunting the rules. Will disappointed him. Richards thought he should have done better. “In short, I wish Will had committed himself to the course more,” he wrote. “Perhaps he didn’t like it—but I think he could have gotten a little more out of it if he had put more in. As a person: here, too, I suspect still uncommitted. He’s sampling. I hope he’ll join up one day.” In the winter trimester of his first year at Andover, Will failed his math exam. His teacher noted that this was actually an improvement over the fall. “His manner of tackling the material was more thorough and reflected understanding and insight,” he wrote, but then added, “The personal spark that was evident earlier” in the fall “wasn’t as noticeable this winter.”
Things didn’t get much better for Will in the spring trimester. In his June 1974 letter home to the Daniels, in Washington, Pease noted the comments from his teachers and also referenced a phone call he had had with Will’s father at the beginning of the term. “Several of us had the impression,” he wrote, that Will “was showing signs of disenchantment with” Andover and “was testing a number of the rules of the School, and the social limitations on the campus.”
Will Daniel was a regular of Upper Left, the dining haunt of the stoners. Will Zogbaum remembered meeting Will in the dining hall and discussing a philosophy text that Will was reading for one of his classes. “He was explaining about the difference between different kinds of knowledge,” Zogbaum said, “and I had some response which to him indicated that I had some understanding, whether or not I actually did. And that was sort of the watershed moment where he said, ‘This guy is okay and he can be my friend.’ And so I started hanging out with Will.” He was infatuated. “I was just a puppy dog following him,” he said. “I was just so thrilled to be accepted by him at all. I think that was that ethereal quality that just sort of made him seem bigger than life for me.”
After leaving Nathan Hale, Bruce MacWilliams and Will Daniel roomed together in Draper Cottage, a late-nineteenth-century house a bit removed from the main part of Andover’s campus. “We bonded over music,” Bruce explained. “We were also experimenting around smoking pot in that freshman year. We smoked a lot of pot together, and that bonded us, because we were kind of rebels.” Unlike Bruce, Will “ended up just getting kind of lost in drugs,” he said. Bruce said that he did not know anything about Will’s lineage until they became roommates; in other words, he knew Will for a full year before Will let the cat out of the bag, which of course was in keeping with what his brother said was his desire: to keep himself as far away as possible from the Truman thing. “He hid all that stuff, but when we became roommates at Draper Cottage, he told me, ‘Yeah, you know who my grandfather is?’ … Can you imagine that, those shoes to step into?” Bruce said. “He was a rebel,” he concluded about Will’s years at Andover. “He was getting through Andover in order to kind of fulfill an obligation. But he was a loner, and he was a recluse. And he was into music and his own world, and he had his own little following, but he was not very social at all. He was social with his particular crowd, but you had to come and be let into his circle, I think.”
By the end of his second year at Andover, Will was briefly on the honor roll, but the success did not carry over into the next year and Will found more solace in the “softer” coursework, like music and drawing. Christopher Zamore, Will’s new house counselor at Draper Cottage, noted in a letter to the Daniels that Will was an iconoclast. “For the second year in a row, when the cottage got dressed up for the yearbook picture, Will refused to adopt the common standard of dress (this year, a coat and tie) and wore his black felt hat and cowboy boots,” Zamore wrote. “Will has a strong dislike of the uniform and the standard, but his individuality and slight eccentricity are a pleasant addition to Draper.… I don’t know exactly where Will’s talents and interests lie and what plans he has in the future, so I am not sure I can give him any better advice than to choose a well-rounded course of study. Perhaps you could speak to him about his courses and advise him as to his future course of study.” It is unlikely his aloof parents took Zamore’s advice to heart. And in any event, Will held fast to his curricular game plan. And did well enough.
Then, in April 1976, came the inevitable “disciplinary trouble,” as Jack Richards euphemistically wrote in a letter home. Given Will’s ongoing flaunting of the rules at Andover, the violation he got disciplined for—“absent[ing] himself from his dormitory in the wee hours of last Saturday morning”—seemed almost comic. But rules are rules, and Richards informed the Daniels that Will’s violation of them “rendered him liable to dismissal.” Instead, though, he was given the “substantially more modest” punishment of “Censure,” the school’s official slap on the wrist, an “official statement of disapproval of Will’s actions” that became a permanent part of his record.
Whether getting caught breaking the rules was the catalyst Will needed to get serious about Andover, by the end of his Upper year, he seemed to have found his stride and his performance improved, according to letters home. For his final year at Andover, Will moved to Stuart House. His house counselor was Ted Warren, who had taught him the previous year. In his December 1976 letter to Will’s parents, Warren reported that Will’s academic performance was again “superior,” and that he failed to get an honors grade in only one class. “He is respectful, and a delight to have in the dorm.”
That same spring, Will called home to his parents’ house in Washington to find that they and his older brother, Clif, then finishing up his first year (of only two) at the University of North Carolina, had flown off together to Athens, Greece.
“They’ve gone to Greece?” Will asked the housekeeper, Eulalee, when she told him this bit of news.
“That’s right,” she said.
“What, you mean like Greece, New York? Greece, Indiana? Greece, where?”
“No, Greece, Greece,” she said. “They went to Athens, Greece. Clifton, too.” There was a long silence.
“Clifton went, too,” he said. “They just all left the country and went to Greece?”
“That’s right,” Eulalee replied.
After another long pause, Will said, “Okay, fine. Thanks.” He called her back two more times just to make sure he had understood the situation correctly.
* * *
NOT SURPRISINGLY, GIVEN HIS PEDIGREE, Will proved to be a very fine—if a little inchoate—creative writer at Andover. His writing showed up publicly in the January 1976 issue of the Mirror, the school’s literary magazine, which he was the editor of during his senior year. In his short story “The Drowning Fly,” Will tried to capture the loneliness of Norman Humphries, a sixty-seven-year-old New York City cabdriver who never quite realized his ambitions, however modest. His father had been a successful restaurateur. But that was long ago. His wife had passed away the year before. “The ensuing decades had hardly feigned to help Normy realize his glorious ambitions,” he wrote in slightly overwrought prose. “The cozy brownstone on 70th Street that he had raised, floor by floor in his youthful imagination had degenerated to the reality of one mean, bare room on Ninth Avenue and 47th, with flaking walls and sagging linoleum. His Mercedes Benz sedan was an aging taxi, bearing the odors of expensive liquors and tobacco from the breath of those who had realized the fulfillment of his fantasy. He had always cursed their successes and hated passionately their disgusting flippancy which so perfectly contrasted with his despair.”
There was a whole lot of despair. “Joys and tragedies were not clearly defined in Normy’s mind any longer,” Will wrote. “They only represented fuzzy stopping points in the torporific flow of his rapidly collapsing consciousness, for he was wearily, inevitable [sic] growing old.” Will’s protagonist took comfort in a local bar and the friends he saw there regularly. There were the occasional daydreams about his beloved wife. When he woke from one such daydream, he saw the aforementioned fly drowning in a glass of water on the windowsill.
It is tempting to think of the short story as subtle autobiography or foreshadowing. But who knows? Maybe it was just a seventeen-year-old’s odd flight of fancy.
* * *
AT THE ANDOVER GRADUATION that June—a lovely and traditional ceremony, replete with bagpipers wearing kilts, held in front of the grand Samuel Phillips Hall in the center of the campus—my parents and my grandmother Margaret Hieken, my mother’s mother, sat in a row right in front of Will’s parents. My mother’s family was from St. Louis, where my grandfather, a watchmaker, had settled after emigrating from Eastern Europe. Harry Truman was a big deal for anyone who lived in Missouri. Upon realizing that Harry Truman’s only child was sitting behind her, my grandmother, a very proud and dignified woman not prone to fits of random public adulation, turned to Margaret Truman Daniel and said that she was from St. Louis and was a great admirer of Harry Truman. Apparently, that was not what Will’s mother wanted to hear. She mumbled something and turned away. The message was clear: Bug off. Margaret Truman Daniel’s reaction to Margaret Hieken became lore in our family: The one time my grandmother did a bit of celebrity gawking, she was rebuffed with extreme prejudice.
But from Will’s mother’s perspective, her ungraciousness was nearly understandable: By 1977, she was probably just sick and tired of people telling her about her father and what he meant to them. We like to hope that people such as Margaret Truman Daniel and Clifton Daniel would be charming and appreciative at such moments, but often they are not. This reality is always a bit jarring.
Will Daniel grappled his entire life with how to handle the fame and adulation that came from being the grandchild of the president of the United States. Were people cozying up to him because of him or because of his grandfather or because of his parents? In truth, Will detested his family pedigree and would often go out of his way to avoid the subject, to the point where months or even years would go by without his friends and professional colleagues having any idea that he was related to a US president. That’s the way Will wanted it, and the way he figured was the best to cope with his family’s fame and notoriety. He could pull off this bit of alchemy in the days before social media dominated our world because his last name was Daniel, not Truman, and because he couldn’t have looked less like Harry Truman if he tried.
Cha Cha Hartwell began dating Will soon after graduation. They ran in the same New York social circles, but hadn’t known each other well at Andover until they both participated in the same community service program during our senior year. After graduation, they sublet an apartment together in Allston, near Cambridge, for two months. By definition, it was destined to be a short-term relationship. He was heading to Yale, in New Haven; she was going to Brown, in Providence. “I had my shitty little job and he had his shitty little job,” she said. “He was working in a warehouse moving boxes.” But she remembered that while she was catching up on her People magazine reading that summer, Will was reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “To me, that is a great example of who he was,” she said. She added that Will “didn’t do casual” or “mediocrity,” or superficial. He was “one of the most brilliant people” she has known, “very demanding on himself” and “very intense.” She explained that Will “was always up for a wonderful debate or conversation, philosophical or political or anything like that” but that he wasn’t particularly interested in the “day-to-day” and chitchat of people’s lives, the How are you? I’m fine conversations.
He was her first love. “That’s always pretty special,” she said. And then, at the end of the summer, he ended the relationship. “It got to a point where it was just too close to the bone and it was time for him to move on,” she said. Her heart was broken. “I’m still getting over him,” she said, joking only a little. Over the years, they did their best to stay in touch. “I’m a loyal friend,” she said. She would write to Will every Christmas. “It would take him a few months to write back,” she said. “There were a couple of letters that got returned because he kept on moving and so I finally just started sending my letters to his parents’ address” on Park Avenue. His letter back berated her. “I’m now 35 years old,” he wrote. “I do have my own place. Believe it or not I’ve moved out of my parents’ house.” But when she sent a letter to the new address he had given her, she never heard back from him. He had moved again.
* * *
WILL HAD BEEN A SHOE-IN AT YALE, probably due more to his family’s stature than his academic performance at Andover. But if this bothered him, he showed no outward signs of it. He wasn’t caught up in the school’s elite image or the cachet it conferred when dropped into certain conversations. “Yale was important to him because he really felt it was the best education he could get,” Hartwell said. “It was going to challenge him the most.” Miriam Cytryn first crossed paths with Will one day at Rudy’s, a New Haven bar frequented by generations of Yale students. She was the daughter of Holocaust survivors who settled in Forest Hills, Queens. Amid beers, the group they were with started talking politics, and eventually they got around to weighing the wisdom of Truman’s decision to drop the two nuclear bombs on Japan. “This blond-haired guy at the other end of the table was taking a very hard stance,” Cytryn recalled. He was arguing that it was “irresponsible” without better information for Truman to have dropped those bombs. He was publicly questioning the decisions of his own grandfather, and not for the last time, either. “You are the president of the United States and you have some obligation to not act until you know more,” he said to the group.
Cytryn disagreed, vociferously. She broke into the debate. “I may have an unpopular view,” she said, “but it’s unfair to go back and think about what the president knew then with what we know now.” She had been raised by her father to believe that Truman had been “good for the Jews.” Eventually the conversation shifted to other topics. As she was leaving with her friend, Jim Logue, the son of the mayor of New Haven, said to her, “Do you know who you are arguing with?”
“Will something,” she said.
“You have no idea who he is, do you?” he asked.
Will and Miriam clicked and became lifelong friends. She was the person Will would invite to join him at important family gatherings and ceremonies. The women who became romantically involved with Will tended to be short-term relationships or not people h
e felt comfortable introducing to his parents. But Miriam was special to Will. Even though their New York City backgrounds could not be more different, they got each other. They joked about how while their parents may have once upon a time paid the same amount for a Park Avenue triplex or a house in Forest Hills, over the years the value of the two diverged materially. She visited Will at 830 Park. She visited Will at the Daniel house on Fire Island. She was his date at Clif’s wedding in Wilmington, North Carolina, and then at the reception at Wrightsville Beach. She was with him at the christening of a nuclear submarine named after his grandfather. He came to Passover seders at the Cytryn house in Forest Hills. She found him to be warm, intelligent, funny, and misunderstood. He could also be aloof, shy, cool, and terribly sarcastic. “There were a lot of different pieces of him and so all of those things ring true and yet I can come up with a lot of examples of how engaging he was,” she said. “And I think a lot of it depended upon who he was with. I was someone I would say that over many, many, many years, he trusted, and so there was no argument or front that we couldn’t get over or through. The expectation was that we were family and that was a natural part of a relationship.” He dubbed her Space Station Mir.
After his freshman year at Yale, Will took a sabbatical. During his year off, Tom Hartman, our Andover classmate who was then at the University of Texas, picked up Will in New Orleans and together they began a summer road trip from Texas to the Pacific Coast of the United States. They went from New Orleans to Austin, from Austin to El Paso, and then to the Grand Canyon, where by complete coincidence they ran into another Andover graduate who was working as a park ranger that summer. From the Grand Canyon, the two friends went to Los Angeles and then drove on US 1 to San Francisco, to Portland, and to Seattle. They had one scary moment when the clutch of Tom’s Saab broke as they were heading out of the Oregon hills into Portland. Will had never driven a clutch before and they ended up coasting into Portland—while constantly on the lookout for those gravel-filled truck runoffs that line treacherous highways across the country—to get a new clutch. In Washington State, they stayed on an island near Seattle with another Andover friend. They parted ways there and Will flew home. But the trip did not end well. And where once Tom would invite Will and a bunch of other Andover friends, including Will Iselin (Will Daniel’s longtime childhood friend), to his family’s house in Vermont, after the road trip during the summer of 1978, Tom no longer invited Will. “They were traveling together, and it ended up very badly, and Tom has really bad memories of Will,” Will Iselin explained. (Hartman declined to be interviewed about Will.)
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