MOTHER AND I left the White House immediately after my father took the oath. He stayed to conduct a brief meeting of the Cabinet. Dad sat down in the raised chair at the head of the table for the first time. Before he could speak, Steve Early, the press secretary, came in and said the reporters wanted to know if the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would begin as scheduled on April 25. Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had issued a wholly unnecessary statement predicting a postponement. Without hesitation, my father told Early he considered the conference crucial to winning the peace. The press secretary departed to give this message to the newsmen.

My father then spoke briefly and solemnly to the Cabinet members. He assured them he intended to carry out President Roosevelt’s foreign and domestic policies. But he also told them he was going to be “President in my own right.” He told them he wanted their advice and they should not hesitate to differ with him, whenever they felt it was necessary. But he was going to make the final decisions. Again, in this brief scene, there is the unmistakable note of a man taking charge, a man who knew what it meant to be President and was determined to do his utmost to live up to the responsibilities of the job Dad always called “the greatest in the world.”

After the Cabinet meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson stayed behind. In a low, tense voice he told my father he had an extremely urgent matter to discuss with him. Briefly, with a minimum of details, he described a weapon of enormous explosive power on which the United States had been working for years. He did not use the term “atomic bomb,” which left Dad more puzzled than informed. The main impact of the conversation was to add a lot more weight to the already enormous responsibility on Dad’s shoulders.

For another few minutes, my father discussed with Secretary of State Stettinius and White House press secretary Steve Early and Jonathan Daniels the need to reassure our Allies and the world that our support of the San Francisco Conference was unchanged. Dad directed Steve Early to issue a formal statement, making this clear. But he wisely declined to hold a press conference, although the White House correspondents were clamoring for one. Escorted by a small army of Secret Service men, he went out to his car and drove home to our apartment.

Mother and I were still in a state of shock. If he had depended upon us for food and drink, he would have starved to death - and the poor man was starving. It was now almost 9:30 p.m. and he had had nothing to eat since noon. Fortunately, the parents of my friend Annette Davis, who was having the birthday party, had canceled their celebration. They fed Mother and me, and when Dad arrived home, we were sitting in their apartment talking. He joined us, and Mrs. Davis gave him a man-sized turkey and ham sandwich and a glass of milk.

With that astonishing equilibrium which he never loses in moments of crisis, my father ate this impromptu supper and then calmly announced he was going to bed. From his bedroom, he called his mother in Grandview. Mamma Truman had, of course, heard the news by now. With the help of Dad’s brother Vivian, she had been fending off a cascade of phone calls from reporters. My father assured her he was all right, but for the next several days he was going to be very busy. It would be a while before she had a letter from him. Actually, it would only be four days. Then, what is most phenomenal to an insomniac like me, Dad turned out the light, slipped under the covers and was asleep within five minutes.

The next morning, Friday, April 13, he began his first full day as President. Thank goodness he is not a superstitious man. He was up at 6:30, had his usual light breakfast, and then chatted for a half hour or so with Hugh Fulton, the former chief counsel of the Truman Committee. Poor Fulton was suffering from what Dad calls “Potomac fever.” Basically, this very common Washington disease involves delusions of grandeur and an itch for power and publicity. The news that my father had become President had aroused the virus in Fulton, in its most acute form. Dad soon learned from friends that Fulton was telling everyone in Washington he was going to be the acting President - the implication being that Harry S. Truman did not have the talent to do the job. Although they parted amicably enough that morning, Fulton was never offered an official post in the White House.

As my father got into his car, surrounded by the inevitable swarms of Secret Service men, he saw one of his old friends, Associated Press reporter Tony Vacarro, standing nearby. He invited him to hop in, and they rode down to the White House together. He got there a little after 8:30 a.m. At nine sharp, Eddie McKim and Matt Connelly arrived. Dad had called them the night before, from the White House, and told them to be there at this time.

My father apologized profusely for forgetting to invite Eddie to the ceremony the previous night. Eddie stood in front of Dad’s desk, completely at a loss for words for the first time in his life.

“Well, Mr. President,” he said, shifting from one foot to another, “it doesn’t count what’s gone before. What counts is what happens now.” Then he just stood there, while Dad stared at him in astonishment.

“Do you have to stand there?” Dad asked.

“Well, Mr. President, I suddenly find myself in the presence of the President of the United States and I don’t know how to act!”

It was Dad’s first glimpse of the tremendous awe with which so many people regarded the presidency. “Come on over here and sit down,” he said.

Eddie obeyed, and Dad asked, “Do you have to go home?”

“Well - I was leaving this afternoon for Omaha.”

“Well,” Dad said, “I need you. Stick around a while. I need some help.”

From the very first moment of the first day, my father understood the importance of having men around him who were personally loyal to him. He had no illusions that the deep devotion Roosevelt’s staff felt for him could be transferred to a new President. Dad had the same attitude toward the Cabinet, but there he knew it would be necessary to make the transition more gradually because Cabinet appointments involved Congress and the President’s political relationship to the nation.

Matt Connelly brought with him the letters my father never had gotten around to signing the previous day. One of them was a letter to Olive Truman, the wife of his cousin Ralph. After signing it, Dad scribbled the following postscript: “I’ve really had a blow since this was dictated. But I’ll have to meet it. Hope it won’t cause the family too much trouble.”

That morning my father saw Secretary of State Stettinius and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretaries of War and the Navy, and Admiral William D. Leahy, who functioned as President Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff in the White House. Dad immediately asked the Secretary of State for a thorough report on the major foreign policy problems of the United States, particularly in Europe. By that afternoon, it was in his hands, and it made grim reading. Relations with Russia had deteriorated disastrously since the Yalta Conference. The Joint Chiefs of Staff expected the war with Germany to last another six months, and the war with Japan another eighteen months. Both predictions were, of course, wrong. In little more than four months, the President and the nation would be catapulted into the postwar era.

After the Joint Chiefs left, Admiral Leahy stayed behind to ask my father if he wanted him to remain on the job. The Admiral was as crusty an old sea dog as they come. He had graduated from Annapolis in 1897 and rounded Cape Horn in a sailing ship in 1898. He had no illusions about the saltiness of his own character and was not at all sure Dad could take him, ungarnished, as it were. He was the first but by no means the last public official to misjudge President Harry S. Truman.

“Are you sure you want me, Mr. President? I always say what’s on my mind.”

“I want the truth,” Dad told him. “I want the facts at all times. I want you to stay with me and always to tell me what’s on your mind. You may not always agree with my decisions, but I know you will carry them out faithfully.”

The Admiral was surprised - pleasantly surprised. “You have my pledge,” he told Dad. “You can count on me.”

At noon that day, my father went up to the Capitol and lunched with thirteen key senators and four representatives. In some personal memoranda he made at the end of the day, he noted that by the time the luncheon was over, and he went back to the White House he had seen “all the senators.” He added he was “most overcome” by the affection and encouragement they had showered on him.

At the time, many people regarded this as simply a sentimental gesture. But my father knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to bridge the chasm which had opened between the White House and the Senate. Later that day, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the leading Republican internationalist and a key figure in the American delegation to the San Francisco UN Conference, wrote in his diary: “Truman came back to the Senate this noon for lunch with a few of us. It shattered all tradition. But it was both wise and smart. It means that the days of executive contempt for Congress are ended; that we are returning to a government in which Congress will take its rightful place.” With obvious pleasure, Senator Vandenberg added that at Dad’s request General Vaughan had sent him the last box of cigars they had in the old vice presidential office, with Dad’s card. On the card General Vaughan had written, “Our swan song.”

The main purpose of the luncheon, aside from healing political wounds, was to discuss with the Senate and House leaders my father’s desire to address a joint session of Congress on the following Monday. Surprisingly, several of the senators thought this was a bad idea. They seemed to feel Dad should not expose himself so soon to a comparison with President Roosevelt’s undoubtedly superior oratorical gifts. My father listened politely to these and other objections and then quietly informed them he was coming, and they had better prepare themselves for his visit.

Later that afternoon, my father conferred with Jimmy Byrnes. He had resigned as assistant president five days before Roosevelt’s death and returned to South Carolina. James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy, had telephoned Byrnes from the White House on the night of President Roosevelt’s death and sent a government plane to South Carolina to fly him to Washington - two rather startling gestures, wholly unauthorized by Dad.

Nevertheless, my father was glad to see Byrnes for several reasons. Perhaps most important, Byrnes had accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta and had taken extensive shorthand notes of the conference. Dad desperately needed to know, as soon as possible, all the agreements and the nuances of the agreements Roosevelt had made at this crucial meeting. For more than a half hour, my father queried Byrnes intensively on Yalta, Teheran, and other conferences between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. As they talked, my father decided to make Byrnes his Secretary of State.

Dad’s chief reason was his concern over presidential succession. According to the Constitution at that time, the Secretary of State was next in line to succeed the vice president. But my father was convinced that any successor to the President should be an elected official, not an appointed one. The fact that Edward Stettinius was Secretary of State made Dad’s concern on this point even more acute. Stettinius had never even been a candidate for elective office. Byrnes had been a senator from South Carolina, had served briefly as a Supreme Court Justice, and then had gone to the White House as Roosevelt’s chief assistant on the home front. He was eminently qualified to serve as President. Finally, my father felt this appointment - the highest he had in his power to dispose - might mitigate the bitter disappointment Byrnes obviously felt over FDR’s failure to back him for the vice presidency in Chicago.

Here my father made his first miscalculation as President. Although Byrnes, as Dad put it later, “practically jumped down my throat to accept” when he offered him the job, their relationship was flawed almost from the beginning by Byrnes’s low opinion of Harry Truman and his extravagantly high opinion of himself.

My father spent the rest of the afternoon conferring with Secretary of State Stettinius and Charles E. Bohlen of the Department of State, who had acted as interpreter at the Yalta meetings with Stalin. The subject was Russia’s gross violation of the Yalta agreements, particularly in Poland. The Russians were totally ignoring the solemn agreement to create a representative Polish government and were installing their Communist lackeys, known as the Lublin government, in Warsaw. My father decided there was no time to waste, and he immediately cabled Prime Minister Churchill, who seemed inclined to denounce the Russians publicly for their conduct. Dad felt this might cause a major breach among the three Allied leaders at the worst possible moment, and he urged instead that we “have another go” at Stalin.

With some reluctance, the British prime minister agreed and a diplomatic crisis, which might have prolonged the war, was averted.

In this same afternoon meeting, my father was able to use the melancholy fact of President Roosevelt’s death to score a diplomatic breakthrough, with the help of our ambassador in Moscow, W. Averell Harriman. Harriman had been summoned to see Stalin when the news of Roosevelt’s death arrived in the Russian capital. He immediately urged the Russian leader to make a gesture which might repair the strong impression that Russia was no longer interested in cooperating with the United States to create a peaceful postwar world. Stalin offered to send Molotov to the San Francisco Conference, if the new American President would back up Harriman’s request for him. My father immediately cabled the American Embassy his strong approval of this request, and one of the major stumbling blocks in the path of the San Francisco meeting was removed.

So, with one crisis averted and what seemed like a major step toward repairing Soviet-American relations achieved, and with an equally urgent repair job begun on Capitol Hill, Dad wearily pondered a stack of memoranda on his desk. There was a request from the Secretary of State for instructions for the American delegation to the conference in San Francisco, and reports on our relationships with Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, and a dozen other countries. There were copies of the cables exchanged between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. Somehow he would have to read as much as possible of this mass of words before going to bed. Dad piled it all into his briefcase and returned to Connecticut Avenue, where Mother and I were waiting for him.

My father was upset to find our apartment building practically under a state of siege. Secret Service men guarded every entrance, and no one could enter without producing complete identification. Dad had told Mrs. Roosevelt he had no intention of moving into the White House until she was ready to leave. But it was obviously impossible for us to stay here much longer. Wisely, Mother had decided it would be best if I did not go to school that day, so we personally had suffered a minimum of inconvenience. But our neighbors, who had to come and go to earn a living, were by no means as fortunate.

The following morning my father arose at dawn to continue his reading of top-secret documents and departed for the White House at around 8:15. He found his desk already covered with telegrams and cables. His first visitor was his old friend John W. Snyder. He had been in Mexico City, at an inter-American banking conference, and had flown to Washington as soon as he heard of President Roosevelt’s death. Snyder was in the process of leaving the government, after some ten years of service, to take a position as executive vice president of a leading St. Louis bank. It was the fulfillment of one of his life’s ambitions, and he admits he was very dismayed to hear Dad inform him he wanted him to stay in Washington as Federal Loan Administrator.

“I told him that my boss at the bank would be extremely upset at this change in plans,” Snyder recalls, “but he stopped me cold on that one by calling him long distance and getting his approval. I was still hemming and hawing, when Jimmy Byrnes walked into the office and said, ‘Don’t let him talk back to you, Harry, you’re the President. Draft him.’ I capitulated.”

My father was delighted. Not only was he getting on his team one of his oldest, most trusted friends, but a man who was widely respected by business and banking interests. Snyder had been one of Jesse Jones’s top assistants in the RFC. As head of the Defense Plant Corporation, he had lent $11 billion to private industry, to help create the American war effort.

As a courtesy, one or two days later, my father telephoned Jesse Jones and said, “Jesse, the President has just appointed John Snyder to be federal loan administrator.”

“Did he make that appointment before he died?” asked Jones.

“No,” Dad answered with a smile, “he made it just now.”

Jones made an understandable mistake, Dad says. “Those first few days, even I occasionally found myself still thinking of Mr. Roosevelt as the President.”

Meanwhile, around the nation newspapers and magazines were making a valiant effort to tell their readers about the new President. The man who made the greatest impact was probably Roy Roberts, the big, broad-beamed managing editor of the Kansas City Star. He and one of his reporters, “Duke” Shoop, had wangled an invitation to see my father for a few minutes the previous afternoon. In a widely syndicated article, Roberts struck a chord which was, while true in one sense, wildly wrong in projecting any genuine appreciation of Dad’s abilities. “The new President is the average man,” Roberts wrote. He went on to add some really incredible nonsense about Dad “approaching forty and still looking at the rear of the horse as he plowed the corn rows.” Then, stuck with his average-man thesis, Roberts tried to argue that this would be my father’s “greatest asset as he undertakes these new overpowering responsibilities.” From there his analysis became almost laughable if it had not been so misleading. “He is really more southern in viewpoint than midwestern,” Roberts wrote. “. . . If he develops a weakness, it will be in not always understanding the newly aroused mass consciousness of industrial labor.”

Later in the week, Time magazine won my prize for the worst analysis and the murkiest crystal ball: “Harry Truman is a man of distinct limitations, especially in experience in high level politics. He knows his limitations. . . . In his administration there are likely to be few innovations and little experimentation.”

At 10:30 that Saturday morning, President Roosevelt’s funeral train arrived in Washington from Warm Springs. My father made another gesture toward political unity and invited Henry Wallace and Jimmy Byrnes to go with him to the station and join the funeral procession. It was a hot, very humid day. The streets were packed with people, many of them weeping. There was very little conversation in the presidential limousine. Dad felt acutely that he was on display as President for the first time and did not feel it would be appropriate for him to chat in his normal manner, as if he was on his way to some routine ceremony. Wallace and Byrnes began, for some odd reason, to discuss President Roosevelt’s political mistakes. Among his worst, they agreed, was his attempt to purge Democrats who had not gone along with his 1937 court-packing plan.

At the train, my father paid his respects to Mrs. Roosevelt and the other members of the family and then rode back to the White House in the funeral procession. It was heartbreaking to watch the tears streaming down the faces of the people on the streets. The flag-covered coffin was carried on a caisson drawn by six white horses. Ahead, the United States Marine Band and the United States Navy Band alternately played solemn funeral music. There was not a sound except the clop of the horses’ feet, the drone of military planes overhead, the hum of car motors.

At the White House, my father went directly to his west-wing office. He did not want the Roosevelt family to feel his presence was an intrusion. Moreover, he had work to do. At 11:30, Harry Hopkins, the tall, thin, cadaverous man who was closer to Roosevelt than anyone else in the government, appeared in the doorway. He had left the Mayo Clinic, where he was being treated for a serious digestive disorder, to fly to Washington for FDR’s funeral. By great good luck, my father felt closer to him than to anyone else in the Roosevelt Administration. They had known each other since the early 1930s. They shared a similar style. Both were direct, practical men.

“How do you feel, Harry?” Dad asked.

“Terrible,” Hopkins replied.

My father explained why he had asked him to leave the hospital. At Cairo, Casablanca, Teheran, and Yalta, Hopkins had sat beside Roosevelt while he conferred with Stalin and Churchill. Dad wanted to know everything Hopkins remembered, and, in particular, because Dad valued his judgment so highly, he wanted Hopkins’s personal assessment of the Russian leader and his associates.

After Hopkins left, Admiral Leahy arrived with two important messages from Churchill. He wanted to know if the President was ready to issue a joint statement hailing the junction of American and Russian armies in Europe, an event which was now only days, perhaps hours, away. The second message asked my father’s opinion of a project created by the Chiefs of Staff. It called for launching pilotless old bombers, crammed with explosives, against German cities. Churchill feared the Nazis might retaliate in kind against London. He wondered if it was necessary, with the war going so well. Reluctantly he had given his approval to it. After talking with Admiral Leahy, Dad decided to postpone the project indefinitely and wired Churchill accordingly. His goal, from the moment he took office, was to end the war as quickly as possible, with a minimum of carnage.

That afternoon, Mother and I joined Dad to attend the state funeral for President Roosevelt in the East Room of the White House. The walls were covered with flowers from the floor to the ceiling - a stupendous sight in that huge room. The heat was almost unbearable, and the thick scent of the flowers made it almost impossible to breathe. I came very close to an attack of claustrophobia. I fought it off by concentrating on Bishop Angus Dun, who was conducting the service. A drop of perspiration kept balancing on the tip of his nose. It was easier to wonder when the drop would fall off than it was to think about the overpowering scene around me.

About ten o’clock that night, Mother and Dad and I went to Union Station and boarded the funeral train for the trip to Hyde Park. It was a huge train - seventeen cars - and it was crammed with practically every official of the American government. In retrospect, it seems a terribly dangerous thing to have done in time of war. If sabotage or an accident had wrecked that train, the nation would have been crippled. Three times couplings broke as they tried to get us out of the station. Because of the enormous crowds along the right of way, and because it was a funeral procession, we moved very slowly. Flares glowed all along the track, illuminating thousands of grief-stricken faces. Sleep was practically impossible. When I did sleep, I had nightmares about trying to open a window and escape from a small suffocating room. I don’t think even Dad got more than a few hours’ sleep that night. For one thing, he was still working. He spent much of the night outlining his speech to Congress and discussing it with Jimmy Byrnes and others.

We arrived in Hyde Park about 9:30 on the morning of April 15. It was a clear, sunny day, mercifully cooler in the lovely Hudson River Valley than it had been in swampy Washington. To the dull beat of the West Point band’s drummers, we followed the coffin, carried by eight servicemen, into Hyde Park’s rose garden. After the graveside service, cadets from West Point fired a final salute, which practically sent poor little Fala, FDR’s Scotty, into a fit. By noon, we were on our way back to Washington.

Now the real politicking began. Every congressman and senator on the train was trying to get to see the President. He was working on the speech he had to give tomorrow, and it must have been maddening to be interrupted so often, but he smiled and shook hands with each of them and asked them to come see him in the White House.

The following day, my father addressed the joint session of the Congress. Mother and I sat in the gallery, and for a moment, as he walked to the rostrum and stood there beside Sam Rayburn, he looked up and - he later told me - saw Mother and me. Dad was terribly nervous up there on the rostrum. He was always nervous before a speech, but this one, so enormously important, doubled his normal tension. He walked to the microphone and began to speak at once.

“Just a minute, Harry,” Sam Rayburn whispered. “Let me introduce you.”

The microphones were turned on, and everyone in the chamber - and in the country - heard him. Then the Speaker added: “The President of the United States.”

It was a good speech, as far as I could tell. I especially liked Dad’s conclusion:

. . . I have in my heart a prayer. As I have assumed my heavy duties, I humbly pray Almighty God, in the words of King Solomon:

“Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this Thy so great a people?”

The Congress interrupted him again and again with tremendous applause and gave him a standing ovation when he finished.

The comment on his speech my father liked most came from his mother: “Harry will get along. I knew Harry would be all right after I heard him give his speech this morning. I heard every word of it, but Mary, my daughter, is going to read it to me. Everyone who heard him talk this morning will know he is sincere and will do his best.”

That afternoon, we moved into Blair House. My father had decided it was impossible for us to stay in our Connecticut Avenue apartment, so Blair House was made ready for us.

This lovely old house was just across the street from the White House. I fell in love with the place the moment I walked into it. Every room, especially on the first floor, was a little masterpiece of architecture and decoration. Almost every piece of furniture was a rare antique from eighteenth-century America or from France. Crystal chandeliers gleamed above Aubusson rugs. Magnificent gilt-framed mirrors redoubled the beauty of the drawing rooms, and the wood-paneled dining room was utterly charming.

The silver service, the china, were exquisite. There was enough china to serve meals for two weeks without once repeating the pattern. Best of all, the food matched the surroundings. A few days after we moved in, we had a visit from a member of the Blair family. They had given the house to the government as a residence for the entertainment of foreign VIPs. The Blairs went back to Francis Preston Blair, a newspaperman and a member of President Andrew Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet.” In later years, the family settled in St. Louis, Missouri, and sent several distinguished politicians to Washington. Blair was tremendously pleased that the first President to reside in Blair House was from Missouri. So was Dad, and he took time off from his reading of crisis-filled reports to talk American history with him.

The following day, I went back to school - another ordeal. I was pursued by a horde of reporters and photographers everywhere I went. At a more discreet distance, I was trailed by the Secret Service man assigned to me, John Dorsey. At first, the photographers almost reduced me to tears, but after I had retreated to a private room and pulled myself together, my Truman common sense came to the fore, and I decided to let them take pictures until they wore themselves or their lenses out; then, I hoped, they would go away and stop bothering me and the rest of George Washington University. It worked beautifully. I remained calm and invited my sorority sisters and even my professors to say cheese and let the photographers click away. They were satisfied by the end of the day. I have followed the impromptu formula I devised that day, ever since. There is really no point in trying to play Garbo and fight off the picture boys. If you try to beat them at their game, they will go out of their way to take bad pictures of you.

My father, meanwhile, had more important things to worry about. Like his first press conference.

The largest mob of reporters in White House history - 348 - showed up for it. On the whole, it was like most press conferences, a combination of the trivial and the important. My father impressed everyone by how swiftly and forthrightly he answered the reporters’ questions. Roosevelt was fond of playing hide-and-seek with the press, tantalizing them with semi-answers and evasions. Dad’s approach was drastically different. He either answered a question directly, or declined to answer it just as directly.

One reporter asked him whether the blacks in America could look forward to his support for fair employment practices and the right to vote without being hampered by poll taxes. “I will give you some advice,” Dad said. “All you need to do is read the Senate record of one Harry S. Truman.” Someone else wanted to know if he was planning to lift the ban on horseracing. “I do not intend to lift the ban,” Dad said. Another man asked his views on the disposal of synthetic rubber plants. “That is not a matter for discussion here. It will be discussed at the proper time,” was the reply. Then there was the goofball who asked, “Mr. President, do you approve of the work of the Truman Committee?” A roar of laughter saved Dad the trouble of answering that one. Perhaps his most important statement - one that drew a rare burst of applause from the reporters - was his reply to the following question: “Do you expect to see Mr. Molotov before he goes across . . .”

“Yes, I do.”

“Before he goes to San Francisco?”

“Yes. He is going to stop by and pay his respects to the President of the United States. He should.”

As his press secretary, my father had decided to retain, on a temporary basis, Leonard Reinsch, a radio newsman from Ohio. But Dad knew Reinsch, with his radio orientation, would never be acceptable to the fiercely clannish newspapermen of the White House press corps. On the morning of April 18, Dad asked the man he wanted to take the enormously important job of White House press secretary to visit him. It was his old friend Charlie Ross, valedictorian of his high school graduating class and now a contributing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. At fifty-nine, Charlie felt reluctant to say yes. The brutal hours and the pressures of the job required a younger man. There was also the problem of salary. The Post-Dispatch was paying Charlie $35,000 a year. The White House could pay him only $10,000.

“Charlie,” Dad said sadly, “I know that. But I also know you aren’t the kind of man who can say no to the President of the United States.”

If ever there was an example of my father’s remarkable ability to judge men, this was it. He was selecting for one of the most sensitive and confidential jobs in his administration a man from a paper that had always attacked him with savage partisanship. But Dad, as usual, separated the trivial from the essential, the man from the issue. He knew that he and Charlie Ross shared a common heritage, believed in the same ideals, sought the same goals. Charlie knew it too, and he backed away from his first instinct, which was outright refusal. He asked for a little time to think it over.

That night Charlie Ross decided to say yes. “This man needs help,” he told his wife.

An interesting observation, which suggests even Charlie did not know my father well at this time. He too subscribed to the average-man theory that Roy Roberts purveyed - although he did not think the word “average” was synonymous with mediocre. In an estimate of Dad written on the night FDR died, Charlie called him “better than average. . . . He may not have the makings of a great President but he certainly has the makings of a good President.”

On the evening of April 19, Charlie visited my father at Blair House and told him he would take the job. Dad was, of course, delighted, and the two graduates of the class of 1901 began reminiscing about the years they had shared.

“Say,” Charlie suddenly said, “won’t this be news for Miss Tillie?”

Dad immediately decided to call Miss Tillie and tell her the news. “I think it’s about time I got that kiss she never gave me on graduation night,” Dad said.

Miss Tillie Brown was in her eighties, but very much with it. She was tremendously pleased and flattered by the call. “How about that kiss I never got?” Dad asked. “Have I done something worthwhile enough to rate it now?”

“You certainly have,” Miss Tillie said.

Miss Tillie was so excited, she promptly called the Independence Examiner to tell them about her chat with the President. The Examiner in turn contacted the wire services, and within minutes, agitated phone calls were pouring into the White House, demanding to know what the devil was going on. Since when did the President leak his most important appointments to country newspapers in Missouri, and ignore the titans of the AP, UP, and The New York Times? Dad had to call a special press conference the next morning to announce Charlie’s appointment. Fortunately, Charlie’s popularity among the press corps muted any resentment the White House reporters felt about being scooped by Miss Tillie. The Washington Post declared: “There is no more beloved nor highly regarded newspaper man in this city than Charlie Ross.” The New York Times said: “It would be hard to single out a Washington writer who has been more highly regarded or better liked.”

My father was learning the hard way that everything a President says and does is news. During one of these first hectic weeks, he decided to stroll down to his bank. No one argued with him. People are not in the habit of arguing with the President about minor matters. Only when he was in midpassage did he realize he was creating a public disturbance. An immense crowd swarmed around him. The Secret Service men were aghast and called for help. Sirens screamed as Washington police rushed to respond. A monumental traffic jam, plus a mob in which women and children might easily have been trampled, was the result of Dad’s first - and last - stroll to the bank.

Even his 100-yard trips from the White House to Blair House became a problem. The first day or two he was startled to discover that as he reached Pennsylvania Avenue, lights in all directions turned red - a little gambit the Secret Service had worked out with the capital police. Traffic jammed, and Dad felt guilty about it. So he ordered the practice to cease. “I’ll wait for the light like any other pedestrian,” he said. But the day he tried this, a big crowd immediately gathered around him, making the Secret Service extremely nervous and slowing the traffic to a crawl. So he gave up and let the Secret Service guide him on a circuitous path from the rear door of the White House to a car that took him to an alley entrance behind Blair House.

My father worried a good deal about the problems he was creating for the rest of the family. “It is a terrible - and I mean terrible - nuisance to be kin to the President of the United States,” he told his mother and sister. “Reporters have been haunting every relative and purported relative I ever heard of and they’ve probably made life miserable for my mother, brother, and sister. I am sorry for it, but it can’t be helped.”

If the Trumans were having their troubles with the press, the press was also having trouble with President Truman. One daily habit Dad absolutely declined to abandon was his preference for getting up early and taking a long walk. A. Merriman Smith, the UP White House correspondent, one of the wittiest and most delightful men in the press corps, described his own and his colleagues’ reactions to this aspect of the Truman Administration: “At first I thought there might be something of a farm boy pose in Mr. Truman’s early rising. That was before I got up every morning at six o’clock for the next three weeks in order to record his two minute walk across Pennsylvania Avenue. Slowly and sleepily I began to realize that this man was in earnest. He liked to get up early. He wasn’t doing it for the publicity or the pictures.”

Smitty, as everyone called him, described Dad’s walking speed as “a pace normally reserved for track stars.” The combination of exercise and farmer’s hours wreaked havoc on the White House scribes, who had a predilection for a playboy lifestyle and had been spoiled by Roosevelt’s preference for starting the day late. “If I stayed up after nine thirty,” Smitty mournfully reported, “I was a yawning wreck and by ten thirty in the morning I was ready for lunch.” Glumly, Smitty concluded that getting to know the new President depended entirely upon one’s “physique and endurance.”

Privately, Dad enjoyed wearing the press boys down a little. Some months later he wrote his mother about a similar workout he gave the photographers: “I took the White House photographers for a stroll yesterday morning and most wore ‘em out. I go every morning at 6:30 to 7:00 for a half hour’s real walk usually doing two miles. I told them that I’d let them take pictures provided they walked the whole round with me. Most of ‘em made it, some did not. I invited all of them to come again this morning without their cameras but none of ‘em did.”

From behind his desk, my father was surprising a lot of other people who were inclined for one reason or another to underrate him. Our ambassador in Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, rushed to Washington, because, he said: “I felt that I had to see President Truman as soon as possible in order to give him as accurate a picture as possible of our relations with the Soviet Union. I wanted to be sure that he understood that Stalin was already failing to keep his Yalta commitment. Much to my surprise, when I saw President Truman I found that he had already read all the telegrams between Washington and Moscow and had a clear understanding of the problems we faced. For the first time I learned how avid a reader President Truman was. This was one of the reasons he was able to take on so rapidly the immense problems he had to deal with at that time.”

Joseph C. Grew, the Under Secretary of State who was appointed Acting Secretary while Stettinius was at the United Nations Conference, had been in the diplomatic service since 1904. He wrote to a friend: “If I could talk to you about the new President you would hear nothing but the most favorable reaction. I have seen a good deal of him lately and I think he is going to measure up splendidly to the tremendous job which faces him. He is a man of few words but he seems to know the score all along the line and he generally has a perfectly clear conception of the right thing to do and how to do it. He is personally most affable and agreeable to deal with but he certainly won’t stand for any pussyfooting in our foreign relations and policy, all of which of course warms my heart.”

Perhaps the most interesting reaction to the new President came from a man who had worked intimately with President Roosevelt for a long time - Harold D. Smith, the director of the Bureau of the Budget. His hitherto unpublished diary is in the files of the Truman Library. Here are some excerpts from it describing his first meeting with Dad on Wednesday, April 18:

When I entered the President’s office, he was standing by the window looking out, but he quickly turned to come over and shake hands with me. This was a startling contrast to seeing President Roosevelt, who could not move from his chair. . . . I commented that our time was short and there were several matters that I would like to take up with him at this session. I started to say that the first one was pretty obvious, but the President interrupted me with “I know what’s on your mind and I’m going to beat you to it. I want you to stay. You’ve done a good job as Director of the Budget, and we always thought well of you on the Hill. I have a tremendous responsibility and I want you to help me.”

When I mentioned the fact that he should be aware that the Director of the Budget was always bringing up problems, President Truman said that he liked problems so I need not worry on that score. I told him how I had once remarked to President Roosevelt that I would not blame him if he never saw me again, for I was in the unhappy position of constantly presenting difficulties. . . . President Truman laughed and said he understood the kind of role that I had to play . . . adding that he was used to dealing with facts and figures so I need not hesitate about presenting situations to him in some detail. . . . His whole attitude pleased me because it showed that he was anxious to plunge deeply into the business of Government.

One week later, Smith returned for another forty-five-minute conference which ranged over a wide variety of problems, more money for the Tennessee Valley Authority, the problem of using Lend-Lease money for postwar rehabilitation, the G.I. Bill of Rights. Summing up back in his own office, Smith wrote: “The whole conference was highly satisfactory from my point of view. . . . The President’s reactions were positive and highly intelligent. While he agreed with nearly all of our propositions, I did not feel that I was selling him a bill of goods. Rather I felt that the propositions were sound because he agreed with them.”