Truman (162 page)

Professor Harris was dismissed, his place taken by another academic scholar, Morton Royce, a highly disorganized, excessively profane man, who continued on with the interviews, but ever so slowly, pressing Truman over and over for more complete and detailed answers, often returning to the same questions several times, and particularly about the atomic bomb. As a consequence, Truman grew extremely annoyed with Royce and the whole process.

The editor of
Life,
Ed Thompson, flew in from New York for a first look early in 1954. Truman had agreed to deliver 300,000 words by June 30, 1955. As it was, perhaps thirty-five pages of manuscript were ready. The raw material, Truman’s own recollections, Thompson thought “lively” and “honest.” But far greater progress was needed, and soon.

Morton Royce departed and two new writers were taken on, young Herbert Lee Williams, a doctoral candidate from the University of Missouri, and Francis H. Heller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas.

Williams would remember being astonished by the volume of official and private papers at hand:

Entering Truman’s office one morning in search of a reference book, Williams was also astonished to find the former President fixing himself a drink. (As Williams strongly disapproved of drinking, he would, as time went on, decline invitations to join Truman for lunch, which customarily began with “a little H
₂
O flavored with bourbon,” as Truman would say.)

As manuscript chapters began to emerge, they were reviewed page by page during lengthy sessions in Truman’s office, a good-sized room comfortably furnished with leather chairs, a flag, portraits of Jackson and Jefferson, and books across one wall. The windows faced west over a panoramic view of the city and the distant hills of Kansas. As someone on the staff read aloud, Truman would sit listening intently. “His approval or criticism was solicited almost paragraph by paragraph. The whole idea was to jog the memory of the man who had been there, to add the auto to the biography,” Williams would recall in an article somewhat vainly and inaccurately titled, “I Was Truman’s Ghost.” In fact, he was only a minor ghost among the several enlisted, and his participation was to be relatively brief.

As time went on, various members of Truman’s White House staff, as well as Dean Acheson, John Snyder, General Bradley, and others of Truman’s Cabinet would come to Kansas City to take part in these review sessions.

The man who had been rising early and going off to work every morning most of his long life had by now settled again into the old pattern. At the house on North Delaware the lights started coming on well before dawn, usually at 5:30, at the sound of the courthouse clock. His morning paper, the Kansas City
Times,
arrived shortly afterward, tossed over the iron fence from a passing car, and he would unlatch the front door and come down the porch steps in his shirtsleeves to retrieve the paper from the front walk.

About seven he would emerge again from the front door, in suit jacket and hat now, a walking cane in hand. He would go out the front gate—in turn unlocking, closing, and checking to see it was secure—then start off on his walk, a half hour tour that took him through the same neighborhoods, over much the same ground in memory, that he was covering in the memoirs. Across the street still was the little Victorian Noland house, occupied still by his Noland cousins, Ethel and Nellie. Rounding the corner from North Delaware, left onto Maple and heading east, “uptown” to the Square, he would pass the red-brick First Presbyterian Church where he and Bess had met in Sunday School.
(She had golden curls and has, to this day, the most beautiful eyes,
he was saying in the memoirs.) At the Square, Clinton’s drugstore was now Helzberg Jewelers, but looked not greatly different from when he had worked there so diligently as a boy
(…mopping the floors, sweeping the sidewalk, and having everything shipshape when Mr. Clinton came in).

The courthouse, the “new” courthouse as his generation still called it,
his
courthouse, held sway over the Square no less than ever, its white cupola catching the morning sun ahead of the rest of the town. Tourists would ask which was his office, which were his windows.
(The judges of these Missouri county courts are not judges in the usual sense, since the court is an administrative, not a judicial body….)

The town had greatly changed in the two decades since he had first gone to Washington. The town was still changing, growing. New sections of new houses seemed to spring up overnight. Traffic was heavier. The population was now past 40,000, more than five times what it had been when he was a boy. More and more, Independence was becoming a suburb of Kansas City. Yet the old part of town, the Square, the neighborhoods of his boyhood looked much like they always had, and he felt great affection for all of it.

Others who were up and about early often made an effort to say hello, to introduce themselves and shake his hand as he came down the sidewalk at his steady clip. “I always try to be as pleasant as I can,” he wrote in his diary. “They, of course, don’t know that I walk early to get a chance to think over things and get ready for work of the day.” If he didn’t know them, he usually knew something about someone they were related to or descended from, and these recollections always pleased him.

“Well, I went to Maple Ave., turned left ‘toward town’ and spoke to several people, turned south on Pleasant Street,” continues the diary account of one such morning.

His mother had never looked back, always forward, he liked to remind himself. It was part of her strength. With the work on his memoirs, and these daily tours through the old neighborhoods now after so many years, he was thinking more than ever of both parents.

He varied his route one day to another, but it hardly mattered. Whichever way he went was a walk through the past. The boyhood home at River and Waldo was still standing, as was the old house on South Crysler, near the depot.
(When we moved to Independence in December 1890, my father bought a big house on South Crysler Street with several acres of land….)

There was to be only one chapter about his early life, taking him from boyhood to his return from France in 1919. But it was a part of the story only he could tell, for which there were no file drawers to search, and the words would be his.

(In the fall of 1892 Grover Cleveland was re-elected over Benjamin Harrison, who had defeated him in 1888. My father was very much elated by Cleveland’s victory. He rode a beautiful gray horse in the torchlight parade and decorated the weather vane on the tower at the north-east corner of the house with a flag and bunting. The weather vane was a beautiful gilded rooster.)

Once at the White House, a magazine writer had remarked to him that his father had been a failure. How could he be called a failure, he had answered, if his son became President of the United States.

During the half hour or so that he was gone from the house, at about 7:15, Vietta Garr would arrive by taxi at the side gate to begin fixing breakfast. The schedule rarely varied. He would return through the front gate at 7:30, not to reemerge until roughly 8:15, but from the back porch this time and carrying an aluminum briefcase, with the manuscript pages he had brought home the night before. He would head for the garage. Then the two-tone green Dodge would be seen backing cautiously out the driveway and off he would go, west down Truman Road, the Kansas City skyline dead ahead and on sunny mornings shining like an artist’s picture of America on the rise.

His regular parking space was in an open lot a block from the office. He would pay a dollar in advance and walk to the bank building. Entering in the lobby, he would tip his hat to the elevator operator, Kay Walker, and greet her by name. By 8:45, he was at his desk.

“I have been working on the opening chapter of my purported memoirs,” Truman wrote to Dean Acheson from the office on January 28, 1954, trying to get to the bottom of why he found the task so very difficult.

On St. Patrick’s Day, he wrote again to tell Acheson he was thinking still about the relationship between history and government. “Our tribal instinct has not been eliminated by science and invention. We, as individuals, haven’t caught up physically or ethically with the atomic age. Will we?”

Perhaps their grandchildren would do better, though, he added, in his case this remained a hypothetical statement. (Margaret as yet had shown no signs of getting married.)

He sensed a change in how the country regarded him and was heartened by it. “The tone of my mail has changed completely. It still comes in by the bushel but there’s hardly a mean one in two hundred….”

The increase in interest and appreciation at home in Independence was even more striking. Automobiles and sightseeing buses now cruised slowly by on North Delaware nearly all day. When Bess sent some of his clothes to her church rummage sale, word spread that one item, an overcoat, had been worn at Potsdam—a silly claim since the meeting at Potsdam had taken place in midsummer, but the coat brought a big price just the same. A sign at the depot now proclaimed: “Independence, the Home of Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States”—a sign that annoyed Truman, who, with his concern for historical accuracy, insisted he was the thirty-second president since Cleveland served twice.

Some people in town, mainly among Republicans, thought no better of him than they had before. But they were a decided minority. By strong consensus the town thought it wonderful that the Trumans were home to stay. People liked the way they had both stepped modestly back into the life of the town, and especially the way “Mr. Truman” conducted himself, as a fellow citizen. They were as proud of him for his lack of side, his fundamental small-town genuineness after all, as they were of anything about him. “I used to say that Harry Truman lived around the corner from me,” his old friend and ardent Republican, Henry Bundschu, told a magazine writer from the East, “now there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t tell myself that you live around the corner from Harry Truman and don’t you forget it.”