1My father wrote these lines sometime before Richard Nixon was in fact elected president. He decided, however, not to change the sentence, He said his comments on Mr. Nixon would be unprintable. MT

2My father once mentioned something to me that he said typified Millard Fillmore and summarized Fillmore’s presidential career in a nutshell. When my father was working on this book, he said he referred occasionally for dates and other data to a number of history books, among them two particularly popular and intelligent books, A Basic History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard and A Pocket History of the United States by Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager. In the Nevins and Commager book, Fillmore is mentioned in a single line as “the dim and forgotten Millard Fillmore.” In the Beards’ book, Fillmore doesn’t appear in the index at all. MT

3I wish my father were around today to give me his views, and tell me what he believes, or doesn’t believe, about the Reagan administration and Irangate. MT

4I’ve made a change here. My father used the word “Negroes” throughout, but I’ve changed all references to “blacks” because that’s the word that African Americans now commonly employ. My father always had a desire to be modem and up-to-date, and I’m sure he would approve. MT

5This is a slight misquote; Mr. Coolidge actually said, “They hired the money, didn’t they?” But “hired” is an old-fashioned usage, and as I’ve already reported, my father liked to be strictly up-to-date. MT

6I described my father’s reactions to the campaign promise in my own book, Harry S. Truman. published in 1973:
“. . . Candidate Eisenhower let one of his speech writers put into his mouth words that completely infuriated my father, In a speech in Detroit, Ike announced he would ‘go to Korea in person and put an end to the fighting.’ As politics, it was a masterstroke, it was exactly what millions of Americans, unhappy and worried about the deadlock in Korea, wanted to hear. As a realistic policy, it was a blatant lie. Equally fatuous was his promise that he would overnight arrange things so that the South Koreans would do all the fighting, and our troops could go home. ‘While he is on the back platform of his train, holding out his glowing hope,’ my father said angrily, ‘his staff are in the press car pointing out to reporters that he has not said when he can do this. And he knows very well he can’t do it without surrendering Korea—until the present Korean conflict is at an end.” MT

7This was prophetic on my father’s part, though he had no idea how prophetic it was. He was no longer with us when Lebanon became one of the world’s most war-torn countries, and when American and other hostages were taken. Or when, in October 1983, American and French military headquarters were bombed by Arab terrorist groups and 241 Americans and 58 French soldiers died, and not long afterwards, the Americans left Lebanon. The slaughter in Lebanon, of course, continues. MT

8In my book about my father, I described Dad’s reaction to these events in this way: “What troubled my father was the fact that Eisenhower was attacking the policies he had helped to formulate and carry out. This seemed to Dad to be the worst kind of hypocrisy. But what really drove the Truman temperature right off the thermometer was Ike’s endorsement of Senators William Jenner and Joe McCarthy, men who spent hours in the Senate vilifying Ike’s old commander, George Marshall. Without General Marshall’s help, Ike would have remained an obscure colonel, at most a brigadier or major general, commanding a division before the war ended. When Ike appeared on the same platform with William Jenner,. and deleted a personal tribute to General Marshall from a speech he planned to make in Milwaukee because Senator McCarthy would have been offended by it, my father just about gave up on candidate Eisenhower.” I’m going to have to admit now that that phrase “just about gave up on . . . Eisenhower” was the understatement of the century. My father never used salty language in the presence of my mother or me, but he came very, very close to it when he talked about Eisenhower in those days. MT

9My father gives no details and mentions no names here, and even threw out the correspondence between Marshall and Eisenhower on this matter, as a courtesy to Eisenhower, when Dad left the Oval Office. But of course he’s referring to the relationship between Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, the British WAC who was Eisenhower’s driver and then his romantic partner during the war. Eisenhower wrote Marshall at the end of the war, asking to be returned to the United States so that he could divorce Mamie Eisenhower and marry Kay Summersby. Marshall responded with fury, telling Eisenhower that his conduct was disgraceful and that, if he went through with his plans, Marshall would kick him out of the Army and harass him in other ways for the rest of his life., None of this is secret now because, in 1975, Kay Summersby told the whole story in a book, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower dropped Kay Summersby after his correspondence with General Marshall. MT

10For the record, my father was rated ninth in the list of thirty-one presidents, and fourth in an associated list of “near-great” presidents, just above John Adams on the “near-great” list. I think he’d rank even higher in a poll conducted today, I also think Eisenhower would rank lower. MT

11Height is often deceptive among presidents. Perhaps it’s the way they’re photographed, or before photography came along, the way their portraits were painted. Among recent presidents, I’ve discovered in conversations with friends who hadn’t ever seen Lyndon Johnson in person that he’s sometimes thought of as a man of average height, but I remember so well that my father and mother and I used to look way up at him, though not necessarily politically. He was our tallest president after Lincoln, standing six feet three inches. Many people think John Kennedy was taller than Johnson because he was so slim, but he was actually just slightly over six feet. Jimmy Carter is often believed to be quite short, but he’s about the same height as my father and Eisenhower were. And I believe most people think of Ronald Reagan as exceptionally tall, but he’s tall but not exceptionally tall; he’s six one. He looks very tall because a lot of the people around him are rather short. I don’t think that was planned or intentional, but who knows? MT

12It’s growing harder all the time, of course. The latest figures estimate the present population at just under 250 million people. My father would have been astonished at this, but pleased. MT

13I was indirectly responsible for our move to Blair House. The White House was really in terrible shape when we moved in in 1945. The place was infested with rats; my father once mentioned in a letter, for example, that Mrs. Roosevelt had told him that she was entertaining some women in the south portico when a rat ran right across the porch railing. The areas seen by tourists were kept freshly painted and decorated, but the paint in the private quarters was dingy, some of the furniture was falling apart, and one night, at an official reception in 1947, the color guard marched in and the old chandelier began to sway and it looked for a while as though it would collapse on the heads of everybody present. Another time, a man brought my father breakfast in his study, and the whole floor began to move as if it weren’t connected to anything. My father also said in a letter that he’d learned that Coolidge was hit on the head one day by a piece of the roof, but that frugal man had the roof and the third floor repaired and left the second floor—where we lived—alone. But the coup de grace occurred when a little spinet, one of the two pianos in my sitting room, suddenly broke through the floor, and we were promptly moved across the street to Blair House until the White House could be put in shape. MT

14My father wouldn’t have hesitated for a minute on what to do about Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter. But then I’m certain that he wouldn’t have had them around him in the first place. MT

15This was a phrase my father used often and about many people, but nearly always affectionately and rarely in a pejorative sense. Washington wasn’t an old man when he became president: he was fifty-seven, as compared, for example, to Reagan, who was seventy when he took office, or John Adams, who was sixty-two. My father was sixty-one when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died and he became president, and sixty-four when he ran against and defeated Thomas E. Dewey. MT
**This is an exception to the preceding endnote. Neither Mr. Roosevelt nor my father were being affectionate when they used that phrase. MT

16Babylonia is now part of Iraq, and Elam is now part of Iran. They were fighting then as now. As my father states in this book, he believed strongly in the lessons we can learn from the past and in the ways we can apply those lessons to present situations. He’s quoted succinctly on this point in Merle Miller’s book about him: “There’s nothing new in human nature, The only thing that changes are the names we give things. If you want to understand the twentieth century, read the lives of the Roman emperors, all the way back from Claudius to Constantine. . . . Those people had the same troubles as we have now. Men don’t change. The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” MT

17My father was a plain-spoken man and always said he preferred small words to big words. He also said that people sometimes forgot that the purpose of language was to convey thoughts to one another, and they used big words not to convey thoughts in the clearest way but to impress each other. My father, however, knew the big words and sometimes surprised people - and me, as in this case - by using an unfamiliar word now and then when it was the best choice. Some of the readers of this book may be ahead of me and know exactly what “hegemony” means when they come across it in that sentence, but I’ll admit that I didn’t and had to look it up. It’s the right choice: It means “preponderant influence or authority, especially of a nation over others.” MT

18I might as well go ahead and do my first, and maybe last, footnote of this book and list the fifty-four other signers of the Declaration of Independence for the record. I’m not much on footnotes; I like to read right along when I’m reading a book and not keep dropping my eyes down eight or ten inches all the time. But I guess some footnotes are necessary, and particularly this one because it’s amazing how many of these men are forgotten even though some have had streets and towns named after them. They were brave men who ought to be noted and remembered. Here are the names of the forty-eight men who signed right after Hancock signed: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Samuel Adams. John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington. William Williams. William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Caesar Rodney, George Read, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton. William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, and George Walton. The six men who signed late were Oliver Wolcott, Elbridge Gerry. Matthew Thornton, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas McKean, and George Wythe.
Some autograph and document collectors spend a lifetime trying to assemble a set of signatures of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The scarcest signature is Button Gwinnett’s. Gwinnett was a delegate from Georgia; he was forty-one when he signed the Declaration of Independence, and he was killed a year later in a duel with a political rival named Lachlan McIntosh, who lived on to become a general in the Revolutionary War and then a congressman and a commissioner of Indian affairs dealing with the Cherokees and the Creeks. I gather that Gwinnett signed practically nothing other than the Declaration of Independence, and his signature is so valuable today that a friend who visited me in the White House told me a joke about it. Seems someone wrote and offered a collector a letter of minor importance, but he went ahead and bought it, and then had to go out of town and told his secretary to keep an eye out for the letter., When he got back, he found a memo from his secretary. “The letter arrived in good order,” the memo said, “but it was practically worthless because some fool had written across the bottom of it, ‘See me about this. Button Gwinnett.’ But it’s okay now. That stuff was written all the way on the bottom, and I cut it off neatly and threw it away, and the cut doesn’t even show.” HST

19My father once told me that the Hessians were also a source of trouble to the Americans in a second way; they brought along with them, undoubtedly inadvertently, a destructive insect called the Hessian fly. I thought he was joking because he wasn’t too crazy about the Hessians or any other soldiers who fought for money rather than principle, but I later looked it up and discovered that he was absolutely right. The Hessian fly is actually a gnat that attacks wheat, rye, and other grains by laying its eggs on leaves, and the larvae then consume the sap and the plants can’t yield grain. The Hessian fly is a menace right up to the present time. It can be avoided to some extent by late planting, but if the insects manage to attack plants, the only thing that can be done is plow them under. My apologies to Dad, who commented a page or two ago (though in a footnote of his own) that he doesn’t like footnotes, but I think some of these things off the main point are interesting. MT

20I suppose there’s no way to avoid another footnote in order to say that that’s just a figure of speech, since Washington never actually lived in the White House, either the original or the place that was rebuilt after the British set fire to the original building during the War of 1812. The cornerstone of the original building wasn’t laid until 1792, and the first president to live in the drafty old barn, John Adams, didn’t move in until 1800. It wasn’t called the White House, even unofficially, for quite a while. When the plans were drawn up, it was called the Palace because it was natural in those days to think unconsciously in terms of monarchies, and monarchs lived in palaces, but that name was never really used. It wasn’t called anything at all for a while, and then some people began to refer to it as the White House because it was painted white to cover up the smoke stains after the British set fire to it. But it wasn’t called the White House officially until Theodore Roosevelt decided to stlick it on his stationery one day. HST

21For the reader who’s forgotten who John Roosevelt was, he was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s youngest son; born 1916, died 1981. He was the only Republican in his family and a constant source of aggravation to his father and to a lesser extent, mine. He was the chairman of Citizens for Eisenhower in 1952, and in later years supported Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, MT

22Interestingly, the poll of historians lists the three presidents in exactly the same order my father sometimes did: Washington as our best president. Lincoln as second best, Roosevelt as third best. And perhaps for the same reason. MT

23In 1961, the Twenty-third Amendment finally gave residents of the District of Columbia the right to vote in presidential elections. The amendment also gave the District of Columbia three electors. MT

24This has happened a couple of times since. In Richard M. Nixon’s first contest he received 43.4 percent of the vote, with the other candidates receiving the other 56.6 percent of the voles. Hubert Humphrey received 42.7 percent and George C. Wallace received 13.5 percent, but Nixon got 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191 and Wallace’s 46. For his second term, however, against Senator George McGovern, Nixon got 61 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes to McGovern’s 17. Jimmy Carter had what might be called a draw; he received 50 percent of the votes with 40,825,839, and Gerald Ford received 48 percent with 39,147,770 votes, the remaining 2 percent going to other candidates. But Carter received 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240. These figures total 537, but there were actually 538 votes cast. The missing vote was east by an elector from Washington State, who voted for Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan wasn’t a presidential candidate at that time. Reagan beat Carter easily in the next election, getting 43,899,248 votes, 51 percent, to Carter’s 35,481,435 votes, 41 percent, with 5,719,437 votes, 7 percent, going to John B. Anderson, a former Republican who ran on the Independent ticket, and Reagan absolutely overwhelmed Carter in the electoral voting, 489 votes to Carter’s 49. Anderson received no electoral votes at all. Reagan did even better in his second run for the presidency, receiving 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale’s 13. Mondale’s votes came only from his home state. Minnesota, and from the District of Columbia. MT

25I think my father would have liked glasnost, the new Russian policy of relative openness and relative freedom for the Russian people, though he would have wanted to see a lot more of it happening there before he’d be convinced that it was totally genuine. I hope it’s still in existence and expanding by the time this book appears. MT

26The British, of course, have now adopted the decimal system, though it took them nearly a couple of centuries to get around to it. And we’re still trying to popularize the metric system in this country. It’s now the official system, but it continues to baffle and confuse the general public. MT

27My father’s attitude toward dress was slightly different: the moment he could afford it, he switched from ready-made suits to clothes made up for him by the best tailors, and when he was a senator, he was on the list of the ten best-dressed men in the Senate. But he shared Jefferson’s insistence on comfort at all times. He wanted to look good, but was much more concerned with feeling relaxed and comfortable. MT

28For people who don’t recognize this name, though I imagine everybody will, it should be explained that Harry Byrd was a prominent and powerful Virginian who was first elected to the Senate in 1933 and who died in 1966. His son, Harry Byrd, Jr., was a senator from 1965 to 1983. It should further be explained that there always seem to have been Byrds of the nonfeathered variety in Virginia. One of the first such Byrds was William Byrd II, who lived from 1674 to 1744 and was one of the first royal governors of Virginia, and who became so rich and powerful that he ended up owning 179,000 acres of even richer Virginia soil., One of his estates was so large that it included the entire area of what is now the city of Richmond. I’m not sure that Harry senior was part of that same family, since he was actually born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, back in 1887. But he certainly became a powerful Virginian and a powerful southern politician, and when Eisenhower and Stevenson were opposing each other, some electors in Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia even gave Byrd a total of fifteen electoral votes. His brother, incidentally, was Richard E. Byrd, the explorer. MT

29There have been two additional amendments signed into law since my father wrote those lines. The Twenty-fifth Amendment, adopted in 1967, was the result of President Kennedy’s assassination and allows presidents to fill the office of vice president instead of leaving it vacant. And the Twenty-sixth Amendment, adopted in 1971, changed the minimum voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. MT

30My father was not here in 1973 when Spiro T. Agnew became the second. Aside from their resignations as vice presidents, of course, there’s no comparison between the two men. Calhoun had plenty of faults, but after resigning as vice president, he went on to serve as a senator again and as secretary of state under President John Tyler in 1844 and 1845. Agnew left office one step ahead of the sheriff, accused of accepting bribes as vice president and of income tax evasion, and was fined $10,000 and placed on three years’ probation. He was also ordered to pay $268,000 to the state of Maryland for various deeds committed while he was governor there, before becoming our vice president. He then went on to write a best-selling spy novel, which my agent, Scott Meredith, who also handled the rights to the Agnew novel, says wasn’t too bad, and after that showed up doing mysterious jobs for various Arabs. Later on, he announced that he was bankrupt. MT

31Ronald Reagan eventually beat that record. He was born on February 6, 1911, and was two weeks short of his seventieth birthday when he delivered his inaugural speech on January 20, 1981. I can’t remember whether or not he wore an overcoat. MT

32My father originally used a shorter word here, but then decided to change it. MT

33The unofficial ban ended on November 2, 1976, with the election. of Jimmy Carter. Carter is, of course, from Georgia. MT

34“The sad truth is that my father is probably mistaken here. In 1978, Dr. Harold Schwartz, a noted physician associated with the USC School of Medicine, studied twenty years of medical evidence and research on Lincoln’s physical condition and determined that Lincoln was suffering from a disease calltted Marfian’s syndrome, a hereditary ailment that affects the heart and alters bone growth. Dr. Schwartz pointed out in a medical journal article that Lincoln’s unusually long arms, fingers, and legs, and his visibly sunken chest, were typical of people afflicted with Marfan’s syndrome, and so was a symptom that Lincoln himself described, an occasional involuntary twitching of his left foot, which is also typical of the disease. Dr. Schwartz’s conclusion was that Lincoln was near death at the time of his assassination. MT

35My father was embarrassed about giving details of the typographical error, but as a longtime writer of mystery novels. I believe that you’ve got to be fair to the reader and be sure to name the killer once you’ve described a murder. I’ve also got to confess that I think the typo was pretty hilarious. The line was supposed to read, “The President spent much of the evening entertaining Mrs. Galt.” The way it came out was. “The President spent much of the evening entering Mrs. Galt.” MT