Truman (160 page)

Yet it was not for the decisions of his first months in office that he would be remembered, Truman speculated.

The decision to go into Korea, he said, was the most important of his time in office. Korea was the turning point of the Cold War. Whereas free nations had failed to meet the test before—failed to stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the Nazi takeover in Austria and Czechoslovakia—“this time we met the test.” Yet the horrific potential of modern war had not been allowed to get out of hand. That was what was so important to understand. The issue was world peace in the nuclear age.

In his State of the Union message of the week before, which he had sent to Congress rather than delivering personally before a joint session, Truman had reported that in recent thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok Island in the Pacific, “we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy,” which was correctly understood to mean that the age of the H-bomb had arrived. The President who had ushered in the atomic bomb in 1945 was departing in 1953 at the start of a new era of destructive power “dwarfing,” as he reported to Congress, “the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

His intent in Korea, he now said, was to prevent World War III. “Starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable….”

How then would the Cold War end, he asked. How and when?

He offered a simple forecast, a long-range prediction that, at heart, was a statement of faith. His whole life Truman had been moved primarily by faith. Now in this last chance to talk to the country, in his attempt to read the history of the future, he trusted again to an unwavering faith. To millions who listened then, it seemed a striking expression of the best instincts of America. Read many years later, in the light of what happened at the end of the Cold War, it would seem utterly extraordinary in its prescience. He appeared to know even then the essence of what in fact would transpire, and, more importantly, why.

He was “glad the whole world will have a chance to see how simply and how peacefully our American system transfers the vast power of the Presidency….” Looking back at his time in office, he said, he had no regrets, and he thanked the people for their support.

The speech, indeed Truman’s whole handling of his departure, was praised on all sides. The speech was the finest of his presidency, it was said; he had finished strong. Walter Lippmann, who had been so consistently critical for years, wrote that

Inauguration day was as sunny as it had been four years earlier, only warmer, with blue skies and again tremendous crowds. The ceremonies for Dwight David Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth President of the United States and the first Republican to hold the office in twenty years, went smoothly.

Up early, Truman spent an hour or so winding up odds and ends in his office and saying goodbye to the secretarial staff and Secret Service agents. Relaxed, exuding good cheer, he popped in and out of the other offices. “Looks mighty bare in here,” he said. He was wearing the formal gray-striped trousers and Oxford gray coat that had been decided on as the inaugural attire. Many of the staff had brought their children to see him and say goodbye. At 10:30 there was a small reception for the Cabinet and their wives in the Red Room, as Truman waited for the President-elect to arrive.

The papers had been making much of a presidential hat crisis. Without consulting Truman, Eisenhower had announced he would be wearing a homburg, instead of the traditional top hat. So what would Truman wear, it was wondered? He had no wish to have his last quarrel over a hat, Truman told his staff. He would wear a homburg.

Further speculation had followed over whether the Eisenhowers would call on the President and First Lady before Inauguration Day, as was customary. Truman’s hopes, it was said, “remained touchingly, almost boyishly high” that the tradition would be honored, and when the Eisenhowers declined an invitation to lunch, he felt insulted. Reportedly the general did not wish to enter the house until he was President. When, at 11:30, the Eisenhowers arrived at the North Portico, to start the drive to the Capitol, they refused to come in for a cup of coffee, but sat in the car waiting. Only when the Trumans appeared did they step out of the car to greet them.

“It was a shocking moment,” recalled CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid, who was on the porch close by. “Truman was gracious and he had just been snubbed. He showed his superiority by what he did.”

From the way the two men looked as they drove off in the big Open Lincoln, J. B. West remembered, “I was glad I wasn’t in that car.”

“I ride with Ike in car No. 1 along with Joe Martin and Styles Bridges. Bess and Margie ride with Mrs. Ike,” Truman recorded in his diary. “Conversation is general—on the crowd, the pleasant day, the orderly turnover, etc.”

Later accounts of what was said would differ, but both Truman and Eisenhower would recall an exchange over the presence of Eisenhower’s only son, Major John Eisenhower, at the inaugural ceremonies. Eisenhower asked Truman who had ordered John back from Korea, and according to Eisenhower, Truman said simply, “I did.” But according to Truman what he said was, “The President thought it was right and proper for your son to witness the swearing-in of his father to the Presidency.” In any event, three days later, Eisenhower would send Truman a gracious letter thanking him for “the very many courtesies you extended to me and mine during the final stages of your Administration…I especially want to thank you for your thoughtfulness in ordering my son home from Korea…and even more especially for not allowing either him or me to know that you had done so.”

Truman had been President for seven years, nine months, for 2,841 days, and at noon it was over. He tried to pay attention to Eisenhower’s inaugural address, he later wrote, but his mind was on other things.

Less than half an hour later, he was being driven in a closed limousine back from the Capitol toward Georgetown when at 7th and D streets the driver stopped for a red light. It was the first time that a car in which Truman was riding had had to stop for a traffic light since 1945.

A farewell luncheon for the Trumans, before their train, had been arranged at the Achesons’ home. It was to be a small, private party for the Cabinet, White House aides, and a few close friends, but as the car swung into P Street a crowd of several hundred people, massed in front of the red-brick house, set up a cheer. Truman was astonished. “The street in front of Dean’s house,” he wrote, “was full of people who cheered as if I were coming in instead of going out.”

Swallowing hard, he told them, “I appreciate this more than any enthusiastic meeting I attended as President, Vice President and Senator. I’m just plain Mr. Truman now, a private citizen.”

Elsewhere in the city, as the Eisenhower inaugural parade filled Pennsylvania Avenue, others were telephoning friends to say that perhaps, even with the city tied up in traffic, they ought to try to get down to Union Station so that at least someone would be there to see the Trumans off.

Margaret would describe the lunch at the Achesons’ as “an absolutely wonderful affair full of jokes and laughter and a few tears.” By the time the party broke up, the crowd in P Street reached the length of the block. Traffic was backed up far beyond. When the Trumans went for their train, thousands were at the station to see him, wave to him, cheer and call, “So long, Harry!” “Good luck, Harry!” People pressed forward reaching for his hand.

The
Ferdinand Magellan,
provided as a courtesy by the new President, had been attached to a regular B&O train bound for Missouri. The police formed a flying wedge to get the Trumans through the crowd.

Old friends, Democratic senators, Supreme Court justices, members of the Cabinet, generals and ambassadors, piled aboard to shake Truman’s hand one more time. “There’s the best friend in the world,” Acheson said above the noise, when a reporter tapped him on the arm. “There’s nothing like that man.”

He kept smiling, waving. Bess looked radiant.

“I can’t adequately express my appreciation for what you are doing. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred,” Truman said from the rear platform. Then, chopping his hands in the air with the familiar gesture, he said with a grin, “And that’s just what I intend to do!”

At 6:30, with the crowd singing “Auld Lang Syne,” the train began pulling slowly out of the station, until it was beyond the lighted platform. It had been a long road from Independence to the White House, and now Truman was going home.

“Crowd at Harper’s Ferry…and it was reported to me at every stop all night long,” he recorded. “Same way across Indiana and Illinois.”

F
or as far back nearly as he could remember, Truman had held to the ideal of the mythical Roman hero Cincinnatus, the patriot farmer who assumes command in his country’s hour of peril, then returns to the plow. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be like Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday,” the farmer from Grandview had written long ago to Bessie Wallace. It was an ideal upon which the nation had been founded. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, in their inaugural procession through the Rotunda of the Capitol, had passed by John Trumbull’s immense painting of George Washington as Cincinnatus—Washington resigning his commission to the Congress as commander-in-chief of the Army, Washington, farmer and hero, turning away from power in 1783. Now, in 1953, having become considerably more than constable, having turned by his own choice from the most power ever vested in a single human being in all history until then, Truman would note in his diary that Cincinnatus knew not only when but how to lay down power.

It was the common belief in America, Truman wrote, that anyone could become President, and then, when the time was up, go back to being “just anybody again.” Recalling his years in the White House, he would say, “I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I would go back to.” In actual practice, however, it was not so simple. A cartoon in the
Saturday Review
showed a small boy with glasses and a book under his arm, a boy very like Truman had been, walking beside a friend who said, “O.K., so you grow up to be President, and you even get reelected, that’s still only eight years. What do you do with the rest of your life?” With his pen, Truman scrawled boldly across the bottom, “God
only
knows!!!”

He had traveled home from Washington unprotected by Secret Service agents and there were to be none watching over him. He had come home without salary or pension. He had no income or support of any kind from the federal government other than his Army pension of $112.56 a month. He was provided with no government funds for secretarial help or office space, not a penny of expense money, and while he and Bess had managed to put aside part of his $100,000-a-year salary as President during his second term, primarily in government bonds, it was in all probability a modest amount. Estimates at the time ranged as high as a quarter of a million dollars, but there was no evidence to support such a figure, or any sum. In fact, it is known that Truman had been forced to take out a loan at the National Bank in Washington in his last weeks as President, to tide him over, though the amount was never disclosed.

With his brother and sister, he had inherited Martha Ellen Truman’s farm land at Grandview, and while official disposition of the old house at 219 North Delaware had yet to be made, he and Bess would soon become joint owners. Certainly, as things were, there could be no extravagant living. In effect they were land-rich only. The estate of the supposedly well-to-do Madge Wallace, not including the house, totaled all of $33,543.60, which after being divided four ways among Bess and her brothers, left Bess with a cash inheritance of $8,385.90. Indeed, among the reasons why they had come back to Independence and the old house was that financially they had little other choice.

The town buzzed with speculation over where the Trumans might live now, whether they would stay on in “the old Wallace place,” which to many seemed unlikely for someone who had been President of the United States. “Rumors have it that they will buy a fine home and live in Kansas City,” wrote Sue Gentry in the
Examiner.
“Other rumors predict they will build a home on farm land Mr. Truman owns at Grandview, a part of his old home place.” A local attorney and old friend of the family, Rufus Burrus, had picked out an elegant house in a new section of town that he thought perfect, much more suitable for a former President. But all such talk was beside the point, finances notwithstanding. The Trumans had no intention of living anywhere else, no interest in living somewhere warmer or less expensive or more glamorous.

Herbert Hoover, the country’s one other surviving former President, was a man of wealth who lived in style at the Waldorf Towers in New York. Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, none of those who had faced the prospect of being a former President since the start of the century, had had worries about money; none but Calvin Coolidge who, downcast over the death of a son and in poor health, lived less than three years after leaving office. Theodore Roosevelt had gone storming off to Africa to hunt big game; Taft became a professor of law at Yale, then Chief Justice of the United States. Wilson with his wealthy second wife, retired in style to a twenty-two-room house on S Street in Washington and lived a few more years in semi-seclusion. For his part, Truman had neither wealth to sustain him nor any particular prospects at the moment, no plans for future employment. His only intention, as he said, was to do nothing—accept no position, lend his name to no organization or transaction—that would exploit or “commercialize” the prestige and dignity of the office of the President.

He had had a number of offers already from undisclosed organizations for jobs paying $100,000 a year or more, and calling for little commitment of his time. A letter from a Miami real estate developer inviting him to become “chairman, officer, or stockholder, at a figure of not less than $100,000” would turn up later in his files, but what the other propositions were is not clear, though none apparently was from a corporation or organization of particular renown. In any event, he had turned them all down and would continue to do so. His name was not for sale. He would take no fees for commercial endorsements or for lobbying or writing letters or making phone calls. He would accept no “consulting fees,” nor any gifts that might appear as a product endorsement on his part. Offered a new Toyota, by Toyota’s American public relations firm, as a demonstration of improved good feelings between Japan and America, he flatly refused. Moreover, he wrote in response, there was no possibility of his ever driving a foreign car of any make. He believed in driving cars made in America.

He liked to say he was just a plain American citizen again. It confirmed his democratic philosophy. It pleased people and pleased him. But the difficulties in practice were more than he had anticipated. “I still don’t feel like a completely private citizen and I don’t suppose I ever will,” he told a reporter. “It’s still almost impossible to do as other people do, even though I’ve tried. You can’t always be as you want to be after you’ve been under those bright lights.”

Further, he missed the bright lights. He missed the pace of the presidency, felt strange without the constant pressures. He missed the people terribly. In thanking Dean Acheson for the farewell luncheon, he wrote that he had never been to such a party “where everybody seemed to be having the best time they ever had.” Then he added, “I hope we will never lose contact.”

The cheering throng that welcomed the Trumans home at the Independence depot the night of their return exceeded all expectations. Perhaps ten thousand people were waiting in the cold when the train came round the bend at 9:03, an hour late because of other crowds at earlier stops across Missouri. Truman was astonished, overjoyed. “Well, Harry, this makes it all worth it,” Bess said to him.

They had arrived the night of Wednesday, January 21. The morning after, asked by NBC correspondent Ray Scherer what was the first thing he planned to do, Truman said he was going to “carry the grips up to the attic,” a remark that would become famous. (Scherer, like Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press, had accompanied Truman from Washington on the train, as had Roger Tubby.) But in another hour, Truman was on his way out the door, heading downtown to Kansas City in a state highway patrol car, riding up front with Sergeant Art Bell, a former Battery D “boy” who had been assigned by the governor as a temporary driver. Truman went to see his new offices, four corner rooms on the eleventh floor of the Federal Reserve Bank Building, at 10th and Grand. The faithful Rose Conway was already on duty sorting through several thousand letters, mostly expressions of praise and gratitude, all of which Truman felt obliged to answer.

There was no official welcome in Kansas City, but this seemed to bother him not at all. When, with Roger Tubby, he walked five blocks to the Muehlebach for lunch with his brother Vivian, and few passers-by took notice, Truman kept on smiling and talking as though all were perfectly fine.

The following day the weather turned foul, with a sudden drop in temperature—down to the 20s—accompanied by a biting north wind, sleet, and snow. Ignoring the weather, Truman set off for Grandview, to look over the site for the library he planned to build. Roger Tubby had arranged for some of the local press to join him and the group made a memorable picture, the old President, his collar up against the wind, tramping across the snow-covered fields, talking rapidly of his childhood and of his $1,500,000 project and what it would mean to the young students “who will take over the destiny of our country,” while a half-dozen reporters, his former White House press secretary, and one-time comrade-in-arms Sergeant Bell in his state police uniform, all tried their best to keep up and stay warm.

The library was the “big interest now.” Truman’s papers, for the time being, were stored at the county courthouse in Kansas City. Since the time of George Washington, it had been commonly understood that a President’s papers were his own personal property, and that he was free to do with them as he wished. The Franklin Roosevelt Library had been established at Hyde Park, New York, the first so-called “Presidential Library,” on the grounds of the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson, but Roosevelt had not lived to take part in the project. Truman, before leaving office, had sent George Elsey out from Washington to look over the farm with his brother Vivian and architect Edward Neild. Vivian had led them to the spot where he thought the library ought to go: a low-lying, swampy corner close to the railroad tracks. When Elsey and Neild pointed to a more attractive site on a high rise with views in all directions, Vivian objected. That was good land, Vivian said, and he saw no reason to waste good land on “any old dang library.”

Truman had already made some sketches. He wanted the building to look like his Grandfather Solomon Young’s house, the big house of his own childhood memories. Truman had made a rough drawing of the house as best he could remember it.

“A cold wind whipping around us,” Roger Tubby would record in his diary, “and he talks of the library. ‘This America of ours…we look out over the prairies, envision cities or universities and lo, they arise!’ ”

The former President, reported the
Examiner,
seemed to enjoy the brisk weather.

A few days later, on a Sunday, he set off early, before it was fully light, on his first walk through town, free of Sergeant Bell or bodyguards of any kind for the first time in more than seven years. He covered some fifteen blocks, rounding Jackson Square en route, and nothing he had done thus far, he later wrote, had given such a striking sense of being on his own at last. “More than any other single thing, this marked the abrupt change in my life.”

Speaking at a huge welcome-home banquet at the auditorium of the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, Truman said simply and from the heart, “There never is and never can be anything like coming back home.”

He bought Bess a new car, a four-door black Chrysler with white-wall tires, and started driving himself again. As sightseers and the curious kept coming around the house almost daily, he decided not to have the iron fence taken down. Often whole delegations—Girl Scouts, tourists—stood outside looking through the fence. “Is this where Truman lives?” a man called to him at seven one morning from a car at the curb.

He kept to the routine of the morning walks, kept up with the mail pouring into the office in Kansas City—72,000 pieces in the first two weeks alone. He refused to be idle. His name was painted in black block letters on the door marked 1107. He arrived regularly before nine each morning.

Nearly anyone who wished could come into the office to shake hands with him or visit. As he told a friend, “You don’t need an appointment to see me now.” Yet he was worse than alone, his friend Tom Evans would remember. “He was utterly
lost.
After all those years in the White House with somebody around to do everything for him, he didn’t know how to order a meal in a restaurant. He didn’t know when to tip. He didn’t even know how to call a cab and pay for it.” But as Evans also remembered, Truman never said a word of complaint.

At home the house seemed “quiet and too big,” with only Bess and Vietta Garr, who went to her own home after dinner. Every night, he and Bess would call Margaret in New York.

By early February, less than a month since the return, it began to look as though their financial worries were over. He was about to sign a book contract for a “fantastic sum,” Truman wrote to Acheson, and on February 12, the press reported that he had sold the exclusive worldwide rights to his memoirs to
Life
magazine for an undisclosed amount. In fact, the figure was $600,000—truly a fantastic sum in 1953—which, by a contract negotiated for him by Sam Rosenman, was to be paid in installments over five years.