Eight Days with Harry Truman (July/August 1992 | Volume: 43, Issue: 4)

Eight Days with Harry Truman

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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July/August 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 4

I can still see Harry and Bess Truman coming toward us across the crowded terminal of the Kansas City airport on that night in 1970, their 86-year-old faces pinched and almost grim with concern. Then they saw their daughter, Margaret, walking safely beside me, and their worries vanished. Their smiles transformed them.

Introductions were swiftly accomplished. The Trumans already knew who I was and why I was there—to help Margaret on the research for her father’s biography.

Within the hour we were ensconced in a small library in the broad-porched three-story white Victorian house on North Delaware Street in Independence where Mrs. Truman had spent much of her girlhood.

Truman insisted we had to christen Margaret’s literary venture with some bourbon and branch water, and I found myself with a rather dark brown glass in my hand. Truman gazed at me for a moment through his thick glasses and said: “Young man, there’s one more thing I need to know about you. Have you always been a Democrat?”

There was a twinkle in his eyes, but I sensed he was not entirely joking. Fortunately I was brought up in the bosom of the Democratic party, in a town famous for its ferocious politics—Jersey City. In our front hall, where many Irish-Americans displayed a print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, my father hung a framed portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Mr. President,” I replied, “as far as I know, no one in the family has ever voted anything but a straight ticket.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear!” Truman said, and all but knocked the glass out of my hand with a resounding clink. So began eight of the most remarkable days of my life.

Margaret and I spent our mornings and afternoons at the presidential library, plowing through the Truman papers. We had lunch and dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Truman each day, and usually spent an extra hour or two after dinner, chatting in their tiny library. Although Truman declined a formal interview—he said that at 86 his memory was no longer reliable—we wanted to get his crystallized opinions on such big topics as Stalin, Roosevelt, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, the break with the Russians, the firing of General MacArthur.

But the topic that absorbed him most—the one he discussed with a passion amazing for a man his age—was the presidency. He believed the American presidency was the greatest office ever created by thinking men, and the key to his judgment of every president was the condition in which he left it. Party was irrelevant here. For Truman, the great presidents were Washington, Jefferson, Polk (with whom he had a distant kinship), Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, and HST’s sentimental favorite, Woodrow Wilson.

All these men shared a common trait. They had strengthened the office—Washington by his forthright assumption of the control of foreign policy and his stern separation of the powers of the presidency