Truman (169 page)

For eight years, Truman had hoped Eisenhower would sometime call on him for advice or ask him to take on a project, as Truman had asked Herbert Hoover, but it had never happened. Nor did it now with Kennedy, and Truman felt terribly let down. “You are making a contribution,” he told Acheson, who was being called on by Kennedy for advice. “I am not. Wish I could.”

The morning walks continued, though he went accompanied now by a bodyguard, a big, solid-looking Independence police officer in plain clothes named Mike Westwood, who was being paid by the town and would stay at Truman’s side in all seasons.

His chief pleasures remained constant—his books, his library, his correspondence with Acheson, his family. To Clifton Daniel, he was the ideal father-in-law, “just great,” never interfering, always considerate. “ ‘Give-’em-hell Harry’ didn’t give anybody hell at home,” Daniel would remember.

In the summer of 1961, Truman had begun work on what was to be a series of television films about the presidency, but dealing primarily with his own years in the White House. It was still another effort, like the
Memoirs
and the Truman Library, intended to educate the country, and especially young. Americans. “I’m mostly interested in children,” he often said. The films were to be produced and financed by David Susskind and his company, Talent Associates. The writer and general “organizer” of the project was Merle Miller, a novelist and former reporter for
Yank,
who had been chosen not only to add a “creative spark,” but because it was felt that he and the former President had much in common. Miller, too, had grown up in the Midwest, a book-loving boy with eyeglasses and early dreams of glory. But more important and influential than the films that eventually resulted was the portrait that Miller would compile from recorded conversations with Truman in a book called
Plain Speaking
—a book that would not be published for another dozen years.

Ironically, because of his background, Miller had not expected to like Truman, imagining him to be far too much like people he had known growing up in Marshalltown, Iowa. “I had thought he was not what we want in a President,” Miller remembered. “I think we want in a President something somewhat regal….”

But here, he remembered, was

With Truman, Miller felt, “You could reach out and there was somebody there. There was a person there!…
He was there for you.
”

The producer assigned to the series, Robert Alan Aurthur, found Truman brisk, opinionated, and during one morning session, Aurthur thought, possibly more fortified with bourbon than ever the doctor ordered.

“Don’t try to make a play actor out of me!” Truman insisted to them. A day of shooting was arranged at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Truman was to sit with a selected group of officers and talk about Korea. Everyone had expected Truman to be at his best in such a setting, with nothing rehearsed. Instead, he was “terrible,” as Robert Aurthur remembered. Truman was told how good he had been, but clearly he knew better. “You’re trying to make a playactor out of me…and it won’t work.”

Using a tape recorder, Miller and Aurthur spent hours—eventually days—interviewing Truman. The stories, the pithy observations came pouring forth. Listening to him, Merle Miller thought Truman had been ill—served by those who had worked with him on the
Memoirs.
“I think there were people, Noyes and Hillman being foremost among them, who wanted to make him something he wasn’t, largely dull.”

Truman still told stories wonderfully and with an infectious enjoyment. He was also inclined to exaggerate, even invent. Miller was reminded of Huck Finn’s comment about Mark Twain, “He told the truth, mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

Truman described the old Democratic picnics at Lone Jack and the oratorical mannerism of the old-time politicians, and particularly Colonel Crisp, who had said, “Goddamn an eyewitness, he always spoils a good story.” He described seeing William Jennings Bryan sitting at lunch in Kansas City with a bowl full of radishes and a plate of butter. “He’d just sit there buttering the radishes and eating them. Ate the whole bowl.”

When Miller asked if he ever “identified” with Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer when growing up, “No,” Truman said. “I wasn’t in that class, I was kind of a sissy when growing up.” Wearing glasses, he said, “makes a kid lonely and he has to fight for everything he wants. Oh, well, you had to be either intellectually above [the others] or do more work than they did…. Then you have to be careful not to lord it over those that you’ve defeated in that line.”

He talked of political bosses. (“The boss is not the boss unless he has the majority of the people with him.”) He talked of Franklin Roosevelt. (“He had something like Bryan had. He could make people believe what he wanted to do was right.”) He told the story of the Chicago convention of 1944, recounting how he had felt when he put down the telephone in Bob Hannegan’s room after talking to Roosevelt and described how the others in the room looked, waiting to hear what he would do. (“I walked around there for about five minutes and you should have seen the faces of those birds! They were just worried to beat hell.”) He described how, during the 1944 campaign, he had threatened to throw Joe Kennedy out the window of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, when Kennedy kept maligning Roosevelt. “I haven’t seen him since.” But then he warned Miller not to use the story, “because his son’s President of the United States and he’s a grand boy.”

An optimist was a person who thinks things can be done. No pessimist ever did anything for the world. Billy Graham said the end of the world was coming, but Truman didn’t believe it. Courtesy mattered greatly to him. He had heard a story of a gas attendant who refused to fill Tom Dewey’s tank, and Truman strongly disapproved. Later he would chide the press for calling the First Lady “Jackie.”

The great men of the Roman Republic were not military men, he said. Hadrian was the greatest; his own favorite, however, was Marcus Aurelius, who thought always of the welfare of his people.

Listened to long afterward the tapes would be extremely difficult to follow, full of static, full of the sound of other voices in Truman’s office, as people came and went. His own voice was strong, lower and more appealing than his platform voice. Often everyone would break into laughter. The mood was one of a good time, good fellowship, and clearly Truman delighted in it.

Unlike the day at Fort Leavenworth, some of the filming sessions went extremely well. His answers “came back rich with detail, and with all the sharp authority of the man who’d been there,” remembered Robert Aurthur of one particularly good session in New York. “Two or three times it was Mr. Truman who asked for another try, saying he could do better.” When, at one point, concern was voiced over whether the President was wearing the same necktie as he had during previous sessions in Independence, Truman asked if that really mattered. “Because if while I’m talking about Korea people are asking each other about my necktie it seems to me we’re in a great deal of trouble.”

To Miller and Aurthur, he seemed exceptionally alert and fit. His first impression, Miller remembered, was, “My God, he’s not old at all!” But in fact Truman had begun to slow down, even slip a little. To those who had worked with him at the White House, those who had known him from years past in Independence and Kansas City, he was noticeably different from the man he had been. He moved with less authority. He had become slightly hard of hearing. Responding to questions, he was often inclined to give a quick abrasive answer for effect, an old man’s wisecrack. He had been asked so many of the same questions so often in recent years that he had developed a set of pat answers that sounded no better than pat answers. Sometimes he talked as if quoting his own books or old speeches. Other times, and only in the company of men, he used more profanity than in days past. And while the famous smile, the cheerful, personable demeanor remained, his private disdain of certain people and trends of the moment was greater than ever before. He hated the fashion of long hair on young men, and greatly disliked being called “senior citizen.” Asked if he thought there would ever be an expedition to the moon, he said probably, but he could not imagine why.

In private, every once in a while, he could revert still to old habits of the mouth as if he were not aware of what he was saying. “People in Independence haven’t changed a darned bit,” he remarked at one point. He had nothing against Mormons, he told Miller, they were exceedingly hardworking people. But a lot of old-timers in town “hate them just as bad as they ever did,” Truman said, and “for the same reason some people hate to eat at the same table with a nigger.” It was prejudice, he said.

He worried about the mounting national debt and “this poor broke government of ours,” He intensely disapproved of what he saw happening to politics because of television. “I don’t like counterfeits and the radio and television make counterfeits out of these politicians.”

He hated to see the town being swallowed up by tract houses, billboards, gas stations, and traffic. And ironically, sadly, it was the automobile and the highway, two of the loves of his life, causing the change. Most mornings now, he had to stop and pick up litter—beer cans and candy wrappers—thrown into his front yard.

His lingering anger over General MacArthur seemed excessive. “There were times,” Merle Miller remembered, “when you wanted to say to him, ‘Look, you know, you had the last word. Leave it lay and bask in your triumph.’ ”

Of Eisenhower, he could hardly say anything without resorting to profanity.

But then Kennedy, too, seemed nearly as misguided to him as had Elsenhower. Truman was utterly appalled by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as was Acheson.

There was an unfortunate preoccupation at the Kennedy White House with “image,” Acheson wrote to Truman.

“Keep writing,” Truman replied, “it keeps my morale up—if I have any.”

“You must remember our head of State is young, inexperienced and hopeful,” he told Acheson in another letter. “Let’s hope the hopeful works.”

Hearing that the Democratic Party, at Kennedy’s suggestion, was going to put on a $l,000-a-plate dinner, Truman was appalled. “If as and when that happens we’ll just quit being democrats with a little d.” Nobody had consulted him on the matter. “To hell with these millionaires at the head of things.”

Of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he said, “I just don’t like that boy, and I never will.” In May of 1960, Matt Connelly had begun serving a prison sentence for income tax evasion. Convinced of Connelly’s innocence, and like others, convinced that Connelly was being made the victim of a Republican vendetta, Truman had done all he could, including helping to raise money to defray Connelly’s legal expenses. In March 1961 he had written to Bobby Kennedy to urge a pardon for Connelly, who was by then out of prison on parole. But Kennedy had responded by saying only that he was studying the problem. In May, Truman wrote again, providing more detailed background information, and again Kennedy guaranteed his personal attention. But nothing happened, and by the start of 1962, a furious Truman wrote in longhand to the Attorney General: